Join the Engineering Leisure Class

https://medium.com/@chrisloer/join-the-engineering-leisure-class-b3083c09a78e

by ChrisLoer • 11 years ago

220 189 11 years ago

gaius2• 11 years ago

The RMS lifestyle - get a $1m grant or two, then work for free!

ChrisLoer9• 11 years ago

Haha, he's a pretty impressive example of independence, although I don't think either the million dollars or the parrots are truly necessary!

Kalium• 11 years ago

Of course the parrots are necessary. They're key to everything!

gohrt4• 11 years ago

RMS is not independent. He is interdependent. He relies heavily on the community for housing when he travels.

Dewie33• 11 years ago

We’re used to thinking of leisure in the narrow sense of “use of free time for enjoyment,” but leisure can be more meaningful if we focus instead on its broader definition as “opportunity afforded by free time to do something.”

Stop coupling "enjoyment" with "non-productive".

rifung10• 11 years ago

How did the author couple enjoyment with nonproductive?

It seems like the opposite considering he's advocating working on an idea for no pay, which is something you'd only do because you enjoy it and can easily be seen as being productive.

Dewie33• 11 years ago

How did the author couple enjoyment with nonproductive?

By considering "use of free time for enjoyment" too narrow. Supposedly because he thinks that "meaningful" is distinct from "enjoyable".

hyperbovine• 11 years ago

How many kids do you have, Chris? :-)

ChrisLoer9• 11 years ago

One kid is on the way -- and yes, I have no idea how children are going to affect our lives! I've considered going in two totally different directions: I might go for a high-paying full-time job so that my wife and I can pay for a nanny and all those other modern affluent child-raising tools, or I might try to go full-bore stay-at-home Dad changing diapers and raising the kids to grow their own food in the backyard and make their own clothes. More likely I'll muddle somewhere in between, but I want to go into it with as many options as possible, and a clear idea of what we want for ourselves and our kids.

crpatino2• 11 years ago

I find it kind of confusing how you fit this back to the land idea with being an engineer that wants to work on his own engineering projects rather than just scape the cubicle farm.

Also, you mention you have a spouse. I know it is terribly unfashionable to say this, but have you considered being a single income family? Sounds like that would give you the best of both worlds.

In my case, we are a single-and-a-half income family. Once kids go to school, there's no much reason to keep an adult around home all day. I am officially the bread winner, and my wife has the lifestyle job, but considering how much she has accomplished just by working part time, we might need to revisit that decision sometime down the road.

danans3• 11 years ago

If you are considering the in-between with kids and work, remember that managing the in-between has it's own logistical overhead (== costs).

For example, if you have a nanny part-time, you will have to figure out nanny taxes - assuming you're doing it the legal way - or pay an outside party to manage the nanny's payroll.

That overhead may be easier to justify when the nanny is allowing you to work a full time high paying job, less so if the nanny is only coming a couple days a week. In this case, you might consider a part-time day care center instead.

And unless you have a lot of energy or hired/family help, you will be so tired in the first few years of your child's life that you likely won't have the energy to do anything beyond growing a few token tomatoes and potatoes, certainly nothing at the scale needed to make a dent in a family's food costs.

For clothing, tap your friends-with-kids network to get into the hand-me-down stream. Babies and toddlers grow out of clothes faster than they can wear them out, and new clothes are $$$.

mndrix5• 11 years ago

I have 5 kids and do pretty much what the article describes. It can be done and it's grand :-)

shard2• 11 years ago

That's pretty impressive. I would have thought that it's only possible to support a few people on that lifestyle. Could you give some more details about how you do it?

velocitypsycho• 11 years ago

Two words make this difficult. Health Insurance.

stevenmays• 11 years ago

Not with the ACA... now if you retire and only have income you draw from your investments, you pay a low income based rate even though you may have significant assets.

ChrisLoer9• 11 years ago

Yeah, I think ACA is a huge supporter of this kind of move... although I planned to get an exchange plan, I ended up marrying a member of the US Navy, so I get covered by Tricare. I know, not everyone has that luck (or lots of other luck I enjoyed)...

toast0• 11 years ago

This is a natural outcome of conflating 'wealthy' with 'high income.' Outside of FAFSA, and estate tax, and maybe FDIC limits, the US government really doesn't have a good view into what assets you may have.

nolite• 11 years ago

I was thinking: "rent"

sandstrom• 11 years ago

Not in most European countries where this is handled at the national level, instead of by each company.

I.e. switching jobs (or having none) doesn't affect whether a hospital will treat you or not.

Flip-per2• 11 years ago

Switching is no problem usually, but if you are able to work but not 'willing' you'll lose your health insurance pretty soon.

Florin_Andrei• 11 years ago

switching jobs (or having none) doesn't affect whether a hospital will treat you or not

From an american perspective, that sounds like some sort of unattainable utopia.

bergie• 11 years ago

Only in the places where healthcare isn't free and provided for every citizen

yummyfajitas2• 11 years ago

Or in the places where a mostly capitalistic system provides it. I did something similar last year in India and the medical system was not a problem. (I did not by any stretch of the imagination get lucky and manage to avoid injury.)

emptybits• 11 years ago

One word makes that easier. Canada.

neilk2• 11 years ago

I did this. I advise against this.

I had money saved up, and for visa reasons had to spend a year outside the USA. Seemed like a perfect time to indulge in some risky ideas, especially those which were a little idealistic.

It ended up being incredibly depressing and I got very little done.

It's hard enough to build a product when you're in a startup or a smart team. In my opinion it's nearly impossible if you're going it alone. And unless some of your friends have an exactly coincidental amount of leisure time or extra energy, you probably won't make progress.

It's especially bad if you're taking on something that you think is good for the world, because now you have extra pressure, but no extra motivation.

Plus, things that are good for the world tend to be products, and not just tools. Those are harder.

I know you, the reader reading this, are exempt from this, and you're an island of personal productivity that needs no human inputs. That's how I used to think, too. Or at least, I told myself that I was more capable than others who said the same thing and who similarly failed.

The main problem is that you think you're freeing yourself from distraction and you're just going to have 100% of time to work on something. But in the process you might also free yourself from people to tell you you are overbuilding, from customers to tell you you're doing it wrong, from the social interactions that make the day brighter. And you might feel the urge to keep it all behind the curtain until The Great Unveiling. This has the effect of making all your small progresses, in the meantime, feel useless. Success recedes further and further away, and human emotional feedback loops don't usually work in those situations.

So I suggest if you're going to use your money and time this way:

- Take on something small. REALLY small. Then cut it to 10% of that size. Then release it. Iterate if it seems to be working out and building a community.

or:

- Be very young and with enough privilege to not have to worry about debt. You have leisure time, few expenses or commitments, and extra energy, and so does almost everyone you know.

or:

- Make sure others are invested in your success and have a commitment to it that's at least in the same order of magnitude as your own. A funded startup is a wonderful way of focusing commitment like this, and ensuring that you have to talk to people all the time. But there are other models.

ChrisLoer9• 11 years ago

Yeah, the lack of feedback (and not being embedded in a motivated team) is a very big downside. In my case, I responded by distancing myself a little bit from focusing so much on success at the one "big" thing I was working on, and focusing more on enjoying curiosity, exploration, etc. The app I've created probably falls in the "tool" category more than "product", and I spend (waste?) a fair amount of time psychologically prepping myself for marking it as a failure. On balance, I still feel like it's been a good move for my life, but of course the experiment is ongoing...

neilk2• 11 years ago

Oh yeah, let me say, my year+ of trying this wasn't a waste either.

I updated my skills, learned new tech, and tried stuff I never would have got to try in a normal work situation. I got to dick around with pretty UI on Monday and backend performance on Tuesday.

So a sabbatical of sorts wasn't a terrible idea -- I'd just do it differently. Ensuring a good iterative environment (social context, regular advisor meetings, customer contact) would be my #1 priority.

intrasight• 11 years ago

Really excellent suggestions in my opinion

tomblomfield• 11 years ago

Totally agree. I get my energy and focus from working with a (small) team of people, usually under time-pressure.

Working by myself, without any deadlines or goals, I become unmotivated and pretty depressed.

jsprogrammer• 11 years ago

Sounds like it would help you to set your own deadlines and goals if you want to successfully work by yourself.

marktangotango3• 11 years ago

I did this too, and I agree. IMO anything worth doing is non trivial. The project I took on had some really hard parts. Example: something akin to defining a relational schema for maintaining a model of c/c++ source code, before and after preprocessing (not exactly, but same idea minus the difficulty of parsing c++). This was one of about 5 'hard' problems. I got bogged down, and with no one to bounce ideas off, I became trapped in 'analysis paralysis'.

I gave up after 8 months and got a job. Now all I have to show for it is some source code, and a gap on my resume to explain.

rifung10• 11 years ago

I'll have to respectfully disagree with the idea that "anything worth doing is nontrivial." This might certainly be the case for you, but I would love to just spend some time learning Haskell, writing an OS for fun, reading papers on Theoretical Computer Science, or trying to find security exploits.

I don't think these things are hard, at least they certainly aren't things I would doubt myself to be able to do. These are just things I'm sure I could do today if only I had more time, and at least to me these are definitely worth thing for one reason: they make me happy

Kaizyn• 11 years ago

I bet you now know a lot about parsing and the relational schemas and managing models now. You'll hit a problem again where this turns out to be valuable knowledge. Even a failed experiment if the problem is interesting enough is fruitful for improving your thinking about hard problems. Once you get past being disappointed over the experience, you'll probably find that a second attenpt at cracking the problem gets you further.

dasmoth2• 11 years ago

How much trouble does the resume gap cause you?

The idea that everyone should want to have a job all the time seems like a strange distortion in the labour market.

mavdi• 11 years ago

It pretty much depends on your personality too I guess. I myself can go years without the need to interact with any other soul.

clarebear• 11 years ago

The author is just asking his friends to do what he is doing to provide the social context he is lacking. He is right that naming it attractively is motivating. But an attractive name is usually not enough to an engineer to make up for not getting to touch the gears of how the world actually works.

DennisP• 11 years ago

I'm doing this right now. I sometimes feel that I'm not being very productive and should just get a job. Then I look over my daily journal and discover I'm getting quite a lot done.

This week I started using Trello with a basic kanban arrangement. When I'm ready for a break from one task, instead of goofing off I just switch to a different one. Eg., if I need a break from coding, I'll read my current book for a while; at the moment I'm going through a stack of books on UI design.

I've built one proof of concept, made a lot of progress on another, did each in a language I didn't know before, and I'm working now on another idea using Meteor, which I also didn't know before. Several projects are from ideas I had after starting all this, and I think they could become marketable products.

I guess you could say I'm not exactly doing the "leisure" thing since I'm working towards real products, but it's not a definite startup yet either. But now I'm focusing more on the easier projects so I can get something into production. It's been nice working in an ivory tower for a little while, but I'm getting an itch to show people results.

And I'm having a great time doing it all. I'm pretty introverted so I don't need that much social interaction, but I have a girlfriend I see every day, do lunch with my old coworkers every week or two, and make sure I get good food and exercise. Several times a week I wake up early enough and watch the sunrise.

All of which is just to say: YMMV.

D_Alex• 11 years ago

Moreover.... if you are not in software, but say mechanical engineering (like myself), doing anything new and interesting usually costs a lot of money. And if you do not have that money - because you have quit your paying job - your ideas will never be built. And if you try to get funding from others... well that can be really disheartening, the VC scene in mechanical engineering is much much worse that in software.

rifung10• 11 years ago

This is actually exactly what I want to do, although I just started working so for obvious reasons it isn't a reality yet. How long does it take to save up enough money that you wouldn't need to work though?

Also, it seems like eventually you'd run out of money unless you can just retire early, in which case, you have the issue of explaining why you've been out of work for so long and proving you still are up to the task.

The last issue I have is that things I want to enjoy in my leisure time are costly. For example, I'd love to finish my degree and study music, but these things cost money. I want to continue studying piano, but pianos cost money, getting a house costs money, and lessons cost money. I'm sure I would still program and do projects, but it's not the only thing I happen to enjoy. Maybe not everyone has expensive hobbies like I do but I bet a lot of people, for whatever reason, want kids. Those things are expensive!

Also, I take issue with the author assuming that we spend money on luxuries just because we make more. At least for myself, this is not true at all. I've had jobs that were very stressful, and getting things I liked was my means of destressing and justifying staying at my job instead of just becoming a teacher or something (Not that teachers don't have stressful jobs, I just wonder if I'd enjoy it more). I think I'd have trouble keeping some jobs if I couldn't enjoy spending some of what I made.

ChrisLoer9• 11 years ago

- On how long it takes to save up enough money that you don't need to work: depends on your assumptions, but yes it takes some years of work. There are lots of people who write on this, I especially like: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

- I don't personally have enough money to pay for my current living expenses for the 70-odd years I hope to remain alive. It was an important shift for me when I stopped thinking this was necessary. I have enough money to glide for several years, and I'm confident that either some money will come my way during those years (and I believe it's a little easier to make money when you're not worried so much about it), or I will at least have enough time to notice I'm running out and adjust course. I'm not too worried about the "hole in my resume". If you do interesting stuff with your life, you'll always have a good story to tell. Maybe your story isn't optimized for going up a certain career ladder, but who cares?

- I don't think luxuries are bad, and I think you spending money on a piano could be an awesome use of your time on earth. I just think we don't realize quite how many choices we have. I know lots of poor musicians find ways to get access to pianos, and owning a house out here in 29 Palms is certainly not too costly. But that doesn't mean you have to do it that way!

- I also spent more money while I was working long hours in part to "de-stress". While I don't think it was strictly necessary, I don't think it's crazy. It's just useful to remember that those "de-stressing" costs disappear when you leave the stressful situation.

rifung10• 11 years ago

Hey I really appreciate that you took the time to respond to me.

I completely agree with all your points! I'm definitely looking to find ways to start saving so that I'll be able to spend some time not working sooner. And I am sure that once I stop working I won't have to de-stress as much!

I am sure it will be glorious.. being able to do things just because you feel like it! That's the dream

rifung10• 11 years ago

Actually I have a question! If you aren't going to be able to permanently not have a job, don't you worry about your retirement or savings? After all, what you invest should compound so the earlier the better! Or so that's what I read..

HaloZero• 11 years ago

Wow, you live out in 29 Palms? I grew up in Yucca Valley.

You can live pretty cheaply out there but you also have to deal with all dumb crap out there. It wasn't very pleasant growing up in the schools there.

gwern• 11 years ago

I want to continue studying piano, but pianos cost money, getting a house costs money, and lessons cost money.

Given the difficulty people experience in getting rid of pianos, and the constant flood of pianos, a piano might not cost you much money; you might even be able to get paid to take a nice piano off someone's hands: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/arts/music/for-more-pianos...

Avshalom3• 11 years ago

Seriously, getting a nice piano might cost money but paying attention to craiglist can easily net you a piano for "free if you can get it out of here"

rifung10• 11 years ago

Hey, thanks for taking the time to try and help me out! It does seem like it's a buyer's market right now for pianos, but a decent piano still costs a considerable amount of money. Of course, I think this is partly because I'm very serious about it so I don't want just anything.

If you get a poorly maintained piano, it could cost several thousand dollars to restore it. Just replacing the actions of a grand costs something like $4k-$5k from what a technician told me.

candu2• 11 years ago

Re: piano - for most use cases, mid-to-high range digital pianos are more than good enough nowadays. They don't require tuning, they fit in even fairly small apartments, and they can be moved with relative ease. It's not uncommon to see professional musicians using digital; the action and sound are at least comparable to the real thing.

Someone in my area sold me an old Roland RD-500 in excellent condition, two amps, and a stand for $500. Total cost including van rental to move it, music stand, and a bunch of sheet music: $700-800. Not sure what an equivalent setup would cost new, but I'd wager somewhere in the $1.5-3k range.

rifung10• 11 years ago

Hey thanks for the advice.

I actually have a digital. In fact I have something somewhat better than a digital: a hybrid (Yamaha N1). It has the action of a grand but I can still use it in an apartment.

I also thought this would be good enough, but after taking lessons it's obvious that it's really not. Even though the action is supposed to be that of a grand piano, the reality is that when I actually try to play on a grand I can't play it. My teacher has also said that I really need to get an acoustic piano.

I'm not entirely sure what it is, but I think the main difference is that even if the action feels like that of a real piano, it doesn't react quite the same. There are a lot more subtleties that you can get from a grand piano that's just not possible from a digital with the touch and especially with the pedal.

Note that this is for classical music, I don't know a thing about Jazz or pop music.

I really do appreciate your trying to help though!

aidenn02• 11 years ago

Many serious teachers won't accept students without an acoustic piano, as the action is too different. I'm not a pianist, but every single one I know whom I asked about this said that the difference is too great, at least to learn on.

vinceguidry6• 11 years ago

Luckily, there’s a corner of the Internet dedicated to breaking the link between “comfort” and money.

The problem with this is that it moves in the wrong direction. You spent all this time learning how to earn more money for your time. Then what do you do after you earn a bunch of money? Figure out how to trade your time for money again, just in different arenas? Why, so you can avoid having to spend more time doing what you specialized in? This isn't the direction of leisure.

The MMM types always are quick to say that they actually enjoy all these little things they do to avoid having to put out more money for daily essentials. Cloth diapering and seems the be the poster-child for these sorts of things. Also using single-blade razors. Working on your own car.

Doing these things properly requires learning more skills. But time spent learning these skills is time not spent engineering. It almost seems more of a irrational reaction against modernity than it does an actual path towards greater impact.

You need to be trading the money you're making through specialization for time not spent learning more skills to be going in the direction of more actual leisure. (what I call "fuck you time". Much better IMO than fuck you money.) You use some of the freed-up time to make more money, and the rest of it towards leisure activities. It's possible for your skill-set to be so valuable that you can maintain ridiculous incomes on, as Tim Ferriss puts it, four hours a week.

Every dollar I can spend on not learning a new skill is a minute I can put towards pushing my flywheel.

ChrisLoer9• 11 years ago

MMM definitely makes most sense for people who enjoy doing the sorts of things MMM enjoys doing. I happen to really like a lot of the around-the-house type DIY projects, so it's a good fit for me, but I don't think there's a moral imperative to it. MMM sets the "$30k/year" bar for frugal family living with his DIY lifestyle, but there are plenty of people who do it differently. My wife's extended family are for the most part recent immigrants, so a lot of them live in that range (comfortably enough!) with a completely different type of frugality.

vinceguidry6• 11 years ago

I actually like doing those sorts of things too. But as my engineering skill-set grows, I also start to really notice the opportunity cost to doing them. You can keep doing them, for awhile, sure. But if you're actually pushing your personal productivity and value flywheel, those costs are going to weigh ever heavier and eventually you're going to have a decision to make. Outsource the things that aren't adding momentum to those who would be happy to take them off your hands or stop gaining momentum. Because as the flywheel gains momentum you have to push ever harder on it to make it go faster.

It doesn't just apply to household stuff. A business has to be able to scale beyond your personal efforts as well. To do so you have to be able to remove yourself from a lot of equations. Large impacts to society and the world don't really happen without institutions, and institutions can't get built any other way.

What I love about engineering is the personal value curve is so steep, that it starts making sense a lot sooner to outsource drudge work. It becomes a question of, how big do you want to grow, and how fast do you want to do it?

ForHackernews• 11 years ago

It's possible for your skill-set to be so valuable that you can maintain ridiculous incomes on, as Tim Ferriss puts it, four hours a day.

Tim Ferriss' extremely valuable skillset is being a flim-flam man / borderline scam artist who markets questionable pesudoscience nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ferriss#BrainQUICKEN

mcdougle2• 11 years ago

I don't see anything in the Wikipedia article that implies he was a borderline scam artist. Even the "controversies" section only really talks about the fact that he used steroids in the past and something about Amazon reviews for his books.

I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong... but what has he done that's actually bad? He says himself that the things he writes about worked for him, and he shows how he measured it in his own life. That doesn't mean it's scientific fact and will work for everyone necessarily.

falcolas2• 11 years ago

Yeah, the MMM manifesto would never work for me - it basically says that I would have to be setting aside over 90% of my income (given my salary range), which wouldn't allow for things like a newer car, owning a house over 300 sq. ft., or traveling to Arizona to visit relatives.

Personally, I refuse to give up my life today for the possibility of a life tomorrow. There's too few guarantees that there will be a tomorrow.

zrail4• 11 years ago

That's not really what MMM espouses, from what I've been able to tell (I've actually spent the better part of the last month devouring his blog and the forums).

MMM's point is that, if you live well within your means and can save 50% of your income (however you choose to define that, but most people do after-tax), you can "retire" after a short number of years. "Retirement" is very much however you want to define it, but the core is that you don't have to work for money anymore, since your previous investments can take care of your lower-than-average expenses. Lots and lots of people are financially independent (don't have to work for money) and still work a normal job because they like it.

MMM promotes freedom, in the sense that you can change some small aspects of your lifestyle and in a short amount of time free yourself of the requirement to sell your time.

Modernnomad842• 11 years ago

I think it's fair to say that this is 95% of people's first reaction to hearing about MMM or similar bloggers.

Here's something you can take away from MMM even if you don't agree with everything he says.

Based on your post, these are the things that are important to you (or at least a start):

- Newer car - owning a house over 300 sq. ft. - Traveling to Arizona to visit relatives.

Maybe there are a dozen or so other things that are important to you that you could add to that list.

Now open up your bank account and find out how much spending happens on stuff that isn't important to you. 50%? 80%?

If you can dial down the spending that doesn't make you happy or the spending you do that just out of habit then you would be able to do more that does matter to you... nicer house, nicer car, more frequent and longer trips to AZ.

gohrt4• 11 years ago

Cloth diapering and seems the be the poster-child for these sorts of things.

Cloth diapering (as currently practiced, with fancy diapers and washing machines) is not cost effective at all; it's (arguably) environmentally responsible, extra butt padding, and cute.

jnem2• 11 years ago

Sorry, but i cant find a reference to what MMM means anywhere. Im guessing you guys aren't talking about the Moon Miners Manifesto.. or talking about enjoying something "mmm.mmm.mmm"

lemdj• 11 years ago

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

Compulsion• 11 years ago

Mustache Money or something. The guy he mentions in the article.

PopeOfNope2• 11 years ago

Many Men of Michigan.

s73v3r3• 11 years ago

"Also using single-blade razors."

For me, single blade razors offer a better shave. The fact that it's cheaper is just a bonus.

vinceguidry6• 11 years ago

Not for me. I got a safety razor a few years ago, never looked back until I found myself traveling, and, unable to bring my blades, just went to the grocery store and got a cheap three-blade razor. Night and day difference.

jtzhou• 11 years ago

Why, so you can avoid having to spend more time doing what you specialized in?

Yes. Part of enjoying life -- at least for most people -- is taking part in challenges and endeavors in a wide range of activities. If you can work for 4 hours a week and maintain a high income, this would fit the bill but probably not realistic for most people (do you have suggestions besides managing a portfolio of capital, or free-lancing?). MMM is not saying we should do everything ourselves, but to be smart about what we do save have more time for other activities. This is how humans have been biologically desired over millions of years -- to be adaptable and have a wide range of skills. Legs for running, hands for climbing and building and fixing physical objects, noses for smelling. Skills that are unnecessary for simply writing code but useful to use. The flywheel sounds a bit too mechanical and less in tune with our biological needs.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." — Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

_yosefk• 11 years ago

I pity the hog butchered by a computer programmer (though except for Zuckerberg I heard about few who tried.) I pity as well the programmer honing his hog butchering skills.

If you want to make the most money to be able to work the least hours over your lifetime, then focusing on those skills making the most money at the expense of other skills (and paying someone else with those skills when necessary) is the best strategy by far.

If you enjoy fucking around with plumbing, then by all means fuck with it all you want. But if making less money and fucking with plumbing is your plan to free up the most time for other things (neither making money nor plumbing), then I think it's just plain dumb.

Dewie33• 11 years ago

So now the goal post has been moved from having more leisure time to an appeal to nature.

gluggymug2• 11 years ago

"Doing these things properly requires learning more skills. But time spent learning these skills is time not spent engineering. It almost seems more of a irrational reaction against modernity than it does an actual path towards greater impact."

I don't think it was about the size of impact but about fixing your work/life balance. When it's skewing too much towards "all work/no play", most people burn out. By changing to learning something new and different, they get refreshed.

Personally I think I may have to write an article called "Join the Leisure Class, Leave the Engineering Class".

For me, I stopped working in engineering and life is awesome. Having made enough to pay off the mortgage and with leftover savings, I don't think I will need to work again. But when I was working I actually did get a certification in a completely different field of welding/machining.

hspak• 11 years ago

Reminds me of the fisherman story: http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/fisherman.html

imgabe2• 11 years ago

Having skills saves you both time and money in the long run. Let's say your toilet is broken. If you can fix it yourself, you need maybe a couple hours. You can do those couple hours any time, for example, on the weekend when you weren't going to be working for money anyway.

If you don't have any skills, you have to pay a plumber to come fix it, for maybe $200. That's already four hours of working at $50/hour. Plus, you have to be home to let in the plumber which is most likely during business hours, so that's maybe another 2-4 hours that you're not at work. Total time cost: 8 hours.

How long does it take to learn how to fix a toilet? Remember, you're a freaking engineer. A toilet is not that complicated. You should be able to watch a youtube video and learn just about everything you need to know in 10-15 minutes. Time spent learning to be self-sufficient pays itself back very quickly.

There's also additional risks to being overspecialized. What if the thing you specialized in becomes obsolete? Now you have no way to trade your time for money and you're absolutely useless for doing anything else.

gaius2• 11 years ago

Programmers routinely underestimate the complexity of every other field.

Modernnomad842• 11 years ago

I just wanted to mention that MMM sometimes rubs me the wrong way too. A more analytical approach that I found more thorough and more intriguing is at "Extreme Early Retirement" here:

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/

His book is especially interesting.

Granted, the author of this book is quirky and ends up doing a lot of work that you could hire someone to do for $10 an hour. But the author stressed that- at least for him- he'd rather spend his team mending clothes or fixing his bike that being in academia (his prior career).

geebee• 11 years ago

"An engineer earning an amazingly-not-uncommon salary of $100k/year ends up living in an expensive place like San Francisco, starts spending money on some admittedly lovely luxuries, and quickly becomes convinced that her spending is just about right for a comfortable life."

Certainly, one way to manage all this is to not live in a place like San Francisco. But I think it is important to make sure people know that lovely luxuries aren't really what forces people with families to focus on money, and that if you do try to raise a family in SF on the median developer's pay (about $114k a year in SF), you'll find engineers don't really have "more money than <we> need", though of course there's always a version of poverty or struggling that would make raising a family on $114k in any expensive city a cakewalk.

Just keep in mind, the median price for a house here is over 1 mil, and that 1 mil will get you a 2br, maybe 3, south of 280 or maybe the outer sunset. OK areas. Full time childcare is about $24,000 a year. Those are really the whopper expenses (that and health care).

Are those "lovely luxuries"? Well, maybe living in SF is a lovely luxury. I like it here, though I'm really here because I grew up here, have two kids in school, and have so much family around that I'm sort of superglued at this point. But yeah, I could leave. All in all, I think there are better places (no, I'm not like some pac northwester trying to get you scared of the rain, if it's your choice to live here you should be welcome in SF, but I really do mean this, I'm really not sure SF is worth it if you have the option of living somewhere else).

I'm not trying to be hard on the author of this piece, but I do think it's important for people to know that engineers in SF even in dual income families struggle with housing and child care payments, not with luxury cars, expensive vacation, lovely luxuries.

toomuchtodo3• 11 years ago

I'm not trying to be hard on the author of this piece, but I do think it's important for people to know that engineers in SF even in dual income families struggle with housing and child care payments, not with luxury cars, expensive vacation, lovely luxuries.

Choosing to work in a locale where a median home price is a million dollars is a luxury. Engineers could pick from other metro areas, and get fairly close to $100K/year with much lower costs of living (Austin, Dallas, Durham come to mind, there are many more).

dilap• 11 years ago

Most of my family is here in SF. Since when is "living near your family" a "luxury"? Fuck that.

sliverstorm• 11 years ago

Still, it's easier for John Doe to empathize with a family that is struggling to pay for their ordinary-house-in-expensive-neighborhood, than it is for him to empathize with a family that is struggling to pay for their three Jags, butler, and Caribbean cruise.

Although oddly enough both probably cost about the same.

s73v3r3• 11 years ago

"Choosing to work in a locale where a median home price is a million dollars is a luxury. Engineers could pick from other metro areas, and get fairly close to $100K/year with much lower costs of living (Austin, Dallas, Durham come to mind, there are many more)."

And have their potential job prospects cut in half or worse.

ChrisLoer9• 11 years ago

Yeah, I think living in SF is a luxury -- although I know that's painful to say to someone who really has roots there. I lived there for four years, and it's an amazing town. Living there also puts you in the middle of a network of bright creative people, so it probably makes you more productive. I'm not saying it's easy, just that we have choices.

walshemj2• 11 years ago

From what I see of housing costs 100k isn't that much in sf and one relitivly minor medical emergency can put a big hole in any savings you have.

scott_s2• 11 years ago

But here’s the thing: Being able to afford those things is pretty good definition of affluence in modern American society.

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/upshot/letter-from-the-edi...

I'm not saying you are not making a good use of your money - I make similar tradeoffs. But we have the choice. Our income affords us that choice. There are people who do not get to make those tradeoffs, they do not have the choice of living in "OK areas", or paying for childcare.

gohrt4• 11 years ago

Full time childcare is about $24,000 a year.

You don't pay this on "a median developer's salary". Most children have two parents.

dreamdu5t• 11 years ago

Engineers don't make that much money. Yes, I live a middle-class lifestyle. But even without owning a car, not having a child, etc. After saving for retirement and eating healthy food, I simply don't have that much savings to start any business that requires a decent amount of capital to get going - at least not without burning through everything fairly quickly. At most I could take a couple of months off and destroy that savings the buffer against job loss and other emergencies.

I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...

Avshalom3• 11 years ago

>But even without owning a car, not having a child, etc.
>I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...

Last year I lived in Austin TX, owned a car, ate healthy, lived 15 minutes from the city center and made 29000 before taxes. Of which I managed to save 15000.

The world doesn't think software engineers are so rich, we think anyone above 50K is rich, because for a lot of us thats double what we make a year, and many of us are supporting families on that. The idea that some one making 75-100k could be living paycheck to paycheck is fucking baffling to the half the population making less than 42k per household.

dionidium4• 11 years ago

What's happening is that upper-middle class families really do run out of money after saving for college, sending the kids to private school, both driving two new cars, and so on. They think of those things as basics and forget that those basics are unattainable to most.

crpatino2• 11 years ago

I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...

Everybody know how much a programmer makes in Silicon Valley, and think everyone in the industry is paid accordingly. Also, high cost of living in SF area is not that well known (or at least, not understood to be correlated) by the masses.

It's a bit like saying every football/basketball player is a millionaire. Those that play in the professional leagues, yes. The ones that end up coaching pee-whee teams, not so much.

dionidium4• 11 years ago

Because even in the midwest it's not difficult for an individual engineer to make twice the median household income. That doesn't make you rich, but I have no idea how anybody could think that's not well off.

candu2• 11 years ago

The US median household income is ~$50k/year, while the US median personal income is ~$35k/year. The average Bay Area software engineer earns ~$100k/year, which is above the 90th percentile of US personal income...

...and if you want to talk global, $100k/year is beyond the wildest dreams of most everyone on Earth. (For that matter, so is starting a capital-intensive business.)

You can probably see where this perception comes from.

chrisBob• 11 years ago

Its nice to see a name for this. I am considering joining the Engineering Leisure Class this winter. My wife got a new job which will comfortably support our family, so I will have some flexibility. My plan is to look for jobs also, but only apply for ones I would love.

If that doesn't work out then I will find something fun to do that may not pay. This will be some combination of taking Tactition Programming seriously, and working on open source lab specific software that my wife uses for crystallography.

desbo• 11 years ago

The author obviously doesn't live in London. I could never afford to pay rent without a job.

The article is idealistic bullshit.

angrybits• 11 years ago

So relocate to bumfuck, england and do your work there. I don't think the idea is to ditch your job and still pay $3000 a month for an apartment.

twic2• 11 years ago

What work? There are no jobs in Bumfuck, and not enough companies that hire remote workers for this to scale.

As i understand it, the situation in the US is that there is Silicon Valley, where the salaries are high and the rents higher, and then half a dozen other places where there are significant concentrations of software jobs, and more reasonable living costs.

This is not really the case in the UK. There's London, there's a ring of big corporate offices just outside London (Guildford, Cheshunt, places like that), and that's more or less it. You pretty much need to live in London or its commuter belt to work non-remotely in software.

dionidium4• 11 years ago

Living in London is a luxury good

ZeroFries• 11 years ago

I would much prefer working part-time in traditional money earning avenues, and spending my other 20-30 hours of energetic time on the projects/activities I personally want to work/play on. I just wish there were more opportunities for high value part-time work.

x3n0ph3n3• 11 years ago

Why should we assign "meaning" to leisure? Why does everything you do have to be meaningful? Reminds me of a lyric from Cat Power - Metal Heart: "How selfish of you to believe in the meaning of all the things you do."

gluggymug2• 11 years ago

I think we assign "meaning" to leisure so we give it as much value as our work. Gaming ourselves to respect leisure more.

I.e. The itch we instinctively don't bother scratching when we are too busy working. We need to value that itch so we take the time to scratch.

scribu• 11 years ago

You’re not limited to small ideas, either: part-time volunteers in the open source community have built huge parts of the modern world.

Am I wrong in thinking that, in fact, all major open-source projects continue to thrive because there are big established companies supporting them? Where corporate support is lacking, the project doesn't do too well in the long term (I'm mainly thinking of the OpenSSL case from a few months back).

strlen• 11 years ago

Few things:

- Depending on what kind of problems you enjoy solving, you're going to be miserable even if you are able to do this.

I love working on my own at times (exploring new concepts and ideas, new languages, or even "toy projects" with no real-world applications), but in the end, I find working on bigger problems, with a team of great people to be a lot more fulfilling.

- Constraints are useful in that they force you to rely on something other than pure will power. This can go both ways: _if_ you are going without a regular source of income (as opposed to retiring after winning the [startup] lottery), you'll need to sacrifice time for money. On the other hand, a full time job provides a good deal of constraints as well (both for what you do _at_ work and what you do outside of work hours).

Gene Wolfe[2] kept a full time job and wrote an hour each day. That had two constraints: he didn't need to rush or alter his work in order to sell (his books are fulfilling and rewarding but not a "easy, fun read" that brings in great royalties right away) and since he only had an hour each day to write, he knew he had to make the best of it (one thing said about him, is that he doesn't waste words: he's got a whole CNC machine milling Chekhov's guns...)

- Burnout is an entirely different matter, one shouldn't generalize from "this helps deal with being burnt out" to "drop everything, do this, and you'll never be burnt out."

- Finally, it isn't a feasible option for most:

First, one can't insure against economic catastrophe, savings and a low burn rate are great, but ultimately the _only_ financial insurance one is there ability to earn an income[1].

That ability is predicated on ability to contribute and the amount of people willing to pay for your contributions. In other words, if you're a great developer and you live (or can relocate to) a fluid job market, your risks are lower than those of an average developer (note: assuming a normal probability distribution, 50% of developers are _below_ average, and most fall within a standard deviation of average...) in a less fluid job market.

Areas with fluid job markets tend to have higher costs of living. Unless one is extremely talented (and in many cases, even if that is the case), one doesn't become a great cut above average overnight. One generally starts off with a job in an area with a fluid job market (hence greater expenses!) and over the time develops ties to the area (friends, family, pets, etc...) and can't easily drop everything to move to a cheaper area for their "leisure time" and then -- if something goes wrong -- easily return to the area to take advantage of the fluid job market.

All else being equal, a developer of equal skill, in an equally fluid area, that did not "take a year off" will hired over one that has, _unless_ they've done something extra-ordinary with this time. Best prediction of being able to do something extra-ordinary is... having done something extra-ordinary. So at the least, do something extra-ordinary on a smaller scale first before going full-time on it. Zuck and billg didn't drop out of Harvard with a blank emacs window (in billg's case, perhaps it was a TECO window, not sure if TECO EMACS was around in his days...).

- In a capitalist system, money does one thing well: if you have more money than you have a use for, you can give it to someone who has the time to make the most of it. Marginally, a dollar spent donating to someone _very good_ working on a project I care about (a programming language, infrastructure for open source projects, a social cause, etc...) goes _much further_ than a dollar "spent" by foregoing income to work on most of those projects full-time. As for the exceptions to this, I can usually incorporate them into full-time jobs.

Conversely, I'd suggest this heuristic:

1) Can you afford it without putting people who rely on you into jeopardy? (Are you going to demand that your wife end a rewarding career to move to a cheaper area with you? Are you going to make your kids move to an area in inferior schools? If either is true, stop right there and then...)

2) Marginal value of dollar spent metric above: if someone can do a better job with the same resources, help provide the resources for them. Concrete example: since my username doesn't begin with a 'p' and end with a 'g', money I contributed to Clojure project (when it was in dire financial straits) probably had more impact in creating a Lisp-1 with a good macro-system than if I were to quit my job and work full-time on a Lisp-1 (likewise, while pg can afford to literally work on anything he wants to, he chooses to invest[3] in teams capable of building things he careers deeply about, but isn't quite good at building himself).

Otherwise, try to make the "leisure" activity part of your day-to-day job as well.

3) Otherwise, if you can do something awesome with your time -- you probably don't need someone named after a function that may never return in a memory-unsafe language's standard library to tell you that :-)

[1] Investments under-writing "early retirement" may collapse. "Social insurance" such as universal healthcare, pensions, unemployment benefits, etc... can be voted or sued out of existence.

[2] If you're an SFF fan, pick up Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy sometime, but be warned that once you start, your dreams of doing anything else with your time will be over.

[3] Investing is not the same thing as donations, but I don't believe any angel/seed investor invests purely for the money.

mndrix5• 11 years ago

I've been doing this for 8 years and love it.

I'm married with 5 kids. We live in rural Wyoming (no income tax, bought a comfortable house for $86k). We've always lived well below our income so we have no debt and sufficient savings.

I mostly choose to work on "products". That helps me focus on problems that people actually care about without any of the startup pressures. Although, I've also written several open source libraries that I thought the community might like.

I started by telling my employer that I would only work 4 days each week. I spent Fridays working on a cool idea my brother and I had. That idea proved useful enough to pay the bills so I quit my job.

I'm much more relaxed now and spend better quality time with my kids. In hindsight, it would be worth almost any sacrifice to get to this point again.

j_lev2• 11 years ago

Hi - thanks for sharing and congratulations - sounds like you've made things work.

I spent Fridays working on a cool idea my brother and I had. That idea proved useful enough to pay the bills so I quit my job.

Regarding this, it sounds like you already had a good idea of what your expenses were, and I think people underestimate how important this is.

I recently quit my job and have jumped into the unknown. Firstly knowing where all my money was going, and secondly spending about 12 months trimming off all the fat was an important part of the process to give me the confidence to try this. These days I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world with my wife for about $2000/month (and over half of that is rent). We want for little. Several years ago this figure was closer to $4000/month.

boothead• 11 years ago

Interesting. What did/do you use to ascertain where all your money goes?

simonebrunozzi• 11 years ago

No income tax is because you live in Wyoming, or because you don't work and therefore don't earn a salary?

liveoneggs• 11 years ago

no state income tax in Wyoming (also Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Texas; Tennessee only has taxes on investment income)

mndrix5• 11 years ago

Because I live in Wyoming. The state has no tax on income from work or investments.

markfinger• 11 years ago

Similarly, I went part-time a few years ago (4 days) and I would say it's been one of the better decisions I've made.

Given the typically high salaries in the dev world, working part-time is an easy path to maintaining a work/life balance which provides time to pursue personal projects.

gambiter• 11 years ago

How do you get a part-time dev job? Do you just mean contracting?

BSousa2• 11 years ago

Quick question since you have a few kids. Is real Wyoming a good place for them in terms of school and future? (really asking, no idea as I live on the other side of the pond).

I work from home so I can move anywhere, and a more rural/calm place, earning less and having more time does appeal to me, but all the good schools here are in the city and I'm not brave enough to risk my kids future on my dreams of today.

marktangotango3• 11 years ago

Wyoming is the least populous state in the US, it's not small either. I've driven through Wyoming and Casper it's largest city. One could call it desolate meaning very little human habitation. Or one could call it a paradise on the plains depending on your perspective. Either way, there ain't shit there. Edit: Other than Yellowstone that is.

mndrix5• 11 years ago

I think that our local schools are about as good as government education can get. My kids' classes range from 11 to 14 students so they get lots of 1-on-1 time with a teacher. The teachers provide extra challenges for exceptional students. The teachers and school administration are very responsive to feedback from parents. Students graduating from high school with good grades get a full scholarship to the University of Wyoming, if they want it.

Having said that, my wife and I place much more emphasis on independent learning and life experiences than on formal schooling. Because my wife and I have plenty of time, we are able to encourage their education in ways we couldn't if we lived in an expensive city. Our lower living expenses also allow us to take trips and have experiences that we feel are more valuable than book learning.

mark_l_watson• 11 years ago

Starting by cutting down to 4 days a week (32 hours) is a good idea. I became an independent consultant in 1998, but for the 20 years before that I worked 4 days a week (and this was for a variety of large corporations - you have to ask, firmly sometimes).

I have never regretted the lost income from reducing my work hours.

solveforall2• 11 years ago

I am currently doing this. I am much more productive compared to having a corporate job, but it is really hard on your family. There seems to be an arms race on doing everything for your kids these days. That means moving to a good school district (usually in very expensive places), paying for and driving to tons of activities, organic food, nice stuff. I have realized none of these things are possible while we are living off savings.

That said I feel much happier now being able to focus on a project that is my own creation. I was frequently angry everyday I had to split my time between paid work and my own project, leaving even less time for my family. (To be honest, in terms of total work, I got more done, but was miserable.) I frequently think about the consequences if my project ends up being a failure, but if I never tried to create something on my own, I'm pretty sure I would regret it on my deathbed.

My advice is to do this engineering leisure time before you have a family to support.

<shamelessplug> If anyone wants a preview of what I'm building, please check out https://solveforall.com/. It's a hackable search engine that can be enhanced with user-provided data, programs, and third party APIs. I'm currently working on making it much more customizable and private, so hopefully I'll be able to publicly announce it in a 2-3 more months. </shamelessplug>

One problem as mentioned in another thread is that it is very hard to get feedback while working alone. Everyone is so busy these days caught up in the rat race and their families, and I don't blame them. It would be nice to have some tech friends at work to bounce ideas off of. If anyone has any feedback for me, I'd greatly appreciate it!

tomjacobs3• 11 years ago

Try telling us about your projects and updates on Glitch Club, this is exactly what it's for: http://glitchclub.com

solveforall2• 11 years ago

Sorry, I'm a bit old school in that I prefer text over videos, and desktop apps over mobile. Text on desktop can more easily be edited and perfected before being sent out. I like the idea of a community feedback platform though -- would definitely use it if it were multiplatform.

MisterWalter• 11 years ago

It always drives me crazy when people that make 50k+ a year complain about not having money. I live on about $500-$600 a month and I'm fine. Granted, not everyone is ablebodied and living within biking distance of their school/work, but most certainly could be, especially with a little effort.

Not needing money is incredibly liberating, I advise everyone to just try it for a year.

s73v3r3• 11 years ago

In many places, living within biking/walking distance of school/work means rent goes up exponentially.

greenjellybean• 11 years ago

I agree with you. My current life style ends up around $7,000 a year. I live in a very affluent mid-east city. I don't own a car (15 minute walk to downtown), I don't eat out constantly (I prefer healthy meals), and I don't buy a bunch of luxury junk. I can honestly say that I do not feel like I'm struggling at all.

Having the 'standard' car, house, and family are unnecessary luxuries. It's fine if you choose to do these things but it's silly to me that people feel poor making 50k+. I would argue that if you are struggling with those types of income, your lifestyle is severely out of whack. You don't have to keep up the Jonses to lead a very happy, healthy life.

The benefits of living cheaply are pretty obvious and already pretty well covered. The ability to work on whatever I want, whenever I want all without ever having to think about the personal finance side of it, is just incredibly freeing.

xacaxulu• 11 years ago

None of us 'need' money after a certain point but everyone's perceived 'enough' is different. Some of us love having a good chunk of money and the amazing opportunities that it brings.

sukilot3• 11 years ago

$600/mo is less than the price of a filthy studio apartment in the cities where most of HN's jobs are.

$100/mo for rice and beans, $70/mo for water,trash,electric,heat,telecom ; $400/mo for rent, ???

Do your kids have their own jobs? Your spouse doesn't, because someone has to watch the kids, and that is over $600/mo alone.

yellowapple• 11 years ago

While I'm sure this sounds great in theory, I can't help but interpret this as coming from someone who is lucky enough to have the privilege of not being broke.

If you're part of the lucky privileged elite that actually has money to burn, then yeah, go for it. For the rest of us, though, saying "you should stop working for a paycheck so you have more time to do other things" basically translates to "you should stop eating, drinking water, and breathing oxygen so you have more time to do other things", which is plain nonsensical unless one happens to be a robot (which, while I'd love to be a robot, isn't really in the cards right now).

swagmeister• 11 years ago

We aren't rich by any means... Don't start thinking about dropping off the face of the earth or going into philanthropy if you still only have a 6 figure bank account, like many of us do... Also don't forget about what happened in 2000. Engineers should probably work more but spend less money because things aren't so easy in less favorable conditions

aswanson• 11 years ago

i have been pondering getting a high salaried job in sv for 1-2 years living out of my car and office and saving 90 percent of my salary to live nicely anywhere else in the country.

campers• 11 years ago

Reminds me of this article :) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2750652/Former-Googl...

tomjacobs3• 11 years ago

This is exactly what I'm building with Glitch Club. It's a community of talented engineers who could be creating great things if they had the support of others and the community feedback on their work daily. Check it out:

http://glitchclub.com

At the moment I'm exploring other directions with it, such as having it as a story telling platform, but the original idea was a startup/engineering sounding board. With reply videos able to be added to the existing videos there, and smart conversations happening through video replying to video.

analog31• 11 years ago

Something to consider is risk. Here's what goes through my head: I can plan for how much I need to earn throughout my life if everything is "normal" and predictable. But what if one of my kids is born in need of some monumental amount of care? What if something happens to my own physical / mental health, or that of my spouse? What if the economy goes into a long term downturn and we have to live on savings indefinitely? What if we have to leave the country due to political turmoil? (One of my parents is a refugee).

Thinking about these things made me kinda appreciate why the rich want to get richer. Even if I'm earning more than strictly necessary for subsistence under normal conditions, our economy / society is set up so that the only source of a safety net for my family is my own productivity right now. I wouldn't mind growing that safety net to infinity, so long as it imposes no externality on my own family. This is what keeps me in the rat race.

A better safety net would make people think less about going to such extremes.

I'm lucky to have a mentally rewarding job with minimal "price" in terms of things like office politics and bullshit. My opinion might change if this situation changes.

nick_urban• 11 years ago

Living comfortably on little money is a skill. MMM calls it the "frugality muscle". If you don't understand how to do it, it's not because it's impossible. It's just that you haven't learned how.

In parallel to the skill acquisition there is a change in mindset, replacing the ideal of comfort with the ideals of strength and self-sufficiency.

Bostonian• 11 years ago

If you are an engineer working at a company, I'd expect that the resources provided by the company and the access to coworkers make you more productive. If you think you would be more productive on your own, this may be a sign to change employers.

Join the Engineering Leisure Class

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