141–150 of 634 posts
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Buying the newest laptop every two years is what like $2000 every two years? That's only $1000 per year, hardly a dent in a programmer's salary.
That's almost a month's salary for a junior/mid-level programmer in this corner of Western Europe.
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Honest [tough] question: Why don't you work for clients that pay more? Just because you're in Southern Europe doesn't mean the person paying the invoices has to be. I have friends who save ungodly amounts (in the 40k/year range) and their employers/clients still think they're damn cheap. Income arbitrage. Look it up :)
I work for a international company, mainly based in the US. I get paid what a local developer gets paid, our chinese employees get paid what the local norm is there etc. Do other companies just outright decide salary based on where the company HQ is? Call me cynical, but I'm a bit skeptical that a company would pay more than they had to. Note: Assuming of course your role is not super vital for the whole company or s…
Companies will not pay more than they have to, but if you demonstrate your worth they will be happy to pay it.
I make high six figures and am completely location independent.
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Likewise here. I'm 47, been programming since I'm 12. I'm very good at it. I also know I'd be a bad manager, unless I work with /very/ good people. And yes, Ican relate to the article; I've seen (I still see) junior managers who can barely tie their shoes make more money than excellent engineers with 25y experience, but that's the way the world is... Basically 'engineer'/'programmer' is a calling for some; it is for…
I'll be 57 in 3 months. I've been coding professionally for 35 years.
My very first paid project was designing the PA audio system in the Lille (france) metro. It was a fancy Mac SE/30 with a IEEE GPIO card. That was driving two big Revox Tape machines, and was playing one, rewinding the other etc. Occasionally it would also play a digital audio file (w000t!).
It was all in Pascal at the time, and I had a whooping 4MB of ram. System ran for well over 10 years!
Regrets as a programmer: 1. Every piece of unpolished, unfinished code that management decided should ship to the customers regardless 2. Ever using node and npm. 3. Seeing and living through the train wreck of J2EE and the XML horrors that ensued. 4. Not seeing the beauty in simple functions early on. Not everything needs to be a class or module. 5. Most business problems are political/social - regret every time we…
Looking back, I view this as a pro. You get to work on more projects that way. I spent five years working with an "ideal" manager that trusted coders to make the deadlines. When I look back on that, while it was the only time I've ever gotten to code things to "perfection", it was also a big black hole of working on a single project for way longer than it really needed.
Of course there's a limit beyond which the lack of polish and finish makes everyone less happy.
He would have been unhappy with the other choice as well, because then it is the programming side he would be missing out on. I would advise everyone to read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536 You chose one option out of many, and the others may no longer be a possibility. However, the writer's unhappiness does not spawn from his inability to be successful at what he does,…
That gave me pause as well. Work 10x as hard for 10 assets? Not worth it for everyone.
He would have been unhappy with the other choice as well, because then it is the programming side he would be missing out on. I would advise everyone to read The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536 You chose one option out of many, and the others may no longer be a possibility. However, the writer's unhappiness does not spawn from his inability to be successful at what he does,…
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$48k/y gig for US client converts in less than 2000 eur/month net with some creative book-keeping. Rent and utilities in Ljubljana cost us about 800 eur. What is left is maybe enough for one person, who will never own any property. $20k/y is close to a welfare level in Slovenia, except maybe in countryside.
The GDP per capita of slovenia is about 20k. So pretty much everyone needs welfare? I don't believe that.
Swizec is right, there are ways to incorporate to pay less tax, but not everyone can go that way.
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JavaScript is actually an incredibly flexible and effective language.
> JavaScript is actually an incredibly flexible and effective language. == vs === No integers. Assignment is declaration. Prototypes. Curly brackets & semicolons. Semicolon insertion. It may be flexible (in the sense that an Alfa Romeo driven into a telephone pole at 120 mph is flexible), but it sure as heck ain't effective. JavaScript is the great shame of the computing industry: that it exists, and that it is used,…
ALL the major players and financial forces in our industry have put time and effort into quite solid solutions built with JavaScript, rather than solving those problems other ways (and in some cases AFTER trying to solve those same problems other ways). Two of those companies build browsers and sit on the W3C and WHATWG. They could have presented both suggestions for alternatives and lobbied as hard as anyone can for their adoption. Neither did that.
I keep hearing stories of non-technical managers making elementary mistakes when it comes to technical decisions. Many of the things are so widely established, they can be learned by spending a little time reading a few books, talking to a few people. So I have to wonder what the obstacles are here. An aversion to reading? Inflexible management dogma? Distractible lifestyles? Poor critical thinking in general?
In many cases a non-technical manager will report to a chain of other managers who are also non-technical. It should not be surprising that the criteria on which they are judged do not include technical decision making. Instead, important metrics may include size of team, number of hires per year, revenue of business unit, number of customer-reported defects, etc. I worked at a place where bugs reported internally we…
Absolutely. Even individual technical contributors are judged on vague criteria. I'd argue that 'being liked by your manager' is more important than being technically excellent.
> So mistakes reported by customers counted against managers, but ones caught by developers did not, regardless of how much effort was required to fix them.
Exactly. Also, I've never seen technical debt (myopic technical decision-making) affect evaluation of management.
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I'll be 57 in 3 months. I've been coding professionally for 35 years.
I started working at 17. So that's 30 years for me! Darn, I should have some sort of celebration ;-) My very first paid project was designing the PA audio system in the Lille (france) metro. It was a fancy Mac SE/30 with a IEEE GPIO card. That was driving two big Revox Tape machines, and was playing one, rewinding the other etc. Occasionally it would also play a digital audio file (w000t!). It was all in Pascal at th…