211–220 of 267 posts
If more employers understood the value of distributed teams, this wouldn't even need to be an issue. You could live exactly where you wanted to live. Want a 700 sq ft studio in Manhattan for $3k/month? Great. Want a 2000 sq ft ranch home next to a river out in the country with your own garden? Done. Want to just save as much as you can, with a cheap apartment in a cheap town outside a cheap city? You got it. Maybe yo…
> If more employers understood the value of distributed teams, this wouldn't even need to be an issue. If something like this seems obvious to you, and obviously a lot of smart people are acting in the opposite way, maybe you should re-consider your assumptions. In reality, online communication tools currently are a poor proxy for in-person communication in many situations. Online tools do not pick up the array of no…
If more employers understood the value of distributed teams, this wouldn't even need to be an issue. You could live exactly where you wanted to live. Want a 700 sq ft studio in Manhattan for $3k/month? Great. Want a 2000 sq ft ranch home next to a river out in the country with your own garden? Done. Want to just save as much as you can, with a cheap apartment in a cheap town outside a cheap city? You got it. Maybe yo…
> If more employers understood the value of distributed teams, this wouldn't even need to be an issue. If something like this seems obvious to you, and obviously a lot of smart people are acting in the opposite way, maybe you should re-consider your assumptions. In reality, online communication tools currently are a poor proxy for in-person communication in many situations. Online tools do not pick up the array of no…
However I find that the amount of "heads down" work I get done is greatly diminished when I'm in an office. And, much worse, there's a lot of noise in that added communication of being in the office. Remote teams, in my experience, have dramatically less "office politics".
Office space is great for communicating "big ideas" but these aren't anywhere near the bulk of communications being had. For most of the communications needs of software remote works fine (in my experience better).
I work on a quite a few "big idea" projects and I've found the best solution is to visit the office quarterly, get all the big idea brainstorming done, then scurry off to my remote office where I'm not distracted by office politics and can just get things done. A little face time goes a long way, and annual, or semi-annual all hands meetups can do wonders at filling in the gaps created on remote teams.
Anecdote: The "average" salary reported for New York is very close to the entry-level starting salary for college graduates at most large (names you've heard of) tech employers in NYC. Companies routinely check what each other are doing and adjust entry-level pay packages yearly to compensate for competition, inflation, demand, etc. which makes data from each successive previous year not as relevant for someone inter…
I still feel like Chicago developers miss out on being exposed to the culture of SV or Seattle. I've worked and lived in Chicago all of my professional career, and one of the intangible non-money aspects to this field to consider is how you grow as an engineer. If you love writing software, this isn't a very good place to work compared to SV/Seattle. There just isn't a very large or strong culture of software develop…
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The life hack to actually come out ahead is to avoid these places and find a good opportunity in a cheaper place. I don't know a lot about Austin, but I'm familiar with NYC, and I think that example works too. If you define the "cool" part of NYC as being in Manhattan, once you have a family it's irrelevant, because you can't live there... like 98% of everyone else, you end up in Jersey, the boroughs, or Long Island.…
Three hours, seriously? That is no longer within the metro area of NY, not even close. If you're talking about suburban commuting, houses upstate in Westchester are still $1 million with a fat 3% property tax bill. The trains suck and have a history of safety issues and you have to spend 2 hours a day on one. No thanks. Don't try to settle in the NY metro w/ a family unless you are in finance, your quality of life wi…
My family gets to hop on the Amtrak and enjoy the cultural advantages of NYC about once a month. We drive to places like the Bronx Zoo and Boston for various things.
When I was a kid in Queens, getting to Manhattan via transit easily took 2 hours. My son gets all of the benefits of not living in NYC, and many of the advantages.
I suspect the cost of living data for Austin trails reality by some significant margin. The sources don't indicate the age of the data, but even if it's only a couple of years old, it's going to be wrong by enough to be a factor. I have lived in Austin for a couple of years, and also lived here (and owned a house here) about 8 years ago. The cost of homes here has gone up tremendously since then. I was shopping for a…
This is a common refrain, but one I consider misguided, having lived in Austin since the first .com collapse. While Yes, housing costs have moved up, others have remained flat (so relatively compared to other cities, have moved down). As silly as it sounds, my favorite metric is "Cost of Drinking". Find the fancy cocktail bars in any city's downtown. In Austin, nothing on the menu is above $12 at Midnight Cowboy or T…
By any metric I can think of, Austin costs more than it did even three years ago. All of my favorite restaurants are $2-$3 more for an entree than they were when I lived here in the past. And some have been priced out of downtown. Thai Passion (my favorite Thai restaurant anywhere which used the have a $5.75 lunch special) closed recently, and they aren't alone.
Again, it isn't California expensive but it's no longer Texas cheap either.
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Very good points. It has really been baffling me why, especially in an industry like tech, where products for distributed networking and communications are developed, companies are so hell-bent on co-location. I have my suspicions that it actually has to do with tax code and incentives to have corporate offices in expensive locations, but that's just an untested theory I have at the moment.
The most likely explanation is that it doesn't work. Bootstrapped companies are very strapped for cash. They often use a distributed team early on. if a distributed team worked, at least some startups would continue on the model - after all it's in the company culture and muscle memory. And we would hear about them. (especially when they succeed really big.) We do, sometimes hear from them: https://news.ycombinator.c…
Stack Exchange.
I suspect the cost of living data for Austin trails reality by some significant margin. The sources don't indicate the age of the data, but even if it's only a couple of years old, it's going to be wrong by enough to be a factor. I have lived in Austin for a couple of years, and also lived here (and owned a house here) about 8 years ago. The cost of homes here has gone up tremendously since then. I was shopping for a…
The life hack to actually come out ahead is to avoid these places and find a good opportunity in a cheaper place. I don't know a lot about Austin, but I'm familiar with NYC, and I think that example works too. If you define the "cool" part of NYC as being in Manhattan, once you have a family it's irrelevant, because you can't live there... like 98% of everyone else, you end up in Jersey, the boroughs, or Long Island.…
I have a few friends at Google who, after working there for close to 10 years, now are thinking about retiring to Portland, or Vermont, or North Carolina. The idea has certainly crossed my mind, that if I wanted to live in a rural area I could buy a house free & clear and be set for the rest of my life. I met an innkeeper in Alaska once that had worked in tech for 20 years, lived like a grad student, and when his kid was a teenager, bought a sailboat, sailed around the world, and came to settle in Seward, Alaska because they'd fallen in love with the town. I've heard it's pretty common in investment banking to have "your number", work for ~10 years until you hit it, and then retire to Fiji.
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And what about falling back to a verbal description of the chart for those of us on ELinks?
Respecting your craft means using the right tools and techniques for the job. Not caring about one group of users is no excuse for needing Javascript to display a chart. You don't use Javascript to display a chart because you don't need Javascript to display a chart. Render the chart server-side and use an image to display it. It's a static chart, it's not like the information is changing with every page load. To do…
svg accessibility stuff (not my blog, just one I found after a quick search): http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2013/12/using-aria-enhance...