scalesolved

I'm British but live in Barcelona, our baby is being raised by the building where I live. The concept of personal space/privacy is much different, practically our whole building come and talk, hang out and play with our baby (9 months old), when we visit the UK people are much more hands off and cautious.

It also makes me incredibly happy that my daughter hears 4/5 languages daily, growing up multilingual seems such a cool and interesting thing.

I like the way you think! I myself have fallen into this trap before, playing video games to relax whilst trying to read technical articles to improve my skills.

I didn't realise the danger of it until someone pointed out the waste, if you're going to relax then just relax!

As a recent father I'm going to teach my daughter financial planning and responsibility so she can provide for herself but otherwise that she can take her life in any which direction and that money is the not the answer.

I'd really consider Barcelona and here are a few reasons why:

* Compact and easy to travel around

* Ton of engineers looking for interesting startups, engineering quality is higher than the average in the UK.

* Beautiful city, easy to attract talent.

* Engineering salaries are much cheaper so less money needed to start hiring.

* Lots of awesome co-working,meetups and cafes to work in, goes hand in hand with being easier to travel around.

* I've lived in the city on 12k euros before and still had a very comfortable life, gives you more runway!

Reasons that Barcelona isn't suitable:

* The legal system and bureaucracy is much more complex and slow which can result in a lot of costs.

* If you start as a sole trader equivalent here you have to pay around 250 euros a month regardless of whether you turn a profit (or even bill anything) which is just maddening.

* Transient population, there are a lot of folks that move here from all over the world and move on again after a year or two. It can be harder to start,keep and maintain professional relationships.

* The official languages are not English, they are Catalan and Spanish. Everyone is bilingual but it does bring challenges in communication, learning two languages and also can be trickier targeting the US/UK market for example (whilst developers here will have English sufficient to work in if needed copywriters/marketers won't always have the native level needed).

* As with most major European cities there are direct flights to London/Madrid/Berlin/Paris/Milan/Rome/Prague/USA etc

The UK is not regaining independence, it was never lost.

I think it is naive to assume that in the current political climate with huge actors (US/China/Russia/India) and the potential for trade wars that the UK will come out better from this especially with their previous privileged position.

" I say hire instead of promoting because I am assuming that if there were someone with the skills for the job you would already have noticed "

Whilst this could be true there also is the possibility for the OP that the business has grown rapidly and they are still trying to operate the same way as the early months, trying to be involved in too much and not delegating control and decisions.

My advice would be to have an honest conversation with the whole team, show the trust to be vulnerable and I'm sure if the team are great as you say people will find a way to pull together.

If these things don't work though as another poster mentioned, sell the business and protect your health. Best of luck!

A head start?!?

Where in the world do you live and what figure of savings would you need to be able to retire?

This comment comes across in a very callous way.

I disagree with this, if you start going above and beyond on your work consistently people/co-workers/the company will get used to this and it becomes your baseline. Why pay more for someone already doing the work?

Achieving above your pay grade for a long period can also place you in the tricky situation of management agreeing to a raise if you up X/Y/Z, if you're already performing to a high level without monetary recognition then you're in a tough spot.

All this leads into why lots of engineers struggle to get raises within the same company and then with a few career hops will instead double/triple their salary.

The cost of the lost productivity from domain knowledge within companies leaving with engineers who can't get raises must be far higher, especially as going out into the current hiring market means you'll probably have to pay equal or more for a similarly skilled but without domain knowledge engineer.

Rather than a doom and gloom prediction, I believe that 2018 will seem remote work growing significantly and hopefully with the benefit of bringing money and new services to towns and regions that have suffered brain/money drain over the last 50 years.

Bitcoin Cash is extremely unlikely to overtake Bitcoin, way less volume and it's losing the appeal of faster and cheaper transactions. Bitcoin has a huge chunk of the current crypto currency market and a massive lead in mind share.

I don't think you should be so absolute in your assessment, it has many values to a lot of people. Also the traditional banking system is hardly a paragon of virtue when it comes to illegal money laundering, currency manipulation, LIBOR scandal,the sub-prime mortgages.

As the eco-system evolves hopefully the environmental impact would be reduced significantly.

These are fair points, my reply was to the OP who said crypto was 100% hype and speculation which I didn't agree with. I'm giving a data point of crypto being useful for me, yes BTC has been slow at points but I've also had with each bank I've ever used (Natwest/Santander/Banco Sabadell/Barclays) points where my accounts were under maintenance and couldn't be moved.

Easier said than done at least in Spain. Poor opening hours and poor customer service. It's one of the reasons I'm a fan of crypto for the ease of transferring.

Whilst there is a lot of hype and speculation I think you are mistaken about there being no real-world applicability. My bank has so many fees and loopholes for sending money even within the EU and they can take days.

I owed a friend some money and I sent him BTC which arrived in a couple of hours with fees that were about 10% of what I pay using the banking system. Real-world applicability and a satisfied user.

Sounds like perhaps you should use this skill more often then, perhaps become an interviewer for a remote company like this? https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/141116/freelance-expert-inter...

Best of luck and keep your chin up :)

Keep in mind too that Effective Java was recently updated/rewritten a long time after the second edition was printed. So to the OP make sure you look at the third edition and not the more linked to/blogged about/higher visibility in google second edition.

Not at all and it's now how I view senior engineers. True senior engineers though do tend to find the right abstractions more often than other engineers but it doesn't mean they can't make huge mistakes with bigger implications.

My thoughts are also on actual senior engineers, not 2 years of experience etc.

Ha it does make me think of this tweet https://twitter.com/KevlinHenney/status/381021802941906944

You nailed it really, senior engineers code is the most simple looking as generally they've picked the right abstraction for the problem.

I'm missing my right hand, on my first visit to the US since 1994 (as a child) I was asked to scan my hand. I politely tried to tell the agent that I'd have to scan my left hand and he started shouting at me without looking at me.

Each time I uttered anything he'd just randomly shout for me to comply, after about the fourth time he looked up and ordered me to use my left hand.

Absolutely bizarre experience.

Short it all and profit then right?

Really depends on the location within Spain like other Euro countries like the UK. In Barcelona or Madrid a Lead engineer at the right firm will be hitting around 100-110k euros.

The thing that makes me think the system is broken is how they'll avoid larger raises at all costs even if it means losing great engineers with lots of domain knowledge.

The cost of replacing this is immense to an organisation, even if they can hire a similarly skilled engineer they've:

1. Had to absorb hiring costs 2. Search in a competitive market for talent 3. Distract team members with another round of interviews 4. On-boarding costs whilst the engineer absorbs all the lost domain knowledge. (This is the big one).

Once all that is taken into account it's probably getting close to a full yearly salary of the engineer they just let walk. I still feel it takes a good 3-6 months for an engineer on complex domain projects to really feel comfortable regardless of their seniority.

"Are there some extra responsibilities I can take on to advance my career here?" - That seems a good way to get a lot of extra work with no benefits and a loose date where management will 'revise' whether you are fulfilling it or whether the raise date needs to be bumped further out (the latter usually occurs).

I found the 4 tips on what not to do well written and useful for people earlier in their career. I didn't get a lot from this article for when you find pushback against raises (very common) especially when we're in an industry that fully rewards job hopping and has a wholly broken promotion/retention eco-system.

100x the volume of hello world or a basic CRUD app does not make it more impressive than what BTC has achieved. (Disclaimer I hold no BTC).

As a disabled person I find this perspective incredibly odd. Why have no hesitation?

I find most people will ask about my disability when I'm doing something that is not affected by it all, they'll start with the 'hope you're not offended but I'm curious, how would you do X?'. This is usually followed by them telling me of a disabled person they know that has a totally different condition but is inspiring.

If you have a strong aversion to private people perhaps you should not ask such personal questions?

I cannot answer your question but BTC comprises $191 billion market cap out of $342 billion market cap of all crypto currencies. Perhaps they'll diversify into other coins, withdraw to Fiat via this too.

I'd pay 15% of payment per contract found for remote backend development jobs.

I think you make some excellent points. I think the oft mental block engineers stumble into is that management are often not clear in articulating that speed for a certain project is more important than reliability or quality for example.

There is a trend in our industry for each company to claim they fulfil speed,quality,cost.

Interesting discussion :)

Gold has a relatively stable supply now but back in history we've experienced several gold rushes that I imagine made prices turbulent. From my limited understanding of Bitcoin the supply is also going to be limited and the mining of coins will become harder and harder.

Seems to fit more along the line of gold than a currency.

Is currency not a store of value?