A Forty Year Career
lethain.com
lethain.com
Amen!
Guessing you FIRE hard? The rule is that people in this field upgrade their lifestyle, the exception is FIRE.
I suspect that your 9 year plan is an unrealistic, best-case scenario, that won't come to pass.
Also, 9 years is a long time to survive if you're miserable. I think you may find that at some point, your employer and coworkers notice it, get sick of working with you, and replace you with someone else that really likes programming. Like a lot. But right now, not N years ago.
Alternative approach: Find something that you care about and also that the business needs, and program that.
Downside is you have lots of uncomfortable conversations with your manager about how you're not doing what they said to do. You might get bad reviews, or fired, or threats of either. But you probably won't actually get fired because net positive programmers are surprisingly hard to come by.
Upside is you get to enjoy your work. Your skills grow instead of atrophying (or failing ever to develop at all). After a decade or two it's the difference between becoming a powerhouse senior IC, vs being an eternally junior programmer forced into management because you're too useless to justify a senior salary and anyway nobody trusts an old programmer who works for cheap.
For me there's only one possible choice. Autonomy, mastery, purpose, gotta have it.
Thinking about that only came later and so I have spent time (and money) on creating space for lots of exploratory activity. The result is a fairly complete lab where I can work on things and learn new stuff. The goal being a space that is fun and engaging to work in until I die[2]. It wasn't what I expected I would be working toward when I was a kid.
[1] I later learned that money was pretty tight during that period but as a kid I didn't have any visibility into that.
[2] EDIT: It goes without saying that the lab has a low cost to operate so it isn't a drain on my funds over time. My wife commented "You're life's work is to build a fun play room eh?" Which isn't too far from the truth :-)
While war is a terrible thing, I appreciated that the irony wasn't lost on the National Guardsmen :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_weekend_a_month,_two_weeks...
So you get time and a pension but you’re hobbling around.
I'm designing the house around the room. I basically want to build a research lab where I could make any idea a reality -- within reason of course.
Could you offer any guidance from your experience with such a lab? I have a lot of questions like, What kind of floor should it have? How tall should the walls be? How much space do I need for each of the tasks I want to perform in the lab?
Which tools will I need and how much space does each one require? Can I make the tools movable or should the be fixed in place? Do I need a gantry crane?
Things I find most useful in my space are the electronics bench, the computer "station" (3 monitors on a desk), and the "small fab" bench (3D printer, mini-mill (Sherline), various holding jigs). I've got parts and such upstairs but they could reasonably be anywhere.
My activities are primarily small circuit design/build/test, small mechanisms (robot) design/build/test, and algorithm research. These things don't have a lot of consumables per hour of engagement so they can go for a long time on relatively low additional investment.
For larger fabrication having a garage door and a concrete floor are essential. But the kinds of things you want to work on and create is pretty intensely personal usually. A friend who likes to build airplanes built an assembly hanger that was roughly 40' x 60'. I have never found the space I have above the two car garage (and the same size square feet wise) to be an issue.
What I have done over the years is look at the projects on the queue, and the things I want to learn, and then built to support those efforts.
I think I'll have enough space! I'm pretty much interested in the same things.k
But more often than not I've realized that while all of my friends are working toward this idea of financial security, very few of them have defined what that actually means. What lifestyle do you want to lead and how much money will that specifically require?
The more I've thought about that, the more I've realized that "financial security" is actually achievable on a fast timescale if we're willing to focus on things like budgeting and perhaps relax some constraints (I want to have a boat, nice car, live in California/NYC, etc).
The things that make me the happiest are having fun (which doesn't require much) and spending time with my family. I could easily find a way to do that indefinitely without needing a post-IPO payday.
Now I'm left wondering where I got the crazy idea that I needed one in the first place.
A general rule of many in the "financial independence" is 20x annual expenses saved for a sustained life without work.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
You sound like a burgeoning F.I.R.E'r. Join us!
It does make some sense, but the simplification sort of drives you in the wrong direction IMHO.
FIRE stands for “Financial Independence Retire Early” (I think it is a good practice to explain acronyms, since those you are trying to inform are the least likely to recognise the acronyms you use!)
Money is also used to measure success, and this can have a huge impact on our self-esteem and happiness. It's very common that people choose a lucrative career simply to please their parents, and this makes them happy in return, even though their aren't materialistic.
A developed (personal) definition of financial security should take that into account. You can't control all uncertainty but there are certainly things you can control for.
> It's very common that people choose a lucrative career simply to please their parents, and this makes them happy
Kind of irrelevant. And I personally don't think you should be making major lifestyle choices simply to please one's parents (perhaps a western view), but to each his own.
Sorry, what does that mean?
This is a very realistic and nice way to look at money and finances. You were paid to do a job. Take what comes out and put it into all of the appropriate places, then you’ll be ready when you come back to work and — wouldn’t you know it — nothing comes out.