I've worked in a lot of Europe and spent a lot of time working in all over the US too. I genuinely believe that it's down to the person. Personally, i'd stay in Europe, but one of my good friends (who did the same route) set up in Austin Texas. The compensation is a lot better in the US that Europe in general (but you can still find ~$300k+ in EU if you look for it). I didn't enjoy SF (downtown, not Palo Alto) and Florida at all. SF was dirty, both felt unsafe, and Florida felt very fake, etc. However, just down the road from SF (San Diego) was beautiful and a totally different vibe. Boston was also really cool.<p>As for the working environment, the general thing I found was that the US tends to have more people which are absolute experts, whereas EU is more general. If you get hired to do, say, firewall config in the US then you'd be an absolute expert on Cisco, and there would be another separate person who is an absolute expert on Checkpoint. In EU there would be one person who (whilst they might be shit-hot) would be 80% as good as their US counterparts, but on both Cisco/Checkpoint. Just an observation I had across several companies. The main things which drove we away from the US were the working environments - long days, and the general intensity. Also unsaid things like travel time in general being a lot longer, just because stuff is more spread out, than EU. I also found that a lot of the meetings were very confrontational, there was a lot of competitiveness/trying to make others look bad, etc. than their EU counterparts.<p>That being said, the time I got completely eviscerated in a meeting on purpose (to make the consultant look bad) was in Eastern Europe. YMMV, but of course these are just my general observations. It sounds weird, but being from the UK I missed the music scene a lot. The US people were absolutely lovely though, everywhere I went everyone made me feel welcome, even the people who look to tear you a new one in meetings 30 minutes later.<p>These are just some random sunday evening musings from someone who has worked a few years in both (some FAANG, some large, some small companies) in both. My observations are pre-Trump though, it does seem recently that there's a lot more division in the US these days, so the environment might be totally different now. I'd honestly give it a go if you're young, see if you like it. You can always move back. FWIW my favorite places in both were probably a smallish company in San Diego, and work in Malta. To choose any places to live for me, other than the UK, i'd most likely pick Boston and Sweden. 99% of the time the people you work with make the atmosphere though, so you can get lucky and unlucky, which is why i'm trying to generalise my experiences as much as possible. I realise i've gone on a mad tangent here, but yes it was totally worth it and i'd do it again if i could.