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Notes -
As a one-time applicant, H1B kind of seems to anti-select for high skill a bit. If you have legible skills in demand (like when I had lucked on a momentarily hot PhD topic), you probably have other options too, and are less likely to keep taking a stab at a vaguely demeaning 1/5 hit rate lottery with 1 year between draws, a ridiculous stack of paperwork to get that lottery ticket, and a delay of months to even find out if you got the short straw. I did one attempt at H1B, didn't win the lottery, then the firm trying to hire me wanted me to go for O-1 next which had its own set of offputting hoops to jump through; and rather than stay more months in a bureaucratic limbo working from the wrong time-zone, I ended up signing on at a local subsidiary of an US bigcorp instead.
In this European office, taxes are higher, salary maybe has a bit of a cut vs. California, and climate is worse, but OTOH there is more vacation and no 60h work week hustle, cost of living is modest, I'm way in top 1% of the country's income stats, and would likely feel less well off at SV. If I was dead set on maximum earnings, my first pick now would be to try and finesse a transfer to Zurich where in turn I'd make more after taxes than US. Some friends in my techy bubble did manage to migrate to the States, at least one via O-1 and one via some roundabout route of being a postdoc researcher first. They've expressed envy that my office's mostly Europeans instead of mostly Asians that are 90% of the workforce over there.
OTOH if H1B is your one great shot at exiting a drab developing country, you're probably way more likely to keep plugging at the lottery year after year and finally make it through.
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