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Comment by ionwake | Hacker News Reader

What I read is positive it’s awesome.

On a related note I can’t wrap my head around how I had to grift over a decade to get roles which would pay as much ( and include this level of responsibility and respect) in the UK. Even now I would be aghast with surprise if a company asked me to spend time writing a blog during company time, pleasantly surprised if I was asked to code review. And I mean surprised. Even with my level of experience. ( normally there would be a silo coder who has been there a decade who is the only one allowed to review code).

I’m not saying it’s unfair I’m just pointing out how different a programmers life can be if they don’t slot it into a FAANG company and ends up working at small ones in Europe. Any thoughts are welcome.

Loved the article and the vibe I think it’s great to include junior devs, just pointing out the disparity in wealth and working conditions within 1st world countries tech world

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Public tech blogs and stuff like that was usually reserved for more senior members of the team. But reviewing code seems pretty standard in the UK for any decent software company from my experience.

It's never safe to have a single point of failure for code review. If all code goes through one guy then they can get lazy and not thoroughly check the code (I've done it myself when I've had a backlog). Sometimes a developer will just submit buggy code because they're lazy! Two lazy developers causes an issue in production. Code reviews need to be spread around the team fairly evenly.

Some developers may have more experience in certain areas, like a core library or service. In those cases it does make sense to have a final pass by a more specific developer. But initial code review passes can be done by anyone.

Pay and responsibilities in tech in the UK really depends on what part of the tech industry you're in. Start ups don't pay that well. Small businesses don't really pay well. Most medium to large businesses can pay fairly well depending on industry.

Definitely depends on industry. I've just got a 30%+ raise moving from a lead role in a massive company to a non-senior role in a startup (UK).

I'm a western European programmer and my experience has been vastly different to yours. Of the 4 companies I've worked at, in 3 of them code reviews were there from the very start and the whole team engaged on them, reviewing and being reviewed, there was no verticality involved whatsoever.

The first one just didn't do reviews because it was a small startup that kept doing small POC for pitches where code quality wasn't a concern, and that one offered the juniors to set up a youtube channel showing the devices we worked with (it was VR related).

As for pay, the article didn't mention salary I think (?)

This does not match my experience in the UK. I have never been asked to blog, but when I was a junior software developer, I was frequently asked to review code from senior developers (except in one team). I think it depends on the individual team, and things can be very different even within the same company.

For pay, there is indeed a large disparity with US salaries. I have seen graduate developer roles going for as low as £19k. And that is the case in many other industries as well, like healthcare. I think this is just about supply and demand, and how much companies are willing to pay.

It seems that junior developers are considered to be of relatively little value in most UK based jobs. The disparity seems to even out a bit as you gain experience, especially if willing to freelance, but it's not uncommon to see junior positions being treated like minimum wage jobs.

Is there simply more opportunity in the US or is this a matter of how inexperienced people are viewed? Perhaps there is more holdover from traditional professions where experience was paramount.

Healthcare in the U.K. is basically a monopsony. It is also, like many traditional high-paying industries, one which requires a bunch of education and a period of not particularly good conditions before getting good pay (but still having long hours.) Certainly in the U.K. one must suffer as a junior doctor for a while before more lucrative positions become available. While I would like people working in healthcare to be better paid and I’m sure the U.K. system could be made better, it is easy to feel that not having doctors paid like Americans keeps costs down a bit (though maybe that feeling is not bourne out by facts.)

This is definitely a component to keeping overall cost low. One that many Americans don’t want to admit. There’s a lot of people in the US all for lower health care costs, lower drug costs, etc. Most will insist that it’s doable without any sacrifices from highly paid doctors, nurses, scientists, technologists, etc. I don’t think it’s possible without everyone with their hand in the cookie jar taking a cut.

>This does not match my experience in the UK. I have never been asked to blog, but when I was a junior software developer,

and that's good tbh.

we need more people that do hard tech that'll write blogs than jrs

I’m truly sorry you had this experience. I must say it doesn’t match mine at all: code review was a major thing since my first day working as a dev, up to this day as an eng manager. My engineers are highly encouraged to write blog posts, it’s a great way to market the company and help with hiring. All of these companies I worked for have been fairly ordinary startups/corporates in the Netherlands too.

There is no time to write blog posts , every engineer is there to try and complete as many tickets as possible before the end of the sprint. I’m glad it’s different in your place. I’ve worked at tons of different companies and it was always the same. Careful what companies you move to.

As a final note I was not expecting any empathy it’s taken me aback slightly. I’m ok now guys I sorted my life out with another revenue stream thanks for replies.

That sucks, but perhaps worth considering switching it up on the jobs front.

Guess it's something of a function of where you live, but e.g. in London there will be plenty of companies with a better experience.

> On a related note I can’t wrap my head around how I had to grift over a decade to get roles which would pay as much ( and include this level of responsibility and respect) in the UK.

I'm not even in western europe, and I had the same feeling, but looks like with advent of remote it's rapidly changing. Not in FAANGs yet, but I think they'll come around to it, too.

Changing it way way? Worse or better?

For those of us outside of the US who can now compete for the same salaries — certainly for the better. For companies who can now hire from a wider pool of talent, with lower salary expectations — for the better, too. For US software engineers — probably not so much.

Basically, the same story that happened to US blue-collar workers when Kissinger opened China to international trade and put a billion of starving peasants on the path to modern economic prosperity: everybody but those who enjoyed geographic privilege before is bound to win.

I don't think most US software engineers are going to fair any worse than anyone else, honestly. If you have one of these $300-400k TC jobs the HN folks act like grow on trees, you're unlikely to be replaced by someone responding to a RemoteOK job add because they're mostly hiring people local, and people with huge online followings/internet-famous dev types. If you make $115k for a bank and got your last 3 jobs from recruiters and LinkedIn, you're equally unlikely for different reasons.

The middle area filled with $200k/yr consultants will probably hurt a bit, but I'm not sure they haven't been competing with that group already.

Thanks for your reply can you explain this statement please ?

>got your last 3 jobs from recruiters and LinkedIn, you're equally unlikely for different reasons.

I don't see this trend in the US at all. Most folks we're hiring now expect $20-30k more than they did pre-COVID. We've had multiple team members leave to make more money and ended up giving a blanket raise to the development staff to try to make sure we're paying market rates.

This is in the midwest US but we're now recruiting nationally since everyone is remote.

Oh, I'm talking about 10-20 years.

Doing code reviews is mostly a decision of the team.

If you value your team mates and strive to have a maintainable code base, you better let someone else review your code. And for me it doesn't end with looking for typos. I actually want someone else to critically read my code.

Sometimes there is a comment missing, or variables and function names could be improved upon, default values should be different, and documentation could be improved. So many things can be improved when you show what you got to your team mates and they comment with questions and suggestions. I actually love the code suggestion feature in Gitlab.

Some Git hosting tools are set up the way that you need approvement by N other people (N >0) and I'm not sure if this is a good thing. For some very simple changes this might be too much bureaucracy, for larger changes (maybe in multiple repositories or some larger architecture change) you might want to involve more than N developers. So I think it should be a cultural thing that is driven by the team.

> On a related note I can’t wrap my head around how I had to grift over a decade to get roles which would pay as much ( and include this level of responsibility and respect) in the UK. [...] I’m not saying it’s unfair I’m just pointing out how different a programmers life can be if they don’t slot it into a FAANG company and ends up working at small ones in Europe. Any thoughts are welcome.

There's a reason why there are no European FAANGs. And the culture around devs vs non-technical roles at tech companies is a big part of the problem (but most Europeans won't acknowledge it!).

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