Disclaimer: I am currently a scrum master/software engineer in a team that has a lot of pressure. I haven't had a 'relaxing' holiday without worries in over 12 months and so I'm considering a change. I want to understand if there exists a well paid, comfortable position in this stress-saturated industry.
Labor is cheap in India and it's easily found specially when we pay more for slightly more safer and comfortable work.
Supporting farmers is a sentimental thing for people in India so we are able to produce very large profits to the tune of several millions yearly in profit.
Previously I was a software engineer for a western company based in India it was very stressful job as you need to be available for Oncall troubleshooting anytime.
Also curious to know how you came to doing this. Did you see it as an opportunity or just went into it through family
Now we are starting an integrated fish farm + jackfruit farm + subsistence farm + livestock (goats only) approach. We have the fish farm because there's a nice irrigation stream that passes right by the side, wholly part of the farm (most farms of a certain land size will have some irrigation arrangement of the sort). The jackfruit is grown to sort of cater to the export demand for jackfruit abroad (especially with the whole "jackfruit as a meat trend"). Jackfruit trees grow thickly, so they provide a nice shade for any agriculture under the canopy at a reduced temperature (for stuff like spinach, tomatoes, pumpkins, etc) but that's mostly subsistence scale unless you go inorganic. Jackfruit leaves are really good as a feed for goats, which are the only animals that eat them and actually love eating them. The goats are sold for mutton to caterers for weddings and other functions.
Government gives electricity on the cheap as long as you show proof of agriculture (you cannot use it for your homes - they connect it separately and check it very often). The only issues have been theft of fish, for which we fit a bunch of security cameras around the place, so we were able to nab a couple of bastards. The main issue has been the semi-manual irrigation system, but I tested a prototype irrigation system using a Raspberry Pi for our small garden here, so I might try something similar for the farm back home.
I would expect GP to be a lot more involved and not less as the post title suggests but I was curious.
It can be very frustrating too, I can’t even keep count of how many times our product launch has been delayed by the business because of some “urgent business requirements they pulled out of a hat. Our latest launch was scheduled for two weeks ago, a day before launch, business just cancelled it because they wanted to make some changes. Mind you that we have strict sign off processes that now all need to be redone. But that stress doesn’t fall on engineers.
> We get 4 weeks of vacation, health insurance, 4 months parental leave, and other benefits
As any permanent full time employee in Australia working for any employer, you'd get a minimum of 2 weeks of public holidays (depends on state), 20 days of annual leave, 10 days of personal leave (carer's & sick leave), and 12 months parental leave. There's health insurance funded through the public system decoupled from employment.
Compared to US this probably seems relatively socialist, compared to europe things are relatively neoliberal.
Excluding retirement fund contribution, equivalent base salary would be around 155k AUD. That'd be subject to roughly 29% total income tax. There are no additional state level income taxes . So you'd end up with around 110k AUD cash. A single person who rents & shares a place can cover all baseline living expenses on a quarter of that.
(I work in operations/devops engineering and not into sofware engineering so my point of view is a bit different, the underlying reasoning is applicable anyway, imho)
I made a point to grill the interviewers during the interview on such topics. HR bullshit like "we care for work-life balance" means nothing, I grill the technical interviewer when it comes to the usual "do you have any question for us?"
How do you manage on-call availability? How many people are on-call and how many at any given moment? Can on-call people escalate things further? To whom? Are developers on-call too? Do do you architect for HA? How? In your current architecture, what could be a single point of failure?
This kind of questions.
Any negative reply is a red flag. If I start seeing more than two-three red flags (or even one on an important question) then I'll pass.
My reasoning when I last changed job was that my job at the time was awful but I had a permanent contract, it would not have made sense to jump into another awful job and win the additional stress and risk derived from the probation time.
Do people on-call have the power to set up or reconfigure monitoring/alerting systems that cause them to get paged?
How did the org react after the last production failure that had serious business impact? (e.g. did postmortem followed up by making process or technical changes to prevent or reduce frequency of issue recurring ; blame: some person at pointy end gets fired but nothing changes ; fear: production change freeze for 3 months, including blocking changes to improve production system reliability... )
Indeed is the best workplace I’ve ever had. The culture is seriously about helping - both each other and jobseekers. PTO is unlimited and strongly encouraged. When the office is open, we have the same free food as Google and Facebook (these used to be worse but improved dramatically a few months before Covid). People take the time to eat with each other, build relationships, make friends.
We discuss ways to ensure those with the least power are heard, and I think we listen to them - I’ve seen changes in the language we use to create inclusivity, and I’ve got two engineers on my team from the Ada bootcamp who I think are happy, and both getting promoted and recognized. I have leeway to trade revenue for, say, changes to our product that reduce unconscious bias in hiring. I also have leeway to target positive outcomes for people looking for work over revenue.
I am sure that like any company the mileage may vary. I make less than I did at Amazon or Apple, but I’m happy; I’d make the trade again in a second. If I think about work on a weekend it’s because I’ve got an exciting idea or solution I should write down, not because I’m anxious about next week.
I’d recommend Indeed to anyone.
I worked in StartUps for 10 years and used to high output everyday. Now everyone seems stressed at this company but we have mostly corporations s clients and I am fairly good at my job.
During December, I probably played more games on Stadia than putting hours into work, but I still got 2-3 shoutouts from clients how pleased they were with my job.
I get nice stock options and it‘s the first time in my life I just want to sit out the next few years, do a decent job and wait for my stocks to be granted. This and Bitcoin will set me mostly free in a couple of years so I can say goodbye to fulltime work.
It‘s almost sad to see the mentality from my US colleagues who consntantly cheer and push themselves over nonsense in Slack, but their quality of life depends so much on their employer.
So yeah, being in Europe and finding a US company to work for, 90% remote is probably the dream, because you merge the upsides from the social system without the downside of boring company culture, and you get the pay from the US without all the downside of overworking yourself.
I am 32 and just realized how stressful Sodtware Engineering is in StartUps. I didn‘t realize how much I learned and did before I took a break. Now I want to do a decent job, be a bit loud or annoying in internal meetings so people think I really care, finish my jon in 3 hours and read or learn something on the side the rest of the 5 hours I have to clock in.
I mostly used it last year to get into Crypto and now DeFi, and made 3-times the money I did with my full time job.
This also broke me mentally, because it‘s hard to engage in „real life“ work after that experience.
These roles are, especially now, mostly remote. So it depends, this company wasn't afraid of big numbers and hired me. I get paid 120k Euro per year and 40k in stocks each year.
I have a family and we don't spend more than 3k each month all together. So 120k boils down to around 6.2k each month, plus my wife earns ok as well (teacher).
I know a few CTOs of smaller gompanies who make 120k without stocks.
So for me, that's a decent pay.
So yeah, look for other roles than SE.
It took some time but now I realize that it is not code lines per hour that they hire me for but for my knowledge and experience. It is my ability to estimate work and deliver project on time. Also in knowledge professions, you are always thinking of the work even if not actively doung it.
Wfh has dispensed away with a huge amount of office based busy work and bs socializing so I’m finding myself productive enough in less than 8 hours as well.
I am really not a morning person, but being able to split a 2 hour commute + 8 hour work day into just casually checking in even at 3 am, when you have an aha moment go code, I honestly feel like the company is extracting more value out of me this way and getting more even though I'm putting in less than half the "butts in seats" hours.
I pop in 10-15 minute blocks completing a quest in Path of Exile during a particularly boring meeting that was called for no reason and was already answered in documentation, while answering questions, I'm sure this would look terrible if I was physically doing this in the open plan office - but the work is getting done, effectively, any problems are being resolved in the same time or faster. My team is also pretty OK with this probably because I'm always happy to deal with on call incidents in the middle of the night so the people with kids don't have to - I'm online anyway...
I'm entirely confident that work is extracting more value from me for the same wage - and thus I don't feel bad about it.
It's also nice to not have multiple-hour commute in a completely packed metal tube with standing room only.
What they paid hasn't changed, but they get more value out of me than before (removing the constant interruptions, people always behind me, loud typing, the only thing for lunch being 8 different kale salad bars for $25 each with lines out the door, hours of commute wasted).
I mentally "stay later" because I don't need to leave early to catch the train right before peak hours that isn't so packed there is no room to board.
I bought in at the low in March, but was playing with it and didn't just let it ride and hodl. Still got a solid amount of the rise.
I plan to take 50% out by December, but honestly can't think of anything more valuable than BTC or ETH at the moment. Maybe India ETF.
It doesn't pay as well as working for FAANG, and I'm not going to get stock options that will make me rich. I live in a medium cost of living area. I make enough so that I can own a house, 2 cars (both paid off), and have a nice retirement account.
For the most part it is pretty low key. If the build breaks close to a deadline, there is some pressure to get it fixed, but that doesn't happen often. Most of the time it is just working on my projects that have realistic deadlines.
Every once in a while I get a little bored, but then I remember those past jobs where everyone's hair is on fire. The thing I like is that I get to work at my own pace, and spend most of the day writing scripts. I enjoy writing scripts more than I do application programming. I consider my scripts to be my minions that I send off to do my bidding.
I often joke that I'm just writing a small script to replace myself with.
Currently I do a lot of data wrangling and analysis, mostly in Python, so still plenty of small programs to automate the boring stuff.
He basically had about 2-3 hours of work a day, mostly early morning, and studied, ended up with a masters degree and a nice resume filler — he had a nice title with a big name during the process.
He really had strong storage chops, they just didn’t use his talents. There are a lot of operations jobs like that in finance and government.
can you do them high available, low latency, cross region redundancy, and restore both ways with near zero data loss?
well, sure, theres this button on the emc console I push and..
I'm not in a phase of my life where that's what I want, so I'm currently at an intense research-focused co, but I half-joke about going back to Google to retire in a few years (esp once I have a family).
I put together teams around projects, mentor juniors, and build cross project teams to fix architectural problems. My favorite part is actually teaching juniors and watching them grow. I live for that!
My advice is to find a niche that you love and stay away from industries that stress you out. There are a ton of different sub industries in SWE.
I would definitely stay clear of startups if you don’t handle stress well: startups and failing companies are the worst and for the same reason – they are both in a financial free fall trying to gain a new lease on life.
My very first day as a software engineer, my boss had me pull down a massive code base, showed me the backlog, and told me to get to work. No training, no mentor. Years later, and I still only have a faint idea what that goddamn program did. Stuff of nightmares.
Software is not supposed to be super stressful — the machines should do the heavy lifting
I’m sure there are a zillion exceptions to this that ppl will point out
Their boss demands unrealistic timelines, actively undermines them, their coworkers are difficult to deal with, etc. I've never met anybody that works as an SWE that is stressed out because they have to fix bugs or manually migrate DBs all the time, its nearly always the environment that is the root cause.
It's not really "exceptions" that will be pointed out. The reality is that someone if going to have to stop automating\simplifying and actually fix the bug or implement the feature. Or in the worst case debug the "brilliant" automation from the really chill guy that left the company last year :)
Can you elaborate? What does this company do? Why did they view themselves as non-tech? What was the impetus behind the decision to become more technical? What are their goals in doing so? What would winning look for them? How do you plan this transition? What have been the problems you faced doing that? What's your experience hiring technical people for this 'non-tech' company; are they excited because everything is to be done or do they eschew it because they'd rather work for a tech's tech company?
My philosophy has been not to fight head-on, to "embrace the Excel" and to build systems around it that provide the outcomes they need. Microsoft Power Automate has been a big part of it, at least at first, getting them used to the idea of automation while staying in their Outlook inboxes. From there I have a basis to build up into proper apps (which is why I have started hiring.)
I was lucky enough to start with a large amount of buy-in from senior management, and after a few months I had the goodwill and appreciation of the foot-soldiers as well, by dint of having made their lives easier. (I set myself a principle to never make any single worker's life harder in the service of the greater good.)
Hiring has been positive, people do like the idea of starting from a clean slate and having the freedom to do it their way. The fact that we set our own deadlines also means we have the time to do it the way we know we should.
edit : added more details
i realistically have about 2-3 years relevant experience, making around 100k. im aware if i study/prepare i could prob get an offer from a FAANG for >150k which i prob will do in a few months tho for the prestige/brand.
my manager has a lot more on his plate, but said in the last three years theres only been one day when hes had to work after 5pm due to a software emergency, so staying at current company is pretty appealing, but id like a pay raise when i hit my year mark so that will effect things.
Oue team of 5 devs is usually working 930-6 on a daily basis though, i usually work 9-5 tho.
I make pixels for movies and TV. It's awesome. Basically tweaking geometry and physics and colour to makes stuff look like the client wants it to look like.
I love the familiarity with the tools in my speciality. Been doing it for 20 years. Graduated from University with a bachelors in it.
There is stress available for the hungry. I've happily weaseled my way into a tiny boutique (30 people) studio with experienced and lovely owners that prioritize the crew (80% senior artists). Basically no OT, 100K$+ year, excellent health coverage (not in the USA), healthy relaxed and skilful coworkers. Dunno what could be better. And no, I have no entrepreneurial drive, happy to work for someone else.
Make $30k a year living in NYC teaching software engineering and data science (mostly python) for a non profit.
It's less than minimum wage if hours are counted, lot of stress dealing with students and their issues (especially during a pandemic) and I'm also on the hook for the curriculum which means my weekends are filled trying to figure out how to write lessons about math that people with no educational background can understand.
I barely sleep and after bills I have zero money. But it beats being unemployed during a pandemic especially since I work remotely. Before this, I spent months sending resumes and got zero interviews.
Try freelance/consulting. Set your own holiday time, set your own hours, target the projects and tech that interest you, and don't agree to do on-call. Not always easy to get started and it's not for everyone but it's like a whole other world salaried people don't know about because it's outside their norm.
No good job is without some stress however I now work 9-5, no weekends, which is great.
I have been at (or have VERY closely worked with folks at) all levels of skill, responsibilities, and salaries. Let's assume you want to stay in scrum/SE role. I am of the opinion that within SWE, you can find your fit as long as soon as you define which two out of three of these qualities you want, and which one you can give up: (1) High salary. (My metric is: get paid at least 50% more than a similar job in another acceptible part of your country.) (2) Super interesting. (It wakes you up in the middle of the night from a dream, because you found the solution you were looking for for a long time. You rather give up sleep than forget the solution.) (3) Stress-free. (Well, every job has its own acceptable levels of stress. Here I'm talking about level of stress that makes you want to consider finding less stressful job. If you are not especially lazy person, and find yourself wanting to switch jobs to reduce stress at least once a month, that's high stress.)
I have have some experience (first hand or second hand) with roles that match the combos: (1)+(2)-(3): Start-up with goals to be bought out by FAANG within a few years, or go IPO in less than a decade of founding.
(1)+(3)-(2): Any team that has self-sustaining profit in a large tech company, or any large non-tech company that wants to seem attract tech talent without changing their non-Silicon Valley type culture.
(2)+(3)-(1): Any startup that is not VC funded, and definitely isn't on IPO track.
There are LOTS of exceptions to above, and there are rare occassions to find all three.. but if you want predictable long-term behavior, I'd say pick two-out-of-three on those, and that'll cast your widest nest. Finally, as soon as you frame your question with which of those two you want and which one you are willing to give up, you'd get a concrete company and role recommendations.
Cheers!
PS: I'm in a (1)+(3)-(2) in a non-FAANG tech company. My (1) is "relative" though, because I'm paid less than the company's average, but I also get to be fully remote in a non-expensive part of the US, so relatively speaking it's more than their average. I work on one of the most mundane parts of MarTech/AdTech (hence the "-(2)" status). I get sufficient autonomy, but I also have to show that I'm bringing the value to the company. It's not stress-free, but definitely manageable. I haven't had to work weekends in a long time.
Imaginary.
Well, actually, software developer, not so high paid, but also not high stress, so it works out anyhow.
This first happened with a huge ($1bn turnover, 500+ people) online travel co i started when I realized that my COO loved solving everyday problems while I loved sitting and thinking and not being stressed out. So he ended up running all ops and then became CEO, and I am a large passive shareholder.
Over the last several years I co-created many other companies – all either venture backed or about to be – from biotech to SaaS to mobile apps to fintech. In all these places there is a team I trust to run them already in place, or being created.
The reason other people want to do this with me is that (a) people like being CEOs and having responsibility (b) i have certain superpowers, especially around identifying opportunities, crafting stories, pulling together talent and capital, coaching people, and – thanks to plenty of MDMA/LSD use – quickly build deep relationships with a lot of trust (c) most people find it quite difficult to take the first step when nothing at all exists, and I find it very easy and exciting because I instantly imagine how things could work (d) I have been a VC-backed founder for a decade and have gone through a lot of stresses of firing people, dealing with complicated situations, motivating teams at times of hardship etc. (e) i am completely unwilling to do things i do not like doing and as soon as these arise i start looking for someone to delegate them to
I love this because I love creating things, building relationships, empowering other people. It feels extremely high-impact, and creates both very significant financial assets and ability to decide my own cash income. More importantly, it constantly builds more relationships and skills and knowledge of how to continue doing this. The flywheel spins up.
The work is quite intense and i rarely take holidays but i can do so whenever i want to, because i am constantly delegating and am rarely in the position when something cannot function without me. i don't take holidays because i don't enjoy them that much. i relax by spending time with interesting people, and that also happens to be a core part of my job since it builds relationships and ideas for the future.
Now. i get that this is not a standard "job" by any measure. however, it is a job i have created for myself because i understand myself well. and i think the answer to loving what you do (thus not being stressed) and getting paid a lot is to build your own job. to refuse to be constrained by existing ways of doing things, and to just not be afraid of doing things differently. there are many people out there doing this across many domains and in very different ways.
at core the reason i am able to do this is a lot of meditation, psychotherapy, psychedelics, coaching, and a lot of close friends i love. you have to deeply understand what you want, not compromise despite difficulties along the way, and build support systems for yourself. stress management is a skill.
good luck figuring this out, this is a very cool and interesting question to consider!
Doing it on a bike though is indeed quite nice.