So, you decided to leave the old continent. You are flying west to change the world. Your mind is full of cheer and plans. I did the same trip right before the Great Recession in 2008, one month before the hiring stops. I collected my thoughts about North America with a European mindset.

  1. Every society has inequality. Whether it is a minority status, finances, or just curiosity, many decided to immigrate to America for centuries. You can see this, if you look down from an airplane near Munich, Bayern. You see almost equally sliced lots of farmland. If a family had three children, they could not split the lots. One moved to a place that has many resources.
  2. Europe still has many privileged groups. There are kings, nobility, nationalists, military. Much of it causes the inequality. All are missing in America. There will always be a place where people, who want more will immigrate. It will be this distant place, that is big enough to protect itself from the world that was left behind. It is the land of Opportunity, not by Language, not by Culture, not by History, but by simple Geography.
  3. People are the State. Still there is a Rule of Law. That is true for many countries, there is usually a leader that represents the Rule of Law. However, here it is the individual Rights that define the state, not the nation.
  4. Wait? There is Ivy League. Are they the hierarchy? Well, there are many families, who expect their children to do more, by telling the story of the grandparents. Indeed, they try to select the best but there is also a justice ethics standard of considering too many options. Being in Ivy League comes with privileges, but it probably costs them more than what it does worth.
  5. America is not Anglo-Saxon anymore. My family is mixed Asian-European. Many in Britain like to get closer to America than to Continental Europe. However, America has very strong Laws and Supreme Court, it is not just Civil Law that defines the state anymore. Individual Rights and the desire to respect the Independence of Individuals are way stronger here than anywhere else. There were many tribal cultural changes in the 2010s, but that started to fade with the presidency of Donald Trump.
  6. Be careful with hierarchies. Selection is great but different managers have different managerial attitudes. Competition is good if it is a positive sum game. Competition embraces value created. Conflict is almost always bad for everyone.
  7. There are big companies and there are small ones. I luckily learned them all. I had the chance to work in many teams at Microsoft, and Amazon. I also did my own business alone outsourcing everything what was possible.
  8. America is a free trade. I do not say capitalist anymore, because the cloud datacenters of Amazon and Microsoft made capital accessible in my industry. This will probably happen in other industries as well.
  9. There are thousands of employers behind the blue-chip brands. Dell, Oracle, AT&T, Boeing, Starbucks, Cisco copy the standards set by the big ones. Regular companies grow and keep being efficient under the scrutiny of their shareholders. CFOs have hard times predicting growth as promised. Fluctuation is bigger. There are layoffs. It is better for the employees on the other hand. Sometimes these generate an industry of new companies that are there to create jobs. What is important is that there is no hierarchy. The standards are simple, you can return to an employer anytime.
  10. In a truly competitive market, companies do not make thick profits. Competitors can act as a reference for investors. Eventually people need to do something else. Profits can also be higher this way, if there is a desire. There is demand from the side of the retired, disabled, students, families to have bigger profits that support the inactive population.
  11. However, what I learned is that you can always earn better in America. This is a widely spread opinion, actually. What is behind it is that if you get your manager promoted by the value the team creates, it will be better for you as well. There are cults that may be tough to work with. Property financing needs down payments, and some teams may hire folks to collect their bonuses. Avoid those places, there are not many of them.
  12. The real good deal on the other hand is not the base salary but equity. I once forgot about my Employee Stock Purchase Plan, and it kept growing. When I noticed, I had so many Microsoft shares that I could use them as a down payment for my house.
  13. There are many traces left from the Cold War. There is some Communism, which I define here as to act as part of a superpower with fierce fight with another superpower having a name in the opposite direction (US-SU). Many companies were founded in this era, like Apple or Microsoft. They embrace hierarchy and being large. Once the cold war was over, traces of the mentality remained. Some people are secretive, suspicious for no reason. Some others have obsession of sabotage and destruction. Transparency can handle both.
  14. Some other companies grew out in the 1990s and 2000s. They are superpower. They decide who buys what and who befriends whom. Google and Facebook are still enormous, especially if you look at their impact. They reflect the victorious superpower. A single company that controls all the search, marketing or peer communication. They are not as big anymore.
  15. Amazon and Walmart filled the gap giving jobs and cheap products and services. They are the result of a new trade era of 2000s and 2010s. They are super efficient to compete with the low labor cost of the emerging countries. Antitrust laws could not keep up with the oligopoly of these companies. Eventually the author also got a check in a database somewhere having problems to easily secure jobs from 2019.
  16. The first thing I learned about America was from Canadians, where I worked first in North America. They usually said with a little smile that Americans really ‘work hard’. This is what you hear everywhere. If you work hard you will be successful. This is true in general. I burnt out of it too to realize is that it is the value you create what is important. Americans actually embrace results, but talk about hard work.
  17. How do you create value? Eventually you may get into a tunnel not knowing what is there at the end. What I learned is there are three sources that help to stay informed for good decisions. Roll the dice. If you still cannot predict the outcome, you are not a superhuman, you may fail in decisions. You watch the stock exchange and the surrounding cars. They align well, and they tell the expectations, job security whether it is time to take a loan or not. Lastly, read some mainstream news that explains the other two, and keeps you calm.
  18. An interesting aspect of America is that we have both a Constitution and written law and a heritage of Civil Law. This may cause some confusion sometimes for newcomers from Europe. My experience showed that my colleagues usually did well, who embraced constitutional thinking. It is usually easy to verify a decision is likely constitutional or not. Bad ideas will eventually get stopped somewhere. Regardless, the role of the state, and the boundaries of states and individuals will probably be the main topic for the next twenty years. The abortion debate, and cryptocurrency movement is a clear indication of this.
  19. There are libertarians. Their main concept are money. What will probably the other main topic of the next ten years is to close the seal on the use of data. Data collection is already regulated. It does not help much that you regulate a starving American small business, if other countries have three datacenters worth data about Americans in gang and/or government agency databases. Nobody should set where you spend your money on. If that means you use cash, you will use cash. It is not the data that is the issue, but that criminals and foreign governments try to set where you work and what you spend on after that.
  20. Some employers sometimes interpret this in the view of Civil Law. They state that they can violate human rights. This is not true. Human and Civil Rights are protected by Statutes as described in the Constitution. Violators may point to English Civil Law or the relative independence of states, but they cannot challenge the Judicial Power of the Supreme Court that extends to All Cases. This means that any constitutional right cannot be challenged without challenging the constitution. It is still an obligation in detailed cases to check the written law or court rulings. You have the freedom, but eventually you need to prove it at court.
  21. Lawyers are important. You will probably not consult many of them. It is expensive. One good thing was at Microsoft, that each developer had a lawyer, who you could ask. I was probably the one in the team that always questioned them. It paid off a lot later in my career to understand their thinking. It is probably not an accident that Brad Smith became the President of Microsoft, a lawyer, and not Satya Nadella, a tech professional.
  22. Check how many lawsuits are there per person. That is what you can expect as well. It is not many. That is lawyers convince you early to negotiate. Make sure that the advice aligns with your thinking as a standard. Different cultures advice different things sometimes. You will need to face the results of your actions years later.
  23. The length of lease agreements got longer the way we moved from Vancouver, BC, to Redmond, WA, then to San Jose, CA. I read them all. Fine prints is sometimes important. Make sure that Non Disclosure Agreements are what they are meant for. Do not disclose anything to the press or friends. My rule of thumb used to be to google up articles on a company and topic, and talk about things that are already public by this evidence. There are also Insider Trading Laws that protect that. However, a contract is business. All contracts are business, therefore each item in such a Non Disclosure Agreement or Employee Agreement must have a compensation item attached to. Also, Non Disclosure Agreements cannot instruct you to hide any crimes seen or being the victim of. Sometimes even State Departments mix this.
  24. The best advice I ever on performance got was to take a note. I made a mistake in a report I sent to other companies, but the logs were not clear, and I had to do the value work. I collected all the evidence, wrote down an assessment as a record. In case there is an investigation the accurate information was there. This kind of thinking helped me a lot later. Mistakes happen, errors happen, keep the accurate information, it is already enough to prove your good intent. Create value.
  25. This is a tough country. Some parts are still rarely inhabited, and some places grow fast. You may see comments, insults or harassment. You say what you feel harassment, and it is harassment, if you complain about it. If you complain directly it proves your good intent, and it stops, almost always. If not, then you probably deal with artificial intelligence or a database, not a human.
  26. You probably also watch many movies like I did. I was very surprised how different it is when I arrived. I was a new hire, and the company did not have an office, so they made me share one with another engineer lady. The first I did was to open the shades, and it is also better to keep the door open. Most states have laws that prohibit wiretapping but still this is the best way you avoid lawsuits or even worse bad flags for false claims. It is very important that if a legal case is set up, it is a fraud, and you are the victim. This was a common topic of Stalinism, so the lawyer, who sets up such cases is probably from a Post-Communist country. Law is not theatre.
  27. There are two different industries here. The regular economy has booms and recessions. The Federal Reserve tries to smoothen these with monetary policies. Banks lend money, but usually industries of essential services get the benefits in the first round. These are housing, construction, finance, banking, infrastructure or fast-food chains. These are so standard that they can get cheaper financing, so any stimulus reaches these first. These are essential services, and usually it is tough to work there. They get strict regulations. The leaders of the Federal Reserve have extreme powers. They need to choose even their vocabulary carefully. Any issues may force them to change a word to another synonym. Now this is big, it means changes in future basis points that may cost thousands or tens of thousands of jobs that politicians care about.
  28. Some other industries let more experimentation. They are like a casino. However, it is important to know that many clusters like Silicon Valley have their competitive regulation. It is good to think ahead, whether an offer or funding is a good business and whether it does not drive away other opportunities. In any case it is a good idea to hire more people than what is immediately needed. Usually projects require twice the investment of original estimates.
  29. It is not such a big issue anymore, but you see the pattern of asymmetric warfare reflected in many societies. America is strong, and we tend to project our power. Sometimes on the other hand may be extremely stressful. Remember to treat these cases as an individual. Any act of power may be disproportionate but reciprocity in terms of law usually reflects the power used and not the status of the victim. Complain early. Many issues are caused by databases.
  30. If you get a job offer that usually describes some base pay, equity incentives and benefits. There are many internet resources to verify the competitiveness of the base pay. However, the easy rule is to compare a salary to the nominal per capital GDP. If your family has two adults and two children, your GDP impact should be four times of this value, otherwise you lower the GDP. Gross salaries are sometimes lower indicating there is a trade deficit to China and Germany, or somebody else is investing instead of you.
  31. The best employment agreements include some equity. Families can sign these terms as equity is usually vested in four to five years. The problem is that do not anticipate getting more equity later. It may or may not happen. Also, many teams have investors, who collect bonuses pushing down your review. If your title does not change for a long time, you likely deal with property investors collecting for a down payment of a shopping mall.
  32. The golden rule is scale. If you are in a profession like IT operations or robotics. You will create lots of value, the company can give better salary. Servicing positions like law, education, or healthcare deal directly with people, and they do not scale well. The salary may get higher, but it will strictly follow GDP growth.
  33. Do you want to get a mortgage and do property investment? The important fact is that housing cannot be more expensive than the proportion of salaries, thus the proportion of GDP per capital. If you see a higher growth, it is likely a bubble.
  34. Joining big hierarchies may be an issue. Sometimes diplomatic ties have influence, not on hiring but management promotions. The promise of equal opportunity is nice but just like the movies, they show a desired future state. The truth is that you rarely see a mixed country executive at big companies. Usually they are from India, China, or US Ivy League. It is a good idea anytime to ask around whether your human and civil rights can be protected at regular courts. This is the United States of America and every square inch of it is subject to the law of the United States of America all the way up to the Supreme court.
  35. Everybody has cell phones these days. Different states have different regulations, but it is a good idea to ask for permission to record meetings in any case. It may be a criminal offense to wiretap somebody. I also had to remind new colleagues from other jurisdictions about the rules in California.
  36. I personally keep a distance from any government department or agency. These places usually employ generations of the same patrician families. It is unlikely that I could get a better career than in the private economy.
  37. There are many ways former bosses, special interests can retaliate. All of them are criminal. One general rule is that if somebody spent a lot on education their families will fight fiercely for a role. The second one is that there are random databases around, you cannot clean all of them from hackers. Simple transparency, a Facebook page explains who you are. Do not spend much on reputation. You will never be able to fix inaccuracies of foreign government databases. This is how their GDP is the fraction of the US GDP.
  38. America is both liberal and conservative. However, be advised that it is usually not an issue to push back when people try to enforce unwritten street rules. You have as many rights as anybody else. There are many protections against all forms of discrimination. It is usually better to discuss and resolve things in person first before going to court. It saves money to everyone. One thing I noticed that some people tend to behave differently than others that does not reflect your attitude.
  39. I already talked about essential businesses. These fulfil needs and not just wants or luxury needs. There is always something to do at these companies and their profitability expands to the entire economy which is called multiplication effect. They are rarely a monopoly. You can expect to get a job without paying a coach, pay a standard 6% for a transaction to a realtor, not more.
  40. So, do you need a PhD? It depends. If your visa or green card list is long, more education helps. Sometimes I saw with friends that they are expected to teach, which might be an issue. Americans like smart people. That is why they play the baseball game with you sometimes, teaching with challenging. This is why I only applied in the US for patents. America values research and we pay for it.
  41. Many folks like sports. This reflects their real-world behavior. Sometimes I saw this pattern that folks try to challenge you all the time like a pitcher. You are supposed to hit it hard, it is part of the show. The other one, if you run away with an idea, all the team members suddenly wants to jump on you. Just do a touchdown.
  42. Living and working abroad is not always easy. Usually people migrate with some perceptions. If those fail to be valid it may lead to something called cultural shock. America in the movies is different from America in reality. Movies are the desired state sometimes.
  43. Some people who come from Europe complain about what I call simple food. It is okay to me. What I found that a main advantage is to get used to simple diet like corn flakes and burgers, is that you can easily get over financial hardships. It affects your mood less. You can become a superhero even if you eat burgers and fries.
  44. Highly educated people like complicated stuff. It helps to raise the barrier to enter their market. Usually these are very small in general. Construction people like simplicity.
  45. Now occasionally you may run into employers that claim that the Constitution and all the human rights are just binding for federal employers. This is not true. Do not buy it. There is One Supreme Court that protects the Constitution. This means that by being unconstitutional, those employers challenge what is called the sovereignty of the United States of America. That hurts.
  46. Do not use drugs. Chemistry is evolving there will be more and more exotic substances invented. People use them to cause harm. Random folks can just drop a dissolved material next to your car in a parking lot. If you can honestly answer you never used drugs, you will be able to protect your health and rights easily, without any issues. Money, secrets, insider information, EMEA trade quotas are all incentives, how you can be ‘burnt out’. Imagine what a ChatGPT like intelligence was able to achieve with Chemistry in government sponsored databases a decade ago. Recovery can last years, and it is easy to misdiagnose, if you do not get a blood test early. Watch others. If a loved one behaves aggressively or strangely, and it is a previously unseen behavior with sudden onset and disappearance, it is probably due to an exposure to a substance, and it may require medical help.
  47. Push for the average. Why wouldn’t you push for the average? The median is usually less than the average due to high earners. This allows to build venture capital and luxury industries. Do not let yourself be exploited with low wages. It is usually a sign of inefficiency in the society. Accepting the status quo makes it last reducing GDP growth. It is not immigrants that pull back the growth of developed countries but immigrants who do not push for building at least an average value.
  48. The United States is a dangerous country. Gun violence is much higher than in other countries. However, much of it is suicide rather than homicide if you look the numbers closely. It is more likely that you will be neglected by society that to become victim of gun violence. Watch out for signs of disinformation, fake news.
  49. US is one of the countries with the lowest level of corruption and the highest level of opportunity as a result. Efficiency is seen in the PPP GDP per capita. Be open, be transparent, accept clear English feedback, read a lot, and communicate a lot. That is it.
  50. Take it easy. One thing about being abroad is to learn about other cultures. Take it easy, step back. Time always gives enough evidence to prove what works.

So why did I write fifty points and not forty? It is the profit.

There will always be a place where people, who want more will immigrate. It will be this distant place, that is big enough to protect itself from the world that was left behind. It is the land of Opportunity, not by Language, not by Culture, not by History, but by simple Geography.

This article was revised on May 28, 2023.