Who are these people? Probably in their 20s, high paying job out of school, don't give a hoot about saving money and just live it up while the going's good. I can't imagine anyone else going for $4000/mo apartments.
I'm extremely confused as to how people aren't able to find anything for less than $4k/mo. It didn't seem all that unusual to find places for mid 1000s if you're sharing a place and not living downtown, and this is when I was looking less than a month ago. I ended up going with a 2.7k place downtown to myself, junior 1 bed.
It's more than I wanted to pay initially, but 4k minimum seems like a bald-faced lie.
Article doesn't say 4K is minimum. It says 350 sq ft is going for $2000 and 1 bed room apartments near Twitter headquater is going for $4000. If you are sharing for mid-1000s then total cost of apartment comes to ~3500 which is quite inline with what article says. BTW, where I live, you can get 3 bed room apartment with a garage and view of mountains for $1700 and commute of < 0.5 hr to major tech companies. And I thought THAT was too high.
I very much agree. I hope that, capitalism, ironically enough for DRM, is the probably always the solution to overstepped DRM remedies. Regardless of the issue of piracy, which I am not advocating.
For instance there will always be a market for custom computing and "PCs", and so non-locked PCs will (hopefully) always exist in a capitalist environment. That market I think ultimately circumvents any attempt at ubiquitous control of hardware. The same thing is at play with software. And hypothetical new methods of connectivity may be able to circumvent many attempts at central control of the net.
For instance there will always be a market for custom computing and "PCs", and so non-locked PCs will (hopefully) always exist in a capitalist environment.
Unfortunately, that market is slowly becoming the minority, and because those "more free" devices may have limitations that make them incompatible with a lot of proprietary content (which is the majority) and circumventing those limitations could be illegal and difficult, there will be fewer users of them.
Given the move away from the carrier-subsidized model for mobile devices, I am optimistic about the technical future of general purpose mobile computing. What I am not optimistic about is the ability to seamlessly access content across devices from data that is privately stored in the cloud, mainly because not enough people would be willing to pay for/fund the development of such a service/piece of software to make it worth developing.
You seem to be at the whim of fickle web APIs, that's no way to go if you're in it for the long haul. Web tech moves very fast because it's just so easy to iterate and deliver the latest version to your users - and why waste time being backwards compatible when people put up with you regardless?
You have to decide whether you want to pursue these ever-changing trends and be a middleman between API services and users, or take charge of your fate and develop your own meaningful technology (that others in turn will use).
What a bore. Why would I want to read mill-produced articles weaved with sponsored posts? There's an overwhelming amount of meaningful content coming from thousands of different sources, made by writers and artists who have something to say to the world beyond optimizing for page views and ad clicks.
Sure, you learn the most in your first 6 months by quantity but that doesn't mean you learn the most valuable things. You won't learn anything of depth in half a year.
Kidding. You ask a legitimate question. This is by no means a comprehensive answer, but...
1. Domain knowledge. I think most of us enjoy the creative and problem solving parts of software engineering. That takes domain knowledge and domain knowledge takes time. You will get an intro to your domain in a year, but mastery? I would bet against it.
2. Working on a hard project from start to finish and sticking around for the lessons learned after. This is just a math problem. You're useless for at least 30 days no matter how good you are. (More like 90 IMO...). So if you start working on a larger project with a new team, and that project takes 6 months, your year is ending rapidly.
3. Mastering truly large code bases. Not everything is a rails app. Some things are just hard. Mastery is difficult to achieve.
4. Engineering leadership. Even if you don't want to be on a management track, it's important for a seasoned, senior-level engineer to be able to lead/drive a project from start to finish.
...And I suppose you may think "But I do all of those." And maybe you do? Or maybe it's just really hard to see something that you're convinced isn't there.
Domain knowledge is only useful if you work in the same domain year after year. That's often not the case. Atleast I've worked with three completely different domains the past year.
Exactly. And you can't learn domain knowledge that quickly. And there is a pile of money and senior-level engineering positions available to those who can marry understanding of the technology with domain expertise.
Impact of architectural and design decisions. How hard to decipher certain code parts you are so proud about today are a year later - my experience is that people used to work on small projects or who change projects a lot generate hard to maintain/understand code.
Learning non-trivial codebase often takes much more time. I worked on bigger projects and someone who worked there only six months would not be allowed to do bigger or core changes.
Then there is domain knowledge (finance, healthcare, law, etc) if you do that kind of software. Six months is enough to learn surface in anything non-trivial and everything is much more effective if developer already learned that.
Of course, last two points are not really valid for small projects world.
Most of the things you describe are deep, but also very narrow and domain-specific; frequently it is also very company-specific. Such knowledge is far less transferable than one might imagine.
"Most of the things you describe are deep, but also very narrow and domain-specific; frequently it is also very company-specific. Such knowledge is far less transferable than one might imagine."
Agreed. It is the quickest way to become a 10x employee but unfortunately your current company won't give you a substantial raise for knowing their product and domain well and it is not transferable to other workplaces.
Working on a big/long running project end to end. If you jump ship after a year you won't really understand the impact of a lot of the decisions you made months ago.
Most companies wont let you make any high risk or big impact decisions in your first year of employment with them (regardless of whether you get hired at a junior or senior or tech lead level).
Experience in solving the more difficult problems that require expertise with the companies particular stack and internal architecture.
And many more. There are ways to mitigate these problems but few do.
I don't know what kind of freelancing you plan to do, but for me the method of moving to freelancing that worked (after two failed attempts) was connecting with veteran freelancers as quickly as possible. I became the technical resource for a creative agency by just calling them up and asking them if they needed technical help. From there it was a matter of being responsive to their communications, helping them look smart in front of their clients by feeding them ideas, and giving them flexibility--trying not to say "no" too often, even after seeing their pie-in-the-sky Photoshop mockups.
Since then, I've expanded my opportunities by reaching out to my competition to build friendships and explore ways of working together.
I found my (limited) corporate background a bonus because I was used to working on a relatively productive team (edit: so I could basically pull a team of freelancers together and bid on a large project as a group of independents), and a liability because I tended to think "I could always go back to the corporate world" instead of taking every opportunity to figure out how I might make self-employment work. It wasn't until I hired a business coach (a former SV corporate guy himself) that I started to learn how to make the whole thing psychologically/emotionally sustainable. There are opportunities to write your own failure narrative around every corner. :-)
Hey, I am starting myself and this is one of the best posts I ever saw on the subject, can I be your friend? ( from my point of view, you are a successful freelancer! )
I'm in the corporate environment myself and definitely interested in seeing what I can do on the side. Could I get in touch with you for some insights?
How about no more scroll jank by just delivering plain useful content without the anti-usability bells and whistles? Even the cheapest hardware out there today is able to provide a nice user experience, and in answer to that we invent new ways to make everything bloated and choppy.
While I completely agree with your principle, I find myself interested in shimming the not-yet-standard "sticky" positioning, which is in draft specifications and available in bleeding-edge [0]. Depending on how many items use it, you would have to write your scroll handlers carefully.
In cases where this would really improve usability, I consider it an exception to my general antipathy towards "bells and whistles", since it will be native before too long.
Your comment fits the general pattern of "I want to keep it simple but if I could just do X" which is entirely valid from a UX perspective and the reason why any generalised janky buster is a good step forward (assuming it does the job, and with minimial overhead).
How about understanding that presentation matters. In fact, in the marketing domain presentation frequently is the content.
One man's anti-usability bells and whistles is another person's essential user engagement element that shapes the perception of the product. You try and sell MBP in Courier New/13px at 100% width and we'll laugh it off as the most idiotic idea ever. And that's not even getting into derivatives like website design galleries that generate a lot of viral awareness, but won't even look at sites without a UX gimmick.
Have you used an industrial quality binocular microscope? I do - though not continuously - and they're not at all unpleasant. The eyepieces are individually adjustable, as is the interocular spacing.
We should make a raspberry powered microscope that can project onto a 22" HD display. It would be awesome if Lytro had a realtime USB version of their camera.
Video microscopes work OK for inspection but for working under the microscope, the video delay and the lack of stereo vision are pretty intolerable. What would probably work better is a Vision Engineering eyepieceless stereo scope.
Sounds good for a second, and then you realize that it's going to induce a conflict between your visual and proprioceptive senses that'll make it impossible to work at best, and probably make you toss up your lunch besides.
Needs to be steroscopic or else you'd be nailing bonds down in the wrong location. No substitute for a good stereo microscope for microelectronics work.
Maybe, but then you've got the lag and pixilation. Seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Still nothing nicer than human eyes looking through good glass of a stereo inspection microscope. Really not even the eyes, but the same posture for hours on end hurting the neck muscles. I suppose you can get used to it, but with a wire bonder there is not much leeway in adjusting the microscope position. Then again, for a guy manually wire bonding LEDs in China, it beats toiling in a rice patty.
Even the USB microscope cameras are garbage. Much better pictures just holding a digital pocket camera up to the eyepiece.
