I agree with others who disagree with the post. It's true that both Leonardo and Jobs were visionaries and it's true that Leonardo lost interest quickly (I guess that's because he was curious about so many different things) but there's a very big difference between the two: Leonardo was inventing, designing and eventually building his own things, Steve Jobs had hundreds of highly talented engineers for that.
Maybe I'm wrong but I have the feeling that the increment in productivity is due more to the restrictions in meetings' length than the 4-days weeks per se.
A little less than 3 years (which is the same amount of time I've been working full-time) if I give up the rent for my apartment and get a single room in the same city (Padua, Italy, for the sake of information).
I have 3 years of experience as a full-stack web developer. I code primarily in Java and JavaScript but I built a Chrome extension in CoffeScript and I'm currently developing a side project in Python and MongoDB.
Junior Italian programmer here. I totally get your point, the thing is here in Italy we're used to a different level of expertise than most of the rest of the world.
I don't know which university you're attending but it's highly likely they're teaching you either useless stuff or useful stuff in a very superficial manner (which will be nowhere near enough for passing a technical interview in the U.S., for example).
As somebody else has already said, one of the best things you can do is to get (very) good at programming. There's a lot of material available on the web for studying on your own and practicing your skills: TopCoder and HackerRank are the first two websites that come to mind. Study hard and practice there, some of the problems you find on those websites are very close to the ones people will ask you during technical interviews. You'll need to be quick and accurate in an interview, so be sure to understand why a certain algorithm/data structure works for a given problem. It's hard and it requires a lot of time, but since you're a student time is on your side (trust me, when you'll be working time will be your most valuable resource).
Another good thing to do IMHO is to practice programming using open source resources such as GitHub: build a nice repo of projects and you'll get noticed. A couple years ago I made a stupidly simple JavaScript program (which I've since deleted) that changed the font size of a text, giving it the shape of a wave, a slope, etc. Very simple, very stupid, but still: I posted it here on HN and I got a couple people watching my GitHub repo. Also, working on personal projects is good for learning programming practices (how to structure code, how to design classes, etc.).
As a final note, it may be hard to believe but there are some nice programming jobs here: you just have to look very hard to find them. Don't settle for the first job offer you get: I know the market is pretty bad here at this moment but still, unless you really (and I do mean really) need the money, keep looking and most important of all, keep practicing. Experience pays off.
You can find some of my contact info on my profile, let me know if you have some questions.
I think it's because programmers in India cost less than you. It's easier to trust someone that cost less - if they screw up you've lost considerably less money.
