Quote: (04-29-2015 07:31 PM)Suits Wrote:
Quote: (04-29-2015 06:47 PM)jbkunt2 Wrote:
This is a no contest.
USA all day long.
China is, frankly, a shit hole.
Have you been to China?
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The USA has some incredible places to live - NYC, Chicago, San Francisco...
Agreed.
And it is incredible living in these places if you earn a lot of money.
If you don't, it'll really take the joy out of the experience.
OP mentioned having only 'soft skills." He wouldn't be earning much money in the US.
China is a great place for someone, who normally wouldn't even be given a chance, to make their mark.
I spent three months in Canada last year before moving back to China. My heart was set in Beijing, in fact, I had a job lined up already.
However, with time to kill while I waited for a family event to come and go, so that I could leave the country, I did an exploratory job search just to see what my value was in Canada.
I applied for over thirty positions. I got invited to three interviews.
One was at a school that didn't have a position to offer. They took some real interest in my resume initially, but I never heard from them again after the interview.
I was interviewed for and offered a low paying part-time retail sales position. All the other candidates at the interview were high school students. I was a recent university grad. I probably could have earned $15-20K a year doing this job. I would have needed to survive by living with my parents and using public transportation.
I was also invited to an "open house" interview at a non-profit. Another 150 people showed up. We were all interviewed for three minutes and asked 3 questions. The line was so long that one woman passed out while waiting her turn and collapsed in perfectly comfortable weather.
Now, Canada is not the USA, but I did my university studies in the US and have a lot of contacts there and I'd argue that even with regional variation, my friends there aren't having results that different than I was having in Canada.
So, instead I went to China. After one year of hustling and taking risks, I have a good list of clients lined up and I make over $50K USD a year -- just teaching English.
I guarantee you that I would not be making that type of money any where in the USA or Canada one year after university graduation with my liberal arts degree in Asian Studies and International Relations.
If you've got some hard skills, like my brother, the engineer, you can do well in the USA. If not, you can join all my university graduate friends with third shift cleaning jobs and part time sales positions at Meijers.
I'm going to expand on that. Now, keep in mind that much like the OP, I'm not really a Westerner, either. I've lived most of my life in the US but never really felt fully a part of this society, so my perspective is certainly colored by that.
I don't want to write a book, so to keep the story short while providing the requisite background, I'm gonna say this: I did not grow up with money and providing for myself was already a "thing" in high school. By the time I got to college I had to hustle my ass off just to pay tuition, food, etc. So believe you me, money has always been uppermost in my mind. It wasn't that long ago that I had to support myself and my education $8.50/hr at a time.
After I graduated college I found myself in a position very similar to Suits'. I've always had very high ambitions for myself and not to toot my own horn, but in my own mind I am just as good as any of the kids who work at Wall Street or in SV. Nevertheless, I didn't go to HYPS so finding a job corresponding to my ambitions was proving difficult. Those were the days I was dreaming with what I'd do with a $50k salary. Anyway, after working tech support for about half a year after graduating, I said fuck it and moved to China as a test prep instructor. I had wanted to go to China for many years before that, so it was only a matter of time regardless.
China was epic. In the interest of brevity I'll keep it at that. As it happened, I got a job offer from one of the companies I had applied to before leaving for China just a month into my stay. I felt torn but ultimately decided to accept the offer and return to the US, especially since I was virtually promised I would be posted back to Asia at some point. In the end, I was able to spend a little under a year in China before I had to onboard with the consulting company I currently work for.
So I came back to the US and started working. I finally had, if not my "dream job," then at least one I felt was a good starting point. Management consulting, travel every week, paid flights, food, hotels, rental cars, and a little over $1000 after tax getting deposited to the ol' bank account every week. It was fun for a few months. But as those months kept flying by, shit developed into a routine and I realized that I'm just wasting my life.
Week blends into week here. I had money, but not really enough to do anything with. I was eating out for free at fancy restaurants 4 days out of every week while traveling, so that was no fun anymore. I'm fascinated by the outdoors, so I went on a few excursions to Colorado, Utah, Montana, etc. These were fun, and almost getting lost, by myself, on the top of the completely deserted second tallest mountain in the US in the middle of winter is a good memory and story I can tell girls. But other than that, life was just passing me by in a way it simply wasn't when I was still in China.
Even before I returned to the US I knew it could only be a temporary interlude, and that sentiment has only intensified the more time I've spent here. At this point, all I'm doing here is working, hitting the gym, and studying Chinese/programming. I have zero enthusiasm for anything else and my only near term ambition is to go back to China, even if it means those big paychecks I was pining for not so long ago are sacrificed at the altar of movement in my life. I do not want to be one of those fucks brainlessly watching life pass in front of my eyes while mechanically going through the motions day after day, so that I can top out at $200k as some kind of middle manager somewhere. Fuck that. I'll take my chances in China at living dynamically and striving to make something happen, rather than coasting through a boring and uneventful life in corporate America.
The point of this long winded narrative is to say, stagnation equals death. Less than 2 years ago, I was thinking similar to the OP: yes, it would be nice to be in position "X" but I'm sure it would get boring after a while. Lo and behold, I managed to achieve position "X" and sure as all fuck, it is boring as hell. It's an absolutely pointless existence. If my time and job experience in the US is to have any utility at all, it will be to allow me to get a job in China that I can then parlay into further opportunities. So basically, I think the OP chose the right path. Stagnation can still happen in China, but it's much less likely than in the US. Things just have a way of happening there that they don't in the US.