playing_colours

As a Staff and higher engineer you may be paid on the level of EM or Director. So switching the career track as an engineer beyond senior in most cases will not lead to salary increase.

Second argument is the assumption that switching to management opens the doors to much higher salary ceiling. In theory, yes, but realistically there is a strong competition for high level positions, few of us reach those places, and there is a big chance that one will simply stuck at a Director level position till retirement. Think if you enjoy management so much that you are ready to replace ability and joy of building things with more meetings, budget discussions, and politics.

Particularly in Europe with our taxes the benefits of slightly higher income may not have a sensible impact on your life.

Can you share any example of non-fiction literature with beauty and humanity? Thanks!

Have you tried autoimmune protocol diet? Anecdotally, but it may help.

I was lucky to have a few friends sharing my passion for metal. Anyway there were quite a lot of magazines about metal music. They really helped me to discover new styles, bands, and releases.

Oh how I enjoyed reading the reviews of the new albums back then! Some journalist were very talented in describing the music in tasty details and I was longing for the moment, when I buy and listen to the long awaited CD.

If you have motivation and time, find a niche, a project you are interested to dig into. Spend a month on learning about it, write some code. Then contact OSS contributors working in that area, show interest to learn and contribute. It may work. Good lick!

Did you roll out your own implementation of Outbox pattern? It is an important pattern to address potential data inconsistencies, but I did not see yet a good scalable implementation of it.

Apart from the patterns that are obviously good or bad by definition, most of the patterns and architecture decisions have their pros and cons, and the focus is on understanding, discussing those tradeoffs, and going with tradeoffs that a team / company prefers to deal with. Monolith vs. microservices, synchronous vs. asynchronous communications, small events vs. fat events - the list can go on, there are no silver bullets or clearly right choices.

What sources for learning do you use?

It is true for Copenhagen, but I wonder how it feels to families living in rural areas.

I think it is a matter of culture. I personally would prefer a straightforward approach, and I think many of my German colleagues, but I think my British colleagues would prefer that indirect way of communications.

In Germany we have probation period of 6 months that helps both sides to decide if they want to continue employment.

Can you please explain the causation between easiness of firing / hiring and high salaries?

My grandpa worked as an engineer at one of the freezer-warehouses where they also produced ice-cream. It was end of 80s - mid 90s in USSR. He brought a lot of it home, and my fridge was always filled with 1-3 sorts of it. Sweet childhood time :)

How do you find them?

Very interesting to learn a bit about Berlin’s culture scene. Do you write in German or English?

German language. I live in Germany for quite a while, but only recently decided to invest in the language properly. Now I am about B2. My goal is at least to get to the level where I can properly work in a managerial position at a German-speaking company.

I have classes with a tutor 2 times a week. I think German is a bit harder for me to learn comparing to English, the main issue is active vocabulary. I regularly check different approaches how to learn the language faster. So far, Anki and reading the literature I both like and can comprehend at my level are the best techniques.

There is a good short story “Progeny” by Philip Dick about AI raising human children ;)

They probably mixed target and launch coordinates when they programmed the missiles.

> Do you think it's practically possible to learn everything without any structure, discipline?

You can learn something superficial without any structure and discipline, but structure and discipline are essential for progress in any learning: be it programming, foreign languages, etc.

There is nothing arcane about acquiring new skills. Plan at least a few steps ahead, set some medium term achievable goals. You need to have both theoretical (CS, frameworks) and practical (build something) parts in your studies.

University can give you some start, but if you want to be successful at work you need to learn how to learn, and it is a life-long activity.

A few months ago I had a pleasant technical interview with Snowflake.

First, the interviewer was very supportive and cooperative, it felt almost like a friendly talk between two colleagues. He did not try to outsmart me or catch on some tricky detail.

Also, the questions were very good - we discussed how to build a distributed data processing system, a very relevant and on the right level for the position I applied (Engineering Manager).

I read the advice you quoted in Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb.

“Deutschland” historically meant “the territory where German-speaking people live”, not a country. The name comes from early Middle Ages when the concept of a national country was not established yet. The idea of Deutschland as a country exists only from 19 century.

Germany is a "Bundesstaat" (or "Staat"). The name for its constituents is "Bundesland" (or "Land"). I do not think it is a correct example.

Can you please elaborate on “render, don’t template”?

I live nearby, and my son absolutely loves riding their trains on weekends. They have two types of railways: regular children’s railways, and something I would call micro-trains that operate within smaller boundaries.

The whole facility seems to come from GDR times, and there are mountains of old rusty train parts around their depots.

Spring planning, backlog grooming, etc. are not the examples I would use if I wanted to support the opinion that leetcode is not a real programming. (I definitely agree that some knowledge of algorithms and data structures can be very beneficial.)

My examples would be activities like building complex systems, maintaining and extending them, making them modular and flexible enough, doing performance analysis, identifying risks, and addressing technical depts, considering and implementing different architecture patterns, creating efficient CI/CD pipelines, automating routine.

Can anyone recommend a good source (book, articles) to learn Java Bytecode?

Lockhart “Measurement” https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674284388 Mathematics is about curiosity, exploration and imagination, asking questions, and looking for answers.

Your post is very inspirational. Maybe, you could recommend something to read on deep expertise that is useful and motivational?

Another attractive option: “doing it” but for +xx percent to compensation.

I believe a lot of interesting and original content is created these days: books, music, games. The problem is it is difficult to find them. They are not in the top of Google search or reddit. “Best original fiction 2022” query will not work.

Can anyone share some recommendations how you find original indie books, games, music?