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I quit the tech industry

eev.ee

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Re: I quit the tech industry

#331

Post by eevee »

xienze wrote: post #195
LatencyKills wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you but on the existential side of things not having that mortgage payment hanging over you every month is quite liberating.

Yes, assuming you also have a job. Having no job (and no desire to get a job) and little savings (the author says it almost all went to paying off the mortgage) is a little stressful, to say the least. In this situation having a big pile of cash and a mortgage would be preferable.

I do also have some pre-existing savings; I just don't want to use them if at all possible (and have to start all over, sob), so I've been deliberately pretending they're unavailable.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#332

Post by dempseye »

cstross wrote: post #310

> The only things they have in common are that their main products are websites with tertiary features that let you buy things. Yet both of them ended up scrambling to write their own payment platforms from scratch. What the fuck is going on? * Raises hand * I was the first dev hire at Datacash and wrote their back-end servers. Datacash only came into existence because an earlier (circa 1995-96) startup trying to sel…

Hilarious. I just finished reading your memoir of that period.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#333

Post by jacquesm »

zatkin wrote: post #194
jfe wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ditto.

Please make more meaningful contributions rather than simply feeling similarities with other users. That is what the upvoting feature is for.

He's been here three times as long as you so I figure he knows how things work. On top of that I got him just fine.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#334

Post by mynameisvlad »

jkot wrote: post #162
lubos wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social insurance, health insurance and income tax will be around 25% on €15k annual salary in Czech republic. And that's assuming they have no children. With children it's even less. source: http://www.penize.cz/kalkulacky/vypocet-ciste-mzdy

Supergross salary rings a bell? 15000*27/12 = 33750CZK/month = 42.5% taxation Add VAT 21%, petrol tax 52%...

Except the VAT and petrol tax have nothing to do with income tax. So you can't just add it to the ~40% income tax. 21% VAT is quite normal in the EU, so that's nothing special.

Also source on that petrol tax? According to http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/07/23/uk-czech-tax-idUKKB... it seems to be one of the lower in the EU, as the cut would have "put Czech petrol taxes below minimum rates allowed in the European Union"

Re: I quit the tech industry

#335

Post by eevee »

xienze wrote: post #137
jahnu wrote: post #43

"I had stock options, and I cashed them all in last week. I net enough to pay off the mortgage, so I’m doing that, which will leave the entire household debt-free and cut our expenses drastically." I'm happy for you. Even a tiny bit jealous. But it does in the end make the whole post sound like a humblebrag to me.

Well, if it makes you feel better, he probably made a bad decision paying off the mortgage right away considering that he has no idea what he's going to do to earn money going forward. It would have been better to continue paying the mortgage for the time being (interest rates are absurdly low) and have a big cushion to fall back on if the whole "I don't wanna be part of the rat race, maaaan" thing doesn't work out.

I crunched some numbers, and the difference came out to losing a couple grand a year over the course of a decade by paying it off now. I decided I'd rather have fewer bills and no debt looming overhead while I figure this out than the slight extra cash.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#336

Post by eevee »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #267

"I don’t know how to turn this into dollars yet. Hopefully I’ll figure that out." This just oozes privilege and naivete. If only most people scraping along had this kind of safety net.

I am definitely hecka privileged. What would you have me do? Keep working a job I don't enjoy, out of guilt that other people have to do the same?

Re: I quit the tech industry

#337

Post by francoisdevlin »

zippy786 wrote: post #213
mpdehaan2 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not burnout related, I found out a while back, and this is somewhat paradoxical, that if I care TOO much, I'm less happy. What happens is I notice all the stuff I can't fix, or need to fix, and other people get stressed out making them fix it. The end result is that I stop caring quite as much (I still care), get happy, and then start caring too much again. It's especially hard at times when you have a lot of e…

This is what is fundamentally wrong with the industry. Often those who don't care or don't do much are the highest paid and get more reward that the ones who care the most and always try to do something. Obviously, the environment eventually turns those who care into someone not caring as much. Eventually not caring at all, thus a toxic environment is formed. Some may also feel that this is the norm in most companies…

Perhaps the people who care too much aren't that smart in this case.

See the Napoleon anecdote:

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/12/27/dumb-and-gets-thing...

Re: I quit the tech industry

#338

Post by mcgrootz »

mcgrootz wrote: post #314

A lot of the work we do as programmers is for a meaningless product. If we worked on things that we believed in, maybe something that helped people live better lives, especially those who really need the help like the poor and disenfranchised, I believe programmers would be happier people. There just isn't a lot of opportunity out there right now to do meaningful work with code. It's a shame.

Additionally, I don't think the answer is to work less and have more leisure time. I don't think that really solves the issue. I think you can spend an enormous amount of energy and time on something you love, and be very fulfilled by it.

Coders have a lot of power in this day and age. Let's start using it to help people and do good work in the world. I'm so tired of meaningless tech achievements, one after another. Elon Musk may get us to Mars, he may help us reduce our energy usage, but we'll still be the same depressed people if we don't work on improving the system.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#339

Post by jcroll »

Not everyone can work on passion projects, someone has to be the employee, the economy just doesn't work without it. Unless maybe if you run a company like Valve where everyone is technically an "owner". Bottom line large value projects require economies of scale and the mobilization of large labour forces, it's just not realistic for every business in our industry to be a company with two founders who are in love with their project. And work should not be something we "love", work is something we do to bring value to our society and wealth to our families. There's no easy answers here but stick to providing value to those you work with, or for, or for your customers, and I hope in the long term it should work out for you.

Re: I quit the tech industry

#340

Post by nostrademons »

aaggarwal wrote: post #219
mtbcoder wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't there people with experience on working on short-term contracts and still living well-off? This is just my opinion and I can only speak from a US perspective, but yes and no. The ones who are able to do this have already gotten a 10+ year head start and have built up a deep network from which to source work from. The ones who are starting out today are more than likely having a very tough go at it. Competitio…

You could be very right here, since most of the people I come across working on contracts are already in the market for at least 10 years. In today's market, for someone new starting out, I guess there will be cut-throat competition to get programming contracts, with people ready to work at a very low rate (e.g. on Freelancer, oDesk).

That was the case 10 years ago as well. Most of my contracting friends started out with $15/hour webmonkey work.

The thing you have to understand about contracting (and really any paid work, I've noticed the same effect as a big-company employee) is that people will pay a large premium for a track record of delivering working solutions. When you first start out, your asset is "I know this programming language", your clients just want someone who knows that programming language, and you're competing with all of these people on oDesk and eLance who also know that programming language. After you've delivered successfully on your first couple projects, your asset is "I delivered on these projects and it made my clients $X", your clients want someone with a track record of delivering on projects with minimal handholding, and you're competing only with other people who have had wins of similar magnitude. The supply of these is much lower and the demand is much higher, and so you can charge much higher rates.

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