OP’s story is from 2014-2015. I’m not German but French, however I do feel that this "Silicon Valley dream" upon developers was still existing in this era. It

OP’s story is from 2014-2015. I’m not German but French, however I do feel that this "Silicon Valley dream" upon developers was still existing in this era. It was at that time that we started to have startups in Europe who tried to follow the SV culture. GAFAMs were still seen as cool enough to envy a well paid job at them. A lot of SV startups weren’t openly privacy hostile (or maybe the issue wasn’t took seriously enough). But I felt that this "dream" was only upon developers at that time and it stoped sometimes after. In fact, in 2015, while on a trip to SF, I ate with a former French coworker who decided to live the dream and he was already saying to me that he wanted to come back in Europe because he couldn’t stand the ambiant culture anymore. It wasn’t the job, he loved it, performed well, was well paid. It wasn’t even the people, he made some friends there, felt like people were genuinely nice. But it was more the delusion about the SV-Life and the mismatch in cultural values and in the global society lifestyle in which he felt you were nothing to others / to the society without money. Now I do feel like that this sentiment about the US is now more mainstream in Europe even amongst those who never came in USA. ps : I urge you to not read any criticism in my comment, I’m describing a general sentiment from the other side of an ocean, probably with a big bias. But I do feel this sentiment is pretty recent and it’s probable that Trump made it way worse.