71–80 of 88 posts
Funny thing is that now US corporations are reaching out to hire developers in other countries as well. Pay for devs in EU is going up as well because of that. Local software houses are loosing devs because of that. US based companies with VC money are showering devs with cash. They don't do that to cut costs anymore but to just have developers.
>Software engineers in all other major countries earns about $30K - $60K on average. These countries include: Japan, China, Australia, Germany, Canada. How are salaries so low there? How do they plan on having competitive tech markets?
Its a struggle. >graduates from the Universities of Toronto, British Columbia and Waterloo in 2015 and 2016 revealed 66 per cent of software engineering and 30 per cent of computer science students were leaving Canada for work after graduation. https://beta.ctvnews.ca/national/business/2021/5/21/1_543849... I wonder how accurate the quoted average salaries are for Canada though. The high end is what a junior develope…
Also, there's really not too much software that a small business needs. Quickbooks. Excel. Salesforce/Zoho/whatever for the CRM. A website. What else does a small business need? When they have special needs, they just get someone like me.
It's not like every business is building a nuclear reactor and needs various monitors and alarms and stuff, whatever they even do with reactors, I don't know.
There's all kinds of outsourced tech support - phone or onsite. MSPs.
Everyone says to find a niche and fill it and that is how you can be successful, but everyone knows this, it is no secret, although so many people do, as if they are the only ones that know about it. But anyways, as a result, there is specialized software for everything imaginable. Damn difficult to find a niche that someone's not trying to exploit. Name an industry, a sub-industry, a sub-sub-industry, a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-industry and there's specialized software for it.
I can't imagine any software dev, working for 30k in Canada. That's close to minimum wage in most provinces, even poverty level in many cities.
It beats shoveling shit in Saskatchewan or dealing with any customer in a retail shop (remember those?).
Desk jobs are fine, but can also be mind sapping horror shows. And who feels justified, working for 1/2 or 1/3rd what most peers are making?
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Regarding the competent people who don’t want to, I’ve met many. I remember meeting a guy a dozen years ago who did a lot with C++ and a Beowulf cluster for a very large research hospital and even then his salary was much lower than it could’ve been, so I asked him why he wasn’t at a FAANG (before the acronym existed), and he told me it was because in his current job he could own all his outside work, whereas Google…
Declaring/Designating and protecting personal IP when joining BigTechCo is standard practice. As long as you are not using tools and internal IP on your project and it is not a competing product it is typically fine. This idea that BigTech is hostile to side projects is misplaced. They would actually like it if you succeed because its a PR and branding win for their engineers.
The process, at least as Google, is to disclose your project to a committee and ask for permission to do it in advance - if they accept they give you IP release waiver and tell you what parts you can and cannot do in your project, for them to not consider it an invasion into Google's interests. My experience with this process was largely negative. Bunch of jerks erring on the employer's side. I can totally see why people with strong interest in their personal projects may not be willing to participate in this circus.
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In my experience, as an American expat working in the EU, these countries have an extremely low level of churn. In most cases the only way to get a raise is to be hired away. So most developers put up with the annual CoL raise of 3-5%. Instead of changing companies every 2 years with a $10k-50k bump you stay 10 years in one company and eventually get a $10k over that period. I know most Americans feel its the strong…
>It can be as high as 20k-50k€. Meanwhile in NYC they're knocking off few months rent and dropping the security deposits just to get people back there.
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Some tech companies offer "unlimited vacation" these days as the official vacation policy. It's great if you feel you can actually take it, but most people don't. It generally means there isn't a defined amount or minimum amount, and everyone knows if you actually take a lot of time off, your output will not look as good compared with your colleages. The undertone of competing with colleages for recognition hasn't go…
That's really interesting. I'm in the UK and the consensus is generally that the US doesn't give much holiday to staff and that Europe is more generous. I'd never heard of unlimited vacation before. Here the standard is 28 days plus the 8 or 9 public holidays, so about 36 days off per year. In Europe it's more, and often you must take them.
That's correct, the US has 0 legal holidays, everything is contractual. That typically means around 7-8 days and builds up with seniority.
It's pretty poor: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm
But anything contractual for the most in-demand jobs (such as software engineers today), is way better than the minimum legal standard or the average contractual standard. From pay to insurance to holidays to things like housing, free food, sports and mental counseling.
The basic rule is that you're better off in a more unequal society when you're at the top, and better off in a more equal society when you're at the bottom. There's of course a limit to this logic.
Then if you take the software devs that tend to frequent HN, (the majority of devs at a FAANG firm will know of HN and visit it from some to time), you're looking at say the top quartile among software devs. It's quite clear that most software devs are better off in the US in many respects, and that their holiday perks can be way better than the average American or European. Plenty of great software companies in the US offer unlimited time off. Most people don't really use it though, it's more a cultural thing.
Fundamentally, software engineers aren't a commodity. They're not all created equal and they have their own desires and preferences which factor in to what they choose to do. The FAANGs in the US will hire basically anybody, provided that person passes their interview process and is willing to physically relocate to one of their offices, which are usually located in major cities that have high costs of living (e.g. B…
So what's an engineer? Outside of software, an engineer is a professional - a member of a professional body, licenced to undertake specified design and construction work, and required to take regular training and re-licensing. It's like a physician; it's not some particular level of training or experience. Or skill - there are rotten physicians and excelent ones. But if they're not licensed, they're not a physician.
Can't we go back to calling programmers programmers?
Many SMBs are wary of the cost of software development, and avoid it. The "magic of software," that you can just write a program and have it start printing money [0] for you, is in most cases a pipe dream. Instead, software is usually just like any other business activity, in that it could be a net asset or liability, often depending on how it affects other parts of the business. In addition, if you don't understand…
Software development projects are incredibly risky. Estimating development costs is an unsolved problem. I've worked for major software company that cancelled a 5-year development project, employing >200 coders.
Government projects seem to be particularly prone to huge cost overruns; I suppose it's because there usually isn't any single stakeholder, because the specification was written by a committee, because the funding is provided by taxpayers who can't choose to withdraw funding, and because "events, dear boy" result in changes to the goals of the project.
I'm really talking about major projects; small projects can usually be cancelled with little harm.
Funny thing is that now US corporations are reaching out to hire developers in other countries as well. Pay for devs in EU is going up as well because of that. Local software houses are loosing devs because of that. US based companies with VC money are showering devs with cash. They don't do that to cut costs anymore but to just have developers.
my previous company has an entire branch in Ukraine. Less need to comply with EU labor laws but equally talented professionals
Company from US just gets an invoice directly from developer as this is B2B arrangement.
The rest is up to that developer if he wants to work 12 hours a day or else. There is also no real "legal way" that they could hire a dev as full time employee if they don't have entity in EU. So there is not much risk, well only that dev might suck, but that is different discussion.