10 ms·

Join the Engineering Leisure Class

220 points by ChrisLoer 11y ago

gaius 11y ago
The RMS lifestyle - get a $1m grant or two, then work for free!
- ChrisLoer 11y ago
  Haha, he's a pretty impressive example of independence, although I don't think either the million dollars or the parrots are truly necessary!
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Of course the parrots are necessary. They're key to everything!
  - gohrt 11y ago
    RMS is not independent. He is interdependent. He relies heavily on the community for housing when he travels.
    - fapjacks 11y ago
      ... Which he has paid for many times over, IMHO. He's always got a place to stay in my town, anyways.
    - smikhanov 11y ago
      Who is RMS? First results on Google are "root main square" and "Risk Management Solutions".
      - dagw 11y ago
        Fourth result and first person (at least for me) on Google is Richard M Stallman.
Dewie3 11y ago
> We’re used to thinking of leisure in the narrow sense of “use of free time for enjoyment,” but leisure can be more meaningful if we focus instead on its broader definition as “opportunity afforded by free time to do something.” Stop coupling "enjoyment" with "non-productive".
- rifung 11y ago
  How did the author couple enjoyment with nonproductive? It seems like the opposite considering he's advocating working on an idea for no pay, which is something you'd only do because you enjoy it and can easily be seen as being productive.
  - Dewie3 11y ago
    > How did the author couple enjoyment with nonproductive? By considering "use of free time for enjoyment" too narrow. Supposedly because he thinks that "meaningful" is distinct from "enjoyable".
    - rifung 11y ago
      I understand what you were trying to say, but I don't remember reading anything that indicated this was his opinion.
    - ChrisLoer 11y ago
      I'm sorry if I phrased that sentence wrong. I certainly don't think "enjoyable" things are "non-productive". In fact I think that the things we truly enjoy are likely to be some of the most productive things we do.
hyperbovine 11y ago
How many kids do you have, Chris? :-)
- ChrisLoer 11y ago
  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.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - crpatino 11y ago
    I find it kind of confusing how you fit this back to the land idea with being an engineer that wants to work on his own engineering projects rather than just scape the cubicle farm. Also, you mention you have a spouse. I know it is terribly unfashionable to say this, but have you considered being a single income family? Sounds like that would give you the best of both worlds. In my case, we are a single-and-a-half income family. Once kids go to school, there's no much reason to keep an adult around home all day. I am officially the bread winner, and my wife has the lifestyle job, but considering how much she has accomplished just by working part time, we might need to revisit that decision sometime down the road.
  - danans 11y ago
    If you are considering the in-between with kids and work, remember that managing the in-between has it's own logistical overhead (== costs). For example, if you have a nanny part-time, you will have to figure out nanny taxes - assuming you're doing it the legal way - or pay an outside party to manage the nanny's payroll. That overhead may be easier to justify when the nanny is allowing you to work a full time high paying job, less so if the nanny is only coming a couple days a week. In this case, you might consider a part-time day care center instead. And unless you have a lot of energy or hired/family help, you will be so tired in the first few years of your child's life that you likely won't have the energy to do anything beyond growing a few token tomatoes and potatoes, certainly nothing at the scale needed to make a dent in a family's food costs. For clothing, tap your friends-with-kids network to get into the hand-me-down stream. Babies and toddlers grow out of clothes faster than they can wear them out, and new clothes are $$$.
velocitypsycho 11y ago
Two words make this difficult. Health Insurance.
- nolite 11y ago
  I was thinking: "rent"
- stevenmays 11y ago
  Not with the ACA... now if you retire and only have income you draw from your investments, you pay a low income based rate even though you may have significant assets.
  - ChrisLoer 11y ago
    Yeah, I think ACA is a huge supporter of this kind of move... although I planned to get an exchange plan, I ended up marrying a member of the US Navy, so I get covered by Tricare. I know, not everyone has that luck (or lots of other luck I enjoyed)...
  - toast0 11y ago
    This is a natural outcome of conflating 'wealthy' with 'high income.' Outside of FAFSA, and estate tax, and maybe FDIC limits, the US government really doesn't have a good view into what assets you may have.
- sandstrom 11y ago
  Not in most European countries where this is handled at the national level, instead of by each company. I.e. switching jobs (or having none) doesn't affect whether a hospital will treat you or not.
  - Flip-per 11y ago
    Switching is no problem usually, but if you are able to work but not 'willing' you'll lose your health insurance pretty soon.
neilk 11y ago
I did this. I advise against this. 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.
- ChrisLoer 11y ago
  Yeah, the lack of feedback (and not being embedded in a motivated team) is a very big downside. In my case, I responded by distancing myself a little bit from focusing so much on success at the one "big" thing I was working on, and focusing more on enjoying curiosity, exploration, etc. The app I've created probably falls in the "tool" category more than "product", and I spend (waste?) a fair amount of time psychologically prepping myself for marking it as a failure. On balance, I still feel like it's been a good move for my life, but of course the experiment is ongoing...
rifung 11y ago
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.
- ChrisLoer 11y ago
  - 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/ 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.
vinceguidry 11y ago
> 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.
- ChrisLoer 11y ago
  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.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    I actually like doing those sorts of things too. But as my engineering skill-set grows, I also start to really notice the opportunity cost to doing them. You can keep doing them, for awhile, sure. But if you're actually pushing your personal productivity and value flywheel, those costs are going to weigh ever heavier and eventually you're going to have a decision to make. Outsource the things that aren't adding momentum to those who would be happy to take them off your hands or stop gaining momentum. Because as the flywheel gains momentum you have to push ever harder on it to make it go faster. It doesn't just apply to household stuff. A business has to be able to scale beyond your personal efforts as well. To do so you have to be able to remove yourself from a lot of equations. Large impacts to society and the world don't really happen without institutions, and institutions can't get built any other way. What I love about engineering is the personal value curve is so steep, that it starts making sense a lot sooner to outsource drudge work. It becomes a question of, how big do you want to grow, and how fast do you want to do it?
geebee 11y ago
"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.
- ChrisLoer 11y ago
  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.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > 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).
dreamdu5t 11y ago
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...
- Avshalom 11y ago
  >>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.
  - dionidium 11y ago
    What's happening is that upper-middle class families really do run out of money after saving for college, sending the kids to private school, both driving two new cars, and so on. They think of those things as basics and forget that those basics are unattainable to most.
    - Avshalom 11y ago
      Right. Hedonistic treadmill/keeping up with the jonses/we rate our lives compared to our peers not compared to objective rock bottom etc... And of course "fucking baffling" was a bit of a rhetorical flourish. Certainly we all understand how they've managed to spend all their money. It's the "and yet they keep spending all their money" that makes us want to grab them by the shirt collars and cartoonishly backhand them.
chrisBob 11y ago
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.
desbo 11y ago
The author obviously doesn't live in London. I could never afford to pay rent without a job. The article is idealistic bullshit.
- angrybits 11y ago
  So relocate to bumfuck, england and do your work there. I don't think the idea is to ditch your job and still pay $3000 a month for an apartment.
  - twic 11y ago
    What work? There are no jobs in Bumfuck, and not enough companies that hire remote workers for this to scale. As i understand it, the situation in the US is that there is Silicon Valley, where the salaries are high and the rents higher, and then half a dozen other places where there are significant concentrations of software jobs, and more reasonable living costs. This is not really the case in the UK. There's London, there's a ring of big corporate offices just outside London (Guildford, Cheshunt, places like that), and that's more or less it. You pretty much need to live in London or its commuter belt to work non-remotely in software.
    - ropiku 11y ago
      There are quite a few startups and companies in other areas like Edinburgh, Manchester, Leeds. They are still big (and somewhat) expensive cities but you can lower your cost of living.
      - BSousa 11y ago
        But they pay pennies compared to London. What you save on rent you lose on income. I get a lot of recruiter spam from UK recruiters, but truth be told, don't think I've ever got an email where the minimum offered was lower than £45k for London while for anywhere else the maximum range was £45-50k
    - AwesomeGorilla 11y ago
ZeroFries 11y ago
I would much prefer working part-time in traditional money earning avenues, and spending my other 20-30 hours of energetic time on the projects/activities I personally want to work/play on. I just wish there were more opportunities for high value part-time work.
x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
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."
- gluggymug 11y ago
  I think we assign "meaning" to leisure so we give it as much value as our work. Gaming ourselves to respect leisure more. 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.
scribu 11y ago
> 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).
strlen 11y ago
Few things: - Depending on what kind of problems you enjoy solving, you're going to be miserable even if you are able to do this. I love working on my own at times (exploring new concepts and ideas, new languages, or even "toy projects" with no real-world applications), but in the end, I find working on bigger problems, with a team of great people to be a lot more fulfilling. - Constraints are useful in that they force you to rely on something other than pure will power. This can go both ways: _if_ you are going without a regular source of income (as opposed to retiring after winning the [startup] lottery), you'll need to sacrifice time for money. On the other hand, a full time job provides a good deal of constraints as well (both for what you do _at_ work and what you do outside of work hours). Gene Wolfe[2] kept a full time job and wrote an hour each day. That had two constraints: he didn't need to rush or alter his work in order to sell (his books are fulfilling and rewarding but not a "easy, fun read" that brings in great royalties right away) and since he only had an hour each day to write, he knew he had to make the best of it (one thing said about him, is that he doesn't waste words: he's got a whole CNC machine milling Chekhov's guns...) - Burnout is an entirely different matter, one shouldn't generalize from "this helps deal with being burnt out" to "drop everything, do this, and you'll never be burnt out." - Finally, it isn't a feasible option for most: First, one can't insure against economic catastrophe, savings and a low burn rate are great, but ultimately the _only_ financial insurance one is there ability to earn an income[1]. That ability is predicated on ability to contribute and the amount of people willing to pay for your contributions. In other words, if you're a great developer and you live (or can relocate to) a fluid job market, your risks are lower than those of an average developer (note: assuming a normal probability distribution, 50% of developers are _below_ average, and most fall within a standard deviation of average...) in a less fluid job market. Areas with fluid job markets tend to have higher costs of living. Unless one is extremely talented (and in many cases, even if that is the case), one doesn't become a great cut above average overnight. One generally starts off with a job in an area with a fluid job market (hence greater expenses!) and over the time develops ties to the area (friends, family, pets, etc...) and can't easily drop everything to move to a cheaper area for their "leisure time" and then -- if something goes wrong -- easily return to the area to take advantage of the fluid job market. All else being equal, a developer of equal skill, in an equally fluid area, that did not "take a year off" will hired over one that has, _unless_ they've done something extra-ordinary with this time. Best prediction of being able to do something extra-ordinary is... having done something extra-ordinary. So at the least, do something extra-ordinary on a smaller scale first before going full-time on it. Zuck and billg didn't drop out of Harvard with a blank emacs window (in billg's case, perhaps it was a TECO window, not sure if TECO EMACS was around in his days...). - In a capitalist system, money does one thing well: if you have more money than you have a use for, you can give it to someone who has the time to make the most of it. Marginally, a dollar spent donating to someone _very good_ working on a project I care about (a programming language, infrastructure for open source projects, a social cause, etc...) goes _much further_ than a dollar "spent" by foregoing income to work on most of those projects full-time. As for the exceptions to this, I can usually incorporate them into full-time jobs. Conversely, I'd suggest this heuristic: 1) Can you afford it without putting people who rely on you into jeopardy? (Are you going to demand that your wife end a rewarding career to move to a cheaper area with you? Are you going to make your kids move to an area in inferior schools? If either is true, stop right there and then...) 2) Marginal value of dollar spent metric above: if someone can do a better job with the same resources, help provide the resources for them. Concrete example: since my username doesn't begin with a 'p' and end with a 'g', money I contributed to Clojure project (when it was in dire financial straits) probably had more impact in creating a Lisp-1 with a good macro-system than if I were to quit my job and work full-time on a Lisp-1 (likewise, while pg can afford to literally work on anything he wants to, he chooses to invest[3] in teams capable of building things he careers deeply about, but isn't quite good at building himself). Otherwise, try to make the "leisure" activity part of your day-to-day job as well. 3) Otherwise, if you can do something awesome with your time -- you probably don't need someone named after a function that may never return in a memory-unsafe language's standard library to tell you that :-) [1] Investments under-writing "early retirement" may collapse. "Social insurance" such as universal healthcare, pensions, unemployment benefits, etc... can be voted or sued out of existence. [2] If you're an SFF fan, pick up Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy sometime, but be warned that once you start, your dreams of doing anything else with your time will be over. [3] Investing is not the same thing as donations, but I don't believe any angel/seed investor invests purely for the money.
mndrix 11y ago
I've been doing this for 8 years and love it. 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.
- j_lev 11y ago
  Hi - thanks for sharing and congratulations - sounds like you've made things work. > 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. Regarding this, it sounds like you already had a good idea of what your expenses were, and I think people underestimate how important this is. I recently quit my job and have jumped into the unknown. Firstly knowing where all my money was going, and secondly spending about 12 months trimming off all the fat was an important part of the process to give me the confidence to try this. These days I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world with my wife for about $2000/month (and over half of that is rent). We want for little. Several years ago this figure was closer to $4000/month.
  - boothead 11y ago
    Interesting. What did/do you use to ascertain where all your money goes?
    - j_lev 11y ago
      YNAB. The developers are a bit accounting-nerdy, and it has lots of graphs/etc which I think would appeal to the HN crowd. It's also very flexible. One example I can think of, my friend installed it on his wife's smartphone so she could record spending on groceries wherever she was. But my wife doesn't like this level of monitoring so I just give her a wad of cash each month and enter that as a general "cash for groceries" entry. I've also seen people in the US say good things about Mint.com, which was not available to me here in Japan. Normally this would be a good place to put my own 10%-off referral link. Instead I'm going to give a link to a forum thread where you can get 10% off AND someone else will then use your link: http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/reader-recommendations/43-discount-off-ynab/100/ http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/reader-recommendations/43-d...
solveforall 11y ago
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/ 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!
- tomjacobs 11y ago
  Try telling us about your projects and updates on Glitch Club, this is exactly what it's for: http://glitchclub.com http://glitchclub.com
  - solveforall 11y ago
    Sorry, I'm a bit old school in that I prefer text over videos, and desktop apps over mobile. Text on desktop can more easily be edited and perfected before being sent out. I like the idea of a community feedback platform though -- would definitely use it if it were multiplatform.
kelboy888 11y ago
RATHER CLUELESS ADVICE since context matters in functional life/work design as well as Functional Programming. The Hacker mentality is complex due to artist/scientist/engineer contradictions. Engineer - slow, slow Haskell improvement Artist - take off time and just do it. Javascript hacker Scientist - Abstract everything. C code is a minor detail. THE PROBLEM WITH THE INDUSTRY is similar to ARTIST. We really have little idea about REAL ENGINEERING teams here in the USA. from expericne over age 50. If you are a genius on Javascript for Facebook; you are working 80 hours a week. Getting jobs done YESTERDAY and changing the timestamps is your specialty. The Japanense Car which started as a mororized bicycle after World War II after the nuclear bombs were dropped uses PATIENCE and Kaizen constant improvement. This is an important question because the VERY MODEL of Open Source; time patience and getting PAID...kickstarter? --- oh OpenBSD is going bankrupt yet one more time again becuase the security of the internet is a ECONOMIC PERVERSE INCENTIVE PROBLEM? PS. as soon as I get to Senior VP of Microsoft, which will be any day soon, I expect a RENT INCREASE FOR ALL SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS working on open source. The visa difficulties GRIND YOU DOWN ploys are losing effectiveness. Yet, Open SSL depends entirely upon some obscure DOCTORATE university student? and on 'volunteer efforts'
- NathanKP 11y ago
  Was this comment written by a Markov Chain?
  - ndrscr 11y ago
    The word "expericne" somehow got into the Markov chain. Perhaps the words themselves are being generated by an algorithm?
    - hiddencost 11y ago
      Markov chains are trained on data geberated by humans. They have no magic waY to identify a vocabulary.
MisterWalter 11y ago
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.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  In many places, living within biking/walking distance of school/work means rent goes up exponentially.
- greenjellybean 11y ago
  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.
- xacaxulu 11y ago
  None of us 'need' money after a certain point but everyone's perceived 'enough' is different. Some of us love having a good chunk of money and the amazing opportunities that it brings.
- sukilot 11y ago
  $600/mo is less than the price of a filthy studio apartment in the cities where most of HN's jobs are. $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.
yellowapple 11y ago
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).
swagmeister 11y ago
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
aswanson 11y ago
i have been pondering getting a high salaried job in sv for 1-2 years living out of my car and office and saving 90 percent of my salary to live nicely anywhere else in the country.
- campers 11y ago
  Reminds me of this article :) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2750652/Former-Google-employees-brag-long-lived-work-rent-free-thanks-tech-giant-s-awesome-perks.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2750652/Former-Googl...
tomjacobs 11y ago
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: http://glitchclub.com 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.
analog31 11y ago
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.
nick_urban 11y ago
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.
Bostonian 11y ago
If you are an engineer working at a company, I'd expect that the resources provided by the company and the access to coworkers make you more productive. If you think you would be more productive on your own, this may be a sign to change employers.

220 points by ChrisLoer 11y ago

gaius 11y ago

The RMS lifestyle - get a $1m grant or two, then work for free!

ChrisLoer 11y ago
Haha, he's a pretty impressive example of independence, although I don't think either the million dollars or the parrots are truly necessary!
- Kalium 11y ago
  Of course the parrots are necessary. They're key to everything!
- gohrt 11y ago
  RMS is not independent. He is interdependent. He relies heavily on the community for housing when he travels.
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    ... Which he has paid for many times over, IMHO. He's always got a place to stay in my town, anyways.
  - smikhanov 11y ago
    Who is RMS? First results on Google are "root main square" and "Risk Management Solutions".
    - dagw 11y ago
      Fourth result and first person (at least for me) on Google is Richard M Stallman.

Dewie3 11y ago

> We’re used to thinking of leisure in the narrow sense of “use of free time for enjoyment,” but leisure can be more meaningful if we focus instead on its broader definition as “opportunity afforded by free time to do something.” Stop coupling "enjoyment" with "non-productive".

rifung 11y ago
How did the author couple enjoyment with nonproductive? It seems like the opposite considering he's advocating working on an idea for no pay, which is something you'd only do because you enjoy it and can easily be seen as being productive.
- Dewie3 11y ago
  > How did the author couple enjoyment with nonproductive? By considering "use of free time for enjoyment" too narrow. Supposedly because he thinks that "meaningful" is distinct from "enjoyable".
  - rifung 11y ago
    I understand what you were trying to say, but I don't remember reading anything that indicated this was his opinion.
  - ChrisLoer 11y ago
    I'm sorry if I phrased that sentence wrong. I certainly don't think "enjoyable" things are "non-productive". In fact I think that the things we truly enjoy are likely to be some of the most productive things we do.

hyperbovine 11y ago

How many kids do you have, Chris? :-)

ChrisLoer 11y ago
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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- crpatino 11y ago
  I find it kind of confusing how you fit this back to the land idea with being an engineer that wants to work on his own engineering projects rather than just scape the cubicle farm. Also, you mention you have a spouse. I know it is terribly unfashionable to say this, but have you considered being a single income family? Sounds like that would give you the best of both worlds. In my case, we are a single-and-a-half income family. Once kids go to school, there's no much reason to keep an adult around home all day. I am officially the bread winner, and my wife has the lifestyle job, but considering how much she has accomplished just by working part time, we might need to revisit that decision sometime down the road.
- danans 11y ago
  If you are considering the in-between with kids and work, remember that managing the in-between has it's own logistical overhead (== costs). For example, if you have a nanny part-time, you will have to figure out nanny taxes - assuming you're doing it the legal way - or pay an outside party to manage the nanny's payroll. That overhead may be easier to justify when the nanny is allowing you to work a full time high paying job, less so if the nanny is only coming a couple days a week. In this case, you might consider a part-time day care center instead. And unless you have a lot of energy or hired/family help, you will be so tired in the first few years of your child's life that you likely won't have the energy to do anything beyond growing a few token tomatoes and potatoes, certainly nothing at the scale needed to make a dent in a family's food costs. For clothing, tap your friends-with-kids network to get into the hand-me-down stream. Babies and toddlers grow out of clothes faster than they can wear them out, and new clothes are $$$.

velocitypsycho 11y ago

Two words make this difficult. Health Insurance.

nolite 11y ago
I was thinking: "rent"
stevenmays 11y ago
Not with the ACA... now if you retire and only have income you draw from your investments, you pay a low income based rate even though you may have significant assets.
- ChrisLoer 11y ago
  Yeah, I think ACA is a huge supporter of this kind of move... although I planned to get an exchange plan, I ended up marrying a member of the US Navy, so I get covered by Tricare. I know, not everyone has that luck (or lots of other luck I enjoyed)...
- toast0 11y ago
  This is a natural outcome of conflating 'wealthy' with 'high income.' Outside of FAFSA, and estate tax, and maybe FDIC limits, the US government really doesn't have a good view into what assets you may have.
sandstrom 11y ago
Not in most European countries where this is handled at the national level, instead of by each company. I.e. switching jobs (or having none) doesn't affect whether a hospital will treat you or not.
- Flip-per 11y ago
  Switching is no problem usually, but if you are able to work but not 'willing' you'll lose your health insurance pretty soon.

neilk 11y ago

I did this. I advise against this. 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.

ChrisLoer 11y ago
Yeah, the lack of feedback (and not being embedded in a motivated team) is a very big downside. In my case, I responded by distancing myself a little bit from focusing so much on success at the one "big" thing I was working on, and focusing more on enjoying curiosity, exploration, etc. The app I've created probably falls in the "tool" category more than "product", and I spend (waste?) a fair amount of time psychologically prepping myself for marking it as a failure. On balance, I still feel like it's been a good move for my life, but of course the experiment is ongoing...

rifung 11y ago

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.

ChrisLoer 11y ago
- 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/ 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.

vinceguidry 11y ago

> 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.

ChrisLoer 11y ago
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.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  I actually like doing those sorts of things too. But as my engineering skill-set grows, I also start to really notice the opportunity cost to doing them. You can keep doing them, for awhile, sure. But if you're actually pushing your personal productivity and value flywheel, those costs are going to weigh ever heavier and eventually you're going to have a decision to make. Outsource the things that aren't adding momentum to those who would be happy to take them off your hands or stop gaining momentum. Because as the flywheel gains momentum you have to push ever harder on it to make it go faster. It doesn't just apply to household stuff. A business has to be able to scale beyond your personal efforts as well. To do so you have to be able to remove yourself from a lot of equations. Large impacts to society and the world don't really happen without institutions, and institutions can't get built any other way. What I love about engineering is the personal value curve is so steep, that it starts making sense a lot sooner to outsource drudge work. It becomes a question of, how big do you want to grow, and how fast do you want to do it?

geebee 11y ago

"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.

ChrisLoer 11y ago
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.
toomuchtodo 11y ago
> 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).

dreamdu5t 11y ago

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...

Avshalom 11y ago
>>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.
- dionidium 11y ago
  What's happening is that upper-middle class families really do run out of money after saving for college, sending the kids to private school, both driving two new cars, and so on. They think of those things as basics and forget that those basics are unattainable to most.
  - Avshalom 11y ago
    Right. Hedonistic treadmill/keeping up with the jonses/we rate our lives compared to our peers not compared to objective rock bottom etc... And of course "fucking baffling" was a bit of a rhetorical flourish. Certainly we all understand how they've managed to spend all their money. It's the "and yet they keep spending all their money" that makes us want to grab them by the shirt collars and cartoonishly backhand them.

chrisBob 11y ago

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.

desbo 11y ago

The author obviously doesn't live in London. I could never afford to pay rent without a job. The article is idealistic bullshit.

angrybits 11y ago
So relocate to bumfuck, england and do your work there. I don't think the idea is to ditch your job and still pay $3000 a month for an apartment.
- twic 11y ago
  What work? There are no jobs in Bumfuck, and not enough companies that hire remote workers for this to scale. As i understand it, the situation in the US is that there is Silicon Valley, where the salaries are high and the rents higher, and then half a dozen other places where there are significant concentrations of software jobs, and more reasonable living costs. This is not really the case in the UK. There's London, there's a ring of big corporate offices just outside London (Guildford, Cheshunt, places like that), and that's more or less it. You pretty much need to live in London or its commuter belt to work non-remotely in software.
  - ropiku 11y ago
    There are quite a few startups and companies in other areas like Edinburgh, Manchester, Leeds. They are still big (and somewhat) expensive cities but you can lower your cost of living.
    - BSousa 11y ago
      But they pay pennies compared to London. What you save on rent you lose on income. I get a lot of recruiter spam from UK recruiters, but truth be told, don't think I've ever got an email where the minimum offered was lower than £45k for London while for anywhere else the maximum range was £45-50k
  - AwesomeGorilla 11y ago

ZeroFries 11y ago

I would much prefer working part-time in traditional money earning avenues, and spending my other 20-30 hours of energetic time on the projects/activities I personally want to work/play on. I just wish there were more opportunities for high value part-time work.

x3n0ph3n3 11y ago

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."

gluggymug 11y ago
I think we assign "meaning" to leisure so we give it as much value as our work. Gaming ourselves to respect leisure more. 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.

scribu 11y ago

> 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).

strlen 11y ago

Few things: - Depending on what kind of problems you enjoy solving, you're going to be miserable even if you are able to do this. I love working on my own at times (exploring new concepts and ideas, new languages, or even "toy projects" with no real-world applications), but in the end, I find working on bigger problems, with a team of great people to be a lot more fulfilling. - Constraints are useful in that they force you to rely on something other than pure will power. This can go both ways: _if_ you are going without a regular source of income (as opposed to retiring after winning the [startup] lottery), you'll need to sacrifice time for money. On the other hand, a full time job provides a good deal of constraints as well (both for what you do _at_ work and what you do outside of work hours). Gene Wolfe[2] kept a full time job and wrote an hour each day. That had two constraints: he didn't need to rush or alter his work in order to sell (his books are fulfilling and rewarding but not a "easy, fun read" that brings in great royalties right away) and since he only had an hour each day to write, he knew he had to make the best of it (one thing said about him, is that he doesn't waste words: he's got a whole CNC machine milling Chekhov's guns...) - Burnout is an entirely different matter, one shouldn't generalize from "this helps deal with being burnt out" to "drop everything, do this, and you'll never be burnt out." - Finally, it isn't a feasible option for most: First, one can't insure against economic catastrophe, savings and a low burn rate are great, but ultimately the _only_ financial insurance one is there ability to earn an income[1]. That ability is predicated on ability to contribute and the amount of people willing to pay for your contributions. In other words, if you're a great developer and you live (or can relocate to) a fluid job market, your risks are lower than those of an average developer (note: assuming a normal probability distribution, 50% of developers are _below_ average, and most fall within a standard deviation of average...) in a less fluid job market. Areas with fluid job markets tend to have higher costs of living. Unless one is extremely talented (and in many cases, even if that is the case), one doesn't become a great cut above average overnight. One generally starts off with a job in an area with a fluid job market (hence greater expenses!) and over the time develops ties to the area (friends, family, pets, etc...) and can't easily drop everything to move to a cheaper area for their "leisure time" and then -- if something goes wrong -- easily return to the area to take advantage of the fluid job market. All else being equal, a developer of equal skill, in an equally fluid area, that did not "take a year off" will hired over one that has, _unless_ they've done something extra-ordinary with this time. Best prediction of being able to do something extra-ordinary is... having done something extra-ordinary. So at the least, do something extra-ordinary on a smaller scale first before going full-time on it. Zuck and billg didn't drop out of Harvard with a blank emacs window (in billg's case, perhaps it was a TECO window, not sure if TECO EMACS was around in his days...). - In a capitalist system, money does one thing well: if you have more money than you have a use for, you can give it to someone who has the time to make the most of it. Marginally, a dollar spent donating to someone _very good_ working on a project I care about (a programming language, infrastructure for open source projects, a social cause, etc...) goes _much further_ than a dollar "spent" by foregoing income to work on most of those projects full-time. As for the exceptions to this, I can usually incorporate them into full-time jobs. Conversely, I'd suggest this heuristic: 1) Can you afford it without putting people who rely on you into jeopardy? (Are you going to demand that your wife end a rewarding career to move to a cheaper area with you? Are you going to make your kids move to an area in inferior schools? If either is true, stop right there and then...) 2) Marginal value of dollar spent metric above: if someone can do a better job with the same resources, help provide the resources for them. Concrete example: since my username doesn't begin with a 'p' and end with a 'g', money I contributed to Clojure project (when it was in dire financial straits) probably had more impact in creating a Lisp-1 with a good macro-system than if I were to quit my job and work full-time on a Lisp-1 (likewise, while pg can afford to literally work on anything he wants to, he chooses to invest[3] in teams capable of building things he careers deeply about, but isn't quite good at building himself). Otherwise, try to make the "leisure" activity part of your day-to-day job as well. 3) Otherwise, if you can do something awesome with your time -- you probably don't need someone named after a function that may never return in a memory-unsafe language's standard library to tell you that :-) [1] Investments under-writing "early retirement" may collapse. "Social insurance" such as universal healthcare, pensions, unemployment benefits, etc... can be voted or sued out of existence. [2] If you're an SFF fan, pick up Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy sometime, but be warned that once you start, your dreams of doing anything else with your time will be over. [3] Investing is not the same thing as donations, but I don't believe any angel/seed investor invests purely for the money.

mndrix 11y ago

I've been doing this for 8 years and love it. 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.

j_lev 11y ago
Hi - thanks for sharing and congratulations - sounds like you've made things work. > 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. Regarding this, it sounds like you already had a good idea of what your expenses were, and I think people underestimate how important this is. I recently quit my job and have jumped into the unknown. Firstly knowing where all my money was going, and secondly spending about 12 months trimming off all the fat was an important part of the process to give me the confidence to try this. These days I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world with my wife for about $2000/month (and over half of that is rent). We want for little. Several years ago this figure was closer to $4000/month.
- boothead 11y ago
  Interesting. What did/do you use to ascertain where all your money goes?
  - j_lev 11y ago
    YNAB. The developers are a bit accounting-nerdy, and it has lots of graphs/etc which I think would appeal to the HN crowd. It's also very flexible. One example I can think of, my friend installed it on his wife's smartphone so she could record spending on groceries wherever she was. But my wife doesn't like this level of monitoring so I just give her a wad of cash each month and enter that as a general "cash for groceries" entry. I've also seen people in the US say good things about Mint.com, which was not available to me here in Japan. Normally this would be a good place to put my own 10%-off referral link. Instead I'm going to give a link to a forum thread where you can get 10% off AND someone else will then use your link: http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/reader-recommendations/43-discount-off-ynab/100/ http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/reader-recommendations/43-d...

solveforall 11y ago

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/ 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!

tomjacobs 11y ago
Try telling us about your projects and updates on Glitch Club, this is exactly what it's for: http://glitchclub.com http://glitchclub.com
- solveforall 11y ago
  Sorry, I'm a bit old school in that I prefer text over videos, and desktop apps over mobile. Text on desktop can more easily be edited and perfected before being sent out. I like the idea of a community feedback platform though -- would definitely use it if it were multiplatform.

kelboy888 11y ago

RATHER CLUELESS ADVICE since context matters in functional life/work design as well as Functional Programming. The Hacker mentality is complex due to artist/scientist/engineer contradictions. Engineer - slow, slow Haskell improvement Artist - take off time and just do it. Javascript hacker Scientist - Abstract everything. C code is a minor detail. THE PROBLEM WITH THE INDUSTRY is similar to ARTIST. We really have little idea about REAL ENGINEERING teams here in the USA. from expericne over age 50. If you are a genius on Javascript for Facebook; you are working 80 hours a week. Getting jobs done YESTERDAY and changing the timestamps is your specialty. The Japanense Car which started as a mororized bicycle after World War II after the nuclear bombs were dropped uses PATIENCE and Kaizen constant improvement. This is an important question because the VERY MODEL of Open Source; time patience and getting PAID...kickstarter? --- oh OpenBSD is going bankrupt yet one more time again becuase the security of the internet is a ECONOMIC PERVERSE INCENTIVE PROBLEM? PS. as soon as I get to Senior VP of Microsoft, which will be any day soon, I expect a RENT INCREASE FOR ALL SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS working on open source. The visa difficulties GRIND YOU DOWN ploys are losing effectiveness. Yet, Open SSL depends entirely upon some obscure DOCTORATE university student? and on 'volunteer efforts'

NathanKP 11y ago
Was this comment written by a Markov Chain?
- ndrscr 11y ago
  The word "expericne" somehow got into the Markov chain. Perhaps the words themselves are being generated by an algorithm?
  - hiddencost 11y ago
    Markov chains are trained on data geberated by humans. They have no magic waY to identify a vocabulary.

MisterWalter 11y ago

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.

s73v3r 11y ago
In many places, living within biking/walking distance of school/work means rent goes up exponentially.
greenjellybean 11y ago
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.
xacaxulu 11y ago
None of us 'need' money after a certain point but everyone's perceived 'enough' is different. Some of us love having a good chunk of money and the amazing opportunities that it brings.
sukilot 11y ago
$600/mo is less than the price of a filthy studio apartment in the cities where most of HN's jobs are. $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.

yellowapple 11y ago

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).

swagmeister 11y ago

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

aswanson 11y ago

i have been pondering getting a high salaried job in sv for 1-2 years living out of my car and office and saving 90 percent of my salary to live nicely anywhere else in the country.

campers 11y ago
Reminds me of this article :) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2750652/Former-Google-employees-brag-long-lived-work-rent-free-thanks-tech-giant-s-awesome-perks.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2750652/Former-Googl...

tomjacobs 11y ago

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: http://glitchclub.com 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.

analog31 11y ago

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.

nick_urban 11y ago

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.

Bostonian 11y ago

If you are an engineer working at a company, I'd expect that the resources provided by the company and the access to coworkers make you more productive. If you think you would be more productive on your own, this may be a sign to change employers.