I would say it's especially true if you go the startup route. Typically programmers are not astute business people and get taken advantage of just the same. The only real difference is that there's much higher demand for programmers than musicians so things like base salary and employment prospects are much more in your favor.
The same is true of startup funding. Beware the VCs! They use these same tactics so that if your startup is sold for $20m you can easily end up with zero, even as a co-founder, even if the VCs made a big profit off their investment.
What in general is the experience you guys have from being CTO co-founder? Personally it hasn't turned out well for me, it always seems to be dominated by the business guy.
Uh, there's this thing called Oracle that essentially solves the scalable SQL problem. Sybase, DB2, and SQLServer as well. UPS, NYSE, AT&T, these guys are running huge Oracle and DB2 systems. You can even go to IMS if you are so inclined.
Besides, isn't facebook using hive/hadoop for most of its storage?
It's perfectly legal for him to make his own US Delaware LLC, with a cost of maybe $300 a year in fees and accounting. There are numerous sites for doing so. Being Polish is no obstacle.
Something quite similar happened to me at FundsXpress when UBS forced the sale of the company. Even if your startup is successful, your most likely outcome is to get very little from the resulting sale. Succeeding is rare, but making significant money from success is even more rare, even if the company is profitable and makes a large return on investment for the VCs.
Statistics-wise, you are better off going into consulting. Don't quit your day job.
Remember that a huge chunk of VC funding in the US comes from Europe. Milner, anyone? Not to mention I know of at least three Austin area startups that began solely from capital raised in the EU. Europe is flush with cash, it just doesn't have so many people willing to work past 4pm.
There are other democracies in the Middle East, Iraq for one.
Not to mention a country having kept half its population in a massive prison camp with no rights and the developed world's last remaining Apartheid system can hardly be called a democracy.
Because the government doesn't want us avoiding social taxes by going freelance. What really sucks is I've been working and living outside the US for years now but I still have to pay 15% of my income to the US government on top of all my local taxes due to self-employment tax.
Learn to survive off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, boiled eggs, milk, and toast. Learn to live in a small apartment close to town. Sell your car, buy a bicycle and take the bus. In five years when you have enough connections to afford it, celebrate at Pizza Hut. Eventually, in say another ten years or so, upgrade to Taco Cabana when sales break your previous salary before you quit your job and became a freelance developer.
It wasn't there for linkbait purposes, it was there because the startup my friend was considering which initiated this post is crazy about python, another startup in progress is all python-based, and python is always coming up in the discussion. If I wanted to linkbait I would have used a more popular language like Java.