$500k would get us 4k-6ksq' in town or a few hundred acres if we wanted to live in the country.
That's just sick:-) We just paid $500k for a 2 year-old 3000sq ft house (on top of a hill == fantastic sunrise views!) on 10 acres here in MN and I was laughing at my friend back in CT. Looks like you could be laughing equally hard at me:-)
OTOH, if I wanted to extend my commute by another 20 minutes or so, we could have 30+ acres for the same price, so...
I was moved from the East Coast to the Midwest for a new job. New employer paid for everything: I even filled out expense reports for the meals I ate living in a hotel while searching for an apartment. The only catch was that I couldn't quit for a year or I would have to repay the $12k+ in relocation costs. That was reasonable.
So understand what you may be getting into.
Other points: - Focus on making the move as painless for *you* as possible. I assume you're being moved professionally? Just pack up a few things you need for the trip + a few days and let the movers do the rest. - At the destination, unpack promptly and inspect everything. Usually you have only 30 days to file damage reports with the movers - Let them move your car. You take the plane to the destination and get a rental. Save the wear and tear on your own vehicle and the hassles. - They should help you find a new place (and sell your house if you own one). Again, a professional relocation company expects to do this for you.
- You *have* checked out where you expect to move to, haven't you? At the very least, fly out there and look around to be sure it's a place you can live happily and comfortably. Stay the weekend and do some stuff you'd normally do. Go to clubs or a park, whatever floats your boat, to be sure the place "fits" you. My east coast friends simply couldn't understand why I would move to Minnesota, but I love it here.
Jeez, are you always this negative or are you suffering from depression or something? Therapy is quite good these days.
He's right, you know. You are putting obstacles in your path. Look. I rented my entire adult life until about 7 years ago when I decided I wanted to own my own house. I couldn't afford one in the Northeast, so I moved to a part of the country that looked pleasant and where housing was affordable for a single person. Got a job in the Midwest off the 'net (at the start of the dot-com boom employers happily paid all relocation expenses plus large signing bonuses). After 6 months on that job I bought a small house.
Got married. Bought a 2x larger house out in the burbs with the profits from appreciation on the first one (and my mortgage payment was actually lower than before). Decided we needed more land, and that being landlords would make us more money in the long run, so we rented out the house and bought another one way out in the country. Now I have rental income in addition to my salary.
The point is not to brag (though I'm sure you'll accuse me of that). The point is that it can be done, and done quite easily if you just see past the artificial barriers you throw up in front of yourself. I knew someone who was making less than $20k/year when she bought her house in a suburb just 20 min outside the city. Sure, it was a tiny 1 bedroom cottage, but she loved it and it was cheaper than renting.
If it's not something you want to do, fine, but don't go dissing people for talking about a real world you have decided doesn't exist.
If you're getting something out of your job that's more than a paycheck, it doesn't hurt to chip in a bit of personal expense to sharpen your skills.
I call BS. Everything my employer pays/reimburses me for beyond salary is an Employment Benefit and they should already have it factored into my overhead cost. The place I work will pay (may have increased) up to $8000/year for tuition and $500/year for books for grad school. I took advantage of that deal to get a Master's degree that cost me only the price of a few years' worth of parking stickers. I could even take the perspective that every year I don't get more education there's $8,500 in compensation made available to me that I'm not taking.
The "bit that I chip in" is called the work I do every day. Just cause they also pay most of my medical, dental, etc insurance premium doesn't mean I owe them anything more than an honest day's work.
It's true, there is no more nobel a calling than motherhood
Change the "motherhood" to "parenthood" and I'm with you. Fathers often get short shrift as the ones who get to do the fun stuff after moms do the hard work, but there is a significant number of us who are true co-parents.
This is not a problem you can fix in software. You have to fix you. If you can't discipline yourself to track your time, then no software package is going to do it for you.
Figure out a way to start tracking your time then work on finding software to make it easier.
What about those of us who may eat fast food (yeah, I admit it:-) but never actually go inside?
When we're away from home, or pressed for time, I sometimes take my son to Burger King/McDonalds (BTW: Culver's has *much* better food, but they're only here in the midwest), but I couldn't tell you the last time I set foot in one of those places. It's always order food from the squawkbox, then drive to window 1 then to window 2. After all, if I had time to go inside, I'd go to a real restaurant where a plastic toy isn't the highlight of the meal.
Better be one really fast download to complete while I'm at the drive through window.
you're just admitting that crap sells too. We already knew that.
Crap is relative. Clayton Christensen has a lot to say about this.
You're building a product. For the sake of this argument, let's assume it's a software product, but that really doesn't matter in general. You have something that says what you need to build and how good it has to be. That's probably called a specification document, or similar.
The primary driver of the product quality should be the specification and inspection of the output (or a process so tightly controlled that output doesn't need inspection, but this never happens in software).
A "good enough" programmer is one who can meet the spec. In some markets, exceeding the spec. improves the company's prospects; in others, it just wastes time and loses money.
I don't understand why people have a problem giving money. Is it just that they like giving a $10 gift, but sending a $10 bill makes them feel bad?
What I find works is to give gift cards. My wife's friends are into horses, so we give them Fleet Farm gift cards; just built/bought a house and we don't know what to give you? You'll probably get a Home Depot gift card, etc...
As far as us personally, we just hold off on getting something we want during the year and ask for it at Christmas. So I'm getting her a new tattoo... would be cheaper to just buy perfume:-)
I dunno about that. I have one of those Circuit Specialists stations to replace my two Wellers with the magnetic control (they can cause ESD problems) and I've done a few electronics consulting jobs with it. Or maybe I'm not a professional cause I don't see the need to pay $200+ for an iron when a $35 one works just as well:-)
How many times do you need to use both SUV's at the same time
Every day. My wife uses hers to transport equipment for her business and I commute to work. You could make the argument that I could sell my vehicle and buy a car (actually I also have a 2-seat sports car), but what would be the point? It was paid for long ago, is reliable and comfortable and SUITS MY NEEDS just fine. This is the point that you, and so many more, ignore. Just because a more "efficient" solution exists, doesn't mean it's desirable. Most people have more than just subsistence requirements, and we don't all want to be martyrs to a cause.
using the fact that you actually make use of it a handful of times on the weekends as justification
I wasn't attempting to justify anything. The only "justification" I need is that my wife and I have determined that the vehicles fit our requirements.
What I was responding to was your comment that the previous poster's use of his SUV didn't bother you because he needed it to carry all those people and things. If that makes it OK in your mind, then you need to give everyone else the same benefit of doubt, since you don't know what they are doing in their vehicles when you don't see them commuting to work.
It's very easy to look at anything you don't like and make specious claims that it's hurting you. Someone having their house warmer in winter, or cooler in summer is "using more energy than they need" and hurting you. People who won't recycle could be hurting you. etc. But no one focuses on the things done that actually are helpful. I won't use Chemlawn, etc because (a) I don't believe that I need perfect green carpets around my house and (b) I'm concerned about chemical runoff that ends up in the many lakes around here.
You remind me of the people who would glare at me in the supermarket checkout line when I said "plastic" to the "paper or plastic" bag question. Sure, I may not be using the environmentally friendly (?) paper, but look at my purchases vs. theirs. I buy mostly raw meat, veggies, milk & fruit versus their carts full of every industrially processed food product known to man. But I'm the bad guy cause I think plastic bags are easier to carry and I can reuse them to take my lunch to work.
If you're using the capabilities of the vehicle where others wouldn't be able to, I don't mind.
See, this is the element to these discussions that always arises and pisses me off. How do you know what those people are doing with their vehicles when you aren't watching? And for that matter why is it your business what they do with their money?
Put me, my wife, our 5 year-old and two large dogs in my SUV and there's barely any room for camping gear or anything else. If we went camping/roadtripping more often I'd consider trading up to a larger vehicle. As it is, even with two SUVs, we're seriously considering buying a used pickup truck or upgrading my vehicle to something larger with more towing capacity.
My point is that if you saw me commuting to work alone you'd probably think I was an idiot; but by your admission, if you saw me going camping with my family you wouldn't. Does that really make sense to you?
Buyers can give you clear specs if you ask them to clarify until they are clear;
I think this is the key to making RAC work; you have to understand what the buyer wants and make them comfortable with you. I am actually got up an hour ago to work on a RentACoder project cause I couldn't sleep. I jumped on/. after I'd had enough. I stick to specialized work only and avoid the web monkey stuff and I ended up with a TopCoder designation because of it. I've turned down two invitations to private bids this week already. * Don't do run of the mill stuff like web development, database front ends, etc that every beginning programmer knows. You'll always be underbid. Even though I live in the relatively low cost-of-living Midwestern US, I still can't compete with the overseas programmers on price, so I compete on skills and impressing the buyer that I get it right the first time. * TALK to the buyer; make him at ease with you, be chatty * Stick to stuff you can do well and quickly unless you're just taking the project as a way to learn a technology and be paid to do so. The speciality I go after on RAC is hardware interfacing and I've had some cool projects. * Remember that even simple things can take a long time. I once bid $25 to hand over a code snippet I had written years ago (literally no change required: just cut & paste), then spent half a weekend trying to figure out why it didn't work on the buyer's system but worked perfectly on mine! * Related to the above is pride. You bid on a job, it's your responsibility to make it work for the price you quoted.
Bottom line: if you're in the US you probably can't make a living at it as a programmer, but it's a good way to get experience in new technologies, dealing with a variety of clients, or just make a few extra bucks when you're bored.
For most commuting needs, Single cars are a waste of energy and time.
I don't have any data to back this up, but anecdotally I don't think so. Commuting into the large cities gets a lot of press (and the mass transit!), but there is a huge amount of commuting happening from rural to suburban areas and between suburban areas that everyone ignores because roads are wider due to more open space and there are fewer bottlenecks. But due to the longer distances and larger combinations, these commutes are poorly served by mass transit. As more and more businesses move to the suburbs to avoid urban congestion, the problem is getting worse. There are commute routes around here that I could drive in 30 minutes, but take almost 3 hours by bus, most of it waiting at the bus stop for a bus that runs once every 2 hours!
Now, THAT's a development model that makes sense to me and in fact it was one I advocated here about a year ago (and I was told that I was crazy and accused of having a "dot-com business model"!). It should also reduce support and sales costs by having fewer total customers for the same amount of revenue.
It's interesting to see a real world example of how it could work.
My interpretation of what the parent poster was asking -- and what I was responding to -- was "why aren't all projects created from scratch and then open sourced since new code is more interesting?"
The coders may prefer it, but the market definitely does not.
The problem is that it costs more than many markets will bear. If it costs me $10,000 to build a Shipping system, there are many fewer potential customers than if it cost $200. But if I build that $10,000 system, keep it proprietary, and sell it for $200, my market is much larger. Instead of a single $10k sale, I can make hundreds of $200 sales.
I understand why it's all still open, but those forces seem to be changing somewhat. Employers are learning that it's getting hard to find people to make insane commutes into the cities, so more of them are moving out to the burbs or rural areas. And the communities out there are trying harder to attract people by becoming more wired. I work for a technology company and we're out at the edge of the metro area, more or less surrounded by farms. I have a relaxing 25-35 minute commute and I don't miss living in the city at all (OK, except for the restaurants).
So if the stock continues to rise and that buyer sells it a week later for 20% more than I sold it for, does that mean now he made money at my expense? Sorry, your chain of reasoning doesn't make any sense to me.
I think you misunderstand what I meant. I'm talking about buyers. OK, house is foreclosed upon. Bank wants to unload the property since they're a bank, not property managers. They can deal with qualifying a new buyer for a mortgage, accepting a buyer who will get a mortgage elsewhere, or accepting a buyer who will pay cash.
All things being equal, the bank will take the cash buyer. That's what I meant.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just sick
We just paid $500k for a 2 year-old 3000sq ft house (on top of a hill == fantastic sunrise views!) on 10 acres here in MN and I was laughing at my friend back in CT. Looks like you could be laughing equally hard at me
OTOH, if I wanted to extend my commute by another 20 minutes or so, we could have 30+ acres for the same price, so...
I was moved from the East Coast to the Midwest for a new job. New employer paid for everything: I even filled out expense reports for the meals I ate living in a hotel while searching for an apartment. The only catch was that I couldn't quit for a year or I would have to repay the $12k+ in relocation costs. That was reasonable.
So understand what you may be getting into.
Other points:
- Focus on making the move as painless for *you* as possible. I assume you're being moved professionally? Just pack up a few things you need for the trip + a few days and let the movers do the rest.
- At the destination, unpack promptly and inspect everything. Usually you have only 30 days to file damage reports with the movers
- Let them move your car. You take the plane to the destination and get a rental. Save the wear and tear on your own vehicle and the hassles.
- They should help you find a new place (and sell your house if you own one). Again, a professional relocation company expects to do this for you.
- You *have* checked out where you expect to move to, haven't you? At the very least, fly out there and look around to be sure it's a place you can live happily and comfortably. Stay the weekend and do some stuff you'd normally do. Go to clubs or a park, whatever floats your boat, to be sure the place "fits" you. My east coast friends simply couldn't understand why I would move to Minnesota, but I love it here.
Average appreciation in the US over the last 40 years is 6% a year. 8% is a bit high, but not unusual.
Jeez, are you always this negative or are you suffering from depression or something? Therapy is quite good these days.
He's right, you know. You are putting obstacles in your path.
Look. I rented my entire adult life until about 7 years ago when I decided I wanted to own my own house. I couldn't afford one in the Northeast, so I moved to a part of the country that looked pleasant and where housing was affordable for a single person. Got a job in the Midwest off the 'net (at the start of the dot-com boom employers happily paid all relocation expenses plus large signing bonuses). After 6 months on that job I bought a small house.
Got married. Bought a 2x larger house out in the burbs with the profits from appreciation on the first one (and my mortgage payment was actually lower than before). Decided we needed more land, and that being landlords would make us more money in the long run, so we rented out the house and bought another one way out in the country. Now I have rental income in addition to my salary.
The point is not to brag (though I'm sure you'll accuse me of that). The point is that it can be done, and done quite easily if you just see past the artificial barriers you throw up in front of yourself. I knew someone who was making less than $20k/year when she bought her house in a suburb just 20 min outside the city. Sure, it was a tiny 1 bedroom cottage, but she loved it and it was cheaper than renting.
If it's not something you want to do, fine, but don't go dissing people for talking about a real world you have decided doesn't exist.
I have no idea what you're trying to say but it seems like it's leading to something interesting.
Want to give it another shot?
I call BS. Everything my employer pays/reimburses me for beyond salary is an Employment Benefit and they should already have it factored into my overhead cost. The place I work will pay (may have increased) up to $8000/year for tuition and $500/year for books for grad school. I took advantage of that deal to get a Master's degree that cost me only the price of a few years' worth of parking stickers.
I could even take the perspective that every year I don't get more education there's $8,500 in compensation made available to me that I'm not taking.
The "bit that I chip in" is called the work I do every day. Just cause they also pay most of my medical, dental, etc insurance premium doesn't mean I owe them anything more than an honest day's work.
Change the "motherhood" to "parenthood" and I'm with you. Fathers often get short shrift as the ones who get to do the fun stuff after moms do the hard work, but there is a significant number of us who are true co-parents.
This is not a problem you can fix in software. You have to fix you. If you can't discipline yourself to track your time, then no software package is going to do it for you.
Figure out a way to start tracking your time then work on finding software to make it easier.
What about those of us who may eat fast food (yeah, I admit it :-) but never actually go inside?
When we're away from home, or pressed for time, I sometimes take my son to Burger King/McDonalds (BTW: Culver's has *much* better food, but they're only here in the midwest), but I couldn't tell you the last time I set foot in one of those places. It's always order food from the squawkbox, then drive to window 1 then to window 2.
After all, if I had time to go inside, I'd go to a real restaurant where a plastic toy isn't the highlight of the meal.
Better be one really fast download to complete while I'm at the drive through window.
Huh?? where the hell do you live that you need an appointment to go to the fscking DMV???
Tell me so I never have to move there. Stupidest thing I've heard yet (today
Crap is relative. Clayton Christensen has a lot to say about this.
You're building a product. For the sake of this argument, let's assume it's a software product, but that really doesn't matter in general.
You have something that says what you need to build and how good it has to be. That's probably called a specification document, or similar.
The primary driver of the product quality should be the specification and inspection of the output (or a process so tightly controlled that output doesn't need inspection, but this never happens in software).
A "good enough" programmer is one who can meet the spec. In some markets, exceeding the spec. improves the company's prospects; in others, it just wastes time and loses money.
Yeah, but if you're both "good enough" then no one cares.
I don't understand why people have a problem giving money. Is it just that they like giving a $10 gift, but sending a $10 bill makes them feel bad?
What I find works is to give gift cards. My wife's friends are into horses, so we give them Fleet Farm gift cards; just built/bought a house and we don't know what to give you? You'll probably get a Home Depot gift card, etc...
As far as us personally, we just hold off on getting something we want during the year and ask for it at Christmas. So I'm getting her a new tattoo... would be cheaper to just buy perfume
I dunno about that. I have one of those Circuit Specialists stations to replace my two Wellers with the magnetic control (they can cause ESD problems) and I've done a few electronics consulting jobs with it.
Or maybe I'm not a professional cause I don't see the need to pay $200+ for an iron when a $35 one works just as well
Every day. My wife uses hers to transport equipment for her business and I commute to work. You could make the argument that I could sell my vehicle and buy a car (actually I also have a 2-seat sports car), but what would be the point? It was paid for long ago, is reliable and comfortable and SUITS MY NEEDS just fine.
This is the point that you, and so many more, ignore. Just because a more "efficient" solution exists, doesn't mean it's desirable. Most people have more than just subsistence requirements, and we don't all want to be martyrs to a cause.
I wasn't attempting to justify anything. The only "justification" I need is that my wife and I have determined that the vehicles fit our requirements.
What I was responding to was your comment that the previous poster's use of his SUV didn't bother you because he needed it to carry all those people and things. If that makes it OK in your mind, then you need to give everyone else the same benefit of doubt, since you don't know what they are doing in their vehicles when you don't see them commuting to work.
It's very easy to look at anything you don't like and make specious claims that it's hurting you. Someone having their house warmer in winter, or cooler in summer is "using more energy than they need" and hurting you. People who won't recycle could be hurting you. etc. But no one focuses on the things done that actually are helpful. I won't use Chemlawn, etc because (a) I don't believe that I need perfect green carpets around my house and (b) I'm concerned about chemical runoff that ends up in the many lakes around here.
You remind me of the people who would glare at me in the supermarket checkout line when I said "plastic" to the "paper or plastic" bag question. Sure, I may not be using the environmentally friendly (?) paper, but look at my purchases vs. theirs. I buy mostly raw meat, veggies, milk & fruit versus their carts full of every industrially processed food product known to man. But I'm the bad guy cause I think plastic bags are easier to carry and I can reuse them to take my lunch to work.
See, this is the element to these discussions that always arises and pisses me off.
How do you know what those people are doing with their vehicles when you aren't watching? And for that matter why is it your business what they do with their money?
Put me, my wife, our 5 year-old and two large dogs in my SUV and there's barely any room for camping gear or anything else. If we went camping/roadtripping more often I'd consider trading up to a larger vehicle. As it is, even with two SUVs, we're seriously considering buying a used pickup truck or upgrading my vehicle to something larger with more towing capacity.
My point is that if you saw me commuting to work alone you'd probably think I was an idiot; but by your admission, if you saw me going camping with my family you wouldn't. Does that really make sense to you?
I think this is the key to making RAC work; you have to understand what the buyer wants and make them comfortable with you.
I am actually got up an hour ago to work on a RentACoder project cause I couldn't sleep. I jumped on
I stick to specialized work only and avoid the web monkey stuff and I ended up with a TopCoder designation because of it. I've turned down two invitations to private bids this week already.
* Don't do run of the mill stuff like web development, database front ends, etc that every beginning programmer knows. You'll always be underbid. Even though I live in the relatively low cost-of-living Midwestern US, I still can't compete with the overseas programmers on price, so I compete on skills and impressing the buyer that I get it right the first time.
* TALK to the buyer; make him at ease with you, be chatty
* Stick to stuff you can do well and quickly unless you're just taking the project as a way to learn a technology and be paid to do so. The speciality I go after on RAC is hardware interfacing and I've had some cool projects.
* Remember that even simple things can take a long time. I once bid $25 to hand over a code snippet I had written years ago (literally no change required: just cut & paste), then spent half a weekend trying to figure out why it didn't work on the buyer's system but worked perfectly on mine!
* Related to the above is pride. You bid on a job, it's your responsibility to make it work for the price you quoted.
Bottom line: if you're in the US you probably can't make a living at it as a programmer, but it's a good way to get experience in new technologies, dealing with a variety of clients, or just make a few extra bucks when you're bored.
But, but that's my wine cellar!
I don't have any data to back this up, but anecdotally I don't think so. Commuting into the large cities gets a lot of press (and the mass transit!), but there is a huge amount of commuting happening from rural to suburban areas and between suburban areas that everyone ignores because roads are wider due to more open space and there are fewer bottlenecks. But due to the longer distances and larger combinations, these commutes are poorly served by mass transit. As more and more businesses move to the suburbs to avoid urban congestion, the problem is getting worse. There are commute routes around here that I could drive in 30 minutes, but take almost 3 hours by bus, most of it waiting at the bus stop for a bus that runs once every 2 hours!
Now, THAT's a development model that makes sense to me and in fact it was one I advocated here about a year ago (and I was told that I was crazy and accused of having a "dot-com business model"!). It should also reduce support and sales costs by having fewer total customers for the same amount of revenue.
It's interesting to see a real world example of how it could work.
My interpretation of what the parent poster was asking -- and what I was responding to -- was "why aren't all projects created from scratch and then open sourced since new code is more interesting?"
The coders may prefer it, but the market definitely does not.
The problem is that it costs more than many markets will bear. If it costs me $10,000 to build a Shipping system, there are many fewer potential customers than if it cost $200. But if I build that $10,000 system, keep it proprietary, and sell it for $200, my market is much larger. Instead of a single $10k sale, I can make hundreds of $200 sales.
I understand why it's all still open, but those forces seem to be changing somewhat. Employers are learning that it's getting hard to find people to make insane commutes into the cities, so more of them are moving out to the burbs or rural areas. And the communities out there are trying harder to attract people by becoming more wired.
I work for a technology company and we're out at the edge of the metro area, more or less surrounded by farms. I have a relaxing 25-35 minute commute and I don't miss living in the city at all (OK, except for the restaurants).
So if the stock continues to rise and that buyer sells it a week later for 20% more than I sold it for, does that mean now he made money at my expense? Sorry, your chain of reasoning doesn't make any sense to me.
I think you misunderstand what I meant. I'm talking about buyers.
OK, house is foreclosed upon. Bank wants to unload the property since they're a bank, not property managers. They can deal with qualifying a new buyer for a mortgage, accepting a buyer who will get a mortgage elsewhere, or accepting a buyer who will pay cash.
All things being equal, the bank will take the cash buyer. That's what I meant.
I just made a nice chunk o' cash when Amazon blipped up last week. Exactly at whose expense did I make that money?