ThePawnBreak

This is the sort of thinking that the Church used to put Galileo in prison.

Do you live in Europe? Schengen is only about passport control at the border, but any EU citizen had the right to work in the UK, no visa required. Eastern European workers lowering wages and quality of work for most British tradesmen and low skilled workers is probably the main reason for Brexit.

The United States itself had "open borders" for a long period of time. There was mass immigration from Ireland, Italy, and many other places and it worked out quite well for us.

There was no welfare state back then, and the economic situation was vastly different. Also saying it went "quite well" looks over all of the ethnic tension that took decades to fix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans#Discrimination

Similarly Europe has 26 countries in the Shengen area. Some of the countries have a "better-than-average standard of living" and they're doing just fine.

Heard about Brexit? The Romanians are coming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb1AkaKJL08

In many metro areas property values have increased more the savings from the median income, meaning that the application, or aspiration, of the majority of people is going in reverse.

That's because a lot of people want to live in cities like Berlin. But don't worry, the Soviet Union had a solution for that, too!

You would get assigned a job by the central committee, based on grades, people you know, who you're married to, things like that. So a lot of people would get assigned to very undesirable places, such as villages or very small cities, thus solving the problem of too many people in large metros. Do you think that's an acceptable tradeoff?

Lithuania is not the US. You saw Swedish and Italian people on the website, in Lithuania they are minorities.

Because it's for your mum that doesn't know what a program is.

Because you're in a place where you don't have the right to install new software.

Because it's quicker.

Because it's OS independent.

Because you don't need to update it.

Dude, the stock you get as a Facebook employee is literally money. It vests every month, so you can go to a broker every month and sell it for thousands of dollars of hard cash. No waiting for IPO, no hoping the stock goes up, no 4 year vesting, no board approvals, no nothing.

But what if someone failed miserably, does one still try to switch collective or choose a more humble mediocre one?

I don't know. I've never seen someone switch and do well, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.

Edit: see I am at a dilemma for the past 9 months in between deciding to stay or just switch highschool to a National College. So far I didn't took any action because thinking that it doesn't matter that much and being far too late for that.

Think about the future. What university do you want to study at? What grade do you want to get on your baccalaureate? Do you need the skills a better high school would give you (e.g. CS)? The name of your high school won't matter, just what you do afterwards.

In your opinion how much does the specific high school matter overall?

It's the only thing that matters. Go to a top high-school (there's 1 or two in most important cities, 4-5 in Bucharest) and you'll probably have good to excellent teachers (and some bad ones) and smart, motivated classmates. Go to a bad one and...you won't.

Yeah, I think it being meritocratic is the most important part. For context, you have to pass a math and literature exam at the end of 8th grade and you get assigned to a high school based on your score and your preferences. Everyone prefers the same high-schools.

I'm a Romanian dev living in London. The tech situation in Romania is quite decent, there are a few good companies to work for, some established (Adobe, Fitbit, Bitdefender), some startups (UIPath, Taxify). Most of the market is outsourcing or offshoring, though, a lot of it for Western European traditional companies (think Mercedes, Bosch, Deutsche Bank etc).

Salaries are very small compared to American ones, but very good compared to the local cost of living. You can expect to make around $1500 to $4000 monthly, after tax. A nice apartment in central Bucharest is $550 to rent, $150k to buy (can be either half or double this depending on the area). The cost of most services is very low, a beer in a restaurant is $2 or less. You can afford mostly anything as a dev, as long as it's not imported.

The state encourages the tech industry by allowing tech workers not to pay income tax (flat 10% normally). You still have to pay social services, which is about 30% of the gross wage. Public transport is not the best compared to Western Europe, but far superior to anything I've seen in the US (lived in Seattle for a bit). The metro in Bucharest is quite good. Other public services (healthcare) are not that good overall, but you can find good options in Bucharest.

In my opinion education is excellent up until high-school, while universities are not so great. I would much prefer that my children study in Bucharest rather than London. You'll find many who disagree on this topic, though.

There are very few expats in Romania, so you'll really have to make an effort to integrate and learn the language. Most young-ish people do speak decent English though, and we are very welcoming to foreigners. Our language is not very difficult, it's very similar to Italian.

I think Romania is especially good if you want your own startup, because cost of living and salaries are low in absolute terms, and the state mostly leaves you alone if you pay your taxes, as opposed to e.g. the French bureaucracy. For micro-companies (revenue less than 1M euro) with more than 1 employee, you pay 1% tax on revenue. You can fund it on your own, and there are also a few local VC's, Radu Georgescu being the most well known.

Even if you wanted to, it's nearly impossible to immigrate to the US as a skilled worker legally.

Nearly impossible? Come on, this is a gross exaggeration. Get a job at a FAANG or unicorn in Europe, work there for 1 - 2 years, transfer to the US on an L1 visa, then apply for H1B each year until you get it. I know several people who have done this. Hell, Microsoft opened an office in Vancouver specifically to move failed H1B's there until they can get an L1.

Doesn't this assume that the interviews get to the salary negotiation stage? If you don't have the name recognition of the FAANG you're probably getting subpar applicants regardless.

People talk about salaries, they know who the top hitters are. Here in London there are many hedge funds you never heard of that have 20 engineers fighting for one spot, because they pay 100k GBP, whereas most startups complaining about lack of people pay 40k.

someone earning $120k here would have to earn at least $200k out there to get the same standard of living.

So are people flocking to the DC area to work as software engineers, then? If so, good job. If not, you know what you have to do.

to get the same standard of living.

That highly, highly depends on what you spend your money on.

As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level.

Pay more. Google and Facebook use ridiculous interviews because so many people want to work there. They still hire thousands of people every year. Why? Mostly because they pay mid-level engineers over $200k. Can't afford that? Then we're not talking about "not finding people" anymore, just about not affording them.

This and the "insult the president" sound both like cases of the offender being an asshole.

I fully agree. I think we should start jailing all the people who called Trump an idiot or a racist. That's no way to talk about the President!

The N in FANG stands for Netflix.

That wasn't very clear, let me clarify what I mean.

Let's say Bob is a programmer and always loved games, and only wants to work for game companies. Let's also say that game companies pay roughly $50k, and the Google office down the street pays roughly $200k. The market rate for Bob is $50k, not $200k, because he is unwilling to work for Google (since it's not a game company) and they are therefore not part of his market. His market is only game companies.

I think examples of this happening are: - game programmers making considerably less so than other programmers simply because their employers can pay less and still get enough applicants - big tech companies paying through their nose because a lot of people are unwilling to put up with their hiring process bullshit - finance companies in London paying a lot because a lot of people don't want to touch them

So for programmer Joe, the market is the intersection of companies which would hire Joe and companies which Joe is willing to work for.

Obviously market forces should dictate what an employee should be paid, but I think the problem here is what we consider the market to be. If you are hiring remote employees from all over the world, the markets you are hiring from are not San Francisco, New York, London and Bordeaux, it is just one market, the global remote employees market (excluding timezone considerations).

I would define an employer market as the set of all the employers that a given employee is willing to work for, should he receive a competitive offer. Some Canadians really want to stay in Canada and therefore their market is Canada, others don't mind moving to the states and therefore their market is Canada+US (and obviously they move to the US). Canadian employers claim to pay "market rate", when in fact they only do so for employees unwilling to emigrate.

If you have a remote employee making $30k a year in Krakow, and he gets offered $150k by a SF startup that really likes him, can you reasonably argue that he was paid market wages, and now he's overpaid? I'd say that his market value is now $150k on the remote market, and if a different employer wants to poach him they need to compete with that.

I would expect a rational employer to set a hiring bar and then keep on hiring people and raising salaries until they can hire as many people as they need. Regardless of whether that turns out to be $40k or $120k (obviously depending on productivity, salary can't grow forever). What I think is happening here is that employers (and their friends and first employees) are making an emotional decision to somehow justify them being "worth" their salaries, and almost always scale salaries down but never up, effectively hiring from their market and less competitive ones. Then they start justifying this as being "fair" and "based on cost of living", when in fact it doesn't have anything with those at all.

And then all the high-paying jobs will go to people who went to MIT and Stanford, and if you're great but couldn't afford more than community college, tough luck, because your credential is the same as other people who barely finished high school.

Yes, just like we took away the right of companies to fire people for being black.

There's no alternative because there's no demand. Almost no company wants to hire remotely and pay good wages, and those that do have >10 qualified candidates for each position.

I think project based learning is the only way to actually learn programming. It's why most people suggest new programmers to "just build something they want" (which I think is bad advice). It's easy to envision a person reading 20 books and taking 3 MOOCs on programming not being able to tic tac toe game. It is far more difficult to envision someone who built 10 projects not being able to program.

What I dislike about the projects linked is that they give you all the code, rather than just giving you the challenge. Shameless plug: I started a blog about programming challenges (projects, not algorithms) where you just get the tests and you have to write the code. The first (and only, for now) project is a URL shortener: https://cmocanu.github.io/blog/post/url_shortener/

Something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKUE62hOvHM

The Eastern Europe "market rate" is lower than the US because cost of living is.

It's the other way around.

I am talking total compensation (salary + bonus + stock), and at Google you get past 200k at L4, so after the first promotion. New grads used to make around $160k, not it's somewhat less.

I would disagree. Zurich does indeed pay very well, but it's very hard to get a job there, and salaries are only competitive with the Bay Area at lower levels. That means it's possible to find a job that pays 100k, but 300k compensation packages are far, far more rare than in the Bay Area. I don't know any company apart from Google that pays that much for senior engineers.

I tried to get a job there about 8 months ago, and I could only convince 3 startups to interview me (after I failed to get a job at Google), and I didn't get an offer at any of them. I failed one for "cultural fit", one because I didn't do well enough in the technical phone screen, and with the third one I decided to stop the process because I had another offer and was tired of interviewing. It's fine to not accept people for cultural reasons, but if there are 4 startups that are hiring in Zurich, that kinda sucks for candidates.

Also, recently Google started paying new engineers in Zurich lower than in the US (same salary, far fewer RSUs). I guess the lack of competition in the European market is a good enough reason.

Do you know any companies in Zurich hiring developers that pay Bay Area salaries (100k junior, 200k senior) and hire >100 engineers a year?

At Google, it is completely not out of the ordinary to make 300k a year as a senior, or 200k after 2-3 years with the company. To get a remote job making that is orders of magnitude more difficult.

Also, nobody wants to hire junior remote people, so if you go to MIT it's either 160k at Google or 40k remote. Maybe after 4 years at Google someone'll be willing to pay you 50% of what you make there, but you don't really want to move away after being in a place for 4 years to get a remote job and be completely depended on your employer.

I'm from Eastern Europe and I tried to get a remote job before emigrating. I applied to dozens of places and could only get an interview at one company that was paying about 25k because Eastern Europe is cheap anyway. Was rejected for lack of experience. Got a job in Western Europe for 4x more.

In addition, the are many many interesting things to work on at Google and smart people to learn from, whereas the few remote jobs that exist are mostly making CRUD is the web framework du jour.

tl;dr There is almost no market for remote devs.

This is why I never understood the obsession with working for the big prestigious corporations like Google and the unicorns.

Money.

Does that mean that location is not taken into account for salaries, or does it mean that if I start in Croatia I get $30k, but if an American starts in the Bay Area and relocates to Croatia, he'll get $120k plus a $10k bonus while I'm still getting $30k?

Internships pay very very well at some companies. Behind every website or app you use daily, there's (usually) a company paying their interns north of $6000 a month.