

Ask HN: Salaries in/around the Netherlands, (Windows) drivers developers? - Lwerewolf

Hello,<p>I&#x27;m currently developing windows drivers(1) for a company in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. I&#x27;ve been there for 11 months now, 5 months as an intern (as part of my HBO studies), and for the past 5 months I&#x27;ve been there part time (20hr&#x2F;wk, except for the current month - 40&#x2F;wk average), working on the same project ever since the start of my internship. Long story short, I&#x27;m currently their primary experienced windows drivers dev (they&#x27;ve had minor forays in the past).<p>I&#x27;m at the point where I can begin the final part of my study (the graduation internship), but I&#x27;d like to stick with the company for awhile until the conclusion of the (reasonably large) project. My main problem at the moment is that my salary is basically the minimum wage in the country for my age (23), which doesn&#x27;t seem normal for what I&#x27;m doing.<p>Given my situation(2), can I reasonably expect to negotiate a higher salary (and in what range)? Also, for future reference, how does this field (kernel&#x2F;low-level development in general) tend to pay around here in general?<p>Other than that, I like both the project&#x27;s team and what I&#x27;m working on, especially since the project involves a wide range of technologies that must work together (== HUGE potential for learning), and the fact that I&#x27;m given relatively large chunks of the project to work on - from research to spec to design to code (almost no micromanagement).<p>(1) WDM&#x2F;KDFM both (mainly KMDF, where possible), PCI-e, DMA, custom &amp; some port-miniport models
(2) bachelor student - not sure how much weight this carries in the region.
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JoachimSchipper
It's not _necessarily_ a bad idea to work for experience ("HUGE potential for
learning"), but minimum wage seems _very_ low. Consider asking around at your
HBO what other students and recent graduates earn; as an inferior alternative,
intermediair.nl usually has some (very broad and vague) salary data. (IIRC,
recent university graduates in computer science can expect 2200-2400 euros per
month.)

If you want to continue working here, consider trying to negotiate an
agreement that you'll get a significant raise once you have your BSc.

Also, do weigh the benefits of not having a more senior person around (e.g.
being allowed to mess with everything yourself) with the downsides of not
having a more senior person around (e.g. nobody to learn from, your mistakes
won't be corrected as long as you still manage to make the project work
somehow.)

~~~
Lwerewolf
Regarding what others earn - I've already asked the ones that I know, and on
average it's 20-30% more (mobile dev & security... advisor, you could say).

About the concern of not having a more senior person around - true. I was (and
still am, as a good measure) scared of that bit, what I pretty much did was
dig in everything that I could find on the subject before development of my
part (and the ones that I'm linked to - not writing a software driver ;)
spinned up. That pretty much meant scouring the books (windows internals,
Oney's WDM, MS's WDF one, except for the UMDF part), MSDN/linked "whitepapers"
(let's say that there are some holes), any sample code that I could find, and
most helpfully, NTDEV discussions/linux drivers docs and guides (yes, it is
very relevant :)/osdev wiki&forums... and whatever else I've stumbled upon
that seemed even remotely connected. As a consequence, I had a slight burnout
during my part-time period (school&work) - I'm nowhere near as exhausted now
(8/day) as I was during that period (3-4/day) :)

The other defense mechanism against being alone is that documents and code
reviews are common in the company, and I'm steadily documenting / teaching
others (who have significant linux drivers experience) the concepts of windows
drivers, so it's not entirely without scrunity. Perhaps the biggest issue
there is converting people from the "windows sucks/linux rules" mindset (well,
it's not so bad, but there are some cases in which I feel it approaches that
set in stone mentality).

Also, a mindset of "making the thing work somehow" for kernel programming
(driver or otherwise) doesn't strike me as proper ;)

~~~
JoachimSchipper
That sounds like a good approach; and making complex hardware work at all is
not easy, so good job!

As to "making things work somehow" \- don't we all suffer through drivers that
are the consequence of that? Also, I'm definitely not commenting on some of my
own company's kernel-/bare metal code here...

------
wslh
Look at sites with salary stats like indeed.com and payscale.com

If I were you I would ask for a rise. My company also does Windows drivers and
these skills are scarce. Obviously there is more work on Node.js than
developing Windows drivers but the scarcity factor gives you an advantage.

