That’s a thin ice you’re walking here… Some people appreciate the support, some people don’t like when work contacts get into their personal feelings territory.

It’s highly dependent on how close your interpersonal relationship is with co-worker, what I’d avoid for sure is suddenly closing the distance just because you know he is trans and you can tell recent events are affecting him.

I stand corrected, thank you!

Appreciate the effort, but without categories it’s not going to sail too far.
Right now it’s just a long list of everything that it’s out there, awesome-selfhosted is much more usable for looking up what you need.

Also, did you join any kind of affiliate programs/partnerships for these “10% off” green boxes? If so, would be great to disclose it. Nothing bad with getting some cash, but community will just appreciate the honesty.

You’d need to put a bit more thought into that, at least to start thinking in more detailed terms than “US” and “outside”.
Countries, visa types, schools for your kid, work opportunities for your wife, local language, acceptance of your identity (believe me, majority of places in the world are much worse in that regard than Trump could ever be), etc, etc…

What I can promise you is that money situation will be worse. Uprooting yourself and moving somewhere is a costly endeavor (did that 2 times, it’s not fun), and besides that US is the best country to earn money out there, it’s much harder to cover necessities and have disposable income pretty much anywhere else.

Opinionated piece with no substance or analysis, author already has some answer in mind and is trying to spin everything around to support it.

Just to illustrate:

That’s why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram. In an ill-advised middle-of-the-night memo to his CFO, Zuck defended spending $1b on Instagram on the grounds that it would recapture those Facebook escapees:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

In this very link, in court-released emails Zuck states they’re buying Instagram because they have good growth and Facebook mobile usability is shit. It’s just 2 different types of social networks, back in 2012 you couldn’t even DM on Instagram, it wasn’t a replacement for Facebook by any means and vice versa. Zuck was just not happy that people spend their phone screen time outside of his reach.

without paying £18 per month

yes, now I’m paying 10 times more.
Don’t mind it though, experience is better in every way possible besides occasional maintenance need, but it’s definitely not for everyone. Could be done cheaper, but it’s tradeoffs all the way as with everything in life.

Programming knowledge is largely irrelevant, as in to gain sensible benefits from it you have to be generalist software engineer with decade+ of experience of seeing it all. Then yeah, you can read any code, any stack traces and figure out the intent of developers of the system and what is undocumented/incorrectly documented.

Focusing on one particular language is the right and wrong answer at the same time. Wrong in a sense that you’ll have to pick up other languages along your journey anyway and right because you need to achieve mastery in one of them to get to more advanced programming topics. Pick a language that you have fun using and don’t care about anything else.

As for what to learn for self-hosting… Linux (pick a distro, let’s say ubuntu LTS w/o gui, ssh there and get comfortable with it. It includes installation, filesystems, RAID setups), networking, HTTP/S (that’s the main thing you’ll be interacting with as self-hoster and knowing various nuances of reverse proxying is a must), firewalling, basics of security and hardening, docker, monitoring, backups.

on reddit majority of heavy lifting is done by community mods. hosting, however, is a pain, lemmy is centralized as fuck.

35 to 40k (if your spouse is choosing tax class with a higher rate) after taxes or around so, depends on many factors - German tax code is complicated.

Is it enough to live on

Generally - barely above “paycheck to paycheck” level, but highly depends on location. In Munich you’ll be fucked with this type of salary.

or buy a home

lmao no. Houses are mainly for older and retired people or rich, vast majority of active workforce are apartment renters, more fortunate ones were able to save/get help from relatives for mortgage. Total home ownership rate in Germany is 46.7%, lowest of all OECD countries - and that’s including older people who got their homes during better economic times. Neat trick about Germany is that you have to have both stable job at big company and a lot of cash on your hands to cop a mortgage, since 20% downpayment + taxes/fees and other bullshit that run at around 10% of the total price make good barrier.

buy a home and support a family

Not really, adults in the household have to work, 60k is not ‘breadwinner’ type of salary at all. In general, tech workers aren’t special in Germany, if not for US companies branches they’d be earning the same as everyone else and in many industries (like transportation), where pressure from international market is not present that much, they still do.

It was good while it lasted, but Germany is heading into some pretty interesting times in general, younger population is absolutely fucked.

lmao, 60k eur tops. wages in Germany suck ass, earning at least something is possible if you are running independent consulting or climbing corporate ladder, having some unique expertise or going extra mile as an employee is pretty much pointless.

ones with floppies are alright, beware modern ones.

bruh, feels like gitlab has security update every other day, it’s some bullshit even for a project this size. And who knows how many 0-days are around.

Launch msrp for a HD7850, which was the same category as the 6700XT today (upper middle tier) was 250 usd.

There’s much more effort involved to produce modern GPU now. Either way, if NVidia would be truly greedy, they’d close gaming gpu business right away and would produce only AI accelerators. You can take same 4070, add $200 worth of GDDR chips to the layout and sell this for $15k minimum, shit would be on backorder.

Just because you’re paid well doesn’t mean others are not being mistreated

FTFY
without unions there could be a huge salary disparity between devs in the same role, in the same company, even in the same project. I’ve personally witnessed more than 2x, heard about even more.

Sometimes it’s more than justified with individual’s performance and impact, sometimes it’s not. Some people are just better skill-wise, some people are better at applying pressure on their employer, holding business-critical knowledge hostage or simply negotiating.

Point here is - while unionizing might make things better on average, there would be a very real pushback from people who are benefitting from current system and this is not necessarily management. For management in some cases it would be even a net benefit, since they don’t have to deal with primadonnas and someone tying things to themselves just for leverage.