You’re right about how it works today but it seems to me this is an odd choice to make. Why not enforce object types?
Could they add a strictness flag that lets objects actually be type safe and enables related functions to work out of the box? For me this stuff is a regular pain point as you end up typecasting at every call site :(
function sortByLabel(a: SortableByLabel, b: SortableByLabel) { ... }
I've written enough, I think you can see how easily this works today and how painful and un-performant it would be to do this if you had to narrow your objects or constantly write extra info into your types to allow them to not enforce narrowing, and then there's a whole can of worms around your "widen"-able object types being illegal to functions that require exact types, ...
Instead you can just write arrays...
interface MyInterface {
key1: Type1;
key2: Type2;
...
}
const myKeys:Array<keyof MyInterface> = [
'key1',
'key2',
...
] as const;
function operatesOnKeys(object: MyInterface) {
// don't use Object.entries...
myKeys.forEach((key) => {
object[key];
// TS is happy, and bonus:
// this will be type checked later if MyInterface changes
});
}
I think TS has some issues but this isn't one of them.
In my experience, this is mostly wrong. You don’t get 500-600k Silicon Valley offers in Europe just for being a solid engineer.
You do get a total comp that is 2-3x local market if you manage to get into FAANG like companies and even the tier below. I think this is what Gergely is describing.
That is still life changing for a lot of engineers, and worth the 3 month grind to get through the interviews. At least it was for me, and this article was a big part of why I made the jump.
2-3x local market is doable even outside of fangs, usually with more flexibility (remote was a nice perk pre-pandemic) and no bullshit interview.
If you pair it with working via your own limited company and get your taxes down to single digits or low double digits you can make as much as salaried people on 300k - and with no equity that can go up or down (sure, and no holidays or sick days if you're the kind of person that does those).
Yet, even when you hit 200+k in EU, you're still left thinking you could be making 600k in SV.
Usage of sick days seems to follow a bimodal pattern. There are people that use them up like vacation days for all kinds of reasons and people who very rarely use them (<1 day a year on avg).
This was true through my entire career and even back in high school. I think usage of sick days is likely to follow a learned behavior from parents/siblings growing up.
It’s more about the definition of “sick”. I’ve seen people take a week off because they had a bit of a throat/head ache. And others that worked from home when they had a flu.
Honestly? I stay home and might check email when I'm bored but don't do any real work, but I don't usually file sick days either because the bureaucracy is a pain (seriously, I'm already sick, I can't deal with that added stress and I'm not going to the doctor just to spread my viruses and be told to go back home and rest). And as long as we're talking about 2 or 3 days, nobody really seems to care.
I've always had managers who care more about what I deliver than when and where my butt is in a chair. Maybe I'm lucky, maybe I'm good enough that it works out that way.
No, I mean, that’s perfectly acceptable. If your boss cares only that you deliver, and doesn’t notice/care that you are gone for a few days due to sickness, that’s still not on you.
Have you considered just informally notifying them that you're out because sick? I mean, not doing that is fine too if you can deliver, but informing them might build more trust.
Here in France people only ever do fixed rate, generally for 20 or 25 year mortgages. I have never heard of someone buying a home with a variable rate loan, not sure if it's even legal.
It might have been a pretty good deal for the people who bought homes with 25 year 0.7-0.9% interest rate mortgages these last few years.
As an Australian, fascinating! I would guess that Tue majority of home loans here are variable.
Another question - with a normal fixed interest loan for 30 years, does that normally include paying off the principal? I.e after the 30 years, the loan is paid off?
Here, fixed interest usually don't pay down the loan whereas a variable loan pays down 100% of the principal after the 30 years
I think in Europe there's a bunch of local markets with a lot of companies that do not want to compete for developers, not within the EU and definitely not with the US. They'd rather push talented developers to leave than raise wages (and maybe it makes sense in their business).
You need to find the pockets in the market which do compete for talent on an international (at least EU-wide) level. That may be foreign tech companies, remote jobs, maybe the very hottest of startups in your country (with stock grants). I like this article (https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...) which goes deeper into this.
A "trick" which works in my market (in France) is to work as a contractor instead of a full-time employee. When I did this move I basically doubled my income overnight while keeping the same job title. A lot of companies will balk at an engineer asking for 70k€ as an FTE, yet have no qualms paying the same person 7-800€/day for 2 years as a contractor.
- Social security: covered by the state through social taxes (URSSAF) like employees
- Benefits: you're the boss, you can be wild :)
- Renting / getting a mortgage: bankers are more and more inclined to examine your situation, especially if you can provide a good track record of recurrent / constant revenue stream
In any case, I agree completely with the original comment: going solo in France is one way to break the "glass ceiling" in terms of net revenue and career path is you feel entrepreneur.
So you can just contract for international companies out of France, pay your taxes as normal, and you still get unemployment if you get fired unexpectedly?
If you are a solo contractor / business owner, indeed you cannot pretend for unemployment compensation ("chômage"). But if you care about accounting, after some time you can live off several months / years without any revenue.
One last thing: at least in France (don't other countries) you are obligated to contract for multiple clients (at least 2) per fiscal year to avoid fraudulent employment and the risk of losing a client the next day. And in this day and age, landing a new client in the IT/Software/Data/AI/whatever industry is relatively easy!
Unemployment is the one benefit you can't get as a contractor (in France, I don't know about OP's country), but it doesn't work that great for higher income professionals anyway.
When it comes to health insurance or retirement you're generally covered though.
> ability to rent/get a mortgage by not being full time/CDI
You can plan ahead and take a FTE position when you need to rent/loan for real estate. If you do a lot of these investments then I agree it is a disadvantage, but for most people that's easy to sort out.
I work on a team where we build around and run Open edX. It's incredibly complicated to run because it's not built as an open source product. It's just that edX open sources their software after the fact, so they're not investing in making it easy for anyone to run, of to contribute features.
On the team I'm a part of, our strategy is to build open source tools around Open edX, using it as a site builder that stitches together all our external services (video hosting, live conferencing, course content, quizzes, web-facing portal, forum, etc.). That is, until we cover enough scope that we can start to replace it with a flexible and lightweight LMS that would basically just do the aggregation.
IMO it's not necessarily a good fit for the LMS category to try and build a gigantic software codebase that handles everything the way every single learning institution wants it. You end up with a glorified site builder with a bunch of specialized features tacked on.
I'm not an ops guy, but I know it was a constant source of trouble in our team and a large challenge to keep it running smoothly. For us it took 2-3 experienced engineers something like 2 years to have a stable and smoothly running production environment at scale.
If you start from scratch today things may have gotten better. You might want to look at https://github.com/overhangio/tutor, I know Régis has been hard at work making it easier to run Open edX.
It's not five years to citizenship. After five years you get to apply. Then it takes about 4 years of administrative hell (with some traps that can get you back to square one) to get there.
No one who is at all familiar with the French immigration system would tell you that it's "lax". It's generally a nightmare to navigate and it feels like it's designed to deter all but the most determined immigrants.
Source: personal experience with friends and my so.
Anecdata, but a Cuban friend of ours has a French wife. Able to apply after 5 years and more or less got his French passport immediately after handing in the necessary documents and passing interviews and language tests. All in the same year he applied. Maybe it's different because of marriage, no idea.
When you are not in France, the hardest part is to find someone to administer the necessary language test. Last time I checked there were two institutes in Germany with the proper certification, one in Frankfurt and one in Berlin. Then Covid hit I didn't check again.
Paperwork seems to be a pain in the ass, so. That being said, it seems easier than getting German citizenship.
Being married to a French citizen makes things much, much easier. You still have to apply to filter out obviously problematic cases (and convenience marriages just for the purpose of getting citizenship) but otherwise it is mostly automatic.
I think it is easier than getting German citizenship (and others: naturalisation in Switzerland is notoriously very difficult), but it’s not necessarily saying much.
Yes it's different because of marriage. It's 10 years of presence in France, that you can prove. Through marriage it's shorter, but you get the special 'white marriage' procedure to make sure you're not in it for the citizenship. Prove that you live and have been living together, that you've been a couple for some time... Didn't like this process at all.
Then I have something to look forward to, haven't I? Living abroad, outside of France, may change things again. Maybe next year, but I keep telling this myself for 3 years now. Hopefully kids and house will make that white marriage thing easier!
When was that? Today the waiting time announced is 12-18 months, and personal experience, even with Covid and two lockdowns it took a bit more than a year.
In most places the cost of living is pretty low compared to the US, so even the admittedly lower engineer salaries in Europe can give you a very comfortable lifestyle.
Eg. in France if you make 60-80k and live anywhere other than Paris you're doing great.
For the top end of talent there's always freelancing, with a different, higher band of earning levels.
>Eg. in France if you make 60-80k and live anywhere other than Paris you're doing great.
Except that how many devs outside of Paris make 60-80k?
Most French engineers I met in Germany left France because of low wages outside of Paris which is so expensive that most of your wage gains evaporate anyway unless you have a baller job in finance or management consulting.
In my anecdotal experience 60k is typical for developers with 5 years of experience in larger cities, but often you do need to get into management to reach 80k.
I think it’s also getting better as all employers need to compete on salaries with remote offers from companies in Paris.
I’ll admit it though, if it was not for the ludicrous immigration laws I’d have probably moved to the Bay Area a long time ago.
>I’ll admit it though, if it was not for the ludicrous immigration laws I’d have probably moved to the Bay Area a long time ago.
That's kind of a catch-22 right there.
If it weren't for those "ludicrous immigration laws", tech salaries in the Bay Area would get watered down significantly while becoming even more expensive to live in, making the whole place less attractive to emigrate to over time, eventually reaching a state of equilibrium with wages probably close to EU level.
Think of it like a fancy nightclub. The more exclusive it is, the more people are willing to queue outside for hours for a chance to get in.
You don't see this happening in London where EU citizens are generally free to move until recently - still after decades of free movement you have much higher salaries there than elsewhere in EU.
That might have something to do with London being the biggest financial center in the world after NYC and less with immigration. It's much simpler to reach some easy money when there so much cash slushing around looking for the next hot thing.
Plus the CoL in London also matches the high compensation and sometimes exceeds to the point where despite the high salary it's difficult to feel well paid when you find yourself competing against people with Mc.Mansions.
Yes but it's not really easy to make 60-80k in France in the tech industry outside of Paris. I used to be in charge of part a product and lead a small team for a formely state-owned large industrial company in the suburb of Paris and was making less than 50k when I left (given the other advantages I was actually making more). I could probably have been paid four times more in the USA (admitedly I could have been paid more in France too but the job was interesting).
It's amazing that you can see them so far south in the US. I live at +48° latitude too and around here it's completely unheard of to see anything of the Northern lights (even when I used to live in the countryside at ~+50°).
In central Kansas, I have seen faint aurora several times in the last 10 years. Nothing bright or fast moving, but if you paid attention and looked they were definitely aurora. And my Canadian mother also confirmed it.
Could they add a strictness flag that lets objects actually be type safe and enables related functions to work out of the box? For me this stuff is a regular pain point as you end up typecasting at every call site :(