ThePawnBreak

It's hard enough getting a remote job or an F# job, I doubt doing both at the same time will be easier.

Not in Europe.

> - We'll pay you more than what you're making now. Sometimes a lot more.

Does this apply only to Bulgarian candidates? Somehow it's hard to imagine you're willing to pay more than a western salary (40-50k euro per year) for a QA Engineer in Sofia.

Um...Bay Area?

I assume you are excluding the top companies or not considering stock and bonus compensation? Because $170k is closer to a new grad compensation package at places like Google or Facebook.

> First, I have yet to see a wave of mainstream technology that lasted more than 2 seasons.

Is technology codename for web framework now? How about C, C++, Java, the JVM, Unix, OpenGL, Directx, Windows, .NET, Python? Aren't they also considered technologies?

I have several friends who are doing the Microsoft Vancouver -> Seattle visa dance, and they're ok with it. I also have a friend who got a green card while working at Microsoft.

I think you don't realise how much better the US is for a software engineer than any other country in the world.

Probably at least 20-30% of big 4 employees are or were on H1Bs. Getting a job is very simple, but not very easy:

1. Get a good resume. They're not very picky here, if you have a couple of years experience programming professionally, it should be enough.

2. Apply online.

3. Get an interview.

4. Pass the interview (hard).

5. If you get an offer, you'll need to get an H1B visa to go to the US. It's ok, if you're unlucky they'll probably offer you a position in a different country, and you can transfer to the US after 1-2 years.

Facebook pays better than Google. Hell, they used to have $100k signing bonuses for new grads.

Do you also account for the fact that you are way more likely to be promoted if you work overtime?

Well, as I said, it's only for interns, so usually for 3 months.

> Label things correctly and let the people decide, just like cigarettes.

I don't know of any country that doesn't have a very high tax on tobacco.

Usually corporate housing at top tech comapanies is pretty sweet. I have friends who got offers.

Both Facebook and Google pay about £80k for new grads (£60k salary + £20k in stock and bonus). Seniors earn about double that. Palantir pays interns £5k / month plus free rent.

I'm sure you can negociate if you have offers from Google, Facebook and Palantir in London. Negociating only works in hot markets, and there are very few of them for tech in the EU.

> And then I go on Hacker News and learn that the fair salary for people working at big companies, with around my experience is 330k!?! Man what am I doing wrong.

Why not go interview at a big company, then?

Any development position that doesn't require me to touch Javascript, HTML or CSS (I hate frontend). I am merely a junior, but I do have 4 internships under my belt (Microsoft, Google) and I would say I am quite decent at programming. I am familiar with both low level software (I wrote some C and x86 asm at Microsoft) and high level software (Python and automation at Google), Linux, operating systems, distributed systems, algorithms and data structures, and most things you would expect a good CS graduate to know about.

I am Romanian, but I would say my English skills are quite good, so communication shouldn't constitute a problem. I applied to about 30 remote positions and didn't get any interviews. I'm going to leave my country soon for this reason (trying to get a job at Google atm).

It's very hard to get a remote position if you're not a web developer. I tried, and it feels twice easier to get offers at Google or Facebook than to get a decent remote job.

> but I remember using Perfect Hash to generate a compiled hash table for the dictionary, and then a trie to organize the dictionary lookups

But... but programmers on HN told me that tries are just useless pieces of trivia used to fail people in interviews, and if you need them a library is just going to do it for you in the most efficient possible way.

That's an excellent observation. Probably a better question would be what software younger than 10 years will still be around in 10 years. I'm thinking Go, Rust, Servo, DeepMind, Uber, Slack, Android, iOS (not sure about the age of the last 2), all the cloud providers' software, and a lot of other stuff. Probably docker as well.

> If you are proposing selective schooling etc. there is a danger of creating social segregation which can reduce social mobility and as a result social cohesion.

In Romania we have elite high-schools where admissions is based on exams (mostly math). This means that the pupils a class will be of somewhat similar intelligence, and makes things easier for teachers. The best pupils are encouraged to participate in olympiads, and the worst usually transfer to lower-rated institutions. I think this system works quite well (apart from the fact that the very lowly rated high-schools are completely useless).

There is always a bell curve. It's more obvious in fields where people start practicing from a tender age, like chess or music, where you start learning when you're around 4. There are many who dedicate their lives to such pursuits, but very few become Kasparov or Mozart. The others still become extremely good, but not the best, and most are forgotten by history.

vim, emacs, linux, chrome, jvm, windows, directx, visual studio, javascript, C++, google, facebook, aws, gcc, llvm, photoshop.

> I understand that your primary goal is avoiding economic competition with people vastly poorer than you, but lets not lose sight of the fact that the economy as a whole suffers when valuable work doesn't get done.

Actually, I am Romanian, I was in the US for 6 months on a J1 visa at a top company, and now I'm looking for a job in Europe since it's so difficult to emigrate to the US.

I just disagree with the principle that if you study philosophy, it's your fault that you can't get a job, whereas if you're a company and want to hire a software engineer for $70k and you can't find any, it's the government's fault, not your own. I would prefer to let the market do its thing.

Also, I think that if suddenly there would be only 100 visas per year allowed, companies would learn to deal with that, either by opening remote offices or being more remote-friendly.

> In the short run, increasing salaries will only get you a greater share of the existing engineers.

That's how the market works. If you are Google or Facebook and you need 10000 more engineers, just pay enough to attract them. You'll get them from lower paying companies, which in turn will raise their salaries as well (but not as much), and so on. At the end of the chain, the companies which are the lowest paying and cannot hire anyone anymore will simply remove those positions. In time, more and more people will train to be software engineers, and salaries will shrink.

Microsoft.

That's the point, there is no magic library that can do this for you. For example, let's say you're writing Python and have a list of receipt numbers. When you get a new receipt, you want to check if it's already in the list, so you do the pythonic thing: "if receipt_nr in receipts", assuming that the standard implementation of this operation in the library is efficient. The problem is, a set would be a lot more efficient here, but the standard library doesn't know you'll be checking if a number is in the list many times, so it cannot use the appropriate data structure.

So, in a way, the time and space complexity of each operation is part of the interface: maybe you don't really need to know how the internals are implemented, but at the very least you need to know the time and space complexity of the data structures you're using, and how to analyse the complexity of your code.

Do you have any advice on how to get that sort of position? I'm a Romanian guy who just graduated (Automatica si Calculatoare), I've done several internships at big companies (Microsoft, Google) and I'm sure I can get full time offers at top tech companies in the US or London. Still, I tried to apply for remote positions and nobody even looks at me. Any tips?

Universities, especially French ones, are far worse for teaching programmming, for several reasons:

- they are highly theoretical and biased against people who are not good at math; I studied CS, and I had to take more electrical engineering and math courses in my first two years than programming-related classes. This is very demotivating for someone who goes to university to learn programming, rather than physics or advanced mathematics

- they take too long and are full of useless classes (useless for getting a job, not in general)

- although the courses are free, it is very expensive to support yourself for the 3-4 years it takes to finish university, and you also need to buy books and other materials

- the most difficult courses are usually not programming related, but science; so you could invest 4 years of your life and end up without a diploma because you couldn't pass Advanced Physics or Calculus 3, despite being a good programmer.

ChromeOS is obviously unsuitable for most developers. So then, does Google guarantee that I will have no problems using my favourite Linux distro (or at least Ubuntu), including trackpad drivers, good battery life, functioning sleep mode, wireless and other usual Linux issues on not officially supported hardware?

Also, do you consider a 64GB SSD to be sufficient for a developer?