eoin_murphy

It is. In Germany at least all communications must be encrypted. And often multiple meters will communicate via one gateway.

Though, if someone has the time and technical ability to implement this kind of surveillance then there are probably easier ways to get better info than inferring activity from energy readings.

Thanks for the real numbers. When I was looking the sort of salaries I was being quoted were in the 10000 per month range which is a lot more than what I'm currently on but would actually work out worse once costs are taken into account.

True, they're not that crazy, but when I looked at the higher salary Vs the higher costs it was financially better to stay put. Of course money isn't the only deciding factor but it's not the land of massive opportunity it's sometimes presented as.

That said, if you've got no dependents and you want to stay in mainland Europe, then it's probably a very good choice.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but while salaries are high and taxes are relatively low, general living costs are quite high. Particularly if you have kids and so want a bigger house and good schools.

I've looked at this and the benefits we get from staying in Germany outweigh the extra income earned.

I don't think you're going to get a great response as that's a lot of identifying information you're asking for. Country, Area (optional), years of experience, gross salary and extras is what you really want.

Sorry for the derail, but who are you with in Germany for that deal? All the contracts I've seen start at at least €40.

> 9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?

I always took this as a criticism of companies where you've got developers who earn multiple thousands per month pecking away at old PC's and squinting at 15" CRT screens. Waiting for 5-10 mins for the OS to startup and > 5 mins to build a project.

Even worse, working on technical debt may be viewed as a negative thing ("if it's working why did you change it?" said the phb).

I've yet to find a code review process beyond a trivial implementation that scaled. The best results I've had were with a rotating buddy system. (Every week/month) you review someone else's code and they yours.

Well, according to this, my house should already be under water. That's what happens when you live below the water level of the neighbouring canal...

To get insight into their budgets.

I have tried one or two services similar to mint in an effort to get more control on budgeting. The typical bank provided online banking interface is like something from 10-15 years years ago with a painful interface and no real facilities to either analyse your income/spending on the site or to easily export data.

The promise of these other services is to scrape at your data, gather it into an easily viewable/filterable format and allow you to group it semantically (i.e. this payment every month is for rent, food, socializing) The idea being that it can automatically analyze the accounts give you more control over your budget.

My experience was that for personal accounts the analysis was no better than I was doing myself and they cannot account correctly for cash withdrawls which kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise. Finally, my bank recently updated their online banking site so that it's just as good as that offered by these external services.

I took this to be less a post about not having a degree but rather, not keeping up with the market. How it's easy to just do the work that's in front of you and not consider how your choices now will affect your career in 10~20~30 years time.

Not having a degree doesn't help finding work (it shouldn't make a difference, but unfortuantely with most HR depts it does) but if the poster had been willing to aggressively work on their career instead of coasting at the "traditional office" the story could be very different.

I've done a few years with a mixture of small company/freelance work myself and I'm back in an enterprise company for the first time in ages and on a purely technical level it's a giant step back. There's huge resistance to changing existing code and/or introducing new technologies. Often with good business reasons (the product is done, it's in production and huge changes are not needed) but if you're on the technical side then you absolutely have to be looking out for your own skills if you ever want to work outside of that company again.

If I was a hiring manager, seeing 10 years at a "traditional" company on a CV with no signs of interest in the field outside of the job would be setting off alarms. I absolutely would rather hire someone with experience and fully developed professional skills than a fresh grad, but the nightmare is that your experienced hire is used to just following their 80 page internal process guide every day and they wouldn't be able to handle any new situations.

There are many countries which prompt for neither prayer nor patriotism. Ireland certainly does not and I don't think the UK does either (certain very religious schools of course may differ).

Not really no. I'm I don't think I spelled it correctly but it's phonetically correct.

"Mar yea" would be a dismissive description meaning something like "..as if" or ".. not!"