Left $180K enterprise gig for €65K at 12-person Hetzner. "autonomy." "culture." . Six months ago this thread would have been me laughing. Now? Watching myself in the mirror wondering if sanity left with the dental insurance
The ticket said... "can you handle abuse complaints too, we have no process"
The ticket said... "our 'billing system' is a spreadsheet"
The ticket said... "the previous guy left, he was also the landlord, also the accountant"
Dry humor but genuinely: freedom to fix everything includes freedom to drown in everything. No process means no guardrails.
Salary cut.
Autonomy gained.
Sleep lost.
Worth it?
Maybe.
1. Enterprise: 47 meetings/week, change advisory boards for DNS TTL adjustments, 18-month procurement cycles
2. Tiny hosting: direct customer impact, 5-minute deploys, responsibility for BGP sessions at 3AM
Specifics from my parallel move to Time4VPS (2022-2024):
- Salary reduction: 62%
- On-call frequency: increased 400%
- Technical decisions owned: 100% vs. 12%
Practical recommendation: negotiate equity or profit-share upfront. Document everything. Version your infrastructure as rigorously as your code; I maintained Ansible 2.12 playbooks with full Git history.
