A couple of comments as a European who lives and works in the US:
- I'm surprised that you find salaries lower in the US than in Europe. That said, if you compared freelance/consulting rates to salaries, that's Apples and Oranges. If you compare salaried positions, even on the East Coast, the salaries should be noticeably higher than in Germany. The extremely high compensation that people in some posts are talking about are generally found in a few, extremely high cost of living areas on the West Coast.
- I would expect AWS focused cloud migration consulting to be in demand in the US more or less the same way it is in Europe. That said, you'll be in competition with the usual consulting/outsourcing suspects and with no network, that might be a bit of an issue.
- The big financial hit for freelancers over here tends to be health insurance, and that's going to be rather expensive at your age (I'm a few years older than you). If your wife's job does offer health insurance for both of you, that's a major bonus. In fact that's pretty much what keeps me from freelancing with 30+ years experience (I used to freelance in Europe).
- Yes, there are differences in the quality of life over here. Not all of it is applicable to freelancers for whom paid vacation time isn't a thing, but it's a different mentality when it comes to work here for a lot of people.
To put not too fine a point to it, yes, your age can be an issue. Despite age discrimination being illegal, it's still rampant in this industry. OTOH I don't have that many problems finding work, and I work with a few people who are older than me and also don't have those issues. A lot of it depends on the company you're working for or with - some of them are looking for cheap young cannon fodder, others are willing to pay for experience and deal with grumpy old people :).
The other question you need to answer for yourself is the motivation for moving over here, even temporarily. If you're looking to make untold riches quickly, it's probably not that great an idea. While you should be able to at least match your German income over here, it might take a few years to get back to that level.
The two typical choices are rspamd and amavisd/SpamAssassin, at least when you're using Postfix on a unity environment. I use amavisd on my primary and rspamd on the secondary, both seem to work OK.
Yes, spam will still make it through and you have to train the filters in either case.
That reads to me like a nice collection of red flags.
1 - They all say that, it's a meaningless phrase used to cover candidates in the effluence from the southern end of a north facing male bovine, if you get my drift ;). I'm sure they also pay the highest salaries ever to make up for hiring only the best.
2 - Oh my aching sides. If they really have more money than they could ever spend, they need a visit from a clue-by-four about business planning. If they're raising that much money are are serious about their business, each one of those dollars should've already been earmarked (even if the earmark just says "runway").
3 - Translation - you're cordially invited to work 168 hours a week as a baseline and if necessary, work nights on top. Yes, I would expect that they mumble something about having a say in your side projects (that are relevant to their business) and consulting activities that might interfere with their legitimate business interest, but a lot companies seem to mistake that for owning their employees. This tends to be easier to handle if you're consulting with them rather than become an employee. There is a legitimate need for a compromise here though, especially if you are an employee. But tread carefully.
The third point also brings up another interesting point - if they hire you as an employee or consultant and you get paid by them for working on your project, who owns the IP? I'd be very careful with that, because you don't want to be in a situation where you suddenly don't own a potentially major piece of work that's based on some work you created.
I've been doing this software engineering thing for over 30 years now, first in Europe, now in the US. The headline compensation for this whole time was pretty much always based on a handful of companies in Silicon Valley - that doesn't mean that developer jobs over here aren't well paid (they often are), but mostly to the level of "comfortable living" and not at the level of "buying my own small country in five years' time". So keep that in mind.
The other part of this is the industry - there has always been a part of the industry that lived on badly gluing together components cheaply for a quick turnaround. Obviously that part of the industry thrives on relatively cheap labour. I do think that sector has grown a bit, but keep in mind that the whole industry has grown, so these jobs have grown in proportion to the industry.
I think another part of this is which sector you are in - there are plenty of niches where jobs can be found where the job is not "chief component gluer". Usually, these tend to be a bit closer to the metal than web development, and arguably a bit more back end or lower level oriented. IOW, not necessarily something that you can show your non-technical family and state "I did that".
I do find it harder to find new jobs, though. Not necessarily because I don't get regular enquiries from recruiters, but more because those jobs are often a repeat of what I've done before with no or very little growth. And there's only so long you can coast along.
I grew up in the 8-bit era, so that's mostly what I'm interested in from a retro computing perspective. Pretty much the whole Acorn lineup starting with the BBC and then going to the early ARMs is interesting, plus a bunch of the other early UK-built weird machines like home computers using Forth (I think that was the ORIC).
Early UNIX workstations are also pretty interesting, like the early SUN stuff, SGI, early NeXT if you're more interested in that type of machines.
I used to live in the UK for couple of years and I never heard of BBC before I living there. Right now I am hunting for Acorn and BBC and I am planning on flying to the UK just to pick them up. It's funny how these systems were so big, however only on the domestic market.
I would love to get SGI but in the country I live in, it's almost imposible, same as SUN and NeXT.
Sun gear has REALLY jumped in price, especially the early 32bit SPARC stuff. I had a BUNCH of them in the mid 2000's, an IPX, SS10, SS20, Ultra1, and a beautiful full stack LX with CD-ROM and two external hard drives. Sold them all on over the years--now ONE machine is worth more than all I sold combined. I recently had a hankering for another Sparc and settled on a SunFire V100 because it was reasonably priced and I wanted to avoid buying a 13w3 monitor and Sun-Keyboard at the upper price range they are going for. Still a very capable server and it scratched my big-endian itch for the time being.
I first learned Linux (and C) on a SparcStation LX back around 2005 with Debian. I had it fully kitted out with 9.1GB SCSI Hard Drive, 128MB RAM. I sold it around 2011 for $300 and thought that was a lot. Now I see them going for 3x that amount and I wish I'd kept it.
Over three decades in this business, done a lot of contract work (outside the US), currently FTE at a US company.
Other than all the micro-annoyances that a lot of my fellow posters already mentioned and the general "we own your behind" attitude that a lot of employers seem to exhibit towards their FTE employees, I think there are two really, really important points that a lot of companies haven't figured out and the FAANGs have to an extent.
1. Have a proper career path for senior technical staff. That's the part that most companies haven't figured out. In the minds of the people who design the career paths in a lot of places, it's apparently desirable to become a manager as soon as possible. Not to mention the "why bother, they're going to leave in a couple of year anyway" approach, which is a self fulfilling prophecy.
2. Have problems that actually require a senior engineer, and let them get on with it with a minimum of red tape and political BS. Please note that I didn't say _technical problems_, there is a lot a good senior engineer can do to improve your technical team by mentoring, process improvements, tooling improvements and so on. Most of us who've been in this industry this long love what we do (because otherwise we'd be off working as a bush pilot or something) and want to share our knowledge as we've now become the people who helped us in our careers when we were the more junior people.
3. Listen to your senior engineers. Yes, I know, I wrote "two points". This one's on the house :).
If your spideysense is tingling about new clauses, talk to an employment lawyer (or a union if you are a member of one) in the jurisdiction that you live in. That's really the only way to get valid legal advice, and you want to understand what these clauses mean from a legal perspective. Usually they're written in legalese and the defined meaning of something in legalese tends to be a bit different from the coloquial meaning.
Also, don't forget that even if some of the clauses they're trying to impose on you may not be legal or enforceable where you live and work, it usually takes a court to make that determination. So it's a matter of understanding what the impact of these new clauses is and what risks you take by accepting them.
And please, please don't accept the "oh, but we're never going to enforce those clauses". You don't want to be the first person they get enforced against. If the employer comes back with that statement, ask them to take out the offending clauses.
I'd just add that for some things like non-competes, even if the company wouldn't/couldn't likely enforce, they can be red flags for a potential employer. I worked for a very small company for a number of years and our COO wouldn't touch anyone with a non-compete even if it seemed likely there was no issue because they just saw it as too big a risk for our small firm to get into a legal tangle with a much bigger company.
Thanks for the perspective. I'm trying to build my network up again - I moved countries a few years ago and the majority of my network in back in Europe.
That's a very good question, and not necessarily something I find easy to explain concisely. Let me try anyway :). Note, some of the bad impressions may come from the usual clued up recruiters who are trolling LinkedIn for keywords and then crank up the spam.
So what I expect from a role that's commensurate with my experience (trying to avoid "senior" as that's usually a pigeonhole):
- You tell me what you need to have built, I'll figure out the how (architecture, design, technology) and when it'll be done, based on the usual cost/velocity/quality constraints.
- I'll work with, guide, mentor and lead a team of developers if the size of the project needs it. However, I'm technical first, so I'm not interested in roles that are management only. This generally seems to be the crux of the matter - not a lot of companies seem to have these roles.
- If you give me the responsibility to deliver X, I also need to have the authority to make it happen. Don't ask me how I figured that out ;)
I can usually find roles that fit two out of three, but I don't seem to be able to find something that matches all three. My current role probably rates as 2 1/4 out of three, and is definitely a good fit, but with very limited growth potential (aka I'm close taking as far as I can take it).
Points 1 and 2 describe the jobs of most Staff Engineers (or higher) at large tech companies like FAANG that I know. Smaller companies rarely have these because, perhaps unsurprisingly, small shops rarely have big enough technical challenges to need more than 1 person like this, and they double as management.
3 is likely to be a sticking point however. Once you have responsibility for large projects you are often in a certain amount of resource contention, the chance of avoiding political battles there is small unless you are a known superstar within the company.
If you're ok with that, I'd prepare for a whiteboard interview at one of the big well-paying tech companies.
That makes sense. I think that I may have consciously been trying to ignore the point you're making that there are only a handful of companies out there that have the sort of problems where they can justify having this level of people on staff, and more than one to boot.
I guess it's a choice between that and consulting, because i suspect there are a whole bunch of smaller companies out there that can use help with problems like that, but they don't have enough of them to justify having someone like me on staff full time.
> That's a very good question, and not necessarily something I find easy to explain concisely.
I've been where you are. One tip I have is to spend a little bit of time (an hour or two) and work out exactly how to explain it concisely. What's your elevator pitch? If you ran into the CTO of your dream tech company at a friend's party, and they asked what kind of work you would like to do, what would you explain in 60 seconds?
For what it's worth, I think what you have above is pretty close. If you can tweak it slightly, you can likely get to a "Here's what I want to be doing and this is why you should hire me" in the same sort of pitch.
I know it's difficult to explain sometimes, but it's worth your time to figure out how to frame it concisely. Good luck!
In the European companies they are not. From my experience (UK Financial Services primarily), they are equivalent to a US Staff Engineer with authority over Design and Implementation. Typically looking after a team or two of engineers of various levels of experience.
There's also a broad amount of "socialising" the design/system internally to generate "buy-in" across the organisation. Which is the tedious bit for me, but hey, the money is good.
Sometimes they are, but that's not what you want. Other times, it's like what you've described but unfortunately with much less (or even zero) hand-on work, and more meetings and dealing with internal bureucracy.
BTW to me, it looks like what you want is a tech lead role.
Tech Lead with some business involvement. I've run my own small consulting companies in the past, just haven't had the nerve to do that here in the US, mainly due to cost of health insurance.
Most car dealers in the US, at least for “normal” (ie, non-premium) car brands are extremely reluctant to custom order cars and often outright refuse to do so. They also tend to put subtle pressure on customers to buy something of the lot right now instead. The car buying experience is very different over here compared to Germany.
- I'm surprised that you find salaries lower in the US than in Europe. That said, if you compared freelance/consulting rates to salaries, that's Apples and Oranges. If you compare salaried positions, even on the East Coast, the salaries should be noticeably higher than in Germany. The extremely high compensation that people in some posts are talking about are generally found in a few, extremely high cost of living areas on the West Coast.
- I would expect AWS focused cloud migration consulting to be in demand in the US more or less the same way it is in Europe. That said, you'll be in competition with the usual consulting/outsourcing suspects and with no network, that might be a bit of an issue.
- The big financial hit for freelancers over here tends to be health insurance, and that's going to be rather expensive at your age (I'm a few years older than you). If your wife's job does offer health insurance for both of you, that's a major bonus. In fact that's pretty much what keeps me from freelancing with 30+ years experience (I used to freelance in Europe).
- Yes, there are differences in the quality of life over here. Not all of it is applicable to freelancers for whom paid vacation time isn't a thing, but it's a different mentality when it comes to work here for a lot of people.
To put not too fine a point to it, yes, your age can be an issue. Despite age discrimination being illegal, it's still rampant in this industry. OTOH I don't have that many problems finding work, and I work with a few people who are older than me and also don't have those issues. A lot of it depends on the company you're working for or with - some of them are looking for cheap young cannon fodder, others are willing to pay for experience and deal with grumpy old people :).
The other question you need to answer for yourself is the motivation for moving over here, even temporarily. If you're looking to make untold riches quickly, it's probably not that great an idea. While you should be able to at least match your German income over here, it might take a few years to get back to that level.