devuo

US companies are free to not operate in Europe.

There's nothing special about US software engineering vs. software engineering made elsewhere from a purely technical and know-how point of view.

The key difference is availability of capital and appetite for risk that make US exceptional by enabling a speed of scaling and execution not possible anywhere else (well, other than China).

If US companies that can't be bothered to follow EU laws leave the +500M people market that is the EU, I'm positive some other equally competent alternative (local or otherwise) would appear sooner or later to fill in the gap.

It's interesting how simplicity so often gets mistaken for a lack of sophistication. Designing a language for clarity and maintainability is a laudable goal, and so is choosing to use one. Chasing complexity, or reaching for the latest trendy language that lets you "express yourself" in ten different ways to do the same thing, isn't what makes someone an S-tier engineer. Simplicity isn't a concession. It's a hard discipline.

I think it's more a case of intellectual dishonesty.

Comparing VAT to an Import Tax is unbelievably stupid.

> building alternatives takes time and resources. the EU has neither.

Oh no. What would we poor Europeans do without a US company to lead us. /s

Of course local and regional players would appear, as they always have and are already in place in multiple segments.

Bolt, Glovo, Delivery Hero and many others are successful competitors to different Uber offerings in the different European markets they operate.

The biggest gap in Europe is not due to a lack of technical ability but rather of European wide capital that's not super risk averse.

First, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento is not the Portuguese Prime Minister, but the Minister of Finance.

Second, the tax breaks were removed at the end of last year because of a widespread feeling in the general populace that these were deeply unfair policies that were understood at the root cause of gentrification and unreasonable real estate valuations. The median house price in Lisbon and Porto metro areas, are now above what the p95 Portuguese salary can pay. So yes, speculation and wealthy foreigners are an issue, as it's not Portuguese salaries propping these values.

Third, the party in power does not have a majority in parliament. This means they'll need support from other parties to approve this deeply divise tax break. While I'm sure they'll get the support from the Liberal party, I'm seriously doubtful they'll get it from the other parties. It's also quite likely that we'll have new elections in the next 12 months and the party in power, despite many populistic policies in the last 4 months since they won by a few thousand votes the election, has not yet been able to gain a wider trust from the voters since then. I doubt this tax break will see the light of day anytime soon.

Fourth and finally, there has been zero talks about this in Portuguese media. I feel this is more of a politician talking out of his ass without double/triple checking with the prime minister.

I have not noticed issues with YouTube, but it's been clear to me how gimped Firefox is compared with Chrome on Google Meet. Some missing minor features, sluggish performance and lower streaming quality to name a few.

Mac is required for designing, which in pratice most designers are using in the vast majority of organizations, so it's not really an issue.

For feedback and handoff the web tool is free and works in any OS that has a browser.

https://www.sketch.com/handoff/

In practice the vast majority of designers are using Mac, so it's not like it not being cross platform was the problem.

The thing that made Sketch lose against Figma was that they never really tackled the issue of collaboration until Figma came along, leaving it for 3rd parties like Invision and others to solve.

Now they have most of the collaboration features they were missing, but by then it was too late and Figma had all the mindshare.

But if Figma keeps following this route, who knows. We might see Sketch grow in mindshare again.

No need to wait 2 years. Sketch already provides a free web accessible developer handoff tool.

Based on that, you might like "First Formic War" trilogy that are a prequel to Ender's Game.

I opened YouTube music app, for which I pay premium and tried to find the podcasts I listen to. I wasn't able to find any filter for podcasts and neither did search yield the podcasts I listen to via Google Podcasts. FFS Google.

If people don't join because of that, then I'd say that's a filter and I'm ok with that. In the Lisbon office of the company I work, on call was not a contributing factor for the people who have left. The vast majority was because they wanted to work in a different country, and not a problem with the company per se.

team effort is a thing, and we want everyone to pull their own weight. In my team we work at most 40h week and on call alerts are rare events, we work to keep it that way and we need solid team spirit to do that.

There are other companies to work at, and we make our expectations clear before the person is hired in relation to on call.

Beeping is a rare event in my team, might happen 1-3 times in a week, or there are weeks it doesn't beep at all, and we work to keep it that way.

evidently the pay must be adjusted to how painful the on call experience is.

as I said it is optional, no harm comes to you for not participating, and we have people with very good reasons for not helping the team support the code they themselves built and deployed themselves to production.

who said there is a social penalty? There are a number of reasons which I explained in a reply below.

1:1s, meetings, general team feeling, retrospectives, amount of whining zero to none.

it is optional, e.g if you have extra work activities that impede you, family reasons etc. and in these cases it's A-OK! Where it's not so OK it's when there's no reason other than not wanting to do just because you just don't want to be bothered.

This is a problem, because during the interviews the person was repeatedly told we did on call and he/she's ok with it.

For us, as a team, it's important because if you have the right to deploy to live whenever you want (after code review evidently), you have the obligation to keep it. When everyone shares the load, the load is lighter for everyone. And my experience tells me it just makes everyone much much more responsible and professional.

At my company, specifically in my team we do on call, and:

1 - it's one week length

2 - it's paid extra

3 - it's optional, but you're a bit of a bad mate if you don't participate

4 - we try to have at least 6 people on rotation to ensure a full month between on call

Because we do several changes to production per day, our coverage is around > 99% for all our services and libraries (my team is responsible for about 30 of them). We have near zero live incidents, and whenever it does happen the phone rings, it ends up being just some unpredictable spike in load that self heals without intervention.

Because on call is not painful (as it shouldn't be!) and we support each other no one has any problem being on call.

True in regards to Skype, although that was an acquisition that was done under Balmer's and not Satya Nadella. In regards to LinkedIn I don't see what exactly you think has went/is wrong with LinkedIn from a product perspective since it has been acquired. There's no assurance had it not been acquired that it would have the features your advisees are claiming it should have. It is still the undisputed leader in its market.

And TypeScript <3!

Well... the thing is those guys really only approach foreigners. I am sorry for your experience, but as a nearly 30y old Portuguese who lives and works in Lisbon, I had that only happen to me once, and it was while speaking in English with a visiting friend.

That makes no sense. We're not talking about a commodity that's for sale and thus, loses its market value as the market becomes saturated by Chinese knock-offs and look-a-likes. It's more than just a show for the mindless consumption of viewers on social media. Primitive Technology videos came from his own personal interest and love for the art of craftsmanship itself, thus, his videos have not lost any of their value, as his motives and drive were never commercial to begin with.

It's your option to eat fast-food, but in no way does that devaluate high end cuisine.

edit: typo

I think you're a bit too pretentious. Your problem is not such much the field in itself but of how others look at you and your idea of class.

Hispania != Spain. In any case, the westernmost region on the Iberian peninsula was and still is occupied by a country then known and still known as Portugal.

Surely you mean western shores of Portugal, or the Iberian Peninsula? Portugal was founded in 1139, Spain as a single entity, and not a collection of Kingdoms was founded in 1469, 200 and so years after Genghis Khan (1162-1227).

I have no idea in VSCode, but with JetBrains Gogland, debugging tests is stupidly easy. Simply add the breakpoint where you want it, left click on the play button in the line of the test declaration, click debug in the contextual menu, and off you go.

Beautifully written.

Which part of it is bad, thinking about cohabitation, or cohabitation itself?