fringedgentian

Prices are not quite that high, even in our most expensive place, Burlington, which has great schools, is on a lake and has a great community. You can find places over 3k a month, but they are really nice places. I'd say you can find a decent 3-bedroom for 2k and up. (Most of the rentals for the state can be found on craigslist: https://vermont.craigslist.org/)

But let me tell you about Montpelier, the smallest state capitol in the country and the only one without a McDonald's. I think it is the best small community in the world, however this is coming from someone who has not lived many places. Near Montpelier things are a little cheaper (depending on how near) and if you go out 15 minutes drive or more prices begin dropping drastically. Montpelier has at least one of everything you need: Mexican place, one sushi restaurant, one pharmacy, one grocery store, one co-op, etc. It does not have much for shopping, which is true of all of central Vermont but there is a Walmart in neighboring Berlin.

If you want somewhere close to cool community events but super-cheap look into Barre, which is Montpelier's sister community--but it's that sister who has had a bit of a 'failure to launch' and everyone suspects is doing drugs. Houses are dirt cheap in Barre and it is 15-minutes drive to cool things in Montpelier. And while there are more 'bad elements' in Barre, it also has a ton of really cool people not on drugs, raising families and I believe things are starting to happen there.

Both Montpelier and Burlington are great for liberal-minded, community-oriented persons, Montpelier being a bit more into it. Burlington seems to be mostly made up of out-of-staters and can seem quiet transient as they come and go, where more people seem to stick around longer in Montpelier. If you are like this and live in Barre you will have to seek out your kind, but there are plenty there.

Vermont is great if you love the idea of hiking, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, of owning a few acres with your own woods on them. Vermonters, especially rural Vermonters, pride themselves on minding their own business and letting everyone do whatever they want as long as they aren't bothering anyone else too much. Also we just legalized growing a few pot plants at home for your own recreational use, if you're into that.

The grant is only for people who work for a company based outside of Vermont.

Ah yes, I remember The Great DeFriending of 2016.

> Personally I feel about $100-200 fee as well, if the candidate is looking for compensation to build something fictional in 2 hours, is that candidate really care about your company, and is it a good idea to hire people who joins to your company just because you happen to be paying decent salary and they don't have a better option at the moment?

The money is more of a token to show that the company values the candidate's time and is not having them complete this coding challenge lightly.

If I am not not their supervisor and they are not specifically impacting my ability to get my own work done, I would mind my own business. Because it is thankfully not any part of my job description to monitor the time my coworkers spend in office.

I once found myself unemployable as well, maybe what I did can help someone. This was quite a few years ago when the ColdFusion job I had just ended and the job I had before that was in Visual FoxPro (and a few other even less known technologies). Talk about unemployable. Also I am not in a major city, so I was getting pretty much no responses to my resume.

After a few months I realized I was unemployable and set out to change it. Being unemployed, I luckily had a lot of free time. I made a study of the programming job ads in my target market and if I didn't know what a technology was, I looked it up. I tried to figure out which language was the most asked for, and decided it was PHP (at the time). Also in my studies and in the job ads I noticed that most of the work involved these new-fangled Content Management Systems and so decided I needed to learn one of those, and I chose Joomla. It was a choice I would later come to regret but it got me a job.

To learn these, for both PHP and Joomla I ordered a book from Amazon.com. I limited my search to books published in the last few years and ranked them by customer satisfaction and chose one near the top. And then I made myself go through reading these books and doing the exercises at the end of the chapters. This was very very boring but I made myself do it. Then I created a few Joomla websites for local small businesses for free.

And then, after 6 months of unemployment, I had made myself employable again. I saw a job ad that I was now now barely qualified for, applied, and was hired to maintain a legacy Joomla website. Was it a glam job? No, but it was somewhere to start. And the rest is history. I do think if I found myself unemployable again I could repeat the process and figure out what is being asked for these days and learn that.

I haven't done a study of it lately but I would guess almost any kind of expertise in a major JavaScript framework like Angular, Ember, or React/Flux might get you a remote job fairly easily, as there are very few experts in this and many companies seem to want it. Also most developers don't want to do front-end/JavaScript stuff like that so there is less competition. That's where I'd start looking anyway.

Do they all own the same amounts of equity in the company, as well? Or, in the case of a sale someday, do two of those guys get rich and the others find themselves having worked for lower-than-average salary for all those years in the name of "fairness to all".

What they are probably doing is multiplying everyone's options, including yours, by 4 and reducing the value of each one to 1/4 the original. Then everyone still owns the same % of the company but it is easier for the finance people work with them.

So your # of options is probably changed just like everyone's, but they don't bother letting you know usually unless it is time for you to sell them. If you get the opportunity to sell, they will let you know your actual number of stock and what each can be sold for. That's what happened to me anyway.

Seeing how quickly this entirely negative, picky-pants review got voted to the front page of hacker news has inspired me to purchase and start reading Lean In immediately.

It makes me think there must be something to this book.

If it is a non-publicly traded company, then you have no access to your investment. You wait and hope for two things to happen: 1. the company increases in value, or at least doesn't go bankrupt 2. you get an opportunity to sell your stock and get your money out. This can happen when it goes public or if they make some deal to sell part of their company to another company, but regardless you have no control over it and it's not something that happens quickly or frequently. Likely years.

I think 20% off is not a good enough bargain for you to take on that level of risk, with no savings and a family.

If you have a degree already, I would try the developer boot camp route. It's going to be cheaper, quicker, and get you into the real world of programming a lot faster.

If you decide you have a lot of potential and want to work at Google or Microsoft, you should then go back to school and get a degree in CS, but I think for the vast majority of developers, what you learn in school doesn't have a ton to do with what you are doing on the job on a day-to-day basis.

This is doubly true if your degree is in something non-fluff. If you have no degree at all, you need to get a degree because so many companies require one before they will even let you in the door these days.

But you don't even have to know what Puppet does to Google search "node puppet example" and see where the syntax was off.

It sounds like you have great technical ability and could easily solve these problems in the way your boss would like. So the problem is communication between you and your boss, that you aren't understanding exactly what he or she would like you to be doing.

Regardless of whose fault it is, it sounds like your work-communication skills could use improvement. And in my opinion, this is one of the easiest ways we can add value to our role as developers.

You can make it your business to ensure that all the details of each project are in shape and make sense before you start.

Because your boss said he doesn't like unconventional solutions, perhaps for the next few projects before you get too far along, make a technical plan and run it by him or her to get their input. If they protest, you can make a case for your way but if they would like you to use a different technology, well, they're the boss and you do it their way. Make it part of your job description to keep your boss informed of the major decisions you are making as you work on the project. If he knows about something, it means he has signed off on it and if the solution ends up being "too unconventional" it is no longer your fault.

Basically, you are learning how to make your boss happy with your work, as he is not. This will probably mean letting go of controlling how things get done and taking the initiative to communicate more, and that is something you are going to have to decide if you can be happy with.

If you need more autonomy you could find a small startup or founder who needs a technical partner; a job situation where you will have full say of how everything gets done. Maybe that is where you will be happiest. Regardless of where you end up, working on communication skills never hurts.