I went the opposite way (in the UK) and moved from development (mainly C#) to lorry driving (everything from 12T rigids to 44T artics) however in my free time I’m enjoying developing (some RoR, some Golang) more than when I was paid to do it.
Although I’m working more hours (average 50-52 hours a week compared to 38-40), I’m also much better compensated doing HGV driving than I ever was as a developer (although that may reflect more on my skills/level as a developer than anything else)
This is what rest of the world looks like USA people! Developers are generally paid enough to get by but not crazy salaries. There are exceptions but required you to get through tough interviews. No $200k TC interns out here.
It means picking up a trade or just doing a scrum master job or traffic duties become viable alternatives.
Developers are caught in stagflation. Buying a property in Sydney metro area (within 90m commute) for example would be challenging for most devs.
Prices have tripled and over the frame of 15y while dev salaries or contract rates have not increased.
Truck (Lorry) Driving in the UK paying what it does is an economic aberration caused by Brexit and Covid 19 - e.g. 16,000 fewer EU nationals working as HGV drivers in the year ending March 2021.
In the end they had a shortage of nearly 100,000 drivers and had to massively incentivise new entrants to the industry. It's a complete outlier as far as blue collar vs white collar jobs in the UK/EU for the most part.
That said, overall the EU is paying somewhere around €80-120k for Senior Developers in the HCOL areas and as low as €45k in places like Spain. Overall, individual Contributor salaries outstripping even minor middle management is rare below architect or principal outside of FAANG.
This leads to the situation the commenter above identifies - that fairly vacuous softer-skill based IT Roles like Scrum Master or ART or Release Manager out-earn the median Engineer and are seen as a viable alternative for motivated people.
IR35 rules were a big factor as well, making it less lucrative for people to be self-employed truck drivers. It also paid better to be a delivery driver for Amazon than a truck driver.
Those "vacuous" roles exist to ensure that the dev team isn't lighting company money on fire working on the wrong thing, or crippled by inefficient bureaucracy which is also lighting money on fire. Which isn't "vacuous;" there is value in saving the company money.
How defensive. It seems to me like it would take someone with a rather fragile ego and low level of maturity to infer and write such a thing. I didn't call you or anyone else a bootlicker, so maybe save the personal attacks for your next sprint review or Reddit.
> nontechnical roles are not automatically fluff, and meetings are not automatically wastes of time.
If this had been your interpretation of my comment, then you'd have been right, but it's a choice to hold back and interpret a comment maliciously or charitably, and it's a choice to put people down. Non-technical roles do have value, as long as they aren't themselves an embodiment of their crippled inefficient bureaucracy.
While what you say is sort of true, developers are paid better than what you made it sound like for me. The difference is perhaps that professions like truck drivers and a lot of tradeskills are compensated very well because there is a general lack of people in those professions. We also have very strong unions (and legislation because of it) in those areas, so it’s not easy to “displace” (is this the right English word?) truck drivers with cheap foreign labour in a lot of EU countries.
Unlike professions like plumbers, however, IT personal is becoming increasingly easy to come by. And since they never really formed unions, the so called golden days are over for a lot of IT professionals. Maybe excluding hardcore IT operations, networking and at least for now developers.
I wouldn’t be able to earn what I do as a truck driver though. Maybe half with more hours? Interestingly enough I didn’t get there by being rewarded for any work. I got there by switching jobs.
In outsourcing destination regions like South America, the European eastern block(my location), India and SEA, software engineers still make multiples of the average wage for the region.
It's the geopolitical west that's largely stuck in this situation, but IIRC that has been the case for a while now - when I was considering emigration around eight years ago I noticed that the salary differences are not as huge as I thought and in some places (like Germany) it's just a job like any other.
Mysterious why Germany has no software mega Corp, ever so mysterious, it's almost like everything software is linear in Germany meanwhile it's exponential somewhere else. I propose the theory that there is a massive object beneath cal to blame.
> This is what rest of the world looks like USA people!
This statement really depends on whatever part of the USA you're in and what kind of work you do.
> No $200k TC interns out here.
I haven't seen that yet, but I think an SF-based intern (if they were paid for the whole year) would make roughly $120k. There are plenty of people living in the Bay who haven't lived there 10 years who comparatively take home very little.
All that to say, I don't think we need to dice up and turn the developer market against itself. We've all been affected by wage stagnation, the rising cost of metros, and the threat that we must live in them or else. Labor movements are good for all laborers, etc etc etc
I hope from the comments people seek higher wages for their worth - if everyone did this it would create a force pushing up dev salaries. The tech profits can more than handle this and smaller shops would have to stop doing inefficient stuff. I think cheaper devs allows laziness in thinking. Just throw a bigger team at it, see if it sticks.
200k TC for an intern is a nice cherry pick in SF or Silicon Valley maybe, but definitely at the extreme top end of the spectrum. Coastal money definitely doesn't speak for the rest of the US - there is a huge amount of space between California and NYC with developers making just enough to get by.
Interviews have always been tough for development positions in the US, whether it's a 60k out of college position in the Midwest or more senior position for a coastal company making the big bucks. It is possible to get lucky and not have to be whiteboarded, but much of the time an applicant is getting grilled.
Although it's obviously objective, I completely agree when comparing to a country like India. However, I'm not so sure it's as huge of a difference as what you are implying when comparing Western countries to non-coastal US developers. I've long since graduated, but if I were still in school and not too far into a CS degree I would probably drop out and be an electrician or plumber, freelancing application development on the side if I still had the energy.
But I was promised free healthcare and more vacation time makes it all even!
(I've always loved that narrative for its optimism. In reality if you have a modicum of self-restraint you can save more money on a US salary than most people are making on a European salary, and tech tends to have excellent healthcare.)
It would be unusual for a new college grad at any well-known tech company in Seattle to make less than $150k right now. Large companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google dominate the market here. If you were starting a software company in Seattle, $100k would probably be enough to interest only the most inexperienced and unqualified candidates.
New York City and San Francisco Bay Area are similar or higher. I don't have much experience with the rest of the US.
Not just Seattle, I am seeing tech salaries in Denver, SLC, Austin, etc starting from 120-30k nowadays (and growing VERY fast if you stick around for a few years because the smaller cities have trouble keeping experienced engineers from taking a 700k offer from some FAANG company.)
Who's getting the 700K FAANG offers? I say this as someone who just took an offer with ~390K TC for an Amazon SDE III or Meta E5 equivalent at FAANG. 10 YoE. Aside from equity value increasing, I don't think 700K without factoring in rising stock prices is common, outside of niche in demand roles.
700k is deep into staff+ territory. One needs to complete something unusually noteworthy to cross that line, years of experience alone is not sufficient.
Taking a close look at the data provided in this page, beyond merely considering seniority level and years of experience, reveals a noteworthy trend at Facebook. Many individuals are being hired at level E5 (Senior) with 6-8 years of "relevant" experience, and some even with 10 or more.
Some candidates with fewer years of experience, such as the 4 years you mentioned in your comment, are joining Facebook with PhD or Master degrees, which significantly bolsters their overall qualifications.
We’re not talking about just any programmer with 4 years of experience in web design straight out of a Bootcamp. These individuals are typically Ivy League graduate students with PhDs or Masters, and approximately 4 years of experience at Tier-1, or at the very least, Tier-2 companies (Fortune 500’s).
To illustrate, consider a recent data point submitted to Level/FYI on March 26th, 2024. This individual has been working at Facebook for 4 years and has accumulated a total of 10 years of work experience. Currently specializing in ML/AI, their total compensation amounts to $410,000 (comprising $230,000 in cash per year, along with $180,000 in RSUs per year).
Point taken, you cherry-picked a particular low number from the chart though, you could easily do it the other way and find a E5 making 600k at Meta.
Apple pays a bit below the silicon valley average, I am not quite I understand sure why---they sure have the money. I had a conversation with an Apple recruiter a couple of years ago who assured me this was not the case, and then eventually their offer was ~25% below my contemporary TC.
Also Canada tech salaries are quite a bit below US west coast levels.
I think Jobs once said that they're not willing to pay top market rates because they don't want to attract people strongly and primarily motivated by money.
That's an interesting philosophy that seems to have worked out for them, except maybe in the last few years where they have struggled to get AI talent.
I am seriously getting shafted then. That is more than I make currently as a developer, and I have almost 8 years of experience (I also live in the US).
Entry level for my job in the Bay Area was 110K salary an about a other 70K in RSUs. This was 2015. Granted this was probably above average, as it was a medium sized but highly regarded company.
Eh, I would have agreed maybe a decade ago, but the past years have seriously eroded USD buying power[1]. For example, for that 100k in 2014 to be equivalent in 2024, you would need 133k or that your adjusted for inflation dollars are 76K ( and that is BLS ).
100k is the floor, because 100k used to actually mean real money. I no longer think it is. I earn more than that and I believe we are struggling. I don't know how other people manage.
> 100k is the floor, because 100k used to actually mean real money. I no longer think it is. I earn more than that and I believe we are struggling. I don't know how other people manage.
I don't think that can be anything but 'lifestyle inflation'? Even if that's one income, supporting spouse and children.
'Lifestyle inflation' is a fascinating phrase and I may need to borrow it for future discussions. I think I strongly disagree, but I am open to convincing. Would you be willing to elaborate?
This sounds like starting up in the USA becomes less viable. And this begs the question why VC is still focused on the USA. 2-3 million dollars in seed money allow me to scale much faster in Europe (and much much faster elsewhere), if only for the fact that the same money I have to pay for an entry level developer in the USA will get me a very senior developer in Europe. Or two, maybe three, juniors.... what do you think?
Employee 'rights' are often much stronger outside the USA and so whilst you potentially pay more, you can 'downscale' much quicker as well. Look where most of the tech layoffs happen.
Floor’s around $70k-80k for a new grad in my 3rd-tier (but still a couple million population) non-coastal US city. A couple major tech firms you’ve surely heard of are based here, plus some other really big ones you definitely know of if you work in the industries they serve. Not just offices—headquarters.
The benefits will be decent, but nothing special, at a big place and dogshit anywhere smaller, so it’s not made up there. You’ll probably have 10 vacation days, maybe like 14 if they pool vacation and sick leave.
I'm 30, I can effortlessly save 100k a year after spending money on everything you listed.
If you're happier in the EU that's fine, but the math definitely doesn't check out for people focused on finances: even when you take soft benefits into account
I made 245k USD before taxes in the EU last year self employed. Most people I know cannot believe how much money I made. To make that money you don’t just need to be an average leet Code drone but negotiate great contracts on your projects and take on and manage a lot of risk.
What I am saying is: the math definitely doesn’t check out because apparently someone in my position would be doing 3x in the US
I had concluded the opposite if you compound over 5-ish years.
With two tech incomes, you'll make approximately 4-5 million in the US counting equity, versus about 1 mil everywhere else except maybe Zurich. US expenses over 5 years would be about 800k-1mil excluding a home which you are likely going to sell for far more than you pay for.
Let's just take one perk I get to enjoy right now: I can afford to live in a high density city block with a long-term average yearly homicide rate below 4 per 100000 inhabitants.
In the U.S. I could replicate this only by purchasing a city block sized campus for myself and then investing in very very good screening of tenants and a private security force.
Based on average salaries of police and municipal infrastructure workers, combined with real estate prices in major U.S. metros, even with a bit of optimization, I couldn't get the cost to go below $2,150,023,240 for the first year (including real estate purchases) and about $1b yearly afterwards. I could maybe go lower by building my own city block somewhere outside a major metro, but I think infrastructure costs would eat that up.
And that's just one perk I got to enjoy: others, such as living within walking distance to my workplace, would be even harder to replicate. Yet others, like the ability to visit a borthel without having to worry about losing my job or going to jail, are nigh impossible.
Sure, there's additional efficiency where one action can help achieve multiple such perks, so let's assume I could replicate the lifestyle I enjoyed for a measlt $1b pa. That's about 8000x the annual income I had when I retired. And US salaries are not even 10x higher than Australian ones, so as far as I can tell, the math is not even close to working out.
(Of course, not everybody cares about these specific perks, and for some the U.S. may be a better fit. They're welcome to emigrate: the ones who don't appear to care enough to vote and keep these policies in place every 3 years, so I doubt anybody's getting the short end of the stick. The point is that it's stupid to compare salary numbers, because a lot of the things people want are trivial conveniences here and still unaffordable for even the richest people in other places, and vice versa.)
> achieving a homicide rate below 4/100k would require building a secure compound and hiring live security
This is a little silly. There are many US cities that meet that standard. Seattle's rate is 6/100k which sounds reasonably safe to me. I've never known anyone (and none of my friends knows anyone) who has died by intentional homicide. It's simply not something that we worry about.
> living within walking distance to work is hard to replicate
Why would this be the case? Major cities have both large tech offices and dense housing. My office has many apartments, townhomes, and single-family homes within walking distance. The neighborhood it's located in is quite livable.
> visiting a brothel without losing my job is impossible
This one is probably true. If regular brothel access is a priority, then the US is probably not a good choice. Nevada might be an exception.
The brothels bit is oddly specific, but it's worth mentioning consuming prostitution in many European countries (including some of those with top wages) is illegal.
> I've never known anyone (and none of my friends knows anyone) who has died by intentional homicide. It's simply not something that we worry about.
I do know people who were hit by a car while crossing residential streets.
I don't know any people who were hit by a car while crossing a highway.
This doesn't mean highways are safer to cross on foot than residential streets.
Similarly, the people who are not murder victims in US cities must change their natural behavior in thousands of costly and humiliating ways so as to not become victims, and all that effort still doesn't keep the murder rate lower than the 30-60s that US downtowns have. Do you mind your own business while a teenager walks out of the grocery store without paying? Congratulations, you won't show up in those homicide stats. But it's not merely the stats that were the problem: it's the amount of social disfunction that it indicates and you won't buy your way out of that by any realistic higher salary.
Similarly, I don't personally know anybody who died of lung cancer, but would also not be keen to wear a respirator so that I can safely eat in a restaurant where people smoke.
> There are many US cities that meet that standard.
Oh, I'm sure there are many such _cities_. But that's not the rate of my city, it's the rate of the high density business district I live in. The city itself has a still lower homicide rate, but it's not relevant. I can't find data about the homicide rate of high-density living downtown areas of Seattle, but I doubt it's lower than that of the city itself.
> living within walking distance to work is hard to replicate
Because then you have to make your city block purchase in the immediate vicinity of your employer's office, which will further increase costs since you won't be able to choose among the cheapest high density city blocks.
Hello, I am an American who has never been murdered. I am curious to learn more about the humiliating ways I have unknowingly modified my behavior to avoid a violent death. Can you be more specific?
Sure, let's be more specific. First of all, do you live in a high density area with a high homicide rate?
If so, answer the following questions.
- Have you ever seen somebody walk out of a convenience store without paying. If so, would you try to say anything disapproving to such a person?
- If you're a woman, have you ever taken an Uber instead of the bus service your taxes subsidize because of safety concerns? If not, has this happened to a partner or friend? Would you let your underage daughter take the bus home from somewhere alone after dark?
- Have you ever had to cross the road because you weren't comfortable walking past somebody standing/lying on the corner?
- It's 3am. A large group of teenagers are having a party in your apartment building. They're still at it and they're very loud. Are you comfortable heading over and asking them to keep it down?
- It's 6pm. A large group of teenagers are hanging out in a public park near your place. You are curious about what they're up to. Are you comfortable walking past them while keeping eye contact with one of them and visibly checking out what they're doing?
- Would you consider walking the streets regularly while wearing an all-red streetwear outfit with a red paisley style bandana? How about a different color,say blue?
- Would you feel safe wandering the neighborhood at night in a drag costume?
- Would you feel safe wearing a black t-shirt with white text announcing that you don't like the music of a popular local rap artist?
If you don't do some otherwise perfectly reasonable and morally activities because it would be irresponsible or unsafe to do so, you're modifying your behavior. If you don't feel that you need to modify your behavior to avoid being a victim of violent crime, chances are it's only because you're very very lucky with your preferences. Some people happen not to want to do any of these activites, of course, but that doesn't change the fact that one can safely engage in them here, but not in any comparable area in the U.S.
These fears seem to portray a kind of caricature of a US city that you might get from the media, rather than an accurate lived experience. There are neighborhoods in the US where you'd be concerned about some of those things, but the urban areas I've lived in are nothing like that.
Most Americans do not live in a constant state of mute terror, waiting for the day that some gangster cuts them down.
Of your examples, the only one that remotely resonated was "have you ever crossed the road because you weren't comfortable walking past someone standing on the corner". Yeah, I'll occasionally avoid a crazy person ranting on the corner. Also, I wouldn't walk by a bunch of teenagers while holding eye contact with them, but that's because I'm not a crazy old man. No need to scare some kids minding their own business.
Look, if only crazy old people make eye contact with each other, your community is not fine. And if everyone is so agitated that they'd be scared if you walked past them and made eye contact... well, that's not the strong testimony against people "living in a constant state of mute terror" that you seem to think it is.
About as convincing as claiming "I'm not gonna take my phone out of my pocket on a train, I'm not crazy! That just happens to be my preference, I don't wish to look crazy like the people who use their phones, nothing to do with crime" would be in [1].
But I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. Ping me next time you're between jobs. If you live in a high-density area with a high homicide rate, I'll pay you a week's wages if you're willing to loiter on the streets for 3 hours a day every evening in an outfit of my choice and don't become a victim of violent crime by the end of the week. I won't pick an illegal (police or military uniform, revealing clothing) or politically charged outfit. If you're right about U.S. urban safety, this should be easy money.
I don’t have access to statistics for specific neighborhoods either, but I’m willing to believe Australia is safer in that respect. Singapore’s rates are so low that they make Australia and the US both look unacceptably dangerous. Perception is relative.
I’m not aware of any humiliating ways that I change my behavior to avoid being murdered, although perhaps if you observed me for a few days you would notice some.
I have never looked into buying an entire city block so can’t comment on that. I’ve been content with a single home so far.
To be clear, I am not looking into buying an entire city block: I am glad I can afford to live the lifestyle I want without having to. This wouldn't be available in the US, which is why the math didn't work out and I didn't move there given the opportunity. And I get salty when people like GP insist that this implies faulty math skills. I'm glad others who have different preferences can live elsewhere and do their own thing, though, especially if I am separated from them by land and water.
Re murder rates: I can't find data for Seattle, but based on data I could find (San José below, LA) I'd expect the rate to be about 10x higher for downtown high-density areas than for the whole city. Which is pretty bad.
>I can afford to live in a high density city block with a long-term average yearly homicide rate below 4 per 100000 inhabitants.
It's great you gave a clear threshold instead of making it vague. Here are some US cities that would satisfy this criteria according to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...) : San Diego, San Jose (yeah I'm surprised too..), NYC (also unexpected!), Portland, Seattle.
LOL. That's not the rate of my city, it's the rate of the high density business district I live in. The city itself has a much lower homicide rate, because there are large suburbs where people onpy sleep and nothing ever happens. The homicide rate of Downtown San Jose (the closest equivalent area) is a whopping 41/100k. So not a good look there.
Based on the OPs figures 1 income with the same expenses would be 1m profit, more than income alone in europe.
I don't believe those figures (and they're meaningless for europeans as you can't simply get a job in the US), but if you take them at face value finanically living in the US for a decade is the sensible approach.
Obviously you'd want to leave before your kids went to school
You don't have to believe me, look at the data points.
The recipe you are looking for is: senior position at big tech, preferably doing something specialized.
>and they're meaningless for europeans as you can't simply get a job in the US
We have plenty of Europeans in big tech, though the usual path is either through attending university in the US or intra-company transfers. You can get a job directly if yoy are extraordinary, but I have not seen that happen very often.
> Obviously you'd want to leave before your kids went to school
>> Obviously you'd want to leave before your kids went to school
> We tried this, and the kid refused.
That also works the other way.
An American colleague left Denmark so his children could grow up in the USA, but after about 3 months came back because the children missed their personal freedom. (Freedom to walk/cycle home from school, see friends without needing parents to drive them, etc.)
> An American colleague left Denmark so his children could grow up in the USA, but after about 3 months came back because the children missed their personal freedom. (Freedom to walk/cycle home from school, see friends without needing parents to drive them, etc.)
I saw some videos recommending the Netherlands as the safest and one of the family friendliest places to bring up your children. It was about safe bicycle lanes and safe ways to and from school and all that. Cannot recommend Germany in that regard, because education system here sucks and bicycle lanes are not cleared quickly and early in winter, or not at all. Also many car drivers here feel too much entitlement to speed in the city.
In this regard the Netherlands is ahead of Denmark, and Amsterdam is ahead of Copenhagen — but it would probably still feel like minor quibbling compared to Iowa or wherever my colleague is from.
I’ll buy that 400-500k a year is average for Facebook, Apple, Google, etc.
It’s absolutely NOT average for companies who aren’t the massive giants that those are. I’ve been in actual tech startups, not Uber for Clowns, and the best salary I’ve seen was an (admittedly very good) $170k for a senior dev position. That’s close to average when I talk to my friends and associates in tech in the valley and beyond.
The range posted is usually just the base pay. For most public companies the total compensation would be ~60-80% more because of the stock. For senior positions, this would sometimes be 2x.
The etc in your first sentence is doing a bit of heavy lifting here. There are so many companies in that category now that if you have any specialized software skill (compilers, ML, database engines, OS, systems in general) you can absolutely make that much if you wanted to. If you don't believe me, and have such skills, spend 20-30 days interviewing!
Sure if you are a typical full stack developer you are not going to make that much money unless you get into Google or something.
Also, base salaries are typically not that high, but the total compensation with equity can reach that pretty easily.
I write software systems to control devices in buildings in the context of energy savings, like hvac and charging cars, and also control attached distributed energy resources, like batteries or solar.
Eh, embedded and sensor-fusion devs are making bank working at Waymo, or VR at Apple or Meta. It's less about the field itself and more about big-tech salary-leveling (and insane profits)
A friend started working in this space last year. It seems like the usual story here is smaller companies giving you lottery tickets in the form of pre-IPO options. And large established companies paying a bit below market rates.
Facebook, Apple and Google are very big companies which hire a lot of very well paid engineers. We're not talking about being an NFL quarterback or something where only a small handful of people will reach that level. Being a big tech engineer is probably the easiest and most achievable path to $500k/year on the planet.
I would have put it differently, but your use of “average” made me wonder what you were thinking as well. I’m still not quite sure. You’re not a hypothetical person whose salary and job prospects are unknown to… you. If you’ve received job offers locally and overseas that would be interesting, but what you’re talking about sounds like speculation.
>If you’ve received job offers locally and overseas that would be interesting, but what you’re talking about sounds like speculation.
Yes, I had considered moving to Europe after completing my Phd. The offers were about 1/3rd of US, with a significantly lower potential for growing beyond a few tens of percentages over 5-10 years.
Ok so you’re in a hot sub-field. Your experience is not typical even at the companies you’ve named. And it’s definitely not typical “after a few years”, unless it’s a new PhD in hot field * top tier company * multiple good reviews. And you’re probably extrapolating the anomalously good stock performance that frankly you have no control over.
Your average Leetcode drone that makes it into those companies is making $300k after 5 years.
Compilers. Not hot, but a bit niche so it sometimes pays well. Not any more than ML or distributed systems specialists.
>Your experience is not typical even at the companies you’ve named
You can check levels.fyi for averages, don't have to rely on my word.
>Your average Leetcode drone that makes it into those companies is making $300k after 5 years.
You are right. So, now the question is: given you are not an 'average leetcode drone' do you work in the US or Europe. I hope this clarifies why competent European computer scientists and engineers move to the US in large numbers.
The math is more like: top 10% of tech jobs in the US would make ~3-4x of top 10% of Europe. And there are so many tech jobs in the US that this top 10% is much larger in number than anywhere else. There's a reason people emigrate to the US from everywhere despite pretty harsh work environment and social security nets.
For example, a Google IC5/6 in Paris would make between 150k-200k vs ~500-700k in the bay area.
That’s 150-200k on the earning side. In most European countries this has a bunch of social security pay-in, pension pay-in, employer-side employee tax etc. already paid for via the employer. The “real” wage is often close to double, so 300k-400k vs 500k-700k, which doesn’t sound nearly as grim once you factor in the much better quality of life.
A pension is not worth 150k-200k a year in compensation. Also taxes are higher in most of Europe, even taking payroll taxes into account (I assume that's what you mean by social security pay in).
Very much this. Folks tend to compare absolute numbers at the top of their payslip while forgetting all the rest. You don’t get good roads and healthcare out of nothing.
You are likely not going to be renting an apartment with that kind of money, you are just making your landlord rich.
Instead, you put a 200k deposit, pay the same 8k per month as mortgage (approx 1/3rd of your salary is the rule of thumb), and sell the house or apartment after a while. That way, you are not losing any money.
The bay area is expensive, but not that expensive. 4-6k/mo in rent will get you a 3-4br in all but the most expensive neighborhoods. You could also rent a house for that much in many nice bay area suburbs.
> For example, a Google IC5/6 in Paris would make between 150k-200k vs ~500-700k in the bay area.
Having worked for Big Tech(TM) in Ireland, I'm a _little_ sceptical of those numbers. There's a big gap, but, at least in the mid levels, it is not _that_ big.
Levels.fyi seems to have paywalled most of their data, so I can't find what Google pay in Paris, but the lowest they show for total compensation for an L6 is $390k, highest $720k. Both of those are serious outliers; median is $550k. While I'm always a bit suspicious of levels.fyi data, I think you're seriously exaggerating how big the gap is, at least in big tech (it can be a lot bigger in small startups).
Most of it is government provided here in Norway. My daughtes do (private) piano lessons and theatre and it's organized and paid by the muni. Sports clubs might have a small fee for equipment, but it's also heavily sponsored by the government, the national lottery etc.
For the things not free you can often have them paid for if you are in the low income brackets, and some places just give credit for those types of activity to all children.
The reasoning is that children of low income families shouldn't be excluded.
Here in Spain, I pay €35/month for weekly piano lessons for my daughter. She loves it and we are really happy with her teacher as well. All from the public music school.
Few people realise that the EU countries and the US are no longer in the same wealth category. There is a 50% difference in GDP per capita between Germany and the USA, for example.
It's not a matter of offering benefits in kind instead of money, but rather a fundamental difference in resources available.
The GDP per capita in the US is (85k USD) and in Germany (54k USD) nominal. That’s about 57% higher. At PPP (purchase power parity) 85k US vs 67k Germany, which “only” is a 27% difference.
Denmark rates at 68k / 77k. So much closer. Norway is tricky to compare and Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland are tax havens.
The population of Denmark is equal to that of Wisconsin. If we look at Denmark simply because it's among the richest EU countries, it might be more appropriate to compare it with the richest US states. Taking the top 5 state (California), we get $100k vs $68k (nominal), again ca 50%.
These estimates are really approximate and depend on the exchange rate. The lowest rate of NOK/USD on my memory was 5.6 and the highest nearly 12.
Developer salaries in Norway are decent as Europe goes but if you want to make money hand over fist there's no other place like America. Yes even with all the old world perks imaginable.
Well, I also like that my neighbors and community also have access to no-pay-at-point-of-use healthcare, low cost education options and guaranteed time off. Makes for a relatively relaxed and content population!
If you don't invest in (or put up lots of barriers to) the health and education of the entire community, then you are going to have an unhealthy and uneducated community.
That's not to say we don't have many problems, but in my personal experience it's a lot less than the US in those regards.
Outsiders have the disadvantage of needing a visa but the advantage of a $2k excess (the cost of the return flight) for unlimited chronic condition management. Obviously ER is different as you can’t go home quickly.
Once you return home you might get to keep the job while in the hone country and rake it in.
I appreciate stories like this as a reminder that it is never too late to make a change in your life that is right for you. Some folks stick to their comforts and avoid such a big life change out of fear - but sometimes the temporary discomfort can lead to greater fulfillment in the long-run.
Whether your coming from or going to lorry driving - or any other job role, keep telling your story and maybe your path will be an inspiration for someone going through their own jaded, burn-out experience.
I am consistently enjoying myself more when doing coding side projects, than anything at work. I think that's just ... sort of normal when your profession and your hobby are the same thing - when you don't have any boss except yourself.
To share an opposite anecdata: After many years of coding side projects and work projects, I no longer get a kick out of side projects. They just don’t scratch the itch anymore. They just pale in interestingness/size/complexity compared to what I get to do at work and if I wanted a big enough side project to scratch the itch, then it would require a team to get done and wouldn’t be a side project.
I think for me it’s not having a time pressure - if it takes me 2 weeks spending 2 hours a day to implement something there’s no issue when it’s just projects for myself (I’ve basically written a PWA for tracking my pay, hours, rest time etc which I use every day, and implement a new feature I decide would be useful when it comes up, so kind of the ultimate dog-fooding)
I'
m the opposite. I put myself under 2 week sprints at home. Imagine someone is working on the same idea and put pressure on myself to get done and release.
At work I hold things an extra day or more so I have something easy to say at the standup. Stands ups at work force this slow pace because it sounds better and is easier for others to follow.
I've come to realise that actually coding is the part of software development I enjoy the least, and in many staff software engineer positions, that is basically entirely what you are doing
Other people are doing the fun/interesting stuff, project managers, product owners, scrum masters, etc etc are doing all of the fun interesting figuring out/thinking, and then it's just your job to code it.
When you work on side projects, you get to wear all of those other hats and it's way more rewarding
Wild! Coding, for me, is the fun part - implementing the solution, once I've come up with one.
I've never looked at a product owner or a scrum master and thought to myself, "man, those guys get to have all the fun." I've more often thought, "wow, they have to answer to three people, two of whom are assholes, who have four opinions on how things should be done between them."
Actually coding is the domain of mid level and senior engineers. Staff engineers architect, design technical strategy, collaborate across teams. A proper staff engineer might only see code during review or a proof of concept.
Opposite for me. Much rather code an abomination than hash out the abomination in meetings all day with scrum “masters”, product “owners”, and software “engineers”.
Not really related to your points but I feel that separating design and implementation is a mistake; the people designing and implementing should be, if not the same people, then certainly in the same room, and in constant contact.
So it could be that, if you’re in a world where you aren’t getting to do any of the fun figuring-out stuff, perhaps that’s a problem with the workplace structure rather than with programming generally.
I enjoy a bit of everything, and am apparently lucky to have been able to do it for a long time.
For me, I enjoy programming but just as a tool. I enjoy it like I do my table saw.
But I use my table saw because I want to build certain stuff. Maybe a cabinet or something. You would never catch me using my table saw or programming “just for fun.”
And if I’m not enjoying what I’m building, it’s not like the tool will somehow make it enjoyable.
Modern trucks (at least European-style cab-over trucks) have extremely soft ride quality. The truck itself has airbag suspension, plus an additional suspension system built into the seat. You do get jostled about a bit, but the movement is very slow and floaty. I'm not aware of any reports of vibration-related harm.
I’ve not had any issues with vibrations but I’ve not been driving perhaps long enough?
That said, the newer generation of trucks are so smooth I don’t think that’s as much of an issue as it may have been in previous generations.
Wage wise, working as a developer in the UK (working for small consultancies, not startups etc) my wage topped out at around 38k - last year driving I earnt 46k and this year with promotion (from rigid to articulated vehicles) and annual payrise, plus assuming I work a similar amount of hours I’m estimating 52-55k (all before tax)
Because we don't need to set away money for medical care, retirement, the education of our kids and a host of other expenses, the government takes care of that, and our housing costs are far lower than in the US.
Oh and we have public transport that actually works and walkable cities, so at least in urban areas where you find the techies, we don't need a big-ass gas guzzling SUV to get to work or to go and grab some basic groceries. We go to work on the subway/streetcar, and we walk by foot or use a bike to go and shop groceries.
Americans always boast about how much they earn compared to us (Western) Europeans, but IME when you make them break down their monthly budget, it usually turns out that after deducting fixed costs, we are roughly the same in purchasing power, and we're happier on top of that as we don't have to fear a random hospital visit might leave us with a 10k$ bill.
I feel this comment's characterizations of both the US and Europe are both basically wrong (or at least, they would require significant qualifications to be reasonable).
I grew up in a suburb of a relatively dense Western European city with ~250k people. The city has buses, but everyone I know gets to work by car. Horrible traffic - 15 mile highway commutes take 45 minutes in the morning. When I was growing up I went to school by car. Nowadays when my father needs groceries he drives for 5 minutes (rather than walk for 15).
Since moving to the US I haven't driven at all - though I live in New York, so it's obviously a special case. For healthcare, "a random hospital visit might leave us with a 10k$ bill" doesn't exist for tech workers - as anyone who's actually worked in tech in the US would know. It's true that the US healthcare has severe access problems for a large portion of the population. But those problems are non-existent for tech workers with employer insurance and bounded out-of-pocket costs.
House prices in the UK are awful. The health system is dire. The education system (in Scotland at least) is awful too (I know several teachers here who will tell you the same, and the international ratings speak for themselves. Tax is high, salaries for tech are way lower than US too. State pensions are chump change.
By some estimates, the US is home to 50% of world's globally reaching corporations. Software written at those companies has giant business implications (thanks to those companies' scale), and thus the devs can be better compensated for their work.
Not neccessarily. Companies just pay each country's market wages. The difference between US and UK is that large amount of developer positions with high return on investment (for the company) pushes US market wages upwards - all those megacorps are competing for a limited pool of US people, and can afford to compete on salaries.
I hear it is much harder to fire in Europe. One of my colleagues (based is US) is trying to fire an obvious underperformer; and I hear only tidbits; but it is quite difficult. Imagine your risk of being fired decreased 90%, would you be willing to take a slightly smaller salary? Of course when you (the employee) do not trust the company / government, you are also willing to be more mercenary and jump at smallest opportunities, so companies in US probably have to pay a bit more to keep the talent.
Why would anyone give a shit about it being harder to get fired when it comes to salary? In what kind of distorted world do you live in? I will never understand how you guys come up with these stories. Like, why exactly do you need to fire the guy through the hardest way possible, when you could just fire them the normal way? Like, you're complaining that your own culture is holding you back, because you can't live out your power trip fantasy by telling the guy to put his stuff in a box while a security guard is forcing him out of the building in the most obnoxious way. That type of firing in Germany is reserved for people who have committed crimes on the job.
No I wouldn’t because I’m good at what I do (at least reasonably so) and I have an emergency fund. There is no safety net in the US for those between 18-65 for the most part.
Worse than the physical harm caused from working at a desk?
I've never driven a Lorry, but I did drive for a living, and also drive long distances regularly.
But I find my car seat much more comfortable than my desk chair, and my posture much better in the car than one I can maintain while sitting at a desk and typing.
Of course, if you're doing very long drives you may not get as many opportunities to stand up and stretch your legs, but I'd imagine lorry drivers would have this opportunity once every hour or so.
I've just returned from a 10 day trip across Europe. 5 days to destination. 5 days there. 5 days back. I've been back for 2 weeks now and I think I've only just "recovered" from the drive. The cognitive load of the German autobahn. Trying to understand the road markings in different countries. Rain one day. Snow the next. Glaring sunshine the next.
Now, sitting in my home office in a comfy chair with no vibrations, no continuous noise and no apparent imminent potential for death is most definitely my preferred way to spend 8 hours a day.
The way I sit while driving is very different from typing
Typing I'm not able to recline and comfortably type. It's possibly a different chair, desk, keyboard, and monitor setup could help with this but I'm self-employed right now and not able to shell that out for what would amount to experiments which I don't expect to be particularly fruitful.
I have worked in a number of offices and with a variety of setups when employers were footing the bill, and have yet to find one that was significantly more comfortable than my current setup.
When driving I'm in much more of a relaxed reclining position and just steering. Long distances I can add cruise control to the mix. Making minor adjustments to the steering wheel is completely different from the wrist/fingertip stress of typing, and good posture when working at a desk requires being more upright, which in my experience ends up putting more stress on my back and neck also.
Interesting! Do you enjoy the lorry driving? I've thought about it but one of my concerns is having to manoeuvre around tiny village high streets (lived in a village where houses were regularly hit!) Is there much of that? Are you under a lot of pressure to deliver in super tight time frames? And how long did it take you to get your HGV licence? Cheers.
It takes surprisingly little time to get used to the size - that said I’m more confident I the rigid vehicles than the artics in terms of tighter manoeuvring. Most of my work is trunking however so distribution centre to distribution centre, generally at most 5miles from a motorway, for customer deliveries I do have to take some smaller country roads, which are nerve-racking at first but now I’ll take much more confidently.
I enjoy being left alone with podcasts for the first 4-6hours of my shift and music for the rest, I tend to talk to the office 3 times a shift - once when I get my keys, once to find out what (if anything) is getting loaded for a second run and finally to hand my keys in - all in all 10mins interaction with “management” over a 10hr shift suits me fine.
Time wise, taking my Thursday shift - I’m booked at Heathrow airport to deliver at 7pm, if I’m 30-45mins late there’s no issues, but I generally leave to get there at 1840 so even if roads are bad I’m still “on-time” - after that I have a collection (anytime after 1900) which has to be at the customer (2hrs drive) by 0200 and I’m generally there by 2200 - I am lucky in the company I work for leave plenty of time for everything including breaks, I know other places run you around and try to get 10hrs work done in 8.
In terms of time for license, I had 4 days training for my rigid (anything over 7.5T with a trailer upto 750kg) with test on the last day which I passed first time, I then drove them for 6 months for my current employer and then again had 4 days training and test on the 5th for artics (anything over 7.5T with a trailer over 750kg) which I passed first time (thanks in part to driving rigids for 6months and being generally confident with the size etc of the vehicle)
>> although that may reflect more on my skills/level as a developer than anything else
Nah, that reflects on the U.K. - developers are generally miserably underpaid, and there’s a massive shortage of freight drivers since Brexit for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Worth pointing out that among non-US countries, the UK has among the highest developer pay. This isn't the UK under-paying, it's the US being a massive outlier.
Truck drivers in the USA can easily make well into the six figures as owner operators. It’s not gonna compete with FAANG (except maybe on oilfields?), but it’s a very good living.
And of course if you’re good at running yourself as a business you have the skills to run other drivers too if you choose to invest in a fleet.
Heck, for a while Amazon was paying people to quit and start trucking.
> there’s a massive shortage of freight drivers since Brexit for no apparent reason whatsoever.
The main reason is that most drivers were Eastern European and since freedom of movement ended it has become significantly harder for them to come and work as freely as they could before. Covid is also a factor afaik.
Though I otherwise agree with you that developers (or rather white collar careers in general with the exception of certain finance roles) are not particularly well paid in many instances in the UK.
From my experience that's in line with people doing "body rentals" for agencies under threat of being deported or because they couldn't find another job.
I think he could have doubled that with a bit of work on resume / negotiation skills.
Sure, still lower than US but life in the UK is way cheaper, so it works out unless your earning potential is mid-high 3 digits.
I'm not sure it's specific to body shops. Frankly some higher-end "body shops" (aka agencies) do actually pay quite well.
This salary sadly seems normal for a non-tech business.
> life in the UK is way cheaper
Nowadays I'm not sure, especially if you actually need any of the services the government is supposed to provide but is no longer able to (healthcare, etc). Private healthcare expenses quickly adds up.
Surpringly the shortage of drivers is not actually a thing anymore (during Covid perhaps) but the large number of people who got their HGV license when the government changed the rules during Covid has actually caused pay rates to drastically fall due to their being more drivers looking for work than work available.
I think that's maybe not _that_ surprising, because freight in _general_ in the UK is in decline. The UK Dept of Transport does not expect freight tonnage to rise to 2019 levels in the foreseeable future. This is partially due to the decline of the land bridge (since Brexit, far more freight to Ireland goes by sea instead of through the UK), but also due to a decline in UK trade in general post-Brexit.
The best thing I ever did for my love of programming was moving (temporarily) into management. All of a sudden I was spending 10-15 hours weekly in nights and weekends writing more code than I previously had been in 40 working hours. It's amazing what a combination of a) working on your own things that you're more passionate about and b) not spending 20-25 hours coding already will do for your motivation.
I thought about making the same move but quickly dropped the idea when I see this:
The average salary for a truck driver is $24.98 per hour in Montréal, QC.
That's less than a third of my cash compensation.
I do wish getting a non programming laid back day job so that I can program happily in my free time. I kinda gave up the idea to find a programming job that I love to do -- it's just technically too tough to get into one of those low level programming jobs.
Same. It's nice to not have the pressure of delivering on vague and intangible goals. I just move cargo from point A to B. Simple as. Also, my home life has improved greatly because I don't have thoughts of work in the back of my mind. I took a vacation recently and it was the first time in 10+ years I felt like I was really on vacation.
For me it’s the fact I hand my keys in at the end of a shift, and I don’t have to think about work until I go in for my next shift - liberating after years of checking work emails from the sofa at night.
Yes, work is covered under both the Working Time Directive (which I’ve opted out of the night work limit and the 48hr working week) and the EU Drivers Hours rules - work are hot on infringements for exceeding working hours but more so on breaches of driving hours or insufficient rest hours.
Yeah, from my point of view we're going to need more 38 year-olds starting new careers as developers to replace those of us that started at 28 and are ready to move on. I'm about 13 years in, but have been burned out for at least 5 years and I'm finally ready to admit it. Get me out of here.
It's great to see people being able to pivot their careers later in life. That said,
> folks overcoming challenges just to be on the same playground as everyone else
This has the same energy as "Kids raise money to buy classmate a wheelchair" news articles, where sure it makes you feel good to see people doing good in the world, but completely ignores that the system we live in keeps certain people down on purpose.
I know reddit isn't universally liked here on HN but there's the community r/orphancrushingmachine which is exactly this. "Class gets together and makes donation to save orphan from orphan crushing machine!"
Sure, if you intend on working until your late 70s. I'm not sure which side of the coin with AI and shit wether or not coding vs hauling is a longer term career
50+ here. I think the point is it is ok to consider 38 as "later in life" if you take into account that there will be at least one or two other "laters in life" in your career.
That's what makes it so pernicious. No one is being targeted and being kept down "on purpose." It's a failure to correctly orient priorities and to see that the balance of tax money is spent on improving individual citizens lives and outcomes.
> It's great to see people being able to pivot their careers later in life.
It'd be even better if we just paid them what they were worth so they didn't have to put a bunch of effort into moving sideways across the labor market like this.
Wouldn’t mind a crack at programming but coming from finance world the salary math isn’t quite as easy as lorry driver. I’d need to land something pretty senior which isn’t credible
Finance as in banking or finance as in accountancy? If it's banking you could look at StratPy, Python etc to go the quant-ish route which pays decently.
I have no idea about the salary level for lorry drivers, but a small curiosity:
It is funny to read these treads, and then reading in another HN post that a guy was able to buy his first home driving laundry truck - and how his contemporary peers seemed to be jealous that they were not able to do such.
It indeed seems like being a lorry driver is the easiest way to get started on the suburban life.
That low variance is double-edged. There is a cap to being a lorry driver, whereas for a developer you can make anything from under minimum wage to billions of dollars.
Being a developer also has a higher status, which I don’t personally care about but I have found to be useful in life.
You can only make billions as developer if you start a company. Then, you're no longer a developer, but rather a business owner and operator - something that a lorry driver can do as well. Also, there's probably larger chance of success in starting a company in logistics than in software.
Elixir wouldn't exist without Ruby, so I have nothing but gratitude.
My question angles more toward learning functional programming first, and I doubt it'll ever happen at bootcamps (though - my understanding is that's exactly what happens at Berkeley/MIT with Lisp/Scheme in CS101 (I'd argue with decent results)) - so it's very much a hypothetical.
Is it decent results because of functional programming? Or decent results because those colleges select for the people who generally have the most intellectual aptitude and you could have them write Cobol on tape for CS101 and they'd still be great
Existing Elixir shops probably aren't looking for fresh bootcamp grad level coders, and those grads' skillsets don't hold any weight until there's enough to start affecting new project decisions, which probably wouldn't have happened. Even Ruby is a stretch as a one-trick skillset for new developers without CS degrees, and it was quite popular well before bootcamps were: that's why they taught it. I mean, I love me some Elixir, but the result is that most of the schools would have closed within months and the graduates would probably not have gained much from them.
Oh, I don't think there's a universal "better" when it comes to such things, and I'm not implying that one is universally better than the other.
I discovered the Elixir runtime (BEAM) a few years before Elixir was created (we were using the Erlang language then), and for my specific use cases, when I understood the principles of concurrency, error handling, and introspection in BEAM, it caused quite an epiphany. It was also scary, because I had to unlearn pretty much everything I knew :)
From a purely esthetic perspective, I find that pattern matching and tail recursion-enabled programming patterns are more concise, easier to comprehend, and are less error-prone than those offered by the more mainstream languages that don't have those features.
In my experience - and I'm not a particularly great programmer, so it was welcome - I found that I produced code with signifcantly fewer dumb errors when I no longer had access to imperative programming paradigms and was forced to come up with more "functional" solutions.
I don't believe that functional programming is inherently more complex than what we learn in school/college/work with conventional languages. My question really stems from the idea of learning functional first - and I do wonder what that would look like.
That's a fine perspective but the way you worded your comment was evocative of the typical "X is objectively better than Y" tech comment. Are you aware that Ruby includes a lot of functional programming features (including pattern matching)?
I think it’s great that functional programming is making its way into traditional imperative languages - even JavaScript (I recently came across https://gcanti.github.io/fp-ts/ as a pretty extreme example)
Elixir/Erlang has function-level pattern matching, which I really like. I’ve yet to see it anywhere else, though my understanding is it came from Prolog.
I worked at a ruby on rails startup and currently am 5 years into a stint as CTO and lead engineer of a startup using elixir.
Ruby shines where you need to just pull some off the shelf libraries and get something together. you save on developer time but your devops setup needs to be a bit more complicated to handle scaling issues which will come sooner. That said, ruby is a lovely language to work in for the most part.
Havign said that, I personally think elixir is the winner for reliability and maintainability. yes, there aren't as many libraries for elixir and they don't have the same level of "drop in and use" functionality that ruby has. elixir's ecosystem's whole approach is to make everythign standardized lego pieces so there's a little but more work up front.
Once you are actually writing your own code however, i find there's less bugs as immutable data structures eliminate whole classes of bugs you find in ruby. Its not as air tight as a fully typed language but I do get descent warnings at compile time to catch plenty of low hanging fruit when it comes to runtime errors. to be sure, you definitly have to think differently about how you code as you haev to think in a more functional style.
Of course elixir's real claim to fame is going to be a combination of concurrency and performance. elixir's metaprogramming happens at compile time and in my experience, elixir systems just run faster than the equvalent ruby code. at my startup, all scaling conversations end up being around pushing postgresql and optomizing our queries. We have yet to really hit the ceiling of our api server.
Ecto, phoenix's db library, is just a better abstraction for database interaction than activerecord. it doesn't try to shoehorn database queries into objects. database records map to elixir records and you write queries using a set of macros that map pretty cleanly to sql with easy escape hatches if you need to use soe nonstandard sql. The result is that we don't spend much time tryign to debug how a db query in elixir maps to the output sql. its easy to tell at a glance. of course this does require that you actually understand how sql works.
lastly, if you want to build anything on top of websockets. there's no comparison. elixir is just better. comparing ror to elixir in terms of websockets is like comparing a cesna to an f16.
> Once you are actually writing your own code however, i find there's less bugs as immutable data structures eliminate whole classes of bugs you find in ruby. Its not as air tight as a fully typed language but I do get descent warnings at compile time to catch plenty of low hanging fruit when it comes to runtime errors. to be sure, you definitly have to think differently about how you code as you haev to think in a more functional style.
This is my experience too - Elixir might not be statically typed, but it's not nearly as big of a problem as you'd think. Immutability, pattern matching, and the general functional style all give you some strong guardrails that avoid a lot of the usual pitfalls of a dynamic language. Plus you also get the benefits of dynamic typing too (flexibility, more succinct code, faster iteration time.)
Sure, it's not as foolproof as a full static type system, but it's good enough in my experience. It's not even close to the uber-fragile NoMethodError clusterfuck that is Ruby development.
I used to be a KDE developer. We had some interesting cases of community members who went into IT: a soprano turned community manager, a grandmother turned developer because she wanted to enhance some games for her grandchildren, etc. Good times.
38 years old is quite young, and you have learnt quite a bit about life. For some reason, there is people in their 20's with 2 years of experience who think someone close to 40 cannot gain the some knowledge as them within 2 years. I would say someone in their 40's and 50's is going to be more pragmatic and disciplined with greater attention to detail as they have more life experience teaching them to be more patience.
As you get older you begin to realize that age obsession is like gossip. It's for the low IQ folks.
You're really not old until you reach 80's where stuff like cognitive decline and frailty are more likely to start showing up.
I use to think 40's was old when i was younger, but if you think about it you have another 40 some odd years until your old. Thats way longer than most companies, marriages, careers etc last.
80 is old? Where I'm from (Northern Europe) 80 is dead, not old. So given that you can't be old when you are already dead, old here is anywhere 60+, with 70+ being the last few years you have left (average life expetency is 76).
Unless your Northern Europe is Kaliningrad or somewhere else in Russia, 76 is the average life expectancy for men and at birth (that's in the Baltics, the rest of Northern Europe has higher life expectancy than that at birth). Life expectancy is much higher than that at 50 or 60, and also higher for women.
Generally, in the Northern and Western Europe I know, people with a "normal" life without special health problems don't seem very old at 60 or 70, and they expect to live to around 80 or more.
Even in the US which is notorious for low life expectancy among OECD nations, the average age of death (from a quick Google search) seems to be 85[0].
I admittedly made a quick google for Estonia, i.e Baltics, and it could've very well been only for men indeed. I must say however that the average age of death and average life expectancy being two different things is a bit confusing to me.
Modal age of death is usually in the 90s. Old is a subjective term. I guess people mean an age associated with frailty. People who die below 76 often die from non frailty associated diseases, and so their lives have been cut short before they got ‘old’.
Of course frailty is also subjective and relative. It’s why everyone seems old compared to their prior self, and yet equally seems young compared to your elders.
In Poland, according to official government stats, 60 year old men will, on average, die at 78 year old. 60 yo women will, on average, die at 83 year old.
Interestingly, for 30 year olds, it's average death at 73 for men and 81 for women.
Too often I hear hiring managers complain that they cannot find good candidates for XYZ specific language. This is the most annoying thing in programming. A good developer can get up to speed with a language in a few weeks. I have and I have had teams go from zero to building full platforms in a new stack. Programming is mainly breaking down problems, creating solutions and then implementing them. The coding is just the end result.
You want some experienced people with runtime platform knowledge in the team. For example async and thread semantics, common failure cases, best ways to do typing etc.
If you are at the point where you are looking for additional Rails (or whatever) developers, you already hopefully have people with runtime platform knowledge in the team.
My gut feeling in my area is if you are coming to these jobs with a non-traditional background and don't have a CS degree you are better off studying Ruby or Python or something a little less traditional. If you are applying to places that use more popular languages you're competing in a sea of candidates with degrees and experience in those languages.
I feel like the Ruby and Python shops are going to be more open minded about hiring someone without the expected degrees, and they are probably a bit more loose about some stuff.
I have almost exclusively worked at Java shops, but I did work one job that was a Python shop. The team borderline hated Java/C++/C# in a political way and was militant about how great Python was. If you shared their feelings they would have a strong affinity with a candidate.
Where I work now we have long had one oddball product that is built on Ruby on Rails. It had an equally passionate/weirdly political team that was really adamant Ruby was better than anything else and they also hired more people from non-traditional backgrounds.
After I left the Python position for quite a few years I got recruiters who were strictly trying to find developers who would do Python.. as if it was going to be more important than what the product was or the team composition or corporate culture. If someone calls/writes me about a job where the team works in Java, C#, etc.. they don't emphasize the language, they emphasize something about the company, who is funding it, what the product is, etc..
Trying to hire for it has been deeply unpleasant. Very few people actually have the experience they claim to have, and asking them basic programming questions that any senior developer should be able to talk about has roughly 80% of the candidates going straight to chatgpt and pretending the answer is theirs. I'm not talking leetcode stuff either, more like "what is polymorphism" or "what is refactoring".
Maybe the whole industry has gone that way... but the smaller talent pool makes it a lot more obvious.
Were it up to me, we would be using something else where I work, and not just because of the smaller talent pool (although that's probably the biggest reason). Many of the "delightful" and time saving things about rails either turn out to have relatively insignificant impacts for complex applications, or turn into sharp edges that slow us down.
I'm a senior developer at least in years, even writing my first Rails application when it was at version 0.6. I had to look this one up. And it seems the internet doesn't even share a consensus of what it means. Attempts to define it are all over the place.
The non-tech definition seems to relate to tech most as to what people usually refer to as interfaces. In fact, one definition for "polymorphism" that I came across – which I dare say was the most reasonable of the bunch – asserted that interfaces are a formalization of polymorphism. I assume this matches your expectations.
Given that, when would using the word "polymorphism" ever be useful as a senior developer? In Rails land, if you truly needed to communicate the concept to other developers (which is dubious), you're probably going to speak to duck typing instead. That is far more practical.
If I had to guess from postings on Twitter and Linkedin, I think hiring is taking everyone by surprise. I remember a Linkedin comment talking about how the company received 1,000+ applicants for a single dev job.
Some blame the layoffs.
I don't think so.
Before GPT, it was a struggle for devs to appear articulate in the domains that they reference on their resume.
Possessing exceptional writing abilities was a definitive competitive advantage.
It's no longer. Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter.
The whole process needs to move to video-based cover letters. It's as simple as that.
FWIW, a friend of mine paid to promote a job posting in LinkedIn for a junior remote React job, specifically asking only for Canadian applicants.
When he woke up the next morning, there were 2500 applications. Only 8 of them were from Canada, 95%+ were from India. Maybe 1/4 attached cover letters, every single one immediately recognizable as the soft, impersonal ChatGPT default temperature type tone. They all still checked the “I am a Canadian resident and eligible to work in Canada” box - my understanding is that this is being treated a bit like the “I have 10+ years of Ruby experience” box.
I think that online applications are going to be broken for a while now, especially for junior roles. Any listing which is open will become a honeypot for eager applicants from around the world, hoping their profile will be exceptional enough that the company might turn a blind eye to the visa question.
Either way, I encourage everyone I know to just leverage their network and seek referrals. Firing resumes into LinkedIn seems like a fools errand at this point.
> Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter.
Zero content coming from LLM's sounds like this and yes I've read quite a bit of output from a variety of them (including whatever version/release the reply is going to ask).
I sincerely doubt that. Every one has been sharply obvious. I've also asked candidates after the fact and they were open about when they were/weren't. I haven't been wrong yet.
There's this idea that LLM content is subversively good enough to pass muster, but ultimately if there's more than 3 sentences, it's not and you can ask any content moderator (Like publishing companies).
We are 1-2 years from chatgpt being able to fool interviewers. I mean speed, latency, audio generation and processing. Just connect your camera to the AI you and get your smart double to take the interview. “Are you a bot” is going to be a question and they are hoping the AI safety people will make it answer correctly.
People are already hiring other people to take interviews for them, that's not really anything new... though at least this type of double will be able to follow them onto the job.
The problem with using chatgpt today (aside from misrepresenting yourself if you don't state that you are using it) is that it doesn't match your own tone, cadence or patter. When you switch between answering for yourself and using chatgpt 's answer, it is blindingly apparent.
I'm extremely skeptical that convincingly creating a double to fabricate an entire interview conversation will come anytime soon.
For experienced developers, it helps a lot to know the names of companies that use Rails. Every time you see an unfamiliar company, learn a bit about how they used Rails, through the interview, if nothing else is available. We're to the point where we can ask nearly anyone fairly specific questions about their contributions depending on the history we see on the resume.
(I am not saying to avoid talking to people if you don't recognize the company.)
As a C#er who was interested in switching to rails: rails jobs pay less. And the kind of companies using it seem to be ones falling apart at the seams and interviewing was frustrating compared to C# jobs. I am not saying Rails is bad but more there is a common causation. Perhaps Rails being a go to for quick MVPs.
C# is mostly adopted by large, hugely profitable companies which were penetrated by Microsoft sales teams, whereas Ruby companies are the opposite - startups which have made it past the startup stage. Some of them are successful, but majority are small and not that profitable.
It was 2013 ish IIRC so precore. Honestly probably just boredom at work. A new language will keep it interesting! And rails is a nice side project language.
Ex-ruby on rails dev here, the RoR jobs don't typically pay as well as other jobs and the problem space tends to be more boring (creating CRUDL api were fun the first 100x).
We've got plans to do just that in a few months, but we need to get at least another one or two seniors on the team to have the right balance of capacity. Otherwise, we wouldn't really be doing the juniors any service by bringing them on.
In my job search for remote USA roles it seems a little less popular than Django just bolstered by the GitHub and Shopify postings. Node, dotnet, go, and Java all seem more popular.
> I decided to join Flatiron School. If you couldn't secure a job after completing their course, you didn't have to pay them anything.
This is key.
I went to a boot camp as well, one of the ones that required an admissions interview, which was legit difficult for a newbie.
The boot camp model is actually very good if implemented well. Of course, there is corruption and grifting, and a lot of innocent people regrettebly lost money.
So if you are considering a boot camp, do one that is difficult to get into and has an income share agreement.[1]
[1] Income share agreements can be sketchy too. Sometimes, if you get a job that is not related to tech (retail job, for example), they will ask you to pay back.
My exp with things like this is they tend to overwhelmingly be highly exploitive and target vulnerable people. The biggest clue is that almost none of these types of places will publicly provide whatever the arrangement is. You usually have to jump through hours of hoops to even find out the details because they don't want the information getting out due to what I just wrote.
On the other side its a really quick filter. Can you send me the details now? Not until you come to our onsite 4hr (brainwashing)meeting, Nope! moving on.
> On the other side its a really quick filter. Can you send me the details now? Not until you come to our onsite 4hr (brainwashing)meeting, Nope! moving on.
Wait until the graduates discover what interviewing is like in tech…
Although I’m working more hours (average 50-52 hours a week compared to 38-40), I’m also much better compensated doing HGV driving than I ever was as a developer (although that may reflect more on my skills/level as a developer than anything else)
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