My firm's advertised billing rate for my time is $175/hour as a Sr Software Engineer. I take home ~$80/hour, accounting for benefits and time off. If I freelanced I could presumably charge my firm's rate, or even more.
This is in a mid-COL city in the US, not a coastal tier 1 city with prime software talent that could charge even more.
Ironically, the freelance consulting world is largely on fire due to the lowered barrier of entry and flood of new consultants using AI to perform at higher levels, driving prices down simply through increased supply.
I wouldn't be surprised if AI was also eating consultants from the demand side as well, enabling would-be employers to do a higher % of tasks themselves that they would have previously needed to hire for.
That's what they are billed at, what they take home from that is probably much lower. At my org we bill folks out for ~$150/hr and their take home is ~$80/hr
On the one hand, there's the moral argument: we need janitors and plumbers and warehouse workers and retail workers and nurses and teachers and truck drivers for society to function. Why should their time be valued less than anyone elses?
On the other hand there's the economic argument: the supply of people who can stock shelves is greater than the supply of people who can "create value" at a tech company, so the latter deserve more pay.
Depending on how you look at the world, high salaries can seem insane.
I don’t even remotely understand what you’re saying is wrong. Median salaries are significantly higher in the US compared to any other region. Nominal and PPP adjusted AND accounting for taxes/social benefits. This is bad?
Those jobs you referenced do not have the same requirements nor the same wages…seems like your just clumping all of those together as “lower class” so you can be champion of the downtrodden
Que haces che! Two of us from Argentina; it seems like a traditional thing with inflation that my father taught me a long time ago to keep food for at least 2 weeks.
I'll try to do the same with the pills, sounds reasonable and low-effort
The two weeks are mostly to avoid short suply cuts events. For inflation the idea is to keep as few pesos as possible at the end of the month.
For example, when we got the usual half extra salary in July, one year we used it to buy liquid laundry soap for the whole year instead of keeping the money in the bank. It has a good shelf life and high price to volume ratio.
A classic of self-promotion. So, with your own criteria, technically, we can say also you “copied?" the name, concept, style of this previous application developed by the Santa Fe Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_(simulation)
> If "systemd" is your magnum opus, we need to have a serious talk about your personal taste in software architecture. A project that’s more controversial than pineapple on pizza? Bravo, Lennart, you’ve truly made a mark in the realm of infamy.
One thing I realized after living in Sweden for eight months is the lack of third places, or at least third places similar to what I found in Italy. In order to go to a place, you need to pay, book an appointment, and be "known." Living in Turin, on the other hand, was a story of magical encounters in the street, bars, clubs, etc. These third places (Murazti, for example) gave me people who have now become very good friends of mine that I can trust.
For me, as an immigrant in both countries, it's essential to have those places, and the lack of them made me depressed, sad, and even suicidal (during the Swedish winter).
Not having someone to talk to is sad and unhealthy. Let's not make this an endangered species; it is a public health issue.
But it sounds like in Italy you entered the coffee shop to drink coffee and socialize - which fulfills the mission of a coffee shop.
However, I noticed that in post-pandemic Poland and the USA where i spend a lot of time, coffee shops are starting to become more like coworking spaces where the "laptop class" is demanding not only perpetual space but worst of all, silence, since they are busy working and concentrating. It is simply not what it used to be.
I disagree with the silence bit. I am a frequent remote worker at coffee shops across the USA and people working have noise canceling headphones usually, I have never seen anyone demand silence in a coffee shop. Libraries are a different story.
We were asked by the staff to re-seat at different table from the 'laptop class' in Montreal cafe because we were speaking in normal voice. Sample of one, but still.
This is what a community is. This can usually be maintained by local businessowners. Not so much by large megacorps who have no stake in the local community.
But, we are making local businessowners an endangered species. How? Ever-increasing regulation, so the only ones left with a budget willing navigate the federal, state, and local regulations - you guessed it, large megacorps.
Economies of scale have always pushed businesses towards consolidation - that's literally what I was taught in Econ 101. There were large megacorps in the Gilded Era which long pre-dated the modern regulatory environment. It ultimately took government intervention (trust-busting) to change things.
Since OP mentioned Italy it's worth mentioning places like Rome have plenty of public spaces that easily accessible which are great places to hang out and meet people. Here in the US we have parks by my house but they're really just giant fields w/ a baseball diamond. Maybe a place scape. What good is that for anyone?
>magical encounters in the street, bars, clubs, etc.
Sounds good, doesn't work. The chance that the stranger has something in common with me, and he's in a mood to talk to me, is extremely low.
I kept going out and trying to socialize in such places, but it turned out to be a massive waste of time without even a single tiny success, and as my life keeps getting busier, the mental cost of being around loud strangers makes less and less sense.
One off chance encounters like that on a bar or street put a lot of pressure on the specific encounter and don't allow a more gradual "get to know you" phase.
Do you have a social activity that you've neglected with the lack of available friends? Or one that you're interested in but never had the chance to get involved with? This is perhaps mundane advice, but check if there's a group that does that activity and try to become a regular. They're always very welcoming to newcomers and you'll find yourself well established in the group after a few returns.
While I agree with everything you have said, and it's been my motto since I read, "I'm sure you're joking, Mr. Feynman." The point of the post was to point out (maybe I did it wrongly) that those things you have described are pretty impossible given the ecosystem we have nowadays in Javascript (as a whole!). Of course, you can try to theorize and try to get a hypothesis on things and then try to prove those, but it's just too hard to keep track of everything.
In addition, we are using lock files and good practices but it's just too much to handle for our small team (small startup) so we will plan to migrate onto a more stable platform.
It's really funny the heated arguments this post generated but I have been using Javascript for 12 years to these days, still this looks as a nightmare to me.
Tsdoing has a good video trying to install React from scratch, that's exactly how I felt during this debugging process
Another random story from this week: we have been using `nanoid` to generate IDs internally for an internal tool. Apparently, they did a breaking change release, and now you cannot use it anymore on commonJS env. See my point? where's the hypothesis we can make? It's hours and hours spent tinkering with code and other people's dependencies, and if, as you said, put a theory that theory won't match if you think how real systems work (the networking section on the blog post)
> The point of the post was to point out (maybe I did it wrongly) that those things you have described are pretty impossible given the ecosystem we have nowadays in Javascript (as a whole!).
That's the thing, nothing you have asserted as impossible actually is as you'll see throughout this thread. I have been writing JavaScript/Typescript professionally since for about the same amount of time and I am not intimidated or challenged by my projects in the way you lament about.
That being said, if you've been at it 12 years and this is still your opinion, fair enough, try something else then.
You don't have a mechanism of trust in Javascript. Typescript up to this point is just sugar syntax. npm is a dumpsterfire (see npm everything package)
If you are not intimidated by the complexities of this Babel tower, it's up to you. For me, this was just a personal catharsis in my personal blog that I wrote mostly for me (and I didn't share it here)
I believe there's no point on discussing this with particularly you since you have been commenting all around trying to just confirm your view instead of just comprehend that this is not sustainable for new developers (try to follow the conversations on packaging, lol)
It's simply too much burden just to maintain someone else mess. We will pay a high bill in the future for all of this.
> I believe there's no point on discussing this with particularly you since you have been commenting all around trying to just confirm your view instead of just comprehend that this is not sustainable for new developers
I don't need to confirm my view at all. Advocating for one's view doesn't imply a lack of conviction, rather the opposite.
No need for a personal attack here. It's definitely sustainable for new developers who learn the stack. It has a learning curve but so does everything else. I've built applications in just about every stack there is (except for the more esoteric stuff like OCaml, Erlang, etc) and over those years complaints like those you raised are easily levied against any language or stack that is practically used in the industry. The common thread is that these sorts of complaints arise when there are more unknowns for a developer than knowns-- and as developers we are in the business of eliminating unknowns. When you encounter unknowns and your response is "this is why this tool isn't fit for use" instead of "let me turn unknowns into knowns", this is often the result.
> (try to follow the conversations on packaging, lol)
There isn't a packaging system out there without complications, but my posts regarding NPM's behavior points to how it actually already works to reduce or eliminate the version pinning failures you appear to have hit. Now if you are using very old versions of the tooling or if you do things like remove or ignore the version pinning tooling and how it should work, then yes the kind of problems you hit can happen. But that does not mean this problem isn't already solved, or at least the problem becomes an education one; which is why I'm out here trying to solve the education problem.
> It's simply too much burden just to maintain someone else mess. We will pay a high bill in the future for all of this.
That's, like, your opinion man. I've yet to find a development stack without it's costs, and once you are fluent in how to work in the ecosystem, Javascript's are not significantly higher than any of the others. And personally the cost/benefit of the Typescript ecosystem for me is quite rosy compared to the limitations of other stacks. I'm clearly not alone in that calculus.
Well your reply still doesn't explain the administrative (not technical) reason why you had to spend some 36 hours uninterrupted hunting for this bug. Particularly since it was 'a demo' and what broke was 'PDF export', while other exports still worked. Hardly the end of the world if you ask me.
Technically though, I have hardly met this dependency update problem with C++ simply because dependencies are rarely if ever updated. Android on the other hand was a nightmare. I had colleagues quitting in a rage and swearing to never again touch Android in their life. Probably half the effort was spent fixing crap that was broken by updated dependencies. Luckily I'm back to C++ now and hope never again will I have to touch such a crazy system. The whole 'update for the sake of update' seems to be a grave problem of the Android / Kotlin / Javascript universe. The mentality is like 'bread won't be sliced anymore, eggs won't hatch, sun won't rise if we don't absolutely have the latest bleeding edge alpha version of all libraries'.
Thanks for reading it! It's the first one to get comments on my blog lol.
Yes we did use lockfiles, all over the place. However each service had a different (and mandatory) security update that modified the libraries with a non-breaking change.
From now on I will try to establish a fixed policy although given the frequency of updates in the ecosystem it will become deprecated rather quickly
To me this sounds more like a "microservices nightmare"?
What do you mean by "the service had a mandatory security update" (paraphrased)?
I'm guessing you are talking about updating packages because of warnings from "npm audit"? Or do you mean an update of some top-level package? Container image??
Anyway, update is update.
And Software tied to cloud services can always be brittle. Why no complaint about Amazon breaking semver (if the mentioned missing function was part of the public API), or the package that was breaking (if it was not)?
As I already answered, if you are using packages that break sem-ver (it can happen very easily), or packages that depend ob unsprcified behavior of another package at a specifiv version, none of that is caused by the package manager or programming language.
I love me some JS hate from an informed IT expert, but sorry, as politely as I can put it, blaming common targets of unpopularity (JS) for your personal and/or organizational issues (not understanding dependency management) seems very unprofessional to me.
The word "mandatory" is a popular slippery slope, but from your description, I can at best guess what you meant and you haven't elaborated on it.
Dependencies are not magic, they are other peoples code. If you blindly update without understanding how anything works, you are in for pain.
Because your company doesn't do the same security update on testing server, thus creating difference between two services.
Npm is highly susceptible on this if you're using uncommon libraries, especially under 1 mil downloaded libraries. However the same can applies to any other toolings or languages that you use.
