Distributed systems can partly fail in many subtly different ways, and you almost never notice it because there are people on-call taking care of them.
All 3 hyperscalers have vulnerabilities in their control planes: they're either single point of failure like AWS with us-east-1, or global meaning that a faulty release can take it down entirely; and take AZ resilience to mean that existing compute will continue to work as before, but allocation of new resources might fail in multi-AZ or multi-region ways.
It means that any service designed to survive a control plane outage must statically allocate its compute resources and have enough slack that it never relies on auto scaling. True for AWS/GCP/Azure.
> It means that any service designed to survive a control plane outage must statically allocate its compute resources and have enough slack that it never relies on auto scaling. True for AWS/GCP/Azure.
In a way. It means that you can get new capacity most often, but the transition windows where a service gets resized (or mutated in general) has to be minimised and carefully controlled by ops.
Yeah I remember one maybe four years ago? Existing workloads were fine but I had to go and tell my marketing department to not do anything until it was sorted because auto-scaling was busted.
The car registration and gas taxes don't even pay for a quarter of all road-infrastructure-related costs. It boggles the mind to see free street parking in places like NYC, where a more reasonable cost structure would be something like other cities around the world (and Canada) do: divide the territory in parking districts. Locals can buy a discounted annual pass for the district where their main residence is located (should not cost less than $400/month in a place like Manhattan), while elsewhere the rate should be at least $10-12/hour.
That would be a good idea, but one of the main impediments is the fact that heavy regulations make underground concrete structures (and hence underground parking lots) very expensive, a lot more than in Europe or Asia, where it's often economical for even 3-5 story residential buildings to have underground parking space. That's the reason why developers push for on-street parking.
Cargo doesn't work. I'm trying to use it in a monorepo and its cacheing story is horrible. The devs refused when I proposed to switch it to Bazel years ago and now they're regretting it.
> We're a US company with employees in Europe (not even an HQ in Europe, just employees there)
I don't think that's true. You can't have employees without a local subsidiary. If you're going through an EOR agency, they're contractors not employees.
I'd say if you get a job in the same company, Zurich is competitive. The problem is that if you lose your job at Google in Seattle there are several hundreds of FAANG positions and probably thousands of other 200k$+ SWE jobs you can reapply to. In Zurich you will maybe see a dozen of openings in the small subsidiaries of Apple, Microsoft & Co., and maybe some individual job offers from small AI companies, and applying to any of these positions basically means competing against the whole rest of the continent.
> and applying to any of these positions basically means competing against the whole rest of the continent
Which should not be an issue, if as I read a lot in this page, "all good European engineers move to the US". It means that you only have to compete against the "bad ones" that stayed back, right? /s
Numbeo shows averages, and the basket of goods that it considers is not what a well-off person would buy. I Zurich I could live perfectly well without having a car, just with public transportation, and French and Italian cheeses and wine are a cheaper than in Seattle.
As a well off person your most significant purchase is going to be a house, and in Seattle they are 3x cheaper.
I just left Seattle Greater Area and my 350sqm admittedly old house + a small ADU with an outdoor pool went for $2M (at the moment it was a downturn, so maybe $2.5M tops now). What can you get for that money in Greater Zurich Area? A 100sqm flat?
In the Zurich Greater Area, you can get this for example: https://www.immoscout24.ch/buy/4002631314. Keep in mind that in most of Europe, real estate ads show the living space, i.e. surface net of walls, corridors, closets, cupboards, etc... whereas in US/Canada it's the gross surface. Those 350sqm are prolly 280 "livable". So if you're willing to live outside the Zurich city core, prices are comparable to Seattle but construction quality is way higher.
Also, most mortgages in Switzerland are very peculiar: you pay 20% down, but then you don't ever pay off the principal, only interest on the remaining 80% which is owned in perpetuity by the bank. The interest rates are kept very low and the currency quite stable, because most of the citizens rely on it. So your monthly interest could be 400-500 CHF, and you invest the rest however you prefer.
The rail network in and around Zurich is reliable and punctual, so you can live anywhere along that 30km long lake and still have your commute be 30-40m, without needing to search for a parking spot and whatnot.
I experienced this myself when I was briefly commutung from Pfäffikon(SZ).
Commute to where? 15 minutes walking from Microsoft main campus and 10 minutes driving from a new Facebook campus. 10 minutes driving to a good daycare.
That was true a few years ago, but not any more. Covid made a lot of US-based companies sack local developers and actually open offices in Europe. I have friends in Italy who, between 2022 and 2023, moved from local companies to US companies opening offices in Rome and Milano, and got a salary bump from ~30-35k to 80-90k plus bonus and RSUs. Same thing happening all over Europe.
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