211–220 of 309 posts
Working full remote for a nice European company with proper work life balance and tier 2 salaries is way better.
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I've been an IC at a company providing IC services to small companies in the buildings next to FAANG HQs. I've worked as an IC designer, have been involved in a lot of IC (obviously) and I also have several years of experience in IC. So clearly, ic wot ppl mean when they type IC. As an IC on various forums for over a decade, I've only started commonly seeing this abbreviation in the past 2 years. Just don't.
It's an amusing term for sure and definitely an outcropping of the internals at FAANG (or maybe MS as well) culture. Like, it almost sounds denigrating. "I was just an individual contributor"; like, the people who do the real work, y'know, they're out there doing the difficult work of herding cats to tell them which protobufs to move from A to B, while the ICs are, y'know just ICing doing the actual protobuf shufflin…
Also, there's no stigma: it's a completely neutral term.
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>(sure, and no holidays or sick days if you're the kind of person that does those). the kind of person that does those? you mean humans?
Usage of sick days seems to follow a bimodal pattern. There are people that use them up like vacation days for all kinds of reasons and people who very rarely use them ( This was true through my entire career and even back in high school. I think usage of sick days is likely to follow a learned behavior from parents/siblings growing up.
Humanities supposedly most brilliant minds work on the next e-billing system, AI on how to sell more crap that nobody really needs, keep a glorified message board afloat or enable the cancer that is advertisment. They should work on how to address the climate catastrophe, the waste/recycling problem, food security, sustainable agriculture and land/water use, medical devices/health care or how to fix the broken partic…
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A common criticism is that “but you get so much more for your taxes in Europe”. I have a counterpoint - you get the choice of what you want to buy in the US. I’d rather keep more of my take-home pay and do without certain services, or better yet choose the provider (and quality / expense) of such services if I want them. Somehow the bureaucracy in the US is still massive, so I can only imagine what far higher tax rat…
A well run government subsidized system still has choice and competition. In belgium I can choose what school my kids go to, even though all of them are subsidized to the point of costing very little. I can also choose what hospital to go to, or what doctor to see, and that visit will always be subsidized by the public healthcare system, while doctors still are self-employed and can set their own rates (higher rates…
I found this fascinatingly counterintuitive. I would normally expect that a broader market leads to lower prices for commodity goods. If I can only buy candy from the vendor at the movie theater, I expect to pay a higher price than if I can buy it from all the stores in the region, which I expect to be higher again than if I can import it from anywhere in the world. The reverse is true for developers? The companies w…
By this logic, the best deal for a good developer will almost always be to start a company
First of all, risk adjusted reward/liquidity almost always favors just doing really, really well as an engineer -> engineering leader at a FAANG or a tier or two down. You'd have to really knock it out of the park with a company you start for it to be financially better for you than simply building and riding out a great career at a FAANG.
Second, many parts about starting and running a company run in different directions or even directly counter to the kind of fulfillment you can achieve by being a good engineer at a strong engineering organization. This is probably the much more important point. If running a company well is something that truly makes you happy -- happier than all the other things you could be doing, and you can stomach the intense resource investment it takes to become successful, then it's worth it.
But that's rarely the case. If you ask a lot of people who run companies who are more on the honest/humble side of things why they run companies, they'll tell you the same thing: "I'm not very successful at working for other people." That's not just them being humble. There's a lot of truth to that. And the other side of that truth, is that for people who are a little better at doing that, there's an enormous amount of very well compensated and highly intellectually stimulating work that can be done in the world of big tech.
For most if not all of the best engineers I know, they have great deals at great companies being well compensated ICs and player-coaches. Why start your own company when you could just walk in making a guaranteed low to mid 7 figures TC with the same level of autonomy at a sure thing?
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The same is valid for Munich. 2-3 bedrooms plus dining room is <2k here. However it’s not the best apartment in the city, rather okayish. Also it’s hard to hit 5k after taxes salary limit here.
Wow. Out of curiosity is Berlin the same price as or more expensive than Munich now?
EDIT: according to this Berlin has the 4th highest rents in Germany https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1885/umfrage/... (€ per square meter, for 2-3BR - which Germans call "3-4 rooms" - you can for ease of calculation assume 100 mˆ2)
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Usage of sick days seems to follow a bimodal pattern. There are people that use them up like vacation days for all kinds of reasons and people who very rarely use them ( This was true through my entire career and even back in high school. I think usage of sick days is likely to follow a learned behavior from parents/siblings growing up.
So what if you are sick? You are using your normal vacation days?
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Usage of sick days seems to follow a bimodal pattern. There are people that use them up like vacation days for all kinds of reasons and people who very rarely use them ( This was true through my entire career and even back in high school. I think usage of sick days is likely to follow a learned behavior from parents/siblings growing up.
So what if you are sick? You are using your normal vacation days?
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> with just a bit of a learning curve This downplays how bad many developers are. I have some web dev friends that know how to use exactly one framework, one language, one source control, and never touch the cli out of a few commands stackoverflow told them to run. Changing from GitHub to bitbucket would be a major undertaking for them and that’s not even abandoning git. They do well managing the small business apps…
The “webdev” kind of person you’re talking about likely doesn’t have the same education as even a relatively unskilled “enterprise Java dev.” I think you’re overselling the complexity of using the tooling at FAANG type companies. The tech is complex, but a tiny fraction of the company actually works on that stuff.