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Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

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Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#471

Post by jjevanoorschot »

oblio wrote: post #460
herbst wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are exceptions. - There are plenty of smaller tech hubs with way higher quality of life like Zurich, Berlin - Or others that are incredible affordable like Warsow, Bukarest, .. - The USD is not looking healthy from CHFs perspective. I would have to expect to earn less every month. - Getting paid from the US makes banking and taxes way more complicated. You can not even open a bank account without signing 3 time…

Don't get cocky. In Europe you literally can't get a job paying 200.000€ per year as an individual contributor, except for US companies. I'd be very happy to be proven wrong and for the respective position to not be a beyond-senior-contributor thing (so maybe 0.0001% of jobs out there).

> Don't get cocky. In Europe you literally can't get a job paying 200.000€ per year as an individual contributor, except for US companies

You can find these jobs in London. And there are plenty of examples of this in Amsterdam as well [1].

But the point is that in Europe you don't need to make as much as you'd have to make in the US to have the same or a higher quality of life.

If maximising your total compensation is your goal, then yeah you'll have to work in the US or for a US based company.

[1] https://techpays.eu/countries/netherlands#

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#472

Post by dagw »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #304
mistrial9 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

transportation modelling, IIR.. he was from Spain

A surprising amount of math/science/engineering types still seem to consider actually programming their models and and such to be the grunt work, sometimes even handed off to someone else. Seems like a terribly inefficient way to work.

Seems like a terribly inefficient way to work.

Yes and no. Learning the intricacies of your particular domain as well as high performance computing is massive task. I used to work as that "someone else", and on the whole I think it was a good way to split the work. They gave me slow python/matlab code that solved a hard problem in a very clever way, and I made run in reasonable amount of time using a reasonable amount of memory etc. I will never know as much about thermodynamics as the scientist, and they don't have the time to learn the best way to make software run really fast.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#473

Post by BiteCode_dev »

moneywoes wrote: post #422
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, but in France you would have to go freelance, as I did. There would be no way to charge what I make if I were an employee. In fact, most companies would not give me the level of responsability I had as a junior freelance, even today. And yet, it's better in IT than in any other field. You already make more money, and the requirements are relaxed compared to other sectors. I some countries, like the UK (well,…

How much time do you spend looking for contracts vs working for Freelance?

I haven't spend any time looking for contracts for a decade. Once I got the ball rolling, work came to me.

I think the hard part as a freelancer is to start. Once people know about you, there is such a high demand for devs that people will come to you. They have problems to solve, and it's not that easy to find somebody you know will solve them.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#474

Post by bsagdiyev »

goodpoint wrote: post #426
bsagdiyev wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House prices where? We got our house for 345k and I earn 100k+ in North Carolina. Not everyone needs to live in California.

And you call that cheap?

In fact I do, it isn’t the 700k or more we expected to pay in California. We could have gone even cheaper if we waited.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#476

Post by wyclif »

exdsq wrote: post #394
mistrial9 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started a conversation with a visiting EU PhD and asked about programming languages. In a very good smelling way, he avoided the question. Apparently it is "blue collar" work to do actual programming? This one PhD did zero actual programming, apparently.

I've spent the last few years in Oxford with a bunch of PhDs and they all programmed. Those who didn't program were interested in programming & I taught a couple at a community organised code bootcamp. I'm now living next to Stanford and the same thing happened again. This isn't just traditional STEM either but economics and history students. Definitely anecdotal but I expect this is more common than those who don't…

I don't know much about this, but apparently Oxford and Cambridge have a history of taking graduates with humanities degrees (i.e, not anything STEM) and training them in computer science and programming. Other students who end up working for tech companies in the UK come from Imperial College or a school where they were in a STEM discipline.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#477

Post by wyclif »

jjevanoorschot wrote: post #471
oblio wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get cocky. In Europe you literally can't get a job paying 200.000€ per year as an individual contributor, except for US companies. I'd be very happy to be proven wrong and for the respective position to not be a beyond-senior-contributor thing (so maybe 0.0001% of jobs out there).

> Don't get cocky. In Europe you literally can't get a job paying 200.000€ per year as an individual contributor, except for US companies You can find these jobs in London. And there are plenty of examples of this in Amsterdam as well [1]. But the point is that in Europe you don't need to make as much as you'd have to make in the US to have the same or a higher quality of life. If maximising your total compensation i…

I don't think that's necessarily true in terms of QOL. Some European cities are very expensive to live in when you factor in taxes, like Zurich, or real estate, like London. Other places in the US, especially outside of San Francisco, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, LA, &c. are quite economical to live in if you're making the standard US-scale engineer salary and working remote from somewhere less urban (or let's just say less "sexy" in terms of lifestyle). It really depends on where you're talking about, so I don't think generalizations like this are all that useful. But I do think you're right that if we're talking about maximizing total comp, the US is where engineers are going to gravitate.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#478

Post by marcyb5st »

908B64B197 wrote: post #454
gonehome wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe undervalues their engineers - and it seems like it's some sort of cultural thing that favors management. Their tax structure isn't great either, there's a reason zero billion dollar companies were founded in Europe (with the possible exception of Spotify). There's also the cultural pessimism and ambition being 'uncool' - there's a similar thing in Australia/New Zealand (at least I've heard from immigrant frien…

> Europe undervalues their engineers - and it seems like it's some sort of cultural thing that favors management. It's something that I observed as well. > American optimism and ambition, really valuing engineers, generous equity and culture are a big part of this. Companies outside of America have been losing talent because they've been fucking this up, I expect things to get worse for them as geography is even less…

I'm from Italy but working in Switzerland for a FAANG company. My theory about the management-heavy way to do things in Europe is the following: in Europe is hard to fire someone unless there is a clear and willingly negligence from his/her part. Engineers' output is somewhat easier to measure than "fluffy" (pardon my lack of better words) tasks performed by management and hence it's hard to prove a manager is doing nothing. Therefore, people tend to gravitate to these positions because they almost certainly guarantee job safety. In my personal experience this happens disproportionately much in countries where worker unions have more sway (like France, Italy, and Germany). Also in my opinion it's not a coincidence that such countries create companies that are bureaucratic behemoths in which there are several different committees to take every small decision. That's how management justify its existence.

This is the main reason that pushed me to go to Switzerland to work for an American company. I feel this is the sweet spot when considering worker rights, salary/purchasing power, interesting work without too much bureaucracy, quality of life, and work-life balance.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#479

Post by jq-r »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #327
darkwizard42 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has the tech companies MASSIVE wealth to stop this. It is all well and good to subsidize local tech companies, but for a majority of junior/senior devs you can't compete with $250K/yr in pay from FAANG companies whose stock won't stop rising and whose name on resume basically sets you up for life (exaggerating, but its not that far from the truth for a non-US and even US developers) Your third point doesn't ma…

>no country will restrict their own citizens from working for a foreign company This might surprise you, but some countries manage to achieve something like that. In Austria for example, if you go freelance (self employed) you'll actually end up paying more tax than being a FTE (which has already one of this highest taxes in the EU) while losing all the benefits of being a FTE like PTO, overtime and such. So yeah, tu…

Something similar in Croatia too. Some years ago they've introduced freelancer laws and pretty much everyone in this industry who was paid by foreign firms was using this.

But relatively recently the government changed their minds and said that if more than 50% of your income comes from a single employer then you're not a freelancer, and these laws don't apply.

So the option is to take a 60%+ tax on your income or find a job with a local company which then works for a foreign company. In latter case, they are nothing more than a middleman taking a smaller (but not much smaller) cut than the government while providing you with next to nothing.

So it doesn't make much time to figure out who lobbied for reversal of those freelancer laws.

Re: Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent

#480

Post by citrin_ru »

908B64B197 wrote: post #447
makeitdouble wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes both ways: local talent will learn from the biggest companies in the world without having to leave, meaning their know how can be turned to local entities as well. For the pay, eventually it settles down as more and more companies try to see what they can get away with. US companies won’t be paying boatloads of money eternally (they were already resorting to offshoring to skimp) and local companies will have…

> It goes both ways: local talent will learn from the biggest companies in the world without having to leave, meaning their know how can be turned to local entities as well. It really doesn't. You end up with a whole segment of engineers that effectively become invisible to the local tech scene, because they are way above the local rates. Local companies are, basically, a waste of time for them. Also, keep in mind th…

> It really doesn't. You end up with a whole segment of engineers that effectively become invisible to the local tech scene, because they are way above the local rates.

If remote salaries will be significantly higher than local ones many governments will be tempted to raise/introduce taxes on foreign income (and in authoritarian ones it is easy to implement). Since cross-border payments in most countries are closely monitored it would be not hard to enforce. Which in turn would make local jobs more attractive in comparison.

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