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Being a Developer After 40

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Re: Being a Developer After 40

#71

Post by spacecowboy_lon »

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.

I think in contrast to the Uk and US - work relationships in a lot of European countries are much more rigid and hierarchical.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#72

Post by wodenokoto »

spacecowboy_lon wrote: post #68
RyanZAG wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I would have stuck with Oracle and Java or spent my career in Mainframes

And last I heard, there are tons of job openings asking for experts in Oracle and Java.

So how exactly would that have been terrible in terms of getting a steady income?

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#73

Post by huhtenberg »

tribaal wrote: post #66
eps wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Google Switzerland employs

remotely?

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#74

Post by iorrus »

tluyben2 wrote: post #14

I'm 41 and a dev (and manager and bunch of other roles when needed, but most my days are spent with software/hardware dev) and sure, it's all true what this article says, but there is no real personal advice there besides, as others said, just 'don't do everything, but do everything'. So some unasked advice from a 40+ then which I wish I was told when I was 17 or something: a) believe in yourself; learn from others,…

Age is an issue with software devlopment. Early forties is not old at all, realistically you will likely be working for another 20 years unless you've already made significant money. In many professions such as law you're only getting started at 40. If in software it's an achievement to reach that milestone than something is wrong.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#75

Post by jgrahamc »

In an email exchange I had with C.A.R. Hoare a couple of years back he said:

Paradoxically, I have been working on shared variable concurrency, using a partially ordered trace semantics. Until I retired, I was too frightened to tackle anything so difficult.

Definitely life after 40, 50, 60, 70, ...

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#76

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#78

Post by Create »

tribaal wrote: post #62
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…

Precarity at CERN, aka cheap disposable temp labour w/o healthcare:

http://www.tdg.ch/geneve/actu-genevoise/suisse-prete-aider-e...

And a warning to non-western members:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264

On top of the above, the usual package for prospective employees:

Resolution of the CERN Staff Council

- the Management does not propose to align the level of basic CERN salaries with those chosen as the basis for comparison;

- in the new career system a large fraction of the staff will have their advancement prospects, and consequently the level of their pension, reduced with respect to the current MARS system;

- the overall reduction of the advancement budget will have a negative impact on the contributions to the CERN Health Insurance System (CHIS);

http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2015/46/Staff%20Asso...

Pensions which will be applicable to new recruits as of 1 January 2012; the Management and CERN Council adopted without any concertation and decided in June 2011 to adopt very unfavourable mesures for new recruits. http://www.gac-epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin...

Given that cheap and disposable trainees — PhD students and postdocs — fuel the entire scientific research enterprise, it is not surprising that few inside the system seem interested in change. A system complicit in this sort of exploitation is at best indifferent and at worst cruel.

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#79

Post by tribaal »

huhtenberg wrote: post #73
tribaal wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Google Switzerland employs remotely?

No. On-site, in Zurich.

They have arrangements with authorities to get work permits more easily (it made a lot of debate in the press). They "import" qualified workers, paid Swiss salaries. If price was the only matter, that wouldn't happen - Google would open a development office there instead (they have smaller ones, but the Zurich office is the largest that is not in Mountain View).

Re: Being a Developer After 40

#80

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

Yeah, that's supposed to be good business sense: you pay less money for the same amount of work. In truth though, you get what you pay for, always. Software works the same regardless of who writes it, where they live, or how much you pay them, so if you pay less for a piece of software you'll just get a piece of software that's worth less money.

It's exactly for this reason that big corporate software is generally shite: because they try to get it at a discount by paying low wages to consultants whom they think they can afford to underpay because they live in a poor part of the world (hint: India). Then they end up with horrible messes of software that nobody wants to work with, at which point they have to pay more money anyway to convince anyone to fix the mess.

It's just people thinking they're so smart when in fact they're short-termist and dumb.

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