> Luckily, there’s a corner of the Internet dedicated to breaking the link between “comfort” and money.
The problem with this is that it moves in the wrong direction. You spent all this time learning how to earn more money for your time. Then what do you do after you earn a bunch of money? Figure out how to trade your time for money again, just in different arenas? Why, so you can avoid having to spend more time doing what you specialized in? This isn't the direction of leisure.
The MMM types always are quick to say that they actually enjoy all these little things they do to avoid having to put out more money for daily essentials. Cloth diapering and seems the be the poster-child for these sorts of things. Also using single-blade razors. Working on your own car.
Doing these things properly requires learning more skills. But time spent learning these skills is time not spent engineering. It almost seems more of a irrational reaction against modernity than it does an actual path towards greater impact.
You need to be trading the money you're making through specialization for time not spent learning more skills to be going in the direction of more actual leisure. (what I call "fuck you time". Much better IMO than fuck you money.) You use some of the freed-up time to make more money, and the rest of it towards leisure activities. It's possible for your skill-set to be so valuable that you can maintain ridiculous incomes on, as Tim Ferriss puts it, four hours a week.
Every dollar I can spend on not learning a new skill is a minute I can put towards pushing my flywheel.
> Why, so you can avoid having to spend more time doing what you specialized in?
Yes. Part of enjoying life -- at least for most people -- is taking part in challenges and endeavors in a wide range of activities. If you can work for 4 hours a week and maintain a high income, this would fit the bill but probably not realistic for most people (do you have suggestions besides managing a portfolio of capital, or free-lancing?). MMM is not saying we should do everything ourselves, but to be smart about what we do save have more time for other activities. This is how humans have been biologically desired over millions of years -- to be adaptable and have a wide range of skills. Legs for running, hands for climbing and building and fixing physical objects, noses for smelling. Skills that are unnecessary for simply writing code but useful to use. The flywheel sounds a bit too mechanical and less in tune with our biological needs.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Yeah, the MMM manifesto would never work for me - it basically says that I would have to be setting aside over 90% of my income (given my salary range), which wouldn't allow for things like a newer car, owning a house over 300 sq. ft., or traveling to Arizona to visit relatives.
Personally, I refuse to give up my life today for the possibility of a life tomorrow. There's too few guarantees that there will be a tomorrow.
"Doing these things properly requires learning more skills. But time spent learning these skills is time not spent engineering. It almost seems more of a irrational reaction against modernity than it does an actual path towards greater impact."
I don't think it was about the size of impact but about fixing your work/life balance. When it's skewing too much towards "all work/no play", most people burn out. By changing to learning something new and different, they get refreshed.
Personally I think I may have to write an article called "Join the Leisure Class, Leave the Engineering Class".
For me, I stopped working in engineering and life is awesome. Having made enough to pay off the mortgage and with leftover savings, I don't think I will need to work again. But when I was working I actually did get a certification in a completely different field of welding/machining.
MMM definitely makes most sense for people who enjoy doing the sorts of things MMM enjoys doing. I happen to really like a lot of the around-the-house type DIY projects, so it's a good fit for me, but I don't think there's a moral imperative to it. MMM sets the "$30k/year" bar for frugal family living with his DIY lifestyle, but there are plenty of people who do it differently. My wife's extended family are for the most part recent immigrants, so a lot of them live in that range (comfortably enough!) with a completely different type of frugality.
Sorry, but i cant find a reference to what MMM means anywhere. Im guessing you guys aren't talking about the Moon Miners Manifesto.. or talking about enjoying something "mmm.mmm.mmm"
Having skills saves you both time and money in the long run. Let's say your toilet is broken. If you can fix it yourself, you need maybe a couple hours. You can do those couple hours any time, for example, on the weekend when you weren't going to be working for money anyway.
If you don't have any skills, you have to pay a plumber to come fix it, for maybe $200. That's already four hours of working at $50/hour. Plus, you have to be home to let in the plumber which is most likely during business hours, so that's maybe another 2-4 hours that you're not at work. Total time cost: 8 hours.
How long does it take to learn how to fix a toilet? Remember, you're a freaking engineer. A toilet is not that complicated. You should be able to watch a youtube video and learn just about everything you need to know in 10-15 minutes. Time spent learning to be self-sufficient pays itself back very quickly.
There's also additional risks to being overspecialized. What if the thing you specialized in becomes obsolete? Now you have no way to trade your time for money and you're absolutely useless for doing anything else.
I just wanted to mention that MMM sometimes rubs me the wrong way too. A more analytical approach that I found more thorough and more intriguing is at "Extreme Early Retirement" here:
Granted, the author of this book is quirky and ends up doing a lot of work that you could hire someone to do for $10 an hour. But the author stressed that- at least for him- he'd rather spend his team mending clothes or fixing his bike that being in academia (his prior career).
> Cloth diapering and seems the be the poster-child for these sorts of things.
Cloth diapering (as currently practiced, with fancy diapers and washing machines) is not cost effective at all; it's (arguably) environmentally responsible, extra butt padding, and cute.
I'm married with 5 kids. We live in rural Wyoming (no income tax, bought a comfortable house for $86k). We've always lived well below our income so we have no debt and sufficient savings.
I mostly choose to work on "products". That helps me focus on problems that people actually care about without any of the startup pressures. Although, I've also written several open source libraries that I thought the community might like.
I started by telling my employer that I would only work 4 days each week. I spent Fridays working on a cool idea my brother and I had. That idea proved useful enough to pay the bills so I quit my job.
I'm much more relaxed now and spend better quality time with my kids. In hindsight, it would be worth almost any sacrifice to get to this point again.
I had money saved up, and for visa reasons had to spend a year outside the USA. Seemed like a perfect time to indulge in some risky ideas, especially those which were a little idealistic.
It ended up being incredibly depressing and I got very little done.
It's hard enough to build a product when you're in a startup or a smart team. In my opinion it's nearly impossible if you're going it alone. And unless some of your friends have an exactly coincidental amount of leisure time or extra energy, you probably won't make progress.
It's especially bad if you're taking on something that you think is good for the world, because now you have extra pressure, but no extra motivation.
Plus, things that are good for the world tend to be products, and not just tools. Those are harder.
I know you, the reader reading this, are exempt from this, and you're an island of personal productivity that needs no human inputs. That's how I used to think, too. Or at least, I told myself that I was more capable than others who said the same thing and who similarly failed.
The main problem is that you think you're freeing yourself from distraction and you're just going to have 100% of time to work on something. But in the process you might also free yourself from people to tell you you are overbuilding, from customers to tell you you're doing it wrong, from the social interactions that make the day brighter. And you might feel the urge to keep it all behind the curtain until The Great Unveiling. This has the effect of making all your small progresses, in the meantime, feel useless. Success recedes further and further away, and human emotional feedback loops don't usually work in those situations.
So I suggest if you're going to use your money and time this way:
- Take on something small. REALLY small. Then cut it to 10% of that size. Then release it. Iterate if it seems to be working out and building a community.
or:
- Be very young and with enough privilege to not have to worry about debt. You have leisure time, few expenses or commitments, and extra energy, and so does almost everyone you know.
or:
- Make sure others are invested in your success and have a commitment to it that's at least in the same order of magnitude as your own. A funded startup is a wonderful way of focusing commitment like this, and ensuring that you have to talk to people all the time. But there are other models.
"An engineer earning an amazingly-not-uncommon salary of $100k/year ends up living in an expensive place like San Francisco, starts spending money on some admittedly lovely luxuries, and quickly becomes convinced that her spending is just about right for a comfortable life."
Certainly, one way to manage all this is to not live in a place like San Francisco. But I think it is important to make sure people know that lovely luxuries aren't really what forces people with families to focus on money, and that if you do try to raise a family in SF on the median developer's pay (about $114k a year in SF), you'll find engineers don't really have "more money than <we> need", though of course there's always a version of poverty or struggling that would make raising a family on $114k in any expensive city a cakewalk.
Just keep in mind, the median price for a house here is over 1 mil, and that 1 mil will get you a 2br, maybe 3, south of 280 or maybe the outer sunset. OK areas. Full time childcare is about $24,000 a year. Those are really the whopper expenses (that and health care).
Are those "lovely luxuries"? Well, maybe living in SF is a lovely luxury. I like it here, though I'm really here because I grew up here, have two kids in school, and have so much family around that I'm sort of superglued at this point. But yeah, I could leave. All in all, I think there are better places (no, I'm not like some pac northwester trying to get you scared of the rain, if it's your choice to live here you should be welcome in SF, but I really do mean this, I'm really not sure SF is worth it if you have the option of living somewhere else).
I'm not trying to be hard on the author of this piece, but I do think it's important for people to know that engineers in SF even in dual income families struggle with housing and child care payments, not with luxury cars, expensive vacation, lovely luxuries.
I'm not saying you are not making a good use of your money - I make similar tradeoffs. But we have the choice. Our income affords us that choice. There are people who do not get to make those tradeoffs, they do not have the choice of living in "OK areas", or paying for childcare.
> I'm not trying to be hard on the author of this piece, but I do think it's important for people to know that engineers in SF even in dual income families struggle with housing and child care payments, not with luxury cars, expensive vacation, lovely luxuries.
Choosing to work in a locale where a median home price is a million dollars is a luxury. Engineers could pick from other metro areas, and get fairly close to $100K/year with much lower costs of living (Austin, Dallas, Durham come to mind, there are many more).
Yeah, I think living in SF is a luxury -- although I know that's painful to say to someone who really has roots there. I lived there for four years, and it's an amazing town. Living there also puts you in the middle of a network of bright creative people, so it probably makes you more productive. I'm not saying it's easy, just that we have choices.
Something to consider is risk. Here's what goes through my head: I can plan for how much I need to earn throughout my life if everything is "normal" and predictable. But what if one of my kids is born in need of some monumental amount of care? What if something happens to my own physical / mental health, or that of my spouse? What if the economy goes into a long term downturn and we have to live on savings indefinitely? What if we have to leave the country due to political turmoil? (One of my parents is a refugee).
Thinking about these things made me kinda appreciate why the rich want to get richer. Even if I'm earning more than strictly necessary for subsistence under normal conditions, our economy / society is set up so that the only source of a safety net for my family is my own productivity right now. I wouldn't mind growing that safety net to infinity, so long as it imposes no externality on my own family. This is what keeps me in the rat race.
A better safety net would make people think less about going to such extremes.
I'm lucky to have a mentally rewarding job with minimal "price" in terms of things like office politics and bullshit. My opinion might change if this situation changes.
I am currently doing this. I am much more productive compared to having a corporate job, but it is really hard on your family. There seems to be an arms race on doing everything for your kids these days. That means moving to a good school district (usually in very expensive places), paying for and driving to tons of activities, organic food, nice stuff. I have realized none of these things are possible while we are living off savings.
That said I feel much happier now being able to focus on a project that is my own creation. I was frequently angry everyday I had to split my time between paid work and my own project, leaving even less time for my family. (To be honest, in terms of total work, I got more done, but was miserable.) I frequently think about the consequences if my project ends up being a failure, but if I never tried to create something on my own, I'm pretty sure I would regret it on my deathbed.
My advice is to do this engineering leisure time before you have a family to support.
<shamelessplug>
If anyone wants a preview of what I'm building, please check out https://solveforall.com/. It's a hackable search engine that can be enhanced with user-provided data, programs, and third party APIs. I'm currently working on making it much more customizable and private, so hopefully I'll be able to publicly announce it in a 2-3 more months. </shamelessplug>
One problem as mentioned in another thread is that it is very hard to get feedback while working alone. Everyone is so busy these days caught up in the rat race and their families, and I don't blame them. It would be nice to have some tech friends at work to bounce ideas off of. If anyone has any feedback for me, I'd greatly appreciate it!
This is actually exactly what I want to do, although I just started working so for obvious reasons it isn't a reality yet. How long does it take to save up enough money that you wouldn't need to work though?
Also, it seems like eventually you'd run out of money unless you can just retire early, in which case, you have the issue of explaining why you've been out of work for so long and proving you still are up to the task.
The last issue I have is that things I want to enjoy in my leisure time are costly. For example, I'd love to finish my degree and study music, but these things cost money. I want to continue studying piano, but pianos cost money, getting a house costs money, and lessons cost money. I'm sure I would still program and do projects, but it's not the only thing I happen to enjoy. Maybe not everyone has expensive hobbies like I do but I bet a lot of people, for whatever reason, want kids. Those things are expensive!
Also, I take issue with the author assuming that we spend money on luxuries just because we make more. At least for myself, this is not true at all. I've had jobs that were very stressful, and getting things I liked was my means of destressing and justifying staying at my job instead of just becoming a teacher or something (Not that teachers don't have stressful jobs, I just wonder if I'd enjoy it more). I think I'd have trouble keeping some jobs if I couldn't enjoy spending some of what I made.
- On how long it takes to save up enough money that you don't need to work: depends on your assumptions, but yes it takes some years of work. There are lots of people who write on this, I especially like: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
- I don't personally have enough money to pay for my current living expenses for the 70-odd years I hope to remain alive. It was an important shift for me when I stopped thinking this was necessary. I have enough money to glide for several years, and I'm confident that either some money will come my way during those years (and I believe it's a little easier to make money when you're not worried so much about it), or I will at least have enough time to notice I'm running out and adjust course. I'm not too worried about the "hole in my resume". If you do interesting stuff with your life, you'll always have a good story to tell. Maybe your story isn't optimized for going up a certain career ladder, but who cares?
- I don't think luxuries are bad, and I think you spending money on a piano could be an awesome use of your time on earth. I just think we don't realize quite how many choices we have. I know lots of poor musicians find ways to get access to pianos, and owning a house out here in 29 Palms is certainly not too costly. But that doesn't mean you have to do it that way!
- I also spent more money while I was working long hours in part to "de-stress". While I don't think it was strictly necessary, I don't think it's crazy. It's just useful to remember that those "de-stressing" costs disappear when you leave the stressful situation.
> I want to continue studying piano, but pianos cost money, getting a house costs money, and lessons cost money.
Given the difficulty people experience in getting rid of pianos, and the constant flood of pianos, a piano might not cost you much money; you might even be able to get paid to take a nice piano off someone's hands: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/arts/music/for-more-pianos...
Re: piano - for most use cases, mid-to-high range digital pianos are more than good enough nowadays. They don't require tuning, they fit in even fairly small apartments, and they can be moved with relative ease. It's not uncommon to see professional musicians using digital; the action and sound are at least comparable to the real thing.
Someone in my area sold me an old Roland RD-500 in excellent condition, two amps, and a stand for $500. Total cost including van rental to move it, music stand, and a bunch of sheet music: $700-800. Not sure what an equivalent setup would cost new, but I'd wager somewhere in the $1.5-3k range.
Why should we assign "meaning" to leisure? Why does everything you do have to be meaningful? Reminds me of a lyric from Cat Power - Metal Heart: "How selfish of you to believe in the meaning of all the things you do."
Engineers don't make that much money. Yes, I live a middle-class lifestyle. But even without owning a car, not having a child, etc. After saving for retirement and eating healthy food, I simply don't have that much savings to start any business that requires a decent amount of capital to get going - at least not without burning through everything fairly quickly. At most I could take a couple of months off and destroy that savings the buffer against job loss and other emergencies.
I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...
>>But even without owning a car, not having a child, etc.
>>I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...
Last year I lived in Austin TX, owned a car, ate healthy, lived 15 minutes from the city center and made 29000 before taxes. Of which I managed to save 15000.
The world doesn't think software engineers are so rich, we think anyone above 50K is rich, because for a lot of us thats double what we make a year, and many of us are supporting families on that. The idea that some one making 75-100k could be living paycheck to paycheck is fucking baffling to the half the population making less than 42k per household.
> I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...
Everybody know how much a programmer makes in Silicon Valley, and think everyone in the industry is paid accordingly. Also, high cost of living in SF area is not that well known (or at least, not understood to be correlated) by the masses.
It's a bit like saying every football/basketball player is a millionaire. Those that play in the professional leagues, yes. The ones that end up coaching pee-whee teams, not so much.
The US median household income is ~$50k/year, while the US median personal income is ~$35k/year. The average Bay Area software engineer earns ~$100k/year, which is above the 90th percentile of US personal income...
...and if you want to talk global, $100k/year is beyond the wildest dreams of most everyone on Earth. (For that matter, so is starting a capital-intensive business.)
You can probably see where this perception comes from.
Because even in the midwest it's not difficult for an individual engineer to make twice the median household income. That doesn't make you rich, but I have no idea how anybody could think that's not well off.
It always drives me crazy when people that make 50k+ a year complain about not having money. I live on about $500-$600 a month and I'm fine. Granted, not everyone is ablebodied and living within biking distance of their school/work, but most certainly could be, especially with a little effort.
Not needing money is incredibly liberating, I advise everyone to just try it for a year.
I agree with you. My current life style ends up around $7,000 a year. I live in a very affluent mid-east city. I don't own a car (15 minute walk to downtown), I don't eat out constantly (I prefer healthy meals), and I don't buy a bunch of luxury junk. I can honestly say that I do not feel like I'm struggling at all.
Having the 'standard' car, house, and family are unnecessary luxuries. It's fine if you choose to do these things but it's silly to me that people feel poor making 50k+. I would argue that if you are struggling with those types of income, your lifestyle is severely out of whack. You don't have to keep up the Jonses to lead a very happy, healthy life.
The benefits of living cheaply are pretty obvious and already pretty well covered. The ability to work on whatever I want, whenever I want all without ever having to think about the personal finance side of it, is just incredibly freeing.
Its nice to see a name for this. I am considering joining the Engineering Leisure Class this winter. My wife got a new job which will comfortably support our family, so I will have some flexibility. My plan is to look for jobs also, but only apply for ones I would love.
If that doesn't work out then I will find something fun to do that may not pay. This will be some combination of taking Tactition Programming seriously, and working on open source lab specific software that my wife uses for crystallography.
> You’re not limited to small ideas, either: part-time volunteers in the open source community have built huge parts of the modern world.
Am I wrong in thinking that, in fact, all major open-source projects continue to thrive because there are big established companies supporting them? Where corporate support is lacking, the project doesn't do too well in the long term (I'm mainly thinking of the OpenSSL case from a few months back).
While I'm sure this sounds great in theory, I can't help but interpret this as coming from someone who is lucky enough to have the privilege of not being broke.
If you're part of the lucky privileged elite that actually has money to burn, then yeah, go for it. For the rest of us, though, saying "you should stop working for a paycheck so you have more time to do other things" basically translates to "you should stop eating, drinking water, and breathing oxygen so you have more time to do other things", which is plain nonsensical unless one happens to be a robot (which, while I'd love to be a robot, isn't really in the cards right now).
We aren't rich by any means... Don't start thinking about dropping off the face of the earth or going into philanthropy if you still only have a 6 figure bank account, like many of us do... Also don't forget about what happened in 2000. Engineers should probably work more but spend less money because things aren't so easy in less favorable conditions
One kid is on the way -- and yes, I have no idea how children are going to affect our lives! I've considered going in two totally different directions: I might go for a high-paying full-time job so that my wife and I can pay for a nanny and all those other modern affluent child-raising tools, or I might try to go full-bore stay-at-home Dad changing diapers and raising the kids to grow their own food in the backyard and make their own clothes. More likely I'll muddle somewhere in between, but I want to go into it with as many options as possible, and a clear idea of what we want for ourselves and our kids.
This is exactly what I'm building with Glitch Club. It's a community of talented engineers who could be creating great things if they had the support of others and the community feedback on their work daily. Check it out:
At the moment I'm exploring other directions with it, such as having it as a story telling platform, but the original idea was a startup/engineering sounding board. With reply videos able to be added to the existing videos there, and smart conversations happening through video replying to video.
Living comfortably on little money is a skill. MMM calls it the "frugality muscle". If you don't understand how to do it, it's not because it's impossible. It's just that you haven't learned how.
In parallel to the skill acquisition there is a change in mindset, replacing the ideal of comfort with the ideals of strength and self-sufficiency.
[+] [-] vinceguidry|11 years ago|reply
The problem with this is that it moves in the wrong direction. You spent all this time learning how to earn more money for your time. Then what do you do after you earn a bunch of money? Figure out how to trade your time for money again, just in different arenas? Why, so you can avoid having to spend more time doing what you specialized in? This isn't the direction of leisure.
The MMM types always are quick to say that they actually enjoy all these little things they do to avoid having to put out more money for daily essentials. Cloth diapering and seems the be the poster-child for these sorts of things. Also using single-blade razors. Working on your own car.
Doing these things properly requires learning more skills. But time spent learning these skills is time not spent engineering. It almost seems more of a irrational reaction against modernity than it does an actual path towards greater impact.
You need to be trading the money you're making through specialization for time not spent learning more skills to be going in the direction of more actual leisure. (what I call "fuck you time". Much better IMO than fuck you money.) You use some of the freed-up time to make more money, and the rest of it towards leisure activities. It's possible for your skill-set to be so valuable that you can maintain ridiculous incomes on, as Tim Ferriss puts it, four hours a week.
Every dollar I can spend on not learning a new skill is a minute I can put towards pushing my flywheel.
[+] [-] jtzhou|11 years ago|reply
Yes. Part of enjoying life -- at least for most people -- is taking part in challenges and endeavors in a wide range of activities. If you can work for 4 hours a week and maintain a high income, this would fit the bill but probably not realistic for most people (do you have suggestions besides managing a portfolio of capital, or free-lancing?). MMM is not saying we should do everything ourselves, but to be smart about what we do save have more time for other activities. This is how humans have been biologically desired over millions of years -- to be adaptable and have a wide range of skills. Legs for running, hands for climbing and building and fixing physical objects, noses for smelling. Skills that are unnecessary for simply writing code but useful to use. The flywheel sounds a bit too mechanical and less in tune with our biological needs.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." — Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
[+] [-] ForHackernews|11 years ago|reply
Tim Ferriss' extremely valuable skillset is being a flim-flam man / borderline scam artist who markets questionable pesudoscience nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ferriss#BrainQUICKEN
[+] [-] falcolas|11 years ago|reply
Personally, I refuse to give up my life today for the possibility of a life tomorrow. There's too few guarantees that there will be a tomorrow.
[+] [-] gluggymug|11 years ago|reply
I don't think it was about the size of impact but about fixing your work/life balance. When it's skewing too much towards "all work/no play", most people burn out. By changing to learning something new and different, they get refreshed.
Personally I think I may have to write an article called "Join the Leisure Class, Leave the Engineering Class".
For me, I stopped working in engineering and life is awesome. Having made enough to pay off the mortgage and with leftover savings, I don't think I will need to work again. But when I was working I actually did get a certification in a completely different field of welding/machining.
[+] [-] ChrisLoer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnem|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imgabe|11 years ago|reply
If you don't have any skills, you have to pay a plumber to come fix it, for maybe $200. That's already four hours of working at $50/hour. Plus, you have to be home to let in the plumber which is most likely during business hours, so that's maybe another 2-4 hours that you're not at work. Total time cost: 8 hours.
How long does it take to learn how to fix a toilet? Remember, you're a freaking engineer. A toilet is not that complicated. You should be able to watch a youtube video and learn just about everything you need to know in 10-15 minutes. Time spent learning to be self-sufficient pays itself back very quickly.
There's also additional risks to being overspecialized. What if the thing you specialized in becomes obsolete? Now you have no way to trade your time for money and you're absolutely useless for doing anything else.
[+] [-] hspak|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s73v3r|11 years ago|reply
For me, single blade razors offer a better shave. The fact that it's cheaper is just a bonus.
[+] [-] Modernnomad84|11 years ago|reply
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/
His book is especially interesting.
Granted, the author of this book is quirky and ends up doing a lot of work that you could hire someone to do for $10 an hour. But the author stressed that- at least for him- he'd rather spend his team mending clothes or fixing his bike that being in academia (his prior career).
[+] [-] gohrt|11 years ago|reply
Cloth diapering (as currently practiced, with fancy diapers and washing machines) is not cost effective at all; it's (arguably) environmentally responsible, extra butt padding, and cute.
[+] [-] mndrix|11 years ago|reply
I'm married with 5 kids. We live in rural Wyoming (no income tax, bought a comfortable house for $86k). We've always lived well below our income so we have no debt and sufficient savings.
I mostly choose to work on "products". That helps me focus on problems that people actually care about without any of the startup pressures. Although, I've also written several open source libraries that I thought the community might like.
I started by telling my employer that I would only work 4 days each week. I spent Fridays working on a cool idea my brother and I had. That idea proved useful enough to pay the bills so I quit my job.
I'm much more relaxed now and spend better quality time with my kids. In hindsight, it would be worth almost any sacrifice to get to this point again.
[+] [-] neilk|11 years ago|reply
I had money saved up, and for visa reasons had to spend a year outside the USA. Seemed like a perfect time to indulge in some risky ideas, especially those which were a little idealistic.
It ended up being incredibly depressing and I got very little done.
It's hard enough to build a product when you're in a startup or a smart team. In my opinion it's nearly impossible if you're going it alone. And unless some of your friends have an exactly coincidental amount of leisure time or extra energy, you probably won't make progress.
It's especially bad if you're taking on something that you think is good for the world, because now you have extra pressure, but no extra motivation.
Plus, things that are good for the world tend to be products, and not just tools. Those are harder.
I know you, the reader reading this, are exempt from this, and you're an island of personal productivity that needs no human inputs. That's how I used to think, too. Or at least, I told myself that I was more capable than others who said the same thing and who similarly failed.
The main problem is that you think you're freeing yourself from distraction and you're just going to have 100% of time to work on something. But in the process you might also free yourself from people to tell you you are overbuilding, from customers to tell you you're doing it wrong, from the social interactions that make the day brighter. And you might feel the urge to keep it all behind the curtain until The Great Unveiling. This has the effect of making all your small progresses, in the meantime, feel useless. Success recedes further and further away, and human emotional feedback loops don't usually work in those situations.
So I suggest if you're going to use your money and time this way:
- Take on something small. REALLY small. Then cut it to 10% of that size. Then release it. Iterate if it seems to be working out and building a community.
or:
- Be very young and with enough privilege to not have to worry about debt. You have leisure time, few expenses or commitments, and extra energy, and so does almost everyone you know.
or:
- Make sure others are invested in your success and have a commitment to it that's at least in the same order of magnitude as your own. A funded startup is a wonderful way of focusing commitment like this, and ensuring that you have to talk to people all the time. But there are other models.
[+] [-] geebee|11 years ago|reply
Certainly, one way to manage all this is to not live in a place like San Francisco. But I think it is important to make sure people know that lovely luxuries aren't really what forces people with families to focus on money, and that if you do try to raise a family in SF on the median developer's pay (about $114k a year in SF), you'll find engineers don't really have "more money than <we> need", though of course there's always a version of poverty or struggling that would make raising a family on $114k in any expensive city a cakewalk.
Just keep in mind, the median price for a house here is over 1 mil, and that 1 mil will get you a 2br, maybe 3, south of 280 or maybe the outer sunset. OK areas. Full time childcare is about $24,000 a year. Those are really the whopper expenses (that and health care).
Are those "lovely luxuries"? Well, maybe living in SF is a lovely luxury. I like it here, though I'm really here because I grew up here, have two kids in school, and have so much family around that I'm sort of superglued at this point. But yeah, I could leave. All in all, I think there are better places (no, I'm not like some pac northwester trying to get you scared of the rain, if it's your choice to live here you should be welcome in SF, but I really do mean this, I'm really not sure SF is worth it if you have the option of living somewhere else).
I'm not trying to be hard on the author of this piece, but I do think it's important for people to know that engineers in SF even in dual income families struggle with housing and child care payments, not with luxury cars, expensive vacation, lovely luxuries.
[+] [-] scott_s|11 years ago|reply
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/upshot/letter-from-the-edi...
I'm not saying you are not making a good use of your money - I make similar tradeoffs. But we have the choice. Our income affords us that choice. There are people who do not get to make those tradeoffs, they do not have the choice of living in "OK areas", or paying for childcare.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|11 years ago|reply
Choosing to work in a locale where a median home price is a million dollars is a luxury. Engineers could pick from other metro areas, and get fairly close to $100K/year with much lower costs of living (Austin, Dallas, Durham come to mind, there are many more).
[+] [-] ChrisLoer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gohrt|11 years ago|reply
You don't pay this on "a median developer's salary". Most children have two parents.
[+] [-] analog31|11 years ago|reply
Thinking about these things made me kinda appreciate why the rich want to get richer. Even if I'm earning more than strictly necessary for subsistence under normal conditions, our economy / society is set up so that the only source of a safety net for my family is my own productivity right now. I wouldn't mind growing that safety net to infinity, so long as it imposes no externality on my own family. This is what keeps me in the rat race.
A better safety net would make people think less about going to such extremes.
I'm lucky to have a mentally rewarding job with minimal "price" in terms of things like office politics and bullshit. My opinion might change if this situation changes.
[+] [-] solveforall|11 years ago|reply
That said I feel much happier now being able to focus on a project that is my own creation. I was frequently angry everyday I had to split my time between paid work and my own project, leaving even less time for my family. (To be honest, in terms of total work, I got more done, but was miserable.) I frequently think about the consequences if my project ends up being a failure, but if I never tried to create something on my own, I'm pretty sure I would regret it on my deathbed.
My advice is to do this engineering leisure time before you have a family to support.
<shamelessplug> If anyone wants a preview of what I'm building, please check out https://solveforall.com/. It's a hackable search engine that can be enhanced with user-provided data, programs, and third party APIs. I'm currently working on making it much more customizable and private, so hopefully I'll be able to publicly announce it in a 2-3 more months. </shamelessplug>
One problem as mentioned in another thread is that it is very hard to get feedback while working alone. Everyone is so busy these days caught up in the rat race and their families, and I don't blame them. It would be nice to have some tech friends at work to bounce ideas off of. If anyone has any feedback for me, I'd greatly appreciate it!
[+] [-] rifung|11 years ago|reply
Also, it seems like eventually you'd run out of money unless you can just retire early, in which case, you have the issue of explaining why you've been out of work for so long and proving you still are up to the task.
The last issue I have is that things I want to enjoy in my leisure time are costly. For example, I'd love to finish my degree and study music, but these things cost money. I want to continue studying piano, but pianos cost money, getting a house costs money, and lessons cost money. I'm sure I would still program and do projects, but it's not the only thing I happen to enjoy. Maybe not everyone has expensive hobbies like I do but I bet a lot of people, for whatever reason, want kids. Those things are expensive!
Also, I take issue with the author assuming that we spend money on luxuries just because we make more. At least for myself, this is not true at all. I've had jobs that were very stressful, and getting things I liked was my means of destressing and justifying staying at my job instead of just becoming a teacher or something (Not that teachers don't have stressful jobs, I just wonder if I'd enjoy it more). I think I'd have trouble keeping some jobs if I couldn't enjoy spending some of what I made.
[+] [-] ChrisLoer|11 years ago|reply
- I don't personally have enough money to pay for my current living expenses for the 70-odd years I hope to remain alive. It was an important shift for me when I stopped thinking this was necessary. I have enough money to glide for several years, and I'm confident that either some money will come my way during those years (and I believe it's a little easier to make money when you're not worried so much about it), or I will at least have enough time to notice I'm running out and adjust course. I'm not too worried about the "hole in my resume". If you do interesting stuff with your life, you'll always have a good story to tell. Maybe your story isn't optimized for going up a certain career ladder, but who cares?
- I don't think luxuries are bad, and I think you spending money on a piano could be an awesome use of your time on earth. I just think we don't realize quite how many choices we have. I know lots of poor musicians find ways to get access to pianos, and owning a house out here in 29 Palms is certainly not too costly. But that doesn't mean you have to do it that way!
- I also spent more money while I was working long hours in part to "de-stress". While I don't think it was strictly necessary, I don't think it's crazy. It's just useful to remember that those "de-stressing" costs disappear when you leave the stressful situation.
[+] [-] gwern|11 years ago|reply
Given the difficulty people experience in getting rid of pianos, and the constant flood of pianos, a piano might not cost you much money; you might even be able to get paid to take a nice piano off someone's hands: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/arts/music/for-more-pianos...
[+] [-] candu|11 years ago|reply
Someone in my area sold me an old Roland RD-500 in excellent condition, two amps, and a stand for $500. Total cost including van rental to move it, music stand, and a bunch of sheet music: $700-800. Not sure what an equivalent setup would cost new, but I'd wager somewhere in the $1.5-3k range.
[+] [-] x3n0ph3n3|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gluggymug|11 years ago|reply
I.e. The itch we instinctively don't bother scratching when we are too busy working. We need to value that itch so we take the time to scratch.
[+] [-] dreamdu5t|11 years ago|reply
I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...
[+] [-] Avshalom|11 years ago|reply
>>I don't get why the world thinks software engineers are so rich...
Last year I lived in Austin TX, owned a car, ate healthy, lived 15 minutes from the city center and made 29000 before taxes. Of which I managed to save 15000.
The world doesn't think software engineers are so rich, we think anyone above 50K is rich, because for a lot of us thats double what we make a year, and many of us are supporting families on that. The idea that some one making 75-100k could be living paycheck to paycheck is fucking baffling to the half the population making less than 42k per household.
[+] [-] crpatino|11 years ago|reply
Everybody know how much a programmer makes in Silicon Valley, and think everyone in the industry is paid accordingly. Also, high cost of living in SF area is not that well known (or at least, not understood to be correlated) by the masses.
It's a bit like saying every football/basketball player is a millionaire. Those that play in the professional leagues, yes. The ones that end up coaching pee-whee teams, not so much.
[+] [-] candu|11 years ago|reply
...and if you want to talk global, $100k/year is beyond the wildest dreams of most everyone on Earth. (For that matter, so is starting a capital-intensive business.)
You can probably see where this perception comes from.
[+] [-] dionidium|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterWalter|11 years ago|reply
Not needing money is incredibly liberating, I advise everyone to just try it for a year.
[+] [-] greenjellybean|11 years ago|reply
Having the 'standard' car, house, and family are unnecessary luxuries. It's fine if you choose to do these things but it's silly to me that people feel poor making 50k+. I would argue that if you are struggling with those types of income, your lifestyle is severely out of whack. You don't have to keep up the Jonses to lead a very happy, healthy life.
The benefits of living cheaply are pretty obvious and already pretty well covered. The ability to work on whatever I want, whenever I want all without ever having to think about the personal finance side of it, is just incredibly freeing.
[+] [-] sukilot|11 years ago|reply
$100/mo for rice and beans, $70/mo for water,trash,electric,heat,telecom ; $400/mo for rent, ???
Do your kids have their own jobs? Your spouse doesn't, because someone has to watch the kids, and that is over $600/mo alone.
[+] [-] s73v3r|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desbo|11 years ago|reply
The article is idealistic bullshit.
[+] [-] chrisBob|11 years ago|reply
If that doesn't work out then I will find something fun to do that may not pay. This will be some combination of taking Tactition Programming seriously, and working on open source lab specific software that my wife uses for crystallography.
[+] [-] scribu|11 years ago|reply
Am I wrong in thinking that, in fact, all major open-source projects continue to thrive because there are big established companies supporting them? Where corporate support is lacking, the project doesn't do too well in the long term (I'm mainly thinking of the OpenSSL case from a few months back).
[+] [-] gaius|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisLoer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] velocitypsycho|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|11 years ago|reply
If you're part of the lucky privileged elite that actually has money to burn, then yeah, go for it. For the rest of us, though, saying "you should stop working for a paycheck so you have more time to do other things" basically translates to "you should stop eating, drinking water, and breathing oxygen so you have more time to do other things", which is plain nonsensical unless one happens to be a robot (which, while I'd love to be a robot, isn't really in the cards right now).
[+] [-] swagmeister|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperbovine|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisLoer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mndrix|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjacobs|11 years ago|reply
http://glitchclub.com
At the moment I'm exploring other directions with it, such as having it as a story telling platform, but the original idea was a startup/engineering sounding board. With reply videos able to be added to the existing videos there, and smart conversations happening through video replying to video.
[+] [-] nick_urban|11 years ago|reply
In parallel to the skill acquisition there is a change in mindset, replacing the ideal of comfort with the ideals of strength and self-sufficiency.