IaacForHire

I'll do whatever I damn well please.

People like you are why San Franciscan locals like myself hate techies.

I agree with you on the stress. I only visit the USA for funerals now. I just had 3 root canals and crowns done last year, it cost me $750 at a high-end dental office. I think that would get me 1/2 of a root canal in the states.

Funny, this is my plan to get out of tech. I've been welding bicycle frames for five years (cumulative, over maybe a 10 year period). I'll probably leave tech for good at the end of the year and start a boutique bike frame company.

EDIT: (clarified a timeframe)

I would rather have a garbage resume, than be a garbage human being like yourself.

It was a small company, 8 people including an office admin and an intern.

I was simultaneously doing conference marketing and managing our infrastructure. Dad died, I told them I had to go, didn't communicate much, because my dad had died, and they thought it was inappropriate that I wasn't calling them while taking care of my mother.

I also found out later that a certain YCombinator partner found out that I had 2% of the company and suggested they fire me before I vest because it was an "obscene" amount of stock for a single employee to have, even if I was the 7th employee and took a 50% salary cut in exchange for that stock.

So yeah, there's more to the story.

I'm not sure about great. If I had family beyond my wife, sure I think Western Europe would be incredible.

Since I don't, I choose to live in a poor country instead of a Western European country. Bought a flat for $100k, spend about $1k per month, and when I am able to find work I put 90% of it into savings.

Good for you. I am not in a field where being a "specialist" is being a generalist who sort of kind of gets to choose what he works on. Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems. That's at all taken into account the sheer amount of architectural guidance, performance and fault debugging I Have to do. Now I also have to learn Pulumi and CDK just to have any prayer of a job if I'm forced to go back to the USA to make $$.

I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube.

Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.

Yes, you're right. After 25 years of mostly being treated like shit by start-ups with an average weekly work rate of 60 hours, my attitude is probably kind of bad.

Do I really need to be a rockstar to get an inflationary raise every year?

Take cost of living into account and we make about 40% less than we did 20 years ago.

The best I ever did with a startup was in 2002 when everybody went under. I made about $200k in 10 months buying routers and switches from startups and selling them to VARs. I have a folder somewhere in storage with all of my stock certs. I framed the worthless one from Napster :)

"Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped. "

You failed to read my comment. I said I did it quite consistently.

You cannot become an expert in a new skillset every month.

I wish I had your enthusiasm. I've been unemployed 90% of the time since Covid.

Ironically, I've given at least 5 people their start in this industry who are all now worth 8 figures. There are haves and there are have nots.

I feel you on this. I live in the 3rd world (Turkiye) and have been itching to buy a motorcycle lately. The $26k BMW 1250RT I want costs $35k here, and another $20k in taxes.

Well now I have a better idea of how much my friend makes (she's an exec at a big company). I just lost my sympathy for her.

> The you have to factor in $0 in health costs (gratis hospital and doctor visits), no payments for kids attending university, 32 weeks of paid maternal leave, and 5 weeks of mandatory holiday each year.

This sounds great if you're the type to have a family. Otherwise, seems like you kind of get screwed?