iteria

> > my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up

> There's a well-known plateau in tech wages that affects most tech workers. Look at what your current employer pays people 10 or 20 years older than you for the type of work you do and you will be able to observe the plateau.

I've been doing this for over 10 years. When is the plateau coming? Even lateral moves for me bump my paid up to whatever market is at the moment. Maybe that's just a 5K bump if i left in a hurry, but it's not like I lost money to inflation with a jump. I demoted myself during the pandemic due to family stuff and even taking a lesser title I still got a pay bump.

I'm still of the opinion that enough money exists, but I just haven't ever experienced that my salary has gone down with a job jump I've experienced meager annual raises and skipped bonuses, but I've never not been reset to market rate however many thousands of dollars that is. I think my record for a salary jump was 40K? I stayed at a jump I liked for like 5 years. Even still, I never felt my lifestyle decrease in those 5 years. I was always paid enough and I remember once there was a 12% raise in there to help that we were too far behind market rates.

Tom Cruise is in an industry where he can be shut out at any given moment and there's only like 5 employers.

How does that match tech? FAANG pays outrageously compared to regular dev jobs, but regular devs jobs are still pay absurdly high for a job that has a lot of comfort. This is nothing like average actor.

So for me, average dev, what is a union doing for me? What can a union offer me that I don't currently get? I make far more than median income in my area. It has never taken me long to get another job even when I burned a bridge. I can't be "black balled". My benefits are stellar and every company I have interacted with has stellar benefits. Merely being at a company with developer bestows better benefits for all white collar workers in my experience.

What can a union offer me when unions in the US are prone to valuing seniority over all (I say this as someone with 10+ yoe) and prone to being sympathetic to companies over time and tending towards modest progress instead of allowing supply and demand pressure to be fully felt.

Software development is not at the stage where it has been whole consolidated and companies are insulated from market pressure. If you work for an airline what real threat is your quitting? You can only do so so many times. This is not the case for developers. Unions however would bring forth a kind of calcified standardization that will resist radical change. That's why I'm against it. If unions existed when I first started my career, I would have seen the rise of unlimited PTO that allows me EU level vacations. I never dreamed when I started that I'd take 5 or six weeks off a year and that would be fine. I could tell my interviewers I'd be doing that and that would be fine. Because as it stands companies need devs and I have power.

People are upset about layoffs but barring Twitter which was an illegal shitshow, was anyone really harmed by it? Layoffs are rare in our field (ignoring game development which does actually need a union for inhuman work conditions and general instability). Easy money ended and so they layoffs happen. Should financial professionals be so up in arms about what happened to them in 2008 because it was the same kind of shitshow looking at my circle.

I remain unconvinced at this moment that unions will help and in fact feel they will hurt our industry which hasn't settled into a bad state and unions could settle us at a point less than we could otherwise get.

I just keep thinking about the fact that literally everyone in my family makes less than that. To say that a developer _only_ makes 110K is high level privilege in many places including tech hubs. 110K is more than a whole household makes in my metro area. The average dev out earns dual income family.

This is why I spend a lot of think wondering what could a union even do for me? I work in comfort. If I work long hours that's my decision because I can always get another high paying less stressful job. Over my career I've taken very high paying jobs with high stress for the money and also chill lower paying jobs. Every job I've ever had I've outearned my both my working parents.

Is that true? I am only a dataset of one, but while my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up. We can say that employers should reward employees who stay, but in an industry where getting your next job is trivial (in my experience anyway), I just say sucks to be those companies when I take my institutional knowledge with me. Also it's been my experience that remote work has put real pressure on local companies to pay higher than they did before the pandemic.

I work in the Atlanta Metro, so it's not like it's a place you think of when you think tech.

Burn out can be dodged for most of your career if you actually like what you do and you avoid environments that are a bad fit for you. I've never experienced burnout, but I have a lot of friends who have and to me their key problem is they stayed when they felt the drain. The moment I become truly apathetic towards a job and don't even have professional investment in it, I just quit and find another job. I've felt the weight of a job that is just a bad fit for you and it eats at you.

I'm currently enduring that now. Unfortunately, I cannot just quit. I and my child have very expensive healthcare needs now and I need to be picky about the healthcare offerings. It's a very slow search because I'm at the top of what I can reasonably expect for what I can give. I can take jobs with more responsibility and excel, but at the cost of my child's health, so that's out. I won't trade pay for her care. I've looked at dozens of insurance plans from perspective employers and reminded myself why I took such a dull job. I'd take a significant pay cut to move anywhere else just from medical bills.

So, I sit at this job bored and apathetic. It's a slow march to burn out. From an outside view it doesn't make any sense to take a new job. This is the trap many of my friends fall into. But burnout isn't always about if a job is hard. It's mostly about how it makes you feel emotionally which will trickle down to physically eventually.

What you're talking about to me is mid-level work. Seniors deal with ambiguity and feasibility analysis. Non-technical people often don't understand the level of tech necessary. They'll say, "I want a bridge about this long" very nice, but but did you consider the about wind that whistles through this area ? Also, how many lanes? Yeah that many is too few because once this bridge goes up we're not gonna be reasonably able to close it even for maintenance. We need at least 4 lanes. Isn't there a cement shortage? Hm.. maybe we can use this material instead? No. I don't think building with wood for this length is a great idea.

You get the picture. Yes lead developers exist, but they only have so much time to do little battles and they're busy making sure the big things are arguing correctly. Senior engineers should be able to talk to design about a redesign necessary because iOS just isn't capable of this it turns out or the cool effect you saw is only available on a version we don't use and can't update to right because complex reason.

If you're just taking your requirements and working without having to negotiate with another person, you're probably not doing senior work.

Some of it I the site I don't think is senior work really unless you're a tiny shop, but they're not weird since these are all skills a for senior adjacent roles that any senior might be called on to take randomly. It's not uncommon in many shops for leads to be a spontaneous and temporary role for some project that disappears on major release.

In the US, there's no real way to force a city to build if they want to and honestly, they shouldn't be forced to. I've seen a city build up fast and it's ugly when the infrastructure lags the amount of people in an area.

I'd like to see literally any kind of rail, but for rail to be viable the Feds would actually have to enforce the law that passenger trains get priority. They're the only people who can sue about it and that's basically why Amtrak sucks. New rail is largely a pipe dream if we can't even leverage the miles and miles of rail we already have.

Subsidiaries would help, since most placed want to grow, but can't. Encouraging municipal internet would help since remote work could bring money into more rural areas and kick start the process of making them worth living in. Honestly, I just think we need strategies to encourage people to leave cities and more to smaller places. Or at least establish new cities outside of the normal bounds of the city a bit further away. The US has the space. There's no reason for everyone to crowd together.

Women and children never need to pee apparently. And apparently pooping is just out and out forbidden to all. Urinals are not anywhere near a replacement for public restrooms and really only fill the gap of trying to discourage public urination probably around bars.

Absolutely. It's just about getting into a firm that isn't doing staff augmentation and is building out things for companies. While you will be paid well, it's worth noting that the code will be shit. Worse than code sometimes. That's why the company is outsourcing. I once spent six months just cataloging all the repositories and dependencies a company had. They needed to move to the cloud but they literally had no idea what code they had. Everything worked and so they just never touched it.

Market rate is based on the national median. So yeah... they do get paid more than the median, but far less than a developer where they work. It's why H1 workers tend to get hired in high paying areas. That's when it's worth it. If they can swing remote, it might be worth it. I've had a California company "lowball" me and I cackled at my amazing raise internally.

No undergraduate degree is your issue. The market has recovered, but only for people who can hop the first HR filter. For everyone, else I hope you have a strong professional network. Humans aren't even looking at your resume. You are getting kicked by a computer.

My only recommendation is that you reach out to non-fully remote small companies/startups. Those are likely to not have automatic resume filters and they are likely to have few enough decent applicants that they'll give you a try.

Get ear plugs and a sleep mask. Don't allow her to demand you stay up with her. Although really the compromise should be she should leave the bedroom until she's ready to sleep, but I get some people will not always agree to that not even for the comfort of their partner.

I wake up at 6AM like this person. I go to sleep around 10PM. Honestly, the best approach is to wake up at whatever time every single day even on weekends and then get to bed when you are tired after 7PM. If you keep doing this you will naturally find your appropriate bed time after about 2 weeks. Most people just botch this because they sleep in on weekends and destroy their body's attempt to set a cycle.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Thank you for clarifying on my behalf

For me, I haven't had a problem specialized in healthcare regulation. I have a favorite stack, but my preferred stack is the ship of theseus if we start from the beginning of my care. That said, I've worked in all sorts of stacks. The only throughline is healthcare regulation with the occasion side steps into other highly regulated fields. I've spent my career automating bureaucracy. Employers just like that they don't have to explain their situation to me. As everyone knows tech stack is fast to pick up, but domain takes much later. I'm coming up on 15 years doing this. It's working for me thus far.

As someone who spent _a lot_ of time playing video games in elementary and then every waking moment on computers/the internet when I was in middle school, but still had friends, got good grades, and have a fine career, I have mixed feelings about electronics. I'm old enough to see that clearly some children are addicted to their tablets/phones/videogames to the detriment of everything, but I also see what impact having no exposure can do and it's not great either but in a different way. I think a middle grade and understanding your child is called for.

My daughter is only 4, but she's had access to a tablet since 1. She's far less addicted than any of her cousins. She will give it up in a heartbeat to do anything else. Sometimes just cartwheels down the hallway. Her tablet is wall garden locked to amazon, so no access to youtube which was honestly a good move looking at some of her classmates. I've some apps outside of Amazon's garden like Disney Plus. All her stuff has parental controls and her tablet operates at my pleasure and before bedtime.

I think that some this is just parenting. I saw a study that stated that screen time only correlated with bad outcomes if your kid would have been doing something else. So if your kid could have been interacting with you, but instead was play games or watching streaming then that's where it's bad. If they would have just been home doing nothing, then the tablet doesn't hurt and can sometimes help.

I've taken this to heart and from a young age I've tried to just do stuff with my kid and have her so stuff and make sure she understood that while riding in the car with her tablet was okay, using it at the park was not okay. Replace park with literally anything. I think this is why now, her tablet is more of a boredom thing for her and she's doesn't need it every moment of every day. She'd rather run outside.

I'm just a sample of one and I know I'm more strict the more addicted the child seems to be (I have many niblings). I do think that screens are dangerous, but so is sugar and I think like sugar you a balance is best. You don't want a kid sneaking sodas because you never let them have one, but allowing soda every day is probably bad idea. That's my stance about screens. If you feel more attached to your phone, etc beyond it being a tool, you probably need a longer break from one is my thinking.

For that to be a reasonable stand people should have reasonable ways to avoid doing business with various ISPs and that's not thr case for many. Their options are one company, maybe two and then they're out of luck. At least if ISP were a real utility in the US they're be able to apply pressure with their votes.

ASMR? There's a woman called yang haiyang who doesn't mean to do ASMR, which is probably why this works for me. I put on a video of her making yogurt or drawing or talking about some trip to a local museum and pass put. Whenever I can't get to sleep I toss one of the dozens of videos she's uploaded that day on.

That is blowing my mind 2 weeks is generally considers standard for white collar work in the US, but companies that have unlimited PTO have a higher tolerance in my experience. I take off 5 weeks a year. I found that taking off a week a quarter and then whatever random emergency days was just right for me. It's why once I experienced unlimited PTO I never went back.

There are rote concepts that underpin stuff like that. There is a certain amount of rote you need in order to be creative. Calculators are great, but knowing how to multiply has more value than just knowing that 3 times 4 is 12. This same idea applies to so many disciplines and I'm wondering if we're going to go back to a more tedious kind of learning where long periods of supervision are necessary to keep sure you know the foundations necessary for the higher level more conceptual classes.

I think I have a high difficulty child. My kid has ASD and whew meltdowns and all that label entails.

I don't think that I had change my parent much, although the results I got at first would be considered less than ideal. I agree that consistency is key. My kid wails, screams, and more, but eventually she does come to understand that her actions have zero impact on the rules. The rules are what they are.

I also don't have a lot of rules I'll be honest. I really only have 3 core rules and all the rules she gets are all enforcement of those rules. The rules are 1) don't impede my ability to keep you healthy and safe 2) you must be able to operate and be productive within your slice of society 3) you are not allowed to be a direct or indirect physical, mental, or emotional danger to yourself or others. That's it.

They seems vague and they're probably abusable, but it gives me a compassion go operate from. It allows me to let things go. There are many things I wish my kid would do, but ultimately when I check The Rules, I find she's not really in violation of breaking anything but my dreams for her or my preference for how I personally want her to live.

I think this ideal makes me both a strict and lax parent, but I like the results I'm seeing now. It was a long hard battle at the toddler years, but she's mostly accepted how it goes I think because she can know how it will go.

I'm come to believe that having core values and being consistent about their enforcement is the way to deal with kids. As long as you aren't too oppressive and they have some space to act as they please, I think you can eventually get to a good state. I guess we'll see how right I am in a decade lol

It's even cover a month of daycare and it pays out over a year, so it's beyond useless. This would cover 3 months of aftercare for me, which I'd only need to have because I was going into the office. Why would I opt into that extra expense, especially when it's significant.

Because women entered the workforce. That's it. A couple has collective time. Before one partner has a lot of time. Right now that is not true and every year more and more couples have two workers. Honestly women working accounts for declining birth rates everywhere. Japan just has it the worst because of their work culture and regular culture. A woman knows that the moment that she gets married, she'll be discriminated against and perhaps just forced out of the work place, so she doesn't. In Japan no one has kids out of wedlock. There you do. Continously declining birth rates from women marrying less and more couples with dual incomes.

That was my point. Which is that Japan being cheap doesn't mitigate anything. Time is the critical factor there. Until they have more free time, no one is having more kids.

I will tell anyone that there are two truths about children 1) they cost exactly as much money as you have and 2) the heaviest cost is time.

I'm a high earner. I have no money issues, what I have are time issues. I'm a single parent with high flexibility and every single struggle I have with my child could be relieved by having a homemaker to distract my kid and take care of the impacts of my kid. I do more than double laundry and clean more often and burn hours at places I don't necessarily want to be but the kid does. My career has stalled out because I don't have the extra hours it takes to get promoted.

Now imagine this in Japan where they're not just working 40 hours a week, looking at add 5-10 more for advancement. That's the issue of children in my opinion. It's why very wealthy people hire nannies. It's the only way to free the most value resource you spend on children: time.

To be fair, we did try to outright ban alcohol and make it illegal. It just didn't work. If people in mass acted towards any drug like they did with alcohol, they'd cave. See: Marijuana

I buy children's melatonin. The doses get do much smaller with children. The price is much smaller.

Life extension is just an expensive brand. You're paying for reassurance you aren't being swindled because the US's regulations around supplements is a joke.

Kids. I have never kept so many strangers in my phone until kids. Friends from school. Friends from random parks. Friends from random activities. Parents to coordinate this activity or that. Trying to remember which platform friend of the quarter is on is too much for me. The reduction of children is the worse. Few children in the neighborhood and everyone is an only child, so now we all have to schedule social interaction until they can read at least.

This. I put my kid into daycare because it didn't cost more than daycare and I'd been paying it this long, what was paying it forever when I'm financially stable. My kid is special needs and the public school would have never accommodated her like this private school has.