[4iuvosvjf23]

I'm seriously thinking about this as well because I look at my future in America and see very few options but car-dependent atomized misery and I'm terrified of it. I just can't go back to the crushing boredom that characterized my childhood. But I'm afraid to make a move because everything I see says tech salaries are a joke in Europe unless you make it to, like, Google in Switzerland or something.

The improvement to my mood of being somewhere nice, safe, and walkable is truly ridiculous. It feels like someone slipped some drugs into my coffee. How sad it is that we in America starve like this for a human way of life. Living here feels like a misery for money tradeoff and I don't know what to do.

[__MatrixMan__]

I've got a similar discontent growing. For me it's this feeling that I'm working for the machine when I should be working against it. The anti-human tendencies of that machine aren't so directly unlivable for me, they're just evidence that I'm on the wrong side.

I have a slow transition plan for getting to something more meaningful:

1. Take classes part time (doing this)

2. Pay off house, switch to fill time focus on skillet transition, part time work

3. Go be a novice who codes well in a separate field

Maybe you should have a similar slow transition plan. For me just having the plan feels better.

For instance, there are remote positions that hire from all over the globe. With a job like that you could relocate anywhere without a salary change. Perhaps something like that should be your goal.

[4iuvosvjf23]

Thanks for the suggestion! I've started looking a little into the global remote thing and it sounds amazing. Would probably take me a while to get into such a position because I'm very junior still but it's something to aim for.

[__MatrixMan__]

My current position is like that. We have this app, "donut" which is sort of like blind dating for work, it will pair people up at random and look at their calendars and schedule them with 30 minutes for chitchat.

Sounds cheesy, and it kind of is, but you get to know your coworkers. Last week's donut was with someone from Kenya, currently in Malta for the month. She works during the week and travels during the weekends.

Myself, I haven't really taken advantage of the location flexibility. But I'm just saying the positions are out there. If you're competing on the global scale you probably want to specialize a bit more than you otherwise would. X years of experience might not be enough.

I worked for a startup whose product was a workflow orchestrator. They failed, so I emailed their biggest competitor (who clearly wasn't making the same mistakes), and said: "If you can't beat 'em, join em?" And now I'm working on a different workflow orchestrator. I picked workflow orchestrators because I like working with graph structures, and I think that familiarity with them might be relevant to future topics I want to work on.

I'm not trying to pitch workflow orchestrators to you, I'm just saying it's handy to have a thing that you're into which makes you stand out when applying for positions that are adjacent to that thing.

It's worth thinking about early on because you might be able to slant your work towards more exposure to that thing.