HACKER Q&A
📣 emphasey

What would you do career wise if you were from a small country?


I am from a small European country (non-EU), working as a software engineer for five years, and I have been thinking a lot about my situation and how to grow as an engineer.

The thing is, I am super comfy living and working here, salaries in tech are a multiple of what most people make, so given the low cost of living, I have absolutely no worries.

On the other hand, I have been noticing that there is just not a lot of opportunities for meaningful work over here. There are a handful of companies working on interesting stuff, but the rest are either doing outsourced work or building basic CRUD apps.

I really love programming, and I love solving difficult problems and having to constantly learn, so I cannot see myself working over here long term given the jobs available.

What would you do if you were in my situation, would you stay here and either look for remote jobs or try building a company, or try moving to a larger country with more opportunities?


  👤 nullindividual Accepted Answer ✓
> meaningful work over here.

What do you consider 'meaningful work'? That can range the gamut of writing an app that helps cure orphans of cancer to working for Google and watching your code end up on killedbygoogle.com.

Is there something else outside of work that is attractive about where you live, or something outside of work locally that would fill time as a hobby, volunteering, ?

(I find little meaning in the work I do, it'll all be trashed in a couple of years; nature does the trick, instead)


👤 Eridrus
I moved to the US to work for a big tech company. I don't regret it. The US has far more opportunity for smart & ambitious people than anywhere else.

It definitely wasn't comfortable though - you leave all your friends and family behind and need to make new friends and family.


👤 GianFabien
The grass in distant meadows always appears to be greener.

By various estimates there are about 30 million programmers in the world. Of those a couple of hundred thousand, maybe even a million do interesting work. The rest are writing CRUD apps and fixing legacy systems. You don't read about that majority.

If you still think you can accomplish greater things, then a good option is to travel to where you see the best opportunities, have a go. But don't burn your bridges and be willing to return home if it doesn't meet your ambitions. You can't lose, because you will then know what it really is like "out there" and make decisions for the future that work for you.


👤 dotcoma
I’d stay where you are — Moldova? Georgia? Montenegro? — and either work on an open-source project you care about or start one of your own on the side.