I didn't think I would have to spell out that I took a pay cut of $10k rather than quitting a job that only paid that much. But then, I sometimes forget where I am.
You could fill in the rest by doing some work on the side with all the free time you have, if you wanted!
I did, in fact, which is what lead to my eventually striking out on my own.
Come to think of it, working for myself also involved a pay cut for a while. I'm making about the same now as I was working full time (more, some months) but it took six months or so to get up to that level. Those first few months I was making a lot less. But like the first situation I mentioned, ultimately it was well worth it. Best decision I ever made.
Oh, come on, there a lot of things more important than salary. I haven't done it recently but in 2004 I gave up $10k/year because:
a) Commute time: A short train ride instead of a hour+ drive each way b) Location: Downtown San Francisco instead of Mountain View (~40 miles outside SF) b) The company: A small company instead of a huge corporation (Verisign, in fact) c) Interest: I'd actually be able to learn something instead of doing work I was completely uninterested in d) Hours: I'd be working normal hours instead of graveyard two days/week (with three regular days)
I would have given up a lot more than $10k for all that.
For every accusation of left-wing bias on Slashdot, I see at least three comments by extremest Libertarians about how people who can't afford health care somehow don't deserve it or the like. I fail to see the bias you speak of.
Do note that I'm not accusing Slashdot of a Libertarian/right-wing/conservative/social darwinist/what-have-you bias; I'm only pointing that the so-called "liberal bias" doesn't exist here any more than it does in mainstream media as a whole.
Ask me that again after you've walked a new computer owner through it over the phone. Now try it with a directory structure about twice as deep.
Ah, the joys of working ISP phone support in the Win95 days, back when Windows really didn't come with a browser installed. I never understood why the Netscape FTP server directory structure was such a mess either.
You say that like there's something wrong with it. Why wouldn't they be? If I had a product making those kinds of margins I'd be damn proud of it too.
And before you say that they should give up some profits in order to lower their prices, do note that they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves with things as they are, leaving the low-end market to Dell and the like.
I'm in a similar position as the poster you're replying to. I was doing sidework off Craigslist (San Francisco) for a while until I was laid off, at which point I decided not to get another job. I've been on one large project since last summer that I found on Craigslist and supplementing it with referral work. I haven't replied to a work ad in six months now. Doing a combination of system administration and web development, I'm making about the same money as I was as a full-time sysadmin but working about 2/3 of the hours, which leave me a nice amount of free time for other things. I don't get paid vacation time, but because I can work from anywhere it really doesn't matter too much (for example, I spent a couple weeks working from Paris recently).
It sounds to me like you're still an employee. Maybe not an employee of the client but this sort of arrangement is far from being your own boss, whether you have the title "consultant" or not.
I think the original poster meant doing it for yourself, not trading one full-time salaried job for a full-time hourly job for a consulting company.
And if your wife considers a heartfelt gift from her husband to be "ultimately disposable", you also need a new wife.
My wife's wedding ring is an antique gold ring set with a ruby. Neither of us had any interest in supporting the diamond industry, and she just plain preferred the ruby.
And if you dont own a paid copy Office running on a working copy of Microsoft Windows, stop now and work for somebody else, seriously. Software purity doesn't pay your bills and thus has no business in your life anymore.
I disagree. Working for myself means I can choose the environment I work in, and doing web development means that I, for the most part, don't need Windows.
Of course I keep a copy of WinXP around as a VMware image for testing sites in IE6/7, and I have Office for OS X for opening the occasional Word doc from clients, but that's literally the extent of my Microsoft use. Windows brings absolutely nothing else to my business that I can't get on my Mac laptop and Linux servers.
Only bill time and materials. Do not ever agree to do fixed fee work or you will loose your shirt.
On the other hand, once you get good at estimating your time, having per-project rates is a sure way to make more money. Estimate the maximum time the job will take, add a reasonable amount for the inevitable delays and overhead (a minimum of 50%), write a clear statement of work (ie, contract) stating what is and is not included. If you get the work done faster, which you will once you get good at these estimates, you've effectively raised your hourly rate for these projects.
Even better is to estimate the value your work will bring to the client and factor that in as well. Read what Alan Weiss has to say on the subject of value billing.
Much like extreme veganism, where you are not supposed to eat anything from a plant where you end up killing the entire plant.
Can you actually provide a source for this claim?
I ask because I'm a 20 year vegetarian (not vegan) who has in the past been active in animal rights circles, I've had lots of vegan friends, I live in Berkeley for god's sake, and I have not once heard anyone suggest that entire plants not be used for food.
Actually a lot of vegans won't eat dairy products...
The term you're looking for here is "vegetarian". Vegans by definition do not eat any animal products, including meat, eggs, and dairy (eg, milk, cheese, etc). Someone who doesn't eat meat but does eat eggs and dairy is simply a vegetarian (sometimes called a lacto-ovo vegetarian).
Well, maybe just north from central California. We don't really have much use for LA or San Diego but if we bring Oregon and Washington along with us we can create the society from Ecotopia (or maybe even Cascadia).
MUNI is actually pretty good if you can overlook the surly drivers and slow buses. The coverage area and prices are good, the trains/buses run frequently, and they have 24 hour service (albeit in a somewhat limited fashion). BART, on the other hand, is expensive as well has having surly station attendants and slow trains. Not to mention the lack of late-night service makes it useless for going out late in SF if you live in the east bay.
What's the purpose of using multiple user accounts? That's an enormous waste of time, shutting things down, logging in again, etc, and is totally unnecessary.
So, my approach has been to buy a powerful PC, and do all the linux/solaris/bsd/windows stuff on that, and then to have an Apple laptop
Why not just do your development on Mac and be done with it? Of course I don't know what sort of development you're doing, so this may not be practical for you, but the original question was posed by an aspiring web developer. For this kind of work, using a single machine with VMware or whatever will be fine. I do exactly this (OS X + VMware on a MacBook Pro) and it works great.
Contrary to what a lot of people are suggesting, you don't need extra computers at all (in fact, recycle all those old ones, they're only taking up space).
You don't need to worry about performance if you're just learning the basics, and so there's no reason for all kinds of over-engineered setups like separate development and testing environments and stuff. Spend too much time setting up all this junk and you won't have any time left to actually write code.
I do all my development on my laptop. I'm running Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Rails, most of which come stock with OS X, and that's all I need. Add VMware for testing sites in IE and you're done. If you're using Windows, check out WAMP; if you have a Mac, either try MAMP or use the stuff that came with the system (you'll have to install MySQL separately in this case, which is what I did); if you're running another *nix variant it's all just an apt-get or yum away.
I was working with 2GB RAM which was fine for everything but VMware and just yesterday upgraded to 4GB. Two is usable though, so don't even consider this a requirement. As far as that goes, don't worry about testing in IE at all if you're really just doing stuff to learn. Worry about that if/when you decide to make something public. Skip VMware and you can do it all in 1GB easy.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't think I would have to spell out that I took a pay cut of $10k rather than quitting a job that only paid that much. But then, I sometimes forget where I am.
I did, in fact, which is what lead to my eventually striking out on my own.
Come to think of it, working for myself also involved a pay cut for a while. I'm making about the same now as I was working full time (more, some months) but it took six months or so to get up to that level. Those first few months I was making a lot less. But like the first situation I mentioned, ultimately it was well worth it. Best decision I ever made.
Oh, come on, there a lot of things more important than salary. I haven't done it recently but in 2004 I gave up $10k/year because:
a) Commute time: A short train ride instead of a hour+ drive each way
b) Location: Downtown San Francisco instead of Mountain View (~40 miles outside SF)
b) The company: A small company instead of a huge corporation (Verisign, in fact)
c) Interest: I'd actually be able to learn something instead of doing work I was completely uninterested in
d) Hours: I'd be working normal hours instead of graveyard two days/week (with three regular days)
I would have given up a lot more than $10k for all that.
[citation needed]
[weasel words] [citation needed]
Please don't mistake a poorly-written rant for an actual argument.
As well, please don't mistake intentional misrepresentation for something that can simply be "disagreed" with.
For every accusation of left-wing bias on Slashdot, I see at least three comments by extremest Libertarians about how people who can't afford health care somehow don't deserve it or the like. I fail to see the bias you speak of.
Do note that I'm not accusing Slashdot of a Libertarian/right-wing/conservative/social darwinist/what-have-you bias; I'm only pointing that the so-called "liberal bias" doesn't exist here any more than it does in mainstream media as a whole.
Ask me that again after you've walked a new computer owner through it over the phone. Now try it with a directory structure about twice as deep.
Ah, the joys of working ISP phone support in the Win95 days, back when Windows really didn't come with a browser installed. I never understood why the Netscape FTP server directory structure was such a mess either.
You say that like there's something wrong with it. Why wouldn't they be? If I had a product making those kinds of margins I'd be damn proud of it too.
And before you say that they should give up some profits in order to lower their prices, do note that they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves with things as they are, leaving the low-end market to Dell and the like.
Or, more likely, he understands that it's totally irrelevant to the issue at hand.
I'm in a similar position as the poster you're replying to. I was doing sidework off Craigslist (San Francisco) for a while until I was laid off, at which point I decided not to get another job. I've been on one large project since last summer that I found on Craigslist and supplementing it with referral work. I haven't replied to a work ad in six months now. Doing a combination of system administration and web development, I'm making about the same money as I was as a full-time sysadmin but working about 2/3 of the hours, which leave me a nice amount of free time for other things. I don't get paid vacation time, but because I can work from anywhere it really doesn't matter too much (for example, I spent a couple weeks working from Paris recently).
I'll never go back to being an employee.
It sounds to me like you're still an employee. Maybe not an employee of the client but this sort of arrangement is far from being your own boss, whether you have the title "consultant" or not.
I think the original poster meant doing it for yourself, not trading one full-time salaried job for a full-time hourly job for a consulting company.
And if your wife considers a heartfelt gift from her husband to be "ultimately disposable", you also need a new wife.
My wife's wedding ring is an antique gold ring set with a ruby. Neither of us had any interest in supporting the diamond industry, and she just plain preferred the ruby.
I disagree. Working for myself means I can choose the environment I work in, and doing web development means that I, for the most part, don't need Windows.
Of course I keep a copy of WinXP around as a VMware image for testing sites in IE6/7, and I have Office for OS X for opening the occasional Word doc from clients, but that's literally the extent of my Microsoft use. Windows brings absolutely nothing else to my business that I can't get on my Mac laptop and Linux servers.
On the other hand, once you get good at estimating your time, having per-project rates is a sure way to make more money. Estimate the maximum time the job will take, add a reasonable amount for the inevitable delays and overhead (a minimum of 50%), write a clear statement of work (ie, contract) stating what is and is not included. If you get the work done faster, which you will once you get good at these estimates, you've effectively raised your hourly rate for these projects.
Even better is to estimate the value your work will bring to the client and factor that in as well. Read what Alan Weiss has to say on the subject of value billing.
Can you actually provide a source for this claim?
I ask because I'm a 20 year vegetarian (not vegan) who has in the past been active in animal rights circles, I've had lots of vegan friends, I live in Berkeley for god's sake, and I have not once heard anyone suggest that entire plants not be used for food.
The term you're looking for here is "vegetarian". Vegans by definition do not eat any animal products, including meat, eggs, and dairy (eg, milk, cheese, etc). Someone who doesn't eat meat but does eat eggs and dairy is simply a vegetarian (sometimes called a lacto-ovo vegetarian).
... and nothing of value was lost.
Well, maybe just north from central California. We don't really have much use for LA or San Diego but if we bring Oregon and Washington along with us we can create the society from Ecotopia (or maybe even Cascadia).
MUNI is actually pretty good if you can overlook the surly drivers and slow buses. The coverage area and prices are good, the trains/buses run frequently, and they have 24 hour service (albeit in a somewhat limited fashion). BART, on the other hand, is expensive as well has having surly station attendants and slow trains. Not to mention the lack of late-night service makes it useless for going out late in SF if you live in the east bay.
What's the purpose of using multiple user accounts? That's an enormous waste of time, shutting things down, logging in again, etc, and is totally unnecessary.
Why not just do your development on Mac and be done with it? Of course I don't know what sort of development you're doing, so this may not be practical for you, but the original question was posed by an aspiring web developer. For this kind of work, using a single machine with VMware or whatever will be fine. I do exactly this (OS X + VMware on a MacBook Pro) and it works great.
Contrary to what a lot of people are suggesting, you don't need extra computers at all (in fact, recycle all those old ones, they're only taking up space).
You don't need to worry about performance if you're just learning the basics, and so there's no reason for all kinds of over-engineered setups like separate development and testing environments and stuff. Spend too much time setting up all this junk and you won't have any time left to actually write code.
I do all my development on my laptop. I'm running Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Rails, most of which come stock with OS X, and that's all I need. Add VMware for testing sites in IE and you're done. If you're using Windows, check out WAMP; if you have a Mac, either try MAMP or use the stuff that came with the system (you'll have to install MySQL separately in this case, which is what I did); if you're running another *nix variant it's all just an apt-get or yum away.
I was working with 2GB RAM which was fine for everything but VMware and just yesterday upgraded to 4GB. Two is usable though, so don't even consider this a requirement. As far as that goes, don't worry about testing in IE at all if you're really just doing stuff to learn. Worry about that if/when you decide to make something public. Skip VMware and you can do it all in 1GB easy.
As opposed to the blood sucking pigs that expect people to work for free?
Just how do you think this would affect his US citizenship status?