Identity reveal

Introducing the author of this newsletter :)

Hello everyone!

When I started this newsletter, I didn’t really have any particular goal nor any previous experience around content creation, and in order to not expose myself too much with this experiment, I decided to create it anonymously.

I now feel like it could help the reader better contextualise what I put out if they had a clearer idea about who the author is, and since we’re at almost 200 subscribers now, I think this experiment is “validated enough” for me to start doing it non-anonymously.

I hope this will also encourage readers to engage more with the content - maybe coming up with questions related to my experience - and will give me the possibility to share more detailed stories, without having to worry about “doxing” myself or having to come up with “preacher’s pieces” or “know-it-all” abstract articles, and instead creating content based more on my actual experience.

So, who is the author?

My name is Nicola Amadio. I am a Software Engineer, originally from Italy, and I currently work for Oracle in Zurich, Switzerland.

I have a bachelor in Robotics Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan, a master in Computer Science from the University of Milan, and I’ve spent around 7 years studying and working abroad in Europe (in Germany, Spain and Switzerland - in addition to Italy).

I have around 4 years of working experience and I’ve had the chance to work for a diverse range of companies, including a small software house in Italy, Samsung Italy, Amazon Spain, a large American FinTech in Zurich, a Swedish consulting firm in Zurich, and currently Oracle, also in Zurich, where I work in the MySQL Control Plane team as a Backend/Cloud Developer.

You can check my complete working history on my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicola-amadio-1194a763/

Once again… Why did I start this newsletter?

A few reasons, and no reason in particular.

In general I like writing and researching things of my interest and creating notes where I analyse the results of my research. So in a way I already had some kind of private/personal journal that I would use as a reference for some decisions or that I’d share with friends to talk about.

Moreover, in my experience as an Engineering student getting into Computer Science and in the Tech job market in Europe, I have always found very frustrating how little advice and info is out there for someone in my specific situation.

If you are a STEM student in the USA and want to get into Computer Science and/or Tech, you really have a lot of detailed guides, personal stories, YouTube videos, blogs and resources to help you figure out what’s out there and how to move once you’ve figured out your goals. But if you try to consume this content and apply it to your situation in Europe, you’ll soon realise that it’s not trivial at all to apply those resources in a different geography.

In addition to this, content around these topics made by Europeans is really scarse, fragmented, and of not very high quality.

The effect of such a lack of information is visible in how unaware most European devs are with regards to the modern tech world, with regards to companies, salaries, career opportunities and so on. I was quite surprised to see how many people out there find it extremely hard to find a 6 figures dev job in Europe, or how little knowledge they have regarding the world of big tech companies (such as Google, Amazon, Uber and so on), or how little they know about the current standing of public academia vs R&D done in the industry.

Not just that, another layer of complexity specific to Europe, is how inherently diverse yet extremely connected the continent is: as a European citizen, on one hand you are quite free to move around for studies and work around the whole EU and Schengen area without ever having to go very far from your family and your home, and on the other hand all the small and bigger countries in the continent offer quite different environments with regards to literally anything from culture, lifestyle, language, work-life balance and also salaries, taxes, cost of living and size and quality of opportunities in tech.

A few anecdotes

I remember, back in 2020, receiving a few offers from different companies in different locations in Europe.

In particular, I had an offer from Databricks in Amsterdam and an offer from a local company in Zurich: Databricks as a company had a way bigger prestige than the one in Zurich, and if you had an offer from both in the US it would be a no brained to take the Databricks offer.

In my case, the company in Zurich was actually offering a bigger salary though, and I was quite confused about the whole situation. I tried to understand how the cost of living of these countries compared, how to compare the salaries, how to compare the quality of life the different countries offered and the future opportunities I would have access to by taking one offer or the other.

It wasn’t trivial. I won’t say in this article how that specific situation turned out, but this is just to give you an idea of the many localised issues and questions I encountered by being a dev in Europe and how much work I had to do to find answers and to some extent create some “theories” about how it works here.

Another example of this type of issue was later on when I was thinking about which specialisation to dive deep in the context of software careers.

Initially I was into Machine Learning, then I got into Distributed Systems, and I started to realise quite soon that, while in the US you could almost peek any specialisation and find unlimited growth potential in any of them in most of their tech hubs, in Europe, again, this was not so trivial.

In fact, if you want to specialise in Distributed Systems in the US, the world is your oyster, if you want to do it in Europe… It depends. In my case, I was quite set on wanting to be in Zurich, and in Zurich there’s not all that many obvious places where you could have a good career and compensation specialising in Distributed Systems: there’s Google that I knew of, and then I didn’t know about much else.

On the other hand, I knew many good offices in Zurich doing Computer Vision. So I started wondering if I should switch to Computer Vision or try to find something in Distributed Systems in Zurich or elsewhere. In the end, after a lot of non-obvious research, I ended up finding quite a few companies and offices with work in this area in Zurich. That’s how I ended up working in the Cloud team at Oracle.

I also spent quite some time trying to figure out if I wanted to “solve all these problems” by just moving to the US. That involved quite a few researches as well. In the end I decided it wasn’t for me to move there (at least for now), but I am sure a lot of people out there would be interested in knowing how to do it (and I could share what I learned about it).

Conclusion

To summarise, in my experience as someone coming up in the tech world in Europe, I had to research a lot of things myself and connect quite a few dots in order to get a clear picture about how to navigate this market, and I would find it a bit of a waste if I wouldn’t share these results with people out there, since I’m sure a lot of folks would find it useful or interesting. I feel like the internet needs a bit more/better content around these topics :)

That’s it! Now you know who’s writing all of this.

Thanks for reading and to everyone who’s subscribed already!

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