markshead

Most people focus on trying to fit more things into their day. The people I see who are massively successful are very good at choosing what things they don't do. Just like you have to remove items from your budget that aren't providing value, you must remove items from your schedule and commitments.

Winnowing your commitments in this way creates the space you need to learn, grow and try new things. Most of those new things will turn out not to be valuable and you'll drop them, but some may turn out to be immensely valuable. When you see people that appear to be very lucky, often they have a way of increasing their chances of discovering things they find valuable. Intentionally stopping things that fall below a certain threshold of value/importance is a great way to give yourself room to discover things that are above the threshold.

> You, the ISP, rent the fiber from them.

Where is this being done? The cities I've seen that are doing municipal broadband like Chatanooga are actually in the ISP business. (as far as I understood)

One of the big difficulties in installing broadband is dealing with the right of way necessary to get to everyone's house. Municipalities have a very strong advantage over a private company in their ability to get their wires to houses.

I wonder if cities could inspire more competition in the ISP market by making it easier for a new company to wire up a town. Another model would be for the city to provide fiber to each house as part of standard infrastructure that any ISP can provide data over. That way ISPs would be competing on price and service--not on who happens to own the wires running through your neighborhood.

I've worked on distributed teams that had an always-on video conference that everyone joined all day, every day. This facilitated much of the communication you are describing. The team still used instant message and email, but if someone needed to have a conversation, it was just a matter of looking at them to see if they looked they were busy and just saying "Hey!" If other people were interested they would listen in. If they had something to add, it was just a matter of speaking up.

If the idea of building a computer and understanding what every part does sounds interesting, I'd highly recommend checking this out:

http://nand2tetris.org/

Well there were a lot of suggestions and there are plenty of other things one could do that I didn't suggest. Your chances of getting a job after 24 months having done absolutely nothing related to your career are much lower than if you do some things like I mentioned--even if you are only spending 10-15 hours or so a month on it.

I'm not downplaying how much work it takes to care for a child, but I don't think it is helpful to downplay the need to stay at least somewhat active in your field if you want to back to the workforce someday.

I'm in no way implying that taking care of your children is less important than your career. I think it is great what he is talking about doing and is a great investment to make in his child.

Leaving the workforce to take care of family and not doing anything to keep yourself marketable is "checking out" when it comes to your career. You are going to have to be proactive in making sure that you are doing things each week that will put you in a good place to return to the workforce IF that is what you eventually want to do.

Typically if you have an organization that only talks to people with current jobs, that rule is for people sending in cold resumes. On the other hand, if they know who you are, you probably won't have the same filters applied.

Let's say you go ahead and move and take time off to watch your child. Two years down the road you want to start looking for work. What you've done with those two years is going to really matter. If you've invested time in activities like writing about your field, speaking about your field at conferences/meetups, creating an online course about your field, contributing to related open source projects, teaching a class at a university, etc. you are going to be in a very different place than someone who just checked out for 24 months.

Being currently employed sends certain signals to a prospective employer, but there are other things that can send much stronger signals. The unknown is still going to be scary and I don't know your field, but your Ph.D. can probably open a lot of doors to make yourself visible to market.

> the value of tests is for the unfortunate person who has to refactor or extend your code

This is probably one of the easiest things to quantify. I just finished working on a project that used BDD and TDD. The project was a rewrite of an older system that required manual testing. It took about 6 months to get a change into production. After the new system went live, they found a simple way to improve it. The code change was very small, but because all of the TDD and BDD efforts could be leveraged as regression tests, the change was deployed in a matter of weeks. That single change was able to capture an additional $5 millions in value that would have been lost if things had of gone through the previous 6-month cycle for testing the entire application manually.

If you want a Git repo hosted on Amazon, I think you can get 50 Gigs of storage using their CodeCommit service for free. It obviously isn't the same as learning how to set things up on the server for yourself, but it might be useful depending on what you are trying to do.

https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/

You might check out Dell's Project Sputnik on the XPS. They are similar in weight to an Apple Air, made of aluminum and come with Linux installed and working with all the hardware.

http://www.dell.com/developers

The user experience of an Apple laptop may be 10 times better than a Linux laptop for the types of things most people want a computer to do. Consider the out of the box battery life experience for example.

It absolutely makes sense! Over 10 years ago I started Productivity501 writing on various things I was learning about personal productivity. It has been extremely beneficial as a writing exercise, but it has also given me a much bigger presence on the web. A government agency was doing a background check on me for some contracting work. After they started, the person in charge of contracting called me up and asked how in the world I had time to do everything I had done online. They had done some searches and started finding hundreds of articles I had written over the years, interviews on other websites, people talking about articles I had written, etc. It made a huge positive difference in the way they perceived me.

Regarding not being an expert in some technical field: If you are putting any time at all into learning something, there is always going to be someone coming after you that knows less than you do. Explaining how you fixed a problem or set something up is going to be valuable even if it is very simple and even if you aren't an expert. Do a Google search for "connecting Visual VM to Tomcat 7" for an example of a post that I wrote simply to remind myself how to use Visual VM with tomcat. I am in no way an expert on Visual VM, but many people have found it helpful.

I have a few posts where I've written about a particular problem, forgot about it, and later Google led me back to my own post when I was looking up how to solve that same error again. So even just posting an error message along with a discussion of the details of how you fixed it can be extremely valuable. Think how often you've found an answer because someone else took the time to do the same thing. You probably didn't care if they were considered an "expert" or not.

One last example. Take a look at this article I wrote as an introduction to state machines:

http://blog.markshead.com/869/state-machines-computer-scienc...

I wrote that post to see if I understood the topic well enough to articulate it well. I'm pretty happy with its current state, but, despite all the time I put into it originally, the real work came when it got a bunch of comments from HN readers. If you scroll down to the comments you'll see people pointed out all kinds of problems that I fixed or clarified based on feedback I received. I may not be an expert, but taking the time to write the article, correct it when people pointed out an error, explain when someone thought they found an error that wasn't, and answer questions has given me a much greater amount of expertise than I had before and I'm not sure I could have gotten it any other way.

All that to say, go for it! Don't let your perceived lack of expertise hold you back. You'll find it to be an extremely valuable way to grow.

And the ones who bought stock (including those that did so at the 85% discount) will get the value of their stock. However, shareholders aren't guaranteed any returns. If they bought their stock in 2013 they lost money. Employees who bought stock with the 85% discount won't be quite as bad off as non-employee shareholders.

Imagine suggesting that any employee who was hired when the stock price was higher than the selling price now had to pay money to those who were hired when the stock price was lower. Fortunately, employees are not held liable for the valuation of the company at which they work. If they WANT to participate in that risk and reward they can buy stock--sometimes at a discount like Whole Foods offered.

> I struggle to see the scenario under which that is considered a failure.

Wasn't Whole Foods valued at over $20 billion a few years ago? If you bought Whole Foods stock at that point (either as an outside investor or an employee) it might feel like Amazon is buying it for $13 billion because Whole Foods has been having trouble staying competitive in the market.

Of course, if you actually started the company $13 billion may be a very big success if your goal was to sell.

Is there any reason they would get a different amount per share than other shareholders? I'd assume it would only depend on how much stock they have obtained either by purchasing it from the market, using the stock purchase plan (where they can buy it for 85% of market price if they agreed to keep it for 2 years), or the stock-grants that were given to employees.

I'd be happy to talk with you about what you are doing with the API. I don't know if my company would have time to write it for you, but I'd be happy to talk through it with you and offer some suggestions.

If each of your users use more than 717MB of data and less than 1 GB, then AT&T is probably cheaper. How much would it cost you if one month you used a total of 20GB of data? If the data usage varies from month to month, Google would probably be less expensive. (I'm not sure if you are including taxes which would probably change things a bit, but you get the idea.)

Giving someone a windfall each year of several thousand dollars is not the same as increasing their wages. It gets spent on very different things.

The cost of getting an education in the US is minimal or nothing. The cost of getting a degree from many schools is very high. However, there are still small universities where you can graduate debt free even with a minimum wage job.

NV?

Just leave the video conference software on. I'm working on an agile project with a distributed team and it works well once people realize that working in front of a live camera isn't any big deal.

Cisco Movi/Jabber. But it was down once and we used Google Hangouts pretty effectively. If a connection dies, you just fire it back up again.

Most of the people from home have it on a second monitor. There are about four team rooms on the call as well. They usually have one or two 30 to 50 inch televisions showing the other members.

>> I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at any time. > Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?

I'm actually working with a distributed team that does this. Everyone is on a shared video conference eight hours a day. If you want to talk to someone you look at your video conference team to see if they are at their desk, on the phone, or talking to someone else. If two people need to talk without disturbing others, they mute their video conference mic and jump on Skype. You can still see them, get their attention, etc. but you don't have everyone talking over each other on the main video conference channel.

It actually works a lot better than I expected.

It appears you can upload a file without creating an account. So without generating a key first. Or at least without generating a key that is somehow protected by a password.

To me the ability to find a job is a more important measurement of stability than the government saying that no job worth less than X and hour can be had.

But back to your question about what happens when employers lower their wages to $2 per hour, they would probably lose all of their employees and have to raise wages if they want workers. Believe it or not, wages do correspond in some way to the amount of benefit an employee brings to a company.

Lets say you want to hire someone to clean your house. How much would you have to pay in order to attract someone with enough skill to do the job? You couldn't just say you'll pay $0.50 per hour and magically get people to clean your house at that rate. There might be some people you'd attract for $5 per hour. As the price goes up, so does the pool of people you could pull from. However, above a certain price, it isn't worth it for you to pay someone else to do it. You might do it yourself or just live with it being dirty.

If having your house cleaned is worth only $5 per hour to you and someone is willing to do house cleaning for $5 per hour should you be allowed to hire them? They probably aren't going to be willing to work for $5 per hour if they can make $10 per hour somewhere else. Does it make sense for the government to say, "You can't hire this person unless the value they provide is greater than $7.25 per hour"? I don't feel that benefits you or the person who you want to pay. I don't feel it benefits society as a whole because I think we benefit by having money flowing through more hands not fewer. Minimum wage says that transactions below a certain hourly rate are not allowed, so it prevents money from flowing through some of the hands that might get it otherwise.

> Companies shouldn't be able to set wages at an arbitrary low.

Why not? You seem to think that there is only one big company setting wages for everyone. If company X needs good workers and is only willing to pay $5 per hour, but company Y is willing to pay $12 per hour, company X is not going to get the good workers. If they want better workers they will have to raise their wages.

> without any regard to the standard of living for the employees making those wages.

The clients who pay me do so without any regard to my standard of living. They pay me with regard to the value I provide. If you are suggesting that low skill employees need to be paid based on something other than the value they provide then you are suggesting that they be given charity rather than wages.

The business owners I know who employ low skilled workers all have trouble finding people who will show up to work on time and actually do work.

The unemployment problem in unskilled or low skilled labor is largely because government benefits make is economically better for low skilled people to NOT work. In my town there was a waitress who quit her job rather than take on the more hours they wanted her to work because it would have meant losing the money she was getting from the government.

I see a lot of people whose job hunting efforts are minimal or are for jobs they know they aren't qualified for because they want to stay on unemployment. When the unemployment runs out, the real job search will begin.

For a statistical look at this see the book: The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy

Lets say you run a small movie theater. You hire a 5 people for $5 per hour to sell tickets. Many of these are teenagers and other people who have schedules that can't work a normal job. The government comes in and says minimum wage needs to be $10 per hour. After doing the math, you decide that financially you can't afford to keep all those people on at $5 per hour. So you keep one to help run the front of the theater and put in a machine where people can swipe their credit cards to buy tickets.

Who was harmed? The business or the people?

The $5 per hour may not seem like much, but to the teenager it is $5 per hour, plus a chance to learn to manage their own money, a chance to learn people skills, a chance to learn work ethic, a chance to have a good reference from you for later jobs, etc.