seestheday

Do you have kids? I would love to move out to the country but I'm really worried about impacting my kids ability to develop skills and build a business/social network.

My parents moved out to a very small town from Toronto, Ontario when I was small. There was nothing for me there when I grew up, and all of the friends I had that stayed in the area are struggling. I went away to school and never really returned. I found that I was at a real disadvantage by having zero network and no relevant job skills pre-university. I've since made up for it and am doing quite well now, but I have 2 kids and them going to a good school is very important to me. I always wonder how people do it well, so I'm looking for information.

"you could sit with your back to the wall instead of to the heavily trafficked area"

In many offices, you can't just re-orient your desk or choose to move.

What state/city? I'm assuming you live in the US. I live in Canada and I've never heard of a poor kids childcare of free summer camp paid for by the city even here.

People talking about saving money by not spending money on clothes and toys really don't know what they're talking about. Brand new clothes and toys today are super cheap compared to what they were when I was a kid. For example, I just bought some brand new baby shoes and shirts on sale for $2 at the grocery store. If I was poor it would cost me more in bus fare to get to the used clothing store than I would have saved had I just bought stuff new at the grocery store. The biggest cost for me _by_far_ is childcare and summer camps.

In general, I'm really starting to question any reports on salary alone once it gets past $100K/year.

After that point, performance bonuses in their many forms can have such a large impact and that doesn't seem to be represented in salary comparisons.

I always thought that technical book writing wasn't about making money directly, but for up selling in other areas.

I.e. improving your resume, looking prestigious to potential consulting clients, or landing paid speaking gigs.

Sorry, I'm not sure if you want me to address the colloquialism or the statement so I'll address both.

"The bar is higher" essentially means that a task is more difficult than it previously was.

In the past it used to be easier to create low-medium quality content around a subject and be ranked well for specific phrases in search engines. This has gotten progressively harder to do and will likely only get harder going forward.

However, if you create high quality content in the area around your product then people will seek it out and you will also get the benefit of good search engine ranking. High quality content can vary, but it is essentially stuff that truly adds value in the area of your product.

You can look on Hacker News and other similar sites for companies that are doing this well. In some extreme cases you even have companies generating content that doesn't seem to be remotely related to their product, but it is still getting eyeballs and very likely sales (e.g. http://priceonomics.com/ and their blog).

In addition to blogging and generating content you should also be spending time cultivating and nurturing an email list of potential prospects.

Does this take a lot of time? Yes. I believe that it is a generally accepted rule that you should spend as much time marketing as you do developing. This is something that is easy to say and hard to do though. I know that even I, a full-time digital marketer in my day job, spend more developing my product than I do marketing it.

I would argue that content still works, it's just that the bar is higher.

Ideally he won't think anything of it because I've spent so much time with him we're working side by side building his first business by that point.

I have high hopes that the time I'm investing in my kids will not only benefit them, but long term will benefit me as well.

At 5 my oldest son is doing a lot of small chores around the house. He just passed the tipping point of where I can spend less time giving him directions than it would have taken for me to just do the job myself. I see this scaling over time.

A part of the "playing" that I do with him is building and repairing stuff around the home. He loves it. It takes much longer to complete anything that if I was just doing it myself, but I'm doubling up "play" and "chores" so it works out. For things that he can't help with I try to outsource.

I like some of the ideas of past generations who often viewed kids as resources.

Opportunity cost and the potential of leaving a good company for a potentially toxic work environment are two bad outcomes that I can think of off the top of my head.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to better your position, but saying that there isn't a possibility of a downside is not fair.

I'm not the GP, but I've helped others by sending them market rate stats etc, and talked about negotiations generally (e.g: ALWAYS negotiate an offer).

Jealousy is real, it will impact your day to day relationships with people.

I'm very curious what your take is on revealing your current salary to recruiters/potential employers early.

Do you tell them early to avoid wasting your time?

For myself I'll just say that I've done well since I realized that I should negotiate for EVERY offer I'm given no matter how high. There are no more exploding offers after you've had a couple jobs - we're not in kindergarten and our parents aren't going to take things away because we're acting selfishly.

This is awesome. Kudos to you.

You are doing these guys a favour, but it is also very beneficial to the company in the long run. If they are good and aren't treated well then they will leave. It is as simple as that.

I'm also guessing that since you're getting them so cheaply to begin with then they're likely still under market rate with a ~75% bump in pay.

I'm not arguing that users blocking ads is an issue. To me that is the same as someone deciding to not look at an ad in a magazine or tear them out/cover them up before reading the article. What they decide to do it up to them.

See my billboard example reply to the comment above to see why I believe that Privdog and Superfish are run by thieves.

It may be easier to think about this in meatspace.

Is it a crime for someone walking around to not look at a billboard? Of course not.

Is it a crime for someone to plaster over an ad on a billboard with their own ad? It isn't explicitly theft, but it is certainly a crime, and the end result is nearly the same (in the meatspace example it is the advertiser that gets the shaft, and in the digital example it is the billboard maker that gets the shaft).

I'd argue that this is also stealing from the content creators or other people/companies that added actual value (e.g. group running a forum that pays for hosting with ads).

I agree. This is theft. It's technical and complicated so it likely won't be ever be enforced or prosecuted, but I think this is outright stealing.

What about pellets/implants? Aren't they supposed to release more consistently over a longer period?

Please excuse my ignorance on this, I am in Canada, have been blessed with naturally high T levels, and have no experience with anti-aging clinics, but I'm fascinated by the subject.

Agreed.

Unfortunately the problem is that they work too well. Every time they are legalized in a limited capacity they are abused in professional sports.

The effect is massively amplified if you give women drugs because they don't have testosterone levels like men do. Those records that were set in the 70's pre-testing will likely never be broken.

The issue is that if it is legal, there is a huge incentive to take it to an abusive point especially in a celebrity economy like what exists is professional sports.

In some sports, professional athletes are almost constantly injured. Off the top of my head I can give you MMA (UFC) and american football as examples but I'm sure there are many others.

Healthy sports end where competitive sport begins.[1]

Right now we have an arms race that barely keeps it at bay. It's not an ideal solution but I think its better than athletes fully abusing their bodies with massive amounts of drugs like they did back in the East German Olympic days.

For non-professional athletes, I agree with you. It should not be demonized to the extent it is.

1. Quote from Brecht, referenced many times, e.g here http://gladwell.com/drugstore-athlete/

Relying solely on a helmet seems like a really bad idea. I recommend learning how to fall using your hands/forearms and not damage them at the same time.

Martial arts training (judo would be a good one) can help a lot here.

There are also a lot of context specific tricks you can pick up. Like if you fall skiing or snowboarding make a fist when you put your hand down instead of falling with an open hand. A fist vs. open hand won't make much of a different on snow, and the fist will stop fingers/thumbs from catching and breaking. In addition the wrist is less likely to break.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but there are thousands of banks in the US [1]. Getting rid of all of them except for a single federal bank is a gargantuan task.

1. http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023045794045792...

I think you're radically underestimating the entrenched interests that are at play here.

I'm shocked that you value your free time so low.

Let's do the math.

There are 24 hours in a day. You should be sleeping for ~8 of those leaving 16. Assuming you are supposed to be at the office for 8 hours (pipe dream, but let's just go for it) that leaves 8 hours of time for other stuff. If you previously had a great 15-30 minute commute then you would have 7 hours of free time to work on side projects and do things you want to do. That would be a pretty sweet normal life. Adding an extra hour to the commute cuts your free time down by ~30%. That is a big deal.

I also find it very helpful to include any time spent commuting as "working time" when considering where to work. You should also consider the increased cost to commute from a more like this. An extra hour of driving 5 days/week represents a non-trivial amount of money. So the salary needs to compensate, or the time at the office needs to go down.

No matter how you look at this, a move like this is asking all of the employees on the short end of the stick to effectively take home less money (not exactly a pay cut, but the end result is the same).

Edit: oh and I'm not from SF, I live in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. This has nothing to do with SF.

As a parent from Canada I feel so sorry for parents in the US.

That you consider only 12 weeks as "abuse" is even more depressing.

In Canada those rights are extended to the man. It's called paternity leave. The parent even mentions that he split the leave with his partner.

There are still cultural barriers resulting in many men not taking the leave, but at least it's an option.

I should note that I think tying the unemployment insurance to maternity/paternity leave is genius.

Honestly, once you learn 5 or 6 languages/frameworks they get really easy to learn. There is not a lot that is truly new with different frameworks, just different combinations of the same things.

Honestly, it wouldn't take you long to get the skills if you could get access and were a decent programmer already. One of the problems with these sorts of systems though is that it's not like they're open source and easily available outside of the enterprise.

Want to set up a testing instance and just play around or build something? They're either not available or horribly crippled. If you can get into a company that is doing it already and you can get access, you will have an easy time learning it (but it's not exactly fun).

Big investment banks pay well. Big consumer banks, not so much, at least in Canada. I was shocked at how low some of the laughable salary offers I received were.

Look at how many distinguished engineers, or other very high level individual contributors who have actual real power there are compared to Directors and VP's who manage large groups of people.

The individual contributor path is exponentially more difficult to climb. I argue that you both have to win the lottery with the right projects and get in early at a company, and have all of the necessary skills.

I believe it is a story that is told to individual contributors by people with real power to keep them motivated.

The only theory that I've heard of where a flat org could be actually beneficial to individual contributors is the parents theory on open allocation. Otherwise it's just management kicking out the ladder once they've climbed it.