I am all for the remote trend. I think InVision is doing a really good thing here and it looks like a lot of other companies are following suit. I hope it influences people to migrate from major tech hubs and help boost the economy in rural areas. I am from the rust belt area and it's been pretty unaffected by all of the tech growth. Most of the locals are still hoping for natural gas or coal to start booming again.…
The rust belt would just get undercut by programmers living in vastly cheaper locations around globe.
Not if programmers demanded the same salary universally, regardless of cost of living expenses- that's a big if though.
I work in the software industry, have a 10 minute commute, breathe fresh air, make enough money to support myself, my colleagues are my friends, and my boss has never once slighted me. A shit job is a shit job, but you don't have to leave software to find a job that isn't shit.
He was in software sales FYI
And, while I haven't worked in that department so I can't really say for certain that the team leads don't slight the people they're managing, it's a small enough company that the culture is pretty consistent.
I agree with your advice (no need to look down, etc). OP however came off as condescending (at least to me) when he said stuff like "breathe fresh air", "stuck in subway for 2 hours", etc in responses, making everything a zero sum game. The way I see it, he moved to wherever because his girlfriend forced him to, and then lucked into find a good job that they enjoy.
>OP however came off as condescending (at least to me) when he said stuff like "breathe fresh air", "stuck in subway for 2 hours", etc in responses, making everything a zero sum game. I don't think he was being condescending. I'm at a point where I would absolutely value fresh air, not having to commute more than 15-30 minutes a day, being able to live in a rural area where I can have privacy and space, and other ben…
I think the point was you can get all of that and still make money at it. I live on the edge of a mid-size metro (Portland, Oregon) making north of 140K with excellent work-life balance, while living next to farmland in a little quiet neighborhood with a nice big yard, the school my kids go to is a hundred yards away, etc. So I don't see why you'd need to give up the job you enjoy just to get the things OP wants. You may need to live somewhere other than NYC or the bay area, but there are lots of places in the country where you can achieve these goals without having to live especially frugally. I don't care all that much about the money at this point but being able to sock away a bunch makes it less stressful to contemplate the future, college educations coming up in the future, etc.
> "After all, when you walk down the aisles of a standard company these days, people are on YouTube, social media," he said. "The modern knowledge worker, the technical worker, is going to focus on what engages them."
If you are not working, it doesn't matter where you are.
Thank you so much for your questions. My high year in sales was 110k W2, 70k post tax, and 35k post expenses like food rent and car. My low year was 45k, aka just plain old base salary, and after taxes and expenses I broke even. I was living in a pretty expensive part of Boston. I'm sure I could have found a really nasty bedroom for like $650 if I wanted to haha. Right now as a waiter I'm making about $600 a week pre…
Good for you, Cant put a price on reduced stress and happiness. I quit a developer job because of the massive stress and travel involved and took a 50% pay cut. I left software completely for 4 years. I was much happier. I am back in software now making 50% more than the prior software job I quit but I work from home and enjoy the industry. Sometimes a break for a few years is just what the doctor ordered.
There are so many places that pay well but are pleasant to work at. Especially in software development. If someone is unhappy they should pick up and leave, the market is good and the choices plentiful right now.
Some points in response to this: I keep nearly all of my gross because of the standard deduction and the nature of cash tips. My rent is $650 a month whereas most people in the bay or in Boston are paying $2200 for equivalent quality. I dont spend 2 hours stuck in traffic or a hot subway every day-- most days I ride my moped which gets 90mpg and uses a hilariously cheap blend of oil and fuel from the hardware store.…
>I keep nearly all of my gross because of the standard deduction and the nature of cash tips. Instead of the "nature of cash tips", it would be more accurate to state "the nature of people to evade taxes (or do other bad things as defined by society) when chances of being caught are sufficiently low". Also why I always use credit card and tip with credit card.
Minimum wage laws for tipped employees (in the US) is also why I always tip with cash.
700 employees? That sounds like an awful lot for a product like InVision. Bohemian Coding, the company behind Sketch, employs a few dozen people. Also, I don't think the web is ready for UI/UX design tools. The ones I've tried feel really slow on my 5K iMac. Maybe in 5-10 years when web assembly is polished and related tool chains...
"Also with our tool, it took an average of 30 seconds to get a meeting started." You must have better phone-meeting tools than my company does.
Right; didn't use a phone-meeting tool which sucks. We used Sococo's TeamSpace, because we were a startup and that's what we were creating (dogfooding our own product). When I left it was an app that was always-on, keeping all folks logged into the same 'map' network-connected. We could click in and out of one-on-one meetings, standups and bullpens, or whole-company meetings with audio/video setup times in 100ms or s…
I just looked up TeamSpace, this is actually a super solid concept. This kind of tool actually makes me think the casual-conversation problem of remote work could actually be solved.
>I keep nearly all of my gross because of the standard deduction and the nature of cash tips. Instead of the "nature of cash tips", it would be more accurate to state "the nature of people to evade taxes (or do other bad things as defined by society) when chances of being caught are sufficiently low". Also why I always use credit card and tip with credit card.
Minimum wage laws for tipped employees (in the US) is also why I always tip with cash.
Obviously this varies widely based on the restaurant, but I worked at a small diner in the middle of nowhere ca 2006-2008 and averaged about $13-14/hr after tips.
The person stocking shelves at your local grocery store is in a much worse financial position than just about any waiter, despite the ~$3 minimum wage.
re: " These days we also have an NYC office, but we refer to it as "the Internet cafe", about 20 of our 70 people "so happen" to work out of there regularly..." It would be interesting to know: - How many other distributed companies have a similar arrangement (i.e., a non-distributed "HQ")? - Does this make employees more productive and/or satisfied? - When on the journey does it make sense to transition from central…
Our onboarding materials explicitly say, "NYC is not HQ". And it's not HQ. It is just an office we leased because we ended up with 10+ staff in NYC and they preferred an office to a co-working space, for security/privacy. (If you've ever lived in NYC, you know it can be challenging to have a home office at any reasonable cost, due to typical square footage of living spaces. That's part of the reason I left NYC.) We a…
Thanks for the details.
Just to clarify, "HQ" was in quotes, in an air quote sorta way :)