ThePawnBreak

> Your saving rate is going to be higher on 50k/year in eastern Europe than 100k SF salary.

Yeah, except that the going rate for a good junior developer in SV is about $150k (Google, Facebook) and in Romania it's $20k. I recently moved away from Romania because while I could find a job in Western Europe paying more than $100k, there was no way to find something in Romania (or remote) paying even 30% of that. And not for lack of trying.

Also, $300k a year in SV is much more achievable than $100k in Romania or Bulgaria, and with that sort of money you start caring about other stuff than housing (luxury goods, exotic vacations, investments etc.) whose stuff doesn't depend on location.

He said 1% in the Valley, not in the US. Also, I think it's better to compare total wealth rather than income (which can easily drop dramatically).

I would try starting with Scratch first, to see if he likes it and because it's very easy to get started, with very little friction. If he seems to enjoy it and seems to understand the way of thinking, I would move to Python with Pygame next.

A friend of my created a Udemy course where he teaches how to build games such as Flappy Bird or Pacman in Scratch. It could be a good start. Let me know if you'd like a coupon (would cost $10).

https://www.udemy.com/programming-for-kids/

> I would rather make more money in a stupid corporate job than working on more aggressive ways of making people to click on ads.

Could you name a few "stupid corporate jobs" that pay better than Google or Facebook (200k - 300k for a senior engineer) ?

No it isn't, especially considering it's 30% that what Google interns earn in the US, even in cheaper places than London (Pittsburgh, Seattle).

Also, it's a lot less than what competitors pay interns in London (Bloomberg, Facebook and Palantir pay interns a LOT better, among others).

She worked on something completely different in Krakow, and earned a lot less (about 1000 euro I think). The compression work was in London, where 2700 GBP doesn't go a long way at all. Rent is about 1000 GBP for a room, and 2700 GBP is about 1800 net, so that leaves 800 GBP per month to spend on food, transportation and other expenditures.

I happen to know the person in the article. I was also an intern at Google this summer in Europe.

2700 GBP a month, plus 1000 GBP housing (for a summer). Because Europe.

Have you looked into Site Reliability Engineering at Google?

Why do you pay based on rent instead of market rate in the first place?

> For now, sadly, there is no replacement that even comes close. I really want an always one screen and at least 5 days of battery life.

Did you take a look at Vector Watch?

Google I understand, but how exactly can you not live without Apple products?

I seriously doubt it. Is London even more expensive than Mountain View? They could also move to a different european city, wages are low everywhere in Europe. Ironically, the largest engineering site of Google in Europe is Zurich, where employees are as expensive as in Silicon Valley.

Google has about 40000 engineers. If they paid $70k less per year per engineer (median total compensation for a Google engineer is probably around $200k), that's a saving of about $3 bilion a year.

I cannot understand why so few US companies open engineering sites in Europe, and when they do, they are much smaller than in the US. It's really easy to get good engineers in Europe.

> This is only true for companies where minimizing the cost is the best (sometimes only) strategy to increase profits. Tata, EDS, Accenture, and the many IT body shops are all in this camp.

It's true for any company. Did we forget about the Silicon Valley wage fixing already?

> This is much more valuable than saving 30% off in an individual's compensation -- at the expense of high turnover, when said worker realizes he/she is being underpaid.

That's the entire point, if you underpay, you get high turnover. But what is considered underpaying is relative to the market rates. And if you get more supply, market rates drop.

As an example, interns at Google in the US earn about $7000 a month, while in London they get about £2000. That's because of market rates in London are far lower than in the US. Ideally, tech companies in Silicon Valley would really love it if they could have the same employees as they do now for half the price.

I tried finding a decent remote job as a new grad. I have 4 internships at top companies (Microsoft, Google). I applied to dozens of companies, only got one interview by a NY based company looking for cheap developers in Eastern Europe.

I gave up, I'm probably moving to London soon.

Does anyone have any tips for learning Scala? I want to learn the language, it looks very interesting, and I have some familiarity with Scheme, Haskell and Ocaml, but I just don't know how to start. What should I read? What should I build?

That's because the Phd's who can write great code work for Google and Facebook.

Yeah, but the super expensive places tend to also have other great stuff apart from great salaries. For example, Donald Knuth lives in Silicon Valley, and I doubt that VC capital is the reason.

Care to name a few tech hubs that have a low cost of living?

I think tech hubs are intrinsically centralized, because you need to get the best people in the sample place. If you have N tech hubs, then you have no tech hubs. If Europe is to have a real tech hub, it needs to have the best minds in Europe (at the very least) be there. And for now, there is not really any such place. Language is also a big issue.

There's an article like this written about 90% of Europe's capitals. There are no tech hubs in cheap places, because smart people move away from low wage, low cost of life places. Libon stands no chance, I would say the only contenders are London, Stockholm, Berlin and maybe 2-3 others. The only low-ish cost country I could see becoming a serious contester for a tech hub would be Poland.

> Now I can map those commands to icons in the toolbar, rather than having to page through the history command each time.

Why not just create a bash function? Call it setupproj1, write the commands you need in a function ~/.bash_profile, export the function and that's it!

And how's that working out for them?

How does that compare to local salaries?

> Let me know when battery life is within a couple of orders of magnitude of real watches, then maybe I'll revisit.

Check out Vector Watch. It's more like a traditional watch that is also smart (it tells you when you got a phone call, an email, a meeting etc), the battery lasts for more than 30 days and it's always on.

Not even as a contractor? So I would send an invoice and they pay it. I deal with the tax stuff.

I've been looking for a remote job lately. Despite having interned at Microsoft and Google, almost nobody seems to be interested, and even if they are, it's for a salary like $30k. I'm in Eastern Europe, but still, that's a really low wage.

So if you're so desperate for engineers, why not hire remotely outside North America, the most competitive market in the world for engineers? I realize it's much more comfortable having everyone in the same timezone, but sure it's preferable to hiring nobody? Also you can probably pay 30% less and still get great engineers.

Google the username.

> Weirdly, some of the best programmers I have met are people who go their degree in Music Theory. Odd and really not enough sample size.

This is a very common experience, and I think it's a form of selection bias. If you look around at the top people in the industry, most have studied CS or closely related, highly mathematical subjects (math, physics). But the reason why so many people see "great" programmers who have studied art, music, literature or any other field is, according to my hypothesis (which may well be wrong), because they don't work in an environment where the typical bright CS student goes to work. So if you're working in a small web-dev company, you're not getting the cream of the crop from MIT, Stanford, CMU and other top universities (or even the less well known ones) -- those guys (or gals) go to work for Google, Facebook, hot startups in the valley or stay in academia. Instead, you're getting the average or below average CS students, and the brightest people who studied irrelevant subjects, who would have a hard time getting into a company like Facebook.

Again, I may be wrong, we need a much more in-depth analysis to draw any form of conclusion. Still, I think this also highly depends on what you consider a "great programmer". Many people consider a programmer to be great if he writes very clean, logical and easy to understand code. Personally, I think this is way too low of a bar, and I think being called great requires a very in-depth understanding of a subfield of programming (be it graphics -- Abrash, scalability -- Dean, languages -- Stroustroup, Sutter, Alexandrescu etc.) Maybe not as good or well known a the people I mentioned, but I wouldn't call any random programmer from a random company writing CRUD apps great.

No, diversity is doublespeak for women or black people.