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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:at my company what a lot of devs would do is work for a time onshore, and then move to a different country, but would keep the onshore salary. the best developer I ever worked with moved back to canada and was making $400 an hour working from his farm, but the company was locked into using him because their product was based on an esoteric technology and he was a world expert in it, so it was definitely a result of poor management. drat, time to become a world expert in some esoteric technology. Has anyone used interview cake? It's on megasale right now and I do need to brush up on stuff.
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Jul 26, 2020 00:41
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The March Hare posted:Has anyone used interview cake? It's on megasale right now and I do need to brush up on stuff. It’s fine but it’s just CTCI in a different package
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Jul 26, 2020 00:52
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Hughlander posted:Well now they just need a visa category that lets me keep my US job and get out of this hellhole. It's something that I find weird doesn't exist as a visa category already anywhere I've looked, given the obvious benefits to the country of somebody getting a foreign salary but spending all the cash locally and paying local taxes.
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Jul 26, 2020 01:00
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Roadie posted:It's something that I find weird doesn't exist as a visa category already anywhere I've looked, given the obvious benefits to the country of somebody getting a foreign salary but spending all the cash locally and paying local taxes. I’m honestly going to mail the NZ ambassador. It’s totally a 2021 thing.
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Jul 26, 2020 05:17
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Who gets the income tax?
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Jul 26, 2020 06:02
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gbut posted:Who gets the income tax? That was my original point. I’d double tax to keep my US job and live in NZ cost of living / exchange rate. So tax me for all the things. It’s too drat low as is.
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Jul 26, 2020 06:55
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gbut posted:Who gets the income tax? Depends on the tax treaty between the nations involved. Frequently, you will owe taxes in both places, but the tax treaty will have a provision that allows taxes paid to one to be used to offset taxes owed to the other. I'm no expert in interpreting international law, but if you are, you could take a look at the US-NZ tax treaty and identify for yourself who gets first look at the money pile for the specific situation you're thinking about.
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Jul 26, 2020 06:55
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:at my company what a lot of devs would do is work for a time onshore, and then move to a different country, but would keep the onshore salary. the best developer I ever worked with moved back to canada and was making $400 an hour working from his farm, but the company was locked into using him because their product was based on an esoteric technology and he was a world expert in it, so it was definitely a result of poor management. The best man at my wedding, I actually got him this job, we used to work at the same company, is the world expert in the change management software used by ICE, not that ice, Intercontinental Exchange, i.e. some megacorp that owns the NYSE, Chicago Board of Trade, as well as a handful of European and Canadian exchanges. As their biggest customer it's nice that they're pretty much immune to economic downturn. He now lives in Bogota (Colombia) in a massive 5 need 4 bath house in the really ritzy part of town, his house also has a 2 bed 1 bath servants quarters above the 3 car garage I wish I were making this up. Also all his furniture is custom hand made solid wood because why not He was still making his Mountain View, CA salary when he moved to Miami; before he left the country he changed his residency to arrive state with no state income tax. Since then he's gotten another 20% raise as well as semi annual cash bonuses. He's doing pretty ok. I was employee 25 at the company and he's probably employee sub 50 Currently he's hating life as Bogota is a city of 8 million with probably 15 daily flights to Madrid and missing out on social life in both Bogota and Madrid. They don't have a car right now because where are they going to go + they get all their groceries delivered
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Jul 26, 2020 08:36
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How many armed guards does he employ?
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Jul 26, 2020 13:03
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Hadlock posted:Y'all must really like your little island, otherwise I can't see why people continue to accept such low pay despite having a major financial hub Right There. Seems like if you swim across the river thing there to the land of frog eaters, or down to ze germans you can double your salary pretty much immediately. The frog eaters also pay poo poo. Votlook fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jul 26, 2020 |
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Jul 26, 2020 19:01
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Re: leaving the states and lower salaries - The obvious solution is to keep your American job & salary, work remote, and go live elsewhere on rotating 6 month tourist visas until you have enough time in residence* to get you a resident visa *: only works in places with relatively light residential visa requirements like Canada, Ireland, and, presumably, Sweden. Would be drat near impossible to pull off in a place with immigration laws as strict as the US's. Although most say 6 months max in a year because they don't want you actually living there.
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Jul 26, 2020 23:16
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Are you guys writing PHP/mysql/java 5 apps with no UI or what is going on over there payscale: average software developer in the UK $22-49K payscale: average plumber in the UK $17-46K  Once you factor in the cost of education, you'd come out way ahead as a plumber, and maybe do software contracting on the side self taught at night Hadlock fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Jul 27, 2020 |
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Jul 27, 2020 00:02
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I’ll freely admit that big tech/tech hub comp packages are inflated, but even accounting for that looking at European dev comp is depressing even considering that you get functioning national healthcare and other social services and safety nets. It’d be such a hard pill to swallow to get paid like 1/3 of a US dev and try to live in even a second tier European city, much less a London or Amsterdam or Zurich.
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Jul 27, 2020 00:16
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Yeah my insurance is comp'd but I think I have to eat ~30% of the costs up until $15,000 at which point it is 100% covered up to some ludicrous amount. At $50k/year $15k is a huge chunk of my post-tax income but with tech salary it would be unfortunate but probably not uncomfortable beyond having to hold off on buying a new car for two years and maybe eat out less, road trip to the grand canyon vs fly international for vacation. What's really surprising to me is that there's no visible difference in pay between a knowledge worker and a blue collar tradesman. Traditionally engineers get paid at least 20-30% more than a blue collar worker. In the UK based on my 20 seconds of research that gap is quite small. For health care, it is really nice to have that safety net if you want to start your own company, there's no healthcare overhead if you or your wife has cancer or whatever and you're free to start that bakery or coffee shop or software company etc.
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Jul 27, 2020 00:31
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I think it's competition from the real low-cost countries. We have a long-term dev from Romania on our team and he often jokes that we could buy an entire apartment complex in Romania for the cost of renting a pretty normal apartment here in the states. For a company working in the EU zone, a developer from Romania, the Ukraine, or Belarus, for example, doesn't come with nearly as many drawbacks (namely time-zones) as hiring one stateside does. So that would be my guess: low-cost competition for jobs drives down wages across the board. Similarly, I tried upwork/toptal back in the middle of my freelancing days, but I couldn't compete on price with a $25/hr dev from Eastern Europe or a $15/hr dev from South & Central America. Which all makes me curious as to what the high-skill mid-wage jobs are over in developed Europe. According to Indeed, it's all upper management and medical, coming in at just under what I would consider a good salary for a mid-senior dev stateside?
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Jul 27, 2020 00:48
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I am probably going to need to accelerate my carreer change plans here. My goal was to move out of pure tech in 10 years, might need to move it to 6. One of my old companies still has 20+ java engineers working in Bulgaria, I think at around $20-25k each, and everyone seems to be very happy with the arrangement. At another previous company, an entire department got outsourced to some Canadians in Ontario. I'm a little surprised that Mexico/Colombia/Venezuela aren't slurping up US tech jobs faster as they're all in the east/central/west coast time zones, no major natural disasters, food stable etc. Venezuela is sort of a dumpsterfire right now but they'll pull out of that in 5 years. Argentina's economy is constantly in the dumpster but for the most part they even pass for "white american" on a video call (it shouldn't matter but there's an alarming number of racists out there). Is the threshold for getting into tech as a Romanian, being able to speak the local language (English)? We had a Bulgarian technical director who was a close friend of the founder and I think that allowed them to avoid needing english speaking developers. Based on my limited travels there the average person in those countries speak broken english at best. Vietnam has Nha Trang (pop. 500K) now which is becoming a bit of a tech hub, I guess Costa Rica is doubling down on their tech industry as well, that city is pop 300K. Not huge numbers but San Francisco is only 800K, and Mountain View (google) is 80K.
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Jul 27, 2020 01:30
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I do feel some concern about US dev comp dropping (perhaps precipitously) in the medium-long run, so I’m definitely getting while the getting is good. On the other hand, folks have been crowing about offshoring and outsourcing for literally decades and dev comp has continued to rocket upward so 
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Jul 27, 2020 02:16
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There's a lot to be said for having people who speak your language and work in your time zone, and even some upside to having them be physically present. I don't think that offshoring is ever going to go away completely, but a lot of the firms that leaned hard into it 10-15 years ago have pulled back pretty hard.
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Jul 27, 2020 02:24
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Yeah, its pretty easy to be happy with outsourcing in the short-medium term but I've never worked anywhere that I couldn't tell which parts of a system had been outsourced and which hadn't. Not a knock on the quality of foreign developers either, I've worked with some very talented eastern euros. I think its just a difference of building a house of cards from a comfortable chair next to the table vs using one of those extendable grabber hand things through a window 100 feet from the table. Both will be fragile, but one is much more likely to resemble a half way coherent code base at the end.
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Jul 27, 2020 03:14
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Hadlock posted:I am probably going to need to accelerate my carreer change plans here. My goal was to move out of pure tech in 10 years, might need to move it to 6. Don't discount Egypt, who is strong in Tech Ed, has English as a common language, and are willing to work crazy hours so they overlap with the US. Our Romanian dev was a bit of a lucky find, and he goes through a few juniors a year looking for one that he likes working with/can communicate with the team, so... yes? I'm not sure we want to go down the path of stereotyping the quality of developer you find in these different locations. I am surprised that Mexico hasn't been making a bigger push, but I'd speculate it's just how common English is. Venezuela is a mess and will be near impossible for any Western nation to do business with for a while. You're right about Costa Rica, though. They're investing heavily in healthcare and tech. If they can build up 3 pillars (Tourism, Tech, Healthcare), they'd have a very strong place in the western hemisphere economy for a country of their size. Won't be more than a contract base for the US until they can build a few multinational monsters like, say, TikTok.
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Jul 27, 2020 03:16
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The other thing about offshoring is that, in a lot of countries, some significant fraction of the developers working there are the ones who couldn't emigrate to the US. With our luck-based immigration system that's not a guarantee that they're less talented than the ones who did the make the cut, but it's not completely unrelated either.
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Jul 27, 2020 03:47
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You can get a 12 month remote work visa in Barbados for ~$2k where they expect you to keep your (current) remote job. It sounds pretty great to be honest.
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Jul 27, 2020 09:14
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The March Hare posted:Has anyone used interview cake? It's on megasale right now and I do need to brush up on stuff. I spent the $30 on this. I agree, it's CTCI by another name but easier to get to grips with if you don't already know the material.
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Jul 27, 2020 09:18
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SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE posted:You can get a 12 month remote work visa in Barbados for ~$2k where they expect you to keep your (current) remote job. It sounds pretty great to be honest. Repeatable? Honestly, I'm a little surprised that one of the Caribbean resort islands hasn't tried the tourism/tech powerhouse economic combo. English is already a common language and they're generally starting out at a fairly high level of income, relative to the larger Central & South American nations. Pour some budget into building up a program at your national university, develop a reputation of high quality development, become a top offshoring shop, gradually develop your own collection of Internet businesses that can afford to pay more than US companies. A single Indeed-sized company would employ a tenth of the island of Aruba, for example, and probably side-effect employ another 40%.
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Jul 27, 2020 16:08
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Barbados is a pretty good island, but the major downsides are 1. Has one beach on the whole island. The rest is steep rocky cliffs. That's why you don't see any bikini beach Instagram photos ever taken there 2. Is in the top 10 list for islands that get hit by Hurricanes the most. Might have been #1 about 10 years ago 3. It's in deep water further from the rest of the islands, it's more of a North Atlantic island than part of the Caribbean If you're looking for a well developed island with fast internet, I can personally vouch for Grenada. Grand Anse Beach in Grenada, you've never heard of it before but you've probably seen it in a couple of Corona beer ads. To the south is Trinidad and Tobago. I don't know any of their visa situations though. There is a 5000 student veterinary college packed full of bored coeds, with a female to male ratio of 7:1 as well. There's also American Virgin Islands, directly east of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico itself, and Hawaii. You can rent a nice condo in any of these locations for under $2000/month with a pretty respectable ocean view. I've heard the AVI have crime problems though. Since these are American territory, no passport needed just hop on a plane to Miami and then get a local flight.
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Jul 27, 2020 20:33
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So, I interviewed with Signal (the messaging app guys) for a senior dev position, working on their desktop app. Got past the code screen "homework" (simple JS stuff, slightly more complicated responsive page design), got through a code interview that was obviously meant to get at some of the wacky idiosyncrasies of JS to show that I knew what I was talking about, was told that the first guy was so eager about me that they were skipping me straight to an interview with the CTO... ...who, instead of getting at anything actually relevant to the job, gave me a binary tree question. As you can imagine, and like basically 99% of anyone who's ever worked in the real world of software dev, I haven't touched binary trees since my second or third year of college, and so I had to muddle my way through it for most of an hour. I apparently didn't muddle well enough, since I got a rejection. Really, though, I'd have been seriously dubious about it even if I was offered the job, given the kind of bizarro internal culture they must have to have the CTO asking low-level algorithm questions instead of literally anything else.
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Jul 27, 2020 20:33
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Roadie posted:So, I interviewed with Signal (the messaging app guys) for a senior dev position, working on their desktop app. Got past the code screen "homework" (simple JS stuff, slightly more complicated responsive page design), got through a code interview that was obviously meant to get at some of the wacky idiosyncrasies of JS to show that I knew what I was talking about, was told that the first guy was so eager about me that they were skipping me straight to an interview with the CTO... binary trees are extremely important to know when you're writing css yeah i still think it's incredibly stupid to have that kind of thing happen. i can't even force myself to be interested.
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Jul 27, 2020 20:41
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Sounds like the CTO was telling the front end manager to not skip the vetting process and you got stuck in the crossfire/were made an example of That said, signal is dealing with pretty heavy duty encryption designed to ward off national intelligence agencies etc. Edward snowden level stuff. If there was one place that the front end team should know how to parse a binary tree, it's probably this outfit.
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Jul 27, 2020 20:55
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Roadie posted:As you can imagine, and like basically 99% of anyone who's ever worked in the real world of FTFY
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Jul 27, 2020 21:07
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Hadlock posted:Sounds like the CTO was telling the front end manager to not skip the vetting process and you got stuck in the crossfire/were made an example of Adhemar posted:FTFY If somebody working on almost anything is hand-crafting binary trees for any purpose, they're doing it wrong. Probably incredibly wrong, given the potential for bugs and slow access compared to data storage methods worked on by entire teams of people specialized in that (which is, you know, the single case where people should actually be doing that).
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Jul 27, 2020 21:28
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There are good BST questions and bad ones. Do you remember what they actually asked you?
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Jul 27, 2020 21:33
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For some reason, all of this talk about binary trees makes me think of the old man from scene 24 and the bridge of death from the Holy Grail. "Breadth or depth first?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7iXw9zZrLo
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Jul 27, 2020 21:35
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Hadlock posted:Are you guys writing PHP/mysql/java 5 apps with no UI or what is going on over there Plus, you can't outsource a plumber.
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Jul 28, 2020 00:10
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Doom Mathematic posted:Plus, you can't outsource a plumber. Gotta keep that poo poo local
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Jul 28, 2020 05:28
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Roadie posted:If somebody working on almost anything is hand-crafting binary trees for any purpose, they're doing it wrong. Probably incredibly wrong, given the potential for bugs and slow access compared to data storage methods worked on by entire teams of people specialized in that (which is, you know, the single case where people should actually be doing that). I agree, but op said “touching” binary trees, which is not the same as handcrafting one.
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Jul 28, 2020 07:02
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ultrafilter posted:There are good BST questions and bad ones. Do you remember what they actually asked you? Adhemar posted:I agree, but op said “touching” binary trees, which is not the same as handcrafting one. The interview problem in this case was, indeed, making code to hand-craft binary trees with certain criteria, in a coderpad (no REPL or anything else to actually run any code). By later the same day I'd figured out much simpler ways than what I muddled through, in what was in retrospect one of those "if you know the trick it's obvious" things that just filters for people who have run into that particular Leetcode problem before.
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Jul 28, 2020 07:47
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Roadie posted:The interview problem in this case was, indeed, making code to hand-craft binary trees with certain criteria, in a coderpad (no REPL or anything else to actually run any code). By later the same day I'd figured out much simpler ways than what I muddled through, in what was in retrospect one of those "if you know the trick it's obvious" things that just filters for people who have run into that particular Leetcode problem before. Were they looking for three pointers, or indexing routines for an array?
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Jul 28, 2020 11:42
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Hey, it's been awhile. Short story of my background: live in Toronto, graduated 2013, have about 7 years experience, about 2 of that in lovely VB6 (+ a little C#) and ASP.NET Webforms, 2 in mainly front-end (Ember.js), and now just shy of 3 years in back-end and front-end (Elixir/Phoenix and React/Redux) at my current job. Currently working at a startup that raised a series A and is moving along decently, I started there when it was still seed series. About every 2 or 3 years I start lightly panicing about my career and how badly (I perceive) it's going and I start mildly freaking out about the prospect of no good company hiring me again. I'm about due for another one of those panic moments and I think now is the time. I make pretty decent money for the area and my years of experience, and I'm not too worried over the prospect of getting a job, but I'm getting increasingly worried about what doors may start closing if I don't try to open them now. My current situation: my girlfriend wants to move to Paris for 1-2 years in the future, probably when covid starts dying down. I was nervous about the prospect of moving to Europe but I'm coming around and want to make more cool scary-seeming choices like that in my life. I have an EU passport so I'm not too worried about the immigration part, but I am having weird regrets about my career overall and I'm thinking about what I can do in the future to resolve those. I guess my biggest fear stems from when I look at descriptions for cool jobs at companies that have a big scale (the FAANG+ kind of joint, but also smaller companies that have distributed systems and large orchestration systems) -- a lot of them have it as a requirement that you have experience working with those kinds of systems. I do not. I know it's a good adage to apply anyways and see if it's actually an issue that leads to a rejection. I think that's definitely true for when you're starting out your career, but I'm getting anxious the longer I settle in. I'm coming up to the 10 year mark pretty fast and I'm getting worried that the number is going to lead to much bigger expectations on my expertise in those areas. Currently my line of thinking is if we move to Paris then I'll apply at all the big FAANG+-ish (I know Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft have offices there, but I'm also thinking along the lines of lesser known companies like Datadog that have similar scale issues), and failing that find a job in general, then after the 1-2 years, move back to Toronto (or possibly another city) and try the same (we have offices for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, also smaller ones like Shopify and Pagerduty). The fear that's stuck in the back of my mind right now is that I'll be 10-15 years in to my career, apply to these jobs, and get rejected because I haven't got a good well known name on my resume. If I got a job at, say Google, out of school, then I don't think it would be an issue, but I definitely did not get a job at Google (or similar company). I'm pretty confident in my ability to do back-end work* (and front-end for that matter), and I think I have a decent amount of experience with solving problems and considering the big picture, working with people, yadda yadda, but outside of that I don't know how attractive my background will look when applying to one of those kinds of companies. * our current service is a monolith that runs on AWS through Docker/ECS, it runs off of two instances but on one database, and it's a long long way from needing more than that How much of this is based in reality, and how much of this is a contrivance of my own self-doubt? Do I still have a shot at getting a Good Name on my resume, or are those doors closing fast? How much do I need to worry here?
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Jul 28, 2020 22:38
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in figgieland prime, the backlash against k8s fanatics and dipshits who demand distributed systems for 5 users/hour is well underway tech majors have lots of jobs for non ds touchers still, itll be fine. many areas of all tech majors are much more warm body oriented than you think if your explicit goal was to write a working paxos impl for real peeps you'd prolly need to go and get a phd really. dont get a phd unless you will willfully ignore all advice about not getting a phd bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Jul 28, 2020 |
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Jul 28, 2020 22:44
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bob dobbs is dead posted:many areas of all tech majors are much more warm body oriented than you think the dirty not-so-secret secret of big tech is that most dev jobs are the same day to day keeping the lights on bullshit as any other dev job, except you get paid twice as much only a small handful of peeps at FAANG and friends are really pushing the envelope technologically, and even fewer out of necessity instead of vanity bob dobbs is dead posted:in figgieland prime, the backlash against k8s fanatics and dipshits who demand distributed systems for 5 users/hour is well underway also this Guinness fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Jul 28, 2020 |
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Jul 28, 2020 22:48
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