sweaty

> The "best" engineer in the world would probably tell you that "the only thing that they know is that they know nothing"

This just tells me that the engineer in question is very good, but also has imposter syndrome.

But that is the answer, in that there is no answer :) And agreed, it is always a mismatch. But I do think that with what I said, that'd be the foundation to create a 10x engineer. That's how I became one, because I was matched with people of that skill level and got to work directly together with them for years. And if I'm 10x by my company's standards, go figure how good those guys were ;)

I've been called a 10xer before, and I'm the only one in my company currently at that level. We're a data company first and software second.

Trainings don't work. What does work is pair programming but you have to do this effectively. Say you have 3 buckets, frontend, backend and infrastructure. Ideally, you want to pair someone who has very full infrastructure and backend buckets, with someone who has an overflowing frontend bucket. Mix and match. There's no value in pairing two more backend oriented engineers together.

There's also no value in categorizing things in frontend and backend, if you just have a frontend engineer that throws things over the hedge to the backenders garden, you're going to have a shit shoveling contest and this doesn't work. Of course, you should still have people specialized in certain domains, but you should try to share knowledge within your team as much as possible and try to broaden's people experience instead of having people work on their own little islands. Pair someone with a backend background on a big frontend ticket with an experienced frontender and before you know it you'll have two full stack engineers that'll possibly grow to become a "10x" or whatever that means.

Code reviews are critical and it's important to have someone in your team that carries a big stick and isn't afraid to use it. This is a sensitive thing I've noticed, I've worked at companies where I wasn't the only 10x engineer, and the code reviews there were a joy because I was getting very valuable feedback. It wasn't so much that my code was wrong, but more something like `{} as MyInterface` could also be written as `<MyInterface>{}`. There were a lot of style related comments. What I notice in my current team is that people feel like this is unnecessary, but I always felt like it is valuable when another engineer suggests something like "maybe you could abstract this?" because it introduces a bigger picture that I may not have thought of before. It's very loathsome to carry the big stick, but I feel like if I dont, we're going to go back to the old patterns of not writing tests, not thinking about architecture.. Those kinds of things.

This happened to me (and is in part why I'm a tad salty in the comments), I was a H1B and in the process of adjustment of status. While your green card application is pending, you're legally in a grey area if your H1B expires. I had to leave for family circumstances but advanced parole took months to process, I figured it would be okay since it was a serious emergency. Upon returning I was told I couldn't re-enter the US because even though my stay in the US was completely legal, I had technically overstayed the terms of my H1B. The USCIS policy and CBP policy differs around this. There's a specific USCIS policy memo that mentions this actually. So I'm now banned, no leniency, no understanding for the situation.

If you think this is good oh boy do I have news for you. You don't need to "afford" fantastic insurance, healthcare is essential and needs to be free for everyone, which it is here. I have complete freedom of choice across 27 countries, no strings attached, completely free of cost. So do people poorer than me.

>Who's paying it?

Very rich people and large companies, generally.

Yes, but you don't tend to get fired on permanent contracts to begin with and it's much more enticing to find something new especially considering work-life balance is very very good, I work maybe 24 hours at most with my company explicitly putting your personal life before work because a healthy employee is a healthy employer. You also still pay taxes over the 50% income you're receiving and taxes are high, so it pushes you to find something new -eventually-.

It's a good question. Here, if you have a permanent contract, the employer is required to pay into various government insurances, and this is mandatory for all employers. The salaries here are lower because of this, but it's deceiving because the insurances are based on your salary. Your employer also pays anywhere between 2-10% on top of your monthly salary into a pension fund on top of your state pension. So in short, if you make 100k EUR, after taxes that's actually your money. So in my case, after I've made my monthly mortgage payment, set some aside for groceries and some subscriptions, the money I have left can be spent on whatever I want without worry, I practically don't need to save unless I choose to.

You're right in that employers restrict hiring as much as possible, what tends to happen here is you get a 1 year contract with the option to be taken on permanently, and these contracts don't have all of the insurances. Taking a permanent contract here is seen as a serious commitment to the company, so most people who just want more money in their bank account at the end of the month choose not to take permanent contracts and take the risk themselves.

If I saved for these things myself in the US, I would've been netting less than I do here in Europe, despite my US salary being 100k higher. A lot of people live way beyond their means with all these things considered.

I'm surprised by these "generous" packages. Where I work in Europe, they must give me 3 months notice, my full salary is paid for 6 months, after which it's 75% up to 2 years, and if I still don't find anything new by then I get 50% indefinitely.

I've worked in both the US and various EU countries, while the higher salary is certainly enticing, it's also a trap; When shit hits the fan, you better have been saving. In Europe, the money I make is money I get to really use, because the rest is taken care of for me.

It actually turned my life around. I was in school and wasn't feeling challenged, but we had a web design class by a shaggy haired, bearded metalhead in his 50s who did it as a part time job, he started his career with punch cards, had seen just about everything. I was a depressed kid in a poor area and no parents, I didn't really have the attention span for learning to program the classic way so I loved what I learned from Codecademy, it was really engaging.

I got an internship at the guy's old company and dropped out of school shortly after to work there full time, since then I've done so many things, moved to the US to work for Microsoft, built some really cool software, worked at all these places I couldn't even imagine 10 years ago. It's crazy to think that it all started in a small classroom going through Codecademy, I don't think anything else would've captured my interest in the way your website did. Thank you.

We definitely need to build more houses, if you look at Topotijdreis and start from around the 50s-60s, increment by 10 years until now, you'll see that we haven't built anything to house my generation. The homes that were built, are large single family homes, not starter homes. The starter homes that we're meant to move into, are still occupied by the generation that grew old in them (born 30s-40s). Those 60s neighborhoods though are now slowly disappearing and replaced with more large single family homes bought by my parent's generation, with their starter homes being rented out to afford their mortgage. The system is completely broken and most of my parent's generation have been told not to pay off their mortgage, I'm curious what will happen when interest rates rise to 5%+ (or even 10%+ like in the 80s), so many of them will be forced to sell because so many are upside down in interest-only mortgages still.

Fortunately, people of my generation tend to earn better than their parents, so maybe in 10-20 years we'll see a situation it's completely turned around? Parents living with their children?

There's definitely enough houses if we take ageing into account (when people born in the 30s and 40s are starting to die off) but since COVID isn't the grim reaper my generation was silently hoping for, there's nowhere for us to go apart from staying with our parents or renting for insane prices.

I'm 25, and I live in The Netherlands as well. My parents managed to buy a house for 110k with government subsidies back in the 90s, they didn't need a deposit, they didn't even need any money. All they had to do was earn just above minimum wage, and they could include any costs from the buying process into the mortgage. Their house sold for 475k last year, a 90s starter home for low incomes. My grandparents had it even better, their house cost 40k in the 60s, of which 40% was paid for directly by the government through subsidies.

I'm in the top 1.4% of income in the country, yet I cannot buy a house, because I don't have the savings required to overbid by 100k. There's a lot of things causing this overbidding, my parents for example sold their house because they wanted something smaller, but because they now had 475k in the bank, they were able to overbid by 80k on a house listed at 250k which ruins any chances for younger people to buy them. There's no way I can match this, let alone less fortunate people of my generation. I'm currently renting for 1600 a month, my landlord rented the place out to pay for his new house's mortgage. They're unwilling to sell it to me, because they plan to retire here in the next 10 years. The house is worth 300k in the current market, it's a very small starter home, but I literally had no other option because there's absolutely nothing available. And this is in a small town in the east of the country, my commute is over an hour as I work in the west.

There's nothing your generation can do, apart from just owning one home. It's not your fault, it's horrible policy making (such as getting rid of the VROM ministry) among other things.

GDPR isn't a be-all and end-all, Dutch laws already incorporated a lot of aspects of it such as having to notify their customers prior to GDPR becoming effective.

Oh boy, I love taking my big ass F-150 Lariat down to the drive-through ATM, through a Starbucks to grab some coffee for the hour long trip just to get some lunch in Tacoma because my mother in law is driving down to Portland to visit her sister and she figured she'd make a stop there because I live close by, I might even pick up my meds at the pharmacy drive-through on the way back and while I'm there I might as well stroll into the Target right across the 2 mile long parking lot to grab some last minute groceries for dinner!

I did exactly this, as a Dutch person living in the US, not realising how ridiculous this is compared to my home country.

I've lived in the US for a while, this reads very nostalgic. But I never really had a sense of culture shock, I was going through the motions of course, adjusting and getting used to American culture, but the 'shock' was never really there while I was living there. The shock came after I moved back to The Netherlands and realised how strange the US was compared to it.

Is delayed culture shock a thing?

My girlfriend is a neurologist and I'm a software engineer. While both of our professions tend to marry within their communities, we got together because of a shared interest in brains. My day job involves artificial neural networks, so there's a lot of matches there.

One thing that is particularly nice is that I can discuss my work with her and vice versa, so she's actually been really helpful with answering some tough questions, it makes for an interesting dynamic.

Oh, and she earns twice what I do, it's crazy how much money neurologists make.

This is how I feel too. And not just with programming languages, but with cloud platforms like AWS and GCP. I've spent the last 3 years working just with GCP, but I have prior AWS experience and recently started working in an AWS heavy role. I don't remember anything. I know what I want to do, and what the things AWS provide do, but I can't remember how, so I'm asking questions and looking things up online because I don't know and I feel like an idiot.