I laugh at Americans mocking Europeans because "they're not willing to work hard" - two reasons:
1. Salaries are shit here anyways, and any additional money you make beyond say 60k (!) is taxed at 40% or higher.
2. For compliance reasons, if you spend more than 8h in the office between "badge in" and "badge out", HR will tell you to work less because the company will get into legal trouble otherwise. It is just prohibited and you will just create headaches for everyone including yourself.
Depending on which European country it's not necessarily forbidden. "Compliance reasons" may also mean "the company must pay overtime at the appropriate rate" and they just don't want to deal with that.
Actually it's super easy for any EU company to sponsor a so called blue card, the salary requirements are laughably low. I think the reason why so few companies do it is because they're simply not aware of its existence
Indeed, if OP equates EU to Europe, but doesn't answer the language question. IME so few companies do it because there's little demand. The east of Europe is relatively poorer (in pure financial terms) than than west, and it's far easier to hire people from those countries who are already in the EU/Shengen than outside.
They did ask about remote work. Some US tech employees would be wealthy enough to move to Switzerland without a job. It's like, 7 figure US wealth you'd need, not 8 figure or above.
Look at levels.fyi for an idea on how much you would make in Europe. Last time I checked an L5 at Amazon Berlin makes about 100k. (dont bother converting because right now EUR == USD, the GBP-USD rate is a bit higher)
The best of both worlds is if you get a contractor role based in the US with a US salary and live in Europe. You will still get the higher tax rate and as a US citizen pay taxes in the US. The Netherlands has a way to self-sponsor your visa, it's called DAFT.
What's the reason that you want to relocate to Europe? It's not looking good right now. Our economies have been stagnant for years, morale is low, division seems to increase, and there is a lot of cognitive dissonance regarding Russia and the new US presidency.
I notice that I trust LLMs a lot nowadays, because I spent a lot of time trying to understand the answer to the first question, thinking I was just "not getting it", until realizing that it's just wrong, and then also realizing that the question doesn't even make sense in the slightest.
Yeah they aren't that good at spotting wrong questions (tho better than a year ago). Claude is especially likely to do this correctly. GPT o whatever will do this push back wrongly. Something in Gemini is positioning Gemini as an all knowing expert rather than a tool for exploring new true statements. It ends almost every thing with "is there anything else I can explain about the distribution of algebraic numbers with a given height".
Actually I just did one of my test questions on GPT o3-mini-high and it got it. Very nice. Back in the lead over Claude. (My last check was with o1; although if they used the whole chat history to train or fine tune I gave the answer and in the end forced o1 to accept it. Lot of arm twisting language tho.)
