Ask HN: What would you do career wise if you were from a small country? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you do career wise if you were from a small country?

4 pointsemphasey9 comments

I am from a small European country (non-EU), working as a software engineer for five years, and I have been thinking a lot about my situation and how to grow as an engineer.

The thing is, I am super comfy living and working here, salaries in tech are a multiple of what most people make, so given the low cost of living, I have absolutely no worries.

On the other hand, I have been noticing that there is just not a lot of opportunities for meaningful work over here. There are a handful of companies working on interesting stuff, but the rest are either doing outsourced work or building basic CRUD apps.

I really love programming, and I love solving difficult problems and having to constantly learn, so I cannot see myself working over here long term given the jobs available.

What would you do if you were in my situation, would you stay here and either look for remote jobs or try building a company, or try moving to a larger country with more opportunities?

> meaningful work over here.

What do you consider 'meaningful work'? That can range the gamut of writing an app that helps cure orphans of cancer to working for Google and watching your code end up on killedbygoogle.com.

Is there something else outside of work that is attractive about where you live, or something outside of work locally that would fill time as a hobby, volunteering, <insert something else>?

(I find little meaning in the work I do, it'll all be trashed in a couple of years; nature does the trick, instead)

Tbh I would be happy with anything as long as I get a little space to be creative, solve challenging problems, have the opportunity to learn new things, have good engineering practices, etc..

I do not expect it but if I get to work on problems even a hundredth of the magnitude of curing cancer - that is a huge plus too.

The kind of work that kills me inside is CRUD apps that need to be done in two months, no time for tests, no time for good engineering practices, etc... Which honestly is a lot of the work available over here.

I lead a small team, and I've managed to get the higher ups in my current company to introduce some good practices and build something sustainable and not just a tech debt ridden monster of spaghetti code.

But it's an uphill battle, and I would love to work in an environment where things like that are not uphill battles, or at least that the hill is less steep.

I moved to the US to work for a big tech company. I don't regret it. The US has far more opportunity for smart & ambitious people than anywhere else.

It definitely wasn't comfortable though - you leave all your friends and family behind and need to make new friends and family.

> It definitely wasn't comfortable though - you leave all your friends and family behind and need to make new friends and family.

I can imagine, this is something that scares me. How was it for you? How long did it take for you to get yourself situated in the US?

I've bounced around the US a bit (Seattle->SF->NYC) so I've reset/made new friends several times.

It's usually relatively easy to make friends at work if you are young & in tech IME. Many people move to the tech hubs and are interested in hanging out with people who they like from work.

Making friends outside of work is harder, but if you find activities you like doing that can be done in a social way, that is often a way to make friends.

It's definitely a "you get out what you put in" sort of thing, if you try to make more friends, you will have more friends.

The grass in distant meadows always appears to be greener.

By various estimates there are about 30 million programmers in the world. Of those a couple of hundred thousand, maybe even a million do interesting work. The rest are writing CRUD apps and fixing legacy systems. You don't read about that majority.

If you still think you can accomplish greater things, then a good option is to travel to where you see the best opportunities, have a go. But don't burn your bridges and be willing to return home if it doesn't meet your ambitions. You can't lose, because you will then know what it really is like "out there" and make decisions for the future that work for you.

I’d stay where you are — Moldova? Georgia? Montenegro? — and either work on an open-source project you care about or start one of your own on the side.

Serbia. I do have a side project but burnout is hitting me hard currently.

I would really like to hear about your reasoning as to why you would stay.

Family, friends, cost of living, good food, opportunities to spend time outdoors.

Not sure life would be better in, say, London, or, god forbid, Silicon Valley, joining the rat race and eating Soylent.

But you should be sleeping now, and so should I ! :)

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