I hired a chef and a manager to do the work professionally, and I pay for wages, rent, material, etc. But I get to learn the immense efforts it takes for a brownie to be on a table, for a cake to bring a smile to face, and a cheesecake to melt in the mouth. It was a fresh experience, and I really like the change of pace it brought. We have been experimenting with waffles, brownie flavors, cheese cakes, etc. It feels like buying a new domain every day!
I'm in a similar spot--my wife bought a retail business (gift shop + dress boutique) with her sister around 2018. My tech background made some things easier, like modernizing how they operate (bluetooth scanners, iPads, inventory management vs. the old clunky stuff that was in place).
Retail is a hard way to make a dollar, but very interesting -- I manage the business's finances and bought the commercial building they operate out of (and rent it to their business at a loss), so I've been learning a lot. For context, the business has grown ~30% YoY the last few years. But to continue growth I think we'll need to expand business online (90%+ of sales are in person).
"Sell online" seems harder and harder these days due to the competition--building to thrive in brick and mortar is different than online. During COVID they started weekly Facebook live shows which do well, but the audience is mostly local.
Since it is a brick and mortar businesses they already have processes for inventory, etc. in place with thousands of SKU's and are next door to the local post office, so I think there are some opportunities to leverage that into unique business opportunities. For example, they are a gift shop and specialize in helping people find gifts. What if they turned that into a service where people submit who they need a gift for + their budget and the store sends a gift to the person?
If I ever take a few months off I'd probably spend time thinking about how to leverage the unique advantages of old-school brick and mortar businesses like this.
You might want to keep that in mind when looking at helping your wife & sister to bring their business online. For example by having a reduced availability or offering a live video call service walking around the store and let customers choose that way.
Yes my wife has had the same trouble putting stuff online: much effort to put it online without the inventory depth to make it worth it.
I've built sonething like this ~3 times as a consultant and I've never seen it get meaningful usage. Somehow it still sounds like a genius idea. Maybe if they have a following that is personally loyal to them it will work well?
I hate to be discouraging but I might see if the idea gets traction with your customers by mentioning it on Facebook Live and running it through the chat before building out anything complicated.
https://tinytotintokyo.com/gift-giving-in-japan-uchiiwai-%E5...
... and gain new domain knowledge every day (sorry :D
How about version-controlled ingredients, chief-as-a-service CI pipelines, taste issues tracker, things like that?
Have you written about your experience anywhere? And if not would you be open to sharing more of your experiences with it?
Cheers.
We've been making cheese going on 8 years now, and have expanded into sheep and cow's milk production, in addition to our goat's milk varieties. Unlike most of the cheese producers around us, we focus on raw milk cheeses with natural rinds. Many of our varieties are inspired by cheese I encountered while working in Europe.
Here's a small gallery of some of our cheeses: https://imgur.com/a/zg0eaTz
https://imgur.com/a/USmPghf
Overall though, it's been net positive for my family, and while I've tried to quit farming at least half a dozen times, I was never able to bring myself to make the break.
Holy cow can you give more specs on your farm?
I'm somewhat smaller than I was two years ago - we scaled back a bit in 2020, as the pandemic seriously killed cash flow for a couple months.
We produce our own sheeps milk too, but on a much smaller scale. We also pick up cows milk from a neighbouring farm. I'm expecting this year to process around 100,000 liters of milk, producing around 10-12 tons of cheese.
For us it's necessary as our sheep get a 2"+ thick coat, which during our summers (last summer we hit 42C/108F, normally we peak at around 35C/95F), and having a thick coat can be deadly.
I put the fleece in the burn pile. I don't have the time nor inclination to clean and card the wool to prep it for sale. I imagine some people would take it to do it themselves, but at this point, I need one less thing to do, not one more. :)
Right now I'm in training for ordained ministry in a Christian denomination. I came back into regular church worship a few years ago, and then started studying theology through my diocese and found I loved it. Now I'm close to completing a Masters of Divinity at university, and I'm in my third year of training at theological college.
Software skills have been much more useful to all of this than you might think. In the church the idea of 'calling' has a particular prominence; sort of doing those things that you find rewarding, that you have the skills and aptitude for, and that also help others – God is seen to be in all of that, too.
It took a while but at a certain point I just realised that while I'm really good at software, it's not the other two things for me. It's a funny thing to let it go, slowly, and if I am ordained I think it'll be my equivalent of playing with train sets in the garage.
I guess what I'd take from all of this is that even in a secular sense, we're always learning about ourselves, and it's never too late to be brave and explore something new.
I have a question: did you ever get a feeling of what I can only describe as "numinous vertigo" when thinking about software systems? I sometimes get the sense that I'm peering into some basic universal structure, especially if the work has strong ties to theoretical CS or mathematics. It's as if I'm looking at something so fundamental and so meaningful that it ends being an emotional experience. At times, it's even been somewhat overpowering; it reminds me of Stendhal Syndrome in its quality [0].
Most people think it quite strange to have this kind of reaction to software, but computer science isn't really about computers in exactly the same way that geometry isn't about measuring the earth. In both cases, it feels like there's a divine essence.
At any rate, I'm curious if your sense of calling in any way resembles this, or if this feeling is familiar to you.
I don't have a hugely strong mathematical background (second year university in some areas, like calculus, some stats, linear algebra, but a long time ago), but I think I know what you're getting at. My answer is yes – I had a particular experience on a silent retreat which I think falls into this category.
There's a 15th century text by Nicholas of Cusa that I think you might enjoy and which I think speaks to what you've raised. It's a fairly hard slog, especially if you haven't read anything similar – but I hadn't when I first read it, and I made it through. The title is De Visione Dei[0].
Cusa starts out with an Icon (a sacred image) which is omnivoyant: like the Mona Lisa, it gives the impression that it looks at each observer. Cusa builds a fairly complex mathematical argument, building on the observations of monks who process around the icon, reporting to each other their observations.
From this Cusa builds a descriptive idea of the divine; but as the argument progresses, this breaks down. This, however, is not a failure – Cusa has rather wonderfully brought the scholastic, reasoned, philosophical approach into dialogue with the apophatic, negative, approach. I won't spoil the ending for you. Cusa's drawing on theology from the Western and Eastern traditions of Christianity, and also on theology from Islam.
These big existential questions that fascinate me. To get a bit Kierkegaard, I think he's right in that it's what's real, it's what ought to ultimately draw our attention.
One interesting thing studying theology/philosophy/... is that my working set of metaphors has somewhat switched. I used to think about everything in terms of software, and sometimes startle people; now I often think about things in terms of texts like Cusa; which also startles people :-)
[0] https://jasper-hopkins.info/dialecticalmysticism.pdf (a reputable, scholarly translation)
>One interesting thing studying theology/philosophy/... is that my working set of metaphors has somewhat switched.
Believe it or not, I come from a literary background (my B.A. was in literature and I switched to a STEM field afterwards) so I know exactly what you mean. There's always a tension between picking the metaphor that's most fitting and the metaphor that your audience will understand.
On a related note, have you ever read Leibniz's Monadology [0]? It's an attempt at a bottom-up, constructive approach to proving the existence of God. Unsurprisingly, it fails at this task, but I've always been fascinated by how close he gets, at least on the surface. You have to think very hard to see where the proof breaks down; I had to look it up.
[0] https://plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-...
I haven't, but it sounds fascinating – thanks for the Sunday afternoon read in return!
Solar is a fantastic industry. Lots of room for improvement feels like internet did in thr mid 90s. Just a ton of enthusiasm and a sense you're part of something big and important.
I just couldn't sit on the sidelines any more.
After that leap it was simply aligning my personal skills with various opportunities until I found a good fit. I looked broadly for a while: reforestation, fintech, residential installations, real estate, utility scale, training, open source, enterprise software, venture, etc. And I'm fundamentally an entrepreneur and a capitalist so I looked for problems through that lens.
But for me that process began with the same basic question every engineer has almost every day: "What is the problem, and what can I do to help fix it?"
You should make a standalone post of it.
The scale of our global energy infrastructure is incredible so small gains can have outsized impacts. I encourage you to just dig in.
I think I’ll wait till corporates are mandated to reduce waste at scale before I go that far. Ever seen how much waste a single Dominos store makes per day? Can’t recycle greased cardboard
What do you envision as realistic for society, and how could we actually get there? Is it realistic for families with children to go without heat or refrigeration? How about senior citizens? As much as I agree that consumption should be reduced in a general sense, I’m a bit skeptical of “personal responsibility” solutions, when a huge fraction of current emissions, perhaps the majority, come from corporations. Another massive fraction comes from personal vehicles. Heating & refrigeration is pretty far down the list of big problems, if we’re going to be realistic about what the “biggest part” is, right?
There are aspects of renewables that require certification or licenses depending on your country (electrical work for example). But most of the work does not.
(At least I feel what I do give me meaning)
Not to say there aren't differences, of course. But I feel like your comparison is condescending. These people do valuable work too.
There are 100 options. Wasting a wonderfull mind just because... sad
It's either a big drop in revenue or bullshit projects
People value what they value, and should be able to work in fields that bring them happiness and don’t break the law without your judgement. Who are you to tell anyone what’s meaningful?
I wish I could do wildly unpopular things without people criticizing me.
Who the hell is everyone else, to dare judge me?
I am above judgement.
The sentiments from you, and the original post I was replying to, have inherent privilege baked into them. A South Asian person with family who depends on them for remittances is ignored. A family with a child with special needs that require specific health insurance coverage is ignored. There are so many reasons people do the work they do. Presumably you think people who work in adtech, for example, are somehow morally inferior. It's this sophomoric view of the world that's bothersome. To tell anyone they should consider teaching at a coding bootcamp instead of what they're doing ... I have no words.
I'd love to hear how these folks are changing the world for the better. It's much easier to tell others what they should do with their time and money.
The truth is there are underprivileged people in every type of industry, doing every kind of job. When people criticize adtech, it is not poor people they are criticizing, and I think we both know the picture you're painting is nothing like the median adtech worker.
You're using disadvantaged people as a blanket justification for the whole industry. But the industry targets everyone, whether they're disadvantaged or not. With that reasoning you can justify anything, but that's not even the core of the problem.
There are scammers who target the elderly over the phone, that have the same justification. You might think I'm picking scammers because they're so hated, but the truth is scammers are people too. They have families that depend of them, they have kids to feed, and they deserve empathy just as much as you do.
But who does their work hurt? Old people, poor people, rich people, and also other underprivileged people.
That's the real problem with the idea that doing the right thing is a privilege. You don't care who's being hurt, and you don't care what their privilege is.
If you're hurting more people than you're helping, you don't get to demand that people also love you for what you're doing, is the problem.
No. I think that's being presumptuous.
The point is not about calling people "morally inferior". Before thinking of yourself as underprivileged and above criticism, you should try to see that there are people less privileged than you that adtech is targeting (or preying on), and people much more privileged than either of us that profit from this work.
>I'd love to hear how these folks are changing the world for the better. It's much easier to tell others what they should do with their time and money.
No, absolutely not. It's really not me who has a pet peeve against adtech in particular, it's a whole lot of people from all walks of life. Do you think I want to feel "superior" and tell you that you're "inferior"? What good does it do to anyone to think like that, exactly?
Maybe I happen to do something that is less unpopular than adtech. Or maybe not. But if you think that's why I replied to you, you're missing the point.
My fiends and I really wanted to do good when starting our careers and looked at many non-profits, all of them pay sub-market rates. And then we learned secondhand that most of these non-profits were run by narcissists leaders with worse office politics than regular offices.
We got jobs in regular companies building some of most critical infrastructure of the internet. We felt like we were contributing to advancement of humanity and freedom. But after 10 years, we realized we just made rich kids richer, divided humanity like never before, destroyed privacy, and made sure everyone is addicted to their screens.
I mostly helped in the building of the cloud, and I know what business most of our clients are in. Very few are doing something that is not harmful.
Teach in bootcamp? So that these rich-kids will have more workers?
Start your own business? Consulting? Helping other companies do evil? Another app to get hooked on? Restaurants? There is already obesity epidemic? Build new homes or rehab? I can respect that but it is capital intensive.
Anyways, I see whenever trading is mentioned people call it a useless activity while most of us are engaged in actual harmful activities.
I've worked for a tech-focused nonprofit for the last decade, and know people who have worked for other tech nonprofits. My experience (direct and secondhand) does not match what you said here. There are lots of good mission-focused tech companies to work for (both non- and for-profit). If, as a sibling comment suggested, you want to bring clean drinking water to the world, I know people who have worked at charity: water and enjoyed it.
It's true the pay will usually be below market rate for software engineers. It still can be much higher than most people in US[0] will ever make, and not an obstacle to living comfortably (by any definition of "comfortable" I consider reasonable). It's possible it could make it more difficult to buy a nice house in a central location in one of the more expensive cities, but that's true for most people and needs systemic changes to address it.
0: I assume we're talking about the US, since that's where the really high tech salaries are (and it's the place I live and have experience)
Some meaningful tech work can be found in healthcare, social work, some portions of national security work, environmental research, teaching, and other places, but they are the exceptions. My definition of meaningful is that it either helps people, in a real way, or furthers knowledge or adds to the expression of humanity (i.e., art).
In my opinion, if someone can siphon off value from the human constructed rivers of the financial markets, and then use that value to live a good life, then I don’t see the problem. Some loose arguments about market liquidity could be made.
There are more ways to make an impact, such as earning a good salary and re-investing / donating to build trees, renewables or serve any of the UNDP goals that are helping society.
In fact that is probably more impactful that personally picking fruit in the garden.
I guess it just depends on the place itself not being generally net negative to society compared to the impact you can make with it.
Here is a good primer: https://80000hours.org/
These apps also include ad sales to the IAPs. The money no longer needs to come from the initial download.
Zynga was one of our biggest clients. Hasbro came in second. As well as a few white label advergames (eg. Vans shoes). We rarely made more than a small cut on profits (if that) and were generally paid upfront and on delivery.
We had a product manager who would regularly play our builds and speak with the clients. If the clients were unhappy, had feedback, or found bugs, he would chat or hop on a call with the lead developer (usually me). We’d write it on a sticky note or put it in our mind palace as a Todo (or if you were a defensive programmer and planned that a certain piece of code needs to be flexible, you were fixing it while he was explaining the problem).
So, we had communication, but not in the form of formal meetings. Product set the delivery dates, we set goals/cadence as engineers around those dates, and based off of continual feedback we iterated on the design.
Daily scrum and weekly grooming and quarterly planning. That’s for product. That’s counting beans and making sure no one goes rogue and accidentally innovates.
Daily scrum is nothing more than a product status meeting. If you’re a dev and you’re waiting for that meeting everyday to tell someone you’re blocked or need something.. then there’s a communication problem.
My current job has zero planning meetings and a standup twice a week with 20 people attending that lasts about 7 minutes on average; standup is literally "what are you working on and are you blocked?". If the person rambles in standup, our boss cuts them off and has the next person go. It's been this way for at least a year and a half (when I started). We're given wire-frames or high-level designs of what needs to be built and the target goal date. Developers are then left to code with nearly full autonomy. We always deliver the product early. I've worked in so very many places over the last decade and a half - from huge corporations to small startups - and if all of them took this approach, they would've increased their productivity at least 10-fold.
Later, I learned that winning being easy was the nature of the market at the time, rather than it being a personal achievement worth proving.
I also was lucky that I didn't discover a compulsive/addictive weakness for the activity, which could've turned a $1K experiment into personal ruin.
Taleb writes about this kind of thing in Fooled by Randomness. Poker player Annie Duke's book "thinking in bets" also goes into it.
I reckon to some extent public market conditions in recent years since GFC have approximately been "stock market only goes up" with a few small fluctuations from covid, negative oil price weirdness, etc. Lots of investors trying desperately to invest cash in recent years pouring money into variety of highly speculative areas -- SPACs, crypto, fraudulent EV companies (Nikola rolling their "truck" down the hill to make it look like it was self propelled, lol).
At some point the music will stop.
Anything else is likely BS.
Last month, when war started I told my team, Aerovironment stock, is gonna double (war drones) but I'm not gonna be part and I want you all to feel how calmed I'm about that and undertand (I don't need those 100k). I now undertand the difference between being Socrates or a 'sofist' (greek philosophs both, one for pleasure, the second as a job). Investing shouldn't be a need, is what's best for humanity. I think Elon musk already refered this way
Those who actually consistently make money daytrading (averaged out over a long enough time period) don't have a need to write those books (and potentially put themselves at a disadvantage by doing so) to make money.
While those who write "daytrading secrets" books typically make heavy majority of their money from those books, because they cannot make money from actual daytrading.
Just dont be this guy
https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/ti1jg8/i_owe_nearl...
I'll never forget the great crash of 2000. Among the signs I should have seen-- I knew a guy from my bowling league who quit his job to day trade. I don't know what your qualifications are for this line of work, but this guy had no discernible skills. He was doing fine 'till the big crash, then he was wiped out.
Please be safe.
I started as a web developer, but I realized that my favorite part of the job wasn't building new pages/apps but helping my colleagues when they ran into roadblocks. I got a reputation as a problem-solver and people would come to me with their thorniest bugs or browser compatibility issues and I loved it - the detective work of investigating and diagnosing the issues, the creative solutions to work around browser limitations, and the satisfaction of helping people achieve their goals.
Then I met a product support engineer at my friend's startup and heard about that role, and realized it was an entire job made of what I loved most about my previous jobs. I joined the team and was on it for years, and have been working in technical support for software products ever since (about twelve years now). I still build websites as a hobby, but I wouldn't want to do it for a job anymore. I'm very happy in product support.
Support requests come in through whatever channels the team uses (every team I've been on has used email, some have also used Slack/phone/videoconference/etc.) and include things like bug reports, questions about best practices or how to do something with the product, and sometimes feature requests. As a support engineer, I take ownership of the support requests and do whatever is appropriate to drive them toward successful resolutions for the customer.
Because software products can change quickly, this often involves learning new features or systems. I often get support requests about tools or workflows I've never seen before (or that have changed significantly since the last time I looked at them) and have to quickly get up to speed on them. I learn best when it's in service of a goal, so this works well for me - I'm trying to help the customer accomplish their own goal and that motivates me to dig in and learn.
If it's a bug, I also investigate and try to reproduce the reported behavior. Sometimes the issue isn't what it appeared and the problem was that our documentation or UX was unclear, in which case I clarify things to the customer and file a ticket to fix the docs/UX. (Or just fix it myself - the amount of direct work I've been able to do in the docs/product has varied between companies, based largely on their size.) Sometimes it is a bug, in which case I'll try to come up with some alternate way for the customer to do what they are trying to do and then also file a ticket to get the bug fixed (with clear repro steps and getting as close to the root cause as I can, depending on how familiar I am with that part of the code base).
I also try to be proactive and serve as a customer champion - in most companies I've seen, product support has the broadest view of what issues are coming up for customers, and that can be valuable signal for the product team on how to prevent issues before they happen.
That's it in a nutshell. :) Always learning and applying expertise to help people succeed. I think it's a great fit for people who don't need to be in the spotlight but like knowing they've helped individuals and who work well in a rapidly-changing environment. (I think it might actually be kind of a dream role for technical people who have ADHD.)
How did you deal with the "overqualified" problem, or did you switch early enough that it didn't matter? From my end, I have over 20 years of development experience, and I feel that often disqualifies me from consideration by a lot of employers.
Thought about culinary school and becoming a chef but after reading Kitchen Confidential, I changed my mind. Decided on welding/fabrication and ended up working on a ranch that had a metal fabrication shop. I enrolled in some classes at the local CC so I could improve my skills and ending up getting an AA in welding and a few classes short of one in machining.
Got a part time job teaching metal trades at the local CC which led to becoming a certified welding inspector through AWS, no the other AWS. I accepted a tenure track offer but switched to management after a few years.
I became the director of CTE department that oversaw the creation of a mechatronics and cybersecurity degree program as well as opening up a makerspace. I loved it because it really allowed me to leverage my eclectic skill set. However, due to a staffing shortage I ended having to train, not teach as I wasn't faculty anymore, incumbent workers as part of a industry partnership. So now I was working two jobs, one blue collar and one white collar. This led to working 12+ hour days and coming in on weekends so I could catch up. In a nutshell, my objections to the situation fell on deaf ears so I quit out of frustration.
After a short break I went back to university to finish my bachelor's degree with the tentative idea of pursuing a job in edtech. Right after I graduated lockdowns started so I took the time to explore some other avenues while I looked for a job.
Today, I'm solo dev working on my first indie game funded by selling some Bitcoins I had been sitting on for over a decade. With the current geopolitical situation aside, I couldn't be happier.
I made the switch to gamedev a decade ago after more traditional startups. If you’d like to chat about the industry I’d be happy to. I helped build a larger studio, then went indie with some moderate success, now I’m doing the build a studio thing again because I am an insane person.
[0] https://longwalkwoodworking.com [1] https://github.com/longwalkwoodworking
Is shipping a problem or do your customers generally arrange to pick up the pieces themselves?
I'm definitely targeting people in the post-IKEA parts of their lives, but sometimes the value prop is as simple as "you can't get a decent book shelf for a kid's room". I built some for a customer whose daughter destroyed a set of cheap ones. That's a very different bookshelf than if a lawyer wants a set for their office, obviously, but not everything I do is high-end either.
Shipping is interesting. After a bad experience with a carrier whose trucks are a familiar sight in the US, I no longer ship anything I can't box the hell out of via non-specialist carrier. Some stuff I deliver, some stuff goes by carriers that specialize in art-type stuff. LTL would likely be an option for some stuff as well. Pickup is an option as well, of course.
Started 1.5 months ago, and enjoying every minute of it! No longer occupying my mind with corporate power dynamics saves a lot of cognitive bandwidth, but to my surprise it has been replaced. I thought I'd feel more 'free', but instead I now feel self-imposed pressure to make this one shot count. I know my runway is limited, so every day that didn't tangibly contribute to bottom-line growth feels wasted. I can rationalize it by reminding myself that I can always get a job and try again later, and that I should be spending most of my time on mid to long-term goals that have delayed effects. But that hardly changes how I _feel_. All in all, I'm really glad I made the jump, and I'm still super excited about what I do now.
My own projects:
I'm using Nim on the back-end, but a Python SDK is going to be added soon after the initial release.
Side note, curious how the domain name autocomplete works when searching? My domain wasn’t suggested, but all the other services I tried in my sector all came up. What’s the source for that data?
A slightly related concept I would find interesting would be a way of visualizing and summarizing ISP/AS information in general (without any expectation the user would be particularly interested in their own; though that could be displayed on the landing page, perhaps). For example, an alternative way of presenting what https://bgp.he.net provides (example: https://bgp.he.net/AS33657#_peers, plus all the other tabs).
Providing an easy, quick, simple way to see "what network providers are upstream of this ISP/AS?" could be a useful feature.
Ideally without just being a proxy for bgp.he.net (unless the UI is totally unique and actually presents things in a fundamentally different way), and ideally without any VPN scarevertisements.
Frankly, this is why I've yet to pursue solo entrepreneurship myself. Unless you get really lucky, it seems there's a constant trade-off between "parasitism/skeeviness" and "not being able to afford rent or food". I've got plenty of ideas, but, so far, all either wouldn't provide enough for me to sustain myself, or would be too shady for me to be comfortable with, despite being legal.
- Don't know you can do it from a command line
- Don't bother remembering the order of arguments
- Want to see all record types in one go instead of repeating the command for every record type
- Would like to have the output clearly formatted
- Are currently on mobile
- Would like to see additional ip info for A/AAAA records
- Would like to check responses for multiple recursive resolvers without remembering all their IP's
- Would like to test GEO DNS
I think any switch actually counts irregardless.
I feel you on the uncertainty thing. Quite honestly don't think you ever can escape this feeling. What helps is sort of going backwards from your imagined lifestyle that you want to live and how much you need.
Generally there is always a conflict of how much $ can I earn on the job and maximise my retirement account vs risking it with potential autonomy factor but less or no $.
Think the best we can do is just try to accept that feeling and do the best to achieve the financial needs necessary to keep going.
I think so too. Thanks :)
Let's just say the last 20 years of my life have been an adventure. Life is good.
I'm loving it. I don't sit or stand in place for eight hours a day. I'm learning a ton. I'm engaging with both local builders and master craftspeople. I get to share my work with family, friends, and neighbors. There's a lot of volunteer opportunities that don't require anything but showing up and willingness to help.
If anyone is interested in leaving tech for woodworking, feel free to reach out. My contact info is in my profile.
TBH at this point in my career I think I’d rather just deliver mail even if it paid 75% of my current salary (unfortunately it’s more like 33%).
TBD :) I've been doing more learning than earnings, but we did plan for this. We paid off our mortgage, got solar, drew down six months of expenses into cash, and bought $5,000 2011 Leaf this year.
Worst case scenario is I get another job in tech and I'm right back were I started from, so we saw it as little downside.
Do you live somewhere that you can afford to have enough space for a home workshop? I want to woodwork, but the Seattle area is prohibitively expensive to have the woodworking space.
I do not have a home shop. I pay $200 / month for access to a maker space with all the big tools along with a 10’x5’ CNC and lasers. Check out Is Good Woodworks for an example of a community shop in Seattle.
I had kids, and my spouse flat out makes more money than me for fewer hours and better benefits. So, I am now the full time parent. We decided that having one of us stay home would be the best for the kids. So far it seems to make a difference.
It has really great parts and hard bits too. Basically, after a decade of short deadlines and long hours it's hard to adjust to the final product being your kids be good people by 2035. You get to rediscover the joy of playing at the playground, pet neighborhood dogs, and visit libraries and museums. On the other hand,I think that in the first year of COVID my number of adults interacted with per week approached 1.
I admit that I keep my foot in the door at one of my previous employers where I do someplace between zero and 5 hours a week of work on some legacy systems I helped build and have now been left to grow unchecked for 10 years.
Overall, I think that from a pure lifestyle perspective I don't think I can go back to 50+ hour weeks.
Worked at Twitch as an early-ish employee, we got acquired by Amazon. Made it to Principal Engineer and just got tired of the sorts of problems that are hardest in software at scale: project management, building consensus, migrating systems.
Also got really tired of the wastefulness of software: so much software gets thrown out in under 5 years. Stuff that lasts 10 years is considered extraordinary, and 20 years is almost unheard of. I don’t like knowing how ephemeral all the effort is. Maybe one day we will know how to make good software but we dont today.
So I want to make “permanent” stuff. Nothing meets that bar but furniture and carpentry can at least manage a few hundred years.
I totally love it and don’t miss my old career at all. The pay is way worse but I saw this coming and saved well while I was paid the insane software salaries that are common today. I am on my feet, more fulfilled, and find the mental effort is actually much higher - the problem solving is more interesting to me. Mostly though I am just much more proud of what I make and do.
Whenever I think of this while working on my personal open source projects, I become a little bit unmotivated, cuz in the end it will be rendered useless, so why the heck should I spend my time on something that’s not gonna last long….
I truly believe we will have more than one career throughout our lifetime due to information availability and accelerated learning. Also for those of us who are privileged and have the time and opportunity, I believe when we achieve the basis mastery of the field, most of us just want to learn something new and do not want to go into PhD level depth.
My next forte is probably design!
The ideal however isn't to compete for those ultra low latency opportunities, it's to find a trade that nobody faster than you is doing. E.g. it's too capacity constrained or cumbersome for the large firms, or in a less developed market that they aren't yet in (e.g. somewhere like Nigeria or Indonesia, or some random blockchain), or it's so creative that nobody else has thought of it.
I’m curious what was your journey into quant from software development… did you studied statistics and data analysis? Saved to have a ton of capital before starting? Open a quantconnect account and profit? :)
Thanks and congrats!
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/beev...
Regardless, congratulations on taking the plunge! I hope it goes well for you!
When you are older and out of high school it’s sort of like a Linked In/resource.
There's not enough houses for people to live in. Most people hate you for "driving up prices" and "gentrifying neighborhoods" - but it leaves me much more satisfied than engineering.
After paying ~40% tax for a decade and paying ~3x what the Fed and State spend per Capita over a lifetime - it's nice to see my working hours reduced dramatically and my true tax rate drop down to ~12%.
You don't need to make $1M per year, when you don't have to give $400k to the tax man.
Since it's unearned income, you don't have to pay payroll taxes.
And you can also avoid paying capital gains tax on the first $250k in capital gains on a property (after 1 year).
There are a lot of people in speculative markets that pay close to 0 tax in real estate.
Also note that the nice round figures OP provides are slightly over the top. In 2021, someone earning $1M would pay an effective 33% tax rate, or about $334K. That’s $66K below their stated $400K.
The poverty line for a family of 4 is just over $20K. So their rounding error is nearly 3 times the poverty line for a couple with two kids. Their net take home every year is an absolutely staggering and life changing amount of money for anyone who hasn’t spent years climbing the sociopathic career ladder at a tier 1 tech outfit.
Top 1%? Paying their share of taxes? Ha ha ha.
I don't think BiggerPockets is actually a great source - but it might be the best to get started.
Basic reasons for switch: 1) self-taught dev, so felt like I was always playing from behind; 2) wanted to pursue interests I had before going into tech; 3) felt like I wasn't productive in college, and thus wanted to have an intellectual experience.
I didn't think at all during law school that I would go back to being a dev (exiting to in-house counsel role in tech was always a possibility). However, working full-time in law has made it clear this is a huge misfit for me culturally, and also the work of being a lawyer mostly involves a bunch of low-skilled bullshit. I thought that I was leaving a more superficial industry to go into something with more intellectual depth and thoughtfulness, but it turned out to be the opposite.
Happy to elaborate if anyone wants; previous times I have mentioned this on HN, people really wanted to know more, but I was unable to answer them in time, unfortunately.
I would say to strongly consider going if these social causes are sufficiently specific (sounds like they are) AND if you really care about them enough to be able to put up with any BS in the actual act of lawyering to pursue such litigation.
If you're in tech, I can say with like 80-90% confidence that the actual experience of working in the law is going to feel like bullshit. But, if lawyering is a means to an end for you, then I think it can be worth it.
> Going to law school seemed to me a good option for understanding how to effect change through the legal system.
Do you know anyone working at a policy-focused legal non-profit? Paradigmatic example would be the ACLU, immigration-focused non-profits, or environmental orgs. I would ask them for a better take on whether effecting such change is even possible.
If you're willing to share what your particular social causes are, I can perhaps give better advice, but ultimately the kinds of changes you want to see are probably better pursued through lobbying and other such advocacy as opposed to actually lawyering. FWIW, during law school, I interned at the ACLU and one of the bigger environmental orgs (and also at the Manhattan DA's office and for a state appellate judge in CA, but those aren't really applicable here).
Every community on the internet has its problems. Every community has its own circlejerk customs. And n-gate.com is all that needs to be said about HN’s problems (hope he comes back).
I’d be curious to hear from people here about other communities or news aggregators of the same quality or better
During that time, I wrote open-source stuff, on the side (unpaid).
Since leaving that job, I am now writing code, more than ever, and still not getting paid.
Not what you're looking for, I know, but that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
My HN profile has ways to get to me.
I actually don't mind that my stuff isn't that popular. The more folks that use it, the less freedom that I have to modify it.
I'm my own best customer. I write the software that I need, and consume it. Publishing it forces me to cross my t's, and dot my i's.
It seems that high-Quality software isn't a "thing," these days, so I guess my stuff isn't something people want.
I’m currently apprenticing with a master binder who’s nearby.
It's a business very dependent upon networking within a collector community, and I have no idea how large it is, but it's definitely there and has deep pockets. One student I took a class with made a decent living making clamshell boxes for collectibles, and one collector brought her an original script from Star Wars, signed by the cast, including all the verification paperwork, and one of the prop light sabres.
I don't need to make a living at it, so I'm lucky. But it's definitely an area of the arts with arts level compensation, which is to say... not great.
We were quite successful but the retail was wearing on me. Specifically retail employees are a challenging bunch to manage because retail margins are so low. I developed a saying: "You can either find someone good at customer service or someone knowledgeable. Anyone who's good at both can find a job paying a lot more." The best employees we had always left for a career in a field outside of retail.
My manager was a great guy. He's very personable, remembers everyone's name, very caring, and knows the products inside and out. He does lack a few management skills but I think he's probably near the top in the industry. He's studying to become a social worker.
During the time we had the store, we did a software startup and had a couple of engineers. I was far happier doing that work and working with that team.
When Covid hit and everything shutdown, I was delivering product to customers and thinking to myself over and over again "I would rather be writing code." So we decided to close. It was really sad to close the store after 18 years. However, my wife told me a few months later that I looked far happier than I had been for years. Now I'm really excited to be getting back into the tech industry.
Highly paid big company engineers are some of the most talented developers out there. The companies invest great resources into making it that way.
The idea that they’re all just average devs who did LeetCode for a month and now they’re paid twice as much is a comforting fiction for non-FAANG engineers, but it’s not true.
If it was true, we’d be seeing scores of average developers taking a month to do LeetCode and then get huge pay increases. Who wouldn’t invest a month of work on a free website if the payoff was millions of dollars over the next decade?
It may be a lottery ticket where a 30-day investment increases your chances of winning to 1:100 from the default of 1:10,000. It’s still unlikely that you’ll get in.
The "golden" pool of applicants would be those that are above average intelligent. They're more financially motivated, willing to jump through the hoops, and confirm to the system, if it guarantees some huge payoff in the end (financial gain, power and prestige, etc.). These applicants are the bread and butter to sectors like high-finance and management consulting. And in recent years, they've jumped ship to join tech.
To be sure, FAANG companies have their luminaries that are some of the brightest people I have ever known. Among engineering they are recognized as the really smart ones — the ones you go to when a bug is kicking your ass (for example — or when you need to re-architect the entire graphics pipeline of your product in order to stream 60 FPS 1080K video).
But they are not representative of the rank and file at big companies.
I'm searching for my next career switch. I don't know what it'll be.
I switched because this is better. Healthier. Saner. Happier. More in line with my long-term goals and general growth.
Living where you're remodeling at the same time is stressful.
I'm thankfully mostly done my last (for a while) remodel, but I spend a bunch of time in my wood shop, and I'm always struck by how much longer I can do stuff when I'm even just wearing an RZ mask even when I have the dust extraction on and the overhead filters going. Dead trees just make a lot of crap, let alone gypsum boards and the like.
However it’s a lot easier for a remodeler to put on a P100 mask.
Compensation wasn’t really effected one way or another since trajectory has been steady upward. I think that slows down nowish since I didn’t come up in the traditional business and many more senior roles are filled by traditional executives.
Like many people right now I’m evaluating options for better work-life balance and really actually miss learning new domains. The downside of looking at other options is the role is so unique I don’t fit exactly into most roles at other companies. So it’s been hard to get a foot in the door with other companies outside the industry I’m in.
[1]: https://bonene.com/
This sounds awesome. Can you elaborate? What does this look like and what are the costs involved?
Moved to academia, got a PhD in machine learning, got a bunch of publications in high ranking outlets, and managed to land an entry level assistant position - but now I'm stuck in the same position, just in academia. My work/life balance is probably a bit better. Still love computer science and will probably keep on, but it's a cruel mistress!
[1]: https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...
It's easier to get started when you're young and have the physical stamina and strength to spend a Saturday in the shop. I'm going to go spend my day down there today, as it happens, while the dog supervises!
I'm affraid physicsts aren't interested in this question (as it can't be answered by science).
My role now still has me involved in solving problems, and I will still review technical architecture (eg why are you proposing a GraphDB for this highly structured data, how are you going to address the fact that Cassandra is eventually consistent, etc.), but it’s a lot more people and solutions driven. A lot of email, Excel, and Zoom. Very little writing scripts and running queries, which I do once a quarter or so.
Pros:
- You get a bigger picture of the business and product. As a SWE you generally work on a tiny morsel of a huge product. Product managers and project managers often get to work across the broad product (or even a portfolio of projects if you're overworked), interact with leadership more, if your lucky, even have a voice in the direction the project/product is going.
- Greatly helped me work on that "social skills" muscle. I have to actually talk to people--people who are not also introverted nerds like me!
- Work life balance can be better than SWE but find the right company. I currently stop work at 5:30 and it's great.
Cons:
- Your work output is generally slide decks and spreadsheets. Yuck. I miss my work output being the actual software that users use.
- The pay is much worse than as a SWE. You're not going to be seeing these $500K total compensation packages that every SWE that posts on HN apparently gets.
- The cost of the MBA can set your net worth back quite a bit, and given the above pay disparity, it's not worth it financially. You can also be a project manager or product manager without paying $X00,000 for an MBA. I'd be closer to retirement now if I just remained a SWE.
- Career growth: Meh. About the same. At most places you're either junior or senior and that's it. Just like software engineering. If your goal is to be VP or This or Director of That, I don't think changing careers to "a different type of individual contributor" is going to help.
I’ve been very lucky/fortunate/successful, so it’s hard to call it a pay cut, but giving up FANG RSU’s 15 years ago hurt, and in general engineers make more than non-engineers.
It was definitely worth it to me because I enjoy the work I do much more. It’s still technical but I get to make business decisions (and pre-pandemic, travel to great places). I work with a lot of project managers but don’t have to do too much PM, which I find a bit dull and not a good match to my skills. I prefer creative thinking and problem solving (with some analysis mixed in) to highly structured work.
It’s easy to say when you’ve got the benefit of privilege (good schools, financial safety net), but I was able to choose to focus on the work I liked and be good at them, and the other parts fell into place.
All that said, multiple times a year since graduating I talk to engineering colleagues about getting an MBA and I almost always advise against getting one. It’s not a good financial decision. If you know what you want to do and are at a good company, figure out a way to pivot to that role eg as an engineer work on projects that are more customer facing, or closer to the product, or closer to analytics, rather than going deeper into SRE or architecture. Why spend $300-500K in lost wages and fees to learn to be a PM if you can be paid to figure out how to do it?
The exception to that is if you want to be a VC. Then it makes to get a Stanford MBA, if you can get in.
When I talk to developers, a lot of them expect me to gush about how much better things are once you’re away from the code. The truth is that I frequently regretted not sticking with a basic software developer trajectory from the start.
Management of any type is far more difficult than it appears from the outside. A huge part of my management jobs has been handling and hiding all of the problems that come up so that the team doesn’t have to deal with them. The better I’ve done my job, the easier it looks from the outside. My teams should never have to know about the difficult battles I’ve dealt with, down to some of the most bizarre and even scary personnel problems I’ve had to handle.
Software development felt like the most difficult and least-appreciated job at the company when I was young, but after a tour of management positions I miss the days of being able to sit down with a team and solve hard problems in the code.
I’ve had three dev jobs since then and have learned that while I love coding I can’t be a professional dev for the rest of my life. Nothing wrong with it, I just need more variety.
So I founded https://careerswitchtocoding.com to help new devs and career switchers land their first dev job.
I’ve also grown a dev focussed Instagram account to 56K followers along the same lines https://instagram.com/allthecode
I’m now full time on this and working out how to build a proper sustainable business model around it.
I love coding and developers and so I want to help new developers have awesome careers.
Friend of mine though, he became a postman, about ten years ago. He was never quite happy being a software engineer. I see him occasionally and he's always happy with a job where he gets to work by walking around in the open most of the day.
To be sure, the pay is great, but as you get on in years it becomes easier to consider if you might already have "made enough".
I often wonder what it would be like to live that life without the money pressure they have. Where you're not trapping beaver to pay for bullets, so you can hunt deer to have enough food for the winter etc. There are lots of other shows like this ("The Last Alaskans", "Life Below Zero", "Yukon Men" etc).
I went to college for CS, but I knew I couldn’t manage a 40+ hour work week. I did some part time web dev for local companies and hated it. I then shifted to being a photographer, with the idea that the seasonality of the work would let me work on my own projects in the winter.
That kind of worked out, but it turns out that the photography takes up a lot more of my time than I thought. I released an app for the Wii U/3DS that did decently well. I made some extensions for Photoshop that absolutely flopped, though I did get a job offer due to it that I had to turn down due to timing.
At some point during all that I/my doctors figured out what was wrong with me - somewhat, at least. Treating my terribly low testosterone helped significantly and I take stimulants to make up the rest.
Now I’m settled with my wife and baby where we grew up, which is rural. I’ve been thinking about quitting the photography to go back in to development but I’m 33 with basically no relevant work experience. Quite frankly, I don’t know how good I’d be at the job either. I have no basis for comparison for my programming skills and I haven’t exactly kept up.
I’m guessing I could get a local job but I don’t know if the pay would be better than what I make now. Theoretically with a few years under my belt I could maybe get a remote position that I’d possibly enjoy and would pay better.
I feel stuck. I love doing (high school) senior photography, so I’d hate to give that up. It’s also just a small portion of my business and I’ve had a hard time expanding it even though my work is definitely the best in the area.
Don’t discount how nice actually using your brain during your job is. Retouching/editing is largely brainless once you’re at my level and the only thing that keeps me sane are podcasts/audiobooks.
There are soooo many more options in terms of learning materials these days that it was before!
I’m switching because first of all, I have the financial luxury of doing so. Secondly, because, as another person said, I feel like it’s my calling. My meaning and purpose in life that was missing from a tech job that I actually really loved, but wasn’t spiritually fulfilling.
Life is short, and money is only one part of the equation, so we’ll see how it goes from here. =)
The previous change also moved in that direction, but it was still in software, but then we started a foundation and built data systems that supports countries that receive development aid, and those organisations that supported them.
The work is super rewarding. But more work than either of the previous half a dozen startups.
But I started a cleaning company. I build custom software to help run the business because I could not find anything to fit my needs. My skills also came in handy to build the website to make it exactly for our needs.
And things like building a chatbot to help bring on new cleaners is what we are starting to build right now.
I still code, but not so much these days. Mostly manage and architect. But occasionally I get my hands dirty to deal with things I want quickly and efficiently.
I want to become a full time writer, part time programmer/indie hacker.
Life is much more than a big tech salary you can’t leave. You can bet your bippy that I’m going to work hard enough to be able to leave that behind in the next few years or retire early on reduced income to pursue it for awhile.
I went through chicken farming, loading trucks at a builder's merchant, handling directory enquiries phone calls, fork lift driving, designing kitchens, fruit picking, managing vehicle fleets, and more.
Eventually concluded dev work is what I love and returned to it about 5 years later.
Honestly, not much of a career change, but given the new position, I can be much more exposed to new technologies, get to try out new things, like IoT and Blockchain as well. Hopefully with the new knowledge I acquired, I can start my own business someday. Mostly since somewhere along the road of coding 8-to-5 as a developer, I want to create something for myself instead of building other's dream.