389 karma · joined February 19, 2011
Reach me at <my nickname>@binaryredneck.net
Telecommuting makes a huge difference: less child care, less gas, no unpaid commute time, etc.
Benefits: Is work paying for my gym? How good is the health insurance? How much vacation do I get? Is work keeping me stocked with tech books and sending me to conferences as needed, or is that on my own tab?
When it comes to salary negotiations, most lower-SEC (socio-economic class) country women I know will counter their first offer. Getting more than the initial offer makes them feel respected; they want to see that the employer wants them enough to make a concession. Most higher-SEC urban and suburban women I know won't ask -- they'll take or turn down the initial offer, but they tell me that asking for more money would make them look whiny and high-maintenance.
Growing up in the country, being able to haggle was a badge of honor. One haggles (or at least asks about discounts/freebies) everywhere from garage sales to car dealerships to the local fabric store. I cannot tell you how many times as a child I heard my mother, grandmother, and aunts say "it never hurts to ask". It's considered mostly a woman thing there -- I get funny looks from the men for teaching my 8yo son to haggle, but my male friends ask me to come shopping with them to handle negotiations.
The women I know from the techie world (all from higher-SEC and more urban backgrounds than I) may look for advertised sales, but haggling or asking for discounts not offered is seen as showing weakness/looking poor. When I go ahead and haggle around them, they say things like "I cannot believe you just said that!" or "You are embarrassing me, we don't need a discount that badly, we can afford this."
As adults, we seem to translate that consumer experience to how we approach salary negotiations. Both groups pursue the strategy that they were raised to believe shows confidence and strength.
My advice: if you want your daughter (or son) to negotiate a higher salary as an adult, teach her (or him) to haggle young. That garage sale where she/he asks "If I buy all twelve of these books [marked 50 cents each], would you sell the lot for five dollars?" will eventually become "Would you consider 70k/year?" (in response to an offer for 55).
However, my 8yo is in the process of earning his own e-reader. At this point, he's past the sparkly, fuzzy, pop-up, colorful books and on to chapter books (which are printed in simple black on cheap paper anyway), so nothing is lost. He's very responsible with electronics, and the idea of having something so grown-up has really helped him get over his reading anxiety and become an enthusiastic reader.
The portability is a big benefit for him, too... it's nice to let him easily take his reading with when he gets shipped off to his grandparents' farm on breaks from school, or we run off somewhere together.
The main down-side, from my perspective, is that on an ereader, I can't let him take his books to school. It's too easy to have an item like that stolen, stepped on, spilled on, dropped -- you get the idea -- in a hectic 2nd grade classroom.
For an elementary schooler, a book should be a book. Any interactivity beyond the "choose your own adventure" style will cause me not to purchase. There's something to be said for letting reading happen, instead of distracting with things that could have been left to the imagination.
Over the elementary school age, I imagine that any child would find an "interactive book" at least as annoying and distracting as I do as an adult.
Why would I want to use my email address as an identity? I already get more than enough spam.
2) I make looking at alternate viewpoints a part of my research heuristic in general. I don't believe in the mythical "neutral news source" so instead I grab things written from vastly different viewpoints and try to get a complete-ish picture.
3) I have the kind of people in my social circle who think that debate for the sake of debate is fun, so we take positions pretty much at random sometimes. It leads to some interesting conversations, and occasionally makes one or more of us re-think our beliefs.
Yet another site/app that depends on Facebook. I'm not even going to try it.
There are other benefits to working from home that are harder to measure:
* I cook more when I work from home because I can stick something in my oven during the work day and have it ready at dinner time, rather than getting take out or buying heat-and-eat foods during the week. This saves big bucks on food, and also improves our health.
* My son gets a better education when I work from home because I am there to see when he's struggling with something, and can work with his teachers to fix it (as opposed to delegating homework time to a nanny or daycare).
* I don't have to take off of work to let a plumber in, to care for my son when he's home sick from school, and so on.
* I don't take off when I'm sick, unless I'm falling-down can't-think-right sick -- there's no worry about infecting my coworkers, not being close enough to a restroom, how I'm going to drive home if I get worse while at work, etc..
* I save a lot of time I might have spent commuting, which can be spent instead on my family, a side project, recreation, whatever.
* I'll never lose 1-2 days of productivity to an allergy attack because Joe Blow from marketing who's a pack-a-day smoker keeps popping by my office reeking of the stuff.
All else being equal, I'd take a job with 20% lower pay in order to work from home full time -- assuming, of course, it isn't one of those companies where telecommuters are second-class citizens. Other related benefits (such as being able to build my work schedule around my life to some degree) could knock it down a bit further.
I see money simply as a tool to help me do things that matter -- money, in and of itself, or as a matter of score keeping, isn't important to me.
I find it decidedly suboptimal that our society insulates young people from work until their late teens or early 20's, then expects them to suddenly and magically become good workers. Raising my kid around my work is a huge plus, in terms of his preparation for life, his understanding why mommy works even though it takes time away from him, and increasing the time we get to spend together.
I'd use this if I could somehow subscribe to an RSS feed of just categories of things I'm interested in.
The mapping that existing real estate and rental listing sites use are frustrating to me because searching by location is clunky -- by city or zip code or even distance as the bird flies is too vague. I want to make sure I don't spend my life commuting, that going to our dojo isn't a prohibitively long trip, that I like the school my child would be in, and that there's a nearby grocery store or grocery delivery that suits my dietary restrictions.
I want to be able to overlay whatever data is important to me -- elementary school boundaries, grocery stores or delivery areas, traffic patterns, etc -- on my home search.
I want to be able to pick a few locations and specify maximum drive times for each, then find places in the overlap (bonus points if I can input my schedule so typical traffic patterns are considered).
I have no idea how you'd make money off of it, though. :/
* Start using open source software -- the easiest place to start is developing on something that you already like and use, and which has an established developer community. Use lots of different things, then check out the communities and try a few on for size. Something will stick.
* DO NOT use your boyfriend or anyone else as your proxy to avoid jumping in the deep end. When you put someone else between you and the communities you would like to participate in, you give up most of the benefits of participating in a hacker community, such as creating relationships that help you grow and learn, seeing what others are doing up close, and so on. We like newbies, and we don't bite.
* AVOID GIRL GROUPS. Don't fall into the trap of joining "$technology Women" groups. They limit more than they help. I blogged about this effect here: http://binaryredneck.net/node/55 -- it's a bit long to discuss adequately in a comment.
* Scratch your itch. If you show up to get closer to your boyfriend or have more in common with him, walk away now. If you don't care about hacking, you won't be good at it, and you'll both end up grumpy. Trust me, I see it frequently. On the other hand, if you have passion, you'll find your niche, I guarantee it.
* Don't be afraid to break stuff. This is one place guys have an advantage over us -- the strategies traditionally taught to women (at least in my experience) are comparatively conservative. That is, guys don't read the directions, even if it means spending twelve hours doing something wrong before they've built whatever they just bought. Chicks often feel they need to really understand something before they attempt it.
The healthy response is somewhere in the middle of course, but failing that, the reckless guy who doesn't read directions will, in the area of software at least, outperform the chick who is waiting for understanding before she does something. Make use of available documentation, but don't be afraid to try stuff, knowing that it may break. It's software -- the worst you'll have to do is restore from backup, and you learn more by doing than by listening/reading.
* Dive into hacker culture and the hacker community. [Hacker culture has a purpose](http://binaryredneck.net/node/170) -- it makes our communities run smoothly. We love to share what we know, we love to learn new things, and we really do like newbies when they are well-behaved (by which I mean that IRC, Stack Exchange, any hacker venue you visit will have its own codes of behavior -- do your best to observe them, take corrections with grace, and never, ever be a [support leech](http://binaryredneck.net/support-leech).)
If you haven't gathered by the egregious number of references to my own blog, I'm very passionate about helping new hackers grok hacker culture and find there niche in the community so they can code and build awesome things. Feel free to drop me a line if you want -- my email is (same as my HN user name)@binaryredneck.net
Nobody wanted to hire me, so I started a company.
Now (almost 4 years later) not only am I employable, but I get 2-5 contacts from people who want to talk about hiring me per month.
I'm really tired of hearing the "poor single mom" drum beaten. I did it, despite my child's special needs, despite a medical condition that limits my employment options, and plenty of other challenges other people can do it to. If it's hard to figure out, and I just haven't noticed that it is, tell me and I'll write a book.
Putting myself in an employer's shoes, I'd be leery of hiring anyone who's been long-term unemployed. What does one do with the time? When I couldn't find a job, I created one. While not everyone is predisposed to entrepreneurship, surely a few months in to not finding employment, any sufficiently determined person would at least try it.
I'm not saying they'll all succeed -- but I'm not sure you have to succeed. When you start your own venture, you go from being unemployed to being employed, and that solves the original problem -- you are no longer a member of the long-term unemployed.
I think its fair to say that someone who's had no break in their unemployment more than a year (assuming they aren't a full-time student, seriously ill, a stay-at-home parent, etc.) probably has something wrong with how they approach becoming employed, and a lot of those somethings would also negatively impact their performance as an employee. It's fine to be skeptical, and it's not a slight against the under-educated or single parents.
My son is 8.
His playroom and my office are really one big room, with some furniture dividing it into separate spaces.
He comes home from school and does his homework at a small table next to my desk. I help him with it and he "checks up on" my work.
He sometimes tests websites I'm designing to make sure the UI is easy to understand.
He's done data entry for extra allowance.
He sometimes goes with me to tech conferences, and has even spoken at one.
I work while he's at school, during homework time, and after he's asleep. We play after homework is done and/or after dinner.
Sometimes he just visits with me while I work, or sets his laptop down next to mine and we have a mother-son hackfest.
Chores are easier and faster because we do them as a team.
I do enjoy the occasional break when he is at his grandparents' place for a while, but for the most part we do things together. I'm a single mother, so there's no one to pick up the slack when I'm "too busy". Also, I've noticed that I'm more productive when I make time for what's important -- being a mom.
I can be having an awful day full of interruptions and some seemingly unfixable bug, then I walk my son home from school and it all changes. For twenty minutes I turn off my phone, get outside, and walk. By the time I reach his school I've calmed down. Then we walk home and talk about his day, or the squirrels, or my neighbor's new flower bed. By the time we get back home I am surprisingly refreshed. I usually fix the bug in a flash, and have more patience with nagging clients.
You can talk about evolutionary psychology and your desire for hard data all you want -- but neither will predict the behavior of an individual, and most entrepreneurs are outliers in some way or another already. I'd never suggest that anybody can juggle building a business and child-rearing without dropping either ball, but clearly I can, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that someone else can, too.
I used to sleep while breastfeeding at night -- plunk the baby on the bed, stick a nipple in their mouth and doze. When baby grabs at the other one, switch sides.
During the day, I coded while breastfeeding, or read, or whatever. Hmm... I wonder if that's why my little guy is such a geek? :P
When I was first starting out, I took a lot of so-so jobs. You only have to have a couple really good clients to get word-of-mouth spreading among people like them, then you can start to be more picky.
I was the mom who coded while breastfeeding and had her son at his first LUG meeting before he was two months old. Being a mom and being a hacker have always melded pretty well for me, despite the fact that I'm now a single mom: my now-8yo likes tech conferences and has even spoken at one, he comes home from school and does his homework in my office while I do my work, he's even made dinner on one or two evenings when I was really swamped (okay, it was chicken nuggets and macaroni or reheated leftovers -- but I didn't have to cook it!). He's my mini-hacker, and he says he wants to grow up to be an inventor.
I highly doubt I'd have pulled all that off if I were like a "normal" first-time mom. Luckily, I grew up in the sort of family where older cousins look after younger cousins -- as a teen I even moved in with relatives to be nanny to their kids for a while when their work schedules had them away from home too much.
Juggling a start-up and a young child is quite possible, but it helps to have some experience under your belt, and to include your kid in your working life a bit. Instead of having two lives competing for your energy, you get a kid who understands what you are doing and why, and feels part of it rather than left out.
I usually fill at home and carry 2-3 pens if I'm going to a conference or something where I may write a lot. However, if I do need to fill on the go, I carry ink vials instead of bottles (the smaller vials don't need a big, clear space to be used for refilling) and a couple of wipes. Dip the pen, suck up ink, wipe the section, done. I usually don't even get any on my fingers, and if I were really worried about it I'd carry ink nix or amodex to wash it off before it stained.
If I (with no degree, no formal training in information security, just my wits) knew, why didn't everyone? I'm tempted to assume "because they didn't care to read anything more than the Dropbox marketing blurbs that say 'secure'".
That said, select employees having access to your files may be expected (as it's the most common practice in consumer backup and file hosting solutions), but it's not necessary.
I use rsync.net for my backups because I can generate a key and use it to encrypt my data without sharing that key with anyone else. Even rsync.net's employees can't read my stuff. (Please note that this is a different type of service than Dropbox: because all my data is encrypted I can't just click to share it with others.)
(I don't have any affiliation with Dropbox or rsync.net. I'm just a consumer who chose one over the other.)
From the time I wrote my first Linux config file, to when I started coding in C (and through the next dozen languages I learned), from using RCS to CVS to SVN to git and hg, when I was a security geek, a nuts-and-bolts coder, a web developer, and a typesetter... I stuck with emacs.
I know folks who learned only a fraction of that breadth of computing tasks, yet passed through six or seven editing environments, revision control front-ends, and so on doing it. There was this extra thing they had to do -- audition appropriate IDEs and customize on to their liking -- every time they learned something new. I'm confident I can pick up whatever language I like without that overhead.
This is one of the many reasons I only write with fountain pens. They write smoother than other pens (rollerballs, ballpoints, gel, etc.), require less pressure, and are less expensive in the long term due to the low cost of bottled ink and the longevity of even mid-range pens.
EDIT: The Constitution is fine; our habit of letting the government ignore it is the problem.