Years ago, while I was a poor students I compiled Gentoo on an overclocked Celeron CPU at whopping 533 MHz. Took literally 3 days to get to a functioning KDE desktop.
Worth every second, especially because it was winter and the dorm room was cold. My friends appreciated it too, they nicknamed my desktop “the reactor” for all the warmth it provided compiling all the damn time.
Has no one here ever worked on a new project or even a new feature in a decently sized codebase? Working exclusively in maintenance / minor change mode has to be exhausting.
Poland.
A lot of development and other IT related jobs get outsourced, so experienced devs are in very high demand. We usually work in a B2B arrangement, a developer starts their own company (sole trader I think it’s called in the US) and invoices an agency that deals with corporate customers.
Salaries are around 3-4x average national salary, with smaller taxes than on a work contract and less safety (which is not a problem due to high demand). Locally, managers do not usually play any role, I report directly to the customer’s managers, usually far away from Poland. If I were to sign a contract with the customer, that’s no longer B2B usually, the salary is less and taxes are higher.
Same boat. Nuh uh, you’re not promoting me. I don’t want to have to deal with offshore support, meeting 6 out of 8 hours, making sure Jira board is up to PM’s standards and only reading code when any of the devs have an issue they cannot solve by themselves or something breaks. I tried management career path and hated it with all my heart, quit when they wanted to promote me higher. Let me do what I enjoy, I’ll deliver.
Bonus points - developers make more than managers up to 2 or 3 levels up where I live, so it doesn’t even calculate.
I recommend distrobox for adhoc distrohopping. Though for Nvidia stuff it links to drivers and cuda that you have installed on your host, so… I recently needed cuda 11.8 and that was hella fun to get going.
In case you don’t know - there are two categories: open and women-only. Anyone can compete in open, no matter what their gender/sex is. Women can also compete against other women only if they want. It’s definitely not like “oh you’re a woman, you can’t compete here, it’s only for men”.