4 ms·
Would you believe that I took a $30k a year programming job as a legal immigrant in the knowledge that it would require 60+ hour weeks because it was my impress
by patio11 10y ago
Would you believe that I took a $30k a year programming job as a legal immigrant in the knowledge that it would require 60+ hour weeks because it was my impression that it was the best option available to me?
"I'm clearly not Google material; I can barely get this J2EE app working", "I perceive that I am working uphill against racism in hiring managers", "I owe my sponsor for this job because they treated me fairly", "Literally no one in my friend group or family has a better job than this at my age", "I suppose this is what 'paying my dues' means and I have been aggressively cultivated to do so since before I could read", "My BATNA is deportation", "Well they are offering a 50% premium on a grad student stipend", etc, can do an awful lot of work.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- umanwizard 10y agoWas this in Japan? (I just read the first few sentences of the bio on your blog). If so, how different is 30k USD there from market rates? And what country are you from originally? I wonder if anything is at all different because of differences between Japanese and US culture with respect to discussing compensation, what is typically expected of workers, and so on. (Not trying to poke holes in your story -- just genuinely curious!)
- keerthiko 10y agopatio11's comments rang perfectly true of the average Indian software engineer's line of thinking and contextual awareness as well. I didn't grow up or work in India, but I have a lot of friends who do/did and can see them constrained by this thinking.
- patio11 10y agoThis was in Japan. I'm from the US. It's market for a 25 year old in Nagoya, but the point is that despite the fact that there were really straightforward ways to get triple that I in fact did not.