41–50 of 634 posts
Regrets as a programmer: 1. Every piece of unpolished, unfinished code that management decided should ship to the customers regardless 2. Ever using node and npm. 3. Seeing and living through the train wreck of J2EE and the XML horrors that ensued. 4. Not seeing the beauty in simple functions early on. Not everything needs to be a class or module. 5. Most business problems are political/social - regret every time we…
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Honest [tough] question: Why don't you work for clients that pay more? Just because you're in Southern Europe doesn't mean the person paying the invoices has to be. I have friends who save ungodly amounts (in the 40k/year range) and their employers/clients still think they're damn cheap. Income arbitrage. Look it up :)
I work for a international company, mainly based in the US. I get paid what a local developer gets paid, our chinese employees get paid what the local norm is there etc. Do other companies just outright decide salary based on where the company HQ is? Call me cynical, but I'm a bit skeptical that a company would pay more than they had to. Note: Assuming of course your role is not super vital for the whole company or s…
And no, your salary/rate isn't defined by where the company HQ is. That part defines their price tolerance. The price is defined primarily by how much you ask for and what you can offer in return.
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Exactly what ddorian43 said. My particular friends (and me of old) are located in Slovenia, clients are in San Francisco. You can have a decent life in Slovenia for $20k/year. You can easily get a gig in San Francisco for $60k/year. Probably even easier for $100k/year because of the whole signaling thing. I wasn't able to save as much as my friends are because of lifestyle inflation, but I sure had a lot of fun. My m…
Thanks for the reply and the info provided. My personal opinion regarding the ability to move from a bad economy is that this is not always as easy as it looks. Even if you are european with an EU passport you are very likely to come up against some high language barriers etc. Although that could be a challenge some people might jump at. For example I know that the UK (and mostly London) is extremely tolerant of non…
This is not a problem I personally experienced for English speaking countries. Started learning when I was in kindergarten, always immersed in the culture via TV and internet, did English and English writing as a hobby pretty much since starting high school. Until they hear my accent, most people assume I'm a native speaker.
So I lucked out on that front.
The hard part for me was the visa. But that is also a solvable problem.
He would have been unhappy with the other choice as well, because then it is the programming side he would be missing out on. I would advise everyone to read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536 You chose one option out of many, and the others may no longer be a possibility. However, the writer's unhappiness does not spawn from his inability to be successful at what he does,…
> I came to a fork in the road and took the one less traveled. Perhaps now I realize why.
He seems to disagree with Frost that the road less traveled is the one worth taking, judging from the title and overall tone of the post.
The problem is that many technical people are not "people" persons. Part of that may be personality, some of it is background, but a lot of it is study and thinking too.
My brother builds huge buildings. He's very proud of them. He often (gently) gives out about the marketing people and their mad notions and lack of technical understanding. But, as I point out to him, if they don't sell the apartments, he doesn't get to build the buildings in the first place.
Ultimately, therefore, if you're going to put your skills into a corporate enterprise (of any size), you need to accept that it all originates with selling. "Business is simple", says Alexandre Dumas, "it's other people's money."
Progammers should either accept that they love playing in the intellectual sandbox of coding and that the material rewards will be variable. OR they should seek leadership.
I keep hearing stories of non-technical managers making elementary mistakes when it comes to technical decisions. Many of the things are so widely established, they can be learned by spending a little time reading a few books, talking to a few people. So I have to wonder what the obstacles are here. An aversion to reading? Inflexible management dogma? Distractible lifestyles? Poor critical thinking in general?
Instead, important metrics may include size of team, number of hires per year, revenue of business unit, number of customer-reported defects, etc. I worked at a place where bugs reported internally were not eligible for the highest levels of severity, because after all no customer had noticed (yet). So mistakes reported by customers counted against managers, but ones caught by developers did not, regardless of how much effort was required to fix them.
Also, he could have tried it and lost it all. You can regret not trying, but you can't regret not winning!!
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Thanks for the reply and the info provided. My personal opinion regarding the ability to move from a bad economy is that this is not always as easy as it looks. Even if you are european with an EU passport you are very likely to come up against some high language barriers etc. Although that could be a challenge some people might jump at. For example I know that the UK (and mostly London) is extremely tolerant of non…
> you are very likely to come up against some high language barriers etc. This is not a problem I personally experienced for English speaking countries. Started learning when I was in kindergarten, always immersed in the culture via TV and internet, did English and English writing as a hobby pretty much since starting high school. Until they hear my accent, most people assume I'm a native speaker. So I lucked out on…
That is something I did not even want to mention due to the challenges it brings. It is not insurmountable but does sometimes come at a high cost of both money, time and stress.
Regrets as a programmer: 1. Every piece of unpolished, unfinished code that management decided should ship to the customers regardless 2. Ever using node and npm. 3. Seeing and living through the train wreck of J2EE and the XML horrors that ensued. 4. Not seeing the beauty in simple functions early on. Not everything needs to be a class or module. 5. Most business problems are political/social - regret every time we…