lj2

Re: Mcdonalds - The USA would be a horrible place to be earning a low wage. To be honest, I think it'd be awful even earning an average wage. Certainly I'd not want to live in the US unless I were on a decent amount of $$ - Which you are likely to be.

I think that I could live with my family of 3 children and non-working wife on £130k (before debt repayments in the East Bay). That's my 'magic number' that I have calculated for myself including one car between us. Your number would therefore no doubt be lower as you have no children.

For that, I will need to make some small sacrifice in location and have a hefty commute and non-perfect schools. Rent approx $2200 per month - Think rental costs rather than house purchase costs.

I was an expat in Chicagoland from 07 - 09 inclusive, and will be an expat again at around August if the world spins nicely for me... ideally in the GBA.

Re: Mileage - I was doing about 20k in Chicagoland where I had done approx 12k in the UK. That may help you to make a comparison with your life, but it may not. That included a few trips to Minnesota, Detroit, Indiana, Missouri etc which I drove over the period. I would imagine a few similar trips in California (Vegas / Highway 1 / National Parks / Tahoe) for leisure but would be commuting by public transport so reckon I'd lease a care for 15k - 20k miles.

N1cky

You can transfer your H visa to another company relatively easily and cheaply, make sure you get a re-pat clause in your contract though

You won't drive many miles in the Bay area, most people want to live on the doorstep of PA so even if you had to live further out due to housing costs, your max commute will probably be 20 miles each way. My hubby currently does 5 miles each way and people comment that he lives out of the way traffic is heavy though so those 5 miles can take 30 minutes

We're expats Yorkshire via Los Angeles to Mountain View, this is a beautiful part of the world

N1cky

Where are you seeing houses for 2200? Also, how are you going to manage with 1 car, is your wife going to take you to work every day?

Not being rude just interested?

lj2

Concord easily (seems most likely), and also some in Sunnyvale / Walnut Creek (rare) / Dublin / Pleasant Hill / Livermore / Danville / San Ramon... there are some about. Obviously the proof of the pudding will be in the eating if I get over there.

And no, I shall be public transporting in every day. Which may mean a bus from house to BART station but HOPEFULLY a walk from house to BART station... Obviously the exact situation varies for each of the areas listed.

elop

>>Systems engineer... the bloke that sits in the corner, playing games, until somebody needs Outlook fixing again; average salary. Senior Software Engineer, the productive and highest paid earners. In my company anyway. That's the problem - you need to look at skills, not job title, though SSE is pretty clear. Systems engineer is somewhat more vague as it can range from the lowly "kick the router" bloke to somebody that designs IT solutions for big companies.>>As an SSE in California you ought to be looking at way over $80k. If you think that your role is above that of an SSE then $80k is definitely too low!>>Most here are British who are now in the US. Personally, I'm moving in a few weeks.

N1cky

Sunnyvale is the next town to me, you won't get a house there that you could fit 5 people in for under $2.5k you won't get anything nice for under $3k and that's if you are extremely lucky. Also anything within a walk to the Bart adds another $500 on to the rent. I can't personally comment on the other places, but from what I have heard and read on here you will struggle in those places too.

Also any house for 2.2 is not going to be in a good school district, a very important consideration with 3 kids

Please redo your numbers and make sure you can afford at least 3.5k, otherwise I think you are going to find yourself in a situation where you are very disappointed.

Bink

£130k or $130k?! I live on $130k (in Houston), with monthly mortgage payments (incl tax etc) of $2,300, two cars and support my wife and son. This is a comfortable life for us with savings money at the end of the month. Having said that, I wouldn't want to my mortgage payment to be any higher than this without earning more money. It's a comfortable range for me personally at this level.

jackattack

I think that you'll find that most people on here are Brit expats living in the US. I've found the board very useful in quite a few unique situations.

I am a Brit who moved from central London (Islington) back in 2002. I must have been one of the few people who thought that moving to the Bay Area was in fact cheaper than living back 'home'. Then again, I was single, no kids and didn't mind commuting a bit to work. That being said, I do think that your house prices seem a little 'off'. Depending on what you need, I'd estimate you probably won't get anything that you want to live in for less than say $2000 per month plus utilities.

Now that I'm married, with kids, and schools matter, maybe I've become desensitized to how much cheaper it is here than if I was trying to do this back home. We drive A LOT, and i hate filling up my SUV with $80 of gas which lasts me a few days but I am fully aware of how much more this would cost if we lived in London.

There are a few things which surprise me as to how much more they cost here than in the UK - communication - TV, internet, phone etc. Insurance - all types (house, car, health). I pay less income tax but way more property tax.

Obviously I cannot tell how my life would be different if I'd stayed in London/home counties for the last 10 years but I feel privileged to be able to live comfortably here. Hubbie earns a good salary, we have great healthcare and benefits (thx to a great Silicon Valley employer!), and a flexible lifestyle which involves going out to eat when we want, traveling, private pre-school, sports etc.

Things are bound to change a little in the short term since I'm about to pop with twin boys. But, if the stars align, it's a great place to live.

Bob

H1B, they can apply in April for a October start.

If you get shit canned, if you can find another company that wants to sponsor you within a couple of weeks they can transfer the visa to them, but any greencard process starts from scratch and you don't get any extension to amount of time in the US.

You really need them to state when they will have the greencard on the go in writing. You also ideally want them to pay to repatriate you if they let you go to give you some job security because by law all they are liable is to send you economy class back home but not all your stuff.

You will find you drive, even if you don't need to for work, it's just the way it is. My missus works practically right next to work, still do 15-20K miles going absolutely no where.

You don't want to be, even if you are able to, to walk around in the summer to do the grocery shop etc.

GeoffM

Right. That's what I was trying to elicit from you - your original question was too vague as to whether $80k was too low as we didn't know what you actually did. Now we do, I would be looking nearer the $120k+ area easily.

Not sure why you think I'm going on about job titles. I've already said that you should look at the roles, not the title. If you think it means little to you, think how it translates (or rather doesn't translate) across the pond.

Incidentally, for my visa application I had to prove I was paid in the top 10% of people in my position. My position is "Software Technical Authority". Try finding that exact phrase on a job site! I just tried and my name appeared in the first page of Google results - ho hum!

elop

>>Not sure why you think I'm going on about job titles. I've already said that you should look at the roles, not the title. If you think it means little to you, think how it translates (or rather doesn't translate) across the pond.I was actually in California last week and happened to pick up a copy of the Daily Post (newspaper) in Palo Alto which contained Mountain View city worker pay - 2 pages full of salaries with individuals names. The job titles were things like "Park Manager", "Firefighter", "Police Officer", "Golf Course Supervisor" etc...with row's worth of salaries averaging at $150K. Do public sector workers generally get paid well in the US? Typically in the UK, such jobs would be £20K-£40K, even in London, depending on experience so I was amazed to see typical figures of 5x that.

md95065

OK - I agree with you about job titles often being meaningless but your description sounds like "software engineering" to me (unless of course you do hardware design as well - in which case you are probably even more in demand) - I am not sure where your association between "software engineering" and "developing applications" comes from - in my experience "software engineering" is much more often associated with systems programming - operating system development, network protocols etc ..

Anyway, my best guess (and it is only a guess) is that as a software engineer with about 8 years of experience and skills that are in demand you should probably be looking at something between $130k and $160k for a job in silicon valley. If you think that you are worth $150k then go ahead and ask for $150k - it may be higher than they were thinking of offering but it certainly won't be an unreasonable place to start negotiating from.

Realistically almost anyone relocating to the US is well advised to rent for at least the first 6 to 12 months - people such as yourself who only have employment related visas are much safer continuing to rent until they become permanent residents.

FWIW I am a "software engineer" working for a fairly large and quite well known internet company in Mountain View - I live in Santa Cruz - my daily commute is 40 miles each way door to door.

elop

Sure, perhaps a cultural difference in terms - but if you are an operating systems/kernel developer, you wouldn't be a website/web app developer as well, you would be focussed on one, or the other normally with just a single language. when you a "Systems Engineer", you're often juggling different pieces of work in various languages - all of which are completely unrelated. I'm regularly writing in Bash/Perl/Python/PHP all in the same day and sometimes (rarely) debugging code in Ruby and TCL/TK etc. Obviously I'm not an expert in all of these, I do specialise to a certain extent but the work seems to be more varied. There is the Systems Administration angle to it too, but this is often minimised by the automation. I'm not saying one role is better than the other, but these are the differences as I see them. If I was to put Software Engineer on my CV/Resume, I'll be bombarded by emails/phone calls from agencies about Java/C++ jobs - I tried it once, never again :-)


I guess you're probably right - even if it is unreasonable. The worst they can do is say no. If I go lower than what I need/want to ensure they agree I may end up with a salary which isn't suitable for me. I guess people don't get high salaries if they ask for low salaries - not that any of the figures discussed on this thread can be regarded low per se.

Agreed. is it really as soon as 6-12 months to get permanent residency? I always assumed longer, although not put too much thought into it yet.


Internet company in Mountain View, eh? :-) How many guesses do I get?

Philgr

Most of the big tech firms in SV have fairly well defined salary grades. Given they haven't asked your salary expectations yet they probably have a pretty good idea of where you fit and are reasonably confident it will be "ok".

Having said that, the market for tech talent right now is heating up again so there's no harm in aiming high. $80k sounds very low. One thing you need to factor into your calculations that I haven't seen mentioned yet is the company ownership stage. I assume they are post IPO given the timescales you are discussing, if it's one of the market darlings like Apple & Google, they will low ball the salary somewhat since they'll say you can expect to make a good return on stock. If it's one of the more "slovenly" companies like Cisco, HP etc then don't count on the stock getting you anything significant. The other question is whether the number you quote is base or total compensation - Cisco, for example, would give 10-25% on target bonus on top of that for mid-level engineering grades. Each company will have its own scheme and it's good to ask what the average payout has been in previous years before getting too excited about the numbers they give you.

On mileage - I live in the East Bay, work in Mountain View and do about 15k a year commuting plus another 2-3k in my car. My wife does about the same mileage in her car being a soccer Mom. CA is BIG compared to the UK and things are spread out.

Good luck

md95065

No - the 6-12 months is just the minimum time that I would advise anyone to consider renting unless they know the area that they are moving to really well.

As for how long it might take for you to get permanent residence that depends on when the company is willing to start the process and how long it takes from the on but you are probably looking at a couple of years at best.

I don't know - are you feeling lucky?