I can sit there as a project is falling over the edge of a cliff with total inner peace.

My interest stops at the pay cheque and by the clock.

Quit working for them and now I'm a freelance dev.

They asked me to get back on the project and I said fine, that'll be €700/day. After some grumbling they realized they had no other option so they agreed.

The project is still failing due to bad management but I no longer care. I believe to now feel the same sense of calm around chaos and failure like you do.

A lot of developers have real mental scars from bad projects like this, because they get duped into thinking it's a matter of personal pride to see it trough.

It's not. Your primary concern should always be personal health.

Why did you undercharge by so much.

I know the EU dev market isn't great but those are rookie numbers for "danger money."

Three of the "retired, then handed enough money to unretire" COBAL guys at my old place were doing 2500 a day.

Like the going rate for a senior here is 900, and a good senior is 1200+. So your starting offer would be at least 1800, probably 2000s to round it up.

Which is the high end of your zone of possible agreement (900-1200) plus 50% for danger money, plus a few hundred to round it up to 2k.

Then you see what happens when you throw out the big number.

Consider that most parts of the world have lower cost of living than the Bay Area.

I have no idea what typical salaries are in the EU, but that’s on the low end of mid-career for much of the US.

If you take the run of the mill Java dev salary here, the net value is somewhere between 900 - 3000 Euros or so, across all levels of seniority [1]. Really makes one consider the benefits of working for companies in other countries, assuming that there are no cultural or time zone issues that cannot be dealt with.

Or, you know, to acquire skills that are high in demand but relatively low in supply.

[1] - https://www.algas.lv/en/salaryinfo/information-technology/ja...

Take Ireland for example. You're not going to be making US level money but I'd say you could easily double what you're making now and there's the potential to go much higher than that.

Well, at least as long as the culture fit is there etc., admittedly remote isn't for everyone, but on the flip side, geography/commute being less of an issue for the remainder of people is great!

If you earn 30% more than a salaried employee you are barely breaking even most of the time.

And that's without the expenses, extra healthcare coverage, insurance etc.

So pretty average when you considering that junior developer salaries are within this reach in EU capitals.

Junior developers make 75.000€ after taxes? They make about 50 - 60.000€ BEFORE taxes.

I used 4 weeks, and by my experience that's generous (not talking about paid leave - all the freelancers I know are workaholics and don't take much leave, but maybe that's a US thing).

5*48 = 240 days, which works out to around 84000 EUR. Or 120,000 EUR - 30%.

Regardless, 700 EUR/day seems in the ball-park for a generic all-around developer.

£500/day is the absolute minimum for developer/DevOps outside London, £600/day much more common and including the cheap end for London. Senior is more often £800/day. You don't see values above that advertised, but people do obviously negotiate higher for specialist work; I have seen a mainframe developer charging £1500/day (on the low end of his range). Anything higher than that has always been a large consultancy rather than a freelancer. In my specialist niche I'd be asking for £1500/day top-end, expecting £800-1200 with negotiation depending on flexibility.

Implying that other developers in my area are available for less than I ask.

I mean, if a person is able to extract 700€ per day, kudos to them but that's still above the 90th percentile of senior developers in Europe.

They can attempt to prove it.

Probably higher now.

The least you could do for "danger money" is 1200 EUR a day (and limit yourself to 4 days a week, but that's another story).

It was me and the two founders that I already knew from working together in the past. I expected that my opinion matters, I tried to improve the product, the service, the engineering, but anytime I recommended something it was ignored. After some months, I learned to just shut up and code. This experience taught me that no matter how close you are to the decision makers, influencing them is still hard. Since then, I just don't care. Sure, I'll do my best, but I do it for me and to get another offer in two years.

Now, I work at a big company, I'm like 5-8 levels removed from the decision makers, and I just don't care. I still try to do my best, if I have any concerns, I might mention it once, but if decision makers are not interested in my feedback, I don't mind. I work my hours, do my best, I don't take anything personally, but I also don't care if there is an outage at Friday (that could have been prevented if only we addressed the issues I brought up a couple of times) or if the feature we are developing never gets to production or if the feature fails (predictably, but a CxO has the amazing idea to pursue some obviously bad product decision).

It's difficult to not show the rest of the team how much I don't care. It's very different to show everyone openly you don't gaf (that's not accepted) and just simply not giving a f while pretending you care (that's okay), so I learned to "mask" my true emotions.

My BS filter is highly developed now.

"We will have the project done by the end of the month. Failure is not an option. We dont fail. We are xxxxxx. Come hell of highwater we will get it done. Lets do it". High fives.

"If you get this done you will get ...... " ($$, vacation, yacht)"

"Give it 110% people"

"If we dont get this done ....... "

This means: "This project is screwed. Nothing the team can do will save it.

I do the right thing; I talk to the PM or whoever is in charge and politely but honestly share my professional assessment of the project.

This is most often totally ignored. Which is fine. It is no longer my problem and nobody can come with "I thought you told me you would get this done ,.... " or some such variant.

I will do a good job and try within my own parameters of sanity and health and time.

After a rather unpleasant and unwelcome time I found myself in the army, having people yell at me all day (and night at times) Even when you have not slept for 48 hours, still screaming.

I can't say anything positive about the army but it did give me thick skin.

I am entirely unfazed and bored by some office drone talking to me loudly. Even if said drone starts turning purple.

> ""With all due respect, sir, you're beginning to bore the hell out of me."" (Clint Eastwood as Gunnery Sergent Thomas Highway in Heartbreak Ridge (1986))

Guess who got called in on the weekend for log4j?

Guess who only heard about the problems on Monday at 9am?

You guessed it, the call was made to not pay the (documented) day rate for contractor call outs on weekends. Full-timers got "days in lieu."

Customers always seemed to want to pay me fixed amounts for jobs and be absolutely no good at estimating them. I got paid 28 days contract fees for a job that took 3 hours once. They paid up and asked me to not come in for the last 3 weeks so their other employees didn’t catch on to what had happened…

When doing contract work, you might be paying $500 / month out of pocket for medical insurance but your hourly rate is likely higher than your hourly rate as a W-2 employee even after factoring in company holidays, PTO and 401k matching. You also have the option of not buying insurance if you really wanted to.

Most insurance in the US is horrendous too. The whole system is optimized to provide you the least amount of coverage while making the process as inefficient as possible for you. I spent literally 12 hours on the phone over a few calls trying to get basic information from a few different dental insurance providers, in the end I got nothing concrete out of it and the only way I could have gotten concrete numbers is if I submit a form that takes 30 days to get processed except in the US you only have 30 days a year where you're allowed to enroll into insurance. Basically it was impossible for me to pick insurance based on coverage because it's impossible to know the coverage without first signing up and then you're stuck in it for a year in which case everything resets the next year and the process has to start again from scratch.

It would be way more efficient for employers not to offer dental insurance and instead give employees a tax-free $1,000 yearly stipend which allows employees to use this for personal and family dental care as an expense report which in turn ends up being a business write off for the employer. Now there's no limitations on what work can get done and no wasting your life trying to chase down dental / FSA details. A higher end dental insurance plan through a company is over $1,000 a year too, so this stipend approach would save employers money and it saves employees a lot of money too because you could easily end up paying $600-700 post-tax money out of pocket for standard cleanings a few times a year when insurance won't cover them (even if that insurance costs $1,000 a year). It's a win / win scenario for both the employer and employee.

Pick the air carrier with the cheapest flight to Mexico.

This is what I'm (slowly) learning as well, even though I'm not entirely sure I want to. Working on projects where you care but almost nobody else does does that to you, but I'm afraid I won't be able to make it back to a position where I can care for projects.

Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into.

It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.

If you don't care about what you're doing, you're spending most of your influence on the world on something you don't care about.

If my choice is between working at a boring job where I can support my colleagues, and an exciting job with cool tech where people are having mental breakdowns and nobody has the mental space to support them, I'll take the boring job where people don't care about stupid directives and dealines from above.

At the end of the day, YOU are the professional. If an amateur decides that you are going too slow, that doesn't mean anything--they can feel free to hire more engineers or whatever needs to be done, but the onus is on _them_ to ante up. No matter how much you love your job, you're probably going to have multiple throughout your career so you need to focus on yourself first and foremost.

Getting on 15 years into my career and not sure I'll ever get there. On the other hand, I actually work on a project I care about and for a company that treats me like a human being and not a "resource". Think I'm OK with that.

I try to be professional, hard working and I even do some unpaid overtime when deadlines are strict.

But the moment you pressure and stress me to do more it's the moment I say no and all my commitment goes away.

I'm not here to clean up poor management, project planning and low budget.

Also see, when everything is a priority/emergency, nothing is....

The squeaky wheel has to be actively on fire to get attention at this point.

That's why a PIP puts said pay checque on the line though.

I don't need that stress. I just hopped over to another company, cut my commute, and made about 20% more salary.

I mean I don't want to do any project with a deadline, ever again, if possible, and I haven't even been exposed to the level of stress and pressure that people get at certain companies.

I thought deadlines had gotten rid of a decade ago in software engineering with the rise of agile software development and the realization that software is difficult to neatly scope, and development time is almost impossible to predict.

In the past, I thought of putting myself in positions like these to increase my understanding in short time, at the short term expense of personal life. I wonder if that's just a stupid thought that leads to nothing but burnout, or actually a viable short-term strategy to get up to speed with some of the tech stack you know but haven't really used in prod at the scale of Amazon.

Nowadays, I have health issues (go figure) so it's off the table and all I can do is wonder :).

This is the normal approach. You are experienced and wise now.

I kinda agree with the OP, I would have a lot of trust issues with management if they pulled this shit on me.

Hunter gatherer survivalist genes just kick in.

YMMV, but I consider it a healthy thing for, at least for some part of your career, to work "Amazon hard." Aka, all the reasons that people list when they say you should really try working for a startup.

When you push yourself to your limits at your profession, a lot of stuff clicks into place and you learn so much.

You can't procrastinate, you can't do it wrong, there just isn't the time.

Maybe a cynical take, but if you’re pushing limits then you’re probably just learning the right corners to cut, shortcuts to take, and how to exploit/manipulate people to get what you want fast. If you didn’t learn any of that, then—well, someone else just learned all that at your expense and you’re setting yourself up to just be exploited again and again.

> there just isn't the time

Yeah, that’s the root cause. Why is there no time? Is someone’s life on the line for this deadline or is it just that the manager is eyeing a sweet bonus for delivering early. 99.9% of the time it’s the latter. So why learn how to get manipulated? Learning to work at a consistent pace is far more sustainable. Tortoise and the hare.

Working at such a rhythm helped me learn much. It also durably damaged my body (both because it chipped away at my health and because it made me forego health check-up), my mental health, and made me lose personal connections. To this day, I'm still picking up the pieces.

Human beings are also "designed" to survive long period of hunger if need be, but no one would argue that going without for a week is a fine and healthy way to lose weight.

I guess I should say the healthy thing to do is to work at 100% of your capacity, whilst going to bed at 9pm and doing 25 minutes of exercise every morning?

The only thing worth working 120% for is raising your newborn child. Or maybe making a civilization-altering breakthrough in the natural sciences, like Fusion energy.

Everything is simply 'meh' in comparison and not worth sacrificing your health for. And I say this as a person who doesn't even particularly like or want kids.

You should have trust issues with "management" in any corporation because these people have the interest of the shareholders at heart, not of the workers. It's just sad some of us have to go through a traumatic burnout to learn this lesson.

Of course, what i said doesn't apply in a self-organized workers cooperatives where management is the workers.

The shareholders try to build a social control structure that aligns these, but it never fully succeeds.

    def caresAbout(self, other):
        if type(self) == type(other): return random.choice([True, False])
        return False

People like to talk about how great a teacher failure is, and how it teaches you valuable lessons... and it's true! Failure does teach you lots of valuable things, including things that you don't learn by succeeding. However, succeeding at something challenging generally teaches you more.

Or to cast it in ML terms... you need examples of both success and failure in your data set, but the "success" data points are more valuable.

And like any great, secure, lasting and stable engineering giving you the knowledge and time is key here.

When a company overloads the safety officer with tasks, so they and up not being able to do their work propperly and an incident happens, the company is at fault because it failed to provide the officer with the resources needed for the job.

If they don't give a dev the resources to do their job it is not different in my eyes. The fact that there might be some magical dev who would be able to get something working out of the same circumstances doesn't matter — maybe it has a company crippling flaw in it because of all the haste.

It's a crazy approach that probably falls apart if you're unsuccessful. But they're very successful so they can just keep burning money to attract new hires. Also, I imagine it's a huge career builder if you work in FMCG or development to have "Amazon retail" or "Amazon Web Services" on your resume. Since everyone uses those platforms.

I imagine what is left at the end is a residue of "born again" workaholics, who're probably pretty great at their jobs. Who then ascend to and form middle management.

And the global express trundles on, powered by these workaholics.

The last 1.5 of those I worked with what I consider two amazingly brilliant a####les.

I ended up leaving the most amazing place I had ever worked at until then (worldwide traveling, learning new stuff, actual high performance systems).

It has taken years to recover and I still cover myself more than I should.

My boss (who I liked) tried to get me back twice after he realized I had not been the problem and the two others had left but by then my salary had increased so much I was out of reach for him (edit:,) and telling my family I'd go down a double digit percentage in salary to work for someone who had not stood up for me back the was out of the question.

Then again, I keep interviewing people with 5-10 years of experience, who will go something like this:

> How would you manage a server? (leaving out a ton of context about what it means to "manage a server")

> Very easy, SSH connection is very fast, reliable, ...

> Awesome, love me some SSH, how about 5 servers?

> Hmm, probably write shell scripts.

> How about 50 servers?

> Shell scripts?

> Even with 500 servers?

> Hire more people..?

And I keep feeling that these people don't have 10 YoE, they have 1-2 YoE times some coefficient.

I feel like if you're in a "successful rut", that's what it will do to you. You feel like you're successful, but in fact, you have fallen horribly behind, without even knowing it.

Your quality of life is probably fine, until you're laid off one day.

I recently came off a project that was technically using "GitOps" but where every deployment involved copying and pasting dozens of files across 3 or 4 repos, and the whole thing was very error prone, and if you didn't change exactly the right things your service would just silently fail to deploy, or be unreachable, with zero feedback.

I've worked at a company with a bespoke CI/CD system hacked together with PHP scripts and Jenkins servers, but where every single process was ruthlessly automated, reversible, with multiple layers of fallback, failure recovery, garrulous feedback, and built-in approvals that you could automate, or if you didn't remember, you'd get a helpful reminder in email and a link to a page to fill in the required information. People could, and did, know how to do a deployment on it their first or second day.

Guess which one was more pleasant to deploy with?

It's the automation mindset that's important. You can find people with the right mindset who haven't had a chance yet to play with ansible or terraform, and you can find people who manage to create nightmarish complexities of manual processes out of ansible and terraform. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found this to correlate much with years of experience.

Not sure what answer you expect here? Just because you have 10 years of experience doesn’t mean you’ve ever worked with more than 25 servers at a time (at least I haven’t).

I consider it a source of pride, I think. You absolutely don’t need mega scale for most things (or maybe mega scale, but still not many servers)

Some people get complacent once they get a job and stop learning. The trick is to keep on learning. I have worked for a company like Amazon with aggressive schedules where we used to work for 12 hrs/day. One time I didnt go home for 3 days. I can say I learnt a lot, but there are better companies with mature planning where you would still learn the same amount.

How different ppl react to toxic environments is also different. Some people may thrive, while some may wither.

I say it is a random walk searching for the best place (for you) to work. You keep iterating until you find what you want.

They ask for a VM or a DB to the DevOps / SRE team, wait a bit days and get a URL. If a team uses CI/CD and K8s, they will write a yaml file from a template, wait a few minutes and app will be deployed.

Basically the higher-ups have to decide what is most important; if the deadline is fixed, then the scope HAS TO BE flexible.

tl;dr; everything in a large corporation is a game of telephone where everyone is incentivized to muddle the message. So any deadline/commitment handed through multiple levels of management is really difficult to negotiate. And the more unrealistic it is, the harder it is the negotiate. Nobody wants to tell their boss that the thing they want done in 3 months will actually take 2 years.

  In the beginning, there was a plan, 
  And then came the assumptions,
  And the assumptions were without form, 
  And the plan without substance,

  And the darkness was upon the face of the workers,
  And they spoke among themselves saying,
  "It is a crock of shit and it stinks."

  And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
  "It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."

  And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying,
  "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, 
  Such that none may abide by it."

  And the Managers went unto their Directors saying,
  "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."

  And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another,
  "It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."

  And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them,
  "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."

  And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him,
  "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor 
  Of the company With very powerful effects."

  And the President looked upon the Plan 
  And saw that it was good,
  And the Plan became Policy.

  And this, my friend, is how shit happens.

And yes, I've been a manager in a company where the phrase "managed out of the business" was used. I no longer work there.

I don’t understand this though? Eventually someone’s head needs to roll. If you fail your project and get fired, how is your manager immune from consequence? They failed too (probably more).

Sounds generally like most jobs.