Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you pay for an LA Times subscription? Do you know anybody that would? The newspaper business is struggling as is. Every time a publication is blocked in Europe people complain. Ads were the answer for most online publications, but showing targeted ads now pose a legal risk. I don't know about their business ops, but I'd suspect they've done the math and decided it isn't worth the effort to change their platform…
You don't need to be not-GDPR-compliant to display ads and do user tracking. Just inform the user and give them the option to opt out of tracking / storing data. Ads won't be as optimized for the user, but they'll still be there. And of course they can offer a subscription.
Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more
321–330 of 451 posts
Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're a senior software engineer, come to Sweden. You'll at least get 6000 usd/month as an employee. Management usually has a background in tech, you get lots of vacation, parental leave, etc. You're not expected to stay longer than 5 pm and working from home is common. There are many interesting jobs in finance, telecom, automotive, entertainment, medicine, defence, and there are plenty of startups. I work as a…
Darkness, cold, property market - no thanks.
Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess my experience differs. Before I moved into the tech world I worked at a law firm for peanuts. When I got a $1/hr raise I went out, bought a bottle of whiskey to celebrate, and then didn't increase my spending at all. Any money I got from that raise went right to my savings account.
When you say "peanuts", do you mean "peanuts relative to what we get paid in tech" or "peanuts relative to the actual average wage"? For reference, the overall average wage is in the range of $6-800/week.
Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
How and where did you find a US remote job whilst being/remaining in the EU? I'm a bit in the same street as you (freelancer, Belgium, previous experience with remote work). More on topic, I hear the same in Belgium, they want someone to work 24/7 basically for free and then they are surprised that the guy they hired isn't some kind of magical being that knows every language (for some reason this goes for both natura…
> How and where did you find a US remote job whilst being/remaining in the EU? I worked in Africa for a while, and got many American contacts there. I also have a very high ranked stackoverflow profile, and get offers from there. And I'm extremely active in the Python community. I'm not actively searching a job with an american company, but if I were, I would just apply to any american job offer that interest me as I…
Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't really make sense to say it because it's not as if there's a general cultural tendency towards shrift. Most people aren't saving enough, what's the point in popularizing the message that we should continue on that same course?
Saving never really makes you happy, it makes you feel secure. Seeing a number in an account rise over the years is great, but also a constant reminder of money you’ll never get to touch until you are old and gray, if you even make it that far. And even if you do, what if the world of the future is no longer worth exploring or even living in? Is it more important for people to feel happy, or secure?
Modern medicine is advancing all the time. You could be old an grey for many years. You could live to be 170. If you live to 170 and save well you could retire at 65 and live the last half of your life with more income from savings to enjoy life than if you work until 170 and spend every penny as you make it.
Of course you could also die in the next few minutes. You need to find that balance.
Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more
#326And if you think it's bad, it's even worse in Europe. Taking the French example: I'm an freelancer, but I used to have a contract with an American company. They gave me 3x the salary most of my French colleagues would get, while keeping the exact same social advantages (they paid me through a French branch). However, to them, the salary was twice lower than what they would have paid for the same guy in the Valley. No…
I have worked for 5 diferent french companies as a developper and this is so true. They all complain because they can't find developpers, sometimes its not even that they can't find "good" developpers its just that they can't find any developpers willing to work for them. Then when you see what they wan't to pay i just laugh. Someone helping on a kitchen in a restaurant can earn the same as a developper here in franc…
Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more
#327And if you think it's bad, it's even worse in Europe. Taking the French example: I'm an freelancer, but I used to have a contract with an American company. They gave me 3x the salary most of my French colleagues would get, while keeping the exact same social advantages (they paid me through a French branch). However, to them, the salary was twice lower than what they would have paid for the same guy in the Valley. No…
>No, you can't pay that $2500 a month. Right now, not that often. However, we're attempting to educate a lot more people in this skill set, and the increased supply will help reduce the cost. White collar is the new blue collar. Business is incentivized to make this happen.
First, I've seen the attempt to dumbing down on the workforce for programming (delegating offshore, hiring only interns, etc). It almost always fails in terrible ways.
Second, the demand for devs is exploding because of the society we live in: all activities uses programs. Shopping. Driving. Listening to music. Working. But the universities are nowhere close to match the demand with their output. Not in quantity, and not even in quality.
Third, there is a limit to this. Not all people can be programmers. A lot of them hate it. And a lot of them don't have the abilities for it. But here we are not talking about just any programmers, we are talking about decently skilled ones. I know that 90% of the people in my classrooms in the 11 schools I went to wouldn't be able to do what I do. Just like I wouldn't be able to boxe professionally, even with a good training, or be a surgeon thanks to a bootcamp.
And finally, complexity is exploding. A simple website was just HTML before. Then we added css. Then a server side language. Then JS. Then JS libs. Then a server side framework. Then quality tooling (version control, ci, task runners, packagers, etc). Then a client side framework. With preprocessors. And all that are moving targets, and must be integrated together. Not to mention is somebody throws in the server admin / deployment / database maintenance / nosql setup / microservice thingy to the mix.
I pity the new comers to the field. The things we can do have never been so amazing, but the thing but they become also mroe and more complex to the point everybody specialized. I know now some people that do only DB, or only server side, or even "only security". We used to comfortably do it all 15 years ago. But the job offers often still want us to do it all.
There is a reason the GAFAs pay premium: they have high quality services, and they know it takes a lot to make them work.
The China and India may change that though, as they are numerous, and skilled. But it won't come from our our societies.
Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paying health insurance is apart from the income tax. So in this particular case your income tax money is not getting you anything in return, healthcare-wise. Worst in case of health insurance, the amount you pay is dependent on your income, not your actual actuarial risk. This means that, indeed, the healthy people working are subsidizing the costs of the ones "who don't give a flying toss". And don't get me started…
I consider "health insurance" to be somewhat of a scam, just less so in Europe than the U.S. I feel like I'm forced to pay into a black hole with no accountability. Don't know anything about Künstlersozialkasse - "artist social fund". Is that like a tax to (supposedly) support cultural activities..?
Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same in Estonia, some companies complain they can't find competent coders, and that we have to import from India...
Which is a joke because you have some damn good coders in Estonia. And the salary is even lower than in France.
Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
I consider "health insurance" to be somewhat of a scam, just less so in Europe than the U.S. I feel like I'm forced to pay into a black hole with no accountability. Don't know anything about Künstlersozialkasse - "artist social fund". Is that like a tax to (supposedly) support cultural activities..?
No, more like a social security system separate for the artist "class". If you manage to declare yourself as an artist, they pay a substantial part of your health insurance, social security, etc... All funded by us, poor feeble minded workers with no creative bone in our bodies, to support 20-somethings and eternal Peter Pans who can't keep a job.