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Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

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Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#691

Post by mrlyc »

kzisme wrote: post #434
kbart wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When the tech world moved away from me (doing mainly embedded C for the last thirty years might not have been the best idea for my career)" Strange, why do you say so? We live in the era of IoT and everything has at least one chip inside them. I also do system/embedded programming, but never felt the lack of possibilities to advance my career.

How did you get into doing system/embedded programming?

I did most of an electronic engineering course and discovered that I like software more than hardware. After programming portable barcode readers and interactive voice response systems, I wrote a Windows device driver at one company then applied to write Linux device drivers at another. I was strictly honest during the job interview, saying I wanted to write device drivers but I had done only one for Windows and none for Linux. The interviewer said "Writing Linux device drivers is exactly the same as writing Windows device drivers" and hired me. I found that it wasn't and faced the kind of learning curve that requires mountaineering equipment.

I succeeded and even trained someone else how to do it. When we started, he didn't know C all that well so I split the drivers into hard and easy parts and gave him the easy ones. We wrote about six drivers together. I made his parts harder and harder until he was able to write a driver on his own.

Perhaps I haven't been reading the right software architecture books but it seems to me that very little mention is made of changing the design to suit the ability of the individual programmers, the way band leaders like Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller did with their arrangements.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#692

Post by sweettea »

up_and_up wrote: post #246
pc86 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless moving out of SF/NY is a deal breaker, it's not necessary to make $100k+ a year to have a solid middle class life. You won't be driving a BMW making $55k a year but you won't need to eat Ramen to make the mortgage payment either. Obviously kids make this harder and my perspective is certainly biased as my wife and I don't plan on children so our nut is much lower every month than our friends with kids in HS or…

> it's not necessary to make $100k+ a year to have a solid middle class life Depends on your circumstances. 100k with one salary?

I find the change from having a family not very large, say 2x food and perhaps to be very generous +1k clothing. The chief difference is the desire to live in a own space instead of having roommates, which are hard to find with a family.

Suppose you live in Cambridge, MA and eat all organic food; rent with roommates and utilities costs perhaps 800/mo, subway costs perhaps 100/mo, food costs 300/mo, clothing is perhaps 100/mo, health insurance perhaps 1k/mo. This adds up to 1300/mo, 28k/year. Throw in a very luxurious 5k/year in travel, 4k/year in restaurants and hobbies, and your 100k salary / 67k takehome pay supports you saving 30k/year (more if you use tax advantaged accounts).

Consider a family of four in such a case. Taxes run about 21k/year instead of 33k/year, so takehome is 79k. A 1br in Cambridge runs about 2k/mo, maybe 2.5k/mo for luxury. Subway is 150/mo, food costs 700/mo, clothing of say 200/mo, healthcare is perhaps 1.5k/mo; these run 5k/mo in total, 60k/year. Throw in 5k for travel, rental cars, and hobbies, and you're still saving 15k/year for emergencies.

This seems like a very luxurious life, as someone who's lived it; expensive, and I found it slightly more luxurious than makes me happy. So yes, families affect saving rate, but also provide perpetual free entertainment.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#693

Post by tacoman »

huhtenberg wrote: post #656
js2 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.jwz.org/about.html

Apparently, they hit a rough patch - https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html

Make sure you open that in a new window to scrub the referrer.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#695

Post by taway_1212 »

div0 wrote: post #603
taway_1212 wrote: post #36

I wonder if asking such question (and inspecting answers given) is not enough to refute the idea behind basic income - that it allows people to retrain into their desired profession, thus making the society more productive. Seeing that most people desire only a relatively small subset of careers (and almost no one want to be for example a dentist, an accountant, not to mention telemarketer or toilet cleaner), I don't…

Interestingly I actually want to be a bathroom cleaner. Nothing dismays me more than walking into a dirty bathroom.

Would you be happy if your days were filled with the smell of urine, shit and chemicals (used for cleaning)?

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#697

Post by bryondowd »

nitrogen wrote: post #688
bryondowd wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different experiences. I put myself through school, have $50k in student loan debt, and I'm living comfortably on $54k/yr in New Jersey. Renting a small house, and sending around 15-20% of my income to help support my mother and 5 young siblings. I eat out a few times a month, and otherwise have a modest entertainment budget. I'm only able to set aside a very small amount, if anything, right now, but overall, I'm fai…

> I often wonder if it's just people who have a different concept of what is a necessity vs a luxury due to never having to go without for a significant part of their lives, or people who have just never lived outside of the cities or other expensive areas. In my case, I lived on the lower end of the income spectrum for much of my childhood, and lived even poorer while building my startup in a low-cost area. So it is…

Exactly. The GP of my comment talks about 100k not being lifechanging money. I know for a fact that it would have been dramatically lifechanging if my mother or stepfather had been making anywhere near 100k during my childhood, even adjusted for inflation.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#698

Post by steveax »

derekp7 wrote: post #476
lloyd-christmas wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always whittled as a fun side hobby. My desire to do anything bigger is limited by a fear of the table saw. As a lefty, nothing in the shop plays nice with me. I'm too worried about losing a finger which would impact my income stream as well as my other hobby, piano. But, I still spend more time looking at joinery than I do on HN.

Most of the time when someone loses a finger on a table saw, it is because they were doing something that they know better than to do, or because they didn't know that a particular action is high risk. What really helps is to initially work with someone who knows what and what not to do, so they can correct any bad techniques that you have. Common errors are things like trying to cut a piece that is too large / awkwa…

First day of my High School wood shop class (do they even have those anymore?), our instructor opened up a couple of packs of hot dogs and ran one through every machine in the shop. We didn't lose any fingers in that class ;-)

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#699

Post by d_burfoot »

Political philosopher and social critic, in the spirit of Taleb and Moldbug.

Our civilization desperately needs independent thinkers of this type. The problem is that the people who get paid to do this for a living are all hopelessly compromised by the institutional structures they inhabit (universities, newspapers, right-wing think tanks, etc)

One idea I would promote is geopolitical vacation as a third-path way to deal with refugee and immigrant crises. My claim is that geographically large countries like Canada, Australia, the US and Russia have no serious need whatsoever for the vast lands they have claimed. So they should take some of that land and vacate it to make room for refugees and immigrants. It doesn't need to be a lot of space: city-states like Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai prove unquestionably that prosperous and wealthy societies can be built in physically small territories.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?

#700

Post by bryondowd »

mywittyname wrote: post #676
johnward wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget it's not uncommon for two college grads to have $100k in student loan debt today.

It absolutely is uncommon to have that much student loan debt. http://ticas.org/posd/state-state-data-2015 The average student loan debt is $27,000. Having four times that amount makes you a massive outlier.

If you interpret that as $100k total rather than each, it's probably not terribly uncommon. I've got over $50k myself, so if I had a partner with similar, that's where we'd be. Median debt would be also be more useful than average, I think, or even just the top 25 percentile. Basically, anyone who paid for their education entirely with loans (say, while barely supporting themselves or even using excess loan dollars for food/rent) would be in this position.
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