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Except: - no country pay like the US. Worked for silicon valley companies remotely, and made twice the money I made in France, while being 3 times cheaper than

Except: - no country pay like the US. Worked for silicon valley companies remotely, and made twice the money I made in France, while being 3 times cheaper than local competition. - no country have the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers the US has. - few countries even have has many interesting projects. If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. - the USA don't care about your diploma, only what you can do. You will be limited in opportunities and earnings depending of your background in many countries. - talent attract talent. It's better to work with companies already full of good devs, the colleagues are coolers, the projects are more interesting and the infra will be better. Inertia is in favor of the USA. So no, it will break no monopoly. If anything, it will make it easier to work FOR the US.

twox2 5y ago
On the topic of diploma - I get the sense this is not exactly true for FAANG
- a_t48 5y ago
  No diploma here - still have recruiters from at least 3 of the 5 messaging me. Edit: downvoters, care to explain a little? Why would they waste their time on me if they weren't interested in me working there?
  - twox2 5y ago
    Do you / have you ever worked at one?
    - groby_b 5y ago
      Working at one for over a decade now. I've got no degree. Both people on my team and in adjacent team without degrees. Also many people with super-interesting degrees nothing to do with CS. So, yes, you can get hired at FAANG & friends without a CS degree. But: I would suggest to always read that as "absolutely go for it, even if you didn't get a degree", not "skip getting a degree, it doesn't make a difference".
    - tazjin 5y ago
      I used to work at Google/DeepMind and don't remember anyone even asking about it during the original interview process. (I did not go to uni)
    - pocket_cheese 5y ago
      I have worked for FAANG without a diploma. While it is rare, you can definitely do it if you grind enough leet code :D
    - a_t48 5y ago
      I've interviewed at Google twice - passed once, declined continuing the process due to not being super interested in the product. I've declined interviewing at Facebook/Amazon. I haven't talked with Netflix nor Apple. I have not worked for one, but have never gotten any indication that the lack of diploma would be a problem. I gather that a decade of professional experience makes the lack of diploma irrelevant. As best as I can tell the only time it has hurt me is when I tried to emigrate out of the US and was unable to as some countries require a degree to get a work visa, even with a job offer.
      - twox2 5y ago
        My anecdotal data is that I went really far in the process with a FAANG, got a verbal offer, and it was rescinded (never got the official offer). I always suspected it was due to lack of a degree. And no one explicitly ever asked, but they did ask for a rather detailed work/education history, and I never claimed to have one. I really suspect that they SAY they don't care if you have a degree or not, but at the end of the day I think they do.
        a_t48 5y ago
        I would lean towards the position being filled by a better candidate or the team having a hiring freeze. Who can say, though? That's a large waste of everyone's time and the company's money.
        twox2 5y ago
        Perhaps! I can only speculate since I wasn't given any concrete feedback.
        filoleg 5y ago
        >My anecdotal data is that I went really far in the process with a FAANG, got a verbal offer, and it was rescinded (never got the official offer). I always suspected it was due to lack of a degree. If your lack of degree was a dealbreaker, they wouldn't go with the interview process to completion. It makes zero sense to waste time and resources on a candidate that you already determined you aren't going to hire. My team had to interview 50+ people just to fill a couple of positions, and every interview is taking away from precious time that could have been spent working on the product. Wasting our time interviewing someone we won't hire due to a lack of degree makes no sense. Not only it would be wasting our own time, we would also be wasting the candidate's time, and all of it for exactly zero gain. There is no grand conspiracy where FAANG companies interview candidates with no degrees all the way till the end, and then drop them due to the lack of degree, it is just illogical all around. Basically, if you got an interview, and especially if you got to the onsite rounds, nothing that is on your resume can disqualify you at this point.
    - filoleg 5y ago
      I am working at one now (kind of, since MSFT doesn't really make it into the abbreviation), and one of the brightest senior engineers on my team had no degree whatsoever, just a high-school diploma (using past tense, because he left for another company a couple of years ago). I also have a bunch of friends who currently work Google (some from college, some former colleagues) and a few at FB, and all of them know at least one coworker without a college degree. And when our team was recruiting experienced candidates (5-10 years or more), at no point we ever cared about their degree or lack thereof (aside from some specialized research positions that typically require graduate degrees). For entry level though, yeah, if you are in your early 20s without much industry experience, it is gonna be much tougher to get hired without a degree.
      - lazyasciiart 5y ago
        It's getting harder. I have a friend who worked at MSFT out of high school >10 years ago, and was told several years in that he could never be promoted beyond his current level without a degree. Decided to take a couple years off to get a degree in something random (theology) and when he applied for his old job, now +BA, was told he needed a CS degree to be qualified for it.
        filoleg 5y ago
        Was your friend in engineering? And what kind of level was your friend shooting for? Because yeah, if you are shooting for a director or a partner level position, you better have a degree. But for a regular senior engineer position? Not at all. Also, i don't know when your friend tried to get re-hired and at which level. The whole "we don't care as much about degrees anymore" is a fairly recent thing, I would say 5 or so years. And of course, if your friend only worked at MSFT for a few years, then left to do school, and then tried to come back, they would be probably still shooting for a close-to-entry level position, not a senior. And entry-level without a degree or something else to compensate for it is going to be really tough. Normally it is compensated by either years of experience or something else (side projects, major open-source contribs, etc.), hence why I never saw someone without a degree at entry-level, but plenty who are senior engineers.
- saratogacx 5y ago
  I've worked at both Amazon and Microsoft. I'm not even an HS graduate. I worked my way in through contract gigs until I was able to get an FTE role. After the first one, moving to another place was no big deal. I was asked about it by HR only to make sure their records were correct and never heard of it again.
  - moneywoes 5y ago
    Any tips on getting the first one? How was your algorithms prep?
Gene5ive 5y ago
Yeah, I've heard about a classist element in Europe that might make the path I took unlikely. I dropped out of college, toiled in the service industry for 10 years, got sick of it, went to code school, got a tech job and 6 years later earn $130k. Still no degree. Is it true you can't do that there or is that just a stereotype?
- mistrial9 5y ago
  I started a conversation with a visiting EU PhD and asked about programming languages. In a very good smelling way, he avoided the question. Apparently it is "blue collar" work to do actual programming? This one PhD did zero actual programming, apparently.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    It's slowly changing, but yeah, coding is not considered a high status job here. Now, it's better though, it's not considered a low status job anymore :)
    - filoleg 5y ago
      No joke. I lived in the US for a while, but I am from Eastern Europe, and so are my parents. Back in high school about a decade ago, I decided that I want to do either an engineering degree or a CS degree. I got a reaction from my parents that was the opposite of what most of my US peers would have expected to get. For context, we have already been living in the US for quite a bit at that point. Even my parents, who are neither doctors or lawyers themselves, considered engineering/CS to be a grunt and pretty much blue-collar work (not that there is anything wrong with blue collar work at all, but I was not going to pick that fight with my parents at the time when I lived with them). And even now, once they know how much software devs can actually get paid in the US, the only thing that's changed is that they stopped pestering me about it. But I definitely took a note of how when the conversations with their friends or other relatives go, my parents still try to avoid mentioning what I studied or what I do as my career (aside from namedropping the company names, because apparently big US corps carry some weight with those people). All while also letting me know every single time how awesome their friends' son or daughter is, because they are a doctor or a lawyer. /rantover I cannot understate how good it feels to me in the US in this aspect, because it feels like most people here on average absolutely don't care which path you took and don't even question it. Sure, some are still judgemental, and some of them still assign weight to the outcomes you got. But I would rather get some weight assigned to the outcomes I got, as opposed to the same weight being assigned to some stupid bs like "oh, your degree isn't of the right class of respect, so no matter what you do, you ain't going to be as much of a respected person as a doctor/lawyer". Just the entire concept of "respectable" degrees makes me feel a certain kind of way that I absolutely hate. If you want to talk about degrees based on any measurable metric, you are welcome to. But "respectability" of a degree is not measurable, and is the most snotty bs that is way too commonplace outside of the US. I had some friends from SK (so not even the same continent as EU), and they echoed fairly similar sentiments in regards to the cultural sentiment about engineers/tech workers in their country. And the thing is, I cannot even really blame my parents, because it isn't just them, it is pretty much what the majority there believes.
evancox100 5y ago
The point isn’t that existing companies in the US or wherever will lose talent, but that the existing companies might retain or even gain talent, and that the workers will reside in locales other than the US. Your points seem to be in favor of the author’s argument that the importance of physically residing in the US will decrease, and that there is an opportunity for other locales/governments to attract remote workers.
- adventured 5y ago
  The parent's premise is that it will make the US more powerful economically and make its tech companies more dominant. Which is exactly what it will do. The local tech labor supply will go to work for US corporations, which pay better than most everyone else. That will cement the US hegemony globally in tech (the sole major exception being domestic China, and to a far lesser extent domestic Russia). The US tech juggernaut will buy up the world's talent without having to plant expensive offices everywhere; that will occupy the talent pool and reduce competition to US tech.
  - echelon 5y ago
    > it will make the US more powerful economically and make its tech companies more dominant. Which is exactly what it will do. Why wouldn't other nations react accordingly? What power does the US have to stop this? 1) Other nations increasingly have a large supply of high-skill talent. 2) Other nations will use capital and subsidies to launch their own tech firms employing their own workers. There are startup accelerators spinning up all over Europe and Asia to capture, retain, and reward domestic talent. They see how the game is played now. 3) Other nations will create more regulations that limit how much US tech companies can participate in their economy and monopolize their citizens as consumers. This is already happening with major international antitrust rulings hitting Google, Apple, and Facebook. This is the nail in the coffin. They will foster and protect their own industry at the expense of the US. There are many more international tech companies participating at the global stage these days. Atlasssian, JetBrains, Spotify, SoftBank, TSM, ASML, miHoYo... Not to mention all of the Chinese tech companies popping up. Epic Games is 50% owned by Tencent. This trend will continue. The US only has 300M people, and it's not growing with the same significant postwar tailwinds it once had. It can't keep the wealth and talent monopoly forever. Just look at how much the middle and lower classes are hurting as a symptom of this global rebalancing. You can also look to other industries. Automotive, aerospace, etc. The US isn't peerless anymore. Not saying this is good or bad, but it's definitely happening.
tshaddox 5y ago
Aren't the things you listed precisely the things that article is saying will change? The point of the article is that countries with favorable time zones for U.S. business hours can implement policies to attract immigrants to come and work remotely for U.S. companies.
mgh2 5y ago
Isn't that what the article implies? Talent will be more distributed, but working for US companies.
EugeneOZ 5y ago
> the USA don't care about your diploma, only what you can do That's a total bullshit, unfortunately. Everything else is correct.
- jaegerpicker 5y ago
  Now a days, it's very much true. I've worked for FAANG companies, a number of mid-major sized tech/internet companies, have had a engineering job for 20+ years, been a CTO and co-founded a VC backed company. All without any degree, in fact in the 20+ years in the field I've never once been out of work. Early in my career I was rejected a couple of times for lack of degree but I can't even remember the last time I was asked about a degree. I know a number of other long term successful non-degree engineers also. So unless you have solid data to back that up, I'd agree strongly for it not being bullshit. The only tech field that I can see that argument for is higher level Data Scientists and that's clearly becoming less and less of a requirement also.
  - lazyasciiart 5y ago
    I work in a big tech company and you have to be extraordinary to get hired without a degree as an entry level dev. 10+ years experience and it won't matter so much, no.
    - oblio 5y ago
      That's why you join a small company that doesn't ask for anything, maybe a small web design shop. Then within a year you find some other company, maybe a middle ware company or consulting shop. And after that, since you now have 2-3 years of experience, you aim for the big boys. Basically a sort of on-the-job-training-degree, just that you get paid for it :-)
  - bduerst 5y ago
    That's the point though - in lieu of some outstanding success and track record that makes you an extreme outlier, a degree is pretty much required.
  - 5y ago
simonh 5y ago
facebook is hiring 10,000 developers in the EU to build the Metaverse. https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-plans-hire-10000-eu-build-metaverse-2021-10-17/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-plans-hire-10000... My daughter is looking to go into software engineering and I was explaining to her that most of the high paying jobs are in the US and there's a big brain drain out of Europe (we're Brits). Not to dissuade her, but that she might consider that as an option on graduation. I was speculating why FAANG don't hire more developers in Europe to take advantage of the pay difference, and then the above story broke literally the next day.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  They do hire in Europe but pick expensive locales such as Switzerland, London or Dublin. I can't stop wondering why not open shop in Italy or Spain - wages may be much lower with way higher life quality.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Are there a big enough talent pool of highly skilled and experienced developers in Italy or Spain? It’s a chicken and egg problem, you need to go where there’s already a market for these skills.
    - thriftwy 5y ago
      They could tap into infinite supply of developers from Romania, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Russia... Who would move just for the privilege of living in literally sea side resort. I also think that some developers from Nordic countries will consider, and the rest of Europeans who would like the opportunity working at FAANG.
      - doktorhladnjak 5y ago
        I’ve worked for several companies with dev centers in more out of the way places in Europe: Vilnius, Sofia, and Braga (Portugal). There were a number of obstacles in each. First, these are just not big cities with a lot of people. They don’t have large labor pools or many companies to choose from like London or Paris or Dublin to start with. It immediately limits the number of locals you can hire without relocation. Second, many of these locations are not as friendly to immigrants. Either they don’t have existing communities or the visa programs they offer are not friendly to non-EU citizens. It is hard to get Indians to move to Bulgaria when they don’t speak the language, there are few other Indians there, and the govt does not provide visa programs that make it easy. Similarly, even though other EU nationals can work in places like Sofia without a visa, few are interested in this. They either want to go to big markets with all the amenities like Berlin, Paris, Dublin, or they want to stay in their home country. Romanians are not very interested in moving to Lithuania. The best candidates we’d find were Lithuanians who had been working in the US or London who wanted to move back to Lithuania for family reasons but work for a Silicon Valley type company. This problem was amplified for older workers who had kids or wanted to start a family. They want to know it’s a place they can stay for a while. Third, often times the govt were just not friendly to tech companies. In Portugal, there were many issues around employees working overtime (at all not just for extra pay), having to give one year notice of layoffs. The business viewed the labor laws as a hassle to do business there. They might put up with it in a market where they can hire a lot, but with the above problems, it made the locations even less attractive.
thriftwy 5y ago
USA is super expensive. Yes you can get a large paycheck, wait until you see house prices. Also current situation does not inspire confidence in somebody who may be identified as white male.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  If you want to be located in a place which pays relatively high in Europe, housing prices are adequate. 10-15 years ago it would be possible to have disproportionally large salary in eastern places like Prague, but that's history now. Even if it still costs less than SF, your paycheck now looks adequate. Covid era raised prices everywhere.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    It's possible to work remotely in post-covid era, which allows living in nicer, cheaper locales. No longer it is necessary to move where jobs are.
    - saiya-jin 5y ago
      If you have family, this becomes more complex. If your kids are older have already good friends and social circles, such a move becomes supremely selfish
      - thriftwy 5y ago
        What if you already live in a cheaper, less bubbly area? Or decide to move there early on. Then staying there and working remotely becomes family friendly, and moving becomes super selfish. Most people assume moving to get a good job, which will lead exactly to the consequences above.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > 10-15 years ago it would be possible to have disproportionally large salary in eastern places like Prague, but that's history now. It still happens but you need to go further East, like Romania, for example. But Romania is far more disorganized compared to Czechia, so there are downsides.
exdsq 5y ago
These are all subjective. I worked on Haskell, without a degree, on interesting problems for an NY salary remotely out of my bedroom in Oxford. I have since moved to the Bay Area and am working for an Eastern European country while earning a Bay Area rate.
- Ambix 5y ago
  I'm living in Moscow, Russia and I know for sure that we have so many crypto companies here but still I was not aware that they are ready to pay Bay Area salaries :)
  - exdsq 5y ago
    I’m sure you can find something if you look! But most are happy with global hires so you can find one elsewhere and apply anyway, I’ve worked with several fantastic Russian devs :)
- whateveracct 5y ago
  For something like Haskell, you can definitely negotiate that kind of thing if you have some experience. Those skills are highly coveted and valued if you know your worth imo.
- filoleg 5y ago
  >I have since moved to the Bay Area and am working for an Eastern European country while earning a Bay Area rate. If I understood it correctly, you physically live in Bay Area while working remotely for a company located in Eastern Europe, and you are earning Bay Area rates? This seems like the complete inverse of the situation I usually hear of (working for a Bay Area company remotely in a cheaper area and earning Bay Area rates). Out of pure curiosity, do you mind sharing the name of that Eastern European company? Totally understandable if you aren't willing to do so, but I have a feeling that there is probably literally 1 or 2 companies tops that would be willing to do that, so it isn't really an option for almost anyone. The first two that popped into my mind were Yandex and, to a much lesser degree, VK.
  - 5y ago
jhgb 5y ago
> If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. Uhh... https://trustica.cz/category/tech/racket/ https://trustica.cz/category/tech/racket/
- curiousgal 5y ago
  Heck, even Ocaml! https://www.lexifi.com/ https://www.lexifi.com/
  - Bayart 5y ago
    I checked them out and they're unsupringly French. As a point of pride, Ocaml is pretty in universities here. For some reason, the computer scientists here are weirdly obsessed with functionalism and formalism.
devoutsalsa 5y ago
It’s not like the USA wants to pay more. If they can get away with paying less for the work, they will.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  Right by they do pay more. A lot more
PeterisP 5y ago
> If anything, it will make it easier to work FOR the US. So that's kind of the point - those remote workers for US companies will do their daily spending, house construction, etc and pay their taxes outside of USA, boosting the economy and creating the demand for non-developer jobs there instead of USA.
- oblio 5y ago
  Yeah, but that's a bit like trickle down economics. It's literal trickling, it's not a deluge. In these cases the top jobs will still tend to stay in the home country. So the most successful of these companies will be able to hire more top level folks and most of these will be in the home country.
  - newbamboo 5y ago
    “a bit like trickle down economics” It is standard economics. If the value of American citizenship is eroded, and I would argue that it is across a number of fronts, then America as a nation loses value. Pretty simple. Econ 101.
deanCommie 5y ago
> "If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck." Sidebar: I don't want to work with any Engineer for whom the programming language plays any role in their choice of career. I want to work with engineers that want to build solutions for customer problems, solving complicated technical challenges using the best tool for the job. Sometimes that tool is Haskell or Lisp, or Erlang. Sometimes it isn't. I also want to work with engineers that recognize that they can do more as part of a team than lone-wolfing everything themselves. That also means that sometimes the best tool for the TEAM is not the best tool for them individually.
coldtea 5y ago
>no country pay like the US. Worked for silicon valley companies remotely, and made twice the money I made in France, while being 3 times cheaper than local competition. Not a problem for foreign companies that can and do pay "like the US", because they compete globally. >- no country have the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers the US has. Well, in that aspect, the US wont compete with each country one by one, but by the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers in all of them combined. >- few countries even have has many interesting projects. If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. StandardChartered is a British bank - and one of the main Haskell employers (it's not like they are many). There are lots of others. Eiffel (France), Smalltalk is used by several European companies in different places, and I see a comparable number of companies using Common Lisp in Europe as in the US ehre: https://common-lisp.net/lisp-companies https://common-lisp.net/lisp-companies And, in any case, even in FAANG 99% of programmers don't do Haskell or Lisp, so the point is moot. >- talent attract talent. It's better to work with companies already full of good devs, the colleagues are coolers, the projects are more interesting and the infra will be better. Inertia is in favor of the USA. Yeah, inertia the US has :-) On the other hand, momentum is in favor of Asia and Africa...
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >Not a problem for foreign companies that can and do pay "like the US", because they compete globally. Do they really though? How many non-US companies are paying $150k+ to mid level front end developers? I don't think that exists anywhere else.
  - gonehome 5y ago
    Yeah - I'd be surprised. I hear European salaries are at best ~100k maybe ~120k and that's pretty much maxed out a decade in. Day 1 silicon valley devs do better than that. 150k is also out of date for mid-level FAANG total comp today. I hear it's more like 600k and goes up from there.
    - ramesh31 5y ago
      >150k is also out of date for mid-level FAANG total comp today. I hear it's more like 600k and goes up from there. FAANG is a whole other ballgame. $150k is intern level pay there. I was just talking average total comp for B and C tier large companies outside the Bay. The kind of role an average self taught dev with 2-3 years experience could expect to land in any major US city.
neonbones 5y ago
>If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. I can agree with points around salary and diploma, but not on that one. Scala, Haskell, Ocaml, Clojure, Coq, Idris are much more significant in the EU than in the US. Many Ph.D. contribute to language and ecosystem, and you can easily find exciting projects with them, not only crypto. Even GHC was developed mainly by the EU and British people. The Swiss academy created Scala. Coq and Ocaml are big in French academy circles. It's also a problem for me because I'm working from Eastern Europe (I can pay only 5% tax on all income up to 250k euro on remote). I primarily work with US companies, salaries are outstanding, but usually interesting FP-ish things are done in the EU, where wages are lower. And I am on remote, so there is no profit for me to earn less with better social and government benefits like people in West Europe.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Can I ask how/where you get good remote US jobs? I'm also from Eastern Europe.
herbst 5y ago
There are exceptions. - There are plenty of smaller tech hubs with way higher quality of life like Zurich, Berlin - Or others that are incredible affordable like Warsow, Bukarest, .. - The USD is not looking healthy from CHFs perspective. I would have to expect to earn less every month. - Getting paid from the US makes banking and taxes way more complicated. You can not even open a bank account without signing 3 times that your money does not come from the US. - US companies have different values/ideas about social security/pension and co. Also work hours or more than 40 hour weeks - I don't fully understand the diploma thing. You may think it is more important than it actually is in central Europe. It's common (because education is free or cheap), but by far not the only way to get in the Industrie. My point is when you already live in modern place with high quality of living standards it's unlikely you'd find a US job, remote or not, tempting.
- oblio 5y ago
  Don't get cocky. In Europe you literally can't get a job paying 200.000€ per year as an individual contributor, except for US companies. I'd be very happy to be proven wrong and for the respective position to not be a beyond-senior-contributor thing (so maybe 0.0001% of jobs out there).
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    I’d love to hear about those US based companies paying EU based ICs $200k / year and for the respective position to not be a beyond-senior-contributor thing (so maybe 0.0001% of jobs out there).
    - oblio 5y ago
      Switzerland, London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Munich, Luxembourg FAANG.
      - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        Without stock appreciation, I don't see that in Dublin. Like, a friend recently got a FAANG offer for senior IC, which netted out at about 150k total compensation, which is far off from 200k. You'd be looking at Staff (or years of stock appreciation) to hit 200k TC, which is a lot lower than one would expect in the US.

twox2 5y ago

On the topic of diploma - I get the sense this is not exactly true for FAANG

a_t48 5y ago
No diploma here - still have recruiters from at least 3 of the 5 messaging me. Edit: downvoters, care to explain a little? Why would they waste their time on me if they weren't interested in me working there?
- twox2 5y ago
  Do you / have you ever worked at one?
  - groby_b 5y ago
    Working at one for over a decade now. I've got no degree. Both people on my team and in adjacent team without degrees. Also many people with super-interesting degrees nothing to do with CS. So, yes, you can get hired at FAANG & friends without a CS degree. But: I would suggest to always read that as "absolutely go for it, even if you didn't get a degree", not "skip getting a degree, it doesn't make a difference".
  - tazjin 5y ago
    I used to work at Google/DeepMind and don't remember anyone even asking about it during the original interview process. (I did not go to uni)
  - pocket_cheese 5y ago
    I have worked for FAANG without a diploma. While it is rare, you can definitely do it if you grind enough leet code :D
  - a_t48 5y ago
    I've interviewed at Google twice - passed once, declined continuing the process due to not being super interested in the product. I've declined interviewing at Facebook/Amazon. I haven't talked with Netflix nor Apple. I have not worked for one, but have never gotten any indication that the lack of diploma would be a problem. I gather that a decade of professional experience makes the lack of diploma irrelevant. As best as I can tell the only time it has hurt me is when I tried to emigrate out of the US and was unable to as some countries require a degree to get a work visa, even with a job offer.
    - twox2 5y ago
      My anecdotal data is that I went really far in the process with a FAANG, got a verbal offer, and it was rescinded (never got the official offer). I always suspected it was due to lack of a degree. And no one explicitly ever asked, but they did ask for a rather detailed work/education history, and I never claimed to have one. I really suspect that they SAY they don't care if you have a degree or not, but at the end of the day I think they do.
      - a_t48 5y ago
        I would lean towards the position being filled by a better candidate or the team having a hiring freeze. Who can say, though? That's a large waste of everyone's time and the company's money.
        twox2 5y ago
        Perhaps! I can only speculate since I wasn't given any concrete feedback.
      - filoleg 5y ago
        >My anecdotal data is that I went really far in the process with a FAANG, got a verbal offer, and it was rescinded (never got the official offer). I always suspected it was due to lack of a degree. If your lack of degree was a dealbreaker, they wouldn't go with the interview process to completion. It makes zero sense to waste time and resources on a candidate that you already determined you aren't going to hire. My team had to interview 50+ people just to fill a couple of positions, and every interview is taking away from precious time that could have been spent working on the product. Wasting our time interviewing someone we won't hire due to a lack of degree makes no sense. Not only it would be wasting our own time, we would also be wasting the candidate's time, and all of it for exactly zero gain. There is no grand conspiracy where FAANG companies interview candidates with no degrees all the way till the end, and then drop them due to the lack of degree, it is just illogical all around. Basically, if you got an interview, and especially if you got to the onsite rounds, nothing that is on your resume can disqualify you at this point.
  - filoleg 5y ago
    I am working at one now (kind of, since MSFT doesn't really make it into the abbreviation), and one of the brightest senior engineers on my team had no degree whatsoever, just a high-school diploma (using past tense, because he left for another company a couple of years ago). I also have a bunch of friends who currently work Google (some from college, some former colleagues) and a few at FB, and all of them know at least one coworker without a college degree. And when our team was recruiting experienced candidates (5-10 years or more), at no point we ever cared about their degree or lack thereof (aside from some specialized research positions that typically require graduate degrees). For entry level though, yeah, if you are in your early 20s without much industry experience, it is gonna be much tougher to get hired without a degree.
    - lazyasciiart 5y ago
      It's getting harder. I have a friend who worked at MSFT out of high school >10 years ago, and was told several years in that he could never be promoted beyond his current level without a degree. Decided to take a couple years off to get a degree in something random (theology) and when he applied for his old job, now +BA, was told he needed a CS degree to be qualified for it.
      - filoleg 5y ago
        Was your friend in engineering? And what kind of level was your friend shooting for? Because yeah, if you are shooting for a director or a partner level position, you better have a degree. But for a regular senior engineer position? Not at all. Also, i don't know when your friend tried to get re-hired and at which level. The whole "we don't care as much about degrees anymore" is a fairly recent thing, I would say 5 or so years. And of course, if your friend only worked at MSFT for a few years, then left to do school, and then tried to come back, they would be probably still shooting for a close-to-entry level position, not a senior. And entry-level without a degree or something else to compensate for it is going to be really tough. Normally it is compensated by either years of experience or something else (side projects, major open-source contribs, etc.), hence why I never saw someone without a degree at entry-level, but plenty who are senior engineers.
saratogacx 5y ago
I've worked at both Amazon and Microsoft. I'm not even an HS graduate. I worked my way in through contract gigs until I was able to get an FTE role. After the first one, moving to another place was no big deal. I was asked about it by HR only to make sure their records were correct and never heard of it again.
- moneywoes 5y ago
  Any tips on getting the first one? How was your algorithms prep?

Gene5ive 5y ago

Yeah, I've heard about a classist element in Europe that might make the path I took unlikely. I dropped out of college, toiled in the service industry for 10 years, got sick of it, went to code school, got a tech job and 6 years later earn $130k. Still no degree. Is it true you can't do that there or is that just a stereotype?

mistrial9 5y ago
I started a conversation with a visiting EU PhD and asked about programming languages. In a very good smelling way, he avoided the question. Apparently it is "blue collar" work to do actual programming? This one PhD did zero actual programming, apparently.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  It's slowly changing, but yeah, coding is not considered a high status job here. Now, it's better though, it's not considered a low status job anymore :)
  - filoleg 5y ago
    No joke. I lived in the US for a while, but I am from Eastern Europe, and so are my parents. Back in high school about a decade ago, I decided that I want to do either an engineering degree or a CS degree. I got a reaction from my parents that was the opposite of what most of my US peers would have expected to get. For context, we have already been living in the US for quite a bit at that point. Even my parents, who are neither doctors or lawyers themselves, considered engineering/CS to be a grunt and pretty much blue-collar work (not that there is anything wrong with blue collar work at all, but I was not going to pick that fight with my parents at the time when I lived with them). And even now, once they know how much software devs can actually get paid in the US, the only thing that's changed is that they stopped pestering me about it. But I definitely took a note of how when the conversations with their friends or other relatives go, my parents still try to avoid mentioning what I studied or what I do as my career (aside from namedropping the company names, because apparently big US corps carry some weight with those people). All while also letting me know every single time how awesome their friends' son or daughter is, because they are a doctor or a lawyer. /rantover I cannot understate how good it feels to me in the US in this aspect, because it feels like most people here on average absolutely don't care which path you took and don't even question it. Sure, some are still judgemental, and some of them still assign weight to the outcomes you got. But I would rather get some weight assigned to the outcomes I got, as opposed to the same weight being assigned to some stupid bs like "oh, your degree isn't of the right class of respect, so no matter what you do, you ain't going to be as much of a respected person as a doctor/lawyer". Just the entire concept of "respectable" degrees makes me feel a certain kind of way that I absolutely hate. If you want to talk about degrees based on any measurable metric, you are welcome to. But "respectability" of a degree is not measurable, and is the most snotty bs that is way too commonplace outside of the US. I had some friends from SK (so not even the same continent as EU), and they echoed fairly similar sentiments in regards to the cultural sentiment about engineers/tech workers in their country. And the thing is, I cannot even really blame my parents, because it isn't just them, it is pretty much what the majority there believes.

evancox100 5y ago

The point isn’t that existing companies in the US or wherever will lose talent, but that the existing companies might retain or even gain talent, and that the workers will reside in locales other than the US. Your points seem to be in favor of the author’s argument that the importance of physically residing in the US will decrease, and that there is an opportunity for other locales/governments to attract remote workers.

adventured 5y ago
The parent's premise is that it will make the US more powerful economically and make its tech companies more dominant. Which is exactly what it will do. The local tech labor supply will go to work for US corporations, which pay better than most everyone else. That will cement the US hegemony globally in tech (the sole major exception being domestic China, and to a far lesser extent domestic Russia). The US tech juggernaut will buy up the world's talent without having to plant expensive offices everywhere; that will occupy the talent pool and reduce competition to US tech.
- echelon 5y ago
  > it will make the US more powerful economically and make its tech companies more dominant. Which is exactly what it will do. Why wouldn't other nations react accordingly? What power does the US have to stop this? 1) Other nations increasingly have a large supply of high-skill talent. 2) Other nations will use capital and subsidies to launch their own tech firms employing their own workers. There are startup accelerators spinning up all over Europe and Asia to capture, retain, and reward domestic talent. They see how the game is played now. 3) Other nations will create more regulations that limit how much US tech companies can participate in their economy and monopolize their citizens as consumers. This is already happening with major international antitrust rulings hitting Google, Apple, and Facebook. This is the nail in the coffin. They will foster and protect their own industry at the expense of the US. There are many more international tech companies participating at the global stage these days. Atlasssian, JetBrains, Spotify, SoftBank, TSM, ASML, miHoYo... Not to mention all of the Chinese tech companies popping up. Epic Games is 50% owned by Tencent. This trend will continue. The US only has 300M people, and it's not growing with the same significant postwar tailwinds it once had. It can't keep the wealth and talent monopoly forever. Just look at how much the middle and lower classes are hurting as a symptom of this global rebalancing. You can also look to other industries. Automotive, aerospace, etc. The US isn't peerless anymore. Not saying this is good or bad, but it's definitely happening.

tshaddox 5y ago

Aren't the things you listed precisely the things that article is saying will change? The point of the article is that countries with favorable time zones for U.S. business hours can implement policies to attract immigrants to come and work remotely for U.S. companies.

mgh2 5y ago

Isn't that what the article implies? Talent will be more distributed, but working for US companies.

EugeneOZ 5y ago

> the USA don't care about your diploma, only what you can do That's a total bullshit, unfortunately. Everything else is correct.

jaegerpicker 5y ago
Now a days, it's very much true. I've worked for FAANG companies, a number of mid-major sized tech/internet companies, have had a engineering job for 20+ years, been a CTO and co-founded a VC backed company. All without any degree, in fact in the 20+ years in the field I've never once been out of work. Early in my career I was rejected a couple of times for lack of degree but I can't even remember the last time I was asked about a degree. I know a number of other long term successful non-degree engineers also. So unless you have solid data to back that up, I'd agree strongly for it not being bullshit. The only tech field that I can see that argument for is higher level Data Scientists and that's clearly becoming less and less of a requirement also.
- lazyasciiart 5y ago
  I work in a big tech company and you have to be extraordinary to get hired without a degree as an entry level dev. 10+ years experience and it won't matter so much, no.
  - oblio 5y ago
    That's why you join a small company that doesn't ask for anything, maybe a small web design shop. Then within a year you find some other company, maybe a middle ware company or consulting shop. And after that, since you now have 2-3 years of experience, you aim for the big boys. Basically a sort of on-the-job-training-degree, just that you get paid for it :-)
- bduerst 5y ago
  That's the point though - in lieu of some outstanding success and track record that makes you an extreme outlier, a degree is pretty much required.
- 5y ago

simonh 5y ago

facebook is hiring 10,000 developers in the EU to build the Metaverse. https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-plans-hire-10000-eu-build-metaverse-2021-10-17/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-plans-hire-10000... My daughter is looking to go into software engineering and I was explaining to her that most of the high paying jobs are in the US and there's a big brain drain out of Europe (we're Brits). Not to dissuade her, but that she might consider that as an option on graduation. I was speculating why FAANG don't hire more developers in Europe to take advantage of the pay difference, and then the above story broke literally the next day.

thriftwy 5y ago
They do hire in Europe but pick expensive locales such as Switzerland, London or Dublin. I can't stop wondering why not open shop in Italy or Spain - wages may be much lower with way higher life quality.
- simonh 5y ago
  Are there a big enough talent pool of highly skilled and experienced developers in Italy or Spain? It’s a chicken and egg problem, you need to go where there’s already a market for these skills.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    They could tap into infinite supply of developers from Romania, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Russia... Who would move just for the privilege of living in literally sea side resort. I also think that some developers from Nordic countries will consider, and the rest of Europeans who would like the opportunity working at FAANG.
    - doktorhladnjak 5y ago
      I’ve worked for several companies with dev centers in more out of the way places in Europe: Vilnius, Sofia, and Braga (Portugal). There were a number of obstacles in each. First, these are just not big cities with a lot of people. They don’t have large labor pools or many companies to choose from like London or Paris or Dublin to start with. It immediately limits the number of locals you can hire without relocation. Second, many of these locations are not as friendly to immigrants. Either they don’t have existing communities or the visa programs they offer are not friendly to non-EU citizens. It is hard to get Indians to move to Bulgaria when they don’t speak the language, there are few other Indians there, and the govt does not provide visa programs that make it easy. Similarly, even though other EU nationals can work in places like Sofia without a visa, few are interested in this. They either want to go to big markets with all the amenities like Berlin, Paris, Dublin, or they want to stay in their home country. Romanians are not very interested in moving to Lithuania. The best candidates we’d find were Lithuanians who had been working in the US or London who wanted to move back to Lithuania for family reasons but work for a Silicon Valley type company. This problem was amplified for older workers who had kids or wanted to start a family. They want to know it’s a place they can stay for a while. Third, often times the govt were just not friendly to tech companies. In Portugal, there were many issues around employees working overtime (at all not just for extra pay), having to give one year notice of layoffs. The business viewed the labor laws as a hassle to do business there. They might put up with it in a market where they can hire a lot, but with the above problems, it made the locations even less attractive.

thriftwy 5y ago

USA is super expensive. Yes you can get a large paycheck, wait until you see house prices. Also current situation does not inspire confidence in somebody who may be identified as white male.

saiya-jin 5y ago
If you want to be located in a place which pays relatively high in Europe, housing prices are adequate. 10-15 years ago it would be possible to have disproportionally large salary in eastern places like Prague, but that's history now. Even if it still costs less than SF, your paycheck now looks adequate. Covid era raised prices everywhere.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  It's possible to work remotely in post-covid era, which allows living in nicer, cheaper locales. No longer it is necessary to move where jobs are.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    If you have family, this becomes more complex. If your kids are older have already good friends and social circles, such a move becomes supremely selfish
    - thriftwy 5y ago
      What if you already live in a cheaper, less bubbly area? Or decide to move there early on. Then staying there and working remotely becomes family friendly, and moving becomes super selfish. Most people assume moving to get a good job, which will lead exactly to the consequences above.
- oblio 5y ago
  > 10-15 years ago it would be possible to have disproportionally large salary in eastern places like Prague, but that's history now. It still happens but you need to go further East, like Romania, for example. But Romania is far more disorganized compared to Czechia, so there are downsides.

exdsq 5y ago

These are all subjective. I worked on Haskell, without a degree, on interesting problems for an NY salary remotely out of my bedroom in Oxford. I have since moved to the Bay Area and am working for an Eastern European country while earning a Bay Area rate.

Ambix 5y ago
I'm living in Moscow, Russia and I know for sure that we have so many crypto companies here but still I was not aware that they are ready to pay Bay Area salaries :)
- exdsq 5y ago
  I’m sure you can find something if you look! But most are happy with global hires so you can find one elsewhere and apply anyway, I’ve worked with several fantastic Russian devs :)
whateveracct 5y ago
For something like Haskell, you can definitely negotiate that kind of thing if you have some experience. Those skills are highly coveted and valued if you know your worth imo.
filoleg 5y ago
>I have since moved to the Bay Area and am working for an Eastern European country while earning a Bay Area rate. If I understood it correctly, you physically live in Bay Area while working remotely for a company located in Eastern Europe, and you are earning Bay Area rates? This seems like the complete inverse of the situation I usually hear of (working for a Bay Area company remotely in a cheaper area and earning Bay Area rates). Out of pure curiosity, do you mind sharing the name of that Eastern European company? Totally understandable if you aren't willing to do so, but I have a feeling that there is probably literally 1 or 2 companies tops that would be willing to do that, so it isn't really an option for almost anyone. The first two that popped into my mind were Yandex and, to a much lesser degree, VK.
- 5y ago

jhgb 5y ago

> If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. Uhh... https://trustica.cz/category/tech/racket/ https://trustica.cz/category/tech/racket/

curiousgal 5y ago
Heck, even Ocaml! https://www.lexifi.com/ https://www.lexifi.com/
- Bayart 5y ago
  I checked them out and they're unsupringly French. As a point of pride, Ocaml is pretty in universities here. For some reason, the computer scientists here are weirdly obsessed with functionalism and formalism.

devoutsalsa 5y ago

It’s not like the USA wants to pay more. If they can get away with paying less for the work, they will.

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
Right by they do pay more. A lot more

PeterisP 5y ago

> If anything, it will make it easier to work FOR the US. So that's kind of the point - those remote workers for US companies will do their daily spending, house construction, etc and pay their taxes outside of USA, boosting the economy and creating the demand for non-developer jobs there instead of USA.

oblio 5y ago
Yeah, but that's a bit like trickle down economics. It's literal trickling, it's not a deluge. In these cases the top jobs will still tend to stay in the home country. So the most successful of these companies will be able to hire more top level folks and most of these will be in the home country.
- newbamboo 5y ago
  “a bit like trickle down economics” It is standard economics. If the value of American citizenship is eroded, and I would argue that it is across a number of fronts, then America as a nation loses value. Pretty simple. Econ 101.

deanCommie 5y ago

> "If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck." Sidebar: I don't want to work with any Engineer for whom the programming language plays any role in their choice of career. I want to work with engineers that want to build solutions for customer problems, solving complicated technical challenges using the best tool for the job. Sometimes that tool is Haskell or Lisp, or Erlang. Sometimes it isn't. I also want to work with engineers that recognize that they can do more as part of a team than lone-wolfing everything themselves. That also means that sometimes the best tool for the TEAM is not the best tool for them individually.

coldtea 5y ago

>no country pay like the US. Worked for silicon valley companies remotely, and made twice the money I made in France, while being 3 times cheaper than local competition. Not a problem for foreign companies that can and do pay "like the US", because they compete globally. >- no country have the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers the US has. Well, in that aspect, the US wont compete with each country one by one, but by the volume of hi-level coding gig job offers in all of them combined. >- few countries even have has many interesting projects. If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. StandardChartered is a British bank - and one of the main Haskell employers (it's not like they are many). There are lots of others. Eiffel (France), Smalltalk is used by several European companies in different places, and I see a comparable number of companies using Common Lisp in Europe as in the US ehre: https://common-lisp.net/lisp-companies https://common-lisp.net/lisp-companies And, in any case, even in FAANG 99% of programmers don't do Haskell or Lisp, so the point is moot. >- talent attract talent. It's better to work with companies already full of good devs, the colleagues are coolers, the projects are more interesting and the infra will be better. Inertia is in favor of the USA. Yeah, inertia the US has :-) On the other hand, momentum is in favor of Asia and Africa...

ramesh31 5y ago
>Not a problem for foreign companies that can and do pay "like the US", because they compete globally. Do they really though? How many non-US companies are paying $150k+ to mid level front end developers? I don't think that exists anywhere else.
- gonehome 5y ago
  Yeah - I'd be surprised. I hear European salaries are at best ~100k maybe ~120k and that's pretty much maxed out a decade in. Day 1 silicon valley devs do better than that. 150k is also out of date for mid-level FAANG total comp today. I hear it's more like 600k and goes up from there.
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >150k is also out of date for mid-level FAANG total comp today. I hear it's more like 600k and goes up from there. FAANG is a whole other ballgame. $150k is intern level pay there. I was just talking average total comp for B and C tier large companies outside the Bay. The kind of role an average self taught dev with 2-3 years experience could expect to land in any major US city.

neonbones 5y ago

>If you want to code in Haskell or Lisp in Europe, good luck. I can agree with points around salary and diploma, but not on that one. Scala, Haskell, Ocaml, Clojure, Coq, Idris are much more significant in the EU than in the US. Many Ph.D. contribute to language and ecosystem, and you can easily find exciting projects with them, not only crypto. Even GHC was developed mainly by the EU and British people. The Swiss academy created Scala. Coq and Ocaml are big in French academy circles. It's also a problem for me because I'm working from Eastern Europe (I can pay only 5% tax on all income up to 250k euro on remote). I primarily work with US companies, salaries are outstanding, but usually interesting FP-ish things are done in the EU, where wages are lower. And I am on remote, so there is no profit for me to earn less with better social and government benefits like people in West Europe.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Can I ask how/where you get good remote US jobs? I'm also from Eastern Europe.

herbst 5y ago

There are exceptions. - There are plenty of smaller tech hubs with way higher quality of life like Zurich, Berlin - Or others that are incredible affordable like Warsow, Bukarest, .. - The USD is not looking healthy from CHFs perspective. I would have to expect to earn less every month. - Getting paid from the US makes banking and taxes way more complicated. You can not even open a bank account without signing 3 times that your money does not come from the US. - US companies have different values/ideas about social security/pension and co. Also work hours or more than 40 hour weeks - I don't fully understand the diploma thing. You may think it is more important than it actually is in central Europe. It's common (because education is free or cheap), but by far not the only way to get in the Industrie. My point is when you already live in modern place with high quality of living standards it's unlikely you'd find a US job, remote or not, tempting.

oblio 5y ago
Don't get cocky. In Europe you literally can't get a job paying 200.000€ per year as an individual contributor, except for US companies. I'd be very happy to be proven wrong and for the respective position to not be a beyond-senior-contributor thing (so maybe 0.0001% of jobs out there).
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  I’d love to hear about those US based companies paying EU based ICs $200k / year and for the respective position to not be a beyond-senior-contributor thing (so maybe 0.0001% of jobs out there).
  - oblio 5y ago
    Switzerland, London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Munich, Luxembourg FAANG.
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      Without stock appreciation, I don't see that in Dublin. Like, a friend recently got a FAANG offer for senior IC, which netted out at about 150k total compensation, which is far off from 200k. You'd be looking at Staff (or years of stock appreciation) to hit 200k TC, which is a lot lower than one would expect in the US.