It is. In Germany at least all communications must be encrypted. And often multiple meters will communicate via one gateway.
Though, if someone has the time and technical ability to implement this kind of surveillance then there are probably easier ways to get better info than inferring activity from energy readings.
> Though, if someone has the time and technical ability to implement this kind of surveillance then there are probably easier ways to get better info than inferring activity from energy readings.
I don't know, the original mapping probably isn't the most difficult thing in the world, and then you can just passively (programmatically) wait for oddities in consumption patterns against an entire neighbourhood.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but while salaries are high and taxes are relatively low, general living costs are quite high. Particularly if you have kids and so want a bigger house and good schools.
I've looked at this and the benefits we get from staying in Germany outweigh the extra income earned.
If you try a bit, you can live for under 2000 CHF or for less than that: "Move to Switzerland, work in IT, live frugally and be free" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1oeSs67myA
You pay 2.5k only for a year or two, when the kids are 2-3 years old; after that it's free kindergarten again.
Thanks for the real numbers. When I was looking the sort of salaries I was being quoted were in the 10000 per month range which is a lot more than what I'm currently on but would actually work out worse once costs are taken into account.
Usually European taxes are complicated. I make 44k a year but I get about 33k on my bank account each year. This is because even though we have a 33% and 40% rate there are also numerous tax-cuts in place.
Ie: in NL you can deduct your entire mortgage rate interest from your gross income. This basically means you get a 40% discount on your mortgage. And there are numerous more.
If you are single and renting, you don't get deductions and if you are having family then probably it is not worth moving anyway. Even less if you already have mortgage somewhere else than NL. So I do not feel it is useful to compare different countries. Unless for single people renting flats who could move quite easily.
i agree its crazy. I do feel a bit dirty for living here seeing all the other europeans helping their neighbours while we are sitting here playing the isolation game.
True, they're not that crazy, but when I looked at the higher salary Vs the higher costs it was financially better to stay put. Of course money isn't the only deciding factor but it's not the land of massive opportunity it's sometimes presented as.
That said, if you've got no dependents and you want to stay in mainland Europe, then it's probably a very good choice.
I don't think you're going to get a great response as that's a lot of identifying information you're asking for. Country, Area (optional), years of experience, gross salary and extras is what you really want.
Oops, just saw this question now. I've registered with https://www.otelo.de/ after seeing their publicity on TV two years ago and they still seem to have available these promotions.
They have several phone models to choose. You pay 1 EUR for most models from Samsung or Sony, a bit more for the deluxe editions (iphone and sorts). Now they even offer more because SMS are free and I still pay extra for each one, but doesn't matter because I simply use other messaging apps.
The Sony Xperia models are good, they're waterproof by default and resistant to shocks, albeit camera is crappy (compared to normal Samsung models)
I pay 12 Eur for unlimited calls/sms within Germany; 3 GB data; w/o phone; w/o contract term (it can be canceled any time); 100min and 100MB free in other EU countries.
They exist. Even prepaid options are getting cheaper. Take a look at discounter offers (Aldi, Lidl etc). Though don't expect great network coverage on the countryside...
I always took this as a criticism of companies where you've got developers who earn multiple thousands per month pecking away at old PC's and squinting at 15" CRT screens. Waiting for 5-10 mins for the OS to startup and > 5 mins to build a project.
This is probably more possible now given the ease with which a fraud can get someone else to do their work for them (I remember a news story doing the rounds of an experienced developer doing all of this and outsourcing all their work to India).
But of course, this isn't new behavior and because we work in a job which is seen as well paid, so fraudsters will try to get something for nothing.
Even worse, working on technical debt may be viewed as a negative thing ("if it's working why did you change it?" said the phb).
I've yet to find a code review process beyond a trivial implementation that scaled. The best results I've had were with a rotating buddy system. (Every week/month) you review someone else's code and they yours.
There are some static analyzer metrics as well as metrics you can obtain yourself. These metrics relate to the cost of maintaining code:
- cyclomatic complexity
- statement length, function length
- number of singletons / global instances
- dead code
- duplicated code (intelliJ has a good duplicate detector that anonymizes variables and ignores whitespace and comments).
- number of known functions/types per file (coupling)
- number of commits per file (git-effort from git-extras)
Some of them are tricky to obtain. Making a simple script that parses import statements and outputs a DOT file with a digraph is useful to map dependencies, which is good to explain coupling.
I have tried one or two services similar to mint in an effort to get more control on budgeting. The typical bank provided online banking interface is like something from 10-15 years years ago with a painful interface and no real facilities to either analyse your income/spending on the site or to easily export data.
The promise of these other services is to scrape at your data, gather it into an easily viewable/filterable format and allow you to group it semantically (i.e. this payment every month is for rent, food, socializing) The idea being that it can automatically analyze the accounts give you more control over your budget.
My experience was that for personal accounts the analysis was no better than I was doing myself and they cannot account correctly for cash withdrawls which kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise. Finally, my bank recently updated their online banking site so that it's just as good as that offered by these external services.
I took this to be less a post about not having a degree but rather, not keeping up with the market. How it's easy to just do the work that's in front of you and not consider how your choices now will affect your career in 10~20~30 years time.
Not having a degree doesn't help finding work (it shouldn't make a difference, but unfortuantely with most HR depts it does) but if the poster had been willing to aggressively work on their career instead of coasting at the "traditional office" the story could be very different.
I've done a few years with a mixture of small company/freelance work myself and I'm back in an enterprise company for the first time in ages and on a purely technical level it's a giant step back. There's huge resistance to changing existing code and/or introducing new technologies. Often with good business reasons (the product is done, it's in production and huge changes are not needed) but if you're on the technical side then you absolutely have to be looking out for your own skills if you ever want to work outside of that company again.
If I was a hiring manager, seeing 10 years at a "traditional" company on a CV with no signs of interest in the field outside of the job would be setting off alarms. I absolutely would rather hire someone with experience and fully developed professional skills than a fresh grad, but the nightmare is that your experienced hire is used to just following their 80 page internal process guide every day and they wouldn't be able to handle any new situations.
Though, if someone has the time and technical ability to implement this kind of surveillance then there are probably easier ways to get better info than inferring activity from energy readings.