[jedberg]

> This blows my mind that in the US one can make such insane money in tech while still being a slacker and retire early with a dream house bought and paid for

Don't feel too bad. As far as I know, only Google and Apple lets you get away with this kind of slacking. Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix certainly don't.

Also, SWE out of college definitely aren't making enough to buy much more than a condo.

That being said, you're still right. I go to a lot of international software conferences, and I when I talk to devs about their work, they are just as smart, passionate, and hard working as the people I've talked to here in the states, but they are getting paid a lot less.

I read a salary report in South Africa and they asked me what I thought, and my first thought was, "You guys need to get paid a lot more".

I hope that with the rise of remote work, this evens out.

[throwaway8291]

The max I negotiated in Europe was $125000, an ok start up salary was maybe $80000 and I am currently - with lots of non-money benefits at around $70000.

What makes me most sad is that fostering the web tracking industry - tech + marketing - is so lucrative. I have such a hard time understanding this world - it does not make much sense any more. This lying and scheming around collecting all your data and activity for the next VC funded ad playground.

And I'm kind of irritated, how people can spend their lives working for mostly investors, who benefit much more than every (even well paid) gear in the machine.

Aren't we as a society smart enough to start treating humans with a bit more respect and not just seeing them as wetware to extract value?

[chii]

> fostering the web tracking industry

because consumers don't want to pay for anything. It's easier to extract private data, and sell that to a corporation for a lot of money, than to extract a small premium from each user (which is like squeezing blood from stone).

[JohnBooty]

Yep. This battle was lost way, way back in the 90s when we collectively decided that everything on the Internet should be free.

I think it's one of the great lost opportunities in human history.

I don't know what the "correct" course of action would have been, instead of making everything ad-supported and mostly terrible. Some kind of very very seamless micropayments? Maybe there was no "correct choice." Maybe "free, but awful" always would have won no matter the alternative.

But man, this outcome sucks. The internet turned out to be just one more way to squirt advertisements into our eyeballs.

[gpvos]

Micropayments were tried, or at least planned, almost right from the beginning of the web, but no one found a way to make them catch on.

See error code 402 in the HTTP spec: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec1...

[swyx]

marc andreesen refers to this as “the original sin of the internet” https://podcastnotes.org/2019/08/31/andreessen-crypto/

[dev-ns8]

I think you could argue that this very battle was lost far before the 90s... Advertisers and marketers have been exploiting and targeting the mediums in which most consumers paid their attention too long before the Internet was around. Inevitably the Internet was going to have ads seep in because it garnered the majority of consumer attention

[neuronic]

Watch VR when it (or rather if) it takes off. Then ads will truly be squeezed into our eyeballs in the most literal sense.

[JohnBooty]

It's never taking off on the scale of the internet itself.

It just doesn't pass any kind of common-sense test. People don't really want to spend large portions of their lives wearing goofy headsets, seeing things nobody else can see. Even if (when) we shrink the screens down to the size and weight of regular eyeglasses, I don't see it. It is not compatible with anything else... you have to completely cease all other activities and utterly devote yourself to your VR experience, sealing yourself off from the world.

VR definitely delivers a pretty awesome experience when done well, don't get me wrong. I think it will hang around and have its fans. But, game-changer? Never.

[isthispermanent]

This is my gut feeling too.

[sqrt17]

Brave Browser has micropayments for exactly this Ads-vs-Micropayments rationale

[badpun]

> The max I negotiated in Europe was $125000, an ok start up salary was maybe $80000 and I am currently - with lots of non-money benefits at around $70000.

I'm currently at $160k (as a contractor, assuming 5 weeks of per year). Could have had more, but I'm currently in low cost of living country (former soviet block), so any move would be offset by increase in taxes and costs of living.

You can make good money in Europe, it's probably just harder here than in the US.

[ZuckMuckerberg]

Datapoint: I'm currently making £145K a year in the British office of a FAANG company as an E4 engineer 2½ years after graduating college.

I'm able to work 10–18 most days, but I do have to have some results eventually. I know of people in this office who got dismissed for not having good enough impact.

[aynyc]

10-18 hours a week or 10AM - 6PM work schedule?

[ZuckMuckerberg]

10am–6pm work schedule. That's ~7 hours of work with ~1 hour of lunch.

[aynyc]

Thanks! Pretty cozy hours. Do you feel your work is more than you can handle?

[pete762]

Can I ask what you do (and where)? That's absolutely insane money for former soviet states, probably equivalent of >>1 mil in the bay area.

[badpun]

Poland, big data developer and architect for a multinational finance company, that's offshored some of its IT to Poland.

For them, $160k is for sure more than they've intended to pay when they opened offices here, but there are just no qualified people who would do that for less (as qualified people f off to London, Switzerland etc. and get paid even more), so in the end they hire me and people like me. We're still cheaper than equivalent talent in company's home country.

[snak]

Europe? Could you specify country?

[baby]

That's a huge salary for Europe, where probably the highest paychecks are in London. I'd say it's probably a large US company, and OP is probably very senior.

[throwaway8291]

Germany.

[joelbluminator]

You are looking at the elite of the elites. How many developers work for google in silicon valley? I am sure there are developers in Ohaio that get paid non stellar salaries, also have a mortgage and by the time they are 45 they worry about the future a lot. On Average yes the German developer makes less but probably has better job security , work life balance etc. You make it out as if American developers live a stress free life

[tommit]

I agree. Clearly, not every dev in the US works for Apple or Google. Plus, simply comparing the raw income is flawed as well. I agree with your assumption that overall, German developers have better job security and most definitely the work life balance aspect. I'm a developer myself and I don't know anyone around me who regularly does more than a 40h week. This is excluding those that have started their own company and the occasional deadline of course. Not to mention that our cost of living is definitely not as inflated as it is in SV.

[taurath]

I never understood how a developer making 40-60k euros could survive in a big city like Berlin, until I visited. People are complaining rightly about increasing rent prices, but they're still extremely reasonable, at $1100 a month. Groceries are /dead cheap/ compared to the US (-30% to -40%), and the food quality in grocery stores is frequently quite better.

You get 6 weeks of vacation, and don't have to worry about going to the doctor.

Compare that the the US, where you can be earning nearly 200k, get a few weeks vacation, save some money but everything feels temporary. Go to the doctor too much? You're let go for not meeting deliverables. Need more time on vacation? No. Don't have time to enjoy living where you're living because you're at work dawn to dusk? Well thats the price of not having to worry about rent.

[joelbluminator]

These things can't be underestimated. Coming from a much more capitalistic country to the Netherlands (allow me to assume it's similar to Germany) - the prospects of leading a relaxed life and raising a family here are very good. Yes, it's less competitive. Yes compensation is worse than SV. but if I had to gamble where developers are leading happier lives I wouldn't go with SV (despite the superior weather).

[Bahamut]

Slacking in Apple? From what I've seen, Apple engineers probably amongst the hardest of the FAANG - probably less so than Amazon if I had to guess, but I know my Google, FB, and Netflix friends do not work nearly as hard.

[jedberg]

It probably depends on the team. I know some that work really hard, but I know others who really coast along, even more than at Google.

[djcapelis]

For the engineers who want to have an impact on stuff, if you’re skilled and your ideas are good and you can convince others about that, you can be given as much impact as you can eat. There’s a huge spectrum of how much impact people opt to go for. Apple is a good place to come if you want to change something about how a billion people use some technology. And generally Apple is cool with people shipping those ideas in as quick a product cycle as they can figure out how to get it done. I’ve seen multiple colleagues take something from idea to keynote (or shipping, keynote is just the most visible way in which that happens) in 12 months or less, within the first year or two of arriving. Some of my colleagues do this yearly. You probably don’t get to do that coasting, so it’s up to you.

If you want to coast, you generally don’t work on teams that ship new product. Apple’s a big place. There’s totally teams that are good fits for people who want to have less direct product impact and be off the critical path, but I wouldn’t say that’s the common case.

The best analogy I’ve heard is that working at Apple is a pie eating contest.

And the reward is—more pie.

Each person has different feelings about how much pie they want to eat.

[jedberg]

Right, to be clear what I'm not saying is that all Apple engineers are slackers -- far from it.

Just that from what I can tell talking to many FAANG workers (and working with a bunch of them who came from other FAANGS), Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to, Google also being an easy place to do it.

It's why most of the people I worked with left those places -- they got tired of the slackers.

I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon. And I never saw anyone get away with slacking at Netflix.

[djcapelis]

Totally get you weren’t applying the same brush to everyone!

> Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to

You are the first person I’ve heard this one from! I’m almost pleased to see some balance? I worry we have the reputation of being too grindy too often!

I think this can be very org dependent. I wonder if most of the people you know are clustered in a specific part.

> I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon.

Weird. I have. We seem to have very different experiences.

Also whenever I’ve talked to people who work inside Facebook I just. I just couldn’t. I’m certain I’d go stark raving depressed so quickly there. The froyo on campus is nice though.

[daniel_reetz]

The joke (while I was there) was that Apple engineers went to Google to retire.

[daniel_reetz]

I worked at Apple. I saw all kinds of things, but never slacking. Quite the opposite.

[thedaemon]

https://www.faang.org/

Acronyms really need to be phased out, as I highly doubt you mean Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes. I'm guessing it's the 2nd result?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Apple,_Amazon,_Netfl...

[MiroF]

you must be new here

[thedaemon]

I'm just horrible with acronyms because I work in IT and the health industry, previous the security industry. They all have acronyms and the same acronyms. So they all mean different things to different people. Acronyms are a lazy person writing and you have to be "in the know" to know what they stand for. 100 years from now, no one will be able to understand them.

[MiroF]

"communicate so that everything you say can be understood 100 years from now" seems like a terrible standard to hold conversation to.

What is "IT", by the way?

[thedaemon]

Information Technology.

[ajcodez]

Facebook hires tons of zero passion 10am-4pm engineers. It might not be deliberate slacking but it’s definitely not hard working.

[madhadron]

"Zero passion 10am-4pm" doesn't necessarily describe not working hard. You can only do three to five hours of sustainable deep work a day unless you're a freak of nature. Usually anyone saying they do more just pads it out with breaks on Hacker News or Facebook, or has failed to automate the repetitive work in their job. A focused, organized engineer can pretty well exhaust their sustainable capacity plus do their overhead in 10am-4pm. As for zero passion, why do you need passion? And what does it have to do with not slacking?

Facebook makes you demonstrate your impact to the company twice a year. You would be hard pressed to be a slacker long term there.

The work does appear different because at that scale you spend a lot of time tracing out what's there, figuring out context, and trying to figure out how to make a change without bringing down everything else. If you're used to a small company or a small codebase where you spend most of your time writing new code it seems less productive, but it's mostly just different.

[ajcodez]

Slacking means doing the minimum required to get by. It doesn’t mean doing nothing and getting fired. I was replying to the parent comment idea that engineers at Facebook work hard because in my experience they do not. Which is fine. Slacking in many ways is optimal.

[ineedasername]

Yes, passion and slacking are not mutually exclusive. I am very passionate about the industry I'm in and the importance of the type of work I do, but....

[throwaway8291]

I met two FB engineers a few years back. They seemed average, at most. But one quality stuck out (we spent half a day together at an event): They seemed to be excellent at following company rules.

[bitL]

That's what top schools teach you - conform 100% to the assignment requirements or there is no A/A+ for you. Also, most companies "get what they measure", so figuring out which metrics are visible and preferred is the way to go in large corps.

[eric_cc]

What does 10-4 have to do with anything? If you don't have significant equity, putting in more hours on a daily basis just makes you a tool in my opinion. There is more to life..

[ThrowAwayZuck99]

I'm not sure which team you are talking about because many people here in Ads are working 9-9-6.

[madhadron]

And many people in ads are certainly not working that schedule, and discourage those around them from doing so since it slows everything down long term.

[52-6F-62]

“The best minds of my generation...”

[lame88]

...are probably working in a particle acceleration lab or something. I know the quote.

[bdowling]

> I know the quote.

The quote is from “Howl” by Allen Ginsburg, a poem about burnout (among other things). That’s applicable to a report of people working a 9-9-6 schedule, a recipe for burnout.

[lame88]

I'm speaking specifically to this quote which seems to have drawn from it and hardly seems separable in this case. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” As if the FAANG-type companies are somehow the centerpieces of modern intellectual activity, which is such a tech industry thing to assume.

[52-6F-62]

Especially when it's burning out on something like ad-tech

[Infinitesimus]

Is it the performance review cycle pressure promoting such hours? That's firmly in the burnout territory even with high (500k+) comp...

[schwabacher]

Are you? If so, why?

[nfRfqX5n]

what if they're hard working + highly efficient?

[narrator]

Be like a friend of mine in Argentina who works remote on U.S jobs. He's from the U.S and moved there, so he speaks perfect English, and Spanish but he make enough in a month to live for the whole year. He bought a house, has a nice smart girlfriend much younger than him. He's doing very well.

[OOPMan]

Yeah...as someone who recently relocated from a third-world country (South Africa) to a first-world country (Canada) I'm just going to go ahead and tell you that while the costs of living and property in third-world countries sound great there are a lot of negatives that don't make up for it.

[keiferski]

Argentina is not a third world country.

[dx034]

Neither is South Africa. Their standard of living (in the right areas) is probably comparable.

[stickfigure]

Hmmmm. The murder rate in Argentina is 5.1/1000, lower than the United States. South Africa's is 35.9/1000, making it the 9th highest in the world.

"I'd love to retire to South Africa but I'm allergic to something in the air - bullets."