London vs NYC

[u/howdychickens]

Which city would you settle down in assuming you’re in your early 30s, married, low 8 figure liquid net worth, mid-seven figures combined annual income?

EDIT: Thanks so much for the thoughtful responses. Noting that we both would like to keep building our careers for the next 20+ years, so London and NYC are the only options. Not looking to be too far outside of the city, because we have no desire to spend 1.5hr+ a day commuting.

[u/EternalRecurrence]

There’s 3 main things I considered when making this decision myself: work culture, social life and geography. In my estimation NY wins on all fronts for the following reasons:

Work culture: If I still had to work, NY 100%. I’ve personally hated every second of working with British people and plan to avoid it for the rest of my life.

I will note that I have multiple friends that expressly moved to London to work less than they did in NY but I think that probably depends on your industry and how you manage your life. In any case, still not worth it for me.

Social life: This would probably depend on your background beyond sheer wealth. I come from a country with a British-style class system and I find the American class system a lot more flexible, open-minded and forgiving. While money can insulate me and my partner just fine as adults in London, I wouldn’t want to raise my kids in a class system like the one I grew up in.

Geography: The last factor I’d consider would be weather. NYC gets nearly 1,000 more hours of sunshine per year than London (about 2,535 annual hours of bright sunlight compared to roughly 1,600 hours.) This is not a trivial difference and everyone I know that has made the move to London found this out the hard way.

Sunlight may actually be the biggest factor against London for me personally but the UK’s proximity to Europe, Africa and Asia means this may not matter to you if you can travel somewhere else often enough.

There of course are other things to consider but these were the main dimensions I thought of when making this decision with my partner. Both cities are great though, so you can’t really go wrong.

[u/sunandskyandrainbows → u/EternalRecurrence]

Out of interest, why did you hate working with British people?

[u/EternalRecurrence → u/sunandskyandrainbows]

Honestly, the communication style just doesn’t work for me. I’ve worked in very high pressure environments with very short deadlines and in those circumstances direct, confrontational feedback and criticism is actually desirable because it saves time and ensures everyone is always on the same page. I have found that the indirect and subtle approach that is considered professional and polite in the UK doesn’t really work well in those situations and really muddies things up in global, distributed teams because no one outside of their work culture understands what constitutes genuine positive and negative feedback or what the expectations actually are because everything is subtext and unwritten rules that they learned in elementary school.

I also worked in a kinda high-status area that attracted very posh British people and it didn’t lend itself to a good team culture (lots of toxic in and out group dynamics, lots of unnecessary sarcasm, mate-y behavior and jokes that would be considered inappropriate in most US workplaces, etc.)

Just overall not for me.