Nothing, because at the end what matters is that I am happy. I am not a fan of pursuing the rat race of always more money. It will create a tunnel vision and, at the end, FOMO and stress.
I am also not in my 20s anymore where I would be willing to move across the Ocean for more money.
I'm myself quite tired of this money rat race. But recently i've been literally heart broken.
I work at a small company that tried to do build their own Cloud product, but wasn't very successful at promoting it. So now it outstaffing me to one big name company that was previously tried to adopt our solution but now is building they own. Which i quite dissatisfied with as i completely lack any sense of ownership working on it. So i started to look into job market.
So i found cscareerquestionsEU sub on reddit. And literally the first post i saw from a fresh graduate who got offer at Amazon(in Germany) with base more than my base and first year bonus more than mine. On top of that he got RSU. And i have 7YoE, contributed to big projects in K8s eco and gave talks at conferences. Seeing this just destroyed my whole motivation to do anything at my job.
I know Google pays new grads ridiculously high salaries, especially if they have a ML specialization. That's just a thing with huge companies, they can afford it. You said your company is small, so what is the issue?
I think it's simply that they can afford it, and if they don't, their competitors will happily steal the best talent away with higher salaries.
I don't suppose the same situation exists within Google, although I've heard freshly graduated ML hires can get up to $500k, which sounds crazy until you realize China is paying twice as much.
Taking part in the "money rat race" isn't just about the Benjamins. It is about working for a company that explicitly values your contribution. That in itself helps with motivation.
I am also not in my 20s anymore where I would be willing to move across the Ocean for more money.