When I did the system design interview the guy told me that zuckeberg created memcached. Not sure if he meant used or invented, could have just been a language thing. Anyway, I'm glad I didn't pass.
I have a lot of colleagues from the middle east at work. I don't know what this person meant by same culture & values, as long as you're allowed to work and are qualified for the position then companies will hire you, regardless of your country of origin, religion, etc.
I wonder if this is where most developers end up getting. You can stick to being good at one language/ecosystem, but the more you age the more things you learn and unlearn, the more components and scope the company adds.
Why would a contractor require special care? On the contrary. They supply you the work, you pay for their services, like you would a software company. The benefits they choose for themselves and factor those in in the rate they ask you. There are differences of course, an employee may be more loyal, but that's a different discussion.
Is there an open source web testing tool which also integrates a dashboard, keeps track of test runs, creates reports, something that I can just install on a vm and run to test a web app?
I don't find this uncommon. I also work as a freelancer, but for local companies (eu). Sometimes the company (banks for example) will ask me to work on one of their laptops, which has vpn and other software that they want. I can of course deny, but then I won't get the contract. As long as I don't feel that they are invading my privacy, like you hear some companies do by taking screenshots, checking for idleness, etc, then I don't mind. In your case I would just rent/buy a new laptop specifically for this job, install their tool and don't worry about it. At the end you can sell your laptop. Or maybe you can work out of a VM running on your laptop, and install it there.
120/hr? Rates are lower now, at least the ones on the open market. And 2000 hours a year is a stretch, you need to take some holidays. But all in all, still better than..
Not in my country, I actually get tax break for being self employed. In the end I pay less tax on my income than someone employed earning a similar income. Not to mention I make 2-3 times what I would make being employed. And I'm not playing any tax tricks.
Everybody pays retirement, the public one, you pay it through taxes. They probably don't pay a private pension. And insurance yes, some don't pay disability insurance which pays you for a while if you're injured and can't work (don't underestimate here the lobby of the insurance companies who pay the press to complain that people don't buy their insurance policies. In the end they are the ones who profit most). One benefit of being a zzper is that you don't have overhead. When you're employed the company gets 100/hr for your work and pays you 25/hr, some of that money may be there to keep you employed when there's less work to do, although when a company is in trouble they will find a way to fire you. The most part goes to the owner of the company, who can take it out, or grow the company, but in the end for their own benefit. There's other dynamics of course, take construction companies, projects come and go, sometimes one company gets a big project, then sometimes another one gets it. These are different companies. They couldn't always employ the same number of people, but they benefit that they can quickly scale the workforce by hiring zzp-ers.
You are exaggerating, I've never seen a beating in school (from a teacher to a pupil). Was in school in Bucharest from the 90's to 00's, had loads of maths and other stem classes. If you didn't keep up you'd get a bad grade, if you didn't pass the year you'd have a chance to correct it during summer school, and worst you'd repeat the year. Nothing uncommon here. And I don't share your hate against the ones competing in the olympics, I knew lots of them, later on they went into research, got jobs at Google, did PHDs at Harvard and Princeton and the likes and are now professors at top universities. And some of them are good entrepreneurs now, you'd be surprised.
It's not. Actually the government will bend backwards just to keep the big companies in the country, while hunting down regular tax payers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand... . The tax laws here are ambiguous so that the tax man can judge to his liking whether you are friend or foe.
Not Russia but eastern Europe. A long time ago I was working at this company 'subscribed' to government contracts. There was a new project for the army/nato and my colleague was writing our bid offer. Right next to him sat an army officer whispering him exactly what to write down to win the bid. Needless to say all public contracts where won by a small group of companies in the same manner. But sometimes the bribes were even higher, and companies hq-ed in central and western Europe, like IBM and the likes, would win the contracts and then sub-contract my company to do the work.