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Being a Developer After 40

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Re: Being a Developer After 40

#61

Post by spacecowboy_lon »

salex89 wrote: post #18

If it is really possible to learn one language each year, and read six books, I'm going to be very impressed with that. Especially considering side projects you actually start in some language, frameworks (which are not the same as languages, obviously), and conceptual things which are language-agnostic. And then comes family, home maintenance and, just sometimes, rest :-) .

Why not? i learnt PL/1G in a week and was productive by the end of the second week.

I can easily go thorough 6 books in a month one of the advantages of commuting by train.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#62

Post by tribaal »

toddkazakov wrote: post #21

I am based in Bulgaria and I recently had my first experience with a potential Swiss employer. It was rather unpleasant. After I went through 5 interviews we discussed my rates (as a remote consultant). I received a low ball counter offer which was about the half of what I usually charge. This quickly became a racist rant and a senior manager at the company tried to persuade me by saying that with the money they offe…

As a developer in Switzerland, I'm unfortunately not surprised.

Maybe Swiss firms have a real arrogance problem (not all, but many). If it makes you feel any "better", your country of origin is not the reason (I get comments like that while living in Switerland too).

They are mostly just clueless. Large Swiss firms even more so (Swisscom being the main offender).

EDIT: To clarify, I got lowball offers with some other bullshit reason like "but it'll help bootstrap your career". As if my multiple years (15+) of career in international companies doing a good job (as developer/architect/senior) was not enough for their position, somehow.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#63

Post by greenspot »

rantanplan wrote: post #56
greenspot wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying 'you will live like a king' is not the smartest thing. He should have said: 'Please consider that your local living costs are much lower than in Switzerland. We incorporate those differences in our offered rate like every other company does. Thanks for your understanding.' So the tone was—yes—unprofessional, the attitude not. And even if this attitude is debatable, you have to allow the other party to express…

Both phrases are quite presumptuous. As if I don't know what my cost of living is. This is how much I charge. Thanks for your offer, it's way below of what I think I deserve for my services. Nah, I don't need a lecture from you on why I should find this generous. Nope, I don't care why you make me such a low offer. What does it matter if I can actually find people who pay the rates I charge? The market will balance t…

You just gave yourself the counter-argument:

> The market will balance this out.

The employer can also and usually choose between different candidates and maybe there are some or many equally skilled professionals in country x offering their work for much less (because they can because of lower living costs). So, it's reasonable to ask for a lower price in such a context. It's not about disdain.

EDIT: why the downvote?

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#64

Post by yosefk »

"That means that you she or he gets 100 KCHF per year, but she or he are actually creating a value worth over a million francs. And of course, they get the bonuses at the end of the fiscal year, because, you know, capitalism. Know your worth. Read Karl Marx and Thomas Piketty. Enough said."

While neither Karl Marx nor Thomas Piketty have a great track record when it comes to economic policy prescriptions (Dean Baker's opinion on this might be interesting for people who share much of their world view with all three of these economists), will they teach me to better negotiate based on my "knowledge of my worth"? I rather doubt that they will, given that the punchline of much of their writing is that worker compensation necessarily trends towards the subsistence level over time, r>g, etc. etc. Certainly if the point is to "know your worth" in the sense of being able to negotiate a better compensation, a better source ought to be available.

Separately, it's an interesting turn of events that fairly politicized economists' writings are now recommended reading for computer programmers. The next logical step is a recommendation to join a political party (certainly joing the political party would help one's career in the USSR where Marx was required reading for people entering the professions.)

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#65

Post by batat »

> Do not worry about hype. Keep doing your thing, keep learning what you were learning, and move on.

Thanks, Adrian. Now I have an official excuse for not writing a single app with Angular/React in 2016.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#66

Post by tribaal »

eps wrote: post #38
toddkazakov wrote: post #21

I am based in Bulgaria and I recently had my first experience with a potential Swiss employer. It was rather unpleasant. After I went through 5 interviews we discussed my rates (as a remote consultant). I received a low ball counter offer which was about the half of what I usually charge. This quickly became a racist rant and a senior manager at the company tried to persuade me by saying that with the money they offe…

The manager's rant part aside, the reason to outsource to the Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Russia is and has always been the rates.

That's very much untrue. EDIT: I stand corrected - this misses the point.

Sure, wages are lower than elsewhere (especially Switzerland), but the quality of engineers in eastern europe is very high.

Case in point: Google Switzerland employs lots of eastern europeans with Swiss-level wages. That wouldn't make any sense if the only reason was money.

EDIT: My math and electronics teachers (both women, data point) in my Swiss engineering school were Russian and Romanian. Their shared theory was that during communism teaching material was not written by teachers, but was written by topic experts (expert mathematicians were forced to write teaching books). It sucked for the experts (they were forced), but was great for students to have a book written by a master to study. Their point, not mine.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#67

Post by blub »

greenspot wrote: post #53
toddkazakov wrote: post #21

I am based in Bulgaria and I recently had my first experience with a potential Swiss employer. It was rather unpleasant. After I went through 5 interviews we discussed my rates (as a remote consultant). I received a low ball counter offer which was about the half of what I usually charge. This quickly became a racist rant and a senior manager at the company tried to persuade me by saying that with the money they offe…

Saying 'you will live like a king' is not the smartest thing. He should have said: 'Please consider that your local living costs are much lower than in Switzerland. We incorporate those differences in our offered rate like every other company does. Thanks for your understanding.' So the tone was—yes—unprofessional, the attitude not. And even if this attitude is debatable, you have to allow the other party to express…

I find it quite bizarre that remote workers living in a country with lower cost of living are expected to take lower pay than locals while doing the same work and offering the same value.

Otherwise yes, people are allowed to express silly things and one shouldn't prevent them from doing so, especially when they show their true colors.

Looks to me like they dodged a bullet.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#68

Post by spacecowboy_lon »

RyanZAG wrote: post #51
ry_ry wrote: post #6

Warm fuzzy nostalgia aside, this article seems to amount to "Learn everything, read everything, do everything, don't bandwagon, Apple is pretty cool. The other stuff is OK too, if you like that sort of thing. Learn Node. PS. Don't harrass people". It's an amalgamation of every Medium tech-post ever.

I guess the real message is: believe whatever the mainstream audience believes at the time. You can't really go wrong with always agreeing with whatever the current thought bubble agrees with - and be quick to change your opinions if the herd is moving. When the author saw the derision against Steve Ballmer, and the favor Apple was getting, he made the clear choice to jump ship. And because he was part of that popula…

So your always going to be playing catch up - back in 94 when i had been playing with the www I volunteered to go to Edinburgh for a month to work on a cutting edge RAD/DSDM Project.

Basically I told my then boss see you after Christmas - If I have followed that advice I would have stuck with Oracle and Java or spent my career in Mainframes

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#69

Post by albertojacini »

greenspot wrote: post #53
toddkazakov wrote: post #21

I am based in Bulgaria and I recently had my first experience with a potential Swiss employer. It was rather unpleasant. After I went through 5 interviews we discussed my rates (as a remote consultant). I received a low ball counter offer which was about the half of what I usually charge. This quickly became a racist rant and a senior manager at the company tried to persuade me by saying that with the money they offe…

Saying 'you will live like a king' is not the smartest thing. He should have said: 'Please consider that your local living costs are much lower than in Switzerland. We incorporate those differences in our offered rate like every other company does. Thanks for your understanding.' So the tone was—yes—unprofessional, the attitude not. And even if this attitude is debatable, you have to allow the other party to express…

It wouldn't have been smart either. What one should charge is what one can charge. And it's unrelated to what the cost of living is in a given country.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#70

Post by rantanplan »

greenspot wrote: post #63
rantanplan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both phrases are quite presumptuous. As if I don't know what my cost of living is. This is how much I charge. Thanks for your offer, it's way below of what I think I deserve for my services. Nah, I don't need a lecture from you on why I should find this generous. Nope, I don't care why you make me such a low offer. What does it matter if I can actually find people who pay the rates I charge? The market will balance t…

You just gave yourself the counter-argument: > The market will balance this out. The employer can also and usually choose between different candidates and maybe there are some or many equally skilled professionals in country x offering their work for much less (because they can because of lower living costs). So, it's reasonable to ask for a lower price in such a context. It's not about disdain. EDIT: why the downvot…

How's that a counter-argument?

My argument is that "offer me whatever you want; I'll accept whatever I want".

I don't need a justification or a lecture on why I should consider your offer as a generous one. That's how much you can give for my services at a certain point in time. Even if I consider your offer low, I won't find it insulting. But I will find it insulting if you think that I should accept your offer because based on your opinion this is how much I should make because of where I live.

No thank you, I'll be the judge of that.

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