TheMog

A couple of comments as a European who lives and works in the US:

- I'm surprised that you find salaries lower in the US than in Europe. That said, if you compared freelance/consulting rates to salaries, that's Apples and Oranges. If you compare salaried positions, even on the East Coast, the salaries should be noticeably higher than in Germany. The extremely high compensation that people in some posts are talking about are generally found in a few, extremely high cost of living areas on the West Coast.

- I would expect AWS focused cloud migration consulting to be in demand in the US more or less the same way it is in Europe. That said, you'll be in competition with the usual consulting/outsourcing suspects and with no network, that might be a bit of an issue.

- The big financial hit for freelancers over here tends to be health insurance, and that's going to be rather expensive at your age (I'm a few years older than you). If your wife's job does offer health insurance for both of you, that's a major bonus. In fact that's pretty much what keeps me from freelancing with 30+ years experience (I used to freelance in Europe).

- Yes, there are differences in the quality of life over here. Not all of it is applicable to freelancers for whom paid vacation time isn't a thing, but it's a different mentality when it comes to work here for a lot of people.

To put not too fine a point to it, yes, your age can be an issue. Despite age discrimination being illegal, it's still rampant in this industry. OTOH I don't have that many problems finding work, and I work with a few people who are older than me and also don't have those issues. A lot of it depends on the company you're working for or with - some of them are looking for cheap young cannon fodder, others are willing to pay for experience and deal with grumpy old people :).

The other question you need to answer for yourself is the motivation for moving over here, even temporarily. If you're looking to make untold riches quickly, it's probably not that great an idea. While you should be able to at least match your German income over here, it might take a few years to get back to that level.

The two typical choices are rspamd and amavisd/SpamAssassin, at least when you're using Postfix on a unity environment. I use amavisd on my primary and rspamd on the secondary, both seem to work OK.

Yes, spam will still make it through and you have to train the filters in either case.

That reads to me like a nice collection of red flags.

1 - They all say that, it's a meaningless phrase used to cover candidates in the effluence from the southern end of a north facing male bovine, if you get my drift ;). I'm sure they also pay the highest salaries ever to make up for hiring only the best.

2 - Oh my aching sides. If they really have more money than they could ever spend, they need a visit from a clue-by-four about business planning. If they're raising that much money are are serious about their business, each one of those dollars should've already been earmarked (even if the earmark just says "runway").

3 - Translation - you're cordially invited to work 168 hours a week as a baseline and if necessary, work nights on top. Yes, I would expect that they mumble something about having a say in your side projects (that are relevant to their business) and consulting activities that might interfere with their legitimate business interest, but a lot companies seem to mistake that for owning their employees. This tends to be easier to handle if you're consulting with them rather than become an employee. There is a legitimate need for a compromise here though, especially if you are an employee. But tread carefully.

The third point also brings up another interesting point - if they hire you as an employee or consultant and you get paid by them for working on your project, who owns the IP? I'd be very careful with that, because you don't want to be in a situation where you suddenly don't own a potentially major piece of work that's based on some work you created.

I've been doing this software engineering thing for over 30 years now, first in Europe, now in the US. The headline compensation for this whole time was pretty much always based on a handful of companies in Silicon Valley - that doesn't mean that developer jobs over here aren't well paid (they often are), but mostly to the level of "comfortable living" and not at the level of "buying my own small country in five years' time". So keep that in mind.

The other part of this is the industry - there has always been a part of the industry that lived on badly gluing together components cheaply for a quick turnaround. Obviously that part of the industry thrives on relatively cheap labour. I do think that sector has grown a bit, but keep in mind that the whole industry has grown, so these jobs have grown in proportion to the industry.

I think another part of this is which sector you are in - there are plenty of niches where jobs can be found where the job is not "chief component gluer". Usually, these tend to be a bit closer to the metal than web development, and arguably a bit more back end or lower level oriented. IOW, not necessarily something that you can show your non-technical family and state "I did that".

I do find it harder to find new jobs, though. Not necessarily because I don't get regular enquiries from recruiters, but more because those jobs are often a repeat of what I've done before with no or very little growth. And there's only so long you can coast along.

For my own amusement I just had a quick look at eBay and it looks like old SUN gear has got expensive since last looked.

NeXT gear has always been expensive, that doesn't seem to have changed.

Looks like my memory isn't what it used to be, the ORIC machines used Basic, what I was thinking of was the Jupiter Ace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace

I grew up in the 8-bit era, so that's mostly what I'm interested in from a retro computing perspective. Pretty much the whole Acorn lineup starting with the BBC and then going to the early ARMs is interesting, plus a bunch of the other early UK-built weird machines like home computers using Forth (I think that was the ORIC).

Early UNIX workstations are also pretty interesting, like the early SUN stuff, SGI, early NeXT if you're more interested in that type of machines.

Over three decades in this business, done a lot of contract work (outside the US), currently FTE at a US company.

Other than all the micro-annoyances that a lot of my fellow posters already mentioned and the general "we own your behind" attitude that a lot of employers seem to exhibit towards their FTE employees, I think there are two really, really important points that a lot of companies haven't figured out and the FAANGs have to an extent.

1. Have a proper career path for senior technical staff. That's the part that most companies haven't figured out. In the minds of the people who design the career paths in a lot of places, it's apparently desirable to become a manager as soon as possible. Not to mention the "why bother, they're going to leave in a couple of year anyway" approach, which is a self fulfilling prophecy.

2. Have problems that actually require a senior engineer, and let them get on with it with a minimum of red tape and political BS. Please note that I didn't say _technical problems_, there is a lot a good senior engineer can do to improve your technical team by mentoring, process improvements, tooling improvements and so on. Most of us who've been in this industry this long love what we do (because otherwise we'd be off working as a bush pilot or something) and want to share our knowledge as we've now become the people who helped us in our careers when we were the more junior people.

3. Listen to your senior engineers. Yes, I know, I wrote "two points". This one's on the house :).

If your spideysense is tingling about new clauses, talk to an employment lawyer (or a union if you are a member of one) in the jurisdiction that you live in. That's really the only way to get valid legal advice, and you want to understand what these clauses mean from a legal perspective. Usually they're written in legalese and the defined meaning of something in legalese tends to be a bit different from the coloquial meaning.

Also, don't forget that even if some of the clauses they're trying to impose on you may not be legal or enforceable where you live and work, it usually takes a court to make that determination. So it's a matter of understanding what the impact of these new clauses is and what risks you take by accepting them.

And please, please don't accept the "oh, but we're never going to enforce those clauses". You don't want to be the first person they get enforced against. If the employer comes back with that statement, ask them to take out the offending clauses.

Tech Lead with some business involvement. I've run my own small consulting companies in the past, just haven't had the nerve to do that here in the US, mainly due to cost of health insurance.

That makes sense. I think that I may have consciously been trying to ignore the point you're making that there are only a handful of companies out there that have the sort of problems where they can justify having this level of people on staff, and more than one to boot.

I guess it's a choice between that and consulting, because i suspect there are a whole bunch of smaller companies out there that can use help with problems like that, but they don't have enough of them to justify having someone like me on staff full time.

That makes sense - I'm in the US right now, and here a Solutions Architect is mostly a pre-sales engineer.

Pretty much any growth in my work will require me working on the people skills side of things, which is something I'm already working on.

Thanks for the perspective. I'm trying to build my network up again - I moved countries a few years ago and the majority of my network in back in Europe.

Aren't those relatively sales oriented in general? At least they seem to be in those companies that I seem to work with.

That's a very good question, and not necessarily something I find easy to explain concisely. Let me try anyway :). Note, some of the bad impressions may come from the usual clued up recruiters who are trolling LinkedIn for keywords and then crank up the spam.

So what I expect from a role that's commensurate with my experience (trying to avoid "senior" as that's usually a pigeonhole):

- You tell me what you need to have built, I'll figure out the how (architecture, design, technology) and when it'll be done, based on the usual cost/velocity/quality constraints.

- I'll work with, guide, mentor and lead a team of developers if the size of the project needs it. However, I'm technical first, so I'm not interested in roles that are management only. This generally seems to be the crux of the matter - not a lot of companies seem to have these roles.

- If you give me the responsibility to deliver X, I also need to have the authority to make it happen. Don't ask me how I figured that out ;)

I can usually find roles that fit two out of three, but I don't seem to be able to find something that matches all three. My current role probably rates as 2 1/4 out of three, and is definitely a good fit, but with very limited growth potential (aka I'm close taking as far as I can take it).

Most car dealers in the US, at least for “normal” (ie, non-premium) car brands are extremely reluctant to custom order cars and often outright refuse to do so. They also tend to put subtle pressure on customers to buy something of the lot right now instead. The car buying experience is very different over here compared to Germany.

I've also been self hosting since the last century, and as you point out, the big issue these days is making your email server play with all the other email services, including those that aren't always playing nicely.

Not to mention that not all hosters are too keen on having people run mail servers due to the danger of hosting spammers and getting blacklisted. With the last two or three hosters, I had to jump through a couple of hoops every time and get permission to run one.

I still think it's worth it, especially if you own a bunch of domains, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to someone starting from scratch these days.

This is the specific one I was thinking of: https://blog.zecops.com/vulnerabilities/youve-got-0-click-ma...

At least the BSI in Germany seems to think it’s serious enough to warn people about it (sorry, no English language link for this): https://www.heise.de/mac-and-i/meldung/Mail-Bugs-BSI-warnt-v...

If your productivity is measured by the hours you put in and not your output, you have a bigger issue than the question if your kid drags down your internal rating or not.

Doesn’t matter if your employer managed to get a bunch of your fellow employees to vote for them in one “great place to irk” survey or other.

Find out what the job you want is, work to get the skills and start looking.

I've got several - one gmail (aka the "refuse collection" that I use mostly for email registrations for website I suspect will send me more email I care for), one protonmail I use as a backup business email where I'm the customer, plus my main personal email address a handful for side projects that I all run via an email server I host myself on a VPS.

Oh, and a work email address.

First, how do you know it's the tech lead's "fault" and not an issue with company culture? Yes, your tech lead may indeed not be the best lead ever, but only too often is this a reflection of overall company culture.

Second, how do you know he's uncoachable? Have you tried? Does the company even offer coaching for new managers? I've run into this far too often that as great engineer, somehow you're supposed to know how to manage people and it shows.

Third and most importantly, given the environment why do you think you can do better? You say you have worked at that level before so obviously you have some experience, but do you see all the obstacles that your current tech lead is facing?

Here's what I would do, based on the fairly limited information you provided:

- Help your tech lead. Make her/him look at least better and try to see if you can affect team culture and morale. Unless it's a company culture issue, this should get recognised (often with a promotion) and you can get a better idea if it's actually an issue with your lead and not the company. It sounds like you came onboard after their promotion so you might not know what sort of dumpster fire they inherited. What I wouldn't do is play political games to undermine the lead - if I as a manager would find out about something like that, you'd be out the door quicker than you can say "but they don't know what they're doing".

- Second, I'd keep an eye out for other job opportunities. It sounds like the issue may well be considerably bigger than an involuntary tech lead. Sometimes you got to know when to bail.

If you're talking about the $2.50 VPS, yes, that's IPV6-only, so it doesn't support IPV4. You're correct that people who only use IPV4 won't be able to access that VPS, at least not without jumping through hoops. There's also a $3.50 VPS instance with the same spec that appears to support both IPV4 & IPV6.

I've been using Vultr for a while and am quite happy with them. I've also used a couple of the IPV6-only VPSs for experiments, but I have IPV4 & IPV6 connectivity at home.

Are you leaving, or are has the company actually gone bankrupt and laid you off.

If it's the latter, telling prospective employers that the company went bankrupt and potentially mentioning that they couldn't secure another round of funding should be more than enough.

If it's the former, it's trickier, especially if the company actually pulls through.

Either way I'd tone down the analysis - as a sometimes hiring manager I might be interested in your analysis that the company burned too much money, but not so much in the "in-depth" analysis of the founder's behaviour.

BTW, I've had to close down a company before because it went bankrupt. I have the utmost sympathy for the founder who spent the last couple of grand on weed.

High performance driving coach. I've done some of that as a volunteer for a car club I'm a member of and I really enjoy it.

Downside is that if anything, there's even more travel than I have with my current job.

Another option I tend to look into from time to time is sourcing and inspecting classic cars and motorcycles for overseas (ie, non-US) buyers. That's something that I've done occasionally as well, but it's very cyclic work.

You can work around that - I'm an introvert and find dealing with people hard work, but I'm still in a client facing consulting role right now and actually enjoy it.

For me the trick is to avoid pretending I'm an extrovert, which is something I feel a lot of fellow introverts are doing.

Put me in front of a whiteboard or on stage at a conference and I'm fine, but I still tend to hide out in dark corners at parties.

Not a contractor myself (I "escaped" into IT), but I come from a family that's almost exclusively contractors and had quite a few summer jobs on construction sites.

I think for more, err, concrete advice, some indication of the location you want to build in would be helpful.

Either way, you will likely want to involve an architect if you're building your first house, to help getting your ideas to paper within the confines of local building codes. You'll also want a structural engineer verifying the suitability of the design, especially with something as heavy as concrete.

If you're in the US (at least) or other places where wood framing is more common than concrete or stone, the "uncommon" material will likely increase cost noticeably.

Also keep in mind that unless you want to drywall the interior of the house anyway, you'll have to make sure you have pipes and conduits for everything in place before you pour the concrete. Even if you are planning to drywall the interior, you're still looking at making sure all your mechanical systems (heating/cooling, water, electricity) can actually be routed from one floor to the next.

If you're looking for an inspirational rabbit hole to go down, check out this thread on Garage Journal: https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=145073

Just keep in mind that the guy building the house is actually a concrete contractor and not exactly new to this game.

Personally, unless you're paid well enough to be a very comfortable sacrificial lamb in this situation, I would walk away from it. This has "fall guy" written all over it.

If hierarchy is important in that culture and you're not introduced as the new boss, you're pretty much dead in the water from day one.

As other posters have said, until you figure out why the project is late (bad project management, unrealistic deadlines from the start, not the right people, trying to hit a moving target), going in an prescribing a cure without understanding the nature of the problem isn't going to get you anywhere.

Thanks - I found a very reasonably priced X240 on ebay, let's see how well that works out for me.

A lot of the licensing systems I've encountered cause problems if you're selling to big corporations because they don't work well in locked down environments. Whatever you use needs to have an alternative way.

The other question is the ease of integration and the cost of the software - if you spend weeks integrating and troubleshooting it, I'd be tempted to forego it for anything but a high-value product.

Keep in mind that troubleshooting it will be an ongoing process when some paranoid BOFH has locked down the user's machine to the extent that they can't do anything, including their job.

So in other words, he's dangling a carrot that's about two months away?

BTW, if you're dealing with "contracts" (implying a consultant/independent contractor relationship), then he's not your boss, he's your client. That's a big difference.

The main thing here is that he's asking you to commit to something that he's not willing to commit to himself. To me, a measured, non-commital response would be in order. Keep it polite and let him know that you'd be happy to discuss a contract for the summer once he's able to commit to one.

No point in aggravating the client but this is a business deal (selling your time and expertise). Treat it as such.