Is this an arbitrage opportunity? What's the best way to harness this concentration of energy?
Offer some part-time options and you'll get a custom-crafted cover letter professing my love and why I am a perfect fit as well. :)
I’m sure there’s various nuances to this and I’m assuming you are actively looking for work versus passively waiting for a perfect situation where a buyer loves your house enough to pay a premium but this actually sounds kinda disconnected from reality if that’s not the case.
and the rest of the argument makes no sense. even as a contractor you'll have to pay enough to make up for the benefits they'd otherwise be getting (pro-rated of course. half the work time means half the value of benefits included). the average contracting rate is twice as high as the average salary for a reason.
I wasn’t really trying to make a global statement. The audience here skews a certain way and My assumption is this attitude is the US Bay Area tech workers, or other exFAANG, used to making >$300k USD and would be glad to make make half part time, probably living in another locale where that translates to megabucks and they still get all the other benefits. It just doesn’t exist for a reason here.
The larger view I hold, that many don't agree with, is a) if I've already decided to go remote and b) my budget is $50k then c) I could hire a small team in India/Asia. I've personally never had problems sourcing talent in those locales with my types of workloads; which I admit are rather basic (web apps, ios, devops, etc). I'm not sure if that would be the case if I was building something hard like a new database or something.
All things equal, skills and such, I think it would be fairly easy to find a US based candidate at this price for part-time work. So why would I bother hiring from another country unless it saves me money?
I don't have to learn/concern myself with German employment laws
if you don't have a subsidiary in the EU or some kind of employer of record through which you hire someone one from the EU, then the employment laws would not be relevant to you. it would just be a contractor relationship.
why would I bother hiring from another country unless it saves me money?
good point. definitely something to consider. thank you.
We have generous leave allowances (18 working days at a starting level.) We also have a flexible sick leave policy - there is a fixed amount but we've extended that for individuals on occasion when the situation demanded it (long hospital stays etc.)
So in theory unlimited time off sounds good, but in practice its not a perk.
*! I was also assuming half the pay, but didn't write that either...
Unlimited PTO is a scam. Instead, offer a generous amount of time off from the jump: Three to four weeks per year, with an option to roll over a portion each year and cash out the rest.
Maybe create a software co-op where people meet and can give or get help with any projects they are working on. Meet anywhere convenient like local library or office after hours or even someones garage. Nobody gets paid unless by agreement and to make money people need to sell something (maybe just ads). There's a much bigger chance of success than if all the people work independently.
if i run out of money i'd have to go back to where i am from, and disrupt not only my own network of friends and relationships that i have been able to develop, but even worse that of my children who not only will have to switch school but also do so in a new language that they only have a passive understanding of.
what i am trying to say is that life will not only be hard, as that would be bearable. i am used to hard times. but the effect would be a very dramatic upheaval, and that is paralyzing. a few months is barely enough time to learn something new just to help me find work. (and i only identified go and react as prominent skills in job descriptions very recently too. a few months ago would not even have known what is worth learning). if i focus on learning now i am almost certain to fail to find work by the time money runs out. i do have plenty of experience, if i could only find an employer or customer who can recognize that.
(ps: this comment may sound defensive, but it isn't. i am trying to elaborate and clarify and i do invite readers here to find the flaws in my argumentation and point out alternatives. i am commenting here so i can learn and improve)
One option is to start a consulting business with a group of engineers (essentially a market equivalent of a union but with more legal protections) and start charging very high market rates and nickel-and-dime the client hedge fund style with pass-through fees for everything. Use the knowledge of former jobs’ contracts and undercut on price.
If the skill set is very niche and highly specialized you could even attempt cornering the market by recruiting people away that are still employed and sell back their services through the consulting gig (offer profit share as a sweetener, etc.)
The problem tends to be that high unemployment tends to coincide with economic downturns. It's hard to get investment to start a business during such a downturn.
Those a little bit older who started during or right after the dot bomb fiasco knew (or should have known) that software might pay well or "is fun/interesting" but have a plan to get out by 40.
I discussed this with same age or older colleagues and tried to impress upon younger colleagues the importance of saving and investing and lifestyle inflation etc.
If you started in 2005 or later you could be forgiven for think you'd found the golden ticket and 6 future salaries, bonuses and stock were never going to end just bc you could npm a bunch of js together.
I never had any illusion that things would last forever as they were - for that matter, things have changes significantly over the past 20 years anyhow.
I’ve always felt like I’m “riding a wave”, and the work I’m doing in AI these days leads me to believe this particular wave is ending. My plan is to jump onto the coming “AI wave”. I see it as taller (there’s more short-term earning potential there) but much faster moving (it’ll be over sooner).
If I can get to the top of this oncoming wave hopefully I can make enough to retire comfortably. If not, then I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing: looking for that next wave and jumping onto it before there’s sand under my feet :)
I'm 43, about to turn 44, and I've been unemployed for three years. My former employer fired me for not vaxxing despite being a full-time remote employee as I refused to give in to their ridiculous requirement. I've been taking care of my aging parents since then as my dad has developed dementia.
I'm interested in working in software again as tech has been my life since I was 13 years old. I've got tons of skills and experience, not just in tech but also leadership, but the prospect of insane hazing rituals known as "tech interviews" has me discouraged. I've been considering starting a tech services business but the economy is rough right now and I'm living in one of the most expensive states in the US.
If anyone could use an experienced .NET dev/DevOps or team lead, look me up.
Started my own single person company a couple years ago and haven’t looked back. It does well enough to fund my modest lifestyle and I would frankly rather die than go back to interviewing and working for someone else.
The tech industry sickens me in general. It’s done so much damage to our society. Feels way better interacting with customers directly and treating software like a craft/trade.
I suspect though there isn't a lot of these people that are unemployed. There's more "mediocre" engineers that are in this zone.
Here is a profitable idea.
Make a group decision and choose a target profitable SaaS company or startup of your choice, replicate it with AI and race the target SaaS company to near zero in pricing and sell your services as the cheapest offering to SMEs and enterprises (assuming you guys have experience in this area)
Keep it running or sell it to another business and the collective reaps the profits once the target SaaS company is dead or is unable to compete.
Repeat for all or any companies or startups that you wish should not exist or that laid you off in the past
Just say you've worked at Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc, 300 years of collective experience.
S4 Capital famously won contracts away from WPP even though WPP had a long standing reputation and marketing prowess.
On the other hand, if it wasn’t mission critical (let’s say replacing my todo list tracker), then I wouldn’t even consider replacing it because it’s not critical, and it’s not expensive. Why should I waste my time replacing it with something a bit cheaper?
So it’s a catch 22
I’m in non-tech industries in finance/accounting and during budget conversations a few things over the past few years consistently pop up as this costs too damn much; smartsheets, zoom, slack, etc. I actually implement a specific Oracle product that costs most companies 6 figures a year that could easily be self service SAAS product with a much better solution. Financial analysts skew mildly technical and could implement it themselves and be targeted fairly easily. Competition exists but they always bloat the product to charge almost as much or more than Oracle does. But end users only care about a few small features and I think some one could execute those much better than what exists on the market. All competitors require an enterprise software sales process to even see/demo their software. If the analysts could login, connect to their data, and set some custom configurations (possibly llm assisted?), and worry about monetizing the relationship until the value prop has been realized- then I think this would spread on its own, people in the industry talk, change jobs frequently and take their tooling preferences with them. Best of all, this group of people usually report to a cfo and can offer their department a significant cost savings by doing this, saving the company money is literally their job already. That’s my business idea without giving it away entirely lol.
Comment here if you’re actually interested in this, I would love to join a group like this working on something as a group. I can code but never done so professionally or as part of a team.
It’s odd to me that while unemployed people are all individually working on side projects, learning the latest stacks, etc and do it all as throwaway code that will never see the light of day-and that’s seen as acceptable, as is contributing to open source, etc. But doing those same activities as a cooperative and paid in equity is where people draw a line.
There’s definitely a lot of details to work out if this were to take shape. How much equity do people earn, what happens when they get a job and their availability declines, etc. But it wouldn’t take much effort to think through those kinds of things and make something reasonable/fair.
The other market is this cohort themselves. What will "40 year old software engineers without a job" pay for? Food, rent, gym membership, haircuts, Factorio. Figure out something they want/need (other than jobs) that they'll pay for, and make that.
The low hanging fruits have all been picked a long time ago. You can try to undercut existing software, but it's not easy.
They don't have to be startups. They can be consultancies.
this month is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243024
if remote work is ok, please contact me. email is in my profile.
Consulting for smaller companies to give them cheap software that helps them with their problems cheap? (And scales revenue with many subscribers) - I could write one example that comes to my mind but I dont want to soubd like a shill
Probably some of them are good, but software recruiters have problems to identify who (this happens to many jobs, not only software). I could write a book how recruitment and assessments could be changed to identify real gems.
"Just" is doing a lot of work here. There is no OS more secure than Qubes, judging by the number and severity of Qubes security bulletins: https://www.qubes-os.org/security/qsb/.
You don't have to run Linux in Qubes. You can run OpenBSD [0], Windows [1] and more [2].
[0] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/4551
[1] https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/windows/
[2] https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/packaged-mirage-firewall/32097 and https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/exotic-oses-which-i-tried-on-qu...
> Also it depends on Xen
https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/7051
> and an X server
What if the companies people really want to work at have already solved this issue and the legacy companies won’t figure out how to change before they die off…