rnprince

I wish I had this advice sooner. The new part for me here, beyond merely keeping a paper trail, is to make sure that everyone knows about your consistently kept paper trail, so that it wards off bad behavior before it starts.

I've been told that opportunities are easier to spot in areas where you don't spend a lot of time.

I'm guessing that this is because you haven't already accepted the status quo in those areas, and because people with your skillset who would beat you to it may not have spent a lot of time there yet.

Yes, it does. I missed that. :-)

Edit: there's a correction on this in the child comments.

The math on this is misleading. $10k invested for 30 years to become $1M implies an interest rate of 16.6%. Even as a nominal interest rate in the US, that would be an extremely lucky result to consistently achieve. My advice to you would be to start a hedge fund immediately with whatever secret knowledge you have, and then all money concerns will become irrelevant. :-)

A good choice for a real ('real' meaning non-nominal) interest rate in these types of projections is 7%, which would make $10k equal to $76k in 30 years. Because you used a real interest rate, the $76k is $76k in today's dollars, not in 2047 dollars. The conclusion is that you will need to invest a bit more than $10k today to retire in 30 years.

I like to use this type of calculation to frame my short-term purchase decisions. Would I like to spend $20 on this thing I don't need? Yes. Would I like to spend today's equivalent of $300 on it 40 years from now? No thank you.

Yeah, I've been intrigued by this cognitive dissonance for a while. Are we going to visit, or would contaminating the planet be a disaster for science and our understanding of the nature of life?

Yes, like MS, type 1 diabetes is considered to be an autoimmune disease. It's surprising to me as someone who hasn't studied medicine how related to each other autoimmune issues seem to be. Rheumatoid arthritis and latitude is another one that follows this same pattern. This article from 2010 about rheumatoid arthritis also mentions the link to low vitamin D levels, and that the link isn't understood.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920915/

This reminds me of autoimmune disease like MS. They are more common in higher latitudes (where there happens to be less sunlight), and there is a connection to low Vitamin D that isn't understood.

While attempting to understand the link better, UW-Madison researchers recently produced data implying that the ingredients of some sunscreen products may provide benefit in preventing MS. https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/07/28/sunscreen-ms-and-hard-b...

But could we please make "Software Artist" happen?

Very cool interview, but I'm struggling to understand it. Consider tweaking the acoustics of your recording space to reduce reverb.

Agreed about the confusion and that this is cool.

I'm not really sure about this metaphor, but I love what Schoenberg had to say in Harmonielehre about choosing voice registers in the parts you write. It never occurred to me how much art went into something seemingly subtle until I read this from him in a section about four-part vocal writing.

"Obviously the range of solo voices, yes, even of choral voices, is in reality larger than, perhaps different from, that indicated here, which only aims at a fairly correct average. The middle register, which should be the one chiefly used, lies a fourth or a fifth from the highest and lowest tones, so that we have:"

<image of vocal ranges>

"Of course the pupil cannot get along with just the tones of the middle register and will have to use some from the higher or lower registers- naturally, at first only the adjacent tones, but then also on occasion the highest or lowest, if there is no other way. In general, however, he should seldom overstep to any significant degree the bounds of an octave whoever wants to write parts comfortable for the voice will avoid, even in actual composition, extended passages exclusively in one of the outer registers. The pupil should therefore enter these registers only for a short time and leave them as soon as possible. Whenever the treatment of solo or choral voices in practice indicates otherwise, it is because the composer sought some compositional or acoustical effects irrelevant to our present aims."

"The characteristics of the voices indicate the requirements, supported by experience for their combination in choral writing. If no voice is to stand out, then all voices will seek out registers whose acoustical potential is approximately the same. For, were a voice to sing in a more brilliant register, while the others move in a duller register, that voice would naturally be quite noticeable. If this voice is intended to stand out (for example, when an inner voice has the melody), then it is well that it sing in a more expressive register. But if it is inadvertently conspicuous, then the director would have to rely on shading, he would have to create equilibrium by subduing the prominent voice or by strengthening the weaker ones."

I once joined a successful, for-profit, private company, because I liked its mission, despite being offered lower compensation and benefits than I could have accepted elsewhere. This was very naive of me, and didn't turn out how I had hoped at all.

It turned out that the mission was more of a very well executed recruiting and sales strategy than what I felt every day at the organization. Looking back, the recruiting effort talked about their culture and values so much that I should have known they were very insecure about something. The lower compensation wasn't required by the company's financials from what I could tell, nor was it made up for by especially meaningful work. Unsurprisingly, the organizational flaws of not valuing employees and cutting corners also showed up in other ways, most painfully in the form of amazingly bad code and hostile managers. The job was unbearable for me, as well as for many others.

I think the takeaway is that honest, successful companies should be willing to fairly compensate their employees. If a company can do that but doesn't, you should reconsider working there.

It depends on how they enforce it. One of my former employers would pay out unused vacation days under vaguely defined terms of being in good standing with the company, which I understood to mean that you have to give them the full notice period that they asked for. In a lot of states I think it isn't allowed to not pay out unused vacation days, but I'm sure other things could be done to enforce the three-month policy.

Thanks! This is good, practical advice.

Three months is aggressive and not standard. This is a red flag in my book. To me it means that very ugly situations come up in the company, and they feel the need to lessen your ability to respond appropriately to them.

There is no good reason for them not giving you the offer they promised you. This is the first of many times this company is likely to take advantage of you. At this point I'd consider walking away even if they did manage to correct the offer.

Could you explain why you think six months is good? Is the goal to get investors within that six months? Or revenue?

That is not a lot of runway. What happened to make it work for you? Did you get investors or revenue within those three months?

Hey everyone, thank you for these replies! All of them were helpful. I came up with these takeaways:

- Frame your services as creating solutions to business problems, rather than trying to sell developer skills. This explains the value in terms that a client understands, and more simply, it lets non-technical clients know what you do in a way that “AWS, Go, JavaScript, PostgreSQL” can’t.

- Focus on getting clients. This is a bigger barrier to entry than how good you are at creating software. Don’t expect to do well just because you are good at making things.

- You’re probably qualified to do this if you've been a developer for a few years.

With this information, I'm going to follow the plan I already had, but with more confidence and focus since I feel more like I'm on the right track. I'm going to launch a few nice side projects with moderate levels of complexity to solidify my skills and figure out how long things take (important for estimates), and then I'll try getting clients using those projects to showcase what I'm capable of doing.

Thanks again everyone!

Hey, thanks for your reply. Would you say that this low bar means that for an actually good contractor, there's a lot of opportunity for word-of-mouth references, repeat business relationships, or high hourly rates?

Some languages don't have first-class functions that you would pass into a map or reduce function, which makes writing loops unavoidable.

But even if you do use map/reduce all the time instead of loops, you're just saying the same thing I did in another way - unless you're doing it for the intellectual thrill of writing a call to map/reduce for the n+1th time.

Reminds me of undergrad class registration, when everything satisfying a general education requirement would fill up and the server would crash the instant it started.

I didn't choose to take History and Religion of Ancient Israel, but it was the class I got the most out of.

By the time you've memorized all the cases where a binary tree does and doesn't make sense, you might as well have just learned how they work.

I mean, I keep writing for-loops even though I've written many of them before.

Dijkstra spent a lot of his research effort on ways to prove that programs are correct.

"Today a usual technique is to make a program and then to test it. But: program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but it is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence. The only effective way to raise the confidence level of a program significantly is to give a convincing proof of its correctness."

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD340.PDF

"One moral of the above story is, of course, that we must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!"

Cute line.

I wondered for a moment if this could incentive developers to introduce bugs for their friends to "find," but then I remembered that hackers are already incentivized a lot more to sneak vulnerabilities into FOSS.

As a musician I've wondered what generating actually good music would mean. Music is such a cultural experience, tied in with a sense of being part of a social group, that I don't think we would ever let computers completely replace humans in producing it - until they become sentient and we start seeing them as friends. (How could a computer be a part of my social group unless it was sentient?)

I think the non-research value will be like the value of chess computers to chess communities. It enriches the community, helping them develop their craft, but the community is still a community of humans.

http://theconversation.com/how-computers-changed-chess-20772

I can think of a few ways machines have beaten humans before, but where human experience is still valued in a way the machine achievement isn't. Modern weapons are valued for what they do, and they can beat any human, but the human practice of martial arts is still valued despite that fact. A player piano with a roll performed by Rachmaninoff will deliver an excellent reproduction of a historic performance, but I'd still rather listen to my friend play, even if what I'm hearing comes down to objectively worse key pressing.

Thanks for writing this. I got a lot out of reading it.

Could you elaborate on defining the intellectual property in your contracts? I've had questions about how to do this correctly recently while negotiating one of my first independent contractor agreements.

> the vast majority are happy with the result

See the congressional job approval numbers http://www.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx

> If HRC had won, we would not be seeing these calls for reform gain attention

Does it matter what inspired people to ask for reform? They have a valid point that for solidly held districts, the minority's voice is completely erased in Congress.