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Wellness Wednesday for November 2, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Glad to hear someone is doing well. I make about $7k a month after taxes right now as a SWE manager, which is not bad at all for Russia, but I gotta emigrate and hot fucking damn, Europeans treat their IT like dirt. 350 for senior SWE? More like 100 if you're super lucky and 60 if you're not. And these 60 turn into 48 after the taxes are paid. Getting my $7k back would require finding someone willing to pay 120. I really hope I can win the diversity lottery this year and move to the greener pastures across the pond.

I really wish someone had told me how much software engineers made in the US when I was younger. I was good at math and liked programming as a kid, but didn't know about computer science until after I started university, and I had no idea they made a lot of money until about three years ago when my friend moved to California and told me what the starting salaries were. But even then, I didn't know how much they increased once you had some experience until a few months ago. Why isn't this better known?

In Sweden if you're having a salary of 60, you're actually getting paid 80 and get to keep 42. ^^

Work in London for a FAANG or in Switzerland.

It was nice of Putin to start the war right before FAANGs entered a contraction phase.

An easier (not easy) way to migrate into the US instead of betting on the DV would be to get Canadian citizenship (trivial compared to getting US citizenship) and then try though the TN visa path, albeit that is a decade long con, but us poors outside the US have to think in those timeframes if we actually want a shot of getting into the US without being within the 99.999 percentile of programmers or being millionaires.

Yes. If you're young, educated, speak English, and have a good job offer, you'll have enough points to be granted permanent residency, after which you get Canadian citizenship after five years I believe. We have a points system that favours economic immigrants and a much higher immigration rate than the US has relative to our population.

Even if you don't have quite enough points, I think you can get a two year work visa pretty easily and then having Canadian work experience gets you more points which allows you to apply for permanen residency. There are probably other types of work visas you can get too, because I know people who have been here for years who don't have their permanent residencies yet.

This. I work for US company and we have people from Canada working for us (remote). In my 2 previous jobs, we also had people from Canada and even interns from Canada working for us. If the company is remote-friendly, hiring somebody from Canada doesn't seem to be a big deal (I'm sure there's some paperwork to be done but looks like it's not too bad if I see Canadians hired all the time). If you can get into Canada, the chances of getting a job is the US are much higher, and as far as I heard, Canada's immigration policies are easier to deal with than in the US. Also, Canada has its own IT companies, though I don't know how the pay is there, probably worse than in FAANG.

Yes, American visa policy is all about luck, there's a reason why illegal immigration is so high. L-1 is the only visa that has a straightforward path to permanent residence, and it still requires a certain shuffle through another country.

The DV odds are very much against me. Last year the chance to get selected was about 1 in 100, 2 in 100 if both spouses applied.