I've been called a 10xer before, and I'm the only one in my company currently at that level. We're a data company first and software second.
Trainings don't work. What does work is pair programming but you have to do this effectively. Say you have 3 buckets, frontend, backend and infrastructure. Ideally, you want to pair someone who has very full infrastructure and backend buckets, with someone who has an overflowing frontend bucket. Mix and match. There's no value in pairing two more backend oriented engineers together.
There's also no value in categorizing things in frontend and backend, if you just have a frontend engineer that throws things over the hedge to the backenders garden, you're going to have a shit shoveling contest and this doesn't work. Of course, you should still have people specialized in certain domains, but you should try to share knowledge within your team as much as possible and try to broaden's people experience instead of having people work on their own little islands. Pair someone with a backend background on a big frontend ticket with an experienced frontender and before you know it you'll have two full stack engineers that'll possibly grow to become a "10x" or whatever that means.
Code reviews are critical and it's important to have someone in your team that carries a big stick and isn't afraid to use it. This is a sensitive thing I've noticed, I've worked at companies where I wasn't the only 10x engineer, and the code reviews there were a joy because I was getting very valuable feedback. It wasn't so much that my code was wrong, but more something like `{} as MyInterface` could also be written as `<MyInterface>{}`. There were a lot of style related comments. What I notice in my current team is that people feel like this is unnecessary, but I always felt like it is valuable when another engineer suggests something like "maybe you could abstract this?" because it introduces a bigger picture that I may not have thought of before. It's very loathsome to carry the big stick, but I feel like if I dont, we're going to go back to the old patterns of not writing tests, not thinking about architecture.. Those kinds of things.
You said a lot of things, many I agree and have experienced as well, but never answered OP. How do you create 10x engineers? Well you can’t. And you probably shouldn’t try. If you’re 10x somewhere it means you’re at a place with a significant (I.e. 10x) skills mismatch between people in the team. It’s not fun for anyone, the company and team become too dependent on you, and you skew any ability to project how long work would take on both sides by your presence.
The best bet for both parties would be they find places “where they belong” - if you consider yourself 10x ie the smartest person in the room, you need to seek a better room for yourself where that’s not the case.
But that is the answer, in that there is no answer :) And agreed, it is always a mismatch. But I do think that with what I said, that'd be the foundation to create a 10x engineer. That's how I became one, because I was matched with people of that skill level and got to work directly together with them for years. And if I'm 10x by my company's standards, go figure how good those guys were ;)
You're right in a way, but you're missing the "10x compared to what?". Consider the 1x baseline as being the median productivity of your development team (which is definitely hard to approximate, but for the sake of the exercise let's take 'value-added tickets per developer' [which excludes bugs/rework]). Then the goal is to do 10x on this median in a reasonable amount of time. Rince and repeat.
This happened to me (and is in part why I'm a tad salty in the comments), I was a H1B and in the process of adjustment of status. While your green card application is pending, you're legally in a grey area if your H1B expires. I had to leave for family circumstances but advanced parole took months to process, I figured it would be okay since it was a serious emergency. Upon returning I was told I couldn't re-enter the US because even though my stay in the US was completely legal, I had technically overstayed the terms of my H1B. The USCIS policy and CBP policy differs around this. There's a specific USCIS policy memo that mentions this actually. So I'm now banned, no leniency, no understanding for the situation.
Advance parole is the permission to leave and re-enter the US while your green card application is pending. USCIS is pretty backlogged right now, so getting anything approved, including advance parole, can take longer, which leads to bad experiences like this one.
If you think this is good oh boy do I have news for you. You don't need to "afford" fantastic insurance, healthcare is essential and needs to be free for everyone, which it is here. I have complete freedom of choice across 27 countries, no strings attached, completely free of cost. So do people poorer than me.
I'm surprised by these "generous" packages. Where I work in Europe, they must give me 3 months notice, my full salary is paid for 6 months, after which it's 75% up to 2 years, and if I still don't find anything new by then I get 50% indefinitely.
I've worked in both the US and various EU countries, while the higher salary is certainly enticing, it's also a trap; When shit hits the fan, you better have been saving. In Europe, the money I make is money I get to really use, because the rest is taken care of for me.
Those benefits are ludicrous. How can any small company or startup survive if they have to contend with those kinds of requirements? If I were a business owner wherever you are I'd restrict my hiring as much as possible and try to find ways to not hire anyone, probably by contracting work out to other businesses or offshore completely.
It's a good question. Here, if you have a permanent contract, the employer is required to pay into various government insurances, and this is mandatory for all employers. The salaries here are lower because of this, but it's deceiving because the insurances are based on your salary. Your employer also pays anywhere between 2-10% on top of your monthly salary into a pension fund on top of your state pension. So in short, if you make 100k EUR, after taxes that's actually your money. So in my case, after I've made my monthly mortgage payment, set some aside for groceries and some subscriptions, the money I have left can be spent on whatever I want without worry, I practically don't need to save unless I choose to.
You're right in that employers restrict hiring as much as possible, what tends to happen here is you get a 1 year contract with the option to be taken on permanently, and these contracts don't have all of the insurances. Taking a permanent contract here is seen as a serious commitment to the company, so most people who just want more money in their bank account at the end of the month choose not to take permanent contracts and take the risk themselves.
If I saved for these things myself in the US, I would've been netting less than I do here in Europe, despite my US salary being 100k higher. A lot of people live way beyond their means with all these things considered.
The value of benefits packages in the US is often around 40% of the salary. For example, health insurance, social security, 401k matching contributions, stock options, etc.
I recognize those numbers and suspect he's talking about the Netherlands. If so, he/she is being incredibly inaccurate in describing benefits.
If you're on a permanent contract, there's a minimum legal notice that depends on years served and your age. So it's not "6 months", it's a variable amount of months. It may be as little as 0.5-2 months if you've worked there for < 5 years. If you're not on a permanent contract, the notice is: BYE.
As for "75% for 2 years", that's not the employer paying you, it's the state. Unemployment benefits. Where both "75%" and "2 years" are lacking some crucial details. It's max 75% of a fixed cap. So if you're a high earner, you might only get 25-50% of your previous salary. Further, you'll be intensely pressurized to find that new job, where you need to supply weekly evidence of job interviews. You can't just take a holiday for 2 years. By the way, you paid for the above yourself, directly from your payslip.
As for "50% indefinitely", this is state wellfare. Which is absolute hell. You don't easily qualify for it and you're even more pressurized to find a job, any job. You'll be closely monitored and you can't own anything of any worth. So if you were a highroller owning assets before, get ready to be stripped naked. Next, you'll have the social stigma of being a leech. Have this on your resume, and its goodbye career.
I'm honestly pissed about the inaccuracy of the poster.
I tried starting a manufacturing site in Switzerland. We wanted to get the Swiss Made badge (70% parts sourced in Switzerland and all major assembly steps done by Swiss employees). An hourly employee had basic rate of CHF 45 an hour and they had to be paid some ridiculous benefits totaling up to like CHF 120 an hour. Apart from the cost, the biggest issue is that you can’t fire them essentially if you hire them on “permanent basis”. It’s impossible to do anything there for a scrappy small business.
Modern Switzerland is much of a socialist state. It’s lost all the things that made it a great place for business. Zurich is still a small tech hub for startups but mostly services and finance. Labor is usually hired in US or elsewhere.
About the only place in EU that's pro-small business is Italy. It still has some 50% of the GDP from companies less than 50 employees.
Pretty much what I expected. Also, I'm surprised that the Swiss Franc is worth exactly the same as the US Dollar. Is it pegged to it? 45USD per hour for an hourly manufacturing job is shocking as well, that's about $90k per year. I'm sure it makes it a nice place to live but God help them if they ever need to get something done in a hurry. I imagine they have to tightly control immigration as well.
Those benefits are not paid by the company, but by the state. That's one of the reasons why cash-in-hand salaries are lower in most "socialist" European countries: the State takes a big fat cut out of it (47% in France), so it can pay for these benefits.
Taxes in the USA are often just as high (remember to add in state and local taxes for an apples to apples comparison with European countries). And for that you get no "socialism" -- no healthcare until you're old, for example.
Income taxes (Federal + CA) seem to be roughly in the same ballpark as France based on [0]. A French income tax simulator is available at [1]. This is the "simplified" version. What matters is box 1AJ for salaried income.
For 100000 USD it's actually a bit higher than for 100000 EUR.
However, as another commenter said, income tax is not the full story - far from it. There are other taxes that you have to pay. Also, while social security comes out of your paycheck, it's considered taxable income in France for the purposes of the income tax. Also, social security is usually insufficient, so you usually have to pay for a separate insurance. Which, you guessed it, isn't deductible from taxes.
As far as a company's concerned, if the employee costs 100 EUR "fully loaded", they only get around 55-60 EUR in hand. Also, when comparing with the US, don't forget that VAT is at 20-25% depending on the country. And, at least in France, VAT is levied on some taxes (yup), like for example electricity and gas.
People forget to count the corporate taxes on the employers in Europe (to support the welfare state) which lowers the salaries of workers making the calculation look like taxes are similar.
> When shit hits the fan, you better have been saving. In Europe, the money I make is money I get to really use, because the rest is taken care of for me.
I wonder where this happy country is. In Germany it is already a common knowledge that relying on state for your retirement is a sure recipe for poverty in the old age.
> In Germany it is already a common knowledge that relying on state for your retirement is a sure recipe for poverty in the old age.
Is it? I'm living in Germany since so many years and nobody told me this. They send me estimates about the money I'd be getting when retiring regularly, and while it'd mean downsizing, I'd not be poor with the amounts named.
Assuming you are somewhere in IT and earn above the average, you will be okay-ish.
People with lower incomes will benefit less.
But if you look at that receipt and consider inflation, the extreme rise in rent in Germany, etc and all of that over maybe 20-30 years from you ending your career. It becomes less.
There are adjustments for inflation, but still.
These high pension values are also quite sure to be unsustainable for the government, as the workforce shrinks quite dramatically and people still get older.
Generally, people are advised to put some money for retirement on the side, if they can.
If you are in a position to put some money aside probably try to do some research.
"Geldanlage für Faule" by Sina Groß is a very down to earth starting place.
It is guaraneed to be less value in 20-30 years, because Germany's pensions are transferred directly from the pension fee deducted from salary of employees. And since in 20-30 years you will have a totally diffeerent ratio of number of employees vs. pensioners, the cake will be smaller and will have to be distributed to more people. No matter how inflation or anything works out in future, pensioners will then have less than pensioners now, who more or less live in paradise.
It's wise to be prepared for this scenario for the reasons you mention, but in 20-30 years a lot can obviously change; either a change to the way the pensions are funded (this already started happening to a small extent) or a sudden influx of qualified (!) migrants.
I wouldn't bet on any of it happening, but predicting the future is always hard.
Great reply! To be honest, It's easy to forget about the inflation. Well, worst case, one could make more kids and invent their own "take care of your parents" ponzi-scheme, hehe.
Seriously though, in Germany, you always get this sense that everybody seems to know what they are doing until ??it hits the fan and you realize all that time nobody had cared about what's coming.
Not in my country (in Europe). You get unemployment benefits for up to 2+ years that is a percentage of your salary up to a certain level, depending on your job history in the last 2-3 years. The maximum you can get is around $40k USD, which can be difficult because you probably have a mortgage and other expenses that were calibrated to a much higher salary.
You are also required to actively apply for jobs, and you may be required to take a job application course. I think you can even be assigned to a job interview if you delay. It is not intended as a "free" paid vacation. I think that even in some cases you are theoretically required to take any job anywhere in the country even if you have to move, but I haven't heard of anyone who had to do that. I assume they look at your social situation (family etc.)
Every 2 weeks you need to send in a form where you state that you have been actively looking for work and your financial situation is unchanged. If you forget to check some boxes, you lose all your money for the 2 weeks. Vacation is also regulated and you need to inform your local government and in some cases you will not receive money for the period. You are assumed to spend a full working week applying for jobs.
After 2 years you are placed into a different type of program where you don't get a fixed amount, but you get money according to what the local government decides you need. That means you would need to sell your big house and move to a cheaper appartement if you want to get any support. If you had any savings, you would probably have to spend them before getting any assistance.
Yes, but you don't tend to get fired on permanent contracts to begin with and it's much more enticing to find something new especially considering work-life balance is very very good, I work maybe 24 hours at most with my company explicitly putting your personal life before work because a healthy employee is a healthy employer. You also still pay taxes over the 50% income you're receiving and taxes are high, so it pushes you to find something new -eventually-.
That's certainly not true in all European countries. In Switzerland, for example, you get 70% (80 for very low salaries) of your old salary for 1.5 years (2 years if you're over 50). After that, if you still don't have a job, you're on your own (if you're broke, you can apply for social welfare).
"Europe" isn't a unified system. Those benefits definitely don't exist in the UK, and I'd still consider our labour laws to be well-balanced and reasonably fair to both employees and employers.
In what universe would that be "properly taxed"? You're saying I can work for 1 year in a $200K/year job and then draw $100k x 30 years = $3,000,000 of value from that one year of work? And it would be fair and just to tax "wealthy people" on my behalf for that?
I still feel like I must be misinterpreting something here, because I can't imagine even the leftiest of leftists thinking this sounds fair. That's basically just UBI except the rate is set for each individual based on whatever the high-water mark of their lifetime earnings were at any point?
So in exchange for software engineering salaries that are 8-10 thousand american dollars lower per month at least. you get a fraction of a much lower salary in unemployment benefits?
Lmao, americans shocked when they realized that proper social welfare is a thing always baffles me.
To reply to you genuine question :
1. Yes it is a thing.
2. Everybody is paying for it through taxes.
It actually turned my life around. I was in school and wasn't feeling challenged, but we had a web design class by a shaggy haired, bearded metalhead in his 50s who did it as a part time job, he started his career with punch cards, had seen just about everything. I was a depressed kid in a poor area and no parents, I didn't really have the attention span for learning to program the classic way so I loved what I learned from Codecademy, it was really engaging.
I got an internship at the guy's old company and dropped out of school shortly after to work there full time, since then I've done so many things, moved to the US to work for Microsoft, built some really cool software, worked at all these places I couldn't even imagine 10 years ago. It's crazy to think that it all started in a small classroom going through Codecademy, I don't think anything else would've captured my interest in the way your website did. Thank you.
I'm 25, and I live in The Netherlands as well. My parents managed to buy a house for 110k with government subsidies back in the 90s, they didn't need a deposit, they didn't even need any money. All they had to do was earn just above minimum wage, and they could include any costs from the buying process into the mortgage. Their house sold for 475k last year, a 90s starter home for low incomes. My grandparents had it even better, their house cost 40k in the 60s, of which 40% was paid for directly by the government through subsidies.
I'm in the top 1.4% of income in the country, yet I cannot buy a house, because I don't have the savings required to overbid by 100k. There's a lot of things causing this overbidding, my parents for example sold their house because they wanted something smaller, but because they now had 475k in the bank, they were able to overbid by 80k on a house listed at 250k which ruins any chances for younger people to buy them. There's no way I can match this, let alone less fortunate people of my generation. I'm currently renting for 1600 a month, my landlord rented the place out to pay for his new house's mortgage. They're unwilling to sell it to me, because they plan to retire here in the next 10 years. The house is worth 300k in the current market, it's a very small starter home, but I literally had no other option because there's absolutely nothing available. And this is in a small town in the east of the country, my commute is over an hour as I work in the west.
There's nothing your generation can do, apart from just owning one home. It's not your fault, it's horrible policy making (such as getting rid of the VROM ministry) among other things.
Yeah I'm happy I have a nice home but we also have some annoyances (minor compared to yours), we have been ready to move on to a bigger property for about 5 years now, very little comes up though. And when it does, we are often too late (they cap at 80 viewers for example, this is talking about 500k+ properties, I swear, 10 years ago you got a couple of viewers for each property, the realtor told me back then he negotiates with 1 person/couple at a time (unimaginable now!) and I think the number of properties for sale in my city easily dropped by 60% over the last 10 years).
Recently we finally got to view a nice property with some land (more rural, 545k) and someone overbid by 105k without and further reservations on the contract. So we are also pretty stuck.
Still it baffled me that when I talked to my bank I can probably sell my 2012 bought house (195k, modernized for 50k) for 330k! And then, I can repurpose my old mortgage to make it repayment-free ("overgangsregeling"), bla bla bla, and I can move to a 600k property with an increase of only 250 euro net per month. It's crazy!!! Yeah your generation doesn't pay transfer-tax but that's a drop in the bucket. Add to that that increasing a bid by 20k only costs you about 60 euro net per month (low rent, 30 years mortgage) and you get into a crazy bidding race really easily.
I feel like we need to build many more affordable houses ("starterswoningen", 200-300k). But I guess that 400-700k properties are where the money is at.
I'm now thinking about buying land and putting a prefab or standard house on it. Still, land is also not easy to find.
Edit: Oh a nice fact about my house: The woman living in it before us bought it for 19500 Guilders (~9k euro's) in the sixties...
We definitely need to build more houses, if you look at Topotijdreis and start from around the 50s-60s, increment by 10 years until now, you'll see that we haven't built anything to house my generation. The homes that were built, are large single family homes, not starter homes. The starter homes that we're meant to move into, are still occupied by the generation that grew old in them (born 30s-40s). Those 60s neighborhoods though are now slowly disappearing and replaced with more large single family homes bought by my parent's generation, with their starter homes being rented out to afford their mortgage. The system is completely broken and most of my parent's generation have been told not to pay off their mortgage, I'm curious what will happen when interest rates rise to 5%+ (or even 10%+ like in the 80s), so many of them will be forced to sell because so many are upside down in interest-only mortgages still.
Fortunately, people of my generation tend to earn better than their parents, so maybe in 10-20 years we'll see a situation it's completely turned around? Parents living with their children?
There's definitely enough houses if we take ageing into account (when people born in the 30s and 40s are starting to die off) but since COVID isn't the grim reaper my generation was silently hoping for, there's nowhere for us to go apart from staying with our parents or renting for insane prices.
dead-middle millennial here. Many of my friends been buying house circa 2016-2018 back when you can still get a 5-10k euro discount, even in Randstad/Eindhoven area. Not anymore. I was just start looking to buy a house and I was just giving up after 4 months and several attempts at bidding with crazy competitors.
I think most people were simply owning 1 house and doesn't benefit much from this housing crisis. Like you said, people who want to go out can't get in to a new house either. We're at the lowest point in NL history with fewest vacant properties available. So taxing all the property owner wouldn't do justice. However, I hope the government start to impose a progressive tax on entities owning multiple properties (hello Chinese/Prince/BlackRock investors?). They're the ones who benefitted the most from this situation. Though realistically, seeing how the current government track records, I kinda feel helpless that they'll help the younger generation. I even feel bad for Gen Z whose racking up student debt on top of it.
GDPR isn't a be-all and end-all, Dutch laws already incorporated a lot of aspects of it such as having to notify their customers prior to GDPR becoming effective.
Oh boy, I love taking my big ass F-150 Lariat down to the drive-through ATM, through a Starbucks to grab some coffee for the hour long trip just to get some lunch in Tacoma because my mother in law is driving down to Portland to visit her sister and she figured she'd make a stop there because I live close by, I might even pick up my meds at the pharmacy drive-through on the way back and while I'm there I might as well stroll into the Target right across the 2 mile long parking lot to grab some last minute groceries for dinner!
I did exactly this, as a Dutch person living in the US, not realising how ridiculous this is compared to my home country.
Haha, I drove around Texas in some small Kia (I just got the cheapest rental), I was constantly afraid someone would not see me (as many cars were much higher) and drive over me and my tiny car (thinking, "the road is really getting worse by the day!" ;) ).
I've lived in the US for a while, this reads very nostalgic. But I never really had a sense of culture shock, I was going through the motions of course, adjusting and getting used to American culture, but the 'shock' was never really there while I was living there. The shock came after I moved back to The Netherlands and realised how strange the US was compared to it.
This just tells me that the engineer in question is very good, but also has imposter syndrome.