Self-hosting a VPN is not entirely straightforward. If you rent a server from Hetzner, for example, and your IP address is linked to Hetzner, it's obvious that it's not a genuine residential IP address.
What you need is a VPN that provides a genuine residential IP address. It's possible to do this, but not easy to set up for everyone.
Last couple times over the border the officers have pointed a camera at me (travelling on US passport), so I assume my mug is in there. Seems completely routine and universal at airports now? I wonder if the original passport photo has similarly been scanned at this point.
Europe does not have the same market conditions as the US. The continent is divided into a gazillion amount of small countries, each with their own rules, laws, regulations, languages, customers, pension systems, healthcare systems, and taxes. Even the currency is not the same everywhere. Not to mention the cultural differences.
One thing they have for them is a lot of money to invest from their American market, and enough momentum that they can afford barely sustainable European operations for a few years whilst they figure things out and streamline everything.
EU federalism would solve this issue, and likely cause others.
The concept of European federalism is extremely interesting to me. The first I heard about it was at a house party in Prague, from a group of very excited young people. It feels both impossible and inevitable.
_Telling the browser how you want the DOM manipulated_ isn't the expensive part. You can do this just fine with Javascript. The browser _actually redrawing after applying the DOM changes_ is the expensive part and won't be any cheaper if the signal originated from WASM.
A: "To determine which number is larger between 9.11 and 9.9, let's compare them step by step. Both numbers have the same whole number part: 9. 9.11 has a 1 in the tenths place. 9.9 has a 9 in the tenths place. Since 9 (from 9.9) is greater than 1 (from 9.11), we can conclude that 9.9 is larger than 9.11."
"Final Answer: 9.9"
I don't think anything else needs to be said here.
I will now refer to this as the jschoe test in my writing and publications as well!
It's interesting to think that maybe one of the most realistic consequences of reaching artificial superintelligence will be when its answers start wildly diverging from human expectations and we think it's being "increasingly wrong".
I’ve legit seen a heated online debate with hundreds of comments about this question (maybe not the exact numbers), and I don’t think most participants were memeing. People are that bad at math. It’s depressing.
Your take away does not go far enough. It's not executive compensations. It's compensation generally, it's all much much much lower than in the US. Many Germans consider 70-90k as already making bank and a high salary that you can ride out until retirement. And the COL isn't low either and quite similar to the US. Europe is just far behind the US when it comes to salaries. Which shows that there is a lot to lose for US engineers.
What numbers are you using for your COL comparison? Because each time I tried to compare these - to get a feel of what the same standard of living would cost me in North America - I always came up with about 1.7-2x at least ( ignoring the valley). So if you say it’s similar, we either mean different things, or use different sources.
For comparison: 70k€ gross is already 60% more than median (which is 44k in 2024, according to stepstone data).
According to census.gov, „Real median household income was $80,610 in 2023“. So while the median income might be an imperfect proxy and comparing stepstone data with census data might be incomplete, I thing a difference of nearly 100% suggests that you cannot directly compare German income with North American.
No, it is supply and demand. And a good deal of culture sprinkled on top. Americans are much more prepared to accept obscenely high salaries for exceptional talent. In Germany by contrast, even the greatest software engineering genius will not make that much more than some middling developer.
Salaries are not set according to how much you need the money. The reason US salaries are high is that US software companies can make staggering amounts of money.
> Salaries are not set according to how much you need the money.
This is not true at all.
When I started working at Microsoft in 2007, Microsoft was one of the most profitable tech companies of all time. (They still are!)
Salaries in the Pacific Northwest were around 1/2 to 2/3rds what they were in the bay area, and total comp was a lot less, since MS's stock was flatlined at the time.
But do you know what we all told each other?
"Housing here is cheap, traffic isn't bad, it isn't worth it to move to the Bay Area."
A senior engineer is happy earning 130K a year if they can get a good house for 500 or 600k!
Once housing prices started exploding, salaries had to go up.
(The other counterpoint would be that many companies have location specific CoL adjustment to their salary bands)
> The reason US salaries are high is that US software companies can make staggering amounts of money.
SAP makes staggering amounts of money!
For knowledge workers, salaries are very disconnected from how much value the employee brings to the company.
I don’t think it’s high housing prices cause high engineer salaries. By that logic all jobs in SF/Seattle should be high paying but that isn’t the case.
I see two ways it could be working:
1. High engineering salaries cause high housing prices
2. High engineering employer demand causes high housing prices (more employees in the same area and stagnant housing supply)
For 2, the high housing prices probably do push up salaries to an extent but the real cause is demand for engineers
Salaries in Seattle are sky high across the board. I've seen house painters getting paid 100/hr, that was obviously on the high end, but 60/he isn't unreasonable around here.
SAP also makes a lot of money. It's not purely related to how much a company makes. There are German companies that generate a shit ton of revenue, but they still pay way lower salaries. The mechanism how salaries come about are much more complex than that.
Prices are set by the highest a seller is able and willing to pay, and the lowest a buyer is willing and able to accept (absent collusion).
It is clear that in certain US metros, sellers are both able and willing to pay a lot, and buyers are not willing to settle for less, because they can find other sellers able and willing to pay more.
Higher land prices come downstream of that. No one is stopping businesses from paying less in areas with lower priced land, but evidently, it is more difficult to make a successful, highly profitable business in lower priced areas.
In the YouTube comments he stated nonetheless that he still bombed big tech interviews, specifically the technical portion, probably because of some ridiculous LeetCode problem he did not memorize beforehand. It just goes to show how these procedures do not effectively determine who is actually a good engineer or programmer. If this guy can't land a job while achieving this, then something is not quite right with the interview process.
hi! yep! this definitely happened. I do mention it in the next "why" video, but it's good feedback to know this is interesting to people because I could say a bit more about what those rejections were like - specifically the one where I failed the technical screening.
I'm actually really excited to share that part of the story because I hope it can be a small thing in the back of people's mind to help them if it happens to them. It can happen to anyone. Interviews are SUCH a lossy process and most engineers I know don't have any training on how to do interviews at all - yet we just assume they know how to evaluate people's skillsets.
I was crushed and embarrassed. Yep. Not even gonna lie.
I used to work on Insomnia at Kong, which is literally a frontend for cURL. But some of the questions I couldn't answer were like "how do you get headers with cURL". I DON'T FRIGGIN KNOW. THAT'S WHY I WORKED ON A GUI FOR CURL. I CAN'T STAND USING THE CLI. lol. But to them, it was a question they were supposed to ask, and I got it wrong. Same story for questions about the git CLI DX (I'm a GitKraken fanatic lol), and more like that.
I would rate my confidence overall as being quite low. Well. I donno how to explain what I'm trying to say. It's not that it's low or high, it's that I don't factor it in a lot in what I decide to do. Where I've noticed some people dip their toe in, I find it easy to just cannon-ball into the frozen lake without needing a lot of justification. That's what I meant in the video about "close-enough-manship". I'm a sort of personality that spends a lot of time just failing miserably over and over again in the least efficient way possible until I get what I'm looking for - and I usually quickly move on before I learn what I could have done better, lol. I've been told that my comfort in the face of non-stop-failures is what confidence is, but I donno if that sounds right.
Getting a job these days is really tough on the psyche.
You have coding skills. Some marketing and video production skills. Self discipline and persistence. The time to spend 18hr days on a project. Why look for employment? Start your own business.
are you some kind of fortune teller!? haha. so that's so funny you say that because that, too, is a big part of the story. actually I was gearing up to do exactly that - but everything blew up in my face and this Doom project was, in many ways, my way of picking up the pieces from the rubble.
there's another reason, which is that I really get a lot of energy from working with other people. it makes me really happy. and right now especially I really love the people I work with. I learned this lesson the hard way in my stint contracting - because the inter-personal relationships are very different when you're there one day and gone the next (as a contractor).
Those interviews select for the type of person that believe it is worthwhile to dump tons of time into studying minutia to succeed at those types of interviews.
The purpose of a system is what it does, after all.
You're making an excellent case for using AI during the interview. If you can actually code and do the work, you're hurting no one by using tools to get past these arbitrary barriers during the live interview. The system is clearly flawed when someone demonstrably skilled gets rejected over trivia.
I actually created a tool to help myself get through the live interviews, specifically by listening to the questions and giving me real time answers to things I couldn't recall under that kind of pressure. It's not about not knowing the material, it's about the ridiculous expectation to perform perfectly on demand.
If I heard him correctly he stated that it takes A LOT to just render a single frame. It's not playable. It can run DOOM, but you can't actually play it.
They write and talk in their group lingo so outsiders can't understand it without diving deep into their lore, mindset and community. It's a common thing. Seen it numerous times. Don't waste your time.
What you need is a VPN that provides a genuine residential IP address. It's possible to do this, but not easy to set up for everyone.