We've seen the same uptick in reckless driving in CO since Covid. Reddit Denver complains about it all the time. I think it's happening everywhere, and it's not clear why.
541 karma · joined January 29, 2014
But yes, this is another reason I want to move. I’ve done all the insulating I can easily do without tearing everything down and starting again.
70 kWh a day sounds about right. That’s what I calculated for a max load when I was sizing solar systems.
I've had a Mitsubishi Hyper Heat mini-split system with 2 outdoor units and 3 indoor heads for ~7 years now. I'm trying to move houses to get away from it. It's crazy noisy during the winter, the temperature control is whacky, and it's 2-3X the price to run than a gas furnace with electric vs gas rates around here. Not only that, with new 95% or 96% efficient furnaces, I'm not sure heat pumps are any greener.
Don't get me started on the install costs and the fact that your average mini split unit is barely sized to heat a room, let alone a full house. For me, it was better than the electric baseboards I replaced, but I'd still prefer a standard furnace.
I think we need to be very careful forcing everyone to convert to these until the tech is more mature, especially in the Northern states and places like Colorado. I looked on forums recently to see if the tech has evolved in the last 10 years, but many of the recent buyers still had the exact complaints I listed here.
I wouldn't trade the perspective I got from the experience, but it was extremely emotionally painful.
In my friendships, am I doing most of the work to text, call, or hangout or is it relatively equal? At work, if I do something that helps you, do you help me in return, or do you turn around and screw me over?
Getting away from the relationships which are non reciprocal has given me a lot of mental peace over the past few years. Most people are not like this, but something like 1/5 to 1/10 of people are.
I started with a 30,000 BTU unit in 2 of the bedrooms and then added another 18,000 BTU unit later. My house is a split level which makes it a huge pain to heat. The price of the first units was ~$15,000 and the second one was ~$10,000. Nothing special as part of the installs.
I've installed 2 Mitsubishi hyper heat pumps in the past 5 years with 3 indoor heads totaling ~48,000 BTUs of heat capacity. I don't think people understand how much more expensive heat pumps are than a traditional natural gas furnace. I paid $25,000, and that was 5 years ago. This is for a small house of 1500 square feet. If you had a larger 3 or 4,000 square foot house, you can double or triple that price. In contrast, I know you can get a 250,000 BTU gas boiler for ~$20,000 with install.
Plus, electricity is still way more expensive than gas, even with the price shocks over the past year and even with the high efficiency of modern heat pumps. And it's not that green, given that you lose ~7% in transmission, and usually it's coming from a coal or natural gas plant. If you had solar to offset some of it, that would be great, but usually there isn't enough sun in the winter to account for all of your heating needs, at least without a gigantic array.
I think this is pretty impractical and misguided. I've tried to be green, but next time I buy a house, I'm going to try to go back to a gas furnace.
I think the experience was invaluable, and I don't regret it, but I arrived at the conclusion that doing a startup is largely overrated.
Why stress out for 60 hours a week for years on end watching your savings dwindle when you could have been making great money at a medium or a big company with great benefits that doesn't force you to work on the weekends and allows you to take paid time off? If you land at FAANG or similar, you'll make more money than most startup people ever do anyway.
The startup community loves to talk trash about regular corporations, but for me the work/life/stress balance has been a great trade off.
At the start of my career, I worked as a SWE at one of the FAANGs. After 3 years, I couldn't take it anymore. I hated everything I worked on, nothing was meeting my lofty expectations, and I thought about quitting constantly.
Eventually I pulled the trigger to go and "do my own thing." I didn't have a backup job - instead I worked on my own projects with a cofounder and tried to turn them into a startup. We struggled mightily. We didn't raise money, and we couldn't find product market fit. Every month I was watching my bank account drain, and I wasn't drawing a salary from anywhere. The stock in my own startup was worthless.
This continued for 2.5 years. Eventually, I had had enough, and I knew something had to change. I went and tried to get my old FAANG job back, but couldn't - probably due to my entitled attitude when I was there. I struggled with interviews for a couple of months, and eventually landed at a company several steps down from my old position, making about half of what I had at FAANG.
About a year ago, I switched back to a different FAANG after having been at that other company for 6.5 years. Why I stayed for so many years is a long story.
So ironically I'm back to where I started, but wow did I cause myself a lot of trouble. I watched for years as my old friends went on to make double and triple what I did, for doing the exact same job. In the meantime, I was more stressed out, dealing with a worse bureaucracy at a company that didn't value engineering.
Leaving FAANG was something I had to do. I had to get the startup out of my system, and I couldn't continue at my original job the way that I was. You can't buy perspective, but I probably cost myself something like 1-2 million dollars in the process. Many times over the years I've questioned "Why couldn't I have just stayed at that cushy job like so many of the people that I knew?" I know there's no way that I could have given my emotional state at the time, but I can't help thinking about it.
So I could tell you a bunch of lessons from my experiences, but unfortunately they're probably best learned yourself. You have to follow whatever you think is right and hope that things will work out for you. Usually they will in the long run - but the short term might be painful.
In the first couple of years I remember getting so irritated by all the time it took to take care of the house and yard. Nowadays, I've gotten used to it, and I view it as a welcome distraction from work, but that definitely wasn't true in the beginning. Even paying someone to do all these things is a large hassle. You have to be at the house to meet contractors, get competing bids, worry about the contractors doing stuff wrong, etc.
I also think people wildly underestimate maintenance costs. I bought a 50 year old house, 10 years ago. I don't think I've had a single year where I didn't have to spend 10K on maintenance. I always wonder how most people handle these expenses - and then I realize that most people just don't take care of their houses.
I've written multi-thousand line Makefile build systems across multiple directories and multiple platforms, from scratch.
I must say Make is the most non-intuitive language I've ever had to work with. It's been near impossible for other engineers to pick up the build systems I've written. They still come back to me to ask questions years later.
And most importantly, you have to use tabs instead of spaces. ::sigh::
It's a great tool for some things, just like anything else. But I'd be careful about using it as your default.
While the point is true, I think your time is best spent worrying about other things.
90% of money problems seem to come from a few things: * Expensive cars - bought with debt. * Expensive housing - again bought with debt. * Expensive schooling - even more debt.
I've never bought (pun intended) the argument that dining out in any form (including coffee) even comes close to these other items. Even if you're eating out 3-5 nights per week, it's just not expensive enough. I guess if you're always feeding a family of 5 and buying expensive bottles of wine while you eat, then maybe.
I also think that time spent worrying about trivial stuff like coffee would be better spent trying to make more money.
I understand it's more work that way, which is why BigQuery is so nice. But if you're trying to do lots of queries, BigQuery is also more expensive.
In those cases, maybe a startup makes more sense.
Startups made a lot more sense when your opportunity cost was 50-150K per year.
When we hire someone, we have no way of knowing if they'll be the life-long learner type who will aggressively consume new knowledge and learn as much as they possibly can. In other words, we have no way of knowing if we can effectively train them, and it's crazy expensive if we can't.
We've tried to hire 1 or 2 of them as interns, but usually they're not interested in being interns.
But a computer science graduate typically has 4 years under his or her belt in an engineering heavy curriculum, and because of that time invested, they seem to be stronger in problem solving.
We use Big-O as a signal for problem solving ability. Whether or not that signal is problematic is another question - you could argue that it is.
So yes, I would say that someone who has invested 4 years into problem solving is going to have an advantage over someone who has only put in 6 months, even if those 6 months are dedicated.
But the bootcamp graduate could equal the C.S. graduate with a little more investment.