People owning touristic buisnesses on the islands are moaning about how much they need more staff and can't find any, and they are arguing why younger people tend to not work and just receive benefits instead of going to work.

The argument here that they won't understand though is that, 1st they are paying very low. They are all willing to pay the minimum salary available... which is somewhat 500 euros. It varies from 500 to 900 euros and 1200 in best cases. The unemployment benefit is 400+ euros per month. So tell me who in their right minds would go to work for 500 euros or even 800 euros, whilst they have to spend petrol to get from and to work, work prolly 10+ hours a day, in the sun most likely cause thats what means tourism industry, get told by 'BOSSES' on what to do, and get treated awfully. There is just no point. And then all I hear from those guys owning massive hotels making 1m+ revenue in their pockets per year saying : 'Cant find anyone good to work for you nowadays, its all youngsters fault'. Well ok I'll admit that prolly youngsters dont have the nerves that older people had in their age, but at the same time you are not helping the situation at all when you are offering money that someone will just pass by and you are making 1m+ euros in your pocket a year, and then the only way to keep profiting is to steal a bit on tax and of course not fully insure your employees. AWFUL system!

It's an escalating problem in Eastern Europe in general. Our politicians are way too greedy. They lost all perspective. They try being a bit more insolent since the last year, they sit and wait -- no revolts, no fires, no pitchforks. So hey, these people don't mind! Let's get EVEN MORE money from them! Sadly it's how it has been going ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. Many elderly people say: "It was not all sunshine and rainbows back then either but at least the people had everything necessary to live respectful lives". They do have a point.

Thank the gods for internet and for me being a programmer ever since teenager. Otherwise I would probably live off social benefits as well.

It's very easy to demean people for being lazy or unmotivated or non-ambitious. But the reality is, the best career advancement ~85% of the people around here can hope for is an awful job with 2-3 hours of commuting in total for the day, for an income that exceeds the bare minimum needs with 5-10%. So it's pretty normal many decide not to bother, or to turn to petty crime.

Nobody in Budapest expects to make even a Berlin salary, but the difference is big enough now that lots of people say screw it, better to live abroad at least long enough to buy an apartment and so on at home. But I doubt many of those people will be coming back.

Ironically enough you could make a killing as a plumber anywhere in Germany right now, or in Vienna, or in Budapest, as per your choice. But a ton of Hungarian plumbers left when it wasn't like that, and now they have lives in Dinkelacker or wherever.

I’m even seeing that in IT. Back in the day you could start out as tech support, or an operator (as I did - long story) and be given a chance to program and move up. Now even those jobs are outsourced. It’s just as easy to hire someone from a foreign country to admin your AWS hosted instances as it is to hire someone locally.

And I believe the maximum amount of time where you can be eligible for unemployment benefits over here in Greece is a year or so.

I believe a large cause for the apathy in people who you'd expect to work these jobs is the fact that working a job like that doesn't move you forward in any way.

Back in the day, you could work for a few years and survive on your salary and hope to open your own business.

Now what's the dream for these workers? They can never afford to save up on their 500 euro a month. They can never get a loan to open their own business.

The best they can hope is that they won't be discarded and their job given to a more young-looking person down the line.

Work harder. Make more money if you want to do your own thing. Surely there are professionals in Greece making good money working as employees for others. What are they doing that the lazy uneducated worker is not?

Do more of that and less complaining that you're making 500 euro a month.

Let's simply discuss why people might not always go for the highest paying job they could get.

What most people that aren't doing everything optimally to improve their situation is that they're succumbing to common human logical fallacies.

People don't see that there are jobs that can potentially lead them out of that class of salaries, not because they're lazy but because they're uninformed about these possibilities.

Or they might gauge that the small chance they have to get such a job isn't worth doing something they don't enjoy at all, and would rather survive doing something they find bearable.

For a lot of younger people however, things are even more depressing. A lot of the "lazy uneducated" workers you mentioned spent years getting a university education, up to the PhD level frequently, and they feel they're invested in a thing they might be good at or they might enjoy practicing.

Objectively, they should give it up. Subjectively, I can understand wanting to hold on to a small hope that you might eventually get to do the thing you enjoy doing for a living.

If I'm allowed to be frank I find the characterization "lazy" very offensive, despite not having been in their shoes, because I have countless peers that are in this exact situation.

And all it takes is one(!) bad/uninformed decision in your past: skip STEM.

One of most cirurgic comments I read in HN. It's a pity that is buried in the thread.

As an anecdote, on average, a masonry assistant(!) earns more than an architect (buildings, not IT) where I live.

Not only are you still not upright, but you just ruined your shoes, and have to pay yet another $3 to replace them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is the argument for Universal Basic Income.

Give everyone something less that 400s euro, whether they work or not.

Let's say its 300 euros. Then the decision is don't work and take home 300 euros, or work and take home 800 or 1100 euros. There is a much greater incentive to work.

There are always people who don't just want to live off the dole.

Also a lot of the people who complain about crappy entry level wages (that they're unwilling to accept) also complain that they are rejected from higher jobs because they don't have any work experience.

> ... get told by 'BOSSES' on what to do,

That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on?

> ... and get treated awfully.

That's not acceptable period though specifics matter.

Pretty much all the software engineering jobs have worked at have given me quite a bit of autonomy. At least within software engineering organizations the purpose of a manager should be to make sure workers have the necessary resources and coordination, but they shouldn't be telling workers what to do.

I know someone that got hired at a company to answer the phone for technical questions from users. When she started they didn't have a phone hooked up yet so she asked for github access and started writing software. They never bothered hooking up a phone at her desk and she just wrote software for the next 2 years. The software she wrote was valuable to the company and was mostly self-directed. I don't think stories like this are that uncommon in the software engineering world.

Edit1: Fixed typo, thanks PaulRobinson

Edit2: Added Anecdote

Even a commune where workers "decide on their own", has bosses. They are just not called bosses. See any of the '70 and '80 communes.

Ever read about Sun Hydraulics?

"At Sun, we have no job titles, no hierarchy, no formal job descriptions, no departments, no budgets, no direct sales channel, no close supervision, and only some work instructions."

https://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2016/09/15/sun-hydraulics-sh...

All for a differential of 200 or 400 euros?

> That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on?

Did you ever work in the hotel industry as a low-level worker ?

If they offer you a $800 wage, when your unemployment is $400, your effective earning rate for the work you are doing is just $400/mo. Cost-benefit analysis isn't in favor of working. The employers either have to offer something on top of the starting wage (like clear path to advancement), or raise the wage. Otherwise it's a fairly logical choice for people to stay home and draw unemployment.

Is there a limit to how long you can collect unemployment? In Finland if you still haven't found a job in about a year, you stop getting payments altogether. And while getting payments, you still have to prove that you're actually searching for a job and not just trying to scam taxpayers.

The subsidy is ~32€ per day, which is the same as the minimum basic unemployment benefit.

I think they may even force you in to unpaid/extremely low paid work if you cant get something yourself.

I think society would be a better place if people were paid based on the value they delivered, and not coerced into work based on the need to subsist. When employers/owners have to absorb long-term costs, they make changes.

People who work on pipes or other buried things used to often get killed or injured by collapses of mud or stone. Worker's compensation costs forced employers to put reinforced steel safety devices in the holes to mitigate.

Parts of these "youngsters" are probably off doing something related to self-development and fulfilling which might provide benefits for society later on.

In this case they (seemingly) aren't getting any more money from working extra, compared to not working either, since their social benefits are stripped away if they start working. If this was basic income, they would be left with something extra at the end.

In this case there's no incentive to work?

Yeah, let's compensate them for being insured and at the worst case scenario lose 500 euros a month every now and then when a shadier employee comes around and leaves quickly. Poor them. Whatever will they do, 1 million euros a year can barely get your ends meet!

That is just off the top of my head.

Of course as has been pointed out, your suppliers could demand more money than you have left in your budget (employees are a form of suppler - the human aspect has been intentionally ignored)

There's risk in the construction (that budgets/timelines will blow out, contractors will be unable to complete the work to specifications), in whether the hotel will be appealing to customers, in the possibility of a recession or natural disaster or civic crisis that will keep tourists away.

There's a few of the more obvious ones.

Here's a thought experiment - those (tourism businesses) owners are making lots of money, so why not create such a business yourself (maybe with help of some external capital) and pay better wages and treat your staff better and pay taxes? Your clients will be much happier with you while having to pay the same. Other capitalists are probably happy to get a piece of the cake.

Of course, you cannot blame workers to not work in this industry right now, but obviously there are still enough people accepting that type of employment, otherwise salaries would have improved already.

Yes. Either yourself or maybe find someone else who does.

But if you find no one who solves it for you, the question stands whether the employer is indeed an evil guy or just doesn't have a lot of margin to hand out higher salaries. It's easy and lazy to assume evilness without ever having been there.

> and single-handedly change the labour market of an entire country. Great suggestion. Why didn't I think of that?

No.

Not many people have €5M to build their own hotel, particularly those who are unemployed. Furthermore, not everyone can overcome all the barriers to entry, or have the know-how to keep a hotel operating.

There are evil rich guys waiting to invest into a promising venture. Interest rates are at a record low. VCs are everywhere.

> particularly those who are unemployed

You just added that element to the discussion.

> Furthermore, not everyone can overcome all the barriers to entry, or have the know-how to keep a hotel operating.

That's an interesting point, maybe it's not so easy after all and maybe the risks and costs of operating the business is higher than the employee thinks.

Do it yourself and the you can complain and prove you have cash left over and hand it out. Then you can complain the guy is evil, the rest is mere speculation.

Note I am not saying it's easy (I know for a fact that it's hard). I'm just saying it's lazy and non-constructive to just assume the other guy being evil without knowing even 10% of what's going on and where the problems of the business lie.

At the scale of publically held companies, your bossy evilness is virtue signalling that tells the market that you are viable in the era of Uber and Amazon. Right now, as things stand, wrecking things and your own employees is expected and you will get no support and no investment from breaking ranks. That's just how it is.

In my field, I ended up just flipping the table and switching to Patreon so I could dump free competitive product and better serve my own userbase. My income got literally decimated by this decision but has rebounded to about a third or half of what it would have been, but I'm totally exempt from having to behave like a vulture: it suits my market positioning quite well, though if I was a really serious threat to the market leaders in my sector, I'm pretty sure they would come up with a way to sabotage me. That's also why I MIT license: I can funnel good stuff to poor musicians if I also let already-rich people steal it in exchange for only publicity. The alternate is they steal it anyway but with no publicity, or simply try to wreck my operation so there's less competition.

The narrative of the evil capitalist overlord persists for good reason: in the absence of a working society it's down to power and power alone, and only winning and getting the most capital allows you to continue to win and get more capital. It's a feedback loop and there's no reason 'salaries would improve' barring outside interference, which is less likely by the year.

Go ahead and do your thought experiment, but it doesn't map to the real world of 2018. To survive you've got to think more disruptively: your axioms here are pretty naive. For instance, what is actually important: your clients being happy, or your clients paying more money?

Dan took a thought and turned it into a real experiment. I believe the results are very positive in terms of profits, much higher wages for workers, higher customer retention, and deservedly good PR. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2018/01/24/what-...

Just to reduce my point to the basics:

Either the evil guy makes lots of money (in the sense of profit) -> You start your own business in the same sector -> get some of that market share and profit -> pay your workers better -> everyone is happy except evil guy

Or the evil guy doesn't make a lot of money -> He cannot pay his workers more -> He's not the evil guy.

Sure, this isn't black and white but as long as there isn't a monopoly on anything involved, the above holds.

Let's just stop complaining and force evil guys to press the pause button by competing with them.

As a side note, it is an open question whether truly evil guys have a pause button (I assume Sauron and Darth Vader don't have one) or whether there are other things at work.

Maybe those guys just spent years living close to poverty to make their start-up a huge success. Maybe not. Just saying there are somewhat understandable reasons that don't necessarily mean the guy is evil.

To make matters far worse, the industry in general pays lip service to on-the-job training and some employers also avoid junior/inexperienced developers, because they don't want to train anyone.

And don't get me started on the absolute cancer that are HR/outsourcing/body farm companies, the type that hires 3 HR technicians to dedicate themselves to bullshit naive techies to work for 50% of their actual market value and fire them as soon as they aren't indispensable.

The real underlying problem is that most employers I've encountered think that they're doing their employees a favor by "giving" them a job. They don't truly perceive it as a value-for-value economic transaction.

This becomes quite evident when they give you a pile of legal papers to sign where the balance of the benefits slant heavily to the employer.

I'm going to use this analogy in the future. "You want filet mignon, but you're only willing to pay for hotdogs- and you're blaming the meat".

The software developer golden age was in the mid-nineties here in Europe, and then the rates and salaries have stagnated (but not the inflation).

Also, the contractual conditions are getting worse. We are now many times offered contracts with a termination clause of one week on the employer's side, and without a termination option the the freelance side.

This means that if you sign a contract of one year, and then on the first week you realize that the job is not what it looked like in the interview, you are stuck for one full year.

This is especially important as employers are not really transparent in the interview process, they will often not tell you what the job is really about, and the job description you have is either out of date or it was embellished to look much cooler than the day to day job actually is.

For the contractual side, if you are in Europe, one-sided rules in such contracts are easily removed, since they are void by European laws.

It's the same with US companies insisting that you do not work for a competitor after contracts end but European laws actually then require the company to pay you for monetary loss or such clauses are void. Also has been confirmed in court cases.

Regarding lack of information or even invalid information before signing contracts: this is also grounds for annulling the contract.

Or 20% less today than in 1996, in gross terms? The problem is, now most freelancers are forced to create their own service companies (of one person), so the contract is between two companies and not between a company and an employee.

And in those cases, the rules are not the same, AFIK. I did ask a lawyer to get the contract reviewed in 2013 for a mission that I was baited into taking and then there is literally almost no programming involved and I wanted out.

The lawyer examined the service contract and told me that by the terms of the contract, I would have to either serve the service contract or reimburse the company for what they would lose. Maybe another lawyer would say something different, or things changed since 2013.

All we can do is wait for the contract to finish and then not renew it. Its perfectly legal, a lawyer told me.

Believe me, they know how to cover their backs.

What they really don't want to do is to lose the billable position. In practice, a lot of people will just suck it up to the end of the contract and then leave, especially if the contract is less than a year.

In practice, they will probably not do that as the HR team is busy with other things and the lawsuit might be bad PR, although a hiring manager that wants to get back to you for doing that might have the HR department sue you, legally they could do that.

Sometimes I think an international one-week walk-off by IT staff would do wonders for the worker-employer relationship.

But in general, if you insist that they add a termination clause of 15 days on your side, they usually do it although only after some insistence and negotiation, which if you have several interviews ongoing and are waiting for other responses might puts us in a precarious position.

Every time I am inundated by queries from the local engineers and developers about how to get work either directly with for my employer or any other US company.

For the same level of skill and experience I'm paid more than double the typical EU engineer and the cost of living (including health care and retirement planning!!!) is much lower where I live.

On top of all of that, I'm 49.5% moron. Most of the guys I work with here in the US and in the EU are much better than I am. The only reason I go on these trips is because nobody else wants to be away from home for a month.

So I just shrug, say "I don't know man", take their business cards and resumes and forward them to HR where I assume nothing happens.

edit: and my understanding is that Frankfurt is a relatively high-wage area.

This sounds like a job that would be perfect for me. Where do you find a software job like this?

All tech companies in Finland are like "We can't find enough competent coders!" and newspapers are publishing that as is.

Well, no shit, because your pay is shit.

To me, if a tech company claims in a newspaper that it cannot find competent coders, to me it says that they are uncapable of detecting talent. Which means "we have a really incompetent human ressource team". This is clearly not something that I would like journalists to print if I were a company owner. :-)

On the other hand, journalists should change their headlines towards "We can't find enough competent coders for xxx €/$!". Giving this information would be a strong service to the reader.

Nah, you see the pattern in pretty much every first world country.

1. Government makes law protecting citizens saying companies must hire local unless as a last resort

2. Big tech companies post job listings with unreasonable qualification requirements, while offering wages so low that few people would accept

3. Nobody applies/accepts offers from those companies

4. Companies start whining to the government about how they can't find workers (at these wages) and that we need to increase the amount of visas from India/Bangladesh/wherever.

5. Government falls for it hook, line, and sinker. More cheap foreign labor is approved.

6. The market value for all programmers in the region drops.

Repeat steps 1 through 6 until the average programmer salary hits minimum wage. If local citizens resist at any point, just accuse them of being racist.

Did it ever happen? I mean, some active high-tech markets that have a lot of hiring going on and have been around enough to run these cycles if it's indeed what is happening. I don't know about other first world countries, but I am seeing in the US software developer's salary is nowhere even near the minimum wage. In fact, they are substantially higher than average wage for all the other comparable occupations (i.e. not bank CEOs and board members for Fortune-500 companies). I also am not seeing them precipitously dropping. So I am not seeing it happening as your model describes. Why do you think it is so?

Is it really worth to invest so much money into "marketing" and "lobbying" the skill shortage instead of simply increasing the salaries to make the job more attractive? Just wondering...

>After examining million records, including data on campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, federal budget allocations and spending, we found that, on average, for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government.

https://sunlightfoundation.com/2014/11/17/fixed-fortunes-big...

>In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/06/144737864/forg...

Well it keeps the money in the Management caste rather than any of it going to the Worker caste.

Cue some months later I see in a magazine a interview with them, and complaining they can't find someone for that job.

So I applied again, they apologized profusely, blamed old HR company. Sent me to talk to new one.

New HR company approves me, then multinational refuse me explicitly because corporate policy is that this particular job must be done by someone experienced.

Thing is: they wanted a local, and they were the first company here offering that job... So good luck finding a experienced person when you are the first one offering that job in first place.

No wonder they complain on media...

Or their definition of competent is unrealistic.

Basically, whenever there's a website like this that annoys me, I just copy the URL and Outline it: outline.com/$url

No clicking through annoying dialogs, or having to use a vpn.

If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't submit it. Outline is for reading pages that:

* you own the rights to,

* is in the public domain,

* constitutes fair use, or

* you have consent of the copyright holder.

It's unlikely to hold up in court; the servers of outline.com and their owners will likely be deemed as creating the unauthorized derived work.

You cannot sue a hyperlink that's floating around in the wild; you cannot prove who created that link.

If I were to guess; they will start inserting their own content into these filtered pages, after some time. Newly created ones will be nice and clean, but after some months perhaps, mysterious stuff will start creeping in when those URLs are viewed.

E.x: https://us.hidester.com/proxy.php?u=eJwBWACn%2F3M6ODA6IoYNRJ...

Use Tor Browser.

Still there's an archive.is link listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506215

The newspaper business is struggling as is. Every time a publication is blocked in Europe people complain. Ads were the answer for most online publications, but showing targeted ads now pose a legal risk.

I don't know about their business ops, but I'd suspect they've done the math and decided it isn't worth the effort to change their platform so people can read for free in Europe.

And of course they can offer a subscription.

You also don't need to be tracking anything to be non-compliant.

The same is not true for the LA Times.

Item two: I wouldn't subscribe to a newspaper just because i read articles linked from HN occasionally, so I'll just pass on LA times.

Item three: whenever someone comes up with a working micropayment platform, I might throw them 2-3 cents if they get linked on HN. No more.

Yes, I haven't read the original article. I won't even through the free links. They don't want me, they don't get me.

Every day, justify your existence. Every day, beat that same dead horse. Every day, grab your coffee, sound off, and then listen to 20 other people bark at the empty air under their nose to show their devotion to a product that has the slimmest utility, and is coated in slippery, greasy dark patterns intended to screw the users that UX/UI supposedly cares so much about.

I have also experienced it in person. The customer, which was their only customer, and works with many similar contractor businesses, made noises that they want their contractors to "be more agile". So a lot of them just cargo-culted something and said, "we're more agile now!"

My previous employer declared a daily stand-up meeting--with mandatory attendance at 8:45 AM, the flexible hours be damned--crammed the entire team (minus customer support) of ~20 people around the walls of the manager's corner office, and proceeded to waste 45 minutes every morning, as everyone listened to everyone else justify their existence to the boss. Needless to say, I was already looking for other jobs, and doubled down on the application rate after that.

At my current employer, we just changed the day and time of our weekly status meeting, moved it to the conference table in the server lab, where the testers in adjoining offices can theoretically hear it and elect to participate, and said, "we're more agile now!"

The customer has absolutely no in-house ability to evaluate the effectiveness of external software development teams, so they just have to take their contractors' at their word.

I think you can probably guess who the customer is.

Agile means small teams focused on one project communicating constantly with the client in a feedback loop.

If any of these elements is missing, you are not doing agile, you are doing the same thing most companies do, but with some agile pieces and labels attached to it.

It's like saying you are on a keto diet, but you eat ice cream, or that you are for democracy as long as the press is controlled by the state.

It's kinda saddening that from everything OP said, the only take you got from the message is whether a soul-crushing mouse-wheel is buzz-word compliant in your opinion.

I work as a contractor in Stockholm (long term assignments; basically like employment but I pay my own taxes), and I can save ~80k usd per year (after expenses and taxes, no family though, but I live in the city center). To get paid more, I either have to specialize hard or move to Silicon Valley.

In my experience it is a bit more difficult to find a job here compared to the rest of Europe, and that's because there normally are more candidates for every job offering.

There are not part of europe, so they do whatever they want.

My map says otherwise... Switzerland is most definitely part of Europe. Maybe not the EU, but that's a different thing.

The national median wage is ~$35K ($27K post tax) afaik, and people live good lives on that, albeit in smaller towns.

And if you have a mortgage, you can deduct 30% of interest payments.

That doesn't sound like much help for a single expatriate coming to Sweden for software work. They're going to want to live in a city where there's lots of other people (including other expats) to network with, date, etc.

Note that you don't rent apartments, you buy them. It makes a comparison harder.

But yes, dark and slushy winters.

Our devs are not paid enough to save projects poorly down by half-competent team from big SSII that undercut everyone else.

And then the client is saying : "how can it takes so long ? I am only asking for this feature from Dropbox, that one from Google, a Facebook like feed and some Whatsapp notifications, all synchronised with these existing applications ! NOTHING HARD to do here !"

/rant

People use these fancy features for free by companies having billions of budget and income... then they want the same features from you, also for free:)

More on topic, I hear the same in Belgium, they want someone to work 24/7 basically for free and then they are surprised that the guy they hired isn't some kind of magical being that knows every language (for some reason this goes for both natural and programming languages) and framework and whatnot.

I worked in Africa for a while, and got many American contacts there.

I also have a very high ranked stackoverflow profile, and get offers from there.

And I'm extremely active in the Python community.

I'm not actively searching a job with an american company, but if I were, I would just apply to any american job offer that interest me as I would do in France. Just be very clear on the situation. A lot of job offers seem definitive, but the people behind it are often ready to make many concessions.

> I'm not actively searching a job with an american company, but if I were, I would just apply to any american job offer that interest me as I would do in France. Just be very clear on the situation. A lot of job offers seem definitive, but the people behind it are often ready to make many concessions.

Well, most people don't understand IT at all. They can barely use their computer. What we do is very foreign to them, and they can't assess at all the difficulty of anything, or the skill of anyone.

Also, the fact something is "virtual" gives it less value. People thing that google is just a page with a button. They can't imagine the complexity behind it. Form then, the UI is the product. For them, stealing a banana is a crime, but a mp3 is ok. So your work seems easy.

After this client I'll apply to job offers more aggressively, see if that helps. Honestly, I just want to work from home most days instead of wasting my time in traffic.

I agree on business/management not comprehending the complexity of IT, it's one thing we need to try to do a better job of, at least to some degree. But I have turned down / terminated jobs because clients are unwilling to even try to understand what we do and simply want to stay stuck in their pre-computer/pre-internet way of thinking and working. IT is here to help your business move forward, but if you are unwilling (which includes paying the right people correct wages) there is nothing I can do for you.

You will have 10 years experience, a relevant degree, security clearance and no boundaries when it comes to overtime.

We will pay you £35k!

The sad thing is, they will fill that position, with someone not very good, with low expectations and no confidence in themselves. And they will get mediocre work, which they expect.

Same company, same upper-upper-upper management, but VASTLY different pay scales. Its nuts to think about, especially when I can rent a full 3 bed/3 bath house with basement and garage for about 2 times less than a 1 bedroom flat in London.

Connecticut isn't.

London is a great place to be, but horrible to live.

Not to say that there isn't companies making terrible offers in London, but I don't know people working for them.

And when I say extremely dangerous, I mean the highway I'd have to take to the larger cities with more jobs is consistently in the top five most dangerous roads in the US, and has been #1 a few times. I can really only hope wouldn't end up in the hospital (with a massive bill) or dead before I earn enough to move. I just kinda have to stick it out unless someone wants to hand me a fairly sizeable signing bonus. I can always negotiate, but it seems like it would foolish to rely on that perk being there.

Your job listing example describes me pretty well, that's what I found striking. At least I do enjoy my job for the most part.

Right now, not that often. However, we're attempting to educate a lot more people in this skill set, and the increased supply will help reduce the cost.

White collar is the new blue collar. Business is incentivized to make this happen.

First, I've seen the attempt to dumbing down on the workforce for programming (delegating offshore, hiring only interns, etc). It almost always fails in terrible ways.

Second, the demand for devs is exploding because of the society we live in: all activities uses programs. Shopping. Driving. Listening to music. Working. But the universities are nowhere close to match the demand with their output. Not in quantity, and not even in quality.

Third, there is a limit to this. Not all people can be programmers. A lot of them hate it. And a lot of them don't have the abilities for it. But here we are not talking about just any programmers, we are talking about decently skilled ones. I know that 90% of the people in my classrooms in the 11 schools I went to wouldn't be able to do what I do. Just like I wouldn't be able to boxe professionally, even with a good training, or be a surgeon thanks to a bootcamp.

And finally, complexity is exploding. A simple website was just HTML before. Then we added css. Then a server side language. Then JS. Then JS libs. Then a server side framework. Then quality tooling (version control, ci, task runners, packagers, etc). Then a client side framework. With preprocessors. And all that are moving targets, and must be integrated together. Not to mention is somebody throws in the server admin / deployment / database maintenance / nosql setup / microservice thingy to the mix.

I pity the new comers to the field. The things we can do have never been so amazing, but the thing but they become also mroe and more complex to the point everybody specialized. I know now some people that do only DB, or only server side, or even "only security". We used to comfortably do it all 15 years ago. But the job offers often still want us to do it all.

There is a reason the GAFAs pay premium: they have high quality services, and they know it takes a lot to make them work.

The China and India may change that though, as they are numerous, and skilled. But it won't come from our our societies.

I've always assumed the term "full-stack" essentially implied that as part of the front-end emphasis.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not being given away. How are the roads, police, schools, defense budgets funded?

> so that people who don't give a flying toss get their benefits

I just checked. The US and the UK both have a 4.1% unemployment rate. Many of those people are unable to work at all. our social security net means that if you're disabled you shouldn't end up honeless. Note it also pays for healthcare, so there's no chance of me being bankrupted from being hit by a car.

I would assume the same way they're funded in America, but for a lot less and with better results.

Domino's streets, McDonalds Police, Facebook Schools, Nestle Fire department,

The army is the only taxes they are okay paying

because they think their money goes towards punishing poor people instead of helping them

It’s a myth that taxes in the US are low.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State... you earn >$400k a year? If so you shouldn't have any problems in NY.

If you do make $100k, you'd be way better off in Texas: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

In other words, we're comparing apples to apples here.

Yes, if you make $100k you are better off in Texas. There are way more jobs that pay $100k (not to mention $400k) in NYC than in Texas though. I’m not sure what the apples are or what we’re comparing; if it’s tax rates than the US isn’t as low as people believe.

Where?

This is the tax in Germany for example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/ES...

For third parties unfamiliar with the setup, to pay yourself those dividends that take you from £100k to £110k, you need to take £12500 of biz profit, then £2500 goes to corporation tax, then £6000 to the taxman in personal taxes, leaving you with £4000 from that initial £12500 profit(!) which "feels" like a 68% tax to, say, a contractor in that situation (note: I am not a contractor).

This example is from 2010 back when I was a student. Since I only worked 6 monhts, I got back 300€ per month, so effectively received 2150*6 = 12,9k out of 24k paid by the employer.

Note that when you spend money, you'll most likely additionally pay 19% VAT, so out of your standard 1800€ another 324 are spent on VAT.

Hopefully you don't buy gasoline, electricity or products that are produced or transported using gasoline or electricity, because then the taxes paid will be higher.

;-)

https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontentnl/...

Which means that you'd need an income over 480k a year to get an effective tax rate >50%.

I hope I calculated that correctly: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+((x-70)*0.5195%2B...

> Then you pay 6-21% VAT over anything you buy, so yeah, in some scenarios you definitely lose >50% of your gross income to taxes.

If you count VAT, you'd also need to take into account all the benefits you get in return from the state.

Well: I gladly pay health insurance in Germany instead of having an American system. Could it be better - hell yes. There is so much bullshit being paid for and so much in the system is made to extract money. But first: taxes are not the culprit here. And second: Pay for healthcare in the US yourself and see what system you like better. Esp if you get older.

So income isn't the sole metric which determines the pay.

Also, as far as I know there is no benefit in going to the dentist, except as "We pay one dental check-up and one clean-up for year, more than that comes out of your pocket". That is at least what I was told when I went to the dentist.

It looks like the TK doesn't pay for just visiting the gym: https://www.tk.de/techniker/service/leistungen-und-mitglieds...

> Also, as far as I know there is no benefit in going to the dentist, except as "We pay one dental check-up and one clean-up for year, more than that comes out of your pocket". That is at least what I was told when I went to the dentist.

They will pay more for a tooth replacement if you visit the dentist on a regular basis: https://www.tk.de/techniker/service/leistungen-und-mitglieds...

You might be interested in their bonus programme: https://www.tk.de/techniker/service/gesundheit-und-medizin/p... Some public insurers have a more extensive one or special, reduced tariffs under some conditions (Wahltarif).

Furthermore you'd also need to take into account all the costs you can set off against tax liability.

Worst in case of health insurance, the amount you pay is dependent on your income, not your actual actuarial risk. This means that, indeed, the healthy people working are subsidizing the costs of the ones "who don't give a flying toss".

And don't get me started on things like Künstlersozialkasse...

Don't know anything about Künstlersozialkasse - "artist social fund". Is that like a tax to (supposedly) support cultural activities..?

Why the distinction? Because this work involved Photoshop and mine used emacs?

It is only available to freelancers. People working in those fields usually don't have the option of regular employment. For that reason was decided that companies using their work still need to contribute to health insurance (as all regular employers need to do as well). For everybody else the answer is: seek regular employment if you want someone else to pay half of your health insurance.

Still does not explain why there is a distinction. Why do artists get to have companies paying them part of their social security while other freelancers still need to make this out of their own pocket? If this is a good idea for the artists, why not for other professions?

Why exactly is it a black hole? Doctors need to be paid, too.

The state caught up on that eventually, and you now have to pay a monthly fee for the car of a couple hundred euros.

This "taxes pay for lazy fucks" meme needs to die.

> see the US where people die on the streets because they can't afford an ambulance

American hospitals cannot deny emergency treatment for lack of ability to pay.

Then there's VAT syphoning an extra 20% of the remaining cash.

Then there are hidden taxes charged throguh other fees being levied, even to access mandatory state services.

In the end you get healthcare, but in general the service is practically unusable and you end up having to pay for health insurance anyway.

And by the way, a large portion of your taxes is effectively "lost" between your wallet and the public services provided to the population.

- About $20k/y to provide health for a family, regardless of income. Median wage is barely double that amount. So most people in that situation forego health coverage (or pick the cheapest catastrophic-only coverage they can afford, and then are on the hook financially for any health issue).

- Still have 33% income tax

- Retirement: it's entirely up to you to save. Good luck! (rule of thumb is 15-20% of income)

- Child care: $12-24k/year/infant should your spouse have to work.

- College education: similar figures, maybe less with some assistance programs, maybe more if children go to prestigious schools. Or you can punt the bill to them and have them be on the hook for a loan.

- Oh, and nursing home for the elderly is about $30k/year so better get that retirement fund full of money. Though it's an undue burden to place on someone else, the traditional view is that having children can help reduce that cost.

In short, the US' system is not optimized for the median citizen ($59k in 2016), it's optimized for those who are in the 75th percentile or above.

UPTO 20% of what you SPEND. In the UK you pay 0% VAT toward most food and child stuff. Then 5% toward essential goods and services. THEN full VAT on the rest of the stuff.

But that doesn't equate to 20% of your remaining cash unless you are only buying pre-prepared foods and furniture with your salary, and spending every bit of it.

You don’t have to pay VAT if you don’t buy anything. You can just invest your money.

A new passport costs money. You need to pay for one if you want it. That shouldn’t be part of your income tax because nobody knows how often you will need one. Essentially those fees are on per person basis.

The NHS is very useable. I never used to pay for any private health insurance for about 5 years. It might not be convenient for you to wait but that’s your problem. That system works and saves lives... so it is usable.

I don’t even know what you mean by “lost”. Money doesn’t magically disappear. Maybe it’s a more complex system than you can imagine or haven’t thought about it hard enough.

Yeah this is just wrong. I have friends who have moved to the US, and said things like - "I wouldn't be as annoyed at how massively expensive health insurance here is, if you got any better service, but you don't"