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This looks very promising, it's refreshing to see a library with a sane interface.

One thing I'd like to see is the possibility to run the coroutines in the main thread, without spawning any new threads in the thread pool. It might seem strange but sometimes you just need to do I/O stuff concurrently in a place where you're not allowed to spawn other threads.

Other than that congrats on the release, I hope you keep working on it!

Apollo's shutdown was a blessing in disguise, I was addicted to Reddit and wasted hours on it before going to sleep. Thanks to that event I no longer browse or even feel the need to see what's going on, it's like quitting smoking, I literally feel better and relieved that I quit. I don't think I would've been able to stop on my own either, Apollo made it too easy.

I write Rust and C++ for a living and completely agree with this. While I do like Rust in general, the language is so complicated that anything other than trivial programs is going to take way longer to implement than in any other language. Testing code in Rust is also half baked at best, I find that any other popular language has better capabilities than Rust in this aspect, including C++. I'd even go as far as saying that for a startup I'd use C++ before Rust if performance was a feature, otherwise I'd just go with something that has batteries included like Python or Golang.

Do you realize that when seen from the outside there's literally no difference between what I'm doing and me being a "bar raiser" or "preventing false positives"? I'm simply using the system against itself within its own rules.

When someone comes in and is able to solve the 2 hardest problems I have cold there's no way I can reject this candidate in a debrief. There's people out there who are able to do this, either through practice or raw intelligence, it's just that they're very rare. If I said I'm filtering for top talent nobody would bat an eye. If you think I'm being unfair you can simply become more skilled at these problems so that I have absolutely no reason to say no, or to not interview in these places (the better approach).

To put it simply, I used to have hobbies before working at FB. Now I don't have time for anything besides work. While the pay is really good the job is a non-stop, grueling grind with no downtime allowed. I enjoyed my time but I'm done with it. Also I can't say I'm proud of working there. There's people inside that are really great to work with and the job was challenging and interesting, but I don't care for FB the company and what it's doing in general.

With that said, and I know it's a first world problem, I'm looking for a place that aligns with my views and in some specific fields that I find interesting. I'm fine taking a pay cut depending on the company and the position, I don't care so much about money anymore as an employee.

Not my experience at all.

For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. In the company I mention I got asked 5 LC hard questions between the 2 phone screens and the first 4 interviews of the zoom "on-site". No relevance whatsoever with what I did before or would've done on that team. I don't know if I passed the first day, but I told them right after I finished I wouldn't be doing the next day of interviews. Other places while not as extreme were more or less the same, they expect the optimal solution in 20-30 minutes max with no hints so that they can ask you a more difficult follow-up question. Many places say they want to know about your "thought process" but it's complete bullshit. Changing jobs is literally a dice roll, depending on who you get as an interviewer: do you get a stickler who's gonna ask you a tricky mathematical problem and expect picture-perfect compilable code because he has a chip on his shoulder and nobody told him it was a stupid way to hire a generalist, or do you get someone who's asking a reasonable problem and mostly looking for signals that you're a well rounded engineer, like choosing tradeoffs, being a team player, helping people around you, and so on. In my experience lately it's been mostly the first type. I don't know if it's simply bad luck or something else, but despite having a pretty good track record these companies are telling me I don't know how to program.

I know it's pretty much impossible for a no-name peon to change the current state of hiring in tech, so in the interviews I conduct I now only ask the hardest possible questions I can find and always put no-hire if the code is not perfect. I've blocked or helped block every single interview loop I've been in except when I knew this person was supposed to join our team directly if they passed, then we just had an reasonable problem and a good talk. My goal is to make hiring slow down to a crawl, make it so hard to find anyone that it hurts the company and is forced to change it. Maybe this is the kind of interviewer I've been finding, someone also fed up with the status quo In that case, I applaud you. The current way we do tech interviews is just idiotic and is absolutely not finding good engineers, it's finding people that lucked out to be in the intersection of "problems they practiced" and "problems you can get asked in an interview".

The main reason why Amsterdam isn't a startup hub, and won't be for some time, is really simple: money.

First of all compared to SV there is no easy access to capital. Want to raise 100k (an insignificant amount by SV standards)? Well you better get a good price for your kids in the black market because there's barely any VC to speak of and banks do not give money to anything more complicated than a clothing shop.

Next is housing. Amsterdam is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, but it's also one of the most expensive ones. Living inside the city ring (what people typically understand when you talk about Amsterdam) is extremely expensive. A 50-sqm-one-bedroom appartment will easily cost you $1500 (over 1000€) and for the average person that means almost 50% of your netto salary. Go under that and you're not really living in Amsterdam proper but the newer, and much less desirable, outer boroughs.

Finally there's the issue with compensation. Amsterdam is plagued with yuppies in the finance/consulting/sales sectors for one reason: it's what pays. In consulting 60k is almost entry level, and I'm talking about middle of the road companies. A senior engineer, someone with more than 5-7 years of real experience, is lucky to break 55k and will never get a raise once there. Lack of talent you say? Go 120km to the southeast and you have access to fairly hardcore technical guys. If you need more you have Germany right next to it which also has lots of technical talent. There is no shortage of talent here, there is a shortage of pay and of interesting work. And let's not get into the highly unfavorable contracts offered, like mandatory non-compete agreements for up to two years and automatic ownership of everything you make in your own time with your own equipment.

In short, nothing will change unless there's more money flowing around.

Hard to say, every country has its own market gotchas. Those 50k something devs are almost always working in salaried positions.

I can count in one hand the number of technical freelancers I've ever seen or heard about but I also have never actively searched for one. On the other hand there are a lot of companies that act as middlemen between contractors and companies. These contractors are employed and paid by the middlemen, but they go on to work directly on the client's site. These middlemen make a very decent profit since they pay their employees the usual (20-40 euros/h), while they bill them out to companies for up to five times as much. In some languages these companies have a specific name but I don't know how to translate it. I think they're a bit different than the agencies in the USA where as far as I know they take a percentage of the contractor's hourly rate.

In any case I guess Linkedin is a decent starting point. In some European countries it is used by huge percentages of the working population.

They aren't a joke in the US or the rest of the world either. It's only in certain circles that they're not valued. There's plenty of companies where an MBA from a well-known university is a passport stamp (and prerequisite) to a high paying job.

Absolutely, I completely agree with those things. I don't think devs here want to go into some kind of management position because they're not having fun in a technical job. It's because technical jobs in Europe are a dead end. You can make a living (just pray you don't get fired after your 50s), but anyone with a bit of ambition can see that it's just not worth it in the long run. Why stay as a developer when you can go into a cushy management or presales position that pays easily over 100k?

That is not only in France, it's in all Europe. Salaries in Germany, The Netherlands, UK and so on are much much lower than in SF or NY. Developer jobs that pay more than 60k euro are few and far between. A 50k+ job is already above average and upgrading is not going to be easy.

You must be playing a different DotA 2 than me then. To me this is by far the worst community of players I've ever been in, but then I've only played in public games. I really want to like the game, but there are so many players with terrible attitudes that there is a huge change you'll get one of those in your team that will ruin the game. I've reported quite a number of people and it makes no difference whatsoever.