_nrv9's comments

I paid $4,200 for it in San Diego, California. Maybe it can be cheaper elsewhere.

Side effects = NOTHING. Seriously. The operation is legitimately nothing, super duper quick. You walk into a room and in less than fifteen minutes you walk out with perfect vision. It's unbelievable.

Satisfied? Very much. I now have perfect vision. I still forget sometimes. Like I'll take off my shirt at the end of the night and will be pulling it away as if I had glasses on.

Or I'll even go to take off my glasses when I get in bed and realize I don't have glasses.

I will say...everyone throughout life treated me like a "very smart person"(tm) but now that is less so and I'm starting to think the glasses had something to do with it :D

There's something called SMILE if you're interested in surgery. I recently had it done.

I clicked your link and clicked on a couple tabs even but did not find data on what most people have liquid or illiquid. Can you point me to it?

$100k sounds like a lot but....I live in San Diego. All in, it costs about $4,200/month post-tax to live here. Sure, it can be done on much less. That means $50,400/year post-tax. So your $100k whether liquid or not only lasts two years max.

Let's say a real recession occurs and you lose your job. If your $100k is in the asset that crashed -- say real estate (which I like real estate) or speculative tech stocks -- oh boy. You're now probably at $70k hopefully. If it takes you 12 months from losing your job to finding a job. Now you're looking at only $20k left in your account....that is scary.

I know I am being paranoid because you'd get unemployment + could probably find a lower level job quick in the meantime + you would cut your $4200/month to bare minimum. But that's my point, I live in this fear and the $100k provides some peace of mind.

I wish there was i3wm for Mac OS. Would make my life so much better.

I am always terrified of losing my job. It's a fear I've had even though I've been a top performer the entire five years I've been professionally working.

Maybe it's because I grew up poor or because I think things are too good in tech and about to crash any day.

My antidote? $100k in liquidity. Preferably not invested in the NASDAQ.

If tech crashes, you can take your liquid $100k and move to Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, etc. In these countries, you can live well for a decade, sometimes even thirteen years off just $100,000 USD.

I know $100k isn't much and it certainly isn't the $1M - $3M people want for retirement in the US. But it's enough to have peace of mind.

In any creative work, output is dynamic.

If you're working in an assembly line or checkout at the grocery store, your productivity isn't as variable. Assuming customers/inputs are always lined up, you'll process a similar number every hour and the quality is somewhat static.

In cloud infrastructure, I notice quality of work is highly variable. Some engineers will bandaid everything to get the task done. It's easy to do that.

Other engineers create solutions taking into account the current technical environment, business requirements and future concerns. I don't think we should hide from this fact. Software engineering as a profession becomes worth more the more we realize there's a difference in quality and quantity dependent on the engineer's abilities.

>Meanwhile when someone is poor they are expected to have zero failures in judgment and the poor generally have better judgment but when they do have a lapse the effects are catastrophic

You are 100% right.

And to respond to the other commenter -- the first guy didn't have much in savings because he was sending money back to his parents.

That's how bad it is. When you are born into wealth, there's a sort of "rubber band" helping you move up the ladder. When you are born into poverty, that rubber band pulls you down instead of propelling you up.

I can speak to this myself, I have helped my parents/family enormously at cost to my financial wellbeing.

And by the way....when a son/daughter does well, gets into software, makes a healthy $150k salary in SV, that does not change the financials at home. That $150k salary has to keep coming and you have to keep giving it to your family to make a real difference over time. At the same time, you have to pay SV rent, you have to buy a car, go on dates with your significant other, have a life of your own, etc.

> Some had very impressive careers, but when you realize that first opportunity was only because of a parental connection, suddenly it seems a bit hollow.

The first opportunity is always the toughest. Also grew up around wealthy people, vast majority of them fall into the category you describe.

I was lucky to meet someone early in my adulthood who would always stress "What part did YOU do?" "Show me YOUR code"

What I like about him is you can't get the bullshit you describe past him. He always breaks down what you say into the most simplest form to ascertain what truth exists within your words. He won't let you ride another person's coattail.

Yep, we agree!

I think you can have your experience while understanding the massive disparity.

I am the same as you. Purely self-made. Handed nothing.

Here's a situation I saw which changed my view from yours to the person you're replying to:

My friend is successful. He did not go to college since he couldn't afford it. Rather he worked after graduating high school and attained a senior engineering role before his peers had graduated college.

Well...the company he was working for folded. He desperately took whatever the next job was because he was young and did not have much savings to fall back on nor a college degree. That next job was across the country and in his words "was a waste of two years". He stayed at that dead end job for resume purposes in a city he hated but had to relocate to.

Now I have another friend. That friend graduated college, moved to a new city. His parents paid for the first year of rent in the new city while he looked for the best possible job in software. He got a great job.

You see the massive disparity? The first guy essentially threw away two years of his youth working a cubicle farm job because he did not have inherited wealth to fall back on. Today, he's doing very well but that does not change what happened to him.

Seeing that first hand changed my "boot straps" thinking. The world isn't fair although I agree, you can make it more fair.

Wow, I hope to never work with you. You value things that should not be valued in tech. We care about competence, not credentials.

I've interviewed dozens of engineers. Never once looked at their education or gave it any weight. I assess them myself, no need to defer.

Selecting for people from schools you've heard of is probably the wildest thing I've heard in my career.

You are being trolled. The other user does not believe in their arguments. They are just saying it to waste your time.

Under the Donald Trump administration, the US receded from its position of total global hegemony. This backtrack has massively hurt the United States.

How has Apple not fixed this? Looks super easy.

Good job! Kinda funny!

Brendan,

I attended a talk you gave at AWS Re:Invent 2019. You need some serious, serious help.

No company should ever be speaking to you like that. You should be showing companies the door, not the other way around.

Early on in my career I learned most tech companies are absolute garbage and are not worth working for. You're worth a lot more than they are, brother.

Why would that make European valuations lower? I don't understand the implication.

Why would more transparency depress the value of a company?

That was my thought process as well.

If these guys can't seem to make a decent living off their own applications, that's not a good sign.

Yep. I already do this.

Saw it was trending on LinkedIn. There's a LifeHacker article explaining how to use Trello (Kanban) + GTD. I do that for my life tasks.

I look at the board most mornings, it helps keep me on track with life admin as well as career goals.

Try Google Photos.