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Tell HN: I'm having the worst career winter of my life

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31–40 of 140 posts

Re: Tell HN: I'm having the worst career winter of my life

#31

Are you able to move / relocate away from the UK? Unless the company is a FAANG company or hedge fund, the UK tech scene is dead. I don’t see any good UK startups worth joining in the UK. All the good ones are in SF / NY, etc.

Extend the statement to mostly all Europe. Tech ecosystem is dead in EU.

Rubbish - you guys are spending too much time on twitter x.

Re: Tell HN: I'm having the worst career winter of my life

#32

Domain-specific knowledge, having no relation to software engineering per se, is a necessary skill set. The best analogy I can find, if not a tired one, is the equivalence of software engineering to tool-and-die making. In prior generations where manufacturing was king, it was a necessary operational skill set in order to produce things at scale, yet is much less (if no longer) relevant in the age of additive or subt…

> Domain-specific knowledge, having no relation to software engineering per se, is a necessary skill set. In other words, you wasted time and energy becoming a programmer/software developer/whatever. Should have done something else.

This is only true if you weren't paid for your work all those years (which, then, it was just a hobby).

But more importantly, this is only relevant for vomiting boilerplate code. I don't know about you but I always did a lot more than that.

Re: Tell HN: I'm having the worst career winter of my life

#33

Are you able to move / relocate away from the UK? Unless the company is a FAANG company or hedge fund, the UK tech scene is dead. I don’t see any good UK startups worth joining in the UK. All the good ones are in SF / NY, etc.

Extend the statement to mostly all Europe. Tech ecosystem is dead in EU.

Meanwhile there are 5m+ devs in Europe, more than in the US apparently.

Re: Tell HN: I'm having the worst career winter of my life

#34

@Mario - I looked for contact details in your profile but did not find any. We are currently hiring senior Rails engineers, fully remote in Europe (see an older job ad here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923191 EDIT and a current one here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466732 ). Please feel free to reach out, and then we can see if there is a good match.

Thanks Marius! Here's my contact details

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mario-gintili-software-engineer/ https://github.com/shellandbull

I'll send an application over. my contact email is code.mario.gintili [at] gmail [dot] com

Re: Tell HN: I'm having the worst career winter of my life

#38
post #13
post #8

Very similar situation. I have been cancelled, and I can't face going back to employment, but finding a way to earn a crust as a solo engineer is proving somewhat hopeless. At least I'm not paying tax any more. Checkmate Rachel Reeves.

You still pay taxes through VAT, property, and other schemes.

Not necessarily. Basic food is zero-rated for VAT, and if you qualify you can get council tax reduction. For example, I get a 25% council tax discount. If you're unemployed with no income, you may genuinely pay very little direct tax, it depends on circumstances.

Re: Tell HN: I'm having the worst career winter of my life

#39

Remote role? Why would anybody pay UK wages instead of $developing_country wages?

Honestly, like the international landscape for salaries has kind off like normalised itself. Wages for SWEs are more or less the same across the globe when you look at remote work.

Intelligent people are cutting costs instead of trying to earn more money

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