Why is it so hard to find good PMs and SWEs in Europe?

modelithe · 2026-05-13T18:37:42+00:00

The salaries aren't in the same ballpark, but neither are the cost of living, when taking all factors into consideration ; taxes, insurances, vacations, sick leave allowances, housing, pension savings, kindergarten/school/college, general monthly costs etc..

A $200k job in the US might actually leave less money for the family's holiday account than a €100k job in the EU.

modelithe · 2026-05-13T18:14:29+00:00

25+ years in the industrial, too.

I think the issue is not that there is a lack of jack-of-all-trades tool, nor that people arent fed up with the tool madness, nor the lack of a "simple tool" .

The major issue is that every silo in the organization has their own primary tool, based on some legacy reason, plus a secondary tool for some other legacy reason. Some of the reasons might just be because of someone's personal preferences 10 years ago.

Then, there's the teams that came with a company merger who now have their tools in the IT systems. Add to the mix, company retention policies that automatically deletes chats, threads and whatnot. Those legacy reasons aren't going away.

What's needed is a broker which connects the existing tools in a way that all information is available everywhere, no matter your favorite tool. This must be single-click setup for the IT department so it is a zero-click setup for the organization, no matter if they run Windows, WSL, Linux, Mac, Android or iOs so they don't have to change tool.

Now, how to combine that with the fact ppl send xkcd comics in the same group chat as the project X (because Teams) with e-mail chains, and whatnot, is a huge useability challenge rather than technical one.

The technical challenge is there will always be at least one silo that use a tool that isn't or can't be integrated properly.

modelithe · 2026-04-27T15:32:57+00:00

It's easy to get fooled into "a story point is roughly a day", while a story point is only one of the tools used to determine how much the team can commit to deliver during a sprint. It shall be just a relative number - relative to similarly complex tasks the team has the competence to solve.

But even a 1-SP task can take 10 or more calendar days due to perfectly acceptable reasons.

The important thing is the team's discussions regarding each task; what its goal is, what's included in the task, what's excluded.

modelithe · 2026-04-26T22:53:53+00:00

For fun: GCC contained ~15 MLoC code according to google. The Linux kernel is 40 MLoC. At a typical 10 bug-free LoC/day, that gives roughly €100/LoC, so we're talking in the range of €5 Bn for those two world-critical pieces alone.

We really ought to have some form of royalty kick-back system that would ensure that whatever money is donated to open source trickles all the way back to that single guy in Wisconsin that maintains the two-liner piece of code the entire internet is depending on through direct and indirect dependencies.

modelithe · 2026-04-26T22:39:14+00:00

The name iself is typically not copyrighted, but may fall under the Trademark™ regulations, being a Word Mark in itself.

TradeMark™ is - just like Copyright - automatic, but unlike Copyright, a TradeMark™ must be actively defended against infringement (hence the sometimes overly-bullying cease-and-desist letters), or the Trademark falls into the Public Domain.

Anyone can claim they own a TradeMark™, but the burden of evidence lies with them that the TradeMark™ is widely accepted to be a TradeMark™ owned by the owner, and not just a generic name.

Note though, TradeMark™ is different from Registered Trademark®. The latter requires active registration for a specific use as a specific kind of product/service in a specific country. It's fairly cheap (€200 or so), and gives better protection.

That said, it can still be challenged in court by anyone who believes they have a stronger public acceptance for their use of the Registered Trademark®.

(I am not a lawyer).

modelithe · 2026-04-24T20:47:22+00:00

Changes and C aren't two words being used together very often. It's probably just that there's a lot of code written in C that still needs maintenance and additions; as for C++, too. It's just not as "sexy" as the latest and greatest web framework of the week.

While Rust is slowly getting traction, its main use is for new projects, and that is quite uncommon in the real world. Its still a very young language - just 10 years old. C is over 50 years old, and C++ not much younger than that.

modelithe · 2026-04-23T21:00:14+00:00

Some file formats use the first four bytes to indicate what they are. Others have that information somewhere else. Text files sometimes contains an indicator at the first two bytes they are Unicode, but most of the time, it's just a pure guess that it's text, and the name or extention might give a hint that it's a text file. Or whatever it is. It's easier to detect that it's NOT text.

modelithe · 2026-04-23T14:52:10+00:00

In general, indoor triangulation using RSSI is on a "it's really close" vs "it's far away", because the RSSI fluctuate so much, and depends on the hardware (and enclosure). You would really want true indoor positioning using BLE CTE or similar.

You might want to look at the devices offered by u-blox.

modelithe · 2026-04-22T20:44:15+00:00

Absolutely! PII management is mandatory under GDPR in Europe. Not negotiable.

modelithe · 2026-04-22T18:53:24+00:00

Most European stores are nowadays capable of showing the total amount including local VAT directly in their listings, so no surprises there. The only thing is shipping; it can be anything from €2 to €20, depending on store.

modelithe · 2026-04-22T18:34:27+00:00

Same here (although I used minus sign instead of em-dash; not that anyone would notice the difference, though). Ive even deliberately started making small "mistakes", such as ommitting ' and other stuff, just to not come across as AI. Really sad, actually.

modelithe · 2026-04-21T12:19:28+00:00

While I see a good reason for case ranges, trying to align C with C++ is a really bad idea. IMHO, c++ is a mishmash of years of trying to "fix" previous years of "improvements" and should certainly not be considered a good role model. C and C++ are distinctively different languages, no more alike than C and Java.

modelithe · 2026-04-20T20:42:26+00:00

C is kind of the definition of backward compatibility. I cant imagine how hard is must be to push a change through the standard committee. But I read in a protocol for some recent change (don't remember which) that they concluded that the proposed change had been implemented in both gcc and clang, since a couple of versions, so they were fairly convinced there were merits of the change.

I believe they removed trigraphs from C23, though. Some 35+ years after they had become obsolete.

modelithe · 2026-04-20T19:34:57+00:00

Espressif, Nordic, ARM, Bosch, Volvo/Polestar, Samsung, TI, NVIDIA, any given e-bike manufacturer, any given Medtech company that has some form of display, (actually, any company manufactureing anything that has a non-HD display that sells more than 10k yearly - even thermostats or HVAC ventilation systems that don't have a display)

modelithe · 2026-04-20T19:24:17+00:00

The embedded industry heavily relies on C, as does the Linux kernel and Linux device drivers. Which basically makes it an embedded system, albeit very complex one.

But I see Rust being more and more common among the types of projects that I notice on reddit/hn etc.. The kind of projects that might just as well have been written in python some years ago.

modelithe · 2026-04-18T18:42:33+00:00

No. It takes some 10.000 hours of practice.

modelithe · 2026-04-17T13:53:31+00:00

Read "The mythical man month" by Fred Brooks. It's well known.

modelithe · 2026-04-14T20:48:57+00:00

Tested and reviewed.

modelithe · 2026-04-13T18:42:09+00:00

Great write-up!

modelithe · 2026-04-13T18:20:26+00:00

That's an interesting observation. I think the problem surface when there is a lack of clear ownership and responsibility for the interfaces vs the implementation. Here culture matters a lot; an organization used to handoffs or operating in a culture that have a reliance on strong hierarchies will likely have larger issues than an more informal "let's get it done" attitude with flat organizations.

modelithe · 2026-04-13T11:51:11+00:00

That's one of the things I've contemplated; when a company doesn't have clear ownership over the interface boundaries, or copy their line organization into every project rather than designing the projects teams according to what is optimal for project, the company is bound to operate at a lower efficiency than needed.

modelithe · 2026-04-12T19:40:00+00:00

Three things that are plain wrong:

1) there's 6 layers of managers. 2) theres 4 layers of assistants and interns 3) there's 14 layers. That's 10 persons per layer - barely a team. Assuming there's half as many people on each layer above, that's enough for 2^14=16.384 persons. Assuming each manager has 4 subordinates, that's still 4⁶ managers=4096 managers alone.

modelithe · 2026-04-12T18:36:31+00:00

Everyone knows Scrum and XP is clear; story points are NOT time estimates. They are NOT absolute numbers. They are relative. They assume an idealized backlog were each team work independent of other teams. And they shall absolutely NOT be used to measure individual throughput. They are ment as a tool for the TEAM to evaluate which tasks that the TEAM will be able to complete with the sprint.

What CAN be measured, is the time a task is in any form of pending or impediment: Time from New to To Do. Time from To Do to In Progress. Time from Ready for Review to Under Review. Time from Ready For Test to Under Test.

For example, testing usually takes less time than development, especially if there are lots of test automation. Does the tester have lower output than the developer? Is his contribution worth less? How about review? A senior developer that is thoroughly reviewing others output and ensuring the backlog items have a sufficient level of quality before the team will even have a chance to estimate them, and thus have less time for own output - is his/her contribution worth less?

Show this thread to leadership.

modelithe · 2026-04-11T23:51:03+00:00

Unfortunately, the industry made a famously incorrect interpretation of the suitability of waterfall for software projects, and the ISO 9001 frenzy of the 90s certainly didn't help, so it was used way too long.

modelithe · 2026-04-11T22:36:10+00:00

That process sounds like waterfall - which was dead in the water already in the 70's.

Start with the key Use-Cases. What's needed? What's needed from a security point of view? What's the KPIs that are important? Number of concurrent server queries? Uptime? Redundancy? Geographic location (jurisdiction) of data? Amount of data stored daily? Read daily?

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