After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder • Hacker News Board

Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder

#151

Post by jamesaguilar » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 5:52 PM UTC

ars_technician wrote: post #144

jamesaguilar wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not, because I am not assuming a promotion to prove my point re: whether you can save money in SF as a single engineer. You can. That's it.

No offense, but I'm strongly inclined to believe that you are not making it by on 80k a year in SF, and if you made that little money at one point, it was not for an extended enough period of time for you to properly understand what it afforded you. Your estimates seem to be nothing more than back of the napkin calculations missing major components like half of the taxes. Your numbers fit to someone making 100k+. Edi…

It does not offend me that you assume I make more money than I'm arguing over, and you are not wrong. I also lived in a $500/mo room in an apartment with two others when I made that much money, so I was saving like a boss. Travel was actually a larger expense than housing.

As far as addressing counterpoints, I've grown tired of quibbling. I think that you can live comfortably spending 66% of your income net of taxes per year without any undue effort if you make $80k a year in SF. I think anyone who looks into it would find the same to be true. That's my last word in this conversation.

Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder

#152

Post by nknighthb » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 5:53 PM UTC

ars_technician wrote: post #123

jamesaguilar wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to live in SF by yourself Oh, sorry, I thought we were talking about someone who is making the bare minimum effort to save money. My mistake.

That doesn't even make sense. If someone is making the bare minimum effort, then they would probably live by themselves. Are you sure you thought that message through?

No, they would have at least one roommate. Not bothering to find a roommate is the zero-effort case.

Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder

#153

Post by ars_technician » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 5:53 PM UTC

breckinloggins wrote: post #140

ars_technician wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They were wrong, and I was a fool for listening to them instead of exploring it for myself. Don't make my mistakes. They were right if you ever want to have a family. You are building no equity in rent so you will essentially have to leave and start over somewhere else to have kids. Your story is fine as long as it ends with you being single and alone without any real assets.

I understand where you're coming from, but I've had over a decade of experience owning and managing both personal and rental real estate so I wanted to chime in. > They were right if you ever want to have a family. Not entirely. "Ever" is a really strong word. If you want to have a family later in life, that should not prevent you from living in places you'd like to experience. You will likely regret being so cautiou…

>There's also a cost of liquidity. $10,000 sitting in a bank account at 0.1% is arguably worth more than $10,000 of equity in a house that might take 3 months to sell.

You make a big assumption with that statement. It strongly (and wrongly) assumes that the monthly payments for owning a home are the same as the rent plus whatever you would be putting into savings. There are plenty of homes in other places you can buy for $2000/mo vs spending $2000/mo on rent in SF while saving separately in either case to maintain the liquidity you are talking about.

>As I believe I have demonstrated, you have no justification for this statement; none whatsoever. It's simply not the case that a person who choses to spend one part of his or her life saving money living with roommates in a fun town will be forever "trapped" by that choice.

The point is that the numbers in his story only work for the "fun" part of the life. Life experiences are great, but it's difficult to pay for your kid's college and save for retirement when you are pouring thousands a month down the drain with nothing (other than a good time) to show for it.

Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder

#154

Post by sebkomianos » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 5:53 PM UTC

I am wondering how does this compare to attending a university's semester? (I am saying semester and not course since 180 days are 6 months)

Please don't answer with the obvious "she didn't study algorithms or computation complexity", we all know she didn't. I am asking about the core issue.

Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder

#155

Post by ars_technician » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 5:56 PM UTC

nickdoesdesign wrote: post #118

ars_technician wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They were wrong, and I was a fool for listening to them instead of exploring it for myself. Don't make my mistakes. They were right if you ever want to have a family. You are building no equity in rent so you will essentially have to leave and start over somewhere else to have kids. Your story is fine as long as it ends with you being single and alone without any real assets.

This is what gets me. The whole building equity thing by equating it to property. I have equity, but I invested it elsewhere. I still rent. You dont need to own property to have equity and to state otherwise is a disservice. America is not all subdivisions and white picket fences...

You are confusing what the point of building equity in a home is. It's not solely an investment vehicle like stocks, bonds, options, commodities, etc. By building equity in a home, you are also eliminating your cost of rent.

>You dont need to own property to have equity and to state otherwise is a disservice.

Again, you do if you want your cost of housing to go towards building equity.

Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder

#156

Post by alanh » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 5:57 PM UTC

jacobquick wrote: post #114

pauletienney wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should do this with arduino/electronic. Just a point : coding is free. Cooking, wood crafting, electronic, or any physical activity requires you buy some material.

"Coding is free" except for the $2000 laptop, the thousands of people working for pennies to make it, the military required to project enough power to keep them working, the endless supply of Starbucks to power through the coding process, the thousands of people working for pennies to grow that, and the military required to project enough power to keep them working as well. Free otherwise though.

Off-topic and flamebait much?

Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder

#157

Post by ars_technician » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 5:58 PM UTC

jamesaguilar wrote: post #151

ars_technician wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but I'm strongly inclined to believe that you are not making it by on 80k a year in SF, and if you made that little money at one point, it was not for an extended enough period of time for you to properly understand what it afforded you. Your estimates seem to be nothing more than back of the napkin calculations missing major components like half of the taxes. Your numbers fit to someone making 100k+. Edi…

It does not offend me that you assume I make more money than I'm arguing over, and you are not wrong. I also lived in a $500/mo room in an apartment with two others when I made that much money, so I was saving like a boss. Travel was actually a larger expense than housing. As far as addressing counterpoints, I've grown tired of quibbling. I think that you can live comfortably spending 66% of your income net of taxes…

>As far as addressing counterpoints, I've grown tired of quibbling. I think that you can live comfortably spending 66% of your income net of taxes per year without any undue effort if you make $80k a year in SF. I think anyone who looks into it would find the same to be true. That's my last word in this conversation.

That's fine. As long as you can admit that you are just arm-chairing it and haven't actually had to live under those restrictions.

Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder

#158

Post by lsdafjklsd » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 5:59 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #147

GuiA wrote: post #7

This is fantastic. Especially inspiring to me, more than the fact that she learned how to code, is the fact that she dove into something that she had no background in, and after 180 days she came out with a solid understanding of the basics of programming; enough to do stuff on her own (and, combined with her graphic design/illustration skills, probably enough to do freelance webdev or get a junior level position in…

There are two type of people in life. The first type graduates from college and their learning stops for the most part. They say to themselves, "well, I studied for four years and got a job, now it's finally time to sit back and relax." So they put in their regular 9-5 and then come home and waste their lives away by watching TV shows and playing video games and going out and getting drunk on weekends. Essentially, t…

I can just imagine how smug you were writing this, it's making me cringe.

Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder

#159

Post by dictum » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 5:59 PM UTC

andyl wrote: post #6

Her ability to attract attention was remarkable. She should become a marketer or spokesperson, not a coder.

She attracted attention to the fact that she was developing a high number of experiments in a short time. The coding aspect was intrinsic to get the attention.

I don't think her ability to get her work known would translate well to getting other people's creations known. Anyway, everyone ought to know how to market themselves, or suffer at the whims of those who do.

Re: After 180 Websites, I’m Ready to Start the Rest of My Life as a Coder

#160

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 6:02 PM UTC

sker wrote: post #47

luisehk wrote: post #10

Wow, this is the total opposite of me. I just spent weeks setting up the perfect development environment, instead of getting actual work done. I need to rethink the way I work.

I feel you there buddy, gotta get the whole (yeoman, bower, grunt, angularjs, batarang, postman, karma, typescript, git, git deployment, ci, visual studio support, assorted js librariers) setup ready to kick some ass.

[deleted]