[deanmoriarty]

It is indeed ridiculous.

I am in my early 30s and I am aggressively saving as much as I can while living very frugally, to hopefully retire multi-millionaire abroad or get a lower paid job that won't stress the life out of me before I turn 40. Hopefully I won't become unemployed before hitting my target, or die of a stress-related heart attack.

I am not completely disappointed about my career choice because it allowed me to save a lot of money (see note), but boy, it is an insanely ridiculous career. Very frequently I wish I pursued something else, there is just way too much and fresh new crap keeps coming, every week. Can you believe 4 years ago almost nobody was talking about containers/Kubernetes? Just to name a random niche. Can you imagine what will happen in a couple years? They say "it's all the same, it's a cycle, you already learned it": that might be true if you are a manager or a PM and you just need a very superficial overview of the ecosystem, but if you are a senior engineer you need to master your craft, so even if a technology has been reinvented you need to spend hundreds of hours learning the details of this new incarnation, that's literally what your employer expects. Ask an engineer if being proficient with VMWare is enough to get up to speed with Kubernetes just because one is the sequel in the virtualization scene... exactly.

Also add the effect of globalization: my company hires talent from Eastern Europe (not consultants, entire teams with local management, product, ...) who produce insanely high quality software products at a ridiculous pace, exquisitely documented. Those people are wicked smart and on top of that work 20 hours a day. I am surprised software engineers are still hired in the US, where working 10 hours a day is already considered unhealthy. I feel the same way as a brick and mortar store that's going to get pushed out of business because of the more efficient and cheaper Amazon.

Note: It also helps that I choose to live in the super expensive Bay Area while not wanting kids, so I don't have the same spending requirements of people with kids and can bank the spread that most people would have to spend on schooling, nannies, good housing, ... I rent a studio for $2k in a ghetto-ish area, and that's 70% of my expenses. If I had a couple kids for whom I needed to provide good housing, nannies and private schools, I would be spending all I earn and there wouldn't even be an end in sight to this madness.

[balfirevic]

> Those people are wicked smart and basically work 20 hours a day.

What makes you think they work 20 hours a day?

[deanmoriarty]

I don't think, I know it. I wake up in the morning (PDT timezone), and they have already produced and committed a massive amount of work, or tackled complex architectural design projects. On top of that, they stay pretty much active on Slack during my entire work day, until their local midnight/1am. By the time I go to sleep at midnight PDT, they are already committing code or following up in previous IM discussions (it's their ~7-8am). So, effectively they work twice my amount, and as I said they are very smart and motivated individuals, so they produce more than twice my amount.

If I were to start a company in the future, rest assured I would do 100% of the engineering hiring over there, after having seen their work ethics and productivity levels.

As an added bonus, they are really not in the mentality of profit sharing/equity compensation typically seen in the US, so you can get them with a cheap salary (think ~$50k/y), whereas a local senior engineer would cost you ~$250k + equity, and would demand a good work-life balance and probably resent you because your free lunch is not as good as FAANG's.

[Tade0]

Eastern European here - it's interesting to read how this looks from the other side.

But yeah, $50k is enough for many to throw work-life balance out the window and at times pull all-nighters - I should know, because just recently I quit a job where that unfortunately was a habit of mine - all for approximately this pay.

I don't think it's sustainable, but younger people increasingly choose this way of life, because it lets them obtain status symbols like a MacBook Pro or a lease for a Mercedes C-Class. Also the overall mindset is that this is how people live and work in Silicon Valley - regardless of whether that's really the case.

But here's the kicker: some in my area are saying that we're in a bubble and developer salaries surely must come crashing down eventually. Others think that our only advantage is low cost.

Personally I share neither of these views. It's all relative and as long as real estate prices in Silicon Valley remain absurd, developers will be compensated generously. Perhaps even after they come down - if they ever do of course.

[ramraj07]

As someone who's heard nothing but good things about Eastern European programming shops, looks like y'all's salaries are only gonna increase. Perhaps you should take some bets on your market with that assumption!

[balfirevic]

> But yeah, $50k is enough for many to throw work-life balance out the window

It should be pointed out whether you mean net (take home) pay or total cost for employer. The latter is usually about twice the former at these salary levels (at least in some parts of Eastern Europe).

[protomolecule]

In Russia a self-employed contractor would only pay 2%-6% in total as taxes depending on where they live.

Of course, for that they will only get minimal pension and standard medical insurance. They have an option of voluntarily contributing additional money to the state pension fund to get increased pension.

[jrochkind1]

In the U.S. too, really. Don't forget health insurance.

[Tade0]

As a self-employed contractor in Poland I can get away with retaining ~75% of the sum of my net invoices(sans sales tax, which is transparent B2B) as take-home pay.

For that I get rudimentary health insurance - only really good enough for a hospital stay free of charge.

The tax rate is a flat 19%, so I would wager that the tax wedge is likely smaller in eastern Europe than in the US.

[ssijak]

Thanks for putting a good word for us. I work mainly for US clients from Serbia, and while I do occasional overtime, or 60-70h/w before a deadline, those should be and are exceptions. Even you as an employer don’t want chronically overworked employees.

[corporateslave5]

Can confirm this. The best engineers I’ve worked with have been remote from Poland and Russia. Insane quality of code architecture

[PaulDavisThe1st]

except for the old USSR-taught folk who can't let go of their waterfalls.

[ramraj07]

Any names you can mention about these work ethic programming shops?

[deanmoriarty]

These are not programming shops, that’s the whole point. These are basically full time employees hired on payroll, who will care about your codebase as much as any other member of the team. Programming shops in my opinion never work, there’s always the mentality of just building crap and throwing it off the fence.

[azinman2]

At least one of those A’s doesn’t have a free lunch :(

[ridiculous_fish]

I think both do not.

[devnonymous]

> As an added bonus, they are really not in the mentality of profit sharing/equity compensation seen in the US, so you can typically get them with a very cheap salary (think ~$50k/y), where a local senior developer would cost you ~$250k + equity.

ugh !!! yeah, you better be scared for your own job and good luck hiring those devs in the future...its more likely they'd be hiring you.

[mouzogu]

I can relate. I'm in my mid-thirties. I've been working as a web designer, which then became a web developer, then front-end developer and now front-end engineer - in the last 13 years.

I've found the same issues as yourself. Things have become more complicated and yet I feel like my position is seen by a more "informed" upper-management as a kind of commodity.

I once had a manager tell me, during a pay-rise request that developers where a dime a dozen. Fair enough, that's probably true.

I've been thinking so much the last few years of how to transition into a field with less technological noise. I feel like most other people I work with, their only real skill is in communication - as in they don't have any strong hard skills like engineering.

I'm in the same boat as you. Unable to get married or buy a house, or have a family due to living expenses. I mean the average price for a 1 bedroom in London is uppwards of 350k, I've been saving for 13 years and barely have a fraction of that - I dont know who is buying these houses...who can afford them? or are people willing to gamble with their savings and their future?

Also, I feel like some technical managers dont do a great a job of protecting our field. As they are the ones primarily responsible for communicating with upper management. Often times, they are downplaying our abilities and our position - they dont realise that their accomplishment in terms of generating efficiency is often compromising our job security. Ultimately most managers dont care how hard it is to be a front end engineer or full stack dev or whatever, they just look at numbers, and in many cases they see us a financial burden or as a commodity. So, you as a technical manager need to bare that mind during your crusade to automate and optimise x,y and z.

[mixmastamyk]

Mortgages. You don’t save up 100%, but rather 20.

[hstreet]

I hope you can make it work. I am nowhere near the path to saving enough to retire soon. Although I'm still holding onto the hope that I could build my own path start enjoying programming again with the BS and pointless stress removed.

To make that work though, I'm done with the interview circus. It's been such a distraction over the past 3-4 years, that if I wasn't prepping for interviews or staying up to date with the waste of knowledge that they test for in tech interviews, I could've built a successful business already. Now I'm choosing to focus my time there.

[samtechie]

These days the effort required to get a well-paying programming job is more or less equivalent to the effort required to start your own business. If you can start a business. It's worth a shot. Worst-case scenario, the business fails and you are back on the job market but you can use your startup as a demonstration of your capability to deliver on projects that require time and dedication. You will also grow and learn a lot and be in a much better position than your competition.

[mettamage]

I am in your boat. I've been in the interview circus for 6 months. I'm quitting, I'm going to start something.

I still have the luxury to do so. So I should take my chances because industry sure isn't taking one on me.

[Gibbon1]

My suggest is save a nest egg, then get a public service job that offers a pension. If you want to know why realize how much you need to save to generate the income a pension provides. Especially since US and EU central banks have decided to punt and just continue to print money.

[sk5t]

To pose a frank question: are your own skills equal or better to the heavy hitters on your European crew? If not, how do you know you're not being snowed by a lot of pomp and ceremony to do regular things in an impressive-looking way?

[tehjoker]

That's right, the pace of work is constantly accelerated by competition, you feel you can never quit, and you aren't paid an amount that for your location _isn't biologically sufficient_. We need unions, we need an end to competition, and we need to take control of the companies ourselves and overthrow the bosses.