Moving from London to San Francisco

http://corp.fightmymonster.com/?p=176

by dylancollins • 14 years ago

41 22 14 years ago

corp.fightmymonster.com

seanmccann• 14 years ago

What visa did they use? That's the hardest part.

petercooper3• 14 years ago

Interesting enough but it misses perhaps the hardest and most onerous portion of this move for most people and companies: the visas/immigration process.

The three people on the "Who We Are" page seem qualified enough to get O-1 (Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement) visas, perhaps.. but that's the interesting part of the story that's missing. Or is it in another post?

Converting to Sterling, you’ll probably pay about 20% more than what you’d expect for similar quality engineers in London.

I'm sure many in London would be intrigued where all the typical full-time software engineer salaries of £62k-£78k are to be had ;-) Maybe I talk to the wrong people or we're just more secretive in the UK but it's not often I hear salaries like that being thrown about.

barrkel2• 14 years ago

I would tentatively suggest that "quality" engineers - specifically, quality meaning experience in the relevant domains - are scarcer on the ground in London. I get the impression, living here, that if you want decent remuneration, you need to work for a bank, that being where the money is. And then I expect the job to be significantly less interesting (and experience less valuable in the startup economy) as a result.

(I work remotely for a CA company. I just live here; the salary hit is bigger than 20% (I had the corresponding US job offer, H-1B visa etc.) but in my estimation it's worth it for my life preference function.)

petercooper3• 14 years ago

Yeah, banking was the only thing that came to mind for me but I similarly discount it for its banality. The sort of people who would take the $120-150k software engineer jobs in SF probably aren't the type to take Java or .Net jobs in the CoL.

On your job though, are you saying that you took a salary hit of 20% just because you live in the UK or work remotely?

regularfry• 14 years ago

Bear in mind that figure includes overheads for the company. I don't know if all the 20% difference would be accounted for entirely by salary.

pmjordan2• 14 years ago

With $2.1m in funding, I suspect it might not be too hard to get E2 visas. (non-resident visa for the purpose of managing an investment in the US) They also recently relaxed the rules on self sponsoring H1Bs if the company has enough cash. Not that I can speak from experience.

I'd love to know what kind of requirements for the O-1 visa apply in the context of our industry, as that seems the strongest visa of them all by far. I assume nobody can talk about their experiences publicly as the whole process goes through immigration lawyers and I guess immigration aren't going to be too pleased with publicly available "instructions" on how to legally enter the country, either.

excuse-me• 14 years ago

The height of the goalposts seem to change with the market. In the last dot-com bubble my UK PhD supervisor was offered head of physics dept at an IVY league school.

He couldn't get an O-1, he was told that "a Nobel prize would help"

petercooper3• 14 years ago

David Heinemeier Hansson got in on an O-1 quite early on in the life of Rails. I think he had just won an award from O'Reilly for best person in open source 2005 or something like that.

I know of two other people personally who've gotten O-1s after having tech books published with major tech publishers (coupled with the high salary requirement and other minor community fame, of course). But we're not talking Nobel Prize levels of fame here.

rjknight• 14 years ago

It's not an unheard-of rate for contractors, and the kind of people who become contractors are probably more similar to the kind of people who work for startups than either are to the kind of people who work for BigCorps for normal developer salaries.

elemeno3• 14 years ago

From what I've seen, I think that's possibly a touch low for experienced contractors. At least in the financial world, the £500pd upwards mark seems to be quite common - which is around £115k GBP/$185k USD assuming 11 months work a year (500 * 232).

sjtgraham2• 14 years ago

> I'm sure many in London would be intrigued where all the typical full-time software engineer salaries of £62k-£78k are to be had ;-) Maybe I talk to the wrong people or we're just more secretive in the UK but it's not often I hear salaries like that being thrown about.

In London there are definitely a fair amount of people making £100k+ writing software, and outside of finance. The key difference is they are on the contract market. There seems to be a ceiling on perm salaries even if someone is worth the money.

elemeno3• 14 years ago

That's likely because salaries are also linked to how much everyone else in a company is making as well so it's hard for someone to be paid a lot more than other people at the same level in a company. Contractors can be budgeted differently though being something closer to a pure transaction of "you write me this, I pay you this much".

Very curious about these well paying non-finance contracts though - I've been thinking about leaving the financial world, but so far the salary differentials have been stopping me. I've not worked outside of finance, so appropriate places to find those type of contracts is an unknown to me.

Mamady• 14 years ago

For all the hackers in London... the last line of this article is why you should be moving to SF :)

rurounijones• 14 years ago

The US government does a pretty good job of discouraging that sort of thing these days.

cjrp• 14 years ago

I don't really understand why you'd move a tech business to somewhere where there's famously a shortage of tech talent? Sure the pool of engineers in London may be smaller, but so's the demand surely?

twinturbo• 14 years ago

Leaving London for San Francisco. That's too bad. San Francisco is a dump.

chris123• 14 years ago

Good tips. Will be interesting to see how much longer this cycle runs.

Moving from London to San Francisco

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