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Yeah that's cynical ;). I for example am with my current startup for 5 years now and can hardly find anything to complain about. Previous job was 4 years and was also ok although there it was a bit too much management for me me ;). Before that I've been freelancing for 10 years where most of the time was also with the same company and also fine (there it was more that I got bored of software dev itself and did my PhD afterwards to get to more special topics than the generic embedded/network development I did back then)

True. If you got two kids (I do) one can just look for both while the other one can have their shower/toilet/sleep whatever. Actually we are often taking turns sleeping.

Yeah Python culture is generally pretty "direct". I did mostly python the last decade and got so used to "no problem to read the source of pytorch or whatever" that I meanwhile really feel challenged when I look at Java, C# whatever framework/library code to figure out where the abstractions end and the actual work is happening. My own code also became less and less abstract over time.

As I've been mostly using Python for the last 10 years I forgot how nice this dot thing can be ;). True that vscode and pycharm can give you something but I found that it's very often crap.

I am writing a little bit of C# atm and astonished how you can just dot tab through your work (without ever having read a tutorial or book on C#) and all those other contextual information you get with "full" visual studio. Somehow feels like just letting you guide through the work :).

On the other hand, the students I teach really struggle when they don't have all their IDE tricks. They learn almost exclusively C# at their institution in the first year(s) while my experience is mostly playing with Unity ;).

Good point. I have been playing with lots of niche languages but in the end I also find that focusing my learning elsewhere is usually a better idea. Even more, I don't know many of the features of the languages I use although I have been working on rather tricky topics - from 3D viz to medical computer vision, low power device soft-realtime streaming deep learning inference ;) etc. and in decades of C++ I still only know the basics of metaprogramming (means standard template functions and classes). I am pretty dogmatic about RAII and similar but try to keep things simple. Even dropped most of the abstractions over time - sometimes 3 else ifs that then never change again are probably better than polymorphism, command pattern, lambda etc. stuff - at least you know what will be called there just by looking at the code.

Similarly I feel my Python code is getting simpler and simpler over time.

I'd probably even gravitate towards Go at some point nur there I do muss a few things.

I usually find the pay off is just better when I rather learn more about deep learning, statistics, domain knowledge, security, visualization or stuff like AWS, Kubernetes, Unity etc.

The language ends up to be a very small piece and usually more important to have the ecosystem and community available. Like Julia also does not solve the 2 language problem for me but leads to a 3 language problem.

Recently seen some statistics (if I could just find them) where clojure was one of those languages with more people wanting to work with it than jobs. Compared to something like Go where it was the other way round

Sadly true. How often do I see this bay area etc. "whining" that some house means a couple years of saving up cash.

Here most people I know first save up for 10 years and then pay back 1300-2000k€ a month for 30 years for their house. And that's with lots of construction work done by themselves.

Most devs I know make less than 3.5k€ a month before taxes, end up with about 2.5k€.

I work for a US startup and while they all got big houses in Boston, we struggle to find anything below 600k€ here in some small Mountain town ;) , and that's usually not more than 1000 square feet.

I do earn more than twice what I did before. Working only part time and fully remote. Devs usually earn less than the business people. We got lots of free education in that regards so you can easily get a cheap 19 year old coder with 5 years from a technical school.

But if you're not out for money you can have your relaxed 38.5h/week job with 5 weeks paid vacation, obviously unlimited sick pay, up to 3 years paid maternity/paternity leave and lots and lots of protection (for example my wife is protected from being dismissed from her job until our kid is 8 years old).

Teaching second semester CS students atm I unfortunately see that many students just can't handle it remotely. Although I admit that I'm skeptical if students unable to do some work independently are... a good fit.

I live in a European country where things are different of course. With university being basically free, this piece is a non-issue. Also people trust public institutions much more - for a reason. The university where I studied had no problem kicking out 70% of the students. I teach at a private institution and every year I have to dumb down things because they pay and controlling and management and blah. We're now sooo far away from the material taught at the comparable university course. And with this remote semester even much worse.

Furthermore, traditionally out university studies were already organized in a very "free" way - no specifically enforced order or lots of mandatory presence. Do your exams and in the end show all your certificates. Most lab courses were a meeting once and then everyone working on their own at home anyway. It was mostly the first 2 years with the math whiteboard sessions with mandatory presence. The rest I did mostly from home anyway and skipped most lectures.

Lastly, many companies are still reluctant to hire graduates with "only a bachelor" as it's still often seen as a dropout degree (we made the switch from out classic 5 years diploma studies just a decade ago or so). So go figure what the opinion on some MOOC certificate.

So to to sum up I don't see much chance here because: - many can:t handle it - university cheaper than udacity nanodegrees - good job compatibility anyway (at least for studies like CS anyway but if not you can't do a MOOC either) - no trust by companies in private edu providers

Well, in Austria you can get up to three years paid leave and freely choose between parents, so not sure if the article is correct. Question is how much the payment is, we get less the longer we take it. Alternatively you can also take a year (also with +2 months if both parents use it) and get 80% of your previous salary.

Time for another round of Subnautica

Most I know take off 2 weeks. Many companies even Full close down for a week or two.

I'm in Europe so YMMV but still I'm currently working for a US startup and will be gone for good starting now

I work 25 hours a week remotely as freelancer (although I'm available in slack more or less all the time) and earn nearly twice as much as during my PhD. Only that in more than 3 years I never really got into demotivated/frustrated phases. During my PhD I often felt depressed when sitting in the office all day, never getting a bit of daylight... And paying 300€ a month to have someone walk my dog.

I have lots of time for learning new stuff and also teach a course twice a year at a local college for some extra cash.

Started when my daughter was born and never stopped ;). Couldn't be happier and I really hope I can somehow keep it that way.

Read that article couple years ago, but still I just have to look at the quality of all the electric devices around me... It's not all bridges and hospitals. Heck, even my electric toothbrush from Philipps can't make it through a full year without failing (planned obdolesence or not).

Security aspects are typically even worse in non-software development fields. Just look how awfully unprotected things like babyphones, elevators, cars etc. always were and are.

Only that hardware hacking is usually riskier and less convenient (and often not very rewarding).

But yeah, of course... The threshold to get started with software is lower.

Yeah in Vienna, Austria we also got a little hill (and also those holes for ages)

Right ;)

From Gavin Belson we know that you can never ever trust your blood boy.

Personally I liked Andrew Ng’s course much more. While fast.ai seems to have some practical gems hidden, it's just so much noise surrounding it.

So much time wasted just by stating over and over again why their top down approach is so great. And even more with how to install this and that, dealing with the command line, setting up stuff, using AWS etc. Things the "coders" the course is targeted at should be able to do anyway.

I always found myself jumping around the videos to find the useful parts (with the help of the time markers in the wiki) but then dropped it every time and did Andrew Ng’s course in combination with "the" deep learning book instead. They just have much less noise.

Yeah especially compared to interrupting the editor, grepping code, parsing results getting back in, opening file and line number.. Find in files/project in Visual Studio makes that so much faster, also you can easily jump through all results without ctrl z and fg thousand times.

Versus a single hotkey press. Where is the context switch? :)

I use the first workflow myself pretty often, only with vim, because I work a lot per SSH. And it is just massively slower.

2 is a really good point. It's the right wing parties here who talk most about direct democracy bla bla (but in reality only for stuff they would like to have). And present themselves as the people for the masses. Not that different to Trump I guess...

I'm more leftish but also feel that democracy isn't perfect. Mostly because of the "majorities voting for issues regarding minorities" thing. But authoritarian is even worse.

Only that basically every right winger I've left didn't call himself right but center. Might be a European thing because they'll quickly call you Nazi otherwise, but still... "I'm not a racist, but...".

The other point is that they really do love their hierarchies, but probably don't think they do. Just looking at all the Burschenschaften (fraternities) I've seen with their strong sense for hierarchy and leadership. Yet only few of them acknowledge it and feel it's that way. It's only from the outside that you can see it really. Person cult is certainly strongest with the extremer parties. Looking at people in Austria dressing their babies in Strache or Hofer shirts and filling their Facebook profiles with photos together with them etc. You never see that with the traditionally centrist parties. They don't have those strong figures but seem more like a homogenous mass of people where you're hard pressed to name one of them. But I have to admit that it's probably one of the reasons why they're losing so much nowadays where people are seeking for those personalities again and love to hype Jobs, Musk or whoever else comes along..

Most gamers will object to the last paragraph. There are really a lot of strong friendships without ever meeting in person. Back then eben without ever hearing each other's voice. I've been working for a startup at the other end of the world for 2 years now and rejected lots of much better (remote) offers because I like the team... Which I've never met in person.

But I grew up in that ICQ/IRC/Forums culture and as a teenie stayed home alone for weeks while my parents were on vacation, didn't bother me. So certainly a personality thing. Now with wife and kids, my remote working times are the only lone times I have,so I love it.

Well, I usually don't care for some time. But if you play a lot and you see this crap every evening for hours... it just starts to dampen the mood. For me at least. I can not ignore the chat, from time to time there's useful stuff in there.

Actually when I was a teen it didn't bother me at all. I so played counterstrike when it was a HL mod, Ultima Online when killing, cleanlooting, horsekilling, resskilling, notokilling, blocking and cleanlooting, house raids etc were still the norm. Didn't bother me.

Actually the older I get the more I don't have the nerves anymore for all this crap.

Agree. I think Guild Wars 2 is a good example (in stark contrast to GW1). There are a lot of people but you don't really have to bother dealing with them. But the game itself embraces anonymous "the more the merrier". You don't have to group up or talk to others. But the more people are around, the more enemies, the more loot, experience etc. Everyone can res and you get experience for ressing. I haven't seen any other game where you die and a dozen people rush in to ress you.

That being said, as a teen I loved Ultima Online exactly because you could steal from players, block them, kill them, loot everything, kill their horse, steal the house key and loot the house, steal their boat etc.

The thrill was amazing because it didn't happen all the time. Might be you are on a guild trip and a group of other pass by and kill you all. But often it did not happen, or you needed a couple PvP savvy people with you as escort.

When they later split the world into a PvP and PvE mirror, the thrill was gone. The PvE world was boring and the PvP world was only full of people attacking you anyway (actually it was awfully empty but the couple of guys you met wanted to strangle you)

While I agree about voice (and that even though I've been working on TTS for 6 years now ;)), I don't think screens and keyboards should be the ultimate goal, but rather something like brain-computer interfaces.

Nice, but similar to Scandinavian countries is exaggerated. I'm from Austria and we have up to 3 years of state paid m/paternity leave, contracts must not be terminated before and after that, employers must not pay you less after your leave or give you a lower job. Mothers typically can leave the job a few months before birth being paid 80% of their salary ("Mutterschutz"/"mother protection"). At least 5 weeks of paid vacation + holidays + unlimited sick days.

Guns for school officials? Wtf.

Right, my move-to countries are similar but our neighbors don't come first for me. More like Scotland/UK, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Germany, US. But perhaps Germany is too similar to Austria so I don't really see any real advantages in moving there, except slightly better job prospects, depending on the region.

Well, apart from the US in most western countries you have a strong social safety net so you don't have to marry because of financial worries.

Actually it's sometimes shocking when you see some being better off unemployed while working people can't find an affordable place. But that's another story...

Well it was up to 700 for me. At least in the first years. Also felt the questions were annoying there. Especially because it was so basic stuff you can find everywhere in the internet. In the specialized courses in the master there were often only 2-20 people and this was completely different, with topics that are state of the art in research and material you can't find online so easily.

Ok nevermind, seems there is the max 4 and max 5 system.

Well, apparently being good at college is not a requirement for becoming professor... But I don't get that US GPA system. If B is the second best grade from 5 available grades, and GPA goes from 1 to 5 with 5 best, shouldn't this translate to 4/5 then?

We here usually just average the grades from the courses. But on the other hand, nobody cares about that score and it's not written anywhere officially. Because teachers are different and schools are different, a C with one Prof could still be better than an A with another one.