I’m in tech. We definitely transfer people all the time. I didn’t say these places don’t do it. I said it’s a difficult numbers game, and many industries reserve these opportunities for more senior staff.

I have a metric fuck ton of colleagues at AWS for instance, and I know many people who’ve transferred internationally with them. But I also know that nearly all of those people were somewhat senior, with at least ~5 years of experience, and most of them were not accepted on their first, second, or even third applications for international transfer.

You’re seeing all the people who have successfully transferred and that’s cool. It happens! But it’s selection bias. You’re not considering all the multitudes of people behind them who failed to be transferred. At some of these huge companies, especially, the odds are very very poor for any one person to bank on this as an opportunity vector.

My first attempt at relocation was trying the internal transfer route at a major Fortune 500. I was lucky that the company allowed fairly junior people to transfer … but that just made the numbers game worse. There’d be 100 opportunities a year, and they’d get 2500 applications. I applied every year for 4 years, I got executive sponsorship for my application, and I only even got an interview once.