171–180 of 262 posts
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I never felt I was earning worse than on US, while enjoying my 30 days vacations, home office, unemployment support, health insurance and having a privileged life above many of my friends in "regular" (non-IT related) jobs.
In which country is 30 days standard vacation?
In the UK I have 25 days of holiday and the 8 bank holidays.
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We pay devs worse because software is a complete aftertought, and the guys who produce it therefore are not seen as adding much value, if any. Meanwhile, the "software is eating the world" memo is almost 10 years old yet nobody this side of the pond got it. Fix this mindset (good luck!), which is the real issue, and dev wages will correct themselves too.
I never felt I was earning worse than on US, while enjoying my 30 days vacations, home office, unemployment support, health insurance and having a privileged life above many of my friends in "regular" (non-IT related) jobs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that in US salary is significantly higher than in EU. Probably that's the main differentiator.
Can confirm, moved from London (while it was still EU) to NYC and literally doubled my pay
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never felt I was earning worse than on US, while enjoying my 30 days vacations, home office, unemployment support, health insurance and having a privileged life above many of my friends in "regular" (non-IT related) jobs.
In which country is 30 days standard vacation?
This is part of a broader problem. Many "apps" from WhatsApp to Zoom are treated as public spaces by citizens. But, legally the app-space is closer to a private space. This creates a mismatch between reality and expectations. (Zuckerberg can delete his chat history and you could not until Europe passed legislation forcing Facebook to do so.) I suffered the "Windows only" of gubernamental applications that excluded Li…
>The USA is in a position to shutdown all the technological infrastructure of Europe (AWS, Google, Facebook, Azure, ...) and to openly spy its citizens OK, and what can we do about that? We build our own successful cars, we build our own successful planes but it seems like when it comes to building highly scalable world dominating software we are powerless even though our universities churn out tons of talented CS en…
The reason there is really no cool tech firms in the EU is because the EU economic policies make them impossible.
Working for a startup is an extremely risky decision. As a top engineer, you get shitty pay, and a really good options package that in most cases ends up being worth nothing because most startups fail.
In the US, however, if your startup cashes out, you end up rich. This is not only a life changing experience, some of these rich top tech engineers end up creating their own startups afterwards with the money they make, which perpetuates the cycle.
In Europe, if as a top engineer your startup cashes out, you only end up marginally better than if you had had an 8-5 job at BigTech (Google, Apple, Microsoft). Almost 50% of your cashout goes away in taxes, and the rest barely compensates the bad paid you got the last 5-10 years of your life, and if you take "worked hours/week" into account, quality of life, and risk taken, the value proposition is just a joke.
Startups already have a very hard time flourishing with top talent. Europe makes it almost impossible for these to attract top talent, so that's why you don't see as many unicorns here as you do in the US.
This doesn't mean there aren't any startups in Europe. There are. There are just much fewer than in the US, have an even lower success rate, and a less qualified and risk-friendlier employee base.
Source: my own personal experience job hunting in Germany, for many US startups operating here, where most of them actually try to offer BigTech salaries without option packages because they know option packages do not make sense here.
Source 2: https://notoptional.eu/
Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/27/30-european-startup-ceos-c...
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Yeah the backup is really bad... WhatsApp put so much effort into the E2E encryption and then just dumped the backups on Google. It was all just window dressing. I bet this is also why the intelligence agencies aren't pounding on them for having E2E encryption, obviously Google is an open book to them. And Google has access to all your history for their own purposes. Of course you can choose to turn off the backups,…
The idea of end-to-end encryption is just too broken. You always need to make sure that the implementation of the idea isn't controlled by the vendor from which it is supposed to protect you. But it is pretty much never the case, all the WhatsApps, Signals, etc. control implementations, updates and openly fight against attempts to decentralize or weaken that control, making sure that ultimately they are the ones deci…
Note that the client side apps are available for researchers to study. If they find a back door, it will be a big publicity issue for the app vendor.
Your concern is still valid though. Both Whatsapp and Signal could announce tomorrow that they drop E2EE or add some feature (like a default on non-disable-able cloud based spellchecker) and there is nothing you could do to protect your correspondence.
Matrix is different here that it encourages independent implementations as well as end to end encryption.
And does the German government care what the data chief says or is this just a HN-feel-good article of no consequence or substance?
Feels like a bit of a non-denial denial, given that that's not what the official claimed.
For further reading (in German), there's been a nice and well-researched article on Golem a while ago: https://www.golem.de/news/datenschutz-duerfen-aerzte-lehrer-... Also, Microsoft sending Cease and Desist letter to the German city-state of Berlin as it wrote a policy advising against Skype (German too): https://www.t-online.de/digital/internet/id_87890600/skype-u...
And the German army just announced it follows the French government in migrating its instant messaging entirely to Matrix. https://www.golem.de/news/messenger-bundeswehr-will-komplett... (and recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23152780 )