4 ms·

This was my experience as well. I went in fall of last year for four days to attend Blender (the 3D modeling software) Conference, and it was simply delightful.

by mkaic 3y ago

This was my experience as well. I went in fall of last year for four days to attend Blender (the 3D modeling software) Conference, and it was simply delightful. I walked to and from the conference center every day, took the metro a few times, got to ride the high-speed rail from the station that's literally integrated right into Schipol airport, and witnessed more bikers than I've ever seen in one place. All of this while the city and its infrastructure was clean, quiet, safe, and beautiful. Then I came back to Los Angeles. For reference, one time while taking the metro I had to evacuate because one of the cars caught on fire and had smoke billowing out the windows. I wound up trapped near the Walk of Fame in Hollywood at roughly 11PM, because when I tried to catch a bus out of there, a bunch of idiots were parked directly in front of the bus stop and the bus driver was forced to just drive right past me because they couldn't pull over and stop. So then I hailed an Uber and had to wait nearly half an hour for it to arrive and pick me up because of how utterly packed the streets were with bumper-to-bumper cars. I used to semi-jokingly tell my friends and family I wanted to move to Europe. Then I went to Amsterdam. Now I am dead serious when I tell my friends and family I want to move to Europe. Although, I'll probably go somewhere with slightly warmer weather than the Netherlands — Portugal and Spain are both high on my list of candidates currently.

4iuvosvjf23 3y ago
I'm seriously thinking about this as well because I look at my future in America and see very few options but car-dependent atomized misery and I'm terrified of it. I just can't go back to the crushing boredom that characterized my childhood. But I'm afraid to make a move because everything I see says tech salaries are a joke in Europe unless you make it to, like, Google in Switzerland or something. The improvement to my mood of being somewhere nice, safe, and walkable is truly ridiculous. It feels like someone slipped some drugs into my coffee. How sad it is that we in America starve like this for a human way of life. Living here feels like a misery for money tradeoff and I don't know what to do.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I've got a similar discontent growing. For me it's this feeling that I'm working for the machine when I should be working against it. The anti-human tendencies of that machine aren't so directly unlivable for me, they're just evidence that I'm on the wrong side. I have a slow transition plan for getting to something more meaningful: 1. Take classes part time (doing this) 2. Pay off house, switch to fill time focus on skillet transition, part time work 3. Go be a novice who codes well in a separate field Maybe you should have a similar slow transition plan. For me just having the plan feels better. For instance, there are remote positions that hire from all over the globe. With a job like that you could relocate anywhere without a salary change. Perhaps something like that should be your goal.
  - 4iuvosvjf23 3y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion! I've started looking a little into the global remote thing and it sounds amazing. Would probably take me a while to get into such a position because I'm very junior still but it's something to aim for.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      My current position is like that. We have this app, "donut" which is sort of like blind dating for work, it will pair people up at random and look at their calendars and schedule them with 30 minutes for chitchat. Sounds cheesy, and it kind of is, but you get to know your coworkers. Last week's donut was with someone from Kenya, currently in Malta for the month. She works during the week and travels during the weekends. Myself, I haven't really taken advantage of the location flexibility. But I'm just saying the positions are out there. If you're competing on the global scale you probably want to specialize a bit more than you otherwise would. X years of experience might not be enough. I worked for a startup whose product was a workflow orchestrator. They failed, so I emailed their biggest competitor (who clearly wasn't making the same mistakes), and said: "If you can't beat 'em, join em?" And now I'm working on a different workflow orchestrator. I picked workflow orchestrators because I like working with graph structures, and I think that familiarity with them might be relevant to future topics I want to work on. I'm not trying to pitch workflow orchestrators to you, I'm just saying it's handy to have a thing that you're into which makes you stand out when applying for positions that are adjacent to that thing. It's worth thinking about early on because you might be able to slant your work towards more exposure to that thing.

by mkaic 3y ago

4iuvosvjf23 3y ago

I'm seriously thinking about this as well because I look at my future in America and see very few options but car-dependent atomized misery and I'm terrified of it. I just can't go back to the crushing boredom that characterized my childhood. But I'm afraid to make a move because everything I see says tech salaries are a joke in Europe unless you make it to, like, Google in Switzerland or something. The improvement to my mood of being somewhere nice, safe, and walkable is truly ridiculous. It feels like someone slipped some drugs into my coffee. How sad it is that we in America starve like this for a human way of life. Living here feels like a misery for money tradeoff and I don't know what to do.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I've got a similar discontent growing. For me it's this feeling that I'm working for the machine when I should be working against it. The anti-human tendencies of that machine aren't so directly unlivable for me, they're just evidence that I'm on the wrong side. I have a slow transition plan for getting to something more meaningful: 1. Take classes part time (doing this) 2. Pay off house, switch to fill time focus on skillet transition, part time work 3. Go be a novice who codes well in a separate field Maybe you should have a similar slow transition plan. For me just having the plan feels better. For instance, there are remote positions that hire from all over the globe. With a job like that you could relocate anywhere without a salary change. Perhaps something like that should be your goal.
- 4iuvosvjf23 3y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion! I've started looking a little into the global remote thing and it sounds amazing. Would probably take me a while to get into such a position because I'm very junior still but it's something to aim for.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    My current position is like that. We have this app, "donut" which is sort of like blind dating for work, it will pair people up at random and look at their calendars and schedule them with 30 minutes for chitchat. Sounds cheesy, and it kind of is, but you get to know your coworkers. Last week's donut was with someone from Kenya, currently in Malta for the month. She works during the week and travels during the weekends. Myself, I haven't really taken advantage of the location flexibility. But I'm just saying the positions are out there. If you're competing on the global scale you probably want to specialize a bit more than you otherwise would. X years of experience might not be enough. I worked for a startup whose product was a workflow orchestrator. They failed, so I emailed their biggest competitor (who clearly wasn't making the same mistakes), and said: "If you can't beat 'em, join em?" And now I'm working on a different workflow orchestrator. I picked workflow orchestrators because I like working with graph structures, and I think that familiarity with them might be relevant to future topics I want to work on. I'm not trying to pitch workflow orchestrators to you, I'm just saying it's handy to have a thing that you're into which makes you stand out when applying for positions that are adjacent to that thing. It's worth thinking about early on because you might be able to slant your work towards more exposure to that thing.