Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Oh hey there is an Oldie thread as well.

What is the likelihood that a 4-year old Silicon Valley startup with 30 employees (10 of whom are sales people apparently) and ~10 million in A-round VC funding last fall will still be around in 2 years? 5 years?

$10 million with 30 employees at $100k each comes out to about three years worth of salary. I know they have some income on top of that. But I'm curious what the raw statistics are that they will sell out to a larger company, get B-round VC funding, etc?

They say 9 out of 10 businesses fail, but presumably you're doing something right if someone writes you a big fat check. Then again $10 mil isn't a whole lot when you're paying Silicon Valley salaries. :iiam:

Trying to get some perspective here.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Yeah it sounds like they probably have ~1-2 million in revenue? I guess I should have asked that. Whoops. They have some name brand customers including my current employer. How big is a big startup?

I have been using the Buffer open compensation spreadsheet as a (very, very) rough guide to raw startup numbers in a competently run startup.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE81a2wzcHYxV1pacWE1UjM3V0w0MUE&usp=drive_web#gid=1

It looks like last year they were doing about $4 million annual revenue with 30 employees. Is 30 a lot?

I guess I'm trying to get a big picture of employee salary vs revenue vs likelihood of going under. I've worked for two companies under 30 employees before, both in the same industry; one was ~15 employees and had about $15 million in revenue with almost no fixed costs, another had ~25 employees and $8 million in revenue but a lot of fixed costs.

Currently I'm sitting pretty in a high pay, low cost of living situation with no debt lots of vacation (~21 days a year) and a fairly good career track, although at ~30 I've mostly topped out within three years as a Senior Analyst until someone in their late 40's quits or dies which could take 20 years, and even then I'm not guaranteed a management position.

Going to Silicon Valley means a raw pay increase but perhaps only $10-15K over what I'm making now after cost of living adjustments. Plus the risk of going under. And you can't buy housing in Silicon Valley unless you make at least $250k.

I really want to head out there and live the Silicon Valley startup dream, but want to make sure this is a calculated risk before relocating 1500 miles across the country in a place where I can't afford to buy a house.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Is the market out there really that white hot? Jesus. I guess you really do have to pay $130 just to keep people from jumping ship to the next guy down the road who not only covers happy hour but also happy hour and bartender tips.

When I spoke to them they said they don't want to go IPO and the current trajectory is to stay private. They do enterprise software.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:

Well, why not both? I think that job seems like an obvious dead end.

Yeah you're never moving out of that position at that job. Start looking.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Talk to your Dev manager and be like, "hey, coworker X just stopped showing up on Mondays and Tuesdays, is this some kind of HIPPA think l thing or what? Because I think it may begin impacting the project soon if we don't reschedule these important Monday and Tuesday meetings. Should we just email him the weekly minutes or how should we handle that?"

Managers exist to run stuff up the flagpole like this and get an answer back without divulging too much personal info. Google "HIPPA".

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Hey, real talk for a second, I just got done having dinner with my friend who apparently is a finance manager at Apple in Cupertino. She deals with payroll so I gave her the $130 figure everyone has been parroting as being a starting salary out here.

Her response was a look of shock and said, "that's way high, I don't know where you're getting that number but that's what we might pay a REALLY good level 2 engineer."

So what's the deal? Does apple pay low, or are you guys feeding me be that a starting engineer makes $130 in the bay area?

Hadlock fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Oct 26, 2015

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

I guess I am mostly interested in the number for salary negotiations tomorrow, for a smallish startup. They're cash flow positive, had series A funding last year and I've used their product for a year + already worked with their developers for about a year adding functionality for my current company. Also they recruited me. So I'm wondering if I should hold my ground for $115-120 to relocate from Texas.

Relocation package would be about $5k but that's a one time deal.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Ok, but 7 years professional work experience, three years programming experience, I have a leg to stand on to ask $115? Basically my plan is to get them to name a number, and then point out I'm making 70 with no state income taxes, and 110 would effectively be a cost of living adjustment. I forget if that 110 number includes state income tax.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Is it wrong to just totally not care about stock? I guess stock is a nice bonus, but anything above $115 is just gravy and goes in to the sailboat fund.

I point out 7 years professional experience I guess, because my finance friend was telling horror stories about her friend's start up where the programmer had no real world experience and the programmer's expectations of how warehouse shipping worked vs the real world.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

What is stock worth in a buyout?

From what I understand in a buyout, the marketing and sales teams get jettisoned, and the engineering team stays on with a big fat pay bump. I don't see this going IPO but more likely either staying independent or getting bought out by someone like Cisco.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Uh, so update

They're going to put me over Software QA as 'lead QA engineer', and once I figure it out in about six months, I guess, put some people under me to create a department. So that's cool I guess. I'm working with the cool kids on the engineering team who seem to run the company, rather than the customer success team who live on the other side of the building with marketing and sales etc, so I'll be part of the process, rather than peripheral to it. They made that pretty clear early on.

I have full access to the source code and will be making some small commits but I guess I'll just be big picture and finding systemic failures in the dev process, regression testing, etc? I want to stay out of dedicated software testing, I guess that's what the other hires under me would be for. They've known me for over a year and so they must have a lot of faith in me but it was ...interesting for them to be so open to getting me books and out to conferences to get me up to speed on the topic. I guess I'm one of the world experts on their software so I probably have a much better grasp of the topic than bringing in some college grad. It's been interesting.

Stock and equity too I guess. Didn't have to ask for it. Hashing out the details on Friday.

Also the team is full of geniuses, hooray! No lamers to worry about.

Still trying to decide if I should live in SF or somewhere on the peninsula.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

The position is near the Mountain View Caltrain station, so what you're saying is that as a single goon, not living in SF is social suicide? Slightly less than that one guy living in an RV at the Googolplex, but still pretty bad? The guys I talked to sounded like MV was pretty boring. One restaurant offered free swing dancing lessons near Castro Street but it seemed pretty dead by 9pm.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

I spent a couple of days out there bumming around MV and SF, and observing the rest of the area via Caltrain. I have another trip scheduled out there to do some apartment shopping soon.

I'm leaning towards SF proper as I already live in a somewhat young urban downtown area and I think I will be fine there, I just am overly cautious and want to make sure I'm making the right decision by soliciting feedback. Moving to the suburbs sounds less than ideal to me.

Also I have designs on buying a sailboat and keeping it near downtown, so I would like easy access to it.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

So let me run the numbers

$125k salary
$30k state and federal taxes
$37k housing
$24k fixed costs (utilities, food, gas)
$12k savings

Leaves $22k disposable income

I have no outstanding debt. Which of those ballpark numbers sounds the most insane?

Edit: obviously I'm going to finance the car ($8,000) and boat ($35,000)

Hadlock fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Oct 27, 2015

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Federal tax calc came up with $22k and the Cali tax calc came up with $7k but I'm rounding up to $30k. I'm thinking I can write some of that off. I will probably want to talk to a financial planner to be sure though.

Whoops I forgot about medicare and SS which knocks $9200 off the top and takes me down to $12,800

Hadlock fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Oct 27, 2015

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

My buddy did this in Houston on and off for a while. It frees up a lot of cash flow yeah.

Boat slip is about $600/mo, plus insurance etc.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Yeah if the office wasn't in loving Mountain View, I would totally just live in Oakland for half the price and commute across to SF or something. I really, really like the sunset district by the park, but it's drat near 7 miles from the Caltrain station. For such a dense, global city, public transit there seems to be total garbage.

I guess Apple has a campus shuttle pickup over in The Haight (hippy-ville) which works for Apple but if you don't work for Apple or Google you're kind of hosed if you don't live within 10 blocks of Market St.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

I had a new experience of watching a woman pee standing up for the first time last weekend in the subway station at ~22nd and Mission in SF. Girl wasn't even drunk or homeless, just really had to pee, and doing it in on the floor of the subway seemed like a good idea I guess? I've been in metro stations of probably 30 one million+ population cities in the last year, from cities Paris to Casablanca to Shanghai and Cartagena and never seen anything like that before.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Closest I've been to NYC in 17 years was Newark airport almost four years ago, I have no desire to go back (that is unless someone offers me a job out there and I can find a place for under $1900!)

What do you guys think about these, general comments, etc.

$2500/850 sq ft - http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/5268766803.html
$2795/650 sq ft(?) - http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/5258619434.html

Bad neighborhood, overpriced? Too close to freeway (noise) too far from public transit?

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Oh gently caress. By how much?

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Yeah, SF is literally more expensive than Manhattan now. It's absolutely insane. At least housing prices are highest where people are producing.. things.. Instead of just shuffling around wealth, right... Right?

I guess the other big draw of SF is that you're in the epicenter of the global tech revolution, and there's no better place to build contacts and network than SF in this industry. Some (1) will strike it rich in SF and settle here, others (2) will become leaders in their sub-field and retire as a senior such and such at some B-level company in the Midwest living in a6 bedroom house on 4 acres. Others (3) will have made the wrong decision and flame out in a heap of debt to somewhere like Nebraska trying to avoid freezing to death in their studio apartment. Here's hoping that I'm in category 1 or 2 and not 3.

I'm interested in riding this out for three years and seeing where it takes me. If the market is good, get a bigger place and settle down here, if not, get a bigger place in the Midwest and settle down.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

I am a pretty avid biker, I went up to and then down Lombard street/Russian Hill on my lovely rental hybrid without having to walk the bike, except for half a block on Hyde Street. That's after biking across the bridge etc. Dallas is flat but my legs seem up to the task.

pr0zac posted:

Also :lol:ing at the idea of having your own place in San Francisco, wanting to have a social life, and expecting to have any money left over at $125k. Especially enough for a sailboat. Your calculations also don't include the couple thousand and change you're gonna spend yearly on public transit costs. A Caltrain monthly pass from zone 1 (SF) to zone 3 (MV) is $179.00, so $2148 a year.

Do you know people who live out here already? Will you have an existing social structure? If not, where do most of your new coworkers live?

Can you break down your expenses in to macro blocks? I'm curious coming from someone who's lived there a couple of years

I know a couple of people out in SF, and it sounds like half the engineering team lives in the city so that's a plus. Most of the younger employees on the far side of the building live in MV it sounds like.

I'll need to figure in caltrain prices yeah. One guy just rents cars when he needs them for camping etc @ ~$50 a day; after insurance, parking and normal maintenance, renting ad hoc sounds like a pretty good idea. We talked about zip car but renting seems to make more sense.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Huh I put in my two weeks notice at my current job and they made a very generous counter offer and I turned that down, which got the attention of the director, so I got 90 minutes of 1-on-1 face time with him today (which is unheard of) where I got to air my grievances and my proposed solutions to them which he was on board with. Apparently, also I've made a very good impression on the new CIO the couple of times I've been in the elevator with him and the handful of meetings I've been in with him where I am a very vocal straight shooter on problem issues. The CIO is very keen not to loose me. So they're looking at a ~40% raise + sizable retention bonus. Also it sounds like there's a hint of ego where the director doesn't want west coast companies stealing talent away from a big company with money. Also we're in the middle of a huge 2-year merger and I'm the key guy in a key group that needs about 18 months to train my replacement.

Neither company knows how much they're bidding against and my current employer doesn't even know who they're bidding against. I appear to hold all the cards. This is kind of awesome. :pcgaming:

Hadlock fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Nov 6, 2015

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Current office came back with an offer to transition me over to their primary software vendor (we have a weird agreement where our software vendor ships us the compiled code and the Visual Studio projects for all releases so we can recompile anything to make it work with our own mostly-similar doppelganger system). That way their developer company gets me (there's only about 100 technical people in the world that work on our product and they're expanding) and my current employer still retains access to me when poo poo goes wrong. Which happens frequently. There's about 12 truly competent technical people that have deep knowledge of how their software works. Current company is still going to make me an offer to stay internal though, so now I have two companies bidding on me against my move to SF.

I'm thinking about asking for back pay to Jan 1 at whatever rate the software company picks me up at, as that was what prompted the whole thing to begin with. The worst that can happen is they say no and I walk over to a better job anyways. And also a retention bonus so that I have insurance that they're not going to jettison me when they get their big project done.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

JawnV6 posted:

There's no reason a conversation about your current job has to be anything but a sunshine-soaked rainbowfest for unicorns.

a slime posted:

Apply this to every aspect of your life and prosper. Occasionally stare up into the night sky and be consumed by existential dread.

Adulting 101. These two phrases should probably be printed in bold red lettering on the instruction manual to life.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

If you want to leave mid January you should have started looking two weeks ago.

Nobody is going to do any hiring between now and January 1. Nobody is in the office due to Thanksgiving, and the long weekends leading up to Christmas and New Years. Even if you wanted to start earlier, they probably wouldn't even let you start before January 11th or so, once they have their books balanced.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

San Francisco is the most expensive city to live in in the United States. We're talking $1500/month for a studio apartment. Its housing market is supremely hosed up,

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

You guys did see that article about a Google employee that decided to buy a truck and install a camper shell to live in, in the Google parking lot, rather than get an actual proper home, right?

Riding the Caltrain in to Mountain View every morning, there's this one street along the tracks that is about half a mile long with probably 70+ trashed-to-poo poo RVs of people living in them. People doing weird poo poo for a halfway affordable living situation is totally normal here. Most people just commute an hour or more rather than pay the convenience.

And loving lol about $1500/mo, you may have been able to find something for $1500 in 2011. I found a 650 sq ft apartment for $2700 in October but had to turn it down as they didn't accept pets. I'm paying over $3k/mo for a 1 bedroom that's slightly less than 650 sq ft although if you're willing to have a roommate you can find half of a room in a two bedroom apartment for $1200 or so.

Yahoo is laying off more people, Twitter is downsizing their SF office and the pool of capital for new startups is tapering off slightly, I'm hoping that when my (rent controlled!) lease is up in December I can find a bigger place at a slightly more reasonable rate.

So far I'm enjoying the 60 degree climate, it's not super warm and I've had to purchase long sleeved shirts and a light jacket but it's not cold. And it doesn't get colder than 45 here, which is way better than Dallas.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

piratepilates posted:

I wish my last workplace would gut and replace at all, they were (and still are) doing VB6 server programs and VB.NET ASP.NET (the old ASP.NET) websites that are not only an immense pain in the rear end to work on, but also not complex enough to not warrant just doing again. The domain knowledge is already there from everyone who has worked on them and management, there's just such little reason to keep working on the same lovely stack that had nothing going for it.

Actually that's not true, they did move all of the old ASP classic code to the legacy ASP.NET about a year ago when I worked there.

This sounds exactly like the office I just left. They were still using Microsoft Visual Source Safe for their code repository. Nobody in the IT department was under 40, because nobody under 40 would stick around long enough to deal with those working conditions.

People were still writing new web applications interfacing directly with COM+ libraries that had to be run as the logged in user because nobody trusted anyone to properly change the passwords and everything had to be logged in to the desktop.

I made a campaign to modernize that poo poo but unless you have top management behind you, no amount of brown bag lunches is going to change that kind of culture.

Their software platform was written on Microsoft's RDS (remote data services?) which was depreciated in 2008 and dropped completely in 2012. They were targeting 2012 R2 and in the last steering committee meeting I was in before I left, I asked our lead architect if they were beginning to target server 2016 as it was already in preview and would be released in the next six months. That went over really well with upper management, but not so much with their architecture group.

My new company writes most everything in C#, Go, Ruby and JavaScript with Git and everything just loving works :dance:

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

60% of $250K is only $150,000

So the difference in salary between a Senior Engineer and Ultra Senior Engineer is $100,000 in 'value-added perks'? Charter jets are what about $3K/hr to run? That's what, a free round-trip flight to the Bahamas for you and all your friends on one of the company jets? Or maybe 10 flights up to Tahoe with use of a company lodge? It can't all be stock, can it?

I keep reading all these amazing stories about how average Google engineers are making "$160K", but that is "total compensation" where their actual salary is usually under $110K

I think after you roll in lunches, beer, home internet, health insurance, transportation perks, vacation, 401k etc (but mostly health/dental/vision insurance) my "total compensation" comes out about $20-25K higher. If salary comes up during a date should I be quoting that BS number instead?

Unless you're getting vested stock options (or soon to vest stock options) it seems like the only number that really matters is pre-tax salary. Somebody please correct me?

Hadlock fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Feb 7, 2016

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

If it were me, I'd go gently caress off to a tiny mountain town like Bucaramanga or Cuenca for a month or so. Even after airfare you'll probably come back with more money than if you had stayed at home.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

I went through the same ordeal working for a FINRA regulated finance company in 2012. It's just part of the horse and pony show. Once you're in, you're in, and really, getting documented is no big deal ) so long as you're OK with getting your personal info inevitably stolen by some rouge state department) but otherwise harmless.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

sink posted:

How does NixOS/NixOps compare to stuff like CoreOS?

Unless I'm mistaking it for what we use at work, CoreOS is a hyper-minimal linux distribution whose primary purpose in life is only running Kubernetes and Docker Containers*. It's locked down particularly hard and doesn't come with a package manager to prevent you from doing silly things like trying to install a GUI on it. It doesn't have anything to do with configuration management or deployment automation. Maybe Kubernetes sort of falls in to this but you'd have to have a very broad philosophical opinion about containerized apps and configuration management. CoreOS is merely the gasket between the bare metal and the container.

*It will run Rkt containers but Kubernetes doesn't support Rkt yet

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

I'm working with the product manager to try and nail down specific release date targets for features (you can stop laughing now). Our engineering team has grown from 4 to about 16 and of the original 4, three are primarily doing management based tasks, so we have 15 people who came in working on an already two year old code base, and when we hire another 2-3 engineers it will be almost four years old.

One thing that came up was guesstimating time per task/bug and then entering that in to JIRA and seeing how accurate that was and basing future projects off that data etc

Two big problems with this

1) programmers universally hate this
2) tracking time feels like you're being hugely micromanaged (see point 1)

When you're a team of 4 engineers you always know what's going on, but now we have three teams, server back end, server front end, and a client agent, and we're rolling out new features that impact all three.

How did your teams transition from "three guys and a keg of beer" to "functional engineering department"

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

If dice is a bad option, what is the goon ranking of recruitment sites currently?

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

What is the interview strategy for going startup -> blue chip company. I have been doing startups for a while now and enjoy the flexibility and relatively flat management structure. Blue chips are pretty rigid management typically.

My ~14 year tech career looks something like:

Midlevel sized corporate finance tech, old school
Series A -> Series B scrappy tech startup
Series B startup scrappy tech startup
Series D -> Series E startup, good growth but slow burn due to regulatory BS

A couple of blue chip companies have reached out, one is a "big three" consulting firm. I am meeting with hiring managers to feel things out. My wife and I are adulting now and wife has suggested several times I look for a more stable big company job to support our adulting lifestyle/goals.

Has anyone done anything like this? From the blog articles I've read they are going to be typical corporate overlord type with 9-5, a dress code etc. Do I lean back on my corporate finance experience from... almost a decade ago? Talk up project planning, deadlines, meetings, how to be pleasantly passive aggressive via email chains... Or if they are reaching out to me are they going to be more interested in the can-do, do-everything start up culture of wearing many hats.

My brother in law worked for an "internal startup" at a major bank, but I've also seen button-down IBM style tech stuff too, like at my corporate finance tech job.

If it's a proper corporate gig, how do you transition in to a role there, it seems like half or more of the people at this consulting company start right out of college and then they work them to the bone and whoever doesn't flame out in the first five years, get promoted to senior, to manage the next batch of fresh meat to go through the grinder. I am no spring chicken so are they going to want me to play the meat grinder game starting at ground level, or do I get to skip that step and move in to a role with built-in seniority. Wife is concerned I will end up doing a lot of travel and work late nights.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

vonnegutt posted:

Just out of curiosity, what do you set your "would commute" price to? Mine's closing in on $20k/yr right now...

Good question, this is always a fun game

Federal maintenance and depreciation is $0.59/mile

20 miles each way * 0.59 * 300 days a year = $7080

$100/mo for insurance, $200/mo for gas, $3600

That's $10,680

If you pay for parking at home $200, plus $5/day downtown, additional $3110/yr

Total let's just round up to $15,000

Plus the added time/stress of actually taking it for service, dealing with it when it breaks down, vandalism, plus how much you value your time while actually commuting, say $50/day... That's another $15,000, total $30,000

I'm sure you can game the numbers in either direction, $20,000 is probably an ok number too.

Commuting sucks and adds the equivalent of one work week a month spent in your car, or at least it did for me at one point.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Faang makes sense if you are trying to get hired in (from the outside) north of $250 total compensation. I don't see a lot of startups with the funds and/or cajones to offer north of $250/yr total compensation. If you want a 3 bedroom house with a view in the bay area you're not gonna buy one working at a startup unless they go unicorn.

Also yeah, I checked 50 items at trader joes, their prices are the same between Dallas and San Francisco. Actually their three buck chuck was $0.50 cheaper in the bay area. Probably due to shipping wine to Dallas from California. Gas is slightly more expensive but I've maybe paid for 12 tanks of gas in the last five years. Uber is more expensive. Amazon, Newegg, walmart.com, homedepot.com are the same price. 80%+ of the things I buy come from Amazon. Between rent, food and Amazon that's 95% of my month to month expenses.

Bars are more expensive by about 30% but that's not an every day expense. Also I'm maxing out my social security. I get extra money in my paycheck starting in around October.

I've been here five years and my daily expenses are maybe 10% higher but outside of rent it's mostly the same. You can argue this till you're blue in the face but I have the receipts to back it up.

If you manage to buy a house in the bay area you can convert your rent into savings. That's a big motivator to move here.

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

CrazyLittle posted:

Ah, but with prop 13 your property tax will never go up in any meaningful way

Yep

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Jose Valasquez posted:

Until the bubble collapses and now you owe 7 figures on a $500k house. Treating a mortgage in the bay area like savings is dumb as hell.

Noted

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Edmond Dantes posted:

This may be not exactly the place to ask, but I'm old and I need career-related advice so here goes:

Back in December I made a rather E/N post here. The tl;dr is that I want to get the hell out of my country and I was considering emigrating to Europe since I've heard/read that they're looking for devs in quite a few places.

The two countries I was considering were Germany (Berlin) and The Netherlands (Amsterdam or Hage?) back in December I got some advice from Keetron, who is based in Netherlands -thanks again for that- and I kinda wanted to settle on one to start taking language lessons, but then it occured to me I only considered those because it's what I've heard people mention as good locations for devs, but is there somewhere else in Europe that I should be looking into? Any particular recommendation between Germany and Netherlands for dev-based work?

This is all from a "going to take a plane to the country then look for work once I'm there and hope someone sponsors me for a visa" perspective. Yeah, I know. I don't like it either but I'm working with what I have. :(

tl;dr: Want to emigrate to Europe as a (rather lovely but trying to get better) dev. Where do I go.

If you want to go to Netherlands check out the DAFT treaty. Dutch American friendship treaty. You deposit $6500 (treaty has never been adjusted for inflation since the 1960s) in a Dutch bank, wait three months, get Dutch 3 year visa that allows you to work and live in Netherlands. Magic.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply