5 ms·

Jakub Konka Hired Full Time

171 points by komuW 6y ago

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
> Right now we are paying 50 USD per hour I'm really happy Zig is gaining momentum. I do hope they can raise more money. If people are paid as freelancers, 50$ is a really low compensation. You'll have to pay health insurance, retirement etc. out of your own pocket. In Germany, the rule of thumb is if you're earning below ~70€ / hour as a freelance sw dev, it is better to be employed.
- whb07 6y ago
  And if they are living in Colombia, they would be living like kings. Got to start somewhere.
  - MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
    The guy hired, Jakub Konka, is living in Warsaw. I'd be surprised if he didn't take a significant pay cut from his previous job at Microsoft.
    - yisonPylkita 6y ago
      Warsaw being one of European capitals isn’t much cheaper than any other East Germany city
  - nkozyra 6y ago
    I didn't see where jakub is living in Colombia, where did you find that?
    - m45t3r 6y ago
      I think the point is that he isn't necessary living in Germany either.
- dstick 6y ago
  For how many hours billable? If you were comfortably billing 40 hours a week for 48 weeks a year that would amount to €134.400 / year. Assuming that Germany isn’t _that_ different from the Netherlands, good luck earning that while employed as an average sw dev. Insurance and retirement isn’t that expensive.
  - lucideer 6y ago
    > If you were [...] Firstly, job security has value. Even if you manage to bill 40 hours a week (or close; I think 36-38 may be more usual for Germany), for an entire year, that is still just 1 year. Who knows how many it will be the following year. Secondly, how many freelancers actually do achieve that number of hours in a year. I don't have data but I would guess it is a small number. Thirdly, benefits do have some value. Thankfully in many European countries (though definitely not all!) they're slightly less "necessary" than in the US, but they still exist and you can't consider a full-time employee's base salary in isolation.
  - legulere 6y ago
    As a hired developer you usually get 30 days of holidays + 12 days (which is a bit more than 8 weeks). The year has 52 or 53 weeks, so you end at around 44 weeks instead of 48 weeks. That’s 123K€ per year. Then you have to still subtract the days you are going to be sick (Google says 18.4 days on average per year) and the tile you need for administrative tasks. If you work with a contract your workplace will pay half of your insurances in Germany, if you are self-employed you have to pay that yourself.
    - 0xffff2 6y ago
      >Then you have to still subtract the days you are going to be sick (Google says 18.4 days on average per year) What? Do I understand correctly that "Google says" and you find credible that on average a person takes 18.4 sick days every year? That sounds high by at least an order of magnitude to me. Even if I took a day off every time I had a slight sore throat or a moderate hangover, I still wouldn't take more than 3-4 sick days a year most years.
- Decabytes 6y ago
  The article says that in the next two years they would like to get it up to $75 an hour and it cites the things you said as reasons why. So I believe they are in agreement with you
- JediPig 6y ago
  If it was a startup in AI yes A language ran by one guy to challenge the most popular language ever, epic mistake.
- magsnus 6y ago
  In Sweden the general rule of thumb is that as a freelancer you should charge 2.4x what you want to (or normally) net since you are responsible for your own vacation-pay, sick-pay, time between projects etc. on top of taxes and expenses.
FpUser 6y ago
Congratulations. I am really happy to see Zig project reaching this stage.
losvedir 6y ago
That's great! I appreciate the full transparency here. I'm a GitHub sponsor for $5/mo, not because I actually use Zig (yet?) but because I'm interested in how this experiment goes. Andy Kelley has been doing a lot of development very publicly (check Zig's issue tracker!) and I feel I've gotten some value just out of watching his process unfold, in terms of community interaction, prioritization of features, brief exploratory experiments, etc. Plus, he seems to have, I dunno, great "taste" in language design (though I realize this is very subjective), so maybe Zig will end up somewhere great.
- geodel 6y ago
  > Plus, he seems to have, I dunno, great "taste" This. I feel something similar. It is kind of way things are arranged, the simple layout of repository, or that on average zig src file has ~500 lines of code (for Swift/Rust, it is 65/80 respectively). So yes, it is all subjective. I also feel as if zig is like more time/money is spent on books and not on bookshelves.
GavinMcG 6y ago
I really don't understand the title changes sometimes. I have no idea who Jakub Konka is. On the other hand, the old title communicated that this hiring was the first for Zig, which gives me far more context, and a prompt for my next thought which was "huh, how does that work?" That value is gone now.
- dgellow 6y ago
  I always check the domain on the right of the submission, here ziglang makes it clear it's for Zig the programming language
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    Which is nice in this case, but it still doesn't tell me what's interesting about this hiring.
    - matu3ba 6y ago
      Jakub Konka wrote the M1 linker without any spec in the last half year while having a dayjob at Microsoft.

171 points by komuW 6y ago

> Right now we are paying 50 USD per hour I'm really happy Zig is gaining momentum. I do hope they can raise more money. If people are paid as freelancers, 50$ is a really low compensation. You'll have to pay health insurance, retirement etc. out of your own pocket. In Germany, the rule of thumb is if you're earning below ~70€ / hour as a freelance sw dev, it is better to be employed.

whb07 6y ago
And if they are living in Colombia, they would be living like kings. Got to start somewhere.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  The guy hired, Jakub Konka, is living in Warsaw. I'd be surprised if he didn't take a significant pay cut from his previous job at Microsoft.
  - yisonPylkita 6y ago
    Warsaw being one of European capitals isn’t much cheaper than any other East Germany city
- nkozyra 6y ago
  I didn't see where jakub is living in Colombia, where did you find that?
  - m45t3r 6y ago
    I think the point is that he isn't necessary living in Germany either.
dstick 6y ago
For how many hours billable? If you were comfortably billing 40 hours a week for 48 weeks a year that would amount to €134.400 / year. Assuming that Germany isn’t _that_ different from the Netherlands, good luck earning that while employed as an average sw dev. Insurance and retirement isn’t that expensive.
- lucideer 6y ago
  > If you were [...] Firstly, job security has value. Even if you manage to bill 40 hours a week (or close; I think 36-38 may be more usual for Germany), for an entire year, that is still just 1 year. Who knows how many it will be the following year. Secondly, how many freelancers actually do achieve that number of hours in a year. I don't have data but I would guess it is a small number. Thirdly, benefits do have some value. Thankfully in many European countries (though definitely not all!) they're slightly less "necessary" than in the US, but they still exist and you can't consider a full-time employee's base salary in isolation.
- legulere 6y ago
  As a hired developer you usually get 30 days of holidays + 12 days (which is a bit more than 8 weeks). The year has 52 or 53 weeks, so you end at around 44 weeks instead of 48 weeks. That’s 123K€ per year. Then you have to still subtract the days you are going to be sick (Google says 18.4 days on average per year) and the tile you need for administrative tasks. If you work with a contract your workplace will pay half of your insurances in Germany, if you are self-employed you have to pay that yourself.
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    >Then you have to still subtract the days you are going to be sick (Google says 18.4 days on average per year) What? Do I understand correctly that "Google says" and you find credible that on average a person takes 18.4 sick days every year? That sounds high by at least an order of magnitude to me. Even if I took a day off every time I had a slight sore throat or a moderate hangover, I still wouldn't take more than 3-4 sick days a year most years.
Decabytes 6y ago
The article says that in the next two years they would like to get it up to $75 an hour and it cites the things you said as reasons why. So I believe they are in agreement with you
JediPig 6y ago
If it was a startup in AI yes A language ran by one guy to challenge the most popular language ever, epic mistake.
magsnus 6y ago
In Sweden the general rule of thumb is that as a freelancer you should charge 2.4x what you want to (or normally) net since you are responsible for your own vacation-pay, sick-pay, time between projects etc. on top of taxes and expenses.

FpUser 6y ago

Congratulations. I am really happy to see Zig project reaching this stage.

losvedir 6y ago

That's great! I appreciate the full transparency here. I'm a GitHub sponsor for $5/mo, not because I actually use Zig (yet?) but because I'm interested in how this experiment goes. Andy Kelley has been doing a lot of development very publicly (check Zig's issue tracker!) and I feel I've gotten some value just out of watching his process unfold, in terms of community interaction, prioritization of features, brief exploratory experiments, etc. Plus, he seems to have, I dunno, great "taste" in language design (though I realize this is very subjective), so maybe Zig will end up somewhere great.

geodel 6y ago
> Plus, he seems to have, I dunno, great "taste" This. I feel something similar. It is kind of way things are arranged, the simple layout of repository, or that on average zig src file has ~500 lines of code (for Swift/Rust, it is 65/80 respectively). So yes, it is all subjective. I also feel as if zig is like more time/money is spent on books and not on bookshelves.

GavinMcG 6y ago

I really don't understand the title changes sometimes. I have no idea who Jakub Konka is. On the other hand, the old title communicated that this hiring was the first for Zig, which gives me far more context, and a prompt for my next thought which was "huh, how does that work?" That value is gone now.

dgellow 6y ago
I always check the domain on the right of the submission, here ziglang makes it clear it's for Zig the programming language
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  Which is nice in this case, but it still doesn't tell me what's interesting about this hiring.
  - matu3ba 6y ago
    Jakub Konka wrote the M1 linker without any spec in the last half year while having a dayjob at Microsoft.