681–690 of 927 posts
Pay me 150k to remotely work with Rust and I'll drop everything and start on Monday. Getting senior resources is not hard, just need the right mix of comp and stack.
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> Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm Yes, and we have plenty of nice stuff that goes along with it Healthcare, 30 paid holidays, unions, paid overtime, weekends and calls off work come extra (it is 40h week period, want more pay for it), retirement, flex time, ... Like the OP, my expenses are more than covered, getting more isn't worth the hassle to change. Ah, and in some countries havin…
Dunno where you live but in Belgium: - That salary certainly does seem realistic, even though I'm on the higher end and have a base salary above that; - I also get the same amount of paid holidays, might be even a couple more; - we have great hospitality insurance, mutuality (general health care) has to be paid by ourselves however, even though that's cheap; - they do help me save for pension in the form of a contrib…
Now you have: https://prospect.org.uk/tech-workers/ or https://www.unitetheunion.org/ in the UK.
I had colleagues in both at a previous job, depending whether their jobs were more scientific (we'd call it data science now) or engineering.
Both unions are more general than just software/IT.
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Depends where in Europe. In Germany, if you lose your job you still have to pay for health insurance, at least the first three months until your unemployment kicks in (assuming you're eligible for it, like in most cases) and I don't know if unemployment covers your health insurance. If you are married and you and your spouse were on the same statutory health insurance, then you're covered by your spouse. Which can be…
Once you are unemployed you do have to pay for your health insurance, but it's heavily subsidized, costing (as a 50 year old) around 200 a month. Compare that to 1200 per month in the USA. It's a huge difference.
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> My opinion is that once an organization is a certain size, everything really needs to be written down and easily accessible. I shouldn't have to regularly ask people how to do basic things, it should be on a wiki. If it's complicated, it should be in a training video, or a user manual. This %100. Automate all the things, but for any part of the process that cannot be automated/scripted, write it down. And don't jus…
Even if it's all documented with a README, with container images and Ansible playbooks or whatever to make it all happen… still people will be complaining that it's oh so complex and that's not how we did it in my previous job and what about secret management, or load scaling, or full disk encryption, or how would this be deployed to a moon-based server, or whatever they can think of how the probably less-than-averag…
I think there's something else that's necessary that doesn't align well with the things in the article, and which is currently lacking in my current work environment, but which is kind of hard to describe succinctly. Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented. In order to get stuff done you have to ha…
Here's the root cause of your bug:
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
> Working software over comprehensive documentation
I remember when my employer adopted agile. One of the first things they did was lay off their team of technical writers.
Also you wasting your time flailing about probably makes some manager's budget numbers look good, because they got to "save" the money that would have prevented you from flailing about.
I think there's something else that's necessary that doesn't align well with the things in the article, and which is currently lacking in my current work environment, but which is kind of hard to describe succinctly. Basically, my job requires using a lot of tools and technology and processes created by other people, but none of those tools are easy to use or well documented. In order to get stuff done you have to ha…
When I first moved into management roles I didn’t fully understand how much of my job would be simply saying “no” to a constant stream of engineers wanting to write or rewrite custom tools, libraries, frameworks and platforms when otherwise sufficiently good alternatives already existed. Not all engineers, but once you get into a big enough organization there are a lot of engineers who want to do meta-work and rework things instead of actually shipping things.
The worst offender I worked for had meta-tools on top of everything. You couldn’t use GitHub, Slack, or even our cloud platform without first learning how to navigate all of the custom tools and bots that had been put together to gate access to everything and make it work. And like you said, it was poorly documented. It turned into little fiefdoms where you had to know who to talk to if you wanted to get past the systems to get things done.
This can all be avoided with good management at an organizational level, but of course some managers want to get in on the situation because it puts them in a perceived stronger position in the company if their team is at the center of everything.
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> everyone works as a consultant to avoid the high taxes You mean, to avoid the social security fees (health/pension/unemployment/…)? After all, as a consultant (whether incorporated or not) you still need to pay taxes and the rates are pretty similar to tax rates for employees.
The people that I know that are self-employed and earning high incomes generally are incorporated and have an accountant to set up tax avoidance strategies to have a lower effective tax rate. Effective tax rates seem to follow a gauss curve, low at the bottom, low at the top, highest for the middle earners.
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I do not disagree with your take, but I think you may only be speaking for a subset of engineers that are already fairly well compensated. The article likewise seems to discard the importance of money in favor of three other more immaterial factors, but I do not think this is representative of the situation of the global job market right now. I also think such a perspective can not fully explain the difficulties that…
> Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm Yes, and we have plenty of nice stuff that goes along with it Healthcare, 30 paid holidays, unions, paid overtime, weekends and calls off work come extra (it is 40h week period, want more pay for it), retirement, flex time, ... Like the OP, my expenses are more than covered, getting more isn't worth the hassle to change. Ah, and in some countries havin…
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Autonomous cars make everything difficult and therefore pretty fun, if difficulty is fun :). Let's talk about door knob release. Ok, so now that there isn't a person driving the car, how do you authenticate that the person at the door is who it should be? All of a sudden you've opened a whole can of worms with that one question. The answer to that problem is gonna be a lot more complex than an electronic lock on a ho…
Yes but my point was (in relation to the article) that a lot of the work in cool companies is the same as that done in 'non cool' companies. Does working in a cooler company when you're doing the same stuff that your buddy down the road in the non cool company is doing make it feel a 'better' place to work. Using my bad examples - if developing the same door knob release system or dealer booking system - feels better…