This is a bit off topic, but wrt working for an US company - US programming salaries are weird - it used to be a decade ago, that programming salaries were roughly in line with other domains in engineering, while most places required a STEM degree as well, meaning both engineering and CS employed roughly the same talent pool at similar wages. Imo, this estimation still holds in the rest of the world, but CS salaries in the US have skyrocketed, while companies opened up to the idea of hiring any enterprising leetcoder.