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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

> Every place is the same

this is false.

look into smaller businesses who only need 1-5 coders. you will get paid well, do interesting stuff and have a lot of say in your stack and tools. usually these companies do not produce software as their deliverable but need good internal software.

e.g. i work for < 50M/yr e-commerce company that manufactures in the DIY/home remodeling industry. i report directly to the CEO, code our full stack and admin our VPS linode server. we have internal voip systems that get integrated, physical production hardware (scales, scanners, etc), inventory tracking, fulfillment, amazon integration and a whole lot more. i get to touch it all.

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Where I live(Germany), the business who only need 2 developers already have them. All the job ads are only from big/medium companies and it's not worth working for the medium sized ones as you have all the downside of the big corps with none of the perks.

> business who only need 2 developers already have them

it takes time, but you have to search continuously. people leave and get replaced all the time.

Well job ads are already the wrong approach. Go meet your local business in meetups, social gatherings, etc.

This is a medium sized EU city, not SV. There are no tech meetups here. Those may be a thing in big metro areas.

Start a tech meetup? That’s hard, but it’s also incredibly good for your visibility.

Even a medium size EU city should have a critical mass of developers by now.

Of course, it would be nicer if we just had decent employers in the first place.

agreed. I was visiting Bucharest last November and was surprised that there were multiple tech meetups on meetup.com. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but ... I was just... pleasantly surprised. I wasn't there for work, but found a couple evenings where I ended up having the night to myself and stumbled on the idea of checking my meetup app and... bam - multiple places to go meet up with tech folks. More than I had time for actually...

Bucharest is capital, not 'just' an EU city, but it's by no means the largest nor would I think it has the most tech folks compared to other areas. (maybe that's wrong assumption though?)

Healthy ecosystem exists even in rather small cities. Up here in Vilnius, Lithuania, small-sized backwater EU city, we've quite a few meetups with a decent amount of networking opportunities. Sure it's not as SV scale. But even < 1million metro area can sustain that.

I agree, actually. It's so hard to find a good job that doesn't pay like crap in Germany (I used to live in Cologne and Berlin). Try contracting with UK companies if you can find a remote gig, my QoL went significantly up after I stopped working with German companies.

define "pay like crap". My experience in Berlin is different, depending on your experience 60-90K EUR is possible. Combined with the relatively low cost of living in Berlin, you can live comfortably. I don't see London paying significantly more, while being a lot more expensive.

That's exactly what I meant by that. I've been in a few companies and I don't think the compensation structure for SWEs is fair for most of the German market. I do agree that Berlin is still fairly cheap.

> Where I live(Germany), the business who only need 2 developers already have them.

No new businesses get created in Germany and no people retire? Sounds like a bleak place.

Do you realize that you have taken on a defeatist conviction? People give you tips and you tell them it's impossible.

The facts however, are that these tips work for the people giving them.

What’s paid well in your case? And how do you handle going to vacation? Who takes over your responsibility.

without getting too specific, 100k-250k. a bit less than i'd expect to make at FAANG but i live in a chicago suburb where the buying power more than offsets the difference. my drive to work is a traffic-free 10min, as is my wife's.

there's another dev that can handle any emergencies or critical bug fixes while i'm out. still i have to be available by phone in case there are questions, but even then it rarely requires more than a lazy login/check at the end of the day.

These kind of salaries, except fintech in London, don't exist in Europe for developers.

i'm not saying that's what he'll get, just that it will be much better than if he's 1/100 devs in a single company.

or at the opposite extreme the FAANG companies have a ton of opportunities for this

I live in Europe, there not much FANG here apart from maybe Lindon or Berlin but anyway, at this point of my life, the relationships I have with the people around me are more valuable than chasing some FAANG job or hip startup in some other country, hoping that would give me more satisfaction.

At the end of the day it's just a salary I need to support my other hobbies. After 7 years in the trenches I lost hope in the do what you love coding for fun mantra as I never found it and i feel that chasing it any longer will waste precious years of our limited time on this Earth I could use enjoying other things life has to offer or new experiences.

> not much FANG here apart from maybe Lindon or Berlin

Zürich and Munich as well.

plus a ton of corporate bullshit & politics. i can count on 0 hands thr number of times someone at a large corp felt they were special and uniquely valuable to the company as a whole. invariably they're just replaceable cogs that have a very narrow set of responsibilities. of course they don't always see it that way ;) stockholm syndrome, perhaps.

Every coder likes to think they're the next Jeff Dean but there's only one Jeff Dean and his job is taken.

The truth is most of us are replaceable cogs regardless of our titles and salaries if we're willing to look past our egos.

if that's the only position you're willing to settle for, then i'm afraid your concerns are well-founded D:

It seems he really did lose hope. Perhaps stuck in a lousy job for too long. Over the course of my life, I've changed jobs whenever I felt I needed a change. I've done databases, Java, embedded, mobile, etc. It kept me happy.

You don’t need hope if you are pragmatic. Know your own weaknesses, and have a system for failing. It seems like that guy is maybe going through something in a shitty career, but it becomes a vicious cycle. You end up traumatized and gravitate toward similar abusive workplaces. Have seen that happen to many friends in this industry. Everyone has an upper limit of the political bs they can take at their workplace. That’s why I personally refuse to work at a place with too many h1b. IME management tend to be literal slavedrivers and suck all the fun out of SWE in those places.

My system for failing is currently pretty one-dimensional; i.e. fall back on considerable savings. Good advice about spotting slavedriver management.

Everyone is replaceable. Feeling valued is a separate cultural issue, but no company should have a major dependence on a single individual for survival.

Mitigating risk and ensuring continuity is a core tenant of good business.

it's true that very few people are truly irreplaceable and it's a good hedge for knowledge to be well distributed. at the same time, small companies rarely have the luxury of employing (and keeping busy) multiple senior architects. unless you're at a very large company, there's always going to be a bus factor somewhere - it's just the reality for 90% of small businesses. either that or you have lock-in to outside consulting companies and services and no one with deep technical insight - just someone who's a consultant coordinator.

i'm not saying it's good to be that bus factor (you're on-call basically 24/7), but it also has undeniable perks for the employee (not the employer).

in reality my bus factor is not that high. the nice thing about well-designed systems is that they seldomly need attention, and there's another dev here who's more than capable of bug fixing and maintaining what's already in place.

There are two types of bus factors though. It’s true that at a small company, you can’t share all your responsibilities with someone else, but you can make sure that if they need to you can be replaced by someone else (ie. if you get hit by a bus) by doing things like documenting your work. Alternatively, if you want to make sure your job is secure, don’t do that, but make sure you’re doing it knowingly.

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