When do you look at/watch them?

Not OP, but same situation. I usually don’t, but my mother who lives far from us does every day. We take a lot of photos and videos, she gets to watch them and she’s up to speed on our kids’ lives, can talk to them about stuff they did today, etc. We feel like it lets her be a part of their lives in a way.

Then you have that Google Photos feature where you get automatically created mini albums like “they grow up so fast” or “now vs then”, it will compile a couple of photos from 7, 6, 5, … Years ago and we watch those religiously, often coming back to the particular event from which some photo is. We can spend an entire evening going through older photos like that.

Poland.

A lot of development and other IT related jobs get outsourced, so experienced devs are in very high demand. We usually work in a B2B arrangement, a developer starts their own company (sole trader I think it’s called in the US) and invoices an agency that deals with corporate customers.

Salaries are around 3-4x average national salary, with smaller taxes than on a work contract and less safety (which is not a problem due to high demand). Locally, managers do not usually play any role, I report directly to the customer’s managers, usually far away from Poland. If I were to sign a contract with the customer, that’s no longer B2B usually, the salary is less and taxes are higher.

Same boat. Nuh uh, you’re not promoting me. I don’t want to have to deal with offshore support, meeting 6 out of 8 hours, making sure Jira board is up to PM’s standards and only reading code when any of the devs have an issue they cannot solve by themselves or something breaks. I tried management career path and hated it with all my heart, quit when they wanted to promote me higher. Let me do what I enjoy, I’ll deliver.

Bonus points - developers make more than managers up to 2 or 3 levels up where I live, so it doesn’t even calculate.