IaacForHire

I'll do whatever I damn well please.

People like you are why San Franciscan locals like myself hate techies.

I was first inspired by this video that a friend of a friend made for a boutique frame builder in California.

http://soulcraftbikes.com

A decade later I sold a company and spent 3 months in Portland at https://bikeschool.com/. I took pretty much all of their classes. (Their wheel building seminar was fantastic, btw). Sadly they no longer teach welding, but the classes were fantastic. In each class you sized, laid out, machined and welded a bike. Started with lugged chromoly brazing, then chromoly fillet brazing, then chromoly tig, aluminum tin and finally titanium tig.

Unfortunately there are no bike schools in the world which have as comprehensive as a program as bikeschool did. I think they lost most of their teachers during Covid. Hoping they recover.

I ended up bringing 5 frames with me on the train home from PDX to Oakland. Over the next year I built another 15 frames for friends, then started a business building and selling custom, very durable bikes to overweight techies. It was great fun, we used to host weekend 25, 50 and 100 mile rides, nobody under 200lbs allowed. I lost $300 on every bike I made, but it was worth it.

Check out Paul Brodie's videos on YouTube, I am hoping to do a master class with him next year. https://www.youtube.com/c/paulbrodie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2CnJ9lmlQo really shows the beauty of fillet welding.

Also, I'm going to take a carbon fiber class here: https://www.framebuildingschool.com

Long story short: Go buy a couple of the cheapest throw-away bicycle frames you can. Get a brazing setup, then spend a few weeks cutting them up and learning how to join tubes solidly. Everything else is easy after that.

I agree with you on the stress. I only visit the USA for funerals now. I just had 3 root canals and crowns done last year, it cost me $750 at a high-end dental office. I think that would get me 1/2 of a root canal in the states.

Funny, this is my plan to get out of tech. I've been welding bicycle frames for five years (cumulative, over maybe a 10 year period). I'll probably leave tech for good at the end of the year and start a boutique bike frame company.

EDIT: (clarified a timeframe)

I would rather have a garbage resume, than be a garbage human being like yourself.

It was a small company, 8 people including an office admin and an intern.

I was simultaneously doing conference marketing and managing our infrastructure. Dad died, I told them I had to go, didn't communicate much, because my dad had died, and they thought it was inappropriate that I wasn't calling them while taking care of my mother.

I also found out later that a certain YCombinator partner found out that I had 2% of the company and suggested they fire me before I vest because it was an "obscene" amount of stock for a single employee to have, even if I was the 7th employee and took a 50% salary cut in exchange for that stock.

So yeah, there's more to the story.

I'm not sure about great. If I had family beyond my wife, sure I think Western Europe would be incredible.

Since I don't, I choose to live in a poor country instead of a Western European country. Bought a flat for $100k, spend about $1k per month, and when I am able to find work I put 90% of it into savings.

Good for you. I am not in a field where being a "specialist" is being a generalist who sort of kind of gets to choose what he works on. Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems. That's at all taken into account the sheer amount of architectural guidance, performance and fault debugging I Have to do. Now I also have to learn Pulumi and CDK just to have any prayer of a job if I'm forced to go back to the USA to make $$.

I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube.

Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.

Yes, you're right. After 25 years of mostly being treated like shit by start-ups with an average weekly work rate of 60 hours, my attitude is probably kind of bad.

Do I really need to be a rockstar to get an inflationary raise every year?

Take cost of living into account and we make about 40% less than we did 20 years ago.

The best I ever did with a startup was in 2002 when everybody went under. I made about $200k in 10 months buying routers and switches from startups and selling them to VARs. I have a folder somewhere in storage with all of my stock certs. I framed the worthless one from Napster :)

"Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped. "

You failed to read my comment. I said I did it quite consistently.

You cannot become an expert in a new skillset every month.

I wish I had your enthusiasm. I've been unemployed 90% of the time since Covid.

Ironically, I've given at least 5 people their start in this industry who are all now worth 8 figures. There are haves and there are have nots.

I feel you on this. I live in the 3rd world (Turkiye) and have been itching to buy a motorcycle lately. The $26k BMW 1250RT I want costs $35k here, and another $20k in taxes.

Well now I have a better idea of how much my friend makes (she's an exec at a big company). I just lost my sympathy for her.

> The you have to factor in $0 in health costs (gratis hospital and doctor visits), no payments for kids attending university, 32 weeks of paid maternal leave, and 5 weeks of mandatory holiday each year.

This sounds great if you're the type to have a family. Otherwise, seems like you kind of get screwed?

I think you might slightly underestimate the sheer # of companies and tech jobs in the Bay Area? I think Hacker News is an echo chamber when it comes to this because there are so many "rockstar" type engineers here.

As a Sysadmin/DevOps engineer, I am expected to be an expert in some new paradigm every 2 years which I have done consistently for 25 years. Working hard and doing solid, consistent, useful work isn't enough to break through a salary ceiling.

Not everybody is an influencer, an MIT grad or a genius.

A few years ago a Danish friend of mine said she'd hit a point where it wasn't worth taking a raise because of the progressive taxation system, and so instead she would negotiate for more benefits.

Personally I've only ever gotten close to making $$ off of stock once, but got fired 2 weeks before my first vesting period because I took 2 weeks off after my father's death.

Every other start-up I've worked for either went under, never exited or had an exit only the founders profited from. This is probably true for 99% of all start-ups.

I have a cousin who makes $220k as a crane operator at a port. I'll never make that much in my career.

I'm not sure I can believe that. The companies who hire for average senior engineers like me do not compete with FAANG. They hire the 90% of us who aren't rockstars and have accepted we have no upward mobility in our careers.

I know very many devops/software engineers in San Francisco making $140k-$150k total comp.

Sadly outside of FAANG this is not the case at all. Total compensation out of non-faang is: Salary + worthless stock option and maybe a 3% 401k match if they're more than 5 years old.

So 3% per year, or just a little bitover inflation. Still, better than the US where we don't really get inflationary raises.

Oof, European salaries are absurdly low. When I first left the USA I was thinking "OK I'll get a nice job in Amsterdam or Denmark" .. Then I saw the cost of living and the low salaries, and waved away that dream.

In Istanbul the watermelons we get from the grocery store are about 4kg, the ones we buy from the road-side watermelon trucks in the summer can be 10-15kg (if their scales aren't rigged).