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And if you think it's bad, it's even worse in Europe. Taking the French example: I'm an freelancer, but I used to have a contract with an American company. Th

And if you think it's bad, it's even worse in Europe. Taking the French example: I'm an freelancer, but I used to have a contract with an American company. They gave me 3x the salary most of my French colleagues would get, while keeping the exact same social advantages (they paid me through a French branch). However, to them, the salary was twice lower than what they would have paid for the same guy in the Valley. Now as a freelancer, I move a lot from companies to companies, and I hear the same complaint over and over: we can't find good devs. But when I look at the job offers they publish, it's full of buzzwords and cool attitude, yet the pay is not remotely matching the skills they are hiring for. You want somebody speaking 2 tongues, coding expertly in 3 languages (e.g: server lang + js + css), knowing a bit of sysadmin, ergonomics, architectural design, data base, and capable of understanding your undocumented stack du jour + infra. No, you can't pay that $2500 a month.

Zeebrommer 8y ago
Can you read this article? I'm in Europe and run into a message saying "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism." with the LA times since the GDPA.
- dijit 8y ago
  I have the same message in Sweden, shame they can't find to operate business without abusing user data. Still there's an archive.is link listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506215
  - samsolomon 8y ago
    Would you pay for an LA Times subscription? Do you know anybody that would? 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.
    - Markoff 8y ago
      you know there are news websites based in Europe right?
      - ceejayoz 8y ago
        Sure, and they're a) subject to European regulators and b) have a largely European audience. The same is not true for the LA Times.
        Markoff 8y ago
        and their economic model its vastly different from american?
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      You don't need to be not-GDPR-compliant to display ads and do user tracking. Just inform the user and give them the option to opt out of tracking / storing data. Ads won't be as optimized for the user, but they'll still be there. And of course they can offer a subscription.
      - vonmoltke 8y ago
        > You don't need to be not-GDPR-compliant to display ads and do user tracking. You also don't need to be tracking anything to be non-compliant.
      - zeveb 8y ago
        Of course, offering a subscription means tracking users means being subject to the GDPR!
    - nottorp 8y ago
      Item one: I wouldn't subscribe to any old school newspaper from the anglo-saxon world because they make it extremely hard to unsubscribe. About the same respect for their readers as their targeted ads they can't give up on. 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.
- sametmax 8y ago
  I use a vpn, but you can use a simple proxy. E.x: https://us.hidester.com/proxy.php?u=eJwBWACn%2F3M6ODA6IoYNRJPBBO8LlMr8EbraemMMbZ0xx54cw%2FcabwpzWX1AV4DtLuKWY5DvloA62GpiUyk7Zsq3GVJO82Yox6gpKNkBPoOOqXfFhE%2Bth4KgMbn3IjvH5ihi&b=7&f=norefer https://us.hidester.com/proxy.php?u=eJwBWACn%2F3M6ODA6IoYNRJ...
- alexgray 8y ago
  He might be using a VPN, I get the same message from the UK.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > Can you read this article? Use Tor Browser.
- Markoff 8y ago
  i see this more frequently in recent days but only here on HN, i guess it's same media house as LA times because you end up on same domain
- thg 8y ago
  Here you go: https://outline.com/vKj7vM https://outline.com/vKj7vM 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.
  - harias 8y ago
    Same here. It works for paywalls too! I wonder what their business model is though.
    - kazinator 8y ago
      Disrupt some shit and duck? :) 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.
  - owie829 8y ago
    which would appear to be a violation of their terms: 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.
    - kazinator 8y ago
      That's not terms of use; it's a feeble attempt to shift any legal issues onto the end user. 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.
  - drewmol 8y ago
    Thanks for this, pretty useful for when I'm not on my own device.
- justsomedude43 8y ago
  I just tend to move on when I see a message like that. If you rather block access to 400-500 million people than sort out your privacy policy and how you manage sensitive data, then so be it. Stay away from such websites!
- HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
  Just get a VPN like the Chinese posters use.
emilfihlman 8y ago
Exactly 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.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > All tech companies in Finland are like "We can't find enough competent coders!" and newspapers are publishing that as is. 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.
  - swebs 8y ago
    >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. 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.
    - JTbane 8y ago
      100% agree. It's all about the money.
vfc1 8y ago
I've worked around in a couple of european countries and I can confirm that the freelance rates for software development today are the same or typically less than in 2001. 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.
- gt2 8y ago
  How is that enforced on the employer side, keeping employees in their contract?
  - vfc1 8y ago
    They can terminate your freelance contract with a one week notice, but on the other hand, we can't terminate the contract on our side under any circumstances. All we can do is wait for the contract to finish and then not renew it. Its perfectly legal, a lawyer told me.
    - CamTin 8y ago
      Surely they can't make you work, right? That's called slavery.
      - getsugablitz2 8y ago
        My bet would be that the contract's early termination would lead to some heavy penalty that effectively forces them to continue.
muse900 8y ago
My example comes from Greece where I reside for the past 9 months. 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!
- mkohlmyr 8y ago
  I wonder if it's quite as simple as being reducible to salary as a single (or majority) variable. I tend to think people are willing to work a poorly paid job if there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel (career advancement, primarily). (As a casual outside observer, and with all due respect) My bet would be that a pervasive sense of pointlessness or helplessness in society is an equal partner along with low entry level salaries in the case of Greece and many countries that face similar struggles.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    And it doesn’t help that large companies use to hire jobs that are low skilled directly and at least there was an opportunity for advancement. But now with most of those jobs being contracted out, there is no chance for advancement. 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.
geezerjay 8y ago
That's so true. Employers in general complain that they can't buy filet mignon for the price of hot dogs, and that's suppose to be the employee's problem. 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.
- mabbo 8y ago
  > they can't buy filet mignon for the price of hot dogs 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".
  - toomanyrichies 8y ago
    That is a good analogy. Another one I've heard is "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."
- slantyyz 8y ago
  >> Employers in general complain that they can't buy filet mignon for the price of hot dogs, and that's suppose to be the employee's problem. 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.
  - totony 8y ago
    I've seen this a lot, a lot of employers seem to think they're doing their employee a favor and are insulted when they demand higher salary/better hours, but they are quick to mourn their loss and to say they can't find anyone when the employee decides to leave.
merinowool 8y ago
Also taxes are extreme in Europe. You work hard to earn this money to make future for yourself and yet you have to give away sometimes more than half of it, so that people who don't give a flying toss get their benefits. I so hate socialist Europe...
- Nursie 8y ago
  Oh shush, taxes are not 'extreme' in most of Europe, and you get a lot for your money - healthcare for example.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    Income taxes tend to cover up to 50% of your income. 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.
    - martimarkov 8y ago
      Yeah up to 50%. Very rarely. 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.
    - jermaustin1 8y ago
      >Then there's VAT syphoning an extra 20% of the remaining cash. 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.
Nursie 8y ago
I see this a lot in the UK, and it's why I'm now a contractor. 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.
- vfc1 8y ago
  In the UK I guess it depends a lot on the region, those are not, for example, London rates, right?
  - eertami 8y ago
    Anecdotally, it doesn't seem so. Even straight out of University with 0 years experience, salaries among my cohort seemed to be between 30-40k GBP and this was some years ago. Not to say that there isn't companies making terrible offers in London, but I don't know people working for them.
  - jermaustin1 8y ago
    I do contract webdev work for a multi-national in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut. The london office posted a job that is exactly what I do but is paid 5 times less. At the Edinburgh office, 7 times less. 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.
    - na85 8y ago
      Part of that cost of rental is location. London is a world class city, highly desirable by millions of people as a place to live. Connecticut isn't.
      - qaq 8y ago
        The post was not about London vs Connecticut but about pay-scale relative to the cost of living.
throwaway494949 8y ago
If you're a senior software engineer, come to Sweden. You'll at least get 6000 usd/month as an employee. Management usually has a background in tech, you get lots of vacation, parental leave, etc. You're not expected to stay longer than 5 pm and working from home is common. There are many interesting jobs in finance, telecom, automotive, entertainment, medicine, defence, and there are plenty of startups. 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.
- misja111 8y ago
  Better yet, come to Switzerland and earn > 10K usd/ month; and on top of that, you pay only a fraction of the Swedish taxes.
  - qaq 8y ago
    I thought it was pretty tough on immigration side of things?
    - sametmax 8y ago
      Depends of the country. If you are french, it's quite easy to work there. If you are Estonian, probably less. There are not part of europe, so they do whatever they want.
      - magduf 8y ago
        >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.
        sametmax 8y ago
        Yeah, and the internet is not the web, but when I say I'm going to surf the internet, you get my point I think.
pc86 8y ago
How many people are experts in a non-JS server language and CSS at the same time? Assuming anyone even falls into that category, how many of them want to work for someone else as opposed to just doing their own thing?
- sametmax 8y ago
  That's what the job offer requests, not what they need or what they will get.
- unclebucknasty 8y ago
  >How many people are experts in a non-JS server language and CSS at the same time? I've always assumed the term "full-stack" essentially implied that as part of the front-end emphasis.
dredalious 8y ago
How and where did you find a US remote job whilst being/remaining in the EU? I'm a bit in the same street as you (freelancer, Belgium, previous experience with remote work). 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.
- sametmax 8y ago
  > How and where did you find a US remote job whilst being/remaining in the EU? 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.
  - expertentipp 8y ago
    mp3 is ok for me too
    - chrshawkes 8y ago
      I prefer .mp4's
frenchdev 8y ago
I have worked for 5 diferent french companies as a developper and this is so true. They all complain because they can't find developpers, sometimes its not even that they can't find "good" developpers its just that they can't find any developpers willing to work for them. Then when you see what they wan't to pay i just laugh. Someone helping on a kitchen in a restaurant can earn the same as a developper here in france. Most of the devs in Paris earn like 2000 per month after tax. Its just a joke, and when you get paid a decen't salary the marketing/finance/lawyers complain beacuse you are "just a developper".
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- poutrathor 8y ago
  The sad truth is that Big Companies are always cutting prices. It's impossible to get contracts at decent prices to shovel it down to the devs. I see both sides of the equation and in France you can't get clients if daily rates are too highs ; then you struggle to pay people what they truly deserve. 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
  - expertentipp 8y ago
    > 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 !" 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:)
kilo_bravo_3 8y ago
My job takes me to Frankfurt and Brussels once or twice per year for four weeks at a time. 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.
- magduf 8y ago
  >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. This sounds like a job that would be perfect for me. Where do you find a software job like this?
  - aloner 8y ago
    Just send him your business card and he'll pass it to HR.
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      Well played.
quotidium 8y ago
Oh, hey, wait, let's not forget the daily standup rituals of agile scrum behavior modification. 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.
- unclebucknasty 8y ago
  I've definitely seen agile implementations that are burnout hamster wheels.
- sametmax 8y ago
  If the scrum has 20 people, something is really wrong.
  - quotidium 8y ago
    Sometimes you get stuck on multiple scrums, back-to-back. Separate projects, but the same plans and activities each.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      Then that's not agile. 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.
      - geezerjay 8y ago
        > Then that's not agile. 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.
abandonliberty 8y ago
>No, you can't pay that $2500 a month. 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.
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  Maybe, but you have to be pretty smart to be a competent software engineer. Most people just aren't capable of it (just like most people aren't capable of being a lawyer or a civil engineer).
- sametmax 8y ago
  Good luck. 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.
sli 8y ago
This is also amplified by tech companies in "non-tech" areas. I know I make less than I should, but my options are very limited unless I want to add a long (and extremely dangerous) commute. Moving is more expensive than I can afford right now. 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.

Zeebrommer 8y ago

Can you read this article? I'm in Europe and run into a message saying "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism." with the LA times since the GDPA.

dijit 8y ago
I have the same message in Sweden, shame they can't find to operate business without abusing user data. Still there's an archive.is link listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506215
- samsolomon 8y ago
  Would you pay for an LA Times subscription? Do you know anybody that would? 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.
  - Markoff 8y ago
    you know there are news websites based in Europe right?
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      Sure, and they're a) subject to European regulators and b) have a largely European audience. The same is not true for the LA Times.
      - Markoff 8y ago
        and their economic model its vastly different from american?
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    You don't need to be not-GDPR-compliant to display ads and do user tracking. Just inform the user and give them the option to opt out of tracking / storing data. Ads won't be as optimized for the user, but they'll still be there. And of course they can offer a subscription.
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      > You don't need to be not-GDPR-compliant to display ads and do user tracking. You also don't need to be tracking anything to be non-compliant.
    - zeveb 8y ago
      Of course, offering a subscription means tracking users means being subject to the GDPR!
  - nottorp 8y ago
    Item one: I wouldn't subscribe to any old school newspaper from the anglo-saxon world because they make it extremely hard to unsubscribe. About the same respect for their readers as their targeted ads they can't give up on. 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.
sametmax 8y ago
I use a vpn, but you can use a simple proxy. E.x: https://us.hidester.com/proxy.php?u=eJwBWACn%2F3M6ODA6IoYNRJPBBO8LlMr8EbraemMMbZ0xx54cw%2FcabwpzWX1AV4DtLuKWY5DvloA62GpiUyk7Zsq3GVJO82Yox6gpKNkBPoOOqXfFhE%2Bth4KgMbn3IjvH5ihi&b=7&f=norefer https://us.hidester.com/proxy.php?u=eJwBWACn%2F3M6ODA6IoYNRJ...
alexgray 8y ago
He might be using a VPN, I get the same message from the UK.
wolfgke 8y ago
> Can you read this article? Use Tor Browser.
Markoff 8y ago
i see this more frequently in recent days but only here on HN, i guess it's same media house as LA times because you end up on same domain
thg 8y ago
Here you go: https://outline.com/vKj7vM https://outline.com/vKj7vM 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.
- harias 8y ago
  Same here. It works for paywalls too! I wonder what their business model is though.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    Disrupt some shit and duck? :) 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.
- owie829 8y ago
  which would appear to be a violation of their terms: 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.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    That's not terms of use; it's a feeble attempt to shift any legal issues onto the end user. 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.
- drewmol 8y ago
  Thanks for this, pretty useful for when I'm not on my own device.
justsomedude43 8y ago
I just tend to move on when I see a message like that. If you rather block access to 400-500 million people than sort out your privacy policy and how you manage sensitive data, then so be it. Stay away from such websites!
HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
Just get a VPN like the Chinese posters use.

emilfihlman 8y ago

Exactly 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.

wolfgke 8y ago
> All tech companies in Finland are like "We can't find enough competent coders!" and newspapers are publishing that as is. 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.
- swebs 8y ago
  >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. 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.
  - JTbane 8y ago
    100% agree. It's all about the money.

vfc1 8y ago

I've worked around in a couple of european countries and I can confirm that the freelance rates for software development today are the same or typically less than in 2001. 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.

gt2 8y ago
How is that enforced on the employer side, keeping employees in their contract?
- vfc1 8y ago
  They can terminate your freelance contract with a one week notice, but on the other hand, we can't terminate the contract on our side under any circumstances. All we can do is wait for the contract to finish and then not renew it. Its perfectly legal, a lawyer told me.
  - CamTin 8y ago
    Surely they can't make you work, right? That's called slavery.
    - getsugablitz2 8y ago
      My bet would be that the contract's early termination would lead to some heavy penalty that effectively forces them to continue.

muse900 8y ago

My example comes from Greece where I reside for the past 9 months. 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!

mkohlmyr 8y ago
I wonder if it's quite as simple as being reducible to salary as a single (or majority) variable. I tend to think people are willing to work a poorly paid job if there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel (career advancement, primarily). (As a casual outside observer, and with all due respect) My bet would be that a pervasive sense of pointlessness or helplessness in society is an equal partner along with low entry level salaries in the case of Greece and many countries that face similar struggles.
- scarface74 8y ago
  And it doesn’t help that large companies use to hire jobs that are low skilled directly and at least there was an opportunity for advancement. But now with most of those jobs being contracted out, there is no chance for advancement. 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.

geezerjay 8y ago

That's so true. Employers in general complain that they can't buy filet mignon for the price of hot dogs, and that's suppose to be the employee's problem. 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.

mabbo 8y ago
> they can't buy filet mignon for the price of hot dogs 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".
- toomanyrichies 8y ago
  That is a good analogy. Another one I've heard is "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."
slantyyz 8y ago
>> Employers in general complain that they can't buy filet mignon for the price of hot dogs, and that's suppose to be the employee's problem. 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.
- totony 8y ago
  I've seen this a lot, a lot of employers seem to think they're doing their employee a favor and are insulted when they demand higher salary/better hours, but they are quick to mourn their loss and to say they can't find anyone when the employee decides to leave.

merinowool 8y ago

Also taxes are extreme in Europe. You work hard to earn this money to make future for yourself and yet you have to give away sometimes more than half of it, so that people who don't give a flying toss get their benefits. I so hate socialist Europe...

Nursie 8y ago
Oh shush, taxes are not 'extreme' in most of Europe, and you get a lot for your money - healthcare for example.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  Income taxes tend to cover up to 50% of your income. 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.
  - martimarkov 8y ago
    Yeah up to 50%. Very rarely. 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.
  - jermaustin1 8y ago
    >Then there's VAT syphoning an extra 20% of the remaining cash. 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.

Nursie 8y ago

I see this a lot in the UK, and it's why I'm now a contractor. 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.

vfc1 8y ago
In the UK I guess it depends a lot on the region, those are not, for example, London rates, right?
- eertami 8y ago
  Anecdotally, it doesn't seem so. Even straight out of University with 0 years experience, salaries among my cohort seemed to be between 30-40k GBP and this was some years ago. Not to say that there isn't companies making terrible offers in London, but I don't know people working for them.
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  I do contract webdev work for a multi-national in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut. The london office posted a job that is exactly what I do but is paid 5 times less. At the Edinburgh office, 7 times less. 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.
  - na85 8y ago
    Part of that cost of rental is location. London is a world class city, highly desirable by millions of people as a place to live. Connecticut isn't.
    - qaq 8y ago
      The post was not about London vs Connecticut but about pay-scale relative to the cost of living.

throwaway494949 8y ago

If you're a senior software engineer, come to Sweden. You'll at least get 6000 usd/month as an employee. Management usually has a background in tech, you get lots of vacation, parental leave, etc. You're not expected to stay longer than 5 pm and working from home is common. There are many interesting jobs in finance, telecom, automotive, entertainment, medicine, defence, and there are plenty of startups. 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.

misja111 8y ago
Better yet, come to Switzerland and earn > 10K usd/ month; and on top of that, you pay only a fraction of the Swedish taxes.
- qaq 8y ago
  I thought it was pretty tough on immigration side of things?
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Depends of the country. If you are french, it's quite easy to work there. If you are Estonian, probably less. There are not part of europe, so they do whatever they want.
    - magduf 8y ago
      >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.
      - sametmax 8y ago
        Yeah, and the internet is not the web, but when I say I'm going to surf the internet, you get my point I think.

pc86 8y ago

How many people are experts in a non-JS server language and CSS at the same time? Assuming anyone even falls into that category, how many of them want to work for someone else as opposed to just doing their own thing?

sametmax 8y ago
That's what the job offer requests, not what they need or what they will get.
unclebucknasty 8y ago
>How many people are experts in a non-JS server language and CSS at the same time? I've always assumed the term "full-stack" essentially implied that as part of the front-end emphasis.

dredalious 8y ago

How and where did you find a US remote job whilst being/remaining in the EU? I'm a bit in the same street as you (freelancer, Belgium, previous experience with remote work). 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.

sametmax 8y ago
> How and where did you find a US remote job whilst being/remaining in the EU? 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.
- expertentipp 8y ago
  mp3 is ok for me too
  - chrshawkes 8y ago
    I prefer .mp4's

frenchdev 8y ago

I have worked for 5 diferent french companies as a developper and this is so true. They all complain because they can't find developpers, sometimes its not even that they can't find "good" developpers its just that they can't find any developpers willing to work for them. Then when you see what they wan't to pay i just laugh. Someone helping on a kitchen in a restaurant can earn the same as a developper here in france. Most of the devs in Paris earn like 2000 per month after tax. Its just a joke, and when you get paid a decen't salary the marketing/finance/lawyers complain beacuse you are "just a developper".

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
poutrathor 8y ago
The sad truth is that Big Companies are always cutting prices. It's impossible to get contracts at decent prices to shovel it down to the devs. I see both sides of the equation and in France you can't get clients if daily rates are too highs ; then you struggle to pay people what they truly deserve. 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
- expertentipp 8y ago
  > 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 !" 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:)

kilo_bravo_3 8y ago

My job takes me to Frankfurt and Brussels once or twice per year for four weeks at a time. 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.

magduf 8y ago
>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. This sounds like a job that would be perfect for me. Where do you find a software job like this?
- aloner 8y ago
  Just send him your business card and he'll pass it to HR.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    Well played.

quotidium 8y ago

Oh, hey, wait, let's not forget the daily standup rituals of agile scrum behavior modification. 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.

unclebucknasty 8y ago
I've definitely seen agile implementations that are burnout hamster wheels.
sametmax 8y ago
If the scrum has 20 people, something is really wrong.
- quotidium 8y ago
  Sometimes you get stuck on multiple scrums, back-to-back. Separate projects, but the same plans and activities each.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Then that's not agile. 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.
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      > Then that's not agile. 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.

abandonliberty 8y ago

>No, you can't pay that $2500 a month. 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.

jeffreyrogers 8y ago
Maybe, but you have to be pretty smart to be a competent software engineer. Most people just aren't capable of it (just like most people aren't capable of being a lawyer or a civil engineer).
sametmax 8y ago
Good luck. 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.

sli 8y ago

This is also amplified by tech companies in "non-tech" areas. I know I make less than I should, but my options are very limited unless I want to add a long (and extremely dangerous) commute. Moving is more expensive than I can afford right now. 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.