Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

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I had this happen to me. Walked out after 2 months before completing 3 month trial period.

I had a boss who said he is best developer in the world and he meant it.

He caused major outage when the code he developed and brought to the company as an asset failed. The code was to exchange SMS messages with an SMS gateway for Ukrainian operator. The messages were sent using mails. That was 15 years ago and not his fault, but his fault was that he received the XML messages and instead of using XML parser, he just parsed text by locating substring in a given line number from a given offset to a specified character.

So what happened is that they stopped pretty-printing XML messages in the responses.

When I pointed (with couple people around) that this is absolutely our fault (I did not say his, but everybody knew this), he started screaming at me that I am incompetent and that he was programming when I was shitting myself in a crib.

I left the same day.

I left companies suddenly on two more occasions:

- when working for a Swedish company, when they extended my contract and said they are very happy to have me but they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues (I am Polish).

- when my boss charged at me to hit me after I refused to lie to management. He stopped himself with his fist 10cm from my face but that, for me, was game over.

> - when working for a Swedish company, when they extended my contract and said they are very happy to have me but they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues (I am Polish).

As an immigrant in Sweden, this is one of the instances where I'd love a name-and-shame (but it's just wishful thinking, I don't expect or really want you public shaming companies). Simply because I've heard this happening to other colleagues, in different companies, and for some Swedes this sounds almost fabricated.

I didn't get that clear message about not raising salaries up to Swedish colleagues but I noticed at some point that I was severely underpaid given my experience and skills, even more after a couple of years and I started to hear from much more junior employees how much they were making.

I worked there on site for a 6 month (minus one day) contract as a developer with already couple of years of experience. But just before the end of my contract I have learned from couple of guys from support line that I am basically earning less than they earn manning the phone with no education, experience or technical knowledge.

So when the end of the contract came I met with my boss who also had ability to make sole decision and sign the contract. He explained that they would like to keep me and they will even give me raise.

But when I said the raise basically puts me on level with the phone desk and I suspect engineers earn a lot more he said that this is as much as I am going to get and I should be happy because as a Pole I am not going to get anything more than that. Those were his words.

I have not met any other form of discrimination from anybody in the company, peer or manager. It was fun working there and I befriended a lot of people, spent a lot of time being invited to parties, etc. But this one statement sealed it for me and I knew that I would never be happy there.

Now, I don't have time to make a shit storm out of this and I am too busy to have any publicity around me at the moment. So I am not going to name the company.

I am lucky to be a developer and basically be able to choose where and for whom I work, so this did not cost me a lot. But I understand most people are not so lucky and this amounts to exploitation.

Treatment of minorities in Sweden is no joke.

It's incredibly common. I knew a great Indian developer with years of experience and a degree from a brand name American university. He was making bus driver money. :) Swedish companies are incredible cheapskates. Swedish engineers doesn't make that much money as it is, but it's still too much for them so they have to import engineers from the third world which they know they can pay peanuts. Wage discrimination is illegal and the unions take it very seriously, but for obvious reasons, not a lot of people want to litigate against their former employees.

One of my regrets was accidentally seeing the salary of my female Vietnamese coworker and not making a stink about it.

Her ESL was not that great but she would just go around fixing bugs. So. Many. Bugs. And in a place full of architectural astronauts, when I say I generally had no issues with the quality of the code in her fixes, that is saying something.

Turned out she was making about the same as our senior QA folks.

We really should just talk about salaries. But that is partly a zero sum game, which requires the people currently winning to take a hard look at rather they “need” that extra 10% or if it’s just going to make retirement easier or sooner.

> they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues

That's also very common in Switzerland. They know that for recent immigrants, the alternative is going back to their country with much smaller wages, so they can afford to propose less.

>- when working for a Swedish company, when they extended my contract and said they are very happy to have me but they can't pay me the same rate as my Swedish colleagues (I am Polish).

Were you living in Poland or Sweden ? I kinda get that they'd want to pay less if you were living in Poland, considering the cost of living, but in Sweden that'd be scummy as shit.

I moved to Stockholm for the duration of the contract.

Why would the cost of living factor in? If I move to a place that has a very high cost of living, then I don't get paid more. Why would the reverse be true?

Pay is loosely related to the value you provide, but also to the balance of supply and demand for a role and a place. You simply can't attract a person from a high cost-of-living place without paying them a higher salary.

Companies explicitly factor this into their salary mix, e.g. check Buffer's formula https://buffer.com/salaries

It's not necessarily how I'd wish things, but it seems to be the reality of the job market.

Do you work in Sillicon Valley? Do you think developers working there are just much better than anyone else and deserve earning 300K+ while the rest of us are on 100K if lucky?

How difficult would it be to do the following?

- rent the cheapest place (smallest, worst, etc.) somewhere on the edge of an expensive area = this will be your official address;

- buy or rent a nice large place in a cheap area = you will actually live here;

- work from home.

Bonus points if you share the cheap place in the expensive area with your friends (no problem, since no one is actually going to live there).

Both of those would have to be in the same state for it to work, due to the way taxes are withheld and paid. Otherwise, you're probably committing tax fraud.

> I kinda get that they'd want to pay less if you were living in Poland, considering the cost of living

Shouldn’t a company pay what a job is worth to them, not based upon what they think the employees costs are?

This gets complicated fast as remote work, work from home etc all changes the equation. Does the end customer get to pay a different amount based on their location? From my experience the remote customer usually pays more, not less.

> Shouldn’t a company pay what a job is worth to them

No, they pay just enough for you to accept working there. If your alternatives are worse than your colleagues because you don't have high-paying local options, you'll be paid less.

Imagine a country where most employers would agree that a black developer should be paid only 30% of what a white developer in the same position with the same skills would make. The black developers would have to accept such deal... because it would be the best option they would have.

Now somehow when you replace "black" with "Polish", it suddenly becomes ethically okay.

It becomes legally ok, which is all that matters to the company.

If companies paid what jobs are worth, they wouldn't make a profit.

The same applies to goods: If you are charged as much as a good is worth to you, why bother buying it?

This isn’t right though. The worker produces something for their company. The company sells it and adds value as they do so. The company offers a track record, a method for getting the goods or services, a policy for returning or fixing the goods. They offer service when the employee is sick or on holiday - continuity. The company adds value to their worker’s work, and for this they can take a margin.

Without the worker, the company would be making a profit of n€. With them, it makes a profit of n+m€. So it gains m€ of value from hiring them. If they paid that money as their salary, hiring them would have been pointless.

> I had a boss who said he is best developer in the world and he meant it.

He was the best developer in his world.

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