pterjan's diary

  Income Taxes

I have always heard that France has a high level of taxes but I found today that it's not true for income tax itself, it's only true if you add other things like social security.

When looking at income tax alone, for a single person without kid, it is even quite low compared to other countries.

Here is a small graph comparing tax rate in France, UK, USA, Belgium and Germany:

Update: As per several requests, I added Brazil, and I also created this new graph correcting things based on Big Mac index so that comparing countries is now a bit less meaningless.

  I am attending GUADEC!

As part of a bigger chain of events, I should be able to attend GUADEC this year!

Now I have to decide when and how I go, from where, to where and where do I stay (my life will me a bit complex this summer, more on it later).

  London Calling

Few months ago, when Mandriva situation started to be very bad again, I decided to give a try to the Google interviews I had been invited to over the last few years.

Phone interviews went fine enough (even if it was not my impression and I thought afterwards to many ways I could have improved answers), and in May I was invited to on site interviews in London offices. This was a good experience, everyone was friendly and questions were interesting and challenging (and the night in 4* hotel before was nice even if I did not use much of what the hotel offered :) ).

Three weeks ago I got a job offer that would be very hard to reject, so I resigned from Mandriva and sent back the contract last week. My last day at Mandriva will be July 23rd, so I can attend GUADEC and I will start at Google as Site Reliabilty Engineer in London on September 6th.

Brick walls, I'm coming

It will be quite a change for me to work in good conditions, for a company trying to avoid most hassles and letting you concentrate on your job.

Mandriva was a great experience. I have worked here for almost 6 years (and contributed for a few years before), met a lot of great people, and worked on a lot of different kinds of software.

This experience also had wrong sides, like commercial side where most motivated and competent people have left quickly or became demotivated. Engineers tend to resist more but for some reason it seems that top management has always tried to demotivate everyone.

Some changes are happening in Mandriva now but I have no idea if that will mean that Mandriva (the company) will now have a clear goal and people willing to reach it, and if it will include the Linux distribution as we know it.

I hope Mandriva distribution has a long life and that I can still use it and contribute to it but feel quite pessimistic currently.