I've done this in previous jobs - nothing to do with the company itself, I just don't like tying both my investment and wage income to the same company.
Our vaccination program is ramping up nicely, even with the lockdown they're posting record numbers. Should be done by the end of the year, and if we can get this outbreak under control we'll easily get there before the next one.
I stopped music and tv piracy once netflix and spotify took off. Spotify is still a good service but we now have netflix, disney plus, and amazon prime to contend with and still can't find some of the content we want due to the stupid turf wars going on. The situation is becoming what turned me on to piracy in the first instance - Sky TV in NZ had a monopoly on distribution for some content which meant it was otherwise unavailable, and they made it impossible to get the bits you wanted without paying for all the crap. Except now instead of having to pay one provider a large monthly fee, it's 3 or 4 of them.
I did it and it's worked out pretty well. If you've ditched your major debts then you'd be in an even better position to manage the ups-and-downs of contracting, so I say go for it!
I've done the same thing for the last 18 months in my small New Zealand town (~10,000 residents). My company is big enough to need two closed-door offices now; we're still happy to stay here, it's got a nice vibe and sharing costs keeps things reasonably cheap.
Yeah, definitely a choice! I chose to quit a nice, salaried job in the city and move back to my small hometown and start a contracting business. Stressful, but it's working out great so far!
I worked in startups prior to that so it wasn't a huge leap outside my comfort zone I guess.
Not to pitch in with low-value "me too thanks" style replies, but by god does this sum up the last 18 months of my life. Every time I feel comfortable, bam! Something new to keep me awake at night. It's one part exhausting and one part exhilarating and I'm not sure if I could go back to salaried work at this point.
I've performed close to 400 screening interviews now for a range of companies. There's a good chunk of people that struggle to write a solution that correctly compiled to an "aggregate this data" style problem. People with the "correct" CV that have made it through the HR filter. It's a real problem.
Me too. We've considered holidays that would take us close to the states (Canada and the Caribbean) but there are very few flights direct from New Zealand and they're crazy expensive.
There's a lot of grads and intermediate developers dragging the average down. Also, Wellington has a lot of services companies that pay as close to the bottom of the range as they can get.
I'm looking at tattoo artists and judging them on their Instagram photos. There's a few things like this I would check social media for, but mostly I'm looking at reputation (reviews and writeups) rather than photos and other social presence.
Harder to hide board decision making process when the employees have a seat at the table though. Might make it easier for employees to organise against problems before they become entrenched decisions.
This handily solves an issue with one of my clients - they wanted to make sure they could deploy their SaaS app on-prem if a customer asked for it, so had been avoiding going all in on AWS-specific services. Bet the pricing is "if you have to ask it's too much" but I guess we'll see.
Better cooling, definitely. My machine gets quite hot on my lap unless I have it turn on the fans earlier using Macs Fan Control. I'm using it as a pro machine, so it's running a bunch of docker containers, Slack, VS Code, a million tabs across Firefox and Chrome. It's a busy machine and it doesn't need to be silent if that means it's hot enough to be uncomfortable on my legs and hands.
I get paid to a bank in New Zealand via TransferWise for work I do for a company in the US. Works well, not sure of the fees on their end as they handle all of that for me. As the recipient of funds it's a nice service anyway.
I love that last one. In my head you've run right through the checklist, popping out a new reason not to offer up a number first, before hitting the last one and just coming right out with it.