The Oatmeal pretty much summed up 6pm of every weeknight of my life (I'm a stay-at-home developer, my wife is a medical resident) http://theoatmeal.com/comics/making_things
1000x thanks for linking this. Hadn't seen it yet.
We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
181–190 of 312 posts
Re: We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what is the hack that keeps us from constantly taking our luxuries for granted? Just as with the traffic situation, how often do we find ourselves complaining about having to do the laundry or the dishes or vacuuming or even heating up something for dinner -- all fairly small and easy tasks thanks to the help of technology, which took much more time and labor in a previous generation? Yes, it's true that the compl…
I was given some brilliant advice by an older gentleman once: he said to find 1 or 2 things that enjoy more than most people, to let yourself really enjoy those things, and be modest in all other things - and then you'll really be happy, but be able to give more to those less fortunate. For instance, he loved music, and he splurged to have a high-quality system in his car. And he focused on really enjoying that, cut…
This.
There's a great book called Living High and Letting Die by Peter Unger which relates to this subject. Essentially, the argument is we here in the first world have a moral obligation to continue onward and upward as long as we benefit those in the third world.
We have to first recognize our privilege or luxury before we are able to see how we can use it to help those people in the third world.
Re: We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
#183There are definitely amazing, luxurious aspects of programming. Something came into view for me recently though, that I never realized before: When I graduated from high school, I started my own little (tutoring) company, and did software from after that, so I never had the experience of a "normal", hourly job, like retail or coal mining or whatever. Recently I had an opportunity to do a job like that and the mood st…
What kind of job was it, retail? Even that job is probably a luxury compared to, say, manufacturing. I don't think you'd have that much down time if you were working in a factory. You wouldn't be thinking a lot, since it's repetitive manual labor, but I'm sure you'd be pretty tired at the end of the day (physically, not mentally).
Re: We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
#184There are definitely amazing, luxurious aspects of programming. Something came into view for me recently though, that I never realized before: When I graduated from high school, I started my own little (tutoring) company, and did software from after that, so I never had the experience of a "normal", hourly job, like retail or coal mining or whatever. Recently I had an opportunity to do a job like that and the mood st…
"and when I charge you $125 for an hour of my time, you got more than that value, because I was working, firing on all cylinders."
No, I don't. I might. But what you value your time at is different from the value I can derive from using your time.
Re: We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always found it a little off-putting when people complain about this. I get that it's probably annoying, and good for them for being in demand. But it still comes off as a humblebrag.
Can't a man walk down the street without being offered a job?
It's more akin to the "job offers" that a woman might get when walking down the wrong sort of street.
The basal level of respect for me as a professional with skills and preferences distinct from those of my peers is typically not present from the recruiter shotgunning spam all over the network.
Re: We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
#186Let's be careful with that term, "luxury". You're a well-paid and comparatively comfortable wage slave, but just because you don't have to labor in a mine or a burger joint doesn't mean you are experiencing luxury. Luxury is what these people are living: http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ We would all do well to remember that the first 85 people on that list have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest people in t…
One of the interesting things that has happened with the increase in inequality is the ability for more people to say, "No, I'm not rich. that guy is rich." Because as inequality rises, the people you compare yourselves to are much further away than they used to be. That's how people making 10x the median income can, with a straight face, declare themselves to be "middle class". Inequality itself is used to justify o…
When expenses exceed income, misery: when income exceeds expenses, bliss.
Re: We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
#187My dad likes to remind me of how much better my job is than what I could be doing.
He's done construction work all of his life, and self-employed construction for as long as I've been alive. Growing up, I often worked for him during the summers after school was out. I've done all manner of construction work under him, concrete work, plumbing, roofing, decks, fences, you name it.
He claims now that he had me doing all that so that I'd want to go to college and get a desk job, and maybe he's telling the truth. There have been some things I remember fondly about those days, but overall, there's no comparison. We have it a lot easier.
Re: We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
#188Yet another bullshit article. IT has zero entrance barrier, anyone can pick up tutorial from internet and start software development. Many people give up after they find out that software development is actually very hard. And work from home is not luxury. Even East Asia textile sweatshops offer work from home. It is just Californian startups who require total control over their minions.
> Even East Asia textile sweatshops offer work from home. I'd like to learn more about this. Intuitively, it makes sense for something like this to be true; the "workers slaving away at assembly lines in factories 12 hours a day 7 days a week" meme seems a bit too ancient and well-established to be accurate and we definitely don't see that many sources of what the East Asia sweatshop lifestyle is actually like. Any l…
It is story from asian friend. Every morning her family would collect batch of clothes for sewing and return it finished at evening. Also Japan industry during WW2 worked this way, lot of work was done in family homes, central factories were only used for steel.
Re: We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
>We would all do well to remember that the first 85 people on that list have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest people in the world Does anyone know where to get the raw wealth data for something like this? It might be interesting to know for example, if you have a net worth of $1, that you might have more wealth than the poorest 500 million combined (or whatever).
http://data.worldbank.org/topic/poverty
Thanks for the link. I've only spent a little time, but I downloaded several of the data sets there, and they don't appear to have what I'm looking for. Lots of data income, etc., but nothing on wealth and what they do have on income is coarse grained (based on quintiles).
Re: We Have Luxurious Jobs but We Are Not Aware of It
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hint: Don't live in California. There are plenty of well-paid software jobs in places like Boston, Chicago, Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Florida, Austin, etc. They might not have the glut of "hot" startups that Silicon Valley does, but they have much more reasonable cost of living.
Another perspective: What you get as a developer in the bay area is way better than other US cities. I've lived in a couple of those places over the course of a decade and a half, and I can tell you that while the cost of living is lower there, so also is the pay. Significantly lower. You figure in the relative scarcity of jobs, and you're looking at making a lot less, limited carrier mobility, and real stress when l…
Sadly, this seems to be the case. I waffle a lot about whether I want to stay in the Bay Area, given the combination of currently being underemployed, the ridiculous cost of living and how much I'd need to make just in order to maintain the status quo, let alone finally live without a roommate.
But when I poke at other markets, with very few exceptions the pay differential for web developers is so steep and the choices are so few it's startling. (And I'm also frequently reminded how much of the rest of the United States is still populated by Microsoft shops rather than living in OSX/Unix-land like I do.) This is why I ended up moving out here in the first place a decade ago from the Tampa Bay area -- I was a Unix-head in a land of very few opportunities, and to my dismay, that really hasn't changed very much.
It's hard not to notice that a lot of the HN crowd that takes mobility for granted are people who co-founded their own startups and/or work at companies with a strong telecommuting culture. I think that's awesome, but finding such roles is not as easy -- even out here -- as I think people who've found them sometimes believe. (And I say that as someone who's primarily worked from home since 2011.)