One day, a developer from this random company in Connecticut (I am German and lived in Germany at the time) reached out to me in my project's IRC channel, and asked if I wanted to interview. I did, and I got the job.

I moved to the UK, then to the US with my wife, and stayed with the company for 8 years. I got promoted from senior engineer to Sr. Principal Engineer and had an amazing time there. I now have a green card and live in CT with my 2 amazing children (with German and American citizenship).

I often think back about how much that project and that person who reached out to me changed my life. How different it would be if I hadn't worked on my side project, if it hadn't become semi-popular, or if he hadn't reached out. Butterfly effect at it's finest.

[1] https://www.syncany.org

Edit: Fun fact: Drew Houston (Dropbox CEO) emailed me at the time and wanted to hire me, but he didn't respond when I emailed him back. And even many years later when I applied at Dropbox they didn't want me, hehe.

I joined binwiederhier for a while in developing Syncany and he invited me for an internship at his current employer.

The experience I gained both in contributing to Syncany and said internship helped me indirectly land the role I'm currently in, and my open source experience in general helped me land a cool engagement where I got to do some innovative open source projects.

Ping me and we'll chat if you like. I'm working on a new open source project [1] that needs your help, hehe.

[1] https://ntfy.sh

However, ntfy is 100% open source so you can self-host it if you like, and I believe it does have a bunch of features that Pushover does not (email notifications, email publishing, scheduled delivery, tags/emojis, phone calls, icons, ... see for yourself: https://docs.ntfy.sh/publish/). I'm sure ntfy is missing things too that Pushover has. I'll let you be the judge of it.

Is your name a reference to that Grönemeyer song, btw? ;)

And yes, it's a reference to the song. Good catch. I was listening to it 20 years ago or something like that when I had to come up with a new username. And it stuck. ;-)

There are however some who want "freedom". Not that they lack freedom in Germany but the spiritual cowboy style, rocky mountain lifestyle freedom. Another reason for migration are obviously job offers in some industries.

I haven't but from what I have gathered the U.S is in many ways more preferable than Europe.

If you're in a poor country and changing country will get you a 10x increase in salary, that might more than compensate for only seeing your loved ones for a few days every few years. But if you're already pretty well off? Not so much.

We could start listing things, but there's probably a list that someone else has made. And depending on how much weight/value they put on things, they could say one or the other is better.

There is no hard feeling, except that I want to express that the US while being a nice country to life is not the "pursue a better life" destination. It is all very relative.

Germany is generally a better place to live if you have a low to average income. Think everything from transit to health care to tenants' rights. But like if you're aiming for really high salaries as a software developer, America is the place to be.

And yet GP did, and others more like him. FWIW I had two German bosses who emigrated to the US(one to California, one to Atlanta), so the US is clearly an attractive place for them and they say they loved it there just like GP.

The majority of Germans talking about how much they hate the US, have never lived there but they hate it nevertheless because it's a populat thing to hate in Germany, and also they don't work in tech, or need to rely on the welfare state, or are already from well off families where the lower local salaries make no difference. The ones working in tech who don't rely on the welfare state, are quite open to the idea of moving there for the right money.

Sure, if GP was one of those Germans from a mid-upper class background with a nice inherited Bavarian house (unaffordable at any German working wage) then immigrating to the US makes no sense as he already would have enough prosperity at home, but if you have no wealth and want to build it, then working in the US tech sector is much better than working in Germany.

So no, a blanket generalization cannot be made of "Germans wanting to move to the US", as that highly depends on their social/wealth class and career.

Edit: seems I upset the apple cart with my comment. Sorry, next time I'm gonna parrot the HN accepted "Germany-Good, US-Bad" party line if that pleases the crowd.

I'm from Poland and I would also not move to US, unless me and my SO had guaranteed high-paying jobs. I currently make around 85k USD/y(base) and even if I could double that easily just by moving there, my living standard would go down dramatically as my current salary already puts me in top 5% in my country. I absolutely love how big US is, amazing national parks, the access to nature and general diversity of people, foods and cultures, but lack of public healthcare and free access to guns would be an absolute no no for me unless I was paid obscene amounts of money for those 'inconveniences'.

Well that's why, because you already make very good money here. But the vast majority of Poles, or even other Europeans in even more expensive countries, don't make anywhere near that money, while having much more expensive housing than Poland.

With that kind of money you're living the good life here already so there's no reason to move to the US even for 2x-5x the money as you can already afford everything you could ever need in Poland on your current salary. You're pretty much in a bubble and are the exception, not the rule.

Like I said before, people with good material situation in Europe have almost no reason to move to the US. But what about those on less fortunate salaries with no wealth to their name, who would get a shot in the US for a >10x pay bump?

A childhood friend's dad moved to work in construction in the US(also from eastern Europe), and with the money from working 15 years there he's set for life in Europe, already retired early and in a McMansion back home. There's no way he could have achieved that financial independence by staying in his eastern European country. Not everyone in Europe has the potential to earn 85k/year here, while in the US it's much much easier.

For many jobs, the EU-US discrepancy in pay is insane, and not just in SW dev.

Sure but we're talking in a technical forum where most of people work in software. Most devs in Poland make good or really good money.

> But what about those on less fortunate salaries with no wealth to their name, who would get a shot in the US for a 10x pay bump?

I can't imagine a person who makes minimal and moves to US in hopes of making more. Most people in EU who make minimal salaries live from paycheck to paycheck, they don't save enough to risk moving across the world. I honestly think that this person either ends up homeless or makes minimal salary in US too and probably ends up worse, due to lack of public healthcare/social support. If you want to make good money, you can do that in most countries(obviously with exception of 3rd world countries, countries with an ongoing crisis etc.). Moving to US won't suddenly make it happen.

If you already work in IT then the salary bump these days might be significant, but I would argue that salary to CoL ratio will stay roughly the same. Unless you're exceptional at what you do and have an extremely good offer, you're probably not going to improve your life significantly by moving. Why would moving to US give you 'a shot at 10x pay bump' that you didn't have in your own country?

That may be, but on the topic of emigration from the EU to US, I was talking about the general population and what reasons they may have to move there since the initial question was about Germans wanting to move to the US, not about German devs exclusively wanting to move to the US, so please not move the goalposts to just to the SW dev bubble.

Yes, I'm aware many SW devs in Europe can build comfy lives, especially in low-Col eastern Europe with western wages, but again, that's a bubble of a small subset of the country's total workforce. The vast majority of Poles not working in tech don't earn that well at all (average salary in Poland is 20,265 EUR/year, and if you exclude well paid SW devs it's probably much lower) so pretty sure they might be more inclined to move to the US is given the chance at a 5x or so pay bump.

>I can't imagine a person who makes minimal and moves to US in hopes of making more.

The alternative to well paid SW dev careers in Europe is not minimal wage person living paycheck to paycheck. There are other jobs in between that pay mediocre or sub-mediocre in most EU countries but pay stellar in the US. For example my office mate's brother moved to the US(North Carolina) to work in banking just like he did in Austria but according to him he "gets paid bank just to move money from one account to another and has less stres than at his job in Europe".

Same for other average jobs as well, that while not living paycheck to paycheck in Europe, don't allow you to build any wealth either, but in the US can get paid significantly more even adjusted to CoL(North Carolina is not Poland cheap but it's not SV expensive either).

> Most Germans I know in tech

It looks like you're the one trying to move goalposts on this conversation.

We can compare salaries, schools, freedoms, houses, and so forth til the end of time, but there’s always an intangible personal factor weighing down the scales to some extent. I think that’s what gets people to actually uproot and move, no matter which direction they go.

Same goes for your blanket generalization implying Germans are either rich, rely on welfare or like working in the US.

I myself would never consider moving there just for a higher salary.

I never said Germans are relying on welfare, I said the Germans WHO rely on welfare would not consider moving to the US for obvious reasons. Nor those who are already financially stable, again for obvious reasons.

>I myself would never consider moving there just for a higher salary.

Good to know. Tell us more about yourself.

I’m not German but French, however I do feel that this "Silicon Valley dream" upon developers was still existing in this era.

It was at that time that we started to have startups in Europe who tried to follow the SV culture. GAFAMs were still seen as cool enough to envy a well paid job at them. A lot of SV startups weren’t openly privacy hostile (or maybe the issue wasn’t took seriously enough).

But I felt that this "dream" was only upon developers at that time and it stoped sometimes after. In fact, in 2015, while on a trip to SF, I ate with a former French coworker who decided to live the dream and he was already saying to me that he wanted to come back in Europe because he couldn’t stand the ambiant culture anymore.

It wasn’t the job, he loved it, performed well, was well paid. It wasn’t even the people, he made some friends there, felt like people were genuinely nice.

But it was more the delusion about the SV-Life and the mismatch in cultural values and in the global society lifestyle in which he felt you were nothing to others / to the society without money.

Now I do feel like that this sentiment about the US is now more mainstream in Europe even amongst those who never came in USA.

ps : I urge you to not read any criticism in my comment, I’m describing a general sentiment from the other side of an ocean, probably with a big bias. But I do feel this sentiment is pretty recent and it’s probable that Trump made it way worse.

For a lot of immigrant Germans leaving Germany is very much a goal, since upward mobility in German society is very low compared to the US. So for a lot of "German Germans" the answer is no, but for the rest it very much is something people aspire to.

If you look at the statistics I believe outward migration is a little under inward migration, but I'd wager that there are a lot more people with higher ed moving out than are moving in.

I complain about the US a lot, but for me both the US and the UK were vastly better for my mental health and career than Germany was, even despite the average standard of living in Europe being much higher.

I don't disagree with the rest of your comment but this is not true. Technically an employer cannot legally require you to attach a picture to your application or judge you any differently if you do not attach one, since the AGG passed in 2006 – although I don't doubt that it plays out different in practice sometimes.

I remember even being told in Highschool though that we shouldn't attach a picture to job applications, since it's generally not done anymore to avoid discrimination.

This appears to be untrue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

Germany ranks 11th on social mobility, while the us ranks 27th.

For making more money for 5 years or so to retire earlier.

But than I think about the bigger social gap and dislike the idea again.

I was working at a bank (as a contractors) and some coworkers and I were working on a HA project for MySQL at the moment (to use it at work). Once I got laid off, I focused on it to the point that it became quite useful, and at some point, someone from Israel reached out with questions.

I answered with a lot of delay, and when I explained that was due to me being out of a job and not able to afford a permanent internet connection, he offered to hire me and also set me up with a permanent connection with a contract paid by him.

If you’re reading this, thank you Aric, I’m forever grateful for that chance!

Curiously, last year I switched jobs and during the interview process it turned out the hiring manager had been a user of my project back in 2003 or so, which definitely helped with the interview process.

The project’s name was mysql-ha, later renamed to highbase due to a Copyright infringement notice from Sun (who were good about it and gave me a free 1 year subscription to Enterprise MySQL when I renamed the project). I abandoned it around 2008 as better things became available around that time .

There's this fun question "if you could change one thing from the past...", and I don't know how to answer it truthfully, because we are the sum of everything in our past, the good and the bad, and I like where I am today... but man, that crisis was rough.

Oh, definitely! I had a bunch of obviously bad things happen to me and I’ve gone through your “if you could change one thing “ exercise many times, until I learned to accept all of it got me to where I am.

In late 2001 my mother killed herself so by the end of 2002 I had a crash course on dealing with adversity!

Anyway, while I’m slightly older than you, one of my coworkers at the bank was the same generation as you at university so I remember you, and all the software you wrote that your classmates used. Crisis or no crisis, it’s no surprise you did great :) Nice to see your name on a comment!

Thanks for the kind words, your name definitely rings a bell. Small world!

Que estes bien Fernando, me alegro que prefieras quedarte en el paisito y cultivarlo ayudando a otros.

Y si, espero que ahora que el trabajo remoto es mas aceptado, mucha mas gente pueda "irse sin irse", trabajando para donde sea pero desde acá.

¡Que estés bien también!

Dozens of us! Dozens!

Good stuff!

In 2009 I joined Percona and saw that, by then, it was better for me to contribute to other open source projects in the MySQL ecosystem than to continue trying to get highbase caught up with things like mysql-mmm.

Sun really was good, huh?

And writing that book lead to lots of recruiters. I humored one, they flew me out to SF, gave me a car for a few days (I had never been to the west coast), dined with me, and made me an offer before I was to fly back home, an offer that was lots more than I was making at the time. I told them I'd think about it.

But I was too scared to leave New Hampshire, and perhaps too sentimental, or some more nameless term, so I didn't accept the offer. All from answering some SO questions.

In the early-to-mid-2000s, Macromedia paid for my trip to San Francisco, a hotel stay at the W, and a chance to meet the programmers and authors I looked up to -- all because I answered and helped people with their questions on online forums.

Eventually, the “organizers” show up and add too much order to a system that wants to be a balance between loose structure and otherwise chaotic ad hoc interplay.

And if the organizers aren’t the ones that over constrain the system, there’s always a PM somewhere looking to “monetize that asset.”

I think, sadly, SO has passed that inflection point now. I haven’t intuited where the next waves are breaking at.

"Question: Why did PyTorch beat Tensorflow in popularity"

"Answer (to a different question): I lost my virginity when I was 11 years old"

If I did that I would probably never shut up about it, so hearing you describe it as "answering some SO questions" is genuinely heartwarming.

I probably have a lot less money than if I went to California, but I have a house and family (2 children so far, we want more) and I somewhat think that if I went out west, it would be harder to have that, at least I would have probably delayed it by a decade or more, like people in cities seem to do.

just happenstance that somoene at that particular company was looking for it. actually was a red flag that they were, but it paid a lot more than I had ever been paid before, for those 3 months I worked there

I did some protocol reversing and wrote a small program that pretended to be an airplay speaker to pipe audio to a sonos speaker (archive: https://github.com/stephen/airsonos)

I ended up getting recruiting messages from both the airplay team at apple and some folks from sonos. I didn't end up taking either offer, but it was also an interesting talking point when interviewing for the job I did take.

It was a cool project at a time when a lot of people were saying it was insurmountable to make us AirPlay compatible.

Sorry you didn’t get the job. I hope you didn’t lose much sleep over it. I left in 2020. I wouldn’t say you’re missing much any more.

However, what should be used instead? I would take the boxes from Apple, but, as far as I know, they are also quite limited (only AirPlay).

Another example of the fact that such things should rather be expanded with open standards.

From my point of view, the best strategy for Sonos would be to be as open as possible.

This would make for an interesting blog post.

Could you recommended resources to learn to do the same?

A bit light on the technical details perhaps, but I recall getting stuck on getting the right airplay parameters, learning how byte endianness works... happy to try to answer any other questions as best I can remember.

EDIT: Sorry, I realized that I didn't actually answer the other question. I first got interested in reversing from console hacking, specifically this talk about wii hacking: https://youtu.be/0rjaiNIc4W8 (including marcan of asahi linux fame!). Their group also had more writing at: https://fail0verflow.com/blog/. Also interesting to read about mgba emulator development: https://mgba.io/tag/debugging/, v8 internals: https://mrale.ph, react internals: https://overreacted.io/

Consuming a lot of literature on how different systems work helped me develop intuitions around how you might take something apart. Then it's a matter of trying things and banging your head against the wall a lot, e.g. at some point I was interested in how compilers worked so I tried hacking typescript syntax support into babel (circa 2017 maybe) - I got pretty far! and got a lot better sense of how compilers work.

Step 2 — deploy the network appliance in question to your LAN and intercept its packets with wireshark.

Step 3 — begin inference of protocol from observed behavior and test hypothesis by sending hand-crafted payloads to the server in question.

Step 4 — rinse and repeat until assumptions are proven to be correct with a high degree of reliability.

A good way to ensure you’ve captured the major parts of the protocol is to record about 72 hours of traffic and then replay it through a proxy that directs traffic to your newly created service.

If you can interpret the vast majority of the messages without error, you’re getting close to a reliable implementation.

Step 5 — use this strategy to develop a deep understanding of both protocols in question.

Step 6 — write an “adapter” that can translate protocol A to protocol B and vice versa.

Step 7 — implement the adapter towards whatever use case you have in mind.

Curious about common tactics people use for avoiding the ban-hammer from the company at this stage. Surely they can tell the difference between normal operations and this kind of hand crafted probing?

Please excuse the code quality... I think I was still learning how to write js at the time.

I added a discord link and they joined that too and just watch and lurk, its a weird world

I bought a couple and then found 2 pairs of nice second-hand bookshelf speakers. Presumably everyone is upgrading to smart speakers and dumping their old stuff because it was really easy to find great speakers for a very low price.

I say this as someone that’s never worked for any tech company anybody has heard of, nor any hip SV startup.

It takes a particular sort of person to thrive in Big Tech. That isn’t just code for ‘really really really good’. It sounds like you still believe that it is. Plenty of ‘really really really good’ people wouldn’t do well at Apple, and plenty wouldn’t want to work there. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself ‘really really really good’, but I know that I don’t want to work at Apple. Not because I think I’m not good enough, not because k don’t think that I could keep up, and not because I don’t like their output as a company.

Putting companies in a pedestal the way that you are is ultimately damaging for the industry. It fosters the increasingly cringey “get a job at FAANG!!!” culture. I’m sick of my YouTube recommendations being poisoned with “here’s how you pass a system design interview at Google” BS. I implore you to stop putting companies on a pedestal. You need only look at accountants talking about working at the ‘big 4’ to see how utterly ridiculous it can get.

Well Amazon is a well known shit show (been there done that)

> Majority wouldn’t want to deal with bullshit at FAANG

Your comment:

> most of us here probably wouldnt be able to keep up with the amount of work it takes to thrive at apple, sure

You have some weird fetish with FAANG?

The same is true of Microsoft (Azure specifically), Google, and Amazon.

Only two "traditional" big tech companies of any note for having sharp people and all-around good vibes are Meta and Netflix. Otherwise, I'd rather go with a unicorn like Snowflake or Databricks, which feels more what software engineering was like in the aughts: exploratory, pioneering, actually building things that people haven't before, rather than gluing stuff together or being drowned in the machinations of some incompetent director.

I wouldn't make it at Apple, because I would get pissed off and quit. There's more to life than money. I don't want to work with people that see "FAANG" (or use "staffed by ex-FAANG" in their recruiting pitch) and think it's a good signal to be presenting.

Putting in a stint at any of these lower end tech companies would cost me intangibles that I'm not willing to give up at this stage of my life. Namely, my sanity, spiritual well-being, and fulfillment with life.

I found Apple recruiters very clear and fair.

Apple's recruiters were flaky on comms, rescheduled me a couple of times, and were disappointing for a company I had higher expectations for.

They’re unicorns for being extremely stupid. I’ll give you that.

Every company has their warts. Some warts don't matter to me.

Sure, your experience is probably true, but it’s anecdotal and the sweeping generalizations you’re making on limited datapoints makes things untrustworthy

Second, you’re assuming money is mutually exclusive from all else at those companies. You admit not being able to get in, which makes this the equivalent of “money can’t buy happiness” from someone who never had money to know first hand that they wouldn’t be happy

Here's what I value: getting shit done, being surrounded by intelligent, hard-working, and perceptive people, not being treated like a peon and gaslit to work to the bone. With that in mind, Meta and Netflix are the only ones that satisfy those conditions. Microsoft is working on some very cool stuff, but those are all in their research orgs, while the rest are effectively the same people that would work at Intel: lifers. Not even coasters, but people who don't care that much at all about tech, and are putting in their hours and moving on with their lives. Nothing wrong with that if that's your value system, but it's not mine. Amazon is a neo-feudalist code mill, no different than Infosys. The people there are better than most devs out in the wild, but that's not a high bar. Google lost its touch when Sundar hopped in around 2015. It's not cool. And Apple I've already lambasted. Netflix's and Meta's engineering cultures are great; I like the people; and I like how none of the people I know there are stressed to the core. Though the problems they're working on aren't interesting to me.

I never admitted to not getting in, that's a conclusion you made yourself. I received offers from all of these companies at various points, but chose not to accept.

Lots of people, including me.

I've used Apple products for years and generally like them a lot as a company, but I have no interest in working for them or any other large US tech company.

The money is good, of course, but the quality of life sacrifices aren't worth it (for me).

That's not contrarianism. That's understanding what matters to me.

What’s wrong with compilers?

And imagine how many middle-managers they have who think a) they're the next Steve Jobs, and b) that what drove his success was being a dick to his workmates.

yeah I mean you

https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...

On a personal level, this is my life now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767599

Do you really think I would give this up in exchange for more money and more stress?

100% guarantee I would

In case it's not, there's an extension of Cunningham's law. If you're wrong and disagreeable to a sufficiently high degree, people will just ignore or quietly ridicule you rather than try and correct you.

Do you seriously think someone cares if you work at FAANG outside of those student groups on Reddit?

Heck, I never wanted to work at a large company. A chance to work remotely at AWS ProServe more or less fell into my lap and from the minute I got there I knew I didn’t want to be there more than four years.

More realistically from my connections and experience I would have a better chance working in the consulting division at GCP (full time position). I wouldn’t work there either even though it would probably pay close to $100K more than I make now.

You're doing RTO, and you're signing NDAs out the wazoo.

Helluva opportunity if you're young, but I'm in agreement with the parent posters that it's not the end-all, be-all. I'm far enough along in my career that I don't need the prestige line on my resume, and 100% remote somewhere I want to live is worth far, far more to me.

So depending on what job you'll want to do at Apple you might have to relocate.