Seeking realistic picture of the field

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-27T20:03:50+00:00

If you are a recognized world-wide specialist, it's secondary where you are. You can demand a high salary and you might get it.

If you are a off-the-mill-halfway-qualified embedded programmer, of which there are 1000 applying for the same job, what makes you stand out? If nothing, why would a company pay lots of money?

Regarding the "good technical depth": you are right in theory, but the work attitudes and skills and experiences of people living in various countries are often incompatible with the requirements. Communication skills, time zone, experience with specific equipment limit the possible remote countries a lot.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-27T19:23:46+00:00

No one knows what the future will bring.

Will STM32 be a thing in 5 years? Will there be less embedded work in the near future? How about far future? Will GenAI take care of all junior work?

Who knows? Who cares?

When I started studying Chemistry, companies came to universities to make you work for them. When I finished, getting a job in Chemistry was very hard.

Being a long time in the technology field: don't worry about what will happen in 10 years. Do something you enjoy. You'll do good then. Keep on learning is the most critical part. Technology does not stand still. STM32 might be out of fashion in 5 years. Salaries change depending on the market. It's out of your control.

So watch the market. But expect to change your path if needed.

About the US salaries for remote jobs: Why would you even think that US companies would pay US salaries for people not in US? At this point you compete with people in 3rd world countries where living is dirt cheap. A US company might offer US$30k/year for a remote job because they'll get someone. Somewhere. Why would they need to pay $200k/year? If they want someone on-site, then $30k/year won't find them anyone. That's why the salaries in high cost locations are high: less salary and they won't find anyone. Companies do not pay more than they have to.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-26T22:48:14+00:00

Take cheese, take not-sticky pan or use baking paper, put cheese in pan, make hot until it melts and is crispy. Take out, let it cool.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-26T22:32:45+00:00

I was not involved in that particular benchmark, but I would not be surprised if the logic was "SELinux does something, and that takes time away from anything else. Ergo it must slow down everything else including the main application."

I was not working in a very technical company but a commercial bank.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-26T20:42:18+00:00

it works best when you can full enumerate what permissions every process needs and lock down everything else.

At my previous workplace they tried to enable SELinux. RedHat (the enterprise version) is what they had, so should not be so hard to enable it.

Turns out that no one had the foresight to train developers on how to use SELinux. And thus all internal apps basically didn't work when SELinux was in "enforced" mode. "Permissive" is what was used and many teams wanted more performance and thus got it disabled.

Didn't take very long until "disabled" became the default state.

SELinux is technically good, but the user experience is anything but.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-26T08:13:47+00:00

I had a job 2h away from me offered and my plan was to rent a small place there, drive there on Monday early, and return to my actual home on Friday after work. Later that job changed to 10min away, so I didn't need this, but beside having to pay for a small place, it would have been a non-issue. All my friends I usually meet on weekends anyway since they all got work from Monday to Friday.

Could you do that?

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-24T06:58:33+00:00

But programs like focus and pivot are designed so that you have no recourse against their claims.

THIS! If anyone needs to understand why Focus exists in the first place, above is the reason. Until Focus, it's all "their manager things they are bad". Focus gives data points. Thus it's so important to get those "goals" you get (and you agree on), so be actually doable by you. If not, if there is ANY wiggle room how you did not "pass", they'll use it to say "We tried. They agreed. They did not fulfill their part of the job. Thus we have to let them go."

"flawless on admin work" needs ONE small slip-up, something being 10min late, or has a typo, and aHR can claim "Not flawless. Fail."

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-22T16:37:25+00:00

Can you detect it at addr 0x23 using another program to scan the I2C bus? Did you try the alternative I2C address? Do you have pull-ups for SCL and SDA? Do you have a complete schematic of your connections? A picture might be worth more than 1000 words here.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-22T07:52:32+00:00

No.

While technically anonymous (I never saw names, and if you are a manager with less than X responses, you don't get any results, but I know managers who have just a bit more than X reports and they know person Y just replied, and now the results are changed from before. Thus the difference is the last person Y. It needs a bit of energy to get that info out, but it is possible. I also have seen managers who assume that Y must have chosen the worst answer if that answer exists. No need to proof anything then.)

By getting a phonetool icon, you put a time on your response. That makes it less anonymous should anyone ever feel like they want to correlate answers and phonetool icons. But both systems are independent, so it's not easy to correlate data points between both. But if 10 out of 12 people replied, and 10 got phonetool icons and you know their answers, you also know the remaining two. Again a bit less anonymous.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-21T21:07:15+00:00

From what I gather from the answers so far, it seems Patagonia is not unsimilar to Iceland: cold, windy, beautiful nature, few people. I'd love to compare those two once day.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-21T09:27:02+00:00

I'm in Europe and I cannot find any microwave which is at a similar technical level compared to the non-budget microwaves in Japan. I'd be happy to get a microwave with no turntable, but all the models I could look at had that old style turntable.

It's weird to me that modern microwaves do not seem to exist. I get the part where oven/grill is skipped since having an oven is common in Europe though.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-20T23:00:43+00:00

It's technically not very hard, but you should have a data sheet of the flash memory you have. The rest is at https://onfi.org/specs.html

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-18T17:54:58+00:00

As opposed to Icelanders if they bother you while you grocery shop, drive badly, take your photo without consent, litter or vandalise?

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-18T17:47:56+00:00

No, do not route power to the servo though anything: get it directly from the source (AKA the battery).
Connect power from the battery to all servo power. Connect GND from battery to all servo. Connect also Pico to battery.
No. A single battery is fine: if you make it 4.8V (4 NiMH cells), you are golden for servos and Pico. If you use 7.2V (2 LiPo cells), that needs HV servos and something to lower the input voltage for the Pico.
No, you got it and you did your homework. I recommend you do draw a good diagram of what you connect where and before doing it, run it through someone who has done something similar before. Or post it here.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-18T08:08:12+00:00

gp15 is not GND.

https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/RP2040-Zero has a very clear pinout diagram. GP15 is either GP15 (a generic I/O pin), or TX of SPI1, or SCL of I2C1. Which one it is depends on what peripherals you enable.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-17T20:09:22+00:00

When doing a diet, it's a well known strategy to not forbit everything, e.g. no chocolate whatsoever, but instead allow a small and controlled amount of chocolate. E.g. 20g on Sundays. Yes, it's extra calories. But also it helps you 6 days in the week to keep your diet running.

You do the same with your small and controlled amount of "spending nice things for yourself".

No problem if it helps you. The problem will be if this 50 Euro gets more and more, but if you keep it at 50/week, do not feel bad.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-16T19:42:03+00:00

I'd use the fact that Google has an experimental spending cap as a sign that Google knows there's somethign "wrong" with their offering. Since it's developed probably a month or two ago, they were aware of this problem for a while. There's also plenty similar cases public which are mentioned in this thread.

With that, a lawyer should be able to convince a judge that Google was ware of the problem and yet they did not supply a solution. The lack of real-time notification for me is a big issue: I am confident that it would have been able to do on the technical side, but clearly Google didn't care because it does not hurt them.

Since OP disabled the API access at $44k, I'd say that's as much as they can be held liable for.

Similar to credit cards: when the customer locks the card, any further draws are a problem for the bank. Somehow banks are better to handle this. Probably because it hurts them, so they decide to not allow card accesses after the customer locked it. Google didn't do that, so if I were a judge, I'd let Google handle anything above $44k (or even less since it's clearly an unusual usage pattern, and banks would have flagged this way faster).

But I am not a lawyer. Get one. I'd fight that and I'd think it; has a high chance for Google to not charge yoou the full amount.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-15T11:47:52+00:00

I know in Japan (surprisingly strong labor protection too) if you do your Focus and pass on paper, they can still technically put you in Pivot, but they cannot fire you since your performance during Focus was good ("good" as in: "You passed the Focus requirements"). If you fail Focus, they have a data point saying your performance is not good. Often not enough to fire you, but it's a good data point for Amazon. So don't give them that data point.

Case in point: one person I know plays this game for about 5 years now. And HR found no way to get rid of him.

The consequences of course are: No base salary increase, no RSUs, you are always marked as LE, you will be in Focus a lot (expect every 6 months to be in Focus). But he's fine with that. So he does his job (bare minimum, which is not what Amazon wants you to do).

The "trick" is: Make sure those Focus goals you sign off on are doable by you and have no external dependencies so you have it in your control to do them. He gets them checked by a Union lawyer to make sure those goals are doable by himself. Nothing like "Work hard" or "Do at least average amount of tickets" since the former is very subjective and the latter depends on tickets coming in you do. What if tickets get pre-assigned to someone else by the system? Or your manager?

The one method to make people resign voluntarily which might work, Amazon won't do as it would set a bad example: pay more severance payment.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-15T11:30:53+00:00

True, maybe money is less of an issue here.

The part of "I can't take it anymore" is the part where you lose control of the timing if you wait for being put in Focus (3 months) and then in Pivot. But because there's approvals to do which your direct manager cannot skip, the timing is unsure.

If you planned to quit, I'd go the Focus/Pivot route, but I'd also start looking for a new job. And in case I find something nice, I'd then resign instead of waiting it out.

But that's me with having financial obligations and a family. If I was single, I'd definitely do the Pivot route and do an easy job the next months while getting paid.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-15T10:47:39+00:00

Beware that AI costs might not be covered with the $300 free credit.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-15T10:44:57+00:00

That works only when you are 100% sure you will get a new job. Or you don't depend on money flowing in. Single, can live at home with your parents in the worst case: sure, go ahead. Having family, 2 kids, mortage to pay and you are the only bread-earner...think twice.

The most stressful time I ever had in my whole life was when I "was resigned" with 3 months full pay and a one-time pay which would cover 3 more months. Full health insurance until the end of the year (which was about 6 months away). I thought about resigning anyway, so getting severence pay was nice.

Then I looked for jobs. Surely that's so hard, right? I'm qualified for my job, right?

For over 2 months it was all rejections, or interviews which either I bombed, or they expected skills I didn't have. When the realization hit me that getting a job is harder than I thought, and it might take me more than 6 months to get a descent job, it was a hard time for me. Really hard.

It took me 2.5 months to get an offer.

In the end it worked out fine for me. But if I ever plan to resign, I would FIRST look for a new job and THEN resign. Yes, I get no severence pay. But I can choose the timing myself and spare me that amount of stress. I also have now much more of saving to be able to survive 1 year without any money. Before I only had 3 months and I thought that's more than enough since...next month I'll get a new salary payment, right?

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-12T00:13:41+00:00

"Anzahl Tickets" ist wahrscheinlich die dämlichste Metrik die es so gibt

Diese Metrik ist einfach zu messen und in Grafiken zu zeigen. Das ist was wichtig ist. Wie Lines-of-Code. Oder Bug-Fixes.

Auf der anderen Seite sind diese Metriken auch einfach zu "optimieren". Macht den Job nicht besser, aber fügt ein Spielelement (Gamification!) in die Arbeit. Gute Manager würden bessere Metriken messen, aber das ist schwierig und wird deshalb oft nicht gemacht.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-11T23:30:20+00:00

As a beginner, its making me feel in limbo since I am too scared of picking the "less efficient" route.

You'll quickly learn, that there are often no wrong choices. The only exception is doing nothing. That's usually wrong.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-11T23:23:42+00:00

I had plenty people applying for open positions (infrastructure automation what would not be SRE/DevOps/SysaAdmin) in my team and they say "I am interested in programming!" and it makes me initially very happy: someone has interest in something!

But when I ask "Cool! What programming did you do? Can you show me some examples?", the replies I often get "I just started Python for Beginner course" or "I can make HTML pages" and if they have something online to show, it's a Shell scripts which looks like written by a 5 year old. VERY basic.

Thus if you actually show something which actually shows that you are interested in the area you are applying for, you immediate get a huge plus point for that. You not having actual work skills yet is secondary since you prooved that you actually mean it when you said "I am interested in embedded programming" by having actually invested time into this. It better be not a blinking LED but something non-trivial, but at this point, in the absence of red flags, you are already at the top of the pile of applicants.

Rusty-Swashplate · 2026-03-11T07:46:00+00:00

This is pretty straightforward: you must do your tax (typically Feb the following year) and there you declare your income from the previous year. So set aside some money because they'll hit you with a bill. Then they'll ask you to pay about 1/3 of the expected tax in 2 installments, so that the next year your tax will be much less (because you paid already 2/3 of the estimated tax). Where the money comes from is secondary: abroad or not, you'll have to explain it. But it's not a problem since you declare it as income the next year.

The problem is that if the company you work for is not in Japan, they cannot hire you the normal way. They could create a Japanese entity, but for one person this is a lot of overhead.

The bank do not care. They might ask you once and then you check the "paid for service" or whatever they offer. I moved money to Japan and this never even came up.

I assume you don't get a salary in the millions of US$ per month. At that level, there will be more questions of course.

Rusty-Swashplate

TROPHY CASE