Not a big deal at all. A great number of people are always looking to change their job at any given time. During the pandemic maby were reluctant to act on it, so it could have created a big delayed volume of resignations. It is not a problem because would be a lot of candidates to fill in the ranks, who too have quit their previous jobs.
I can imagine a few other factors that might be playing into this:
* People who have moved, and now want a job closer to home if they want/need to go into the office.
* Companies who have hoarded cash during the recession and can now offer big salaries.
* Looser bonds with colleagues they only see remotely
I've no idea whether and to what extent any of these things are true, but it's definitely easy to imagine a big move around. That said... I'm not seeing much change in volume on the typical job boards so perhaps it's all hypothetical.
You may be right but this seems extremely presumptuous—how do you know the people will go back vs taking a gap year or other extended hiatus or field change?
Not GP, but most people are not secure enough (either financially or psychologically) to just quit for a year. The overwhelming default is trading one job for another rather than trading your job for margaritas on the beach.
Synchronized resignations are definitely more of a headache than staggered ones. For example, in a normal situation if I quit my boss will be able to hire someone to replace me, knowing what my strengths and weaknesses are and what gaps my departure has created for the team. If they quit then I am a source of information to whoever is hired to replace them.
Of course anyone is replaceable but some knowledge will be lost. Also your model does not account for businesses which are aggressively expanding and doing a better job than the average employer retaining their employees by either being a genuinely great place to work or LTIPs
I'm not sure I believe the conclusion based on the survey. Resigning and "thinking about quitting [your] job" are very different things. I've spent my whole working life thinking about quitting but I've rarely actually quit, the pandemic hasn't changed that.
After I left Airbnb, I paid $680 a month to keep my previously employer-paid health insurance. Very cool, loved to have the “freedom of choice” to “participate in the market”. Insurance feels like another little way businesses seek to own people in the US. Want to own yourself? Gotta pay the lease… on your own body.
Basically, the metal levels are as follows: bronze, silver, gold, platinum are priced so that you the insurance company pays 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% of the healthcare costs.
Of course, this is an actuarial calculation, so it’s only true over a large population over a long timeline. But healthcare is a pretty certain need for everyone, so the cost for healthcare for everyone from age 0 to 65 (when government starts offering it called Medicare) is amortized into health insurance premiums for all of the 0 to 65 years.
The ACA law of 2010 requires a few things which cause the premiums to be adjusted such that younger people subsidize older people. The age rating factor table at the bottom of the linked pdf shows that the riskiest person (64 year old) must cost at most 3x what a 21 to 24 year old costs.
Also, healthy people subsidize unhealthy people because your health condition cannot be taken into account when determining premiums, and men subsidize women since gender cannot be taken into account (due to birthing).
As far as I know, smoking is the only activity that causes one’s premium to be higher.
The out of pocket maximum for in network providers is $6,550. The premium is $350 per month. So $4,200 premium plus $6,550 out of pocket means a 21 to 24 year old pays at most $11k per year for healthcare if they get into trouble (most will only pay the $4.2k premiums since they are 21 to 24 and probably will not need healthcare).
A complication to these calculations is when employees pay, they can pay with pretax money, and HSA plans allow you to invest your HSA contributions tax free (max of a few thousand dollars per person per year).
Medical illnesses are the most frequent reason. Which can include bills of course. But also includes inability to work, a requirement for ongoing home help, etc.
Insurance in general typically has deductibles (auto, home, renters, etc). for which you are responsible for first before the insurance kicks in. This is beneficial since it allows for lower premiums and lets customers pay out of pocket for expenses that they can afford. As a concept, it only makes sense to purchase insurance for expenses that you cannot afford.
>So when you hear about those people who get lumped with $100k medical bills they still have to pay like $20k of that on top of your insurance?
It depends if the person was insured or not, and if the care was provided by healthcare providers who have contracts with the insurance company or not (referred to as being in network).
In the US, when you go to a healthcare provider, the first thing they will ask you to sign is a form acknowledging you know you are responsible for anything your insurance company does not pay for (unless you go to a vertically integrated healthcare / health insurance company like Kaiser Permanente). In fact, health insurance companies are better referred to as managed care organizations (MCOs) in the US.
What happens is people are not capable of knowing what healthcare services they need or do not need. They have no way to determine if they are being ripped of or not. So the MCOs employ legions of doctors and pharmacists and whatnot to double check the doctors performing the services. They also have enough knowledge about pricing healthcare procedures that they are more able to determine a "good" price to pay.
Anyway, after the ACA law, there is an out of pocket maximum for in network providers, so you would not get a $100k bill. the out of pocket maximum for individual / family is $8,550 / $17.1k in 2021:
So you would only be liable up to that amount at most in a calendar year for all healthcare you receive from an in network provider. Everything else is paid for by insurance.
>What happens if you can't afford the remaining percentage?
The healthcare provider can choose to go after you for it, since you signed the form that says you will pay them if insurance does not. If you feel your insurance denied the doctor inappropriately, you can appeal to a third party to determine if insurance is obliged to pay it (if it is evidence based medicine, then they most likely have to pay it).
You just get the care anyway and get a bill later. It’s all pretty weird.
My wife got a medical bill for $100k after being hospitalized with a life threatening illness years ago called and told them she’d send them $6,000. They said fine and considered it paid in full. The whole system is really bizarre.
My uncle has cancer and no insurance and is on Medicare so all his costs are covered.
My daughter is disabled and is also on Medicare, which is a weird mix of private and public where Medicare pays her primary insurance deductible so if she gets a surgery any surgery or doctors visits we might need after that in the year are going to be free.
I was unemployed when my disabled daughter was born so it didn’t cost us a dime, if I’d been employed it would have cost at least several thousand dollars. I started a job a week later but that didn’t retroactively change the cost owed.
When my disabled daughter was in the NICU for six months while a recruiting firm was technically my employer, she ruined their health insurance plan by racking up a million dollars in fees because they only had 60 or so employees, so the cost was extreme and their health insurance renewal rates were more expensive for a worse plan. I left the plan and used a Health Insurance marketplace plan instead which was cheaper and better than what their organization was offering for the following year.
There was a lot of uproar from middle and upper middle class people when the original healthcare reform proposals in 2009 involved getting rid of all employer sponsored health plans.
Many leaders at that time did want to dump everyone into one insurance market so all healthy people subsidized all sick people, but there was tons of politics blowback from people who already had access to good healthcare who would see their costs rise because until then, they only had to share costs between healthy, employed workers.
Even today, you will read people lamenting how the ACA increased their health insurance premiums. Nevermind that it enabled millions more to actually get healthcare, so obviously the money was going to have to come from somewhere.
$680 is probably somewhat typical, I pay $1000/mo for family coverage.
It only covers "medically necessary" procedures as deemed by the insurance company (there are some laws requiring certain procedures to be covered). You have to use specific doctors and facilities.
Typically you have a deductible as well. I have to pay $4,000 out of my own pocket before insurance kicks in. Preventative care (check-ups) are usually covered by a co-pay, mine is $30.
There's usually an out-of-pocket maximum you can pay every year (mine is $9,000). That's the real value of the insurance... if you're in a catastrophic event hopefully it caps your costs (but it doesn't always depending on facility, procedures, etc).
Not sure what you mean by excess or value of coverage, but the answer is probably no.
Medically necessary is still a rule in the UK NHS. It doesn't cover cosmetic surgery unless there's a very good reason (like something affecting a person's quality of life)
I think excess is what you call a deductible, as in if I have an accident in my car, I pay for the first £250 and that's the excess.
The value of the coverage is the maximum amount they'll pay out. I don't know if I have that on my car, but my house contents insurance is insured up to a certain value
I have insurance with Hastings Direct(because they were cheap) and their 3rd party liability maximum is 25 million pounds. When I was with Aviva last year theirs was 20 million.
I pay £300/year to insure my car.
And yeah, excess in US can be crazy I think. We have private health insurance from work and when I had to use it there was a £100 deductible for the year - I thought that was quite steep.
Low-cost-of-living (that is: undesirable) US state here.
~$1800/m for bad family (married couple + kids) health insurance on the HCA Marketplace. There are no providers beyond the two on there still selling individual insurance to anyone in this state. Other providers are only interested in selling group insurance. Check with insurance providers directly, check with insurance brokers, that's what you hear. No, no-one sells individual insurance in this state except those two providers you've never heard of. Other providers will only deal with businesses or other organizations.
How is the insurance bad? Well, for one thing, it still leaves you with ~$25,000 of risk exposure per year. That is, if things go very poorly (two family members get very sick, basically—nb, because US healthcare is actually, no-joke, insane, "gets very sick" includes "gets pregnant"), you could potentially have to pay $25,000, total, in a given year, on top of the monthly premiums. For another, US insurance plans have a concept of a "network", that is, particular places (hospitals, clinics, testing centers) where the insurance applies. For most insurance, you'll pay most or all costs if you go "out of network". These two providers each have very different networks, such that, for our location, one must choose between having the only children's hospital in the area "in network" (and of course said hospital is itself a "network" of locations and they've bought up everydamnthing related to children's healthcare in our city, because healthcare in the US is batshit insane) or having either of the two nearest normal hospitals to us be in-network.
Oh, and get this: US healthcare plans like to restrict coverage geographically. I think they all have to cover emergency room visits anywhere, but I wouldn't want to see what happens if you get in a bad car wreck, or have a heart attack, or whatever, in another state and can't be moved and are transferred out of the ER to any other part of the hospital. My guess is you get hit with five to six figures of bills that insurance won't touch. That's right: it's probably advisable to get travel healthcare insurance to travel in your own goddamn country. Further, lots of people live within tens of miles of a state border and might routinely travel—even just to commute to work—outside the area their insurance covers. Hope they never need anything but ER care while doing that!
US healthcare: fucked top-to-bottom, and we pay a huge premium for the "privilege" of "enjoying" it, because freedom or something.
Most businesses would very much prefer NOT to have to deal with employee health plans. Forgetting the cost to them - it's a massive annoying overhead and nightmare to manage.
Big businesses would prefer it. They already have the huge HR departments to manage it, and it serves as price obfuscation so the worker cannot accurately compare alternative employers’ offerings.
It also works against small businesses that cannot afford to offer health insurance, because the small businesses’ employees cannot purchase health insurance with pre tax money, while the big businesses can compensate people with pretax health insurance that they subsidize.
It’s also a huge disincentive to switching jobs: I’ve known people who took or stayed at jobs they didn’t love just for the benefits who would have preferred to be independent or at small companies but had families, various conditions which didn’t prevent working normally but would have made individual insurance prohibitive. The ACA helped, but not enough and not in every state — especially because large group plans can mean less pushback on every charge.
That may be true, but it’s not annoying enough for them to prioritize doing anything about it. We’d see them forming coalitions to counter the insurance lobby were it otherwise.
Also I’m skeptical that they don’t actually want it, per the sibling commenter’s remarks. I think bigger businesses are all too happy to have another lever of informational asymmetry to pull to manage their actual biggest cost: salary.
The US's healthcare system is a crime against humanity. A nation's population is it's greatest asset, and to manage healthcare as it is handled in the 'States is a recipe for 360 degree stagnation, cronyism, and the destruction any reason for the non-wealthy to live there at all, unless trapped.
It’s much less of an issue than it was a decade+ ago. Unemployed people in the US get free health coverage through Medicaid pretty much everywhere but the Deep South, albeit with a limited selection of doctors.
You get an insurance card that you can take to any doctor that accepts Medicaid, they'll treat you for free or for a nominal (say, $5) copay and bill the state. Mental health treatment is covered, prescription drugs are covered, the only major thing it's missing, as far as I know, is dental. But the main catch is that many doctors don't accept it, since Medicare generally reimburses at a lower rate than private insurance. Anecdotally, I was on Medicare in the rural Midwest several years ago and I think I had two choices of GP within a 25 mile radius.
Everyone doesn't have it because it's means-tested - if you make more than very roughly $1,200 a month you don't qualify. You still qualify for income-based subsidies at that point (under a totally different government program), but at higher income levels the expectation is that either you pay for your own health insurance premiums out of pocket, or your employer pays them for you. It's all very complicated, but that complexity is the price we pay so that we higher-income Americans can say that our employer is paying a "premium" and not a "tax." Evidently some of us care an awful lot about that sort of thing.
But thats the same as Germany, no? You still have to pay for health insurance when you quit your job, so thats something to take into consideration before you resign, not only in USA.
There might be a bump as a few employers try to capitalize on the work-from-home to get good talent. ...but in the long term, employee performance will be better in the office, and so most employees will end up back at work.
The thing the that the article misses is that the vast majority of CEOs want all employees back in the office.
This is why "quit rate" is a sign of economic strength. If workers are confident enough that resigning will result in both speedy re-employment and a better job than before, there is probably good overall confidence in the markets.
I know a lot of people who are looking for alternative jobs because their companies expect a full return to the office. They are all looking for more flexible, or remote-first, employers.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about quitting and have had 6 jobs in 14 years. The first 1-2 years of employment is usually fairly interesting and then you hit a rut in which you're no longer learning, IMO.
I suspect what the authors are presuming is a relationship between the variable "proportion of workers thinking about quitting" and the variable "near future quitting rate".
Imagine if I told you that the number of people "thinking of buying a Tesla" had gone up dramatically. Now, most people can't afford a Tesla, so no, not everyone is going to buy a Tesla. But if overall the proportion of people thinking about it went up, you wouldn't be surprised if the number of Tesla sales went up soon, and would probably be surprised if it fell.
What I'm saying here is that it would be weird if those two variables are completely independent.
But that's kind of the point - the article is not saying that the proportion of workers thinking about quitting has gone up dramatically. They're saying that "25% to upwards of 40%" are thinking about this, but it seems a completely reasonable rate even in normal conditions, for all we know it may not be an increase at all.
The difference is that there’s not normally a mass catalyst like the end of WFH. Many people think of quitting their job, few actually do.
That’s largely because of status quo bias. People don’t like to make any major changes to their life situation unless prompted. But if a company exists on ending the WFH arrangements that people have become accustomed to over the past year, all bets are out the window.
This is the important question. At my previous job the results of internal surveys would have these fairly high numbers, like 20% of employees don't think they will be here in a year.
But if you looked at the previous year's numbers, it was something like 18% or 15%. And the previous year's actual attrition was closer to 5-8%. So perhaps you could extrapolate if you had the attrition rates combined with survey data, but surveys are a much weaker signal.
I am more impressed that people would confess to thinking of leaving their position to an internal survey. I have no confidence that a company sponsored survey will be confidential and 'worrisome' results would not be shared with my direct management.
Good point. That said, in many countries employee protection is solid enough that people would not need to worry. If within the EU, then GDPR regulations could also lead to pretty massive fines if a supposedly anonymous survey turned out not to be.
Exactly. I'm sure people are often thinking about quitting their jobs, but are they actually likely to quit within the next 12 months or are they just thinking about it?
Well another way to frame this is "X% are willing to quit their jobs if they can find a better offer" but only a fraction of that actually manage to find that something better. Not being able to do so could be due to those employee's shortcomings, but more likely its about how many better jobs there are and how competitive it is to get those jobs.
This is the real question. How many people are never actually considering leaving their job if another better opportunity comes along? The journalists asked a loaded question to exaggerate the idea that employees are ready to quit in droves because they don’t want to go back to the office or something. In reality many people are always looking for the next step in their career.
There was a similarly hyperbolic headline yesterday about a spike in resignations. Buried in the article it said that monthly employee turnover had moved from typical mid 1% to a higher mid 2% rate.
There might be a slight increase in turnover due to the hot job market and booming economy, but journalists like this one are working hard to make the situation sound like a dramatic change that’s going to change everything.
The next step is to ask yourself -why- journalists are asking loaded questions and pushing certain narratives. I don't believe it's coincidence, or just that they're just not very good at their jobs. There's economic, political, and social power to be gained for them and their ideology if they push these narratives.
100% agree that journalists emphasize the sensational for the clicks instead of the moderate and reasonable.
That said, I don't agree with this framing of your question with regard to "individual" journalists. It's unlikely that any "individual" journalist has economic, political, and social power. Journalists' power results from their collective efforts as a group. I would be hard-pressed to name more than five individual NYT reporters but collectively, the NYT has unquestionable social and political power, if not economic. The NYT's angles on stories, its decisions to pursue certain trends and not others, its portrayals as somethings as good and others as not good, etc. - these efforts have tremendous power and shape society.
Why do you think someone like Bezos was so interested in buying WaPo? To anyone who fails to appreciate the power of journalism, start with Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion.
Interesting. Looks like a rising trend since the last financial crises. The effect of corona seems to be limited to a dip around the beginning of the pandemic, presumably due to uncertainty. No great resignation wave though, judging by the graph.
No great resignation wave, are we looking at the same charts? Both charts have the highest values ever since they started tracking this in 2001, and we've only seen increases in monthly quits since the start of 2021.
Hiring is just picking up. If you didn’t grab the best people during the pandemic because you had an incredible glut of qualified people applying, good luck doing that shit now.
Sounds like my employer, and I’ve been on-site for 1 year. Their excuse for 2% raises was that the economy was bad, despite record earnings and productivity during the pandemic. Now that inflation is 5%, I’m gone with another 2% raise.
Google's yearly raises are generally the same as Amazon I've learned, for what it's worth. The difference is the bonus and refreshers, and the fact that there are more evaluation periods with more achievement buckets.
+1. We froze all hiring during the initial lockdowns, while continuing to advertise our positions. Now we're hiring again but, in aggregate, all of the good engineers who were made redundant have already been hired and those that remain are the bad ones.
Im quitting and not looking for another job. Gonna use the savings to take a gap year, or a couple, work on some stuff I want maybe. Maybe more involvement in OSS is coming too?
I've never had a gap year, it was all school, then immigration, work, university, more work. Any holiday time you fly back home. I kept hearing its not unusual for people in the west to take gap years, so thats what Im doing.
edit: thank you all for advice, encouragement as well as for cautious pessimism. By the amount of upvotes Im hoping Im not the only one doing this. See you out there!
Much of crypto codebases are open source, where at the end of the day you're pushing to an OSS codebase.
If you're paid by a crypto co., foundation, grants, or are financially incentivized by your crypto holdings to contribute, you're often within the bounds of both OSS & crypto.
example: devs that've contributed to Defi projects e.g. uniswap, or received ethereum or solana grants for their OSS code (i think nearly everything user-facing in these organizations is OSS).
I didn't do a gap year either. I left education at 16 and immediately went into FTE and have been there ever since (for longer than I dare count) and now that I am all wrapped up in a mortgage and kids I'm not sure I'll be taking a gap year any time soon (voluntarily, anyway!)
FWIW I have worked with several colleagues who took a gap year and never stopped. They pick up remote contract work along their travels and continue living the life of a modern day nomad. Not one of them is unhappy :)
>I kept hearing its not unusual for people in the west to take gap years, so thats what Im doing.
You hear a heck of a lot more about it on HN than happens in reality.
Maybe I don't hang out with the trust fund crowd enough but I don't know ANYONE who's taken a "gap year" where they weren't doing something for ~40hr/wk in order to make a buck. I know a few people who didn't jump right into career stuff after college but even they did low pay large applicant pool type jobs at least tangentially related to their careers (e.g. working as basically unskilled labor on tourist fishing charters in Miami before getting a real entry level job on a container ship). Heck, even the people who took a year off before college were doing stuff tangentially related to their career/skillset in that time (e.g. working for geek squad prior to going to school for CE). I know a couple people who went from full time to part time or to less demanding jobs in their field prior to retirement. I know a couple people who did jobs not related to their vocational training for less than a year after they got out of the military but that was more of a stopgap to keep a roof over their head. I don't know anyone who's gone from full time to part time or less unless it's part of a career transition or approach to retirement. I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's managed to pay their rent by waiting tables and stripping for a grand total of 15hr/wk and spent the rest of the time doing art or writing a book or something. I'm sure there's someone who's banked a ton of money and taken a year off in the middle of their career. I don't know anyone who's pulled something like that off.
I only heard about it from friends here in UK, and they would typically do it between collage and uni. Thats when I came here and had to start working to support myself.
Pretty common for a sizeable portion of high school graduates in Australia to take a gap year either immediately after graduation or after their first year of uni
A good fraction of people I’ve come across in uni in the US have taken gap years (or just take forever to finish college). This is not normal for regular immigrants these days. I did not have saturdays off from when I was 15 till I turned 32. Even then I was in a tech job which had great vacation but still not months at a time. It’s literally alien for folks like us to have an entire year where we don’t need to report to anything at all. I wish the OP the best, I’m still waiting for the day I can do the same but that’s at least years away.
I learnt of this sort of thing only after I moved to the UK, where it's traditional for wealthy and middle-upper-class kids to take a long break between college and university - a habit that probably comes from the times of the "grand tours" of continental Europe in XVIII and XIX century.
I've met people who do it on a 6-months basis - 6 months travelling, 6 months earning. They don't make much, their career is somewhat stalled, it would have probably ended when/if they had a kid, but they did it. They were conscious that they were sacrificing something (money, comforts) in exchange for this lifestyle.
Between Brexit and COVID most of the typical destinations are out for a while, by the sound of it.
Almost all of the people I knew who did gap years before or after university went to either Australia or New Zealand (from the UK) following a three teaching-year degree with an extra industrial placement year - Australia in particular have (had?) a scheme where someone can live and work for a year with few restrictions provided they are under 30, and could extend that to two years if working in a rural area for some of that time.
It's called the working holiday visa. I went to New Zealand on that after my first job. You have to work in agriculture for 3 months to extend your one year visa.
This is my experience too. The impact on career progression is very minimal when it done intentionally. There are of course people who think it's a lark, but before 2020 there were many folks developing skills that will catapult them forward after they graduated.
I've moved to the US and can see how things are very different culturally with regard to travel. Others have mentioned that the US is not into backpacking. I think it's less about that, and more about travel being a prize for retirement.
I've seen this changing a bit in my time in the US, but it's still the norm for a lot of people who then end up being unable to travel. The US has many more people who are skilled and equipped for a backpacking lifestyle than I found in the UK.
>Others have mentioned that the US is not into backpacking.
I assume "backpacking" in this context tends to mean riding trains around Europe, staying in hostels/couchsurfing/etc.
The US has a fair bit of backpacking and camping in National Parks/Forests/long-distance trails although it's not necessarily a fully mainstream activity. But much less of the "European-style" backpacking.
I think it's partly a difference of scale and ability to get around without a car once you get out of a handful of (mostly expensive) cities.
I wonder if maternity/paternity leave laws in UK have any affect on making this more feasible?
My understanding is that workers get a year of maternity leave, a few weeks of paternity leave, and there is some sort of sharing arrangement whereby maternity leave can be used to extend paternity leave.
When maternity/paternity leave ends, the worker must be given their job back.
I'd expect that at many employers they can't just have the work that someone on leave would have done go undone so they are going to have to bring on someone else to do it--someone who knows that they will only be needed until the person they are filling in for comes back from leave.
Thus, I'd expect there to be a need across nearly all industries and at nearly all skill levels for people who want to fill a 6 month to a year opening.
Compare to the US (Federal 12 weeks maternity leave if your company has 50 people, no legally required maternity leave otherwise--individual states sometimes add more), where openings for people to work a temporary job for a few months tend to either be low end jobs or very specialized consulting jobs. The former don't pay enough to afford a 6 on/6 off lifestyle, and the latter are out of reach of most people. There aren't many good middle-class jobs to support 6 on/6 off.
Maternity temping is definitely a thing. Also, hospitality - outside London, the flow of tourists is typically too low in the Winter months to sustain jobs, but picks up significantly in Summer. The Christmas Rush also starts around mid-October now, in terms of recruiting, so that will give you around 3 months of steady employment in bookshops and other retail.
well, it's not usual for first-gen immigrants doing a gap year unless rich, so i applaud parent for living his dream. it's pretty usual in western europe for middle-class children doing this.
In Germany, gap years after school or sometimes university are pretty common (at least for the middle class). They do often work, but rarely in a field related to what they studied or want to do. Instead, it’s travel-financing jobs.
It used to be that it was more a thing for women, but that probably changed since draft was abandoned (before that the gap year for men would usually have been military service or alternative civilian service)
Higher-middle and upper class more likely? Kids which need to earn their money usually go straight into apprenticeship or university and earn money promptly.
People tend to flip flop between the classical "wealthy people but not born into centuries old familial wealth on the top end and successful doctors, lawyers and financial professionals on the bottom end" definition and the "blue collar workers plus or minus a little" definition based on whichever is more convenient for the point they are trying to make that minute.
Basically the GP is using the former definition and the person you're replying to is using the latter definition.
Crap on the Marxists all you want but they do at least have a fairly unambiguous taxonomy for these distinctions.
Most HN readers would be more than a little flummoxed at what "middle class" actually is in the US. The median household income is somewhere between $50-60k depending on where you look. The median individual income is a solid $15-20k less than that. And yet people will still nearly break their own spine trying to convolute a $200k cash comp tech worker as "middle class" because they happen to pay $4k/mo for a shared apartment in San Francisco.
Well that depends on whether you're defining middle class as an income or a lifestyle. If the latter, I would certainly not consider any shared living arrangements as "middle class" in the US. Even if your income band puts you in the top 1%. Now, it's quite possible that they're choosing a lesser lifestyle now in order to save and transition to another lifestyle elsewhere. That's what my brother did -- two years in SV saving as much as possible, then moved back to Seattle and bought a house.
This is why any of these definitions get really murky, fast.
While Gates was richer than Jobs, once you're in the $100B vs. $10B, you're mostly in the keeping score category. Woz is apparently worth about $100M which is still in the you can buy pretty much anything you want category. So I would say yes.
On the other hand, someone who is worth, say, $10M or $20M is obviously still quite wealthy. But not necessarily in the doesn't need to think twice about hopping on a private plane or owning a private island category.
So what is it about? You're acting like we should all know what you mean. Typically when someone talks about class they referring to income, wealth, and sometimes debt.
I actually oriented myself more on the numbers for Germany. Which means middle class is a single household with about 2000€ net income per month. That includes a lot of trade workers. It is perfectly possible to finance a gap year without or just minor parental support.
Obviously it's easier with rich parents, but it doesn't really require as much cash as you're imagining. It's pretty common to work a little first then use all the cash to travel later for example, or to work while you travel, e.g. by teaching English (TEFL - https://www.tefl.org/blog/why-tefl-on-your-gap-year/).
Doesn't university student already imply financial security? I don't know how socialist education is in the UK nowadays. I know in the Netherlands it used to be that your education is effectively paid for (either free / you get a scholarship like I did, or a very attractive loan scheme). But they changed the system so it's a loan for everyone now, which will put a damper on how many people go to college / university AND everybody that graduates will be in debt, which works against them if they're looking for a house in an already overheated market.
It's a bit above £9000 a year but everyone gets a student loan guaranteed, same with some level of means tested maintenance loan. This means that it's usually a "free" upfront cost to go to uni, however you eventually have to pay it off once you become financially eligible to do so
The loan in the UK is effectively a tax, and doesn’t really directly play into anything when getting a mortgage for example (but of course your take home is reduced)
The point is though - you don’t get anything at all until you actually attend classes. So taking a gap year means having to fund it yourself, or have generous parents but what this comments author describes is closer to ‘normal’ - a large number, not necessarily a majority, of 18year olds will plan out a gap year contingent on taking a part time job at some point and then using that to fund travel or something - before taking up a place on a course (and hence receiving the money)
If you have luck/motivation/connections/skillset - you might find a job related to your (future) degree too. I knew several people on my CS course who worked IT support at a local office for a few months whilst living with their parents - then set off on a backpacking trip somewhere exotic.
Not really. It's not free, but its dramatically cheaper than the US, and usually paid via government-provided loans with good terms (low interest, fixed repayment of 9% percent of your salary above a reasonable minimum, taken automatically by employers). It's closer to a graduate tax than a traditional loan.
Everybody can have a loan for the full cost if they want one, people from poorer families get outright grants instead.
Certainly not perfect, but my impression is it hasn't significantly hindered uptake from lower income students and its not a major financial burden in practice.
That's not been my experience here in the UK. Plenty of my friends spent 6 months working to pay for 6 months of low-budget travelling before heading off to university or whatever they were planning to do next (or sometimes they hadn't figured out what they were wanting to do next yet)
In the UK "upper class" is used almost exclusively for aristocrats. No matter how rich you are, unless there is a viable way for you to hold a title (e.g. Earl), you will not be considered upper class.
Middle class is basically anyone who does knowledge work and has aspirations of home ownership.
Your description of "Kids which need to earn their money usually go straight into apprenticeship or university and earn money promptly" would be very likely to be working class kids in the UK i.e. unlikely to be middle class.
I know quite a few people from various background (finance, multinational corporations, non-profits) doing things like these. Depends on employer. In hindsight always regarded as one of the best decisions of their lives (along with reducing workload to 80%, usually 4 days/week).
We all know that once old, the amount of money earned/saved will mean absolutely nothing in terms of happiness/achievement. Work achievements for office type jobs mean mean even less. The life lived well will mean everything. So some act accordingly when/if possible.
I haven't done gap year myself, but did a shorter variant - 2 times 3 months backpacking around India and Nepal. Remote Himalaya in the north, swimming in coral reefs on Amdamans, Thar desert in the west, and thousands of years of history, culture and people to meet everywhere in between. I still barely scratched the surface of what this place can offer.
Literally the best decision in my life. It changed me for the better. It motivated me to make changes in my career, go for consulting, move to Switzerland etc.
Have met tons of people from all over the world who were like this - traveling like this for 3-24 months, and then continuing work/study/beginning someplace else.
These trips I've done when having a pretty high mortgage and very little savings, and they both meant losing at least 2 salaries each time while expenses mounted. No rich family to cover for me anyhow if I would hit the financial wall. Still well worth the risk. If one doesn't have kids yet, there is practically nothing to lose with doing this, just gain.
> We all know that once old, the amount of money earned/saved will mean absolutely nothing in terms of happiness/achievement.
I dont think this is true at all. Money in retirement means the difference between mostly maintaining your standard of living after work an “choosing between medicine and food each week”. I think a lot of people saving up and then spending all their savings to party every 5 years are in for a shock when they are 60 and their joints are sore and their knees don’t work and they can no longer make a salary.
US vs Europe perspective - here you can rely on healthcare much more to actually take care of you while not ruining you. One of the benefits of not living in a society which more in the mode of 'everybody for themselves, and fuck the rest'
I guess we have different social circles, but I know many people who have done this and none of them are "trust fund crowd". Have done it myself for multiple half-year-or-so periods as well. Maybe it's more of a European thing to do.
I spent 3 months as a research assistant in Australia and used savings from that period to travel in South-East Asia and South America for 6 months or so. Shortly after graduating, having saved a bit as a student (again - Europe, I managed without student debt, having done web development next to my studies), I went to a conference in Taiwan with my MSc thesis and traveled back home over land. Then after working a little bit on my first job again I traveled, hitchhiking to/through the Middle East and Russia.
It's all very doable if you don't spend a lot - during many of these trips I spent $400-$1000/month.
Highly recommend it, traveling in Turkey/Iran/Oman/Georgia/Russia/Ukraine definitely shaped my perspective on the world.
It is a very popular thing to do in the UK before or after university. Around 20% of people at my university did the whole travel around Europe or Australia thing.
Edit - Sorry, see all the peer comments made the same point.
I'm studying at a UK university too, and I always scratch my head as to how on earth people get the money to travel around Europe or Australia before they go to uni. Who funds it?
Generally, I think family does. Some families have more money than others. It also depends how much the parents are willing and able to sacrifice, of course.
The same way you might scratch your head wondering how some fellow students pay for rentals you can't imagine affording, and alcohol binges you can't imagine affording. Students from poorer families rarely go on gap years. But even some poorer parents will sacrifice a lot, if they can find a way, to pay for their children to travel.
That said, the costs aren't outrageous. Travelling around Europe or Australia is fairly cheap for a young person (or at least used to be). There are schemes to allow travelling costs to be lower for young people, visas tend to be cheaper and easier to get, and people do local, temporary work e.g. in bars in kitchens to supplement the money they brought with them, to make it last longer.
I went to university in the UK a long time ago. And I struggled to understand how people afforded gap years (or rent) then, too. I never had a gap year, and it makes me a little sad. But as I couldn't even afford to eat regular meals, and certainly couldn't join people for socialising when they went out to places like Pizza Hut (too expensive), it was the right decision not to take a gap year :/
There is a wide distribution of wealth in capitalist societies, and a lot of it is hidden from sight. Financing a relatively low-budget formative and educational gap year is something thrifty and financially conservative people would do for their kids.
I had my moments, worrying about a friend's finances and professional decisions, only to learn later that, well, there was clearly nothing to worry about.
The exchange rate is what makes it possible. Any $1000USD goes a long way in many places. If you save $24.000USD you can live like an itinerant mid-to-upper-middle-class for a full year in most or all of Latin America, for example.
Yup. When I played online poker for a living for a bit after college, coming home for a few months and staying with my parents was more expensive than traveling.
Here in Brazil minimum wage is currently in USD a bit less than $200/month. In my city, which is one of the biggest, you can live confortably with $400/month in my lifestyle, which admitedly is quite frugal. $2k month is quite high-class imo.
You can get travel insurance for extended trips. I'm American and I've taken multiple 6-month trips abroad (usually after quitting a job). Backpacking just isn't part of the American culture.
Regular travel insurance != health insurance. It will basically cover you getting stabilized and shipped back home but then you're on your own. (And lost travel deposits.)
Don't even bother with the travel insurance, pay for health care out of pocket in another country. Travel insurance is only needed for traveling in America for the reason you stated.
IMO travel insurance sometimes makes sense. Circumstances like high altitude trekking that may require expensive evacuation. Expensive non-refundable trips, especially those that a broken ankle before or during the trip could put a rapid stop to.
That said, I've only purchased travel insurance maybe a half-dozen times out of probably hundreds of trips.
You need to make sure it covers that altitude. They top out around a certain altitude in the fine print you usually need to pay a little extra for altitudes like Kilimanjaro. Make sure it has helo evacuation covered for all altitudes.
Good point. The few times I was up at that sort of elevation or higher, the insurance was always through someone the guide company specifically recommended. Fortunately, I've never had any significant altitude issues.
You can continue your employer insurance for 18 months. But, as you say, it's more out of your pocket because your employer is now no longer subsidizing it.
You're referring to COBRA, and when my wife and I had a month lapse because of her switching jobs, it would have cost us $1300/month to continue her insurance. Not cheap.
I just got off 2 months of it between jobs, was around $1,100 for me as well. Certainly not cheap without the subsidization but also probably not a real concern if you're looking at taking a year off work anyways.
How about the entirety of the US medicaid program? If you literally have no income you get free healthcare, even if you have limited income you may qualify for Medicaid or a heavily discounted marketplace plan.
Though I suspect it's a lot more complicated than calling them up, telling them you've decided to take a gap year, and asking for your insurance card. It also wouldn't surprise me, never having looked into it, if the coverage is US only.
There's an online form where you upload your info, they verify your income level (duration does not matter), and that's it (at least in NY). I don't think any government healthcare programs cover care outside that government's country, do they? I suppose the EU ones cover care in other EU countries but that's the only case I can think of.
Based on that article, the programs vary widely by state including eligibility standards and rates of reimbursement.
> As of 2013, Medicaid is a program intended for those with low income, but a low income is not the only requirement to enroll in the program. Eligibility is categorical—that is, to enroll one must be a member of a category defined by statute; some of these categories are: low-income children below a certain wage, pregnant women, parents of Medicaid-eligible children who meet certain income requirements, low-income disabled people who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and/or Social Security Disability (SSD), and low-income seniors 65 and older.
This makes it seem like it's not just "low income", but also membership in one of those other categories.
I also didn't see anything on the page that indicated what share of expenses were covered by medicaid, but perhaps I missed it.
You are not getting health insurance in most European countries unless you are working or registered as unemployed and remain at disposal of the local job centre.
And the whole meme that a 65% tax rate +25% vat on most products on top of it (I am in Sweden) is somehow worth it financially because "fReE HeAlThCaRe" is laughable.
Maybe it's more lax in the more worker friendly socialist regions like France or Scandinavia but in Austria you only get healthcare coverage if you work or are unemployed and registered as a job seeker which means staying in the country and proving to your local job center on a regular basis that you are looking for work.
Traveling abroad for leisure while unemployed automatically disqualifies you from receiving any healthcare coverage and unemployment benefits until you return.
Doesn't mean there aren't people cheating the system and taking vacations abroad while receiving unemployment but the rules are strict and being caught cheating is really bad for you.
Also doing courses on your own dime during unemployment, that are not on the job center's curriculum, like a boot camp in data science, automatically disqualifies you from unemployment benefits during that period. I tried explaining to my case worker at the job center that a data science certification gives me the opportunity for a better paid job afterwards and I need the unemployment benefits for that period and her response was "sorry sir, that's the law".
Yeah, the system is extremely stupid and archaic in some cases here and if you're an ambitious high achiever it can screw you over sometimes more than it helps you.
I find that strange for Austria, considering that in Romania; when unemployed, and not being registered as a job seeker, you can still have insurance.
It's automatic in those situations you've described, but you can buy into the system otherwise.
At today's exchange rate if you'd like to benefit from the healthcare system, for a year, you'd have to make a 271 EUR contribution, with no other criteria required.
The system in Austria is extremely rigid and sometimes verges on idiotic in some cases due to how archaic and pro-business it is.
As a Romanian I can say you'd be surprised how many things the Romanian system gets right in favor of the workers in comparison to some western countries. At least on paper.
In Germany, there is obligatory health insurance (when you're employed in a normal job up to certain income, or receiving welfare), and voluntary insurance (otherwise), but having health insurance is compulsory. In other words, if you're not obliged to have obligatory health insurance, you must take out voluntary insurance.
With some historical context it can be made to make some sense, but when dealing with it the first time it is prima facie absurd.
To be clear, I'm merely saying "the complexities of the American healthcare system might be why Europeans are more inclined to take gap years". That said, I didn't know that European public health insurance was commonly contingent on employment. I would be curious to know more about this.
I am honestly very bitter about Americans glorifying the European system while happily taking home 2/3rds of their 100k+ developer salaries and enjoying much lower prices of everything.
With regards to insurance:
- in some countries (UK, Sweden) - the insurance is contingent on having a social security number, so the coverage is pretty much universal for residents, but people coming from other EU countries will still need to work or register as unemployed to get it.
- in other countries, you generally need to be working or looking for work (i.e. answer phones / invitations from job centre and attend any interviews/courses they send you to) to be covered.
Some countries (Poland for example, I'm Polish) allow you to buy insurance if you are neither working nor looking for work. But as of December 2020, about 1.5 mln Poles are not insured at all. [1]
> I am honestly very bitter about Americans glorifying the European system while happily taking home 2/3rds of their 100k+ developer salaries and enjoying much lower prices of everything.
I agree, although I think the ignorance extends to Europeans as well. Europeans are often surprised to hear that American software professional salaries are ~60% higher than European salaries even after adjusting for taxes, healthcare, vacation, etc. Some will argue that the US cost of living is more expensive, but they're almost always comparing some major US metropolis with some European village or perhaps an Eastern European city. I've seen other arguments that the cost of housing in the US is comparable or more expensive, but they're typically comparing some relatively tiny European apartment with a much larger American home. Europeans seem to fixate on medical bankruptcies, as though these are commonplace for upper-middleclass Americans.
This was all a surprise to me, an American, who has tried earnestly to live in Western Europe for a few years, but found that I can either live in Europe or I can travel in Europe but trying to do both would likely be economically infeasible (even if I can find gainful work as a software professional, it would specifically be difficult for my wife who isn't in a hot field). Fortunately, now that remote work is catching on, it seems likely that my wife and I will be able to do more frequent 1-3 month stints in Europe while remaining employed by our American companies.
To be clear, I think the United States healthcare system should be reformed, because it doesn't serve the poorest Americans very well. However, the US healthcare system works pretty well for the upper middle class (if not the whole of the middle class) and above, contrary to perceptions I frequently hear from some Americans and Europeans.
How difficult is it to work remotely in a different country? I’ve thought about doing this but it seems like it’s be a lot of hassle with my employer and navigating local laws in Europe.
My wife and I work for smaller firms. Both of our managers seem okay with it provided we keep American-ish hours. I get the vibe that they're just not worried about it, perhaps out of ignorance or perhaps because it just seems unlikely that a single employee working remotely for a short amount of time is likely to provoke the ire of any tax authorities.
> To be clear, I think the United States healthcare system should be reformed, because it doesn't serve the poorest Americans very well.
This depends on the state; Medicaid expansion is doing good things for the poorest people in states where it exists.
The US benefit system is tilted towards the poor, old, and people with children (distant 3rd.) It has some bad welfare cliffs for disabled people, and is the worst for middle class self-employed who aren't on their parents' insurance.
Unfortunately this last group includes all online writers and popular social media users, which is why they pretend it doesn't exist for anyone.
> I am honestly very bitter about Americans glorifying the European system while happily taking home 2/3rds of their 100k+ developer salaries and enjoying much lower prices of everything.
Why do you believe those salaries are the result of the American healthcare system? Per-capita, Americans pay more than anyone for healthcare, just in a very unbalanced way that dramatically favors those with a job over those without.
Regarding comparing tax rates, those six figure job numbers don't include the substantial amount the employer is paying to the healthcare company.
Bitterness about the salary gap is understandable, but it's misguided to say that the fucked-up parts of the US system are what has produced the high-revenue/high-profit companies that are driving the compensation levels.
Notably, Americans pay more per capita for Medicare and Medicaid alone than many European countries pay per capita for universal coverage.
> Regarding comparing tax rates, those six figure job numbers don't include the substantial amount the employer is paying to the healthcare company.
To be fair, in many European countries - and certainly for Sweden - there's substantial payroll taxes paid by employers as well. Though to end up at 65% in Sweden even with employers payroll taxes tacked on, you're already earning a multiple of an average salary.
> Why do you believe those salaries are the result of the American healthcare system? Per-capita, Americans pay more than anyone for healthcare, just in a very unbalanced way that dramatically favors those with a job over those without.
It doesn't really matter whether or not the salary difference is caused by healthcare or indeed that Americans pay more for healthcare. The only thing that matters is the post-healthcare take-home pay; if that figure is larger in American than Sweden for a given individual, then that individual is economically better off in America pretty much tautologically.
But what matters from the perspective of the American complaining about their healthcare system, though, is if they would be even better off with their same salary but a less fucked up healthcare system.
As long as that seems to be true, you'll see people complaining about it, and they'll have a valid reason for their complaints.
Your point is valid, but I don't think that's what we're talking about in this thread. Rather, we're talking about Europeans and Americans who have the perception that the overall economic situation of professional employees is dramatically rosier in Europe.
Personally, I think we should have a single payer system if only for the fact that it likely better serves poorer Americans.
Yeah, I was talking specifically about the "it would be nice to easily take a gap year"-sourced comparison of healthcare alone - though even that apparently is not so pro-Europe after all, with the folks discussing how you'd have to be actively seeking work to be covered.
Most (all?) European health care is not contingent on employment. With a few exceptions (notably the UK) it is contingent on being able to afford it, and one way to do that is following the rules to have the gov't pay for it. It's guaranteed, and highly regulated in price; it's not free.
The easiest way to afford it is to have a job. However, if you are willing to pay more (still much less than equivalent US health insurance, e.g. in Germany around 180€/mo) you can buy it directly. Or, you can participate in that country's social safety net which, yes, usually requires you to actively seek a job (often for some loose definition of "actively.")
This is just semantics. If you have to pay more because of your employment status, then the system in question is contingent on employment for all useful purposes.
The claim is that "European public health insurance is commonly contingent on employment", not "European public health insurance monthly payments vary based on employment status."
The only way you could end up paying more is if you previously made an average amount of money, have a lot of savings, but now make nothing. Normally this is called "retirement" and if you didn't save enough for it, you don't do it.
Indeed. In Canada if you’re out of the country longer than 6 months you’re not longer insured (in Canada). And in fact, insurance doesn’t cover you outside the country anyways.
Varies by province. In Quebec, they have a similar absence rule to what you described (for being outside Quebec even if in another Canadian province), but they entirely exclude absences of under 21 days from the calculation, and they have a bunch of exceptions, including a "once every 7 years" exception for miscellaneous personal reasons including leisure vacations that just requires you to notify them in order to qualify. And in theory they will reimburse expenses outside of Quebec, even outside of Canada, but only at Quebec's very low rates.
Still, yeah, very different than how US health insurance works, agreed.
Anything that starts "In Canada, ..." is generally suspect. Canada is a confederation. Most things are in the purview of the provinces, so there's rarely a globally applicable rule. Canada does not have a single healthcare system, but thirteen separate provincial and territorial healthcare plans.
You're not guaranteed to be covered for 6 months. If you leave permanently and settle within Canada, BC will cover you for the remainder of the month plus two months (enough time to establish residency in the destination and get coverage). If you leave the country, you are covered for the remainder of the month.
If it's a temporary leave, however, several of the provinces do cover you outside of the province, and many will extend your coverage for quite a long time depending on the circumstances. BC allows you to retain coverage for a 2 year trip during every 5 year period. They also (like many provinces) will extend your coverage as long as you're in school full time in another location.
BC does not cover care outside of Canada (assuming that’s what you meant by “2 year trip”) with the exception of emergency care at a max of $75 per day.
> You are not getting health insurance in most European countries unless you are working or registered as unemployed and remain at disposal of the local job centre.
Not the case in France (at least for the past 20 years), and I doubt it's the case in most other European countries.
>Not the case in France (at least for the past 20 years), and I doubt it's the case in most other European countries.
Nope, your parent is right, in Austria you also don't get healthcare if you don't work or are looking for work via your local job center.
Maybe France is an exception due to having stronger social system that heavily favors the workers (insert memes about strikes) while in Austria the system is very rigid, designed to favor businesses and the government rather than the workers and to discourage abuse.
It is not - you get access to healthcare at all times (employed or otherwise, young or old) and simply pay a slightly higher tax rate when you are working to pay for it.
definitely the case in Germany. If you're unemployment and not looking for a job or exempt from it(sickness, poverty, ...), you're going to need to pay on your own.
So... not the case in Germany. You don't need to be employed or in social programs, you can just pay money. In Germany it's a fixed amount, less than you would pay if you had income, and they can't refuse you.
I know to a European this might sound like the only two options, but pre-Obamacare, and very possibly again if the US can't get its shit together, it was impossible to buy health insurance no matter how much money you had for a large number of unemployed or self-employed people.
> You don't need to be employed or in social programs, you can just pay money
If there are different pricing tiers based on employment status, then the healthcare system is contingent on employment by definition. It's commendable that the American and European healthcare systems aren't contingent on pre-existing conditions, but that's a distinct issue.
If you are employed the employer pays half and if you are not they don't (somewhat obviously, since if they don't exist they can't). This is only "pricing tiers" in the most vapid sense.
That description could just as easily be for the US. Maybe you disagree with the terminology, but when people talk about their health insurance being predicated on their employment, this is what they are talking about.
Obamacare, for all its controversy and limitations, removed the ability to screen for pre-existing condition which was a very important feature. Prior, some people who weren't covered by an employer's group policy simply couldn't get insurance for any amount of money.
Now, yes insurance is expensive, but anyone can get it for about 2x what most people who get healthcare as a benefit are paying into an employer's health care plan.
> You are not getting health insurance in most European countries unless you are working or registered as unemployed and remain at disposal of the local job centre.
Or your partner has health insurance. Or you are studying (even if you take gap year at university). Or you happen to have farming land. Etc, etc - lots of exceptions.
Or you pay for it yourself from your savings (under 100 USD a month last I've checked).
The vast majority in Sweden pays nothing like "65% tax rate + 25% vat", though. To get to that tax rate you need to earn far above average.
Someone who is single with no child earning 167% of an average wage pays ~35% income tax and social security contributions [1].
The effective VAT also for most ends up far lower as a proportion of income, as most people don't spend anywhere near their whole income on VAT-rated products. For starters, you can't spend what you've already paid in tax. As such the VAT rate has a relatively low impact on total tax paid - the difference between the UK vat rate when I moved here (at the time 17.5%) and the Norwegian VAT rate of 25% added up to only about 1 percentage point difference in total taxation for me.
> The vast majority in Sweden pays nothing like "65% tax rate + 25% vat", though. To get to that tax rate you need to earn far above average.
First of all, the OP is including the social security tax in the 65% figure. But more importantly, arguing that "the average Swede doesn't pay that much in tax" isn't very consoling for the American who would have to (1) take a salary hit to live in Sweden and (2) have to pay that higher tax rate. Universal healthcare doesn't remotely make up the difference in take-home pay.
As a reference point, taxes, retirement/pension/social-security, and healthcare account for ~30% of my gross salary in the U.S. If I moved to just about any Western European country (not sure about Sweden in particular), my take-home pay would likely fall by 40% (conservatively) while taxes and cost of living would likely rise.
Of course, the tradeoff for the Swedish system is that you have a stronger social safety net, which is certainly worth something. But the issue at hand is the notion that the European systems are better than the American system for professional employees.
The numbers I quoted also include the social security taxes (I edited to make that clear, so apologies if you replied before I made that edit). Swedish marginal rates certainly are among the highest in Europe, but the proportion who pay that much is tiny.
And yes, there are people who will end up paying more, and it sucks for them.
The point is there's always this scaremongering about tax rates when it comes to Europe, and most of the time the tax rates that comes up are marginal rates that are not at all representative.
As self-employed, you'll be paying social security rates set to cover what would otherwise be paid by the employer via payroll taxes, as otherwise using self employed people would be an easy way of evading tax.
(My point was not to dismiss that you might well pay a very high tax rate, by the way, because the rate you gave is certainly possible, but to point out that paying a rate that high is highly unusually high, even in Sweden)
> The point is there's always this scaremongering about tax rates when it comes to Europe, and most of the time the tax rates that comes up are marginal rates that are not at all representative.
As an American, I find the tax rates much less scary than the raw differences in salary. If I could keep my US salary, healthcare, tax rates, etc and move to Europe for a few years, I would do so in a heartbeat.
I don't think that's a considerations for most. Salary differences internally in both the US and Europe are large enough that there's a huge overlap. For my part in the instances where taking US jobs have come up the salary differences ended up being small enough not to be worthwhile.
Tax rates also depends greatly on which locations you're comparing. Between e.g. California and the UK the difference was small enough when I looked into it that it'd be easily eaten up by healthcare.
For my part, I spend about $5k/month total on living costs including sending a kid to private school and mortgage on a 3 bedroom house in London, and ordering food in most days, and I'm being hugely wasteful and could make do with far less of I had to.
> I don't think that's a considerations for most. Salary differences internally in both the US and Europe are large enough that there's a huge overlap.
How does that work? Presumably if the median salary for a given field is 40% lower, then the jobs which pay at my well-above-the-median salary are going to be much fewer and farther between with more competition. Add to that laws that (understandably) favor EU citizens and it seems like it would be quite difficult to get one's hands on those positions?
> Tax rates also depends greatly on which locations you're comparing. Between e.g. California and the UK the difference was small enough when I looked into it that it'd be easily eaten up by healthcare.
Yeah, like I said, I'm less concerned about tax rates. No surprise that California tax rates are comparable to London tax rates though; California is notoriously expensive and many Californians seem eager to move to other parts of the country.
The point is that it's meaningless to make blanket statements about whole continents when the differences are so substantial within them, and mobility within them is much less than you might expect. E.g. consider the number of Eastern European developers who could significantly increase their salaries by moving to higher paid locations in Europe, but you instead stay and e.g. work for local agencies. As such, you're not competing against all of Europe if you go to the highest paid locations in Europe any more than you're competing against all of the US in Silicon Valley.
> The point is that it's meaningless to make blanket statements about whole continents when the differences are so substantial within them
Apologies if I'm dense, but I still don't understand. You can have a lot of variance in Europe and the US, but if the median is 40% lower in the Europe than in the US, doesn't it still suggest that any given American moving to Europe would have a dramatically harder time keeping his American salary?
> E.g. consider the number of Eastern European developers who could significantly increase their salaries by moving to higher paid locations in Europe, but you instead stay and e.g. work for local agencies
Fair enough--I wouldn't be competing against all of Europe, but there are far fewer jobs that pay $200K in Paris than, say, Chicago and the number of developers competing for those jobs is probably pretty comparable. I suspect it would be a lot harder for me to make $200K in Paris, but I would love to be wrong.
> Apologies if I'm dense, but I still don't understand. You can have a lot of variance in Europe and the US, but if the median is 40% lower in the Europe than in the US, doesn't it still suggest that any given American moving to Europe would have a dramatically harder time keeping his American salary?
I don't know. That would also depend on what the distribution around the median are in the respective locations. And again, a blanket comparison isn't really useful because you're unlikely to be looking to move to the lower paid places. If the distribution was the same, and you had to move, you'd have a point. But you don't have to move, and so you'll inherently discard a whole lot of places that doesn't fit what you want.
For my skillset and levels, all I know is the number of places in the US where I can earn more than I do in London is fairly small. They exist, and Silicon Valley is one of them, but it's not like there are a lot. So I'd likewise instantly disregard most of the US.
But last time I considered it (I worked for a Palo Alto based startup, and flew over every 6-8 weeks for a couple of years, and I do love the Bay Area - to visit anyway), the costs of living just didn't add up for me. If I'd wanted to, I could have made it work, certainly, but it was not like the financials looked attractive enough to sway me much (either direction).
Things like food were cheaper, but even compared to my house in London, housing in the Bay Area is insane. E.g. I just checked on Zillow again now, and to put it this way: I'd need a fairly massive raise to afford a house similar in size and standards within a similar distance to downtown SF as I am to the centre of London today just to break even on a move. It's likely doable, but it's not all that obvious I'd come out ahead.
[this is while disregarding the complicating factor that I've never had a need to take a drivers license, because I've always lived places where public transport is good enough]
But your mileage may vary - it'll depend greatly on what specifically you value, what niche skills you have, and what type of areas you'd like to live in - all of it greatly affect the financials.
That might not be an accurate way to measure it, because "bankruptcy" can mean very different things by country.
In some countries, individuals often don't qualify for bankruptcy. In others you might be able to restructure your debts, but they might not be discharged. In some, you may need to give up significant possessions to pay for your debts.
The US, for all of its healthcare issues, actually has a relatively progressive and accessible bankruptcy system. The majority of people in the US who file Chapter 7 have all of their assets exempted from liquidation by law. For these people, bankruptcy is literally as simple as a matter of trading all of their debt for 10 years of a bad mark on their credit report.
In the US, we pay 5x-10x that amount for a crappy high deductible plan that has measurably worse outcomes than your free insurance.
It is hard to overstate how bad US healthcare is for the typical American. If you are wealthy, you have access to some of the best doctors in the world, but for the rest of us we are entirely dependent on our employer for access to reasonable health care.
While I agree that vårdcentralen-level health care is hit or miss, the point is that _everyone_ has a basic level of health care and getting sick won’t bankrupt you.
This has the second-order effect that _I_ won’t have to worry about _someone dear to me_ will be personally bankrupted by a medical condition. It saves me having to decide whether or not I should indebt myself to pay for their treatment.
Not having to raise fundraisers for my family members cancer treatment is worth a whole lot of disposable income for me.
Most gap years happen in the early 20s where most Americans can be on their parents coverage. Even if they're not, it's pretty cheap with subsidies for a young healthy person to buy insurance on the marketplace. Possibly even free depending on income.
In Germany, I can buy travel health insurance that covers an unlimited number of trips abroad of up to 8 weeks each (including basically any doctors and hospitals abroad, as well as transport back home when medically recommended) for about 15 USD a year, and similar insurance for trips up to 1 year for about 500 USD a year. (Valid worldwide, or excluding North America for a cheaper rate.)
What’s the limit on that? If it’s like 100-200k then i got bad news for you… also as other thread says they will deny everything that is even remotely chronic and likely also that wasn’t preapproved with them before the visit
If you live in NY or CA (not sure about other states) and are under retirement age, Medicaid is a thing and works great. No asset limit, just income, so regardless of what you've saved you're likely eligible - so you can quit your job and without paying COBRA things will be ok
I don’t think any country with single payer national health care covers travel insurance, so this would not put Americans in any different situation than others who are travelling for that gap year, which seems to be the topic here.
It assume it depends on the destination. I suspect most European healthcare systems cover you in most of Europe (maybe Schengen or EU?) while American systems only cover you in America. But yes, I suspect traveling to Africa or Asia puts the American and the European on equal footing.
In eastern Europe it's normal for your degree to take anywhere from 1-3 year longer than it should have for various reasons including "taking a year off to chill", but actual, planned gap years where you're not in education are basically unheard of. Let alone gap years where you travel around and spend money.
I know a few people who signed up for master degrees in say Germany and found that almost everyone in the program is a few years older then them.
> I know a few people who signed up for master degrees in say Germany and found that almost everyone in the program is a few years older then them.
Is that because of gap years, or an interest in actually getting industry experience before continuing academic education? I think I was about 6 years into my career before I thought I could really squeeze a lot of value out of a graduate program. (I didn't ever go back for one, though.)
The Bologna alignment in Germany created a lot of weird situations. The old Diplom degree varied a lot and could be counted as a bachelors or masters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplom#International_compariso...) leading to some Germans to go back to get a firm masters. Also if it was more than 10 years ago, some Germans I know did their first degree, then their conscripted service, then their second, which caused a 1-2 year gap.
> Maybe I don't hang out with the trust fund crowd enough
I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of people taking a gap year, especially people in tech. The industry pays well relatively early and there is a surplus of jobs. If you keep your expenses low relative to your salary, don't let your lifestyle inflate beyond your means, and are fortunate enough not to be burdened with debt, health problems, or other large expenses, a gap year seems completely doable.
I think failure to save money is by far the most likely reason sabbaticals are uncommon, though I've been told by hiring managers they're more common in tech than you'd think. There's also probably some stigma against being unemployed, especially in professional circles, as well as fear of the dreaded "resume gap." As far as I can tell, that concern is fairly overblown for those in tech as well.
In the Europe I know, "sabbatical" means unpaid time off (commonly 6 months) while staying with the company. You don't get paid and don't accrue holidays/other benefits, but continue right where you left off when you're back.
I think option for this is required by law in some countries, though I've never taken it so I'm not exactly sure.
My former company allowed this after two years of continuous employment to let employees try their wings with building their own product. I thought this was pretty cool, and definitely a recruitment carrot. On the downside (for the company) lots of those colleagues ended up leaving after their sabbatical was up, but I figure that those people would have left soonish anyway. It's not like they would've had a problem getting a new job.
Here in the UK _most_ of the people I met at university didn't know gap years were an option. Post university it's been the same. The few who do take it absolutely love it. I personally didn't know either until I met a few people at university who got to the UK through the Erasmus programme.
It's sad really. As a young person this is the time to be able to do it. Often as you get older life gets in the way. I've been wanting to do it ever since I found out about it but every time something else has gotten in the way. If you're young and reading this, and everything has aligned for you, take a gap year or two.
Few do that in France. Is it because we already have plenty of PTO (5 weeks, plus often 12 more days because the legal week is 35 hours but we usually do more)?
Anyway, I took a gap time at age 36 for a 3 months trip in South America. And this allowed me to take an turn in my career when I came back.
You're on a discussion board filled with software developers and tech employees generally. The vast majority of such workers make a lot of money. If you're working in tech and you can't bank enough to take 6m-1yr off, you're doing your finances wrong. It doesn't require a trust fund to avoid the hedonic treadmill and save up.
Yes and no. Depends on your seniority and where you live to some degree. I was pretty burnt out at 28 after a year that included things like a 110 hour work week. At the time I couldn't afford 6 months or a year off.
> Do you ever find this makes finding a new job on return difficult?
I am not the same person you asked the question to, but I guess if you work on a couple of hobby projects and actually release those in your break year, you won't have holes in your CV.
Heck, I’m a poor grad student who gets a stipend from my program and is lucky enough to have parents willing and able to pay my rent. My total income including that family support is probably around $40k and I saved a ton of money this past year since I couldn’t do anything. I can only imagine how much someone in my situation with a FAANG income would have saved.
Understood, but your expenses as a student are also unlikely to be very high, especially if your parents are covering rent/medical/etc, especially if you're comparing to SWEs in SV.
Sure if you don't have a family to provide for. It turns out that it becomes a lot harder to take a gap year when you've still got a spouse and little people depending on you.
I don't see this as much different from "sure, if you don't have a million dollar mortgage and 2 car payments to cover!"
Having a family is partially a financial decision. People should make the decision with eyes wide open, having planned for it. Achieving a financial position above sustenance before having the expensive family is generally a good idea. Same as buying the house and cars.
You are thinking from the point of view of someone with no mortgage, no family and you can choose what to do with your spare income. Some of us have a family or a house and that means they have renounced traveling.
You can have a family, a house be sustainable but not earning enough to be able to pay for a year off of work. Which is the lot of 99.99% of people on this planet.
> You can have a family, a house be sustainable but not earning enough to be able to pay for a year off of work.
I think we have different definitions of "sustainable", then.
What you're describing sounds one step up from living paycheck to paycheck. And the fact that "most people are in that position!" doesn't make it a good position to be in, or a necessary one.
You can travel with your family too. You won't be able to quit your job, go backpacking, and stay in youth hostels.
But, you can go on road trips, go camping, you can take a cruise, or find an all inclusive resorts. You won't have as much time for yourself like you did in your youth, but you can still travel and you'll make memories with your family, and show them new things about the world.
> If you're working in tech and you can't bank enough to take 6m-1yr off, you're doing your finances wrong.
Why would you assume to know what other people's financial situations are, let alone their wage scale in an industry where not everyone is a US-based SWE?
Not to mention, even if you can save this much, put it in your 401(k), not a vacation savings account. The financial impact of taking a whole year without pay in your 20s probably adds 5 years to your retirement date, due to compounding interest and investment growth. Is it really worth it, just so you can fill your Insta with pictures of you windsurfing in Ibiza?
If you're writing so much software you hang out on HackerNews for fun, and you're not saving enough to max out your 401k AND have savings left over for 6 months off, you're doing your finances wrong (and/or you can get a 4x pay bump in a new job)
Most people here, even most software engineers, don’t make the sky high salaries that “very high-level FAANG engineers who also live in the Bay Area” make. Many have families, kids, education expenses, parents they support, expensive health issues, etc. It’s a huge assumption to think that everyone on HN can max out a 401(k) at all, let alone have any left over to save and blow on extended unpaid vacations.
EDIT: Obviously (from the voting) I hit a raw nerve with that original comment. Who knew “save for retirement” was such controversial advice. I personally plan to ensure I do not have to eat dog food when I’m 80 because I partied in my 20s but I guess to each their own. Given the average American’s retirement savings rate, my plan is clearly unpopular!
So you're saying that you're single-handedly pulling in between 2x and 5x the median household US income, yet can't set aside $20k a year for your 401k?
That means you're either not living on a budget at all, or you're doing something ridiculous like paying out of pocket for prescription medication without using the ACA.
Why wait until one is old to have fun? Why assume one will even live to enjoy retirement? Can one even pick up windsurfing at a typical retirement age?
I took off 3 years in my 20’s. 34 now, and back on track to retire in my early 40’s. Saving for retirement and enjoying life today are not mutually exclusive.
This sums up my (admittedly naive) view towards retirement. Why would I sacrifice so much of my youth for a future so far down the road that I will 1) most definitely be in worse shape for, and 2) may not even reach? I think the wringer of grad school is enough of an investment in my future.
"Is it really worth it, just so you can fill your Insta with pictures of you windsurfing in Ibiza?"
Do you really think all these folks want to do is fill their Instagram with pictures of windsurfing in Ibiza?
That misses the entire point of travel. It isn't to show off on instagram (although that can be a fun component, it isn't the driver for 99% of people); it isn't to tell other people you did it.
It is to have this amazing experience with a foreign culture and place. And that is very hard to value.
Yes, planning for retirement is important. But you may also be dead before you get there. It takes balance.
It depends on the person. I think I'd rather go windsurfing in my 20s then try to do it in my 60s when my health is not as good. I probably won't remember posting it on Instagram, but I will remember going wind surfing.
I agree. I had two weeks off between grad school and my current job. I’ve been maxing out my 401k for 25 years and have zero debt (mortgage paid off 2 years ago). Could actually retire now at 49.
I did. I took almost a year off. It cost me about $35k in 2005 USD.
I was really burnt out. But I'm not sure that taking the time did anything for me. I was a little stressed about the "unknown" the whole time and I mostly wish I had left that money in my savings.
It’s not very difficult to do financially if you don’t mind moving to a lower cost of living country. You can live pretty well for 20k USD in many parts of the world.
This differs by gender. A married woman taking time off for domestic/child rearing/continuing education is very common. An adult male, it’s very uncommon unless you’re rich, which most posters here obviously are.
I did. I took a year and sailed. Sold my house and used some savings. I couldn't have done it if I had kept my house though. I was mid 30's at the time (40 now). I don't work in the valley though, I just do data and analytic design for corporations so finding a new job only took a week when I moved back to Columbus, OH after sailing.
While I did figure out I didn't love single handing a sailboat long term I don't regret any part of that year. I came back significantly happier than I was.
OP here, learning to sail is one of my dreams and a potential candidate for first thing Ill want to do this year after quitting. Do you have any tips? I have some very small experience in it.
It's interesting reading the comments on HN because, although everyone isn't making say $300-600k+ TC/yr here, I think it's safe to assume the TC distribution shifts the median earner here safely above the median US earner, perhaps by even a multiple of two. This, in theory means if you lived a lifestyle akin to a median labor earner, you should only need to work about half the amount--part time, every other year, FIRE / retire early strategies and so on.
Most the advice is quite the opposite (and I would agree with them). To me, this really shows just how toxic the control is across the labor force. Job mobility is about the only vote or voice you have if you're in the labor force and if empty positions can be readily filled, you have no voice. The only reason things are interesting now is because the mass layoffs and turnover haven't been well stagged due to the pandemic so labor has more leverage. When true unemployment returns to norms, positions are largely re-filled, and attrition begins to follow traditional rates, the voice of the labor market voting will their feet will again fall on deaf ears and your voice will again disappear in the noise. It would take another global catastrophe to change this balance and give labor a voice again.
You do not need to be a trust fund kid to travel the world cheaply. I did when I was 23 (2004-ish) and realized I didn't like working. Took out a credit card with 5k credit limit, saved money for a month or two (I was making 40k so not exactly tons). Bought a ticket to Eastern Europe, kicked around hostels for a few months, when I finally almost ran out of money, bought a ticket back. I met other people who picked up side jobs in hostels or bars to help cover their costs too.
What you can't do is continue to have an expensive quality of life if you're no longer producing income.
I have many rock climbing friends who live on less than 15k a year. They often do it for years, working seasonally 3-5 months a year. the trick is to go somewhere with a very cheap lifestyle. It can be accomplished by living in your car in the mountains, or traveling to SE Asia, etc. The climbing provides something to do and a sense of community.
There are other cultures like this. I’ve seen kids from Europe doing a gap year staying in hostels for very little (they sometimes do some light work for the hostel to get a free place to stay)
You hear a heck of a lot more about it on HN than happens in reality.
In my industry, and the one my wife works in, if you have a gap year it's a red flag that makes potential employers wonder if you got fired from your last job and just aren't listing it, or did time in prison, or are simply unreliable.
It's great that in the tech bubble people don't think much about gap years. But in the real world, they can doom your chances of getting a new job.
Especially since these days you don't get to explain the gap since your application is vetted, filtered, and ranked by a computer and not a person.
You might be surprised by what is possible when you set goals and live below your means. You might also be surprised by how little money it costs to take off a year mid-career.
When I finished university, I had a few weeks between graduation and my start date at a well known Midwestern embedded electronics company. I had a $7k signing bonus and I found a $500 round trip ticket to Rome, so I went to Rome. While I was there, I learned about the world of backpacking and hostels. I ended up spending 6 weeks in Europe before returning home. During that time I decided that travel was something I wanted to pursue in my life.
The salary at my entry level SWE job was $58k, which was pretty modest. I didn’t buy a new car. I didn’t buy a new house. I cooked most meals at home and I brought lunch to work. I tracked my expenses and budget using Mint, and set a goal to save $30k so I could leave and travel in SE Asia where I calculated the daily burn rate should be around $30/day. After three years I hit my savings goal and bought a one way ticket to Hawaii, then from Hawaii to Thailand. I ended up spending over a year outside of the country and returned home with a $10k cushion to get back on my feet.
The biggest leg up I had was graduating with $2000 in student loan debt, but that was made possible mostly through merit based scholarships. No trust fund.
I inspired a friend to do the same thing, except with a destination of Australia on a working holiday visa. Also no trust fund, just living below his means and saving over time.
My advice to you is to find a way to do the things you want to do instead of limiting yourself with beliefs that only the ultra-rich can take time off from work to pursue personal passions.
I recommend traveling. See all the places, you want to see, with no pressure of having to go back to work by a fixed date, soon. Meet people, make new connections, chances are, you will find new opportunities to work, along the way.
Bonus points, if you have all your stuff packed somewhere and not have to pay any rent. But it depends what you want, if you like your home, keep it. Have projects in your home ...
There are lots of things to be done. Doing nothing is also fine for a while, but gets booring very soon and puts you in lethargic state ... wasting your time.
I took 3 years off, didn’t do anything other than read, watch tv, go to the movies, and walk/ride my bicycle. Never traveled once. Loved every minute of it.
Doing nothing doesn’t get boring for everyone. And it’s my time not yours so who’s to say what a waste is?
My biggest advice is to do what you want and don’t feel like you have to live up to some HN-gap-year fantasy. You might regret sitting in your apartment surfing the internet (I didnt) but you might also regret traveling. It’s your time. Do what you want.
Got a job. Had 6 months of expenses left in the bank and didn’t want to risk dipping into stocks.
I wasn’t wealthy in the HN sense though. This was 2010-2013 and my rent for a tiny studio apartment was $550 a month. Other major expenses were just internet (50 a month), groceries (few hundred a month), gym (35 a month) and electricity (20 a month). No cell phone. No car.
For the 5 years leading up to that I was working full time during the day and doing freelance SEO writing side. Was able to save quite a bit. But I was really fortunate to be in the right time/place. Rent in my city had basically doubled (and then some) since then, for example.
Lol thanks. I'm nearly 40 and still holding out on both. Never driven, never owned a smartphone. I have a pay as you go flip phone I got at Office Depot for work in 2015 but I never turn it on unless I need to make a call that won't go through Google Voice.
"Doing nothing doesn’t get boring for everyone. And it’s my time not yours so who’s to say what a waste is?"
You didn't do nothing for 3 years. You enjoyed your time, and you did things, so no, you did not waste it.
Otherwise I very strongly agree with, that you just should do, what you really want and not what others want.
After I decided to leave university, I planned a bike trip from germany to portugal. I wanted to do this. And I did it.
But then, along the way, on the border to spain, at a nice place I stayed for a while ... I decided I had enough. Or I realized, that I had wanted this for a while already.
It was fun, but "accomplishing" my trip would have only meaning for my travel blog and the expectations of other people - but not for me.
I enjoyed the trip very much, but did not felt like moving further and spend the whole winter in the south. So screw other peoples expecations, I am doing what I want, so I flew back home.
OP here. This is the best advice. Although I do intend to do some travelling, I always detest when people put some sort of life-worth qualifier onto it, as if you havent lived your life if you havent done some milage. Thats just bullshit, or probably marketing effect.
>Im quitting and not looking for another job. Gonna use the savings to take a gap year, or a couple, work on some stuff I want maybe. Maybe more involvement in OSS is coming too?
Unless you have some serious FU money saved up, I'd strongly reconsider. A "gap year" as an adult can make you radioactive to potential employers. And that cash goes quick when there's none coming in. Trust me I know. It's alluring to just walk away. But trying to get a job when you're unemployed is literally 10x harder than while employed, regardless of the actual circumstances of your departure.
Just try taking a few weeks off first. And if that's not enough, ask for a sabbatical. At the very least have something lined up for a few months after you leave. Don't fall for the "I can have another job in two weeks" meme. It's rarely true in reality for all but the very top of the market.
I think this is horrible advice. I’ve hired all sorts of people with voluntary time off on their resume. Your experience doesn’t ‘expire’ in a single year. Life is about more than just working, if you have the money to take time off to enjoy your life you shouldn’t not do it out of fear.
He's right about it being harder to get a job while unemployed. You finish your gap year and then spend another 6 months trying to get hired. Maybe if you lived in SF it'd be easier.
Key thing, when you quit, don't burn bridges. I took a year off, did some traveling after working at my job for 8 years. At the end of the year, I applied to a few jobs, but my old boss contacted me to rehire me. I went back as if I never left. I am in a different field, so you experience may vary, but if you are in a good team, your old boss is likely to rehire you instead of investing in someone they don't know and have to train.
My experience with tech hiring is getting three decent resumes for 5 open positions, everyone qualified gets an interview and serious consideration. It's not that way for junior people in entry level positions and non-IT staff (there the "200 resumes, no reason to interview most of them" scenario often applies), but if we're talking about e.g. mid-level developers, then every decent manager I know is in a "always be hiring" mode.
I don't care about this at all, I'd assume you still remember how to do things after a year (or even two.) Of course before it gets to the team it might be filtered elsewhere.
>Your experience doesn’t ‘expire’ in a single year
You're right, it doesn't. But it brings up all sorts of questions in the mind of your interviewer as to the true nature of your departure, and it immediately puts you at a huge disadvantage.
As an interviewer I recognize people might take time off work for a variety of reasons and never give a lot of thought to unemployment gaps. I’ve found very short stays at previous positions (say less than a year) to be more of a warning; I want people who are likely to stick around.
Being open-minded, seeing something different, meeting other people, working hard to be able to follow your objectives and take calculated risks. That can be a valuable experience and an advantage over ten similar candidates.
Assuming I would even notice a six month gap, if someone told me they had taken a year off to work on an open source project, hike the Appalachian Trail, or whatever, I'd find it far more of a conversation starter than a negative. Maybe you're either imagining things or talking to the wrong employers.
I've done about a 10 mo break after my first job and after my second and it has never been an issue with employment. You're overestimating how much hr and hiring managers care.
No one you work for has a "relationship" with you unless there is nepotism involved. They will lie to you. They will throw you out when you don't make them money. The only "lie" is that there is a "relationship" and if you believe it, it will end up making you very unhappy. Live for yourself and your family.
I've never had reason to embellish my resume, but let's not pretend employers don't exaggerate, are "aspirational" or outright lie what the job is about "You'll be working on cutting-edge technology" vs. "Actually, we plan on migrating to that cutting-edge platform soon, in the meantime, add features to our 'legacy' PHP5 and Java 1.7 platforms" and "We offer unlimited vacation" vs. "Everyone usually only takes the week between Christmas and new years as our clients shut down then. Currently, the team really needs your contribution to make the release deadline, so now is not a good time"
Both interviewer and interviewee have to be diligent during interview process to dig out the truth about important aspects of what they expect, and not just take it at face-value (asking pointed questions usually reveals the truth, for either party)
you won't be marked as radioactive, but you will have to reassure people that you're not planning to do it again with little to no notice. apart from that, I would plan to get back a month earlier than planned so you have a money buffer to get a job you want, rather than _need_
Always assume that you will have bad luck and will need a few months to get a job. More importantly, you will have higher standards for your next job if you have the financial security to do so.
That said, I forsee a lot of gap years in 2021-2023. The key is to have something to show for it. Did you spend a year in another country and learn the language? Do you have a series of open source pull requests? Do you have a game? A novel, even if unpublished? We live in a capitalist society and people expect that you are always working on something.
I feel like I'm seeing a larger than normal wave of retirements. Which isn't surprising. People who were thinking that way anyway probably figured they might as well keep collecting a salary during the pandemic given everything was closed anyway. But now that travel is creaking back to life, etc. people are ready to pull the trigger.
Beyond the distasteful idea that we should always act in a way demonstrating obedience to potential employers, the solution to this is extremely easy. Gap year? No! I am merely doing independent consulting. Do I actually have any contracts? So many questions!
Plus if you actually use the time to work on OSS instead of traveling or whatever I have no idea how an employer (that you'd want to work at) could fault you for that. Seems like a huge asset.
>Gap year? No! I am merely doing independent consulting. Do I actually have any contracts? So many questions!
People aren't stupid. They'll have questions. And lies are extremely hard to keep straight in the long term. The sad fact of the matter is that you are not a person to them in the initial hiring process. You are a piece of paper. And unless you are some rock star 10x top level candidate with impressive credentials, they'll have a dozen other pieces of paper that look just as appealing and don't have those questions attached.
Seconded one of my regrets was not really going for a place on a round the world boat race a few years ago and taking a sabbatical to do the whole thing.
Id just been diagnosed which a chronic illness and though it would have been fair on the rest of the crew.
i interview and i've never looked at the dates of employment on someone's resume. i don't care one whit when you did what in the past, just what you're capable of right now.
Yeah. There's no doubt age discrimination and people in PR who filter on meaningless stuff. But the idea that you can never do anything non-standard seems pretty ridiculous to me. And I'm pretty sure that no one who has hired me would think twice about it. I never have taken a real sabbatical--never seemed like a great time--but I have taken a number of month-long vacations and it's never been an issue.
> Beyond the distasteful idea that we should always act in a way demonstrating obedience to potential employers
Maybe even more than distasteful, perhaps soul nullifying?
(Pardon the awkward phrase, it's what I get when looking for an antonym for affirming.)
For myself, when I leave the engineering field it will not be to return to engineering again unless it's strictly on my own terms. More than likely teaching or similar would follow a "gap year".
I think the advice is a reasonable thing to consider; a lot of responses (and presumably downvotes) are either "It doesn't matter to potential employers", which is categorically untrue - it'll matter to some, raise a question to others, and be irrelevant to others yet. How you answer that question is important, and it's fascinating that other half of comments is, basically, "Lie!".
When I'm interviewing candidates, a gap year is a data point - no more, no less. It may lead to more substantial data points, or it may be a non-issue. If you do as many here suggest and lie through your teeth about it ("I was a CTO! I was working on startup! Independent consulting"), you may get away with it, but likely not (even if you think you did); and if caught in prevaricating or lying about your experience and work activities, that is a far far bigger and more immediate red flag than the gap year itself.
Also - sure, knowledge doesn't expire, but oh boy skills do get rusty! A year into my new management-y role, I felt how rusty my sysadmin skills were getting. Two years in and you shouldn't give me root access again without some catchup :-).
You mind seems to be trapped in the employment binary where you're either a full-time W-2 employee or you're unemployed. With contracting and startups it isn't so simple. Contractors (especially ones working in boutique niches on scoped projects) might work for a month with much time between contracts. During that down time maybe they write blog posts or contribute to OSS or hang out with someone else prototyping some neat ideas that don't pan out (which might reasonably be called a startup after the fact) or just do literally nothing so as to recover from burnout, which is lethal to the contractor in a way it isn't to an employee. All of which feed into more people dropping into their inbox inquiring about their contracting availability. It isn't "lying" to say time spent not working on a paid contract is time spent in service of contracting.
1. All of it is true in general and explicitly not the case for the OP/GP I was responding to, which indicated a traveling/no-work year, so it feels you're fighting a straw man.
As well, all of it is easily discussable during interview, and my team and myself will not see any of these in a negative light.
2. >> "It isn't "lying" to say time spent not working on a paid contract is time spent in service of contracting."
Of course not. At the time of my post however, a lot of advice in comments was explicitly to lie and "Say you were in a startup / independent consulting / working on OSS / CTO even if you weren't, rather than admitting to gap / traveling year", and my reaction to them is: That lie will harm you much more than any honest discussion of the gap year.
So again, I feel we are talking past each other here a bit. I've been a contractor, I've been a consultant, and I'm a full-time employee now; I've taken a time to write a book/techmanual, I've run a photography business for a bit,and I've taken extended paternity leave; so I don't think my mind is trapped into thinking of employment as binary. But I do think honesty during interview is paramount - on my team, I don't care how good your technical or functional skillset is, if we cannot trust your integrity. I understand that this is a tricky position for the candidate as market at times rewards dishonesty; but I try to be convincingly upfront in what we're looking for.
Someone who has been doing "independent consulting" for six months or a year is pretty transparently obfuscating that they were unemployed. I'd probably view it in a better light--not that there's anything wrong with doing or trying to do some consulting on the side--if they were just open about taking some time off.
> Someone who has been doing "independent consulting" for six months or a year is pretty transparently obfuscating that they were unemployed.
Lol, what? I did exactly that after getting pissed off with $LARGE_CRAPPY_EMPLOYER. Worked for 3-4 companies for 6-8 week periods over that time on a short term basis, and made more than $LARGE_CRAPPY_EMPLOYER by a factor n > 2, and did some work on a startup. But then $LARGE_EMPLOYER came along with an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Don’t project what “independent consulting” might mean for you onto everyone. It would be interview-ending if I caught a hiring manager suggested this was a euphemism, and I’d subsequently recommend every person that asked me about said company steered clear.
I didn't express things very well, Sure, I know lots of independent consultants who are legitimately work full-time or at least on a regular basis. I was more referring to someone who just sticks "consulting" on their resume so they don't have a gap but didn't actually do anything.
> Unless you have some serious FU money saved up, I'd strongly reconsider.
You're talking to the HN crowd. I get the impression that a lot of the people here think of $200k/yr as poverty level. "FU money" to them is probably on the order of $100M.
I disagree. Whilst some employers would be dead against it, others may look positively on people taking sabbaticals/gap years. As long as you have a good CV/resume and if you are older, consistent work history and are taking the time off in a manner which is within your means, I would say go for it.
> A "gap year" as an adult can make you radioactive to potential employers.
I'm not sure where you got this idea in your head but it is demonstrably false in tech right now.
I took a gap year after getting fired from an extremely toxic company. I didn't want to rush into a new role right away after such an awful experience.
Once I was ready to go back it took ~1 month to go from starting my search to signing an offer letter. I interviewed at a large range of companies and was pretty picky after my previous experience.
My apply -> interview rate was consistent with what it had been in the past, and nobody cared about either my being fired or taking time off.
> trying to get a job when you're unemployed is literally 10x harder than while employed
The only thing that changed for me interview wise was that I was much pickier after not having to work for an organization for such a long time.
The rest of the interview is much easier since you have much more time to do things like practice for coding interviews, doing take home work etc.
On top of all that, because I was so grossed out from looking at linkedin during that time, I've never bothered update my profile, and I still get the same constant stream of recruiters reaching out even though it looks like I'm still unemployed.
In retrospect I wish I had had the sense to just quit earlier. Very often interviewing when you're employed at a place you are not happy with makes you too eager to find someplace else, making you more likely to ignore warning signs during the interview.
In the world? Very, very few. I know it's it a tremendous fortune and privileged to be able to search for a job you think is a good match. Most people work in near slavery conditions with little choice.
At the same time, squandering that privilege out of some misplaced guilt only helps employers exert control of employees.
In tech? Virtually everyone has that level of privilege so long as they have some experience. I'm fairly certain I couldn't get hired by a FAANG company (I don't have too much interest in it, but I won't deny the possibility of sour grapes), so I'm not in some super-elite category of tech worker.
In addition, not everything lasts forever. I used to work for minimum wage in customer support jobs and I wouldn't be surprised if in 10-20 years (or sooner) I'm back in a much less desirable role.
It took me a long time to recognize that my market value had increase over time, and one of my biggest career mistakes was underestimating that and not acting on it sooner. As the saying goes, from a time when most people had to work on farms, "make hay while the sun shines".
The only places I have known who would care much about 'CV gaps' have been toxic workplaces who also discriminated against other groups for spurious reasons unrelated to their competence or likelihood of succeeding in the job.
Your attitude reinforces the corresponding attitude by many employers. If 50% of us signed a pledge not to have children, never to take any health risks, never to join a union, not sue our employers, etc, many employers would be delighted and would hire them preferentially, making things harder for the other 50%.
I've done this twice: the first time back in 2007 when I got made redundant and decided to use the time and money to study and indulge in my dream of writing a book; more recently (which is still ongoing) to recover from burnout and rediscover the joy of coding.
I do not consider this time to be "gap year", but rather an investment in, and a reward for, myself. Why do I need such luxuries? Because time is short and nothing is destined. None of us are guaranteed to make it to retirement age. My Dad died when he was 54; my brother when he was 53. My sister survived her heart attack when she was 60 - luckily it happened when she was at work; she was a cleaner at a hospital.
Keep a roof over your head, make sure you have enough food to live on. Don't leave it until the last minute to start looking for paid work. Most importantly, enjoy your time away from the capitalist treadmill - with good fortune this can become an investment in yourself that you'll never regret!
Huh. Funny that you mention it. I decided this exact same thing for myself this winter, and just started. Same reasoning too. Is it only among technologists who have great recent returns in the stock market, or is this a wider trend?
I find the FIRE movement fascinating but also slightly depressing.
Among the actually old (my parents' generation - in their 60s and 70s) retirees I know, around half of those retiring from decent 'knowledge worker' jobs have kept on working part-time to some extent. They are consultants, advisers, board members, independent researchers, and so on. They seem to be very happy - they are working at something they are good and believe in, while not having any economic constraint forcing them to work more than they want to, or for anyone they don't get along with.
I can't imagine having 'Financial Independence', but not wanting to do something like this. I enjoy my work in general, and I would enjoy it much more if I had almost complete freedom to plan my day and to walk away from toxic situations. But all the FIRE people that I see online seem to be basing their lives on the other type of retiree - the ones who take leisure activities and sports such as bowling and tennis far too seriously, read and watch constantly but quite aimlessly, and go on endless trips to 'tick off' different world destinations.
I've been following this movement for well over a decade now, and it's not a heterogenous community. You see the entire spectrum, from people who just want to get really rich and indulge in expensive hobbies like keeping their own private jet, people who end up working and earning more after they're financially independent, to people who are burned out and can only imagine a retirement existence consisting of beaches and Netflix, plus quite a few bitter folks who mostly care about tearing others down.
The 'RE' sort of implies not working, but I've seen plenty of accounts of people who ended up with varying degrees of work and income after they quit their regular jobs. For the folks who seem to seek retirement above all else, I wouldn't be surprised if burnout is both a big part of the motivation and the reason for why that is their main focus.
Yes, it kinda doesn't make sense. You don't want to "retire". You want to work on the things you care about. There are jobs that pay poorly but are still very interesting. Retirement is what you do when you can't work anymore.
Traveling the world is fun but it's not incompatible with work. You just need to ask for long chunks of vacation, say two to four weeks in a row. If all you do is work a 40 hour work week then given the right schedule you still have half a day plus weekends left for leisure.
What people truly want is FU money. They want negotiation power.
Retirement is what you do when you can't work anymore.
I wouldn't get hung up on the name. The main part is the FI, so you can pick and choose what you want to work on or if you want to work on anything. Arguing over whether it's a real retirement or not is missing the point.
I would suspect that the online communities skew a certain way that may not be reflective of the people actually doing it. One of the most well-known FIRE bloggers is known for saying that he is as active after retiring as he was before, but that he now gets to choose his projects - and despite his blog bringing in an income comparable to his pre-retirement income, blogging was not one of the major 'pulls' in his life after a while. I imagine people who spend a lot of time contributing to such forums may temperamentally enjoy the fantasy better than the reality.
I think for people who got two very senior levels but stayed as hands-on engineers don’t really have the option of consulting. I am extremely senior and while I could do contract dev, they are actually aren’t that many low-commitment consulting jobs for people like me.
I haven't taken a gap year myself but a good friend took a six month unpaid travel-leave period in the company we both used to work for. He had a great time. When he finished and got back into work he realised that his break very similar to a female employee taking maternity leave. As it happened, our company was quite good with maternity leave, and many of the women who took it resumed very successful careers. So, perhaps worth checking at your own place to see how maternity leave is handled.
He didn't notice any long term career effects although he had to re-establish himself somewhat with new people and projects that had appeared in his absence.
> When he finished and got back into work he realised that his break very similar to a female employee taking maternity leave.
I have not met a single woman who would compare maternity leave to a travel leave and a “great” time.
Infants are a ton of work, and between recovering from the birthing process (a vaginal tear with a few stitches is considered one of the best outcomes), learning how to breastfeed, only sleeping 2 hours at a time due to breastfeeding, diastesis recti ruining your abs and making your core weak, pain from clogged milk ducts, pumping breast milk for storage since the US does not provide adequate leave so the kid has to go in daycare, hemorrhoids for a good portion of women, etc.
I have no doubt anyone who has been through this would rather work an office job for 6 months.
I think all he meant was it was a similar break in terms of length of time and the company did a good job of re-integrating women who went on maternity leave for that length of time, leading to a good company culture in general for getting employees out for long amounts of time back into the thick of things.
My interpretation of the post you're responding to wasn't that the experiences were similar, but that the work culture responses and company infrastructure for handling extended absences worked the same way for him as they did for mothers. I think the point was that if there are good systems in place at a company for maternity leave, that maybe people can use those same system to take non-maternity time off.
Yes, that's a good point! However, the biggest risk to employer is the employee using those systems to try out a new employer and then resigning just after the sabbatical.
Maybe not this directly, but I expect more people quitting "megacorp" jobs, will lead to another big wave of "innovation" in tech in the next few years as people spin up small companies to 'scratch that itch' they've had for a while.
In 2016 I took about half a year off, staying in Thailand and working on my hobby projects.
Was one of the best, most happy periods in my life.
It made me more focused on trying to reach early “retirement” so I can work fulltime on my hobbies. Hopefully I can achieve this goal before I’m 45 years old.
Same same!. I am going to start my gap yea in September and focus on finally getting that ski instructor certification that i've been dreaming about for years.
I am going to start off my gap year with full time skiing and working on side projects on off/rest days and evenings.
I have taken a year off before and a couple of months in between jobs. I think many of us have undergone once-in-a-lifetime type of stress in the past year that few would consider taking some time off as toxic. We all processed the events of the past year differently, and we all coped in different ways, but it still took a toll. I would encourage taking time off.
The one major issue of taking some time off right now to travel is that it is incredibly difficult to do so. Many countries are still closed, or if open, have some sort of curfew. In the US, national parks are overwhelmed with tourists. If traveling solo, social distancing (either laws or new culture) makes it difficult to connect with strangers.
A 6 month gap was the healthiest emotional choice I ever made. Just be prepared that you have no idea how you'll react to it until you do it. I strongly recommend setting very light goals for the first month while you adjust, otherwise you'll stress yourself out.
I've done two 366 photo-a-day projects (the first was in 2012, the second was 2020). Last year was simultaneously the worst and best time to do one; worst because of obvious reasons, but best because it was a quarantine monotony barometer ("monotometer") and helped me plan my days so that at least one interesting photographable thing would happen. I definitely felt burnout and oversharing, but I'd probably do it again and just keep the photos in a private album or print them immediately.
That's so wholesome. During my 6month gap I did nothing but see much THC I could put in my body, eat fried chicken, play computer games, watch porn, and generally decline physically, mentally, emotionally, etc.
I think I learned a bad lesson by getting a much better and better-paying job than I had before the break, without putting much effort in.
I’ve not taken a gap year or heard of anybody else that has either. My peers and I are all 1-2 jobs out of college, and we’re all terrified of having a gap in our resume. Apparently this concern is overblown, but we all seem to have learned it from our parents.
> we’re all terrified of having a gap in our resume
I took a 1 year break and have had to answer a simple recruiter/interview inquiry regarding it for the next 5 years. I don't think it ever eliminated me from consideration but it was more like a necessary precaution. Not so great answers would include:
* Anything beginning with "uh uh uh". Answer confidently.
* "I was searching for work the whole time and just couldn't pass interviews"
* criminal activity
* anything indicating a bad work ethic or difficult employee
* apathy, indifference, numb, lazy. Even if you felt that way the whole time, LIE. You took a year off, you want to look like you had an undying passion for something every day even a hobby.
I started a startup, but it failed.... how about that.
Easy peasy. It really depends on what you did. If you are an engineer and were keeping your skills sharp by doing a side project, then you shouldn't have any problem saying: I was working on my project/trying to do a startup.
99% of people will understand. Failed startups are neither a plus but not a negative thing either.
Gap years, or as they used to be called sabaticals, are common once you reach 8+ years of experience. If you are a good engineer, you can take mutiple years, and still be ok, as long as you keep your skills sharp. (i.e. have some kind of personal project that you work during those times)
I left my job in May and I'm hiking the Appalachian Trail now. I saved more than enough for living in a tent for 5 months (admittedly the tent was expensive but I already had it). So far it's been great. I've met a lot of folks who are burned out and taking some time to think.
If long-distance hiking appeals, I'd be happy to discuss it.
My brother and I both got burnout last year and picked up thru-hiking, albeit more of the weekend warrior (3-7 days) variety. It has been a life-changer for both of us. We are planning on hiking part of the PCT for a month next year.
I had a buddy who disappeared for 6 months after our deployment, who we eventually found out was just hiking the Appalachian trail. It ended up being very helpful for him, and it’s something I’ve considered for myself on occasion.
A cousin of my was a multiple-tour forward observer for the U.S. Army in the Korean War. He spent a lot of time doing extended hiking after that.
I'm not sure if it was a result of his experience in Korea, but I get the impression he really wanted some extended alone time. I never asked because I didn't want to risk dragging him into some terrible memories.
It's a fairly popular activity for people in the military to get engaged in, for many reasons. Particularly people who were deployed in the field.
The back country is an environment where one is able to apply physical skills and tools, earned over years of experience, and to which most civilians attribute no value. The solitude is nice, however I think most veterans actually prefer company on activities like this, there just aren't many people who can cope with the mileage or the off-the-grid aspects.
I've never been in the military myself, but I'm a reasonably experienced backpacker. Discussions on the subject have made friends out of many coworkers, who had been deployed in the field while serving in the military.
You should ask your cousin about it, maybe even ask if you can join him sometime; he'd probably actually really enjoy you expressing an interest and wanting to tag along.
I saved low five figures but I don’t expect to need all of that. On very rainy days, or when I need to do laundry, I typically go to a hostel or split a hotel room with fellow hikers. Other than that it’s really just food and miscellany…having said that I am carrying like $1500-$2000 worth of gear at any given time so there is a real startup cost.
I hiked the northern half of the trail a couple years back. You should expect to spend $1,000/month at a minimum for a good experience. I spent $2,000/month and felt like I was living large. (I'd eat like a pig at every hotel/bar/restaurant I entered when arriving into a town. Most people lose weight on the trail; my weight stayed the same.) Expect your gear to cost around the same as your monthly budget.
My brother hiked the length of the AT a few years back and spent about $300/month for the 5 months it took him end to end He had a great time. Even when new his gear was less than $1000 all in, though it was all 5+ years old and very well used when he started.
$300/month would be tough for me but maybe doable. At $10/day, you're having peanut butter, tortillas, and mashed potatoes for just about every dinner (maybe tuna and ramen sometimes?); you're only rarely staying in hotels or hostels; and if you're getting a ride somewhere, it's from a trail angel, never a taxi or a shuttle.
It's possible but I really enjoy getting into town and having a real meal. Everyone hikes their own hike.
Hah, yes, perhaps I should say that I would need to spend $1,000/month to have a good time. For context, I had never camped a day in my life before setting out on my hike (I didn't even camp out a single night as a test run with my gear before flying out). So I was pretty green, and definitely not a tough lad. :)
I have seen others recommend a budget of $500/month as a reasonable amount.
Have you done something like this before or was this on a whim?
Trying to figure out how much training / prep one needs to do. I want to do long distance cycling, I am not concerned about the stamina. I am concerned about camping in the wild, packing and repairing the bicycle when it breaks.
That sounds superb and I wish you good luck and lots of trail magic. The AT looks beautiful (I've only seen pictures of it in blogs).
Forests are wonderful. I grew up around forests, playing in them as a child. A few years ago while day hiking in a forest I came to a Sun-warmed opening in pine barrens from amidst taller pines. That specific scent of the ground and the pines etc., the heat and the wind -- all these, but mostly the strong scent, took me vividly back to my childhood. I remembered so many things as if I were there again, I saw these memories just flowing at me. For a moment, I was transported back to my grandparents place at a summer when I was 6-8 years old. I felt how much they loved me and what a good and carefree place I had been in.
For some time, I stood there in awe with my mouth open, trying to process what just happened. It was such a powerful influx of memories.
I don't know if you've experienced something like this, but I hope you will! Maybe some years from now your hike will come back to you.
If you have the financial means to do so, I highly recommend taking a gap year. It was a very rewarding time for me - just working on projects that interested me (tech and non-tech) and at my own pace, instead of racing towards arbitrary deadlines set by the employer. It was also the time where I could actually learn some new skills, which is quite difficult when you have a full time job. I cannot wait for the next time I can take a year off!
I’m about 15 months into my “gap year,” similar story (except no immigration). I traveled on the cheap, switched careers, found a new city I love (and is way cheaper), and settled down with my gf.
Word of warning: depending on what kind of friends and family you have, you might lose some people along the way. Taking a leap like that brought out a new side of people I thought I knew. Most were supportive, but some not at all. Focus on the “keepers” instead of the “haters,” stay positive, and enjoy it!
I never too time off. Even not between from job to owning a business.
During the early Covid lock down was the best time. Had a really good sleep. Learned cooking. Biked with my son everyday. Walked in the evening everyday.
Right before the covid-19, I visited my parents for a month in India and didn't do anything. Screen time reduced to 1-2 hrs a day - hardly any emails, no business calls, no Reddit, no HN or no news. That was the best time. Slept from 10pm - 6am everyday.
Obviously "the West" is a big place and there are lots of cultures and in-groups within it.
I can tell you as a non-elite, middle-class American that I've almost never heard of someone taking a gap year after beginning professional work. The one case that comes to mind was an ex's father who was burnt out on his accountant career. He took a year to follow his dreams on music-related stuff, which didn't pan out in terms of turning a passion into a career, and he went back to being an accountant (also, after causing his wife and kids some stress related to running low on money).
I did however take a 6 week gap between jobs a few years back. I think things like that are common enough. I flew to Costa Rica, intending to spend a month backpacking around the country ... and honestly I got kind of bored after 2 weeks so I flew home early. Then I hopped in the car and drove cross-country at my own pace, seeing sights that I wanted to see, etc. Absolutely one of my favorite memories and I'd love to do something similar again.
The important thing to remember is that this is for your growth, happiness, and well-being. You set the rules for your time off. If you travel the whole time or stay at home, or a mix, that's your call. If you do something to try to set yourself up for your next opportunity professionally or you completely stay away anything related to your profession, that's up to you. Don't follow a path just because you think it'll look good on Instagram or because you think it'll sound cool when you talk about it at parties in the future. (Or do, if those are high enough priorities for you). Good luck!
>I did however take a 6 week gap between jobs a few years back.
I've never had enough time off between (my few) jobs since grad school. The circumstances have never been quite right. I did get a 3-4 week vacation the last time and that was mostly because I had done everything except pull the trigger while waiting to see if an offer came through--then pushed things out as far as I could.
I actually had a month off the prior time as well but that was because of a post-9/11 layoff. As it turned out a conversation I had with someone I knew pretty much the following day panned out. But I didn't know that of course and it wasn't the time to just head off and vacation.
As an European tech-sphere data point: it seems somewhat normal to travel the world for half a year before your first job. Gap time later on is not so common. Still, I can easily name five colleagues who took one to six months off, some as unpaid vacation, some between jobs.
Personally, six weeks sounds more like an extra-long vacation. I always took four to six months off before looking for a new job, or when on-job an unpaid month or two every other year. But that's definitively nowhere near the norm, many people don't understand it. I usually end up coding 20h per week on geek projects or random open source stuff. After six months I predictably get bored with it.
I rarely end up doing the project I planned to do. So if you want any advice from me: Don't force yourself to do what you thought you wanted to do, before you had time. Look around and don't feel guilty for following that new interest you just discovered.
Careful with gap years to clear your plate to work on slower pace stuff - if you're anything like me, you'll have trouble doing the one thing day in and day out. Even with full freedom, it is hard to manage one's output
FYI, frame this as freelance consulting when you apply for your next job. You can talk about wanting something new and striking out on your own for a bit.
IMO what you find out is a year is a long time without work from a time perspective. Hope you enjoy your year off!
Just chiming in that I absolutely detest this way of thinking. This isn’t a dig at you personally, but against the idea of living or presenting your life as some series of neatly explainable resume bullet points. I have been susceptible to it myself to a greater or lesser degree throughout my career.
My "independent consulting" time was a mask for burnout. I certainly did consult independently, right down to paying too much for health insurance. My time off was extremely valuable and made me realize I needed to rest and reinvent myself. Plus, as I get older I realize I can use the b-word at certain stages of interviewing as a way to filter out toxic people and institutions.
But yeah, it's all a big game. Nobody is owed a tidy explanation of this.
I did something similar between school and a job, but it wasn't so much intentional as acute burnout.
In tech, we luckily have the luxury to take time off and recover when we need to.
I worked on some closed source personal projects and worked on getting into shape. When I was ready to return, the employer didn't really care that I had taken time off.
> I've never had a gap year, it was all school, then immigration, work, university, more work. Any holiday time you fly back home. I kept hearing its not unusual for people in the west to take gap years, so thats what Im doing.
As a Westerner, I have never taken a gap year but I never met anyone who took one and wish they didn't. If you can make it work, take it, especially after the Pandemic because it's going to be an awesome time to travel.
When hiring I totally Want gaps in people's resumes. I've even asked people who hadn't why and whether they really want to be looking for work right now at all.
I honestly try to maximize humanity, unhappy people can't do good work.
I'm considering this too but I might just wait till the beginning of 2022 hoping thats when the entire world opens up. I can't break my lease before November, so that helps me stay at my job. So many ideas though for 2022,
1. Cycle Eurovelo 6
2. Drive through the Pan American Highway
3. Learn different things at different places, Muay Thai in Thailand, surfing in Bali, Kali in the Philipines
4. Just travel doing nothing for a few months and then try 12 month 12 startups or something.
As well as the pandemic causing employment uncertainty, as @Andrew_nenakhov says, there could be a temporary downturn in the number of resignations in the last year and a significatnt portion of this "great wave" is potentially the numbers catching up again.
I also think that because a lot of people lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic, some industries moreso than others, the market may also be temporarily saturated (at least more so than usual) with candidates at the moment, which will dampen the number of resignations.
Having said that, I personally am receiving just as much recruiter spam as I was before.
This already happened at the company I left two months ago. We had been acquired a few months before the pandemic started, and the people who had not left by February 2020 mostly buckled down to ride things out. So there was remarkably little turnover for about 9 months. Once the vaccines got approved, it was like the dams burst, and people started leaving left and right, particularly senior engineers. (My guess is that, like me, they had dependents, so didn't want to jump ship until they felt like the worst was behind us.)
Basically a year's worth of departures in a very compressed timeframe. Not a good situation for the acquiring business, especially since they prided themselves on a longer hiring process than comparable companies.
An anecdote: a handful engineers I've worked with (and they're all high quality) have resigned from traditional bigtech to work in open source finance within crypto.
It's as though pandemic solitude gave many the mind-time to ponder their authentic values hierarchy.
I'm glad more bright minds will be spending less time working directly or indirectly on ads. It's hard to watch.
From how I perceive the definition of the 'crypto' domain, it's a lot wider in range than currencies/tokens. These are just one integral primitive of a p2p economy.
hmmm, i can loan stablecoins via crypto & receive interest with zero intermediary. or i can sell digital assets (e.g. art or IP) directly as an artist anywhere in the world, uncensorably & without revealing my identity (e.g. if in China). pretty useful.
Open finance already exists. My neighbors and I trade tomatoes for lemons occasionally. Bartering is open finance. Shackling yourself to some meme token does not seem very open to me, compared to exchange of goods which has certainly stood the test of time and the rise and fall of countless societies. Can't really say the same for crypto.
Brave is a really good example of where the two can even meet. It would not have been possible without crypto, and I'd suggest it's much more useful than the entire traditional ad industry.
Whereas with crypto, you can just ignore the subject entirely if you so wish. You won't be shouted at, when you open your digital newspaper to read stuff, that YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GET MORE DOGECOIN!!!
Ironically, that’s mainly because all ad exchanges ban crypto ads. Google has actually reversed course on this [1] and soon you’ll start seeing crypto ads too. Sadly, I already see tons of crypto related ads on Instagram already. Also, I’m not sure which digital newspaper you refer to, but I see articles about crypto pretty much on a daily basis on most websites.
People like to say ads are useless, and then talk about how they listen to others’ recommendations and blogs and videos, conveniently ignoring that they’re also ads.
I'm happy with crypto investors being bled out of their money... Not so happy with adds and tracking me for useless things as this affects also those companies who buys adds...
Crypto organizations hire, give grants & ofc anyone can buy a token [if there's one present] & start writing code / content etc. to make that token more valuable.
For many, their wealth is derived more from crypto / token capital gain than traditional income. Its increased risk no doubt. More upside & downside.
Many DAOs have massive (>$1B) treasuries that are used to fund development and marketing. Developers propose OSS projects and these orgs give out grants based on community votes. See https://gitcoin.co or the Uniswap Grants program for examples.
You create a decentralised service that crypto companies need, and then add a native token for governance. Governance token ends up having value (more than it should in a lot of cases) and the developers profit.
For example, people initially just had crypto tokens. Then came uniswap liquidity pools for exchanges. People could suddenly earn interest on their crypto. Uniswap creators profit.
Sounds like people are discovering it's actually not that hard getting off the teat of a boring 9 to 5 job ... I'm not sure why that would be a bad thing.
The increasing acceptance of working from home has allowed me to get offers from major cities nearby instead of being low-balled by my small town rate.
FAANGs take some of the employees at second tier companies and the vacancies trickle down and now I'm getting opportunities for remote work from the companies at major cities nearby (that previously were on-prem only) instead of just what is available in Wichita. And with coworkers quitting as well it gives me more leverage for a counter offer.
For what it's worth, this was my strategy living in a bigger city in the south. Local salaries are so egregiously out of line with the national US market that breaking into remote work a decade ago is easily, easily the best decision I've personally made.
At the time it was hard work and a bit of serendipity. At this point I already found a great remote job I have no desire to leave. It's wild that currently there is a deluge of recruiters from very large west coast companies trying to get me to join without any relocation. That's been a big shift in the past year. Good time to live somewhere cheap with decent internet.
Most people are open for new opportunities and are proactively or passively checking at all times anyway.
If a recruiter calls me and has an up to date cv, I will have a chat with them.
This might lead to something, if not, at least they have their crm updated for the next calls.
And when the need arises, you can get back at them, one of them placed me in a FAANG with full remote recently, totally unexpected.
I think many people will consider quitting one semi or on premises job for a remote, I certainly would not go back to office unless it is a head of or c level position, if I can avoid it.
Sorry for the tangent, but have you found any benefit in maintaining a traditional CV / resume?
I'm not actively looking for a job, so I just tell them to have a look at my LinkedIn profile. But I wonder if that's keeping me from some worthwhile opportunities.
I think this is important, not just tangential.
The traditional cv is still something most companies will check, one way or another. At the very least, they will use a tool to check for keywords, same thing on job platforms.
I personally never update my LinkedIn with the current role, I always think if my employer checks, they would think I am shopping around, so I leave that.
But on job platforms, I have the most current CV.
LinkedIn never gave me good results anyway, only currently held roles.
But Glassdoor is pretty ok and some other platforms(I can pm if you like) have proven good, they seem to have some kind of alert system whenever a keyword of a recruiter portfolio is triggered and on cv updates.
I do think limiting oneself to LinkedIn will definitely make you miss on some opportunities. I spend no more than an hour a month to update etc.
Most have auto apply button etc.
It is easy to send 50-100 applications within an hour.
Of course some of the contacts will be rubbish, just delegate to spam I it keeps happening, eventually unsubscribe.
I got some interviews to places where I thought they would never, ever touch me. However, sometimes such companies are desperate to hire.
I went pretty far with bitfinex, just for fun and because it's remote, despite knowing sweet little about what is needed to know .
Many stories like that.
Anecdotally I've had much more contact from recruiters this year and I suspect many greybeard embedded devs have decided this was the year to finally take their retirement.
I've worked remotely for over 8 years as a senior software engineer, and I'm not going back anytime soon.
This will get interesting for both salaries and global movement.
Being a digital nomad certainly won't be as "hip" when everyone else can do the same thing. And now people are going to be competing with a lot of low-cost employees with equal skills.
This has already been the issue with offshoring, but now you can hire someone in Fargo, SD instead of San Fran, CA and pay them going market rate. For the same skills.
In the long-term, this might get people out of packed cities and horrific commutes and help become a rebirth of small-town America (or small-town Chile and everywhere else).
>In the long-term, this might get people out of packed cities and horrific commutes and help become a rebirth of small-town America (or small-town Chile and everywhere else).
Perhaps. I think the shift will be to more healthy-livable cities, whether thats big or small.
Vast majority of humans seem love the benefits of high population density more than they dislike the costs, remote work or not.
> Vast majority of humans seem love the benefits of high population density more than they dislike the costs, remote work or not.
Over these 8 years I've lived everywhere from NYC to small town America and other countries in AirBnbs.
They each have their benefits, they are just different.
If you have a family, small towns can be amazing. Good school districts, tight-nit communities, great charitable events to participate in. Of course you can find that in NYC but it's a completely different scenario and vibe.
It comes down to what works for the individual, which is perfect and exactly where we need to be moving to.
Agree. More people should try out different living contexts to find which tradeoff matrix works best for them.
I'm now in Vancouver BC, quite a high population density, yet I find it's super easy to remain healthy & happy (air quality, access to nature, safety etc.).
> If you have a family, small towns can be amazing. Good school districts
Your definition of "small town" must be different than mine, or small towns in your area are a hell of a lot nicer than ours. Or maybe you mean suburban/exurban towns? Those are the only "small towns" with good public schools, around here. Cities (as in, actually in the city proper)? Bad schools. Rural small towns? Bad schools. Smallish cities? Bad schools. There's a belt of good schools in (some of!) the suburban and exurban towns around the major cities, and that's it. Few or none of those towns have the other characteristics you mention, because they're basically bedroom communities for the city they're attached to, with some lame chain retail and fast-food and you go to the city for anything that's actually worth doing.
I've always dreamed of packing up and moving to the mountains (the Whites, or the Rockies, or the Sierras) but I've always been held back by 3 major factors. First, most rural communities don't have very good educational infrastructure. Second, moving somewhere with no social scene as an adult means you'll be spending a long time with no or few friends. Third, the cost and time sink of traveling back home to visit family for holidays, baptisms, etc.
I think that time zone bands will temper this somewhat. It’s a lot easier to work with people on the same schedule than trying coordinate with people/teams that are +/- 3 time zones away.
I'm currently managing a team of offshore developers +11 from me on top of being the lead developer.
It's chaotic but members of the team adjust their schedule to partially overlap so it works, for the most part.
But I agree. We are a US company and we originally looked at South American companies to try to keep people around the same timezone. I was not involved in the final decision, which apparently came down strictly to financials.
It's actually not that bad. Regular meetings between global teams can be scheduled as any others are. People working internationally with people in the U.S. are already used to taking evening conference calls around convenient U.S. based meeting times. For east and west coast teams, in my experience they usually just adopt east coast hours, which the west coast people prefer because this means they avoid traffic entirely.
3 time zones is a pain, and 4+ is a nightmare. I can definitely see a lot of people telecommuting from "nearby" (Vermont to NYC for example) but Hanoi to San Francisco is just too much.
You can’t really just compare average salaries in different metros, because there’s major selection bias. The average engineer in South Dakota is not the same as one in San Francisco. Less talented workers tend to heavily flow towards low COL markets, because they’re less to achieve a high enough productivity differential to justify the high cost.
This obviously isn’t true for every single case. But the typical engineer at a sleepy regional bank is nowhere near talented enough to make it at a fast-paced, hyper-growth venture backed startup.
Having worked in everything from backend systems for sleepy banks to hedge funds to the hottest pre-IPO valley darlings, anecdotally you are dead wrong.
If there is any correlation at all it’s that the venture backed startups have a lower than average skill level.
Surely effort is a very big part of success, but I would attribute at least some of the magic that makes the tech companies hum to above average technical expertise.
Is that surprising? You can cook up an electron app after a few tutorials and two weeks time. All you have to do is sell a product, the product can be junk if you can convince your buyers otherwise. Charisma gets more funding than technical expertise, because consumers buy on charisma.
Consumers are not buying iPhones because of charisma. They are not using Gmail because of charisma.
Some VC pump and dump companies get by and make some headlines by being a fad electron app, but I am referring to those that stick around for years and develop products that require R&D. I have a hard time believing that people who work at companies that have transformed the way we live over the past few decades are "lower than average skill".
So, I wasn’t thinking Apple or Google when I wrote this because those are giant companies that hire globally. Most of Apples profit comes from products produced far from the valley. That said, I’ve worked with lots of veterans of Apple and Google and there quite literally is no correlation between having worked at those companies and being good. I believe that the current hiring environment in software is so broken that being hired by someone is effectively arbitrary.
Similarly Microsoft and Amazon are not valley creations but are giant profitable companies that hire tech workers from a wide variety of regions.
When you hire as much of the industry as those companies do its not at all surprising that the talent in them runs the gamut. They represent so much of the industry it would be near impossible not to have a big distribution of talent within them.
But when you get into the rest of the ecosystem is when it gets pretty ugly pretty fast. So far as I can see the biggest correlative factor with engineers in the valley is a capacity to move there. That filter does not trend towards being good at the job. And I’ll stand by my anecdotal opinion.
I think the more amazing thing that some firms are able to overcome this talent problem is that it took a global pandemic for the opinion it being an issue to change.
I would say my claim is that offering more money or the chance to make more money does make it possible to end up with a workforce of people with a higher than average skill level.
And if certain geographical locations are known for being places where the chances of making a lot more money are significantly higher, then I would say the skill level of people there is probably higher on average. The proof would be the numerous leading companies and products coming out of these places.
Of course, those locations can change, and maybe widespread access to broadband will cause that to change that or reduce benefits of agglomeration. But it remains to be seen.
That presumes a) that hiring good developers is a driver for that success b) the valley offers more money relatively c) there is actual proof that those firms are producing outsized returns.
I for one have made more money in finance than valley style tech. That may change one day but there _also_ was no correlation in the finance firms for quality.
c) is pretty clear based on 10-Ks and performance of tech companies relative to others in the market.
And while I personally do not know people’s financial histories, I can say that the part of my college class that went to tech seem to work far less than the part that went to finance. Even if gross income is similar, I doubt that $/hour worked, or the risk was better in finance than in tech over the past 15 to 20 years.
That isn’t to knock finance, it’s just my interpretation of the reality of how much access to broadband and advancements in certain technologies have underlined much of our economic growth.
> The average engineer in South Dakota is not the same as one in San Francisco.
How do you know? I've worked with extremely talented engineers from all over the globe at this point, 20+ years in. Do you think all the engineers in San Francisco were born there?
You would never guess where I'm living, and it's not San Francisco. I'd love to, but I'm waiting for tech to recede a bit and a sense of normalcy to return.
anecdotally, I can confirm this happening in a few companies I know... I left my job at the beginning of 2020 to work for myself. A lot of ex-colleagues took a similar path.
I guess the "focus on the mission" companies are trying to foster among their ranks is also useful to distract oneself from what your own mission actually is.
This hiatus on company focus might have been the best thing that happened to a lot of engineers I know.
I can tell you all the market for devs is white hot at the moment. I mean it was never cold, but right now seems to be insane.
If the work-from-home thing has given you thoughts about what you like, now is the time to go. I see very few firms insisting on onsite work though, having interviewed with quite a few over the last few weeks. Even guys that I know would rather have people in the office and would pay them very well are feeling forced to let people work from home at least a couple of days.
Salary wise it seems like it's breaking upwards too, though of course all I have is my own offers and the word of some recruiters. There's also just a lot of firms out there who are happy to create roles for people they like, or discuss new ventures with new people.
Also, don't forget if you're going to look, absolutely everyone is interviewing remotely. You can sit at home at interviews all day until you find the job for you, something you might not be able to once more firms go back in the office.
This. The WeWorkRemotely posting silicon valley type companies are getting flooded and are quite picky currently. But once you apply to a few jobs elsewhere that have recruiters, you get flooded with small to medium size companies looking for devs. And the market is so hot that companies which previously had longer interview processes are condensing down to 1-2 interviews, because if they take any longer all their applicants have already taken offers elsewhere. For most devs, no matter what you're making someone else would pay you more, and they're willing to do it remotely.
Don't wait on your company to make a remote work plan once they've got you all back in the office. Start looking around now while they don't have a monopoly on your time. That doesn't necessarily mean taking interviews during work hours -- my previous job was 10-6 eastern, and east coast companies would happily interview me at 9, while west coast ones interviewed me at 7. Once your current company has you back in the office, they have a much stronger grasp on you, and they know it. That's why they want everyone back in the office before they talk about remote work.
But if you're not going to a company that is itself 100% remote, I'd still be wary about being the stranger that they only see online. I went with a job where I was only an hour away from the office but could still work remotely, and plan to be there once every couple months, so I still get some face time.
Are you seeing the salaries at these smaller companies keeping up? When I was changing jobs just before the pandemic I also saw a ton of interest from small/med companies, but none with competitive offers. Big, publicly traded tech companies were able to offer more than double total compensation in some cases, and that's with equity you can actually sell for cash.
It probably depends where you are on your career path. For me, those silicon valley startups were offering less than my target salary and I was going to try to negotiate up. For the small company I ended up at, I gave my target salary range and they exceeded it by 10k. I wasn't shooting for big publicly traded companies, and I don't know how they're acting currently. From friends I do know that some are seriously considering changing their remote work policy obviously.
I'm seeing a lot of colleagues leaving for substantial raises. But I've also noticed that we've been hiring a lot of entry-level folks. Not sure if we can extrapolate that industry-wide, but I suspect we can.
There are a lot of cities in the USA with an underpaid, but experienced workforce. While you might not find these offers to be competitive, someone from Springfield making $65k would absolutely jump at a $95k offer, even if that's still pretty well below the median national salary.
Weworkremotely just seem to be targeted at "web"-devs judging by filter categories (fullstack, backend, frontend). Is those positions maybe easier to do remotely?
Im not seeing a lot of remote/hybrid offers in the midatlantic area (from my little checking around my area).
It's a lot more "we're remote right now and haven't determined our remote strategy" which like my current place generally means we'll expect you back, but might be a little more lenient on why you need to do a special WFH day.
I've done both full remote and full open office. I think being close enough to go in and get together to determine project path and then going remote to work on it seems to be the way to go. It doesn't look like my current employer believes the same way - even though they are doing very well right now and we're all remote.
That's why people are looking for a new job that will specifically let them work remote. Like anything else, it's easier to get the change you want from a new company than your current one, and you work that out as part of the interview and offer. With the jobs in such demand, companies that wouldn't normally hire remote people will.
The forced year of remote has led to both a lot of companies opening up permanent remote work, and a lot of people to change jobs (because their current company doesn't support them remotely well, or because without the social component normalizing their work they've come to question it more). Further, with just the economy reopening, a lot of businesses are opening headcount that they've been sitting on the past year, reluctant to hire due to COVID uncertainties. Taken together, there is a lot of churn. There's a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of competition for roles.
I don't work in this space currently, but have colleagues and former colleagues that do. So many companies still have people running around with clipboards or doing routine calculations in Excel or handing loan applications by hand or managing contracts by printing them out and filing them or having someone sit at a monitor and watch for an alert so they can tell someone else or manually processing reward point changes or fax out hotel booking confirmations.
This is ludicrous to people steeped in tech, but I have had former colleagues or classmates or even myself work on all of those in the past year and a bit.
The fact that nothing has really changed seems to mean it is still cheaper to hire a minimum wage earner with zero benefits than to hire or contract software engineers to service your software and/or hardware that automates the job.
Stocks (and therefore RSUs) are up. I joined a FANG in 2019 with $500k RSUs. Now I have $740k in unvested RSUs, including $600k remaining from the initial grant.
It is here in Australia. I've spoken to a lot of people who are hiring (EY, Accenture and some small-caps) and they all say the same thing - super hard, and expensive to get tech people right now.
How is it for Product Managers and Product Owners? I've seen a slight bump in the past few weeks, but (anecdotally from my monitoring) the number of listings was still higher under Trump in 2019:
Every time a recruiter (especially internal) reaches out to me lately about "remote until after Covid" I politely tell them I have no intention of ever being forced back into an office every week and good luck with their search. Hopefully they'll realize quickly enough.
Agreed on the salary uptick now. I'm not actively looking, but I'll entertain interesting companies. I've had a lot more companies say "yeah, we can do that" when I tell them I want at least $200k base (8 YOE, full stack developer) than before.
RSUs (that are contractually part of your on hire compensation) in a publicly traded company are as good as cash. Just sell immediately when they vest.
Levels says E-7’s at Facebook get a nearly $1,000,000 compensation package
A) Is this annual? As in their unvested RSUs are nearly 4x this amount
B) This is not accounting for stock price appreciation?
or do I have it entirely wrong. Two years ago on Blind I could tell people were discussing their compensation packages in wildly differing ways. It was impossible to tell if people were discussing if they signed an offer that computed a particular dollar value that was only relevant a single year and they just liked to brag about it, or if they were discussing their annual tax filings from employment, or even something else. I feel like this discrepancy translates onto Levels as well.
As someone who recently interviewed (although not at Facebook) the number is the _annual compensation package at the time they signed their offer_ (it includes base salary + annual stock grant + bonus). If someone got $1,000,000 in annual compensation 2 years ago, the stock portion per year will likely be larger now due to appreciation of the stock. These numbers are crazy high and before I interviewed this time around I was somewhat skeptic of how real these numbers were outside of a few outliers but now I'm pretty sure it's pretty common.
Super nice that trillion dollar companies are being extremely competitive with compensation now
Wages have stagnated for 30 years and, to me, progress is not achieved until a house in the same area as the economic center can be owned outright in 5 years or less just like the baby boomers experienced
This seems to accomplish that, but lets throw in paying off all other encumbrances like student debt as well
Base + bonus + annual refresher should be in the 700s annually. Likely the way this gets to $1M is with stocks going up and stacked refreshers (getting a couple annual refreshers while the initial grant is still vesting).
Can I get an ELI5 on how to even start looking around? I'm someone that contracted via word of mouth for years, and I have zero recruiter relationships. My resume is probably very strong (principle engineer / architect level, strong mentor, JVM/distributed backend, nodejs react typescript frontend) but I haven't updated it for years. I know a lot of recruiters are lousy so I don't want to just cold-call one at random.
First of all, find out where the jobs are. Some board for your niche or something like that. For me it's efinancialcareers. Now efinancial is still a black hole if you try to use it to apply through, but what you're really after is the recruiter details.
You then phone up the rec, or you write to him on LinkedIn. A lot of them are crap at responding, but that's how it is. Phone a few, and convince them that you are the real deal for whatever it is he recruits for.
They'll all want an updated CV. They need it to be able to proceed, nobody will place you without one. Good news is it isn't that hard, just highlight the relevant bits for reach recruiter.
The rec will then say "I've got a job at X, Y, and Z. X is a this kind of co, Y is looking for blah..."
When they have some of those details it means they actually have something. Otherwise it's just a generic company that they will find later. By find, I mean they will forget you by the time the job comes. One guy told me straight up the ad I responded to was not a specific job, it was a honeypot to lure candidates.
So now the companies get your CVs, and they decide whether to interview. If the recruiter is good, they will interview you maybe 3/4 times. Companies often screw up their own internal hiring process and ask for CVs when they aren't ready. But the other companies should be willing to interview you. This is where you find out if the rec is crap, because a fair few of them will just not tell you anything about what happened to your CV.
It's still a numbers game. I've got over 20 recruiters listed on my Trello, most of them did nothing useful for me.
It's probably worth cultivating some relationships with the recruiters. You learn a lot about what the market is doing for free from them.
Now, from memory I seem to recall that depending on which staffing survey, and how you phrase it, 10-35% of all employees say they intend to quit.
I'm not saying that we will won't see and increase turn over. However I suspect that given the level of disruption we've already had, I would be skeptical that its going to get worse.
The counter argument to that is of course that the people who were forced to change jobs from ones they liked (ones that were heavily hit by covid) to ones that existed, will migrate back to their old profession.
Not sure if this was just pent up demand from the limited mobility due to lockdowns last year. Now that places are opening up, people can actually move.
I've been a consultant for years, and I'd be unable to work as an employee for any company, especially a larger one. Seeing all the bullshit employees have to put up with at companies would make me scream.
I'm not talking about the work, it's everything else. The culture.
I was looking around recently, particularly at startups, but then chose to stop. Here is my reasoning:
* I am currently employed with great benefits. If I am going to throw that away there needs to be something of value in exchange: leadership position, architecture, or some other increase of responsibilities. I wasn’t seeing this.
* If your primary platform or language is JavaScript everybody wants a tool jockey. They claim to want somebody full stack. But when you really press for details the really want somebody to do react on the front end and play around with their cloud provider. The services piece in the middle is where things get strained in a full stack interview. If tools are the direction of work I have already lost interest. Why would I want to give up stable employment with great benefits to wire tools together? I would rather just stare out the window.
* The idea of a senior engineer is incredibly convoluted. It sounds like people want somebody who can mentor in a vacuum. You can only mentor so much about dicking around with tools. If you try to mentor past that and the culture is just go dick around with tools you are either mentoring too much or not enough. Either way you are a horrible senior incompatible to the new organization. Worse is when they ask you to guide and train junior developers without leadership support. Really if that should work beyond vague hints you need a title. Excellent juniors have a passion for learning but many juniors aren’t excellent, just want a paycheck, and feel insecure when challenged.
From going through the exact same conversation several times in a row I get the impression many employers kind of know what they want to build, kind of guess at what they need, and completely guess at what qualifies as execution planning but cannot put any of that together into a single vision.
What do you mean by “tools”? Generally I think of “tools” as anything that assists you in building, deploying, or operating a (production) service, but not the service itself. For my definition, the firebase CLI is a tool, but Google Cloud Firestore (a no-SQL data store) is not. At the places you talked to, was everything service-y left to a separate back-end/infra team?
* Just about anything to do with the DOM. Its a standard tree model. You learn it and get comfortable with it and suddenly all that browser tooling you cannot live without becomes immediately unnecessary. Hiding from this, making a bunch of excuses, and complaining about how hard life isn't appealing.
* The file system is also a tree model. If you have an abstraction layer that normalizes file system access cross OS all you really need is a basic comfort of data structures.
* Tools that provide session management are there because planning for real time parallel distribution is challenging. This is yet another one of those that once you go through it a few times you just know how to do it.
Looking at the code examples they shared it seems like they are the lone-wolf sort of developer that wants to "solve problems" in code that no one else can read.
Regarding your second point, I think it's good to know what interests you, but there's a lot of quality ideas out there that don't have hard tech components, and if they invent hard tech problems to keep their engineers interested, they're probably not going to last very long.
IMHO, the "all JavaScript tech stack, connected together by a cloud provider via tooling" pattern is probably among the faster ways to get an idea from inside someone's head and in front of customers, all of the longer term problems aside.
To me personally, the "challenge" comes from being able to do all of that quickly and seamlessly, basically solid execution becomes the fun part.
Oh, also I would love to make a bunch of money relatively quickly. :)
IMO the only way to make that stuff engaging is to move "up" a level and be the one picking the tools to solve the problem, interacting with users/clients, that kind of thing. Basically, start your own business or become a product manager at a place where product manager is a fairly expansive role.
Otherwise, I agree, it's all of: fucking boring; frustrating; and unrewarding. But, it's also most of the market for developers. :-/
The business should be inventing the problems, because that is (hopefully) driving the revenue that keeps you employed. Usually the business has all kinds of wonderful ideas of which some are practical and vetted while others are a distraction. If you are thinking in terms of automation, internal training, and service fulfillment you probably aren't properly aligning solutions to expense reduction. The benefit of writing original software is innovation and IP (even if open source and liberally licensed) that can generate additional revenue for the business.
If you current approach is entirely dependent upon tools it will be boxed in to a set of configurations and flexibility is lost. From what I have seen on HN the greatest challenge for most early stage startups is finding product-market fit, which means you need to pivot at a moment's notice. That ability to pivot is far more significant than whether you can have a website up in 2 days versus 2 weeks.
For me, there's this fire of urgency that makes it feel appropriate to make some long term bad tech choices if it helps me get customer feedback/iterate in the nearer term.
Honestly, as long as the tech doesn't fall over at 3am and generally lets me know when it's unhealthy, I'm just trying to grow enough to hire people who know more about making good long term tech choices than I do...
What I don't understand is that everyone still has roughly the same expenses as they did before. The basic economics of rent, groceries, child care, car payments, etc have not changed. I'd think people might move from one industry to another. But how can a wave of people afford to quit?
I guess people are living off of their savings, but that seems like a temporary solution. At the least I'd expect to see a similar wave of people re-entering the job market in 6-12 months. I'm still not sure what to make of this general trend, though
> The basic economics of rent, groceries, child care, car payments, etc have not changed.
For some people, they have though. Quite a few people moved out of the bay area/NYC, some have partners that lost jobs and have chosen to focus on child care instead, some have sold 1 of 2 cars because remote work no longer requires a commute.
Capital assets went up a surprising amount during the pandemic. My stock portfolio and my house are worth a lot more than they were 2 years ago.
I feel a temptation to use that money. I also have a nagging feeling that it’s somewhat artificial (the govt pumped a ton of money during the pandemic) so I should cash out before it falls.
I was lucky enough to buy into a great neighborhood in a city years ago. If I sold now and quit my job, I could live farther out and get more property for less money, and pocket the difference.
In the U.S., capital gains on your primary residence can be kept tax free up to $250,000 ($500k if you’re married).
I think by "quit" they mostly mean look for a job elsewhere with a different employer. "1 in 4 workers (26%) plans to look for a job at a different company once the pandemic has subsided, ... " [1]
I'm curious about this as well. In my market we've seen rent and child care costs go up roughly 40% in the past year. But, it may well be the people leaving higher COL areas driving up the prices here.
Lots of people are spending less than a quarter of their income on those expenses. So it's pretty easy to quit and use their savings on it for multiple years.
I've been unemployed for a long time, living on benefits, without guilt or remorse. For health and other reasons.
One problem being lack of social integration and interaction.
But honestly I don't think I can believe in the necessity of having a job, if I can't see purpose or meaning. There are few jobs that matter, and a lot of barriers and filtering.
/r/antiwork is really a viewpoint I can understand and defend.
How is this a scalable approach to everyone in the society? Someone has to work to produce food. Someone has to work to produce electricity. Until we can automate everything, most people have to work and contribute to society (unless you choose to be self-sufficient - grow your own food, produce your own electricity etc.)
Here's the pro fast food take. There are productive people working jobs that have massive necessity, and they need to eat. The least somebody who isn't productive can do is help feed them.
There are plenty of people building houses, growing food, and maintaining infrastructure like water treatment that directly contribute to sustaining life. And there are plenty of people in the industries that are required to support those people.
I'm not saying they don't know how to cook- but I'm saying that the least the rest of society who aren't responsible for sustaining us can do is make life better for those who do
Depend on those people are treated. Minimum wage and work conditions matter. If it's not sustainable, it's just not, and you cannot argue that "work is mandatory" on the premise that some people should prepare food for others.
I worked in fast food for several years and the job is terrible. The fundamental problem with this job and others like it are the fact that you can bust your ass day in and day out and see no benefit to your work. It's like groundhog day where every singe day you work there is exactly the same until you finally quit.
I think what would really improve a job like fast food is if workers were part owners of their franchise. Most fast food restaurants are franchises owned by one person or a local corporation that owns several franchises. Putting ownership into the workers hands would mean profit sharing, it would mean when you bust ass over the hot grill working a double shift or cleaning shit and blood from the walls in the bathroom, you are actually rewarded for the increased demand on the restaurant. It would be like a built in hazard pay for when things got busy and stressful and awful. At least benefits would be nice, I know several people who burned their forearms really bad on the fryer.
We don't need a lot of people to provide food, shelter, electricity and water for 7.6bn people? What about clothes, cars, furniture, electronics, schools, hospitals, medical equipment?
"The main argument is UBI." - is that it? UBI will solve everything? Let's just print more money and give it to everyone. Problem solved.
As I said in my other comment, I am not saying that the current status-quo is right. I think there is plenty of inequality and injustice in the world, but I just don't think "antiwork" is the way to solve that.
> What about clothes, cars, furniture, electronics, schools, hospitals, medical equipment?
Not all jobs are unnecessary, but there are jobs that are more important than others. There are a lot of jobs people wish they would not work or that they think nothing would change if they did not work those jobs. Just read about David Graeber and his book, Bullshit Jobs.
Just imagine all the workers in fast food. Look around and you will see a lot of people working jobs when they could spend time at university instead. You only listed the best jobs. People who work in insurance, sales, fast food, uber drivers, food delivery, clothing shops, etc.
> Let's just print more money and give it to everyone. Problem solved.
That's already what happens when there are bailouts. Giving money to people instead of giving it to the banks makes more sense.
I'm not saying that everybody should quit their jobs, I'm just saying that once you raise unemployment benefits, you will see a lot of wage slave quit their jobs and nothing will change.
They are just two examples of things we need. Did you expect an extensive list of all the things someone needs to do? What is the point of your comment?
These are few examples and I am expecting the reader would use their imagination a bit.
Food production - planting seeds, collecting crops, watering the farms, creating anti-pesticides, creating all the farming equipment, packaging food, distributing food, storing food (for storing food just think about all the work that goes into creating a fridge - from mining metals from the ground, to designing the fridge and building a factory that create thousands of fridges quickly)
> How is this a scalable approach to everyone in the society?
It is not, but let's not pretend most of us work to increase societal good. It just happens to be that our rent-seeking behavior is aligned with society's interests.
I was only giving an argument against the "antiwork mentality". This doesn't mean that I want to preserve the status-quo or I that I think the existing system is perfect. I agree that there are many issues in our society and the existing system, but I don't think "antiwork" is really the right way to go about it.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 390 ms ] thread* People who have moved, and now want a job closer to home if they want/need to go into the office.
* Companies who have hoarded cash during the recession and can now offer big salaries.
* Looser bonds with colleagues they only see remotely
I've no idea whether and to what extent any of these things are true, but it's definitely easy to imagine a big move around. That said... I'm not seeing much change in volume on the typical job boards so perhaps it's all hypothetical.
Of course anyone is replaceable but some knowledge will be lost. Also your model does not account for businesses which are aggressively expanding and doing a better job than the average employer retaining their employees by either being a genuinely great place to work or LTIPs
(Turns out the grass is pretty much the same in most places.)
Being from England, I hadn't even considered that healthcare is something that has to be factored into whether someone could take time off
Does it cover all procedures? Is there an excess? Value of coverage?
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
Basically, the metal levels are as follows: bronze, silver, gold, platinum are priced so that you the insurance company pays 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% of the healthcare costs.
Of course, this is an actuarial calculation, so it’s only true over a large population over a long timeline. But healthcare is a pretty certain need for everyone, so the cost for healthcare for everyone from age 0 to 65 (when government starts offering it called Medicare) is amortized into health insurance premiums for all of the 0 to 65 years.
The ACA law of 2010 requires a few things which cause the premiums to be adjusted such that younger people subsidize older people. The age rating factor table at the bottom of the linked pdf shows that the riskiest person (64 year old) must cost at most 3x what a 21 to 24 year old costs.
Also, healthy people subsidize unhealthy people because your health condition cannot be taken into account when determining premiums, and men subsidize women since gender cannot be taken into account (due to birthing).
As far as I know, smoking is the only activity that causes one’s premium to be higher.
Let’s take a silver HSA plan for example:
https://www.horizonblue.com/qhp/files/2021/2021_IHC_OMNIA_HS...
The out of pocket maximum for in network providers is $6,550. The premium is $350 per month. So $4,200 premium plus $6,550 out of pocket means a 21 to 24 year old pays at most $11k per year for healthcare if they get into trouble (most will only pay the $4.2k premiums since they are 21 to 24 and probably will not need healthcare).
A complication to these calculations is when employees pay, they can pay with pretax money, and HSA plans allow you to invest your HSA contributions tax free (max of a few thousand dollars per person per year).
So when you hear about those people who get lumped with $100k medical bills they still have to pay like $20k of that on top of your insurance?
What happens if you can't afford the remaining percentage?
>So when you hear about those people who get lumped with $100k medical bills they still have to pay like $20k of that on top of your insurance?
It depends if the person was insured or not, and if the care was provided by healthcare providers who have contracts with the insurance company or not (referred to as being in network).
In the US, when you go to a healthcare provider, the first thing they will ask you to sign is a form acknowledging you know you are responsible for anything your insurance company does not pay for (unless you go to a vertically integrated healthcare / health insurance company like Kaiser Permanente). In fact, health insurance companies are better referred to as managed care organizations (MCOs) in the US.
What happens is people are not capable of knowing what healthcare services they need or do not need. They have no way to determine if they are being ripped of or not. So the MCOs employ legions of doctors and pharmacists and whatnot to double check the doctors performing the services. They also have enough knowledge about pricing healthcare procedures that they are more able to determine a "good" price to pay.
Anyway, after the ACA law, there is an out of pocket maximum for in network providers, so you would not get a $100k bill. the out of pocket maximum for individual / family is $8,550 / $17.1k in 2021:
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
So you would only be liable up to that amount at most in a calendar year for all healthcare you receive from an in network provider. Everything else is paid for by insurance.
>What happens if you can't afford the remaining percentage?
The healthcare provider can choose to go after you for it, since you signed the form that says you will pay them if insurance does not. If you feel your insurance denied the doctor inappropriately, you can appeal to a third party to determine if insurance is obliged to pay it (if it is evidence based medicine, then they most likely have to pay it).
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
And they have to cover all non elective procedures.
My wife got a medical bill for $100k after being hospitalized with a life threatening illness years ago called and told them she’d send them $6,000. They said fine and considered it paid in full. The whole system is really bizarre.
My uncle has cancer and no insurance and is on Medicare so all his costs are covered.
My daughter is disabled and is also on Medicare, which is a weird mix of private and public where Medicare pays her primary insurance deductible so if she gets a surgery any surgery or doctors visits we might need after that in the year are going to be free.
I was unemployed when my disabled daughter was born so it didn’t cost us a dime, if I’d been employed it would have cost at least several thousand dollars. I started a job a week later but that didn’t retroactively change the cost owed.
When my disabled daughter was in the NICU for six months while a recruiting firm was technically my employer, she ruined their health insurance plan by racking up a million dollars in fees because they only had 60 or so employees, so the cost was extreme and their health insurance renewal rates were more expensive for a worse plan. I left the plan and used a Health Insurance marketplace plan instead which was cheaper and better than what their organization was offering for the following year.
That is really bad. The gov or insurance providers (whoever is responsible) are essentially discouraging employing people with sick family members.
Many leaders at that time did want to dump everyone into one insurance market so all healthy people subsidized all sick people, but there was tons of politics blowback from people who already had access to good healthcare who would see their costs rise because until then, they only had to share costs between healthy, employed workers.
Even today, you will read people lamenting how the ACA increased their health insurance premiums. Nevermind that it enabled millions more to actually get healthcare, so obviously the money was going to have to come from somewhere.
It only covers "medically necessary" procedures as deemed by the insurance company (there are some laws requiring certain procedures to be covered). You have to use specific doctors and facilities.
Typically you have a deductible as well. I have to pay $4,000 out of my own pocket before insurance kicks in. Preventative care (check-ups) are usually covered by a co-pay, mine is $30.
There's usually an out-of-pocket maximum you can pay every year (mine is $9,000). That's the real value of the insurance... if you're in a catastrophic event hopefully it caps your costs (but it doesn't always depending on facility, procedures, etc).
Not sure what you mean by excess or value of coverage, but the answer is probably no.
This does not include dental or vision services.
I think excess is what you call a deductible, as in if I have an accident in my car, I pay for the first £250 and that's the excess.
The value of the coverage is the maximum amount they'll pay out. I don't know if I have that on my car, but my house contents insurance is insured up to a certain value
This should be fairly standard around the EU. In Germany this is capped at around 1 million, I think.
Which sounds a lot, but bigger accidents can ramp up a lot of costs...
I pay £300/year to insure my car.
And yeah, excess in US can be crazy I think. We have private health insurance from work and when I had to use it there was a £100 deductible for the year - I thought that was quite steep.
~$1800/m for bad family (married couple + kids) health insurance on the HCA Marketplace. There are no providers beyond the two on there still selling individual insurance to anyone in this state. Other providers are only interested in selling group insurance. Check with insurance providers directly, check with insurance brokers, that's what you hear. No, no-one sells individual insurance in this state except those two providers you've never heard of. Other providers will only deal with businesses or other organizations.
How is the insurance bad? Well, for one thing, it still leaves you with ~$25,000 of risk exposure per year. That is, if things go very poorly (two family members get very sick, basically—nb, because US healthcare is actually, no-joke, insane, "gets very sick" includes "gets pregnant"), you could potentially have to pay $25,000, total, in a given year, on top of the monthly premiums. For another, US insurance plans have a concept of a "network", that is, particular places (hospitals, clinics, testing centers) where the insurance applies. For most insurance, you'll pay most or all costs if you go "out of network". These two providers each have very different networks, such that, for our location, one must choose between having the only children's hospital in the area "in network" (and of course said hospital is itself a "network" of locations and they've bought up everydamnthing related to children's healthcare in our city, because healthcare in the US is batshit insane) or having either of the two nearest normal hospitals to us be in-network.
Oh, and get this: US healthcare plans like to restrict coverage geographically. I think they all have to cover emergency room visits anywhere, but I wouldn't want to see what happens if you get in a bad car wreck, or have a heart attack, or whatever, in another state and can't be moved and are transferred out of the ER to any other part of the hospital. My guess is you get hit with five to six figures of bills that insurance won't touch. That's right: it's probably advisable to get travel healthcare insurance to travel in your own goddamn country. Further, lots of people live within tens of miles of a state border and might routinely travel—even just to commute to work—outside the area their insurance covers. Hope they never need anything but ER care while doing that!
US healthcare: fucked top-to-bottom, and we pay a huge premium for the "privilege" of "enjoying" it, because freedom or something.
It also works against small businesses that cannot afford to offer health insurance, because the small businesses’ employees cannot purchase health insurance with pre tax money, while the big businesses can compensate people with pretax health insurance that they subsidize.
Also I’m skeptical that they don’t actually want it, per the sibling commenter’s remarks. I think bigger businesses are all too happy to have another lever of informational asymmetry to pull to manage their actual biggest cost: salary.
Everyone doesn't have it because it's means-tested - if you make more than very roughly $1,200 a month you don't qualify. You still qualify for income-based subsidies at that point (under a totally different government program), but at higher income levels the expectation is that either you pay for your own health insurance premiums out of pocket, or your employer pays them for you. It's all very complicated, but that complexity is the price we pay so that we higher-income Americans can say that our employer is paying a "premium" and not a "tax." Evidently some of us care an awful lot about that sort of thing.
The prediction isn’t a massive wave of unemployment. It’s people switching jobs. They will still be earning money, just perhaps elsewhere.
The thing the that the article misses is that the vast majority of CEOs want all employees back in the office.
Imagine if I told you that the number of people "thinking of buying a Tesla" had gone up dramatically. Now, most people can't afford a Tesla, so no, not everyone is going to buy a Tesla. But if overall the proportion of people thinking about it went up, you wouldn't be surprised if the number of Tesla sales went up soon, and would probably be surprised if it fell.
What I'm saying here is that it would be weird if those two variables are completely independent.
That’s largely because of status quo bias. People don’t like to make any major changes to their life situation unless prompted. But if a company exists on ending the WFH arrangements that people have become accustomed to over the past year, all bets are out the window.
How does this compare to the figure over a longer period of time?
But if you looked at the previous year's numbers, it was something like 18% or 15%. And the previous year's actual attrition was closer to 5-8%. So perhaps you could extrapolate if you had the attrition rates combined with survey data, but surveys are a much weaker signal.
There was a similarly hyperbolic headline yesterday about a spike in resignations. Buried in the article it said that monthly employee turnover had moved from typical mid 1% to a higher mid 2% rate.
There might be a slight increase in turnover due to the hot job market and booming economy, but journalists like this one are working hard to make the situation sound like a dramatic change that’s going to change everything.
That said, I don't agree with this framing of your question with regard to "individual" journalists. It's unlikely that any "individual" journalist has economic, political, and social power. Journalists' power results from their collective efforts as a group. I would be hard-pressed to name more than five individual NYT reporters but collectively, the NYT has unquestionable social and political power, if not economic. The NYT's angles on stories, its decisions to pursue certain trends and not others, its portrayals as somethings as good and others as not good, etc. - these efforts have tremendous power and shape society.
Why do you think someone like Bezos was so interested in buying WaPo? To anyone who fails to appreciate the power of journalism, start with Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion.
* ALL Non-Farm: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR
* Professional and Business Services (which I believe captures software) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS540099QUL
List of all the options https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/32247
Unfortunately my company already did our yearly compensation adjustment. 2%, of course.
I've never had a gap year, it was all school, then immigration, work, university, more work. Any holiday time you fly back home. I kept hearing its not unusual for people in the west to take gap years, so thats what Im doing.
edit: thank you all for advice, encouragement as well as for cautious pessimism. By the amount of upvotes Im hoping Im not the only one doing this. See you out there!
Yep, that's what I'm seeing already.
Financially incentivized OSS (much of which falls under the label 'crypto') is very attractive if you're in the top percentiles of competence & drive.
Has there ever been an open, competitive, global, beurocracy-free, low barrier to entry market like this?
If you're paid by a crypto co., foundation, grants, or are financially incentivized by your crypto holdings to contribute, you're often within the bounds of both OSS & crypto.
example: devs that've contributed to Defi projects e.g. uniswap, or received ethereum or solana grants for their OSS code (i think nearly everything user-facing in these organizations is OSS).
I didn't do a gap year either. I left education at 16 and immediately went into FTE and have been there ever since (for longer than I dare count) and now that I am all wrapped up in a mortgage and kids I'm not sure I'll be taking a gap year any time soon (voluntarily, anyway!)
FWIW I have worked with several colleagues who took a gap year and never stopped. They pick up remote contract work along their travels and continue living the life of a modern day nomad. Not one of them is unhappy :)
You hear a heck of a lot more about it on HN than happens in reality.
Maybe I don't hang out with the trust fund crowd enough but I don't know ANYONE who's taken a "gap year" where they weren't doing something for ~40hr/wk in order to make a buck. I know a few people who didn't jump right into career stuff after college but even they did low pay large applicant pool type jobs at least tangentially related to their careers (e.g. working as basically unskilled labor on tourist fishing charters in Miami before getting a real entry level job on a container ship). Heck, even the people who took a year off before college were doing stuff tangentially related to their career/skillset in that time (e.g. working for geek squad prior to going to school for CE). I know a couple people who went from full time to part time or to less demanding jobs in their field prior to retirement. I know a couple people who did jobs not related to their vocational training for less than a year after they got out of the military but that was more of a stopgap to keep a roof over their head. I don't know anyone who's gone from full time to part time or less unless it's part of a career transition or approach to retirement. I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's managed to pay their rent by waiting tables and stripping for a grand total of 15hr/wk and spent the rest of the time doing art or writing a book or something. I'm sure there's someone who's banked a ton of money and taken a year off in the middle of their career. I don't know anyone who's pulled something like that off.
I've met people who do it on a 6-months basis - 6 months travelling, 6 months earning. They don't make much, their career is somewhat stalled, it would have probably ended when/if they had a kid, but they did it. They were conscious that they were sacrificing something (money, comforts) in exchange for this lifestyle.
Bit harder now post Brexit though
Almost all of the people I knew who did gap years before or after university went to either Australia or New Zealand (from the UK) following a three teaching-year degree with an extra industrial placement year - Australia in particular have (had?) a scheme where someone can live and work for a year with few restrictions provided they are under 30, and could extend that to two years if working in a rural area for some of that time.
I've moved to the US and can see how things are very different culturally with regard to travel. Others have mentioned that the US is not into backpacking. I think it's less about that, and more about travel being a prize for retirement.
I've seen this changing a bit in my time in the US, but it's still the norm for a lot of people who then end up being unable to travel. The US has many more people who are skilled and equipped for a backpacking lifestyle than I found in the UK.
I assume "backpacking" in this context tends to mean riding trains around Europe, staying in hostels/couchsurfing/etc.
The US has a fair bit of backpacking and camping in National Parks/Forests/long-distance trails although it's not necessarily a fully mainstream activity. But much less of the "European-style" backpacking.
I think it's partly a difference of scale and ability to get around without a car once you get out of a handful of (mostly expensive) cities.
My understanding is that workers get a year of maternity leave, a few weeks of paternity leave, and there is some sort of sharing arrangement whereby maternity leave can be used to extend paternity leave.
When maternity/paternity leave ends, the worker must be given their job back.
I'd expect that at many employers they can't just have the work that someone on leave would have done go undone so they are going to have to bring on someone else to do it--someone who knows that they will only be needed until the person they are filling in for comes back from leave.
Thus, I'd expect there to be a need across nearly all industries and at nearly all skill levels for people who want to fill a 6 month to a year opening.
Compare to the US (Federal 12 weeks maternity leave if your company has 50 people, no legally required maternity leave otherwise--individual states sometimes add more), where openings for people to work a temporary job for a few months tend to either be low end jobs or very specialized consulting jobs. The former don't pay enough to afford a 6 on/6 off lifestyle, and the latter are out of reach of most people. There aren't many good middle-class jobs to support 6 on/6 off.
It used to be that it was more a thing for women, but that probably changed since draft was abandoned (before that the gap year for men would usually have been military service or alternative civilian service)
Higher-middle and upper class more likely? Kids which need to earn their money usually go straight into apprenticeship or university and earn money promptly.
Basically the GP is using the former definition and the person you're replying to is using the latter definition.
Crap on the Marxists all you want but they do at least have a fairly unambiguous taxonomy for these distinctions.
This is why any of these definitions get really murky, fast.
On the other hand, someone who is worth, say, $10M or $20M is obviously still quite wealthy. But not necessarily in the doesn't need to think twice about hopping on a private plane or owning a private island category.
I think it is deeper than that, the country just has a confused relationship with the entire concept of class by both rejecting and embracing it.
I actually oriented myself more on the numbers for Germany. Which means middle class is a single household with about 2000€ net income per month. That includes a lot of trade workers. It is perfectly possible to finance a gap year without or just minor parental support.
Obviously it's easier with rich parents, but it doesn't really require as much cash as you're imagining. It's pretty common to work a little first then use all the cash to travel later for example, or to work while you travel, e.g. by teaching English (TEFL - https://www.tefl.org/blog/why-tefl-on-your-gap-year/).
The point is though - you don’t get anything at all until you actually attend classes. So taking a gap year means having to fund it yourself, or have generous parents but what this comments author describes is closer to ‘normal’ - a large number, not necessarily a majority, of 18year olds will plan out a gap year contingent on taking a part time job at some point and then using that to fund travel or something - before taking up a place on a course (and hence receiving the money)
If you have luck/motivation/connections/skillset - you might find a job related to your (future) degree too. I knew several people on my CS course who worked IT support at a local office for a few months whilst living with their parents - then set off on a backpacking trip somewhere exotic.
Everybody can have a loan for the full cost if they want one, people from poorer families get outright grants instead.
Certainly not perfect, but my impression is it hasn't significantly hindered uptake from lower income students and its not a major financial burden in practice.
In the UK "upper class" is used almost exclusively for aristocrats. No matter how rich you are, unless there is a viable way for you to hold a title (e.g. Earl), you will not be considered upper class.
Middle class is basically anyone who does knowledge work and has aspirations of home ownership.
Your description of "Kids which need to earn their money usually go straight into apprenticeship or university and earn money promptly" would be very likely to be working class kids in the UK i.e. unlikely to be middle class.
Its a bit more complex in the UK ABc1 is middle but their are social distinctions dependant on job not income.
For example A Plumber Miner or train driver might make more than an engineer but would be working class.
Basically what sort of honour would you get for doing charity work is a good marker
We all know that once old, the amount of money earned/saved will mean absolutely nothing in terms of happiness/achievement. Work achievements for office type jobs mean mean even less. The life lived well will mean everything. So some act accordingly when/if possible.
I haven't done gap year myself, but did a shorter variant - 2 times 3 months backpacking around India and Nepal. Remote Himalaya in the north, swimming in coral reefs on Amdamans, Thar desert in the west, and thousands of years of history, culture and people to meet everywhere in between. I still barely scratched the surface of what this place can offer.
Literally the best decision in my life. It changed me for the better. It motivated me to make changes in my career, go for consulting, move to Switzerland etc.
Have met tons of people from all over the world who were like this - traveling like this for 3-24 months, and then continuing work/study/beginning someplace else.
These trips I've done when having a pretty high mortgage and very little savings, and they both meant losing at least 2 salaries each time while expenses mounted. No rich family to cover for me anyhow if I would hit the financial wall. Still well worth the risk. If one doesn't have kids yet, there is practically nothing to lose with doing this, just gain.
I dont think this is true at all. Money in retirement means the difference between mostly maintaining your standard of living after work an “choosing between medicine and food each week”. I think a lot of people saving up and then spending all their savings to party every 5 years are in for a shock when they are 60 and their joints are sore and their knees don’t work and they can no longer make a salary.
I spent 3 months as a research assistant in Australia and used savings from that period to travel in South-East Asia and South America for 6 months or so. Shortly after graduating, having saved a bit as a student (again - Europe, I managed without student debt, having done web development next to my studies), I went to a conference in Taiwan with my MSc thesis and traveled back home over land. Then after working a little bit on my first job again I traveled, hitchhiking to/through the Middle East and Russia.
It's all very doable if you don't spend a lot - during many of these trips I spent $400-$1000/month.
Highly recommend it, traveling in Turkey/Iran/Oman/Georgia/Russia/Ukraine definitely shaped my perspective on the world.
Edit - Sorry, see all the peer comments made the same point.
Generally, I think family does. Some families have more money than others. It also depends how much the parents are willing and able to sacrifice, of course.
The same way you might scratch your head wondering how some fellow students pay for rentals you can't imagine affording, and alcohol binges you can't imagine affording. Students from poorer families rarely go on gap years. But even some poorer parents will sacrifice a lot, if they can find a way, to pay for their children to travel.
That said, the costs aren't outrageous. Travelling around Europe or Australia is fairly cheap for a young person (or at least used to be). There are schemes to allow travelling costs to be lower for young people, visas tend to be cheaper and easier to get, and people do local, temporary work e.g. in bars in kitchens to supplement the money they brought with them, to make it last longer.
I went to university in the UK a long time ago. And I struggled to understand how people afforded gap years (or rent) then, too. I never had a gap year, and it makes me a little sad. But as I couldn't even afford to eat regular meals, and certainly couldn't join people for socialising when they went out to places like Pizza Hut (too expensive), it was the right decision not to take a gap year :/
I had my moments, worrying about a friend's finances and professional decisions, only to learn later that, well, there was clearly nothing to worry about.
Yeah, for Americans it means buying health insurance which is quite a lot more expensive than what you get from your employer.
That said, I've only purchased travel insurance maybe a half-dozen times out of probably hundreds of trips.
And trust me, you want a private hospital in some of those countries. Even the locals wouldn’t go to a public hospital if they had a choice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
> As of 2013, Medicaid is a program intended for those with low income, but a low income is not the only requirement to enroll in the program. Eligibility is categorical—that is, to enroll one must be a member of a category defined by statute; some of these categories are: low-income children below a certain wage, pregnant women, parents of Medicaid-eligible children who meet certain income requirements, low-income disabled people who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and/or Social Security Disability (SSD), and low-income seniors 65 and older.
This makes it seem like it's not just "low income", but also membership in one of those other categories.
I also didn't see anything on the page that indicated what share of expenses were covered by medicaid, but perhaps I missed it.
And the whole meme that a 65% tax rate +25% vat on most products on top of it (I am in Sweden) is somehow worth it financially because "fReE HeAlThCaRe" is laughable.
Maybe it's more lax in the more worker friendly socialist regions like France or Scandinavia but in Austria you only get healthcare coverage if you work or are unemployed and registered as a job seeker which means staying in the country and proving to your local job center on a regular basis that you are looking for work.
Traveling abroad for leisure while unemployed automatically disqualifies you from receiving any healthcare coverage and unemployment benefits until you return.
Doesn't mean there aren't people cheating the system and taking vacations abroad while receiving unemployment but the rules are strict and being caught cheating is really bad for you.
Also doing courses on your own dime during unemployment, that are not on the job center's curriculum, like a boot camp in data science, automatically disqualifies you from unemployment benefits during that period. I tried explaining to my case worker at the job center that a data science certification gives me the opportunity for a better paid job afterwards and I need the unemployment benefits for that period and her response was "sorry sir, that's the law".
Yeah, the system is extremely stupid and archaic in some cases here and if you're an ambitious high achiever it can screw you over sometimes more than it helps you.
It's automatic in those situations you've described, but you can buy into the system otherwise.
At today's exchange rate if you'd like to benefit from the healthcare system, for a year, you'd have to make a 271 EUR contribution, with no other criteria required.
As a Romanian I can say you'd be surprised how many things the Romanian system gets right in favor of the workers in comparison to some western countries. At least on paper.
With some historical context it can be made to make some sense, but when dealing with it the first time it is prima facie absurd.
I'm not sure it is! It's not in the UK, certainly.
With regards to insurance:
- in some countries (UK, Sweden) - the insurance is contingent on having a social security number, so the coverage is pretty much universal for residents, but people coming from other EU countries will still need to work or register as unemployed to get it.
- in other countries, you generally need to be working or looking for work (i.e. answer phones / invitations from job centre and attend any interviews/courses they send you to) to be covered.
Some countries (Poland for example, I'm Polish) allow you to buy insurance if you are neither working nor looking for work. But as of December 2020, about 1.5 mln Poles are not insured at all. [1]
[1] https://tvn24.pl/polska/szczepionka-na-koronawirusa-czy-osob...
I agree, although I think the ignorance extends to Europeans as well. Europeans are often surprised to hear that American software professional salaries are ~60% higher than European salaries even after adjusting for taxes, healthcare, vacation, etc. Some will argue that the US cost of living is more expensive, but they're almost always comparing some major US metropolis with some European village or perhaps an Eastern European city. I've seen other arguments that the cost of housing in the US is comparable or more expensive, but they're typically comparing some relatively tiny European apartment with a much larger American home. Europeans seem to fixate on medical bankruptcies, as though these are commonplace for upper-middleclass Americans.
This was all a surprise to me, an American, who has tried earnestly to live in Western Europe for a few years, but found that I can either live in Europe or I can travel in Europe but trying to do both would likely be economically infeasible (even if I can find gainful work as a software professional, it would specifically be difficult for my wife who isn't in a hot field). Fortunately, now that remote work is catching on, it seems likely that my wife and I will be able to do more frequent 1-3 month stints in Europe while remaining employed by our American companies.
To be clear, I think the United States healthcare system should be reformed, because it doesn't serve the poorest Americans very well. However, the US healthcare system works pretty well for the upper middle class (if not the whole of the middle class) and above, contrary to perceptions I frequently hear from some Americans and Europeans.
This depends on the state; Medicaid expansion is doing good things for the poorest people in states where it exists.
The US benefit system is tilted towards the poor, old, and people with children (distant 3rd.) It has some bad welfare cliffs for disabled people, and is the worst for middle class self-employed who aren't on their parents' insurance.
Unfortunately this last group includes all online writers and popular social media users, which is why they pretend it doesn't exist for anyone.
Why do you believe those salaries are the result of the American healthcare system? Per-capita, Americans pay more than anyone for healthcare, just in a very unbalanced way that dramatically favors those with a job over those without.
Regarding comparing tax rates, those six figure job numbers don't include the substantial amount the employer is paying to the healthcare company.
Bitterness about the salary gap is understandable, but it's misguided to say that the fucked-up parts of the US system are what has produced the high-revenue/high-profit companies that are driving the compensation levels.
> Regarding comparing tax rates, those six figure job numbers don't include the substantial amount the employer is paying to the healthcare company.
To be fair, in many European countries - and certainly for Sweden - there's substantial payroll taxes paid by employers as well. Though to end up at 65% in Sweden even with employers payroll taxes tacked on, you're already earning a multiple of an average salary.
It doesn't really matter whether or not the salary difference is caused by healthcare or indeed that Americans pay more for healthcare. The only thing that matters is the post-healthcare take-home pay; if that figure is larger in American than Sweden for a given individual, then that individual is economically better off in America pretty much tautologically.
As long as that seems to be true, you'll see people complaining about it, and they'll have a valid reason for their complaints.
Personally, I think we should have a single payer system if only for the fact that it likely better serves poorer Americans.
The easiest way to afford it is to have a job. However, if you are willing to pay more (still much less than equivalent US health insurance, e.g. in Germany around 180€/mo) you can buy it directly. Or, you can participate in that country's social safety net which, yes, usually requires you to actively seek a job (often for some loose definition of "actively.")
The only way you could end up paying more is if you previously made an average amount of money, have a lot of savings, but now make nothing. Normally this is called "retirement" and if you didn't save enough for it, you don't do it.
Still, yeah, very different than how US health insurance works, agreed.
You're not guaranteed to be covered for 6 months. If you leave permanently and settle within Canada, BC will cover you for the remainder of the month plus two months (enough time to establish residency in the destination and get coverage). If you leave the country, you are covered for the remainder of the month.
If it's a temporary leave, however, several of the provinces do cover you outside of the province, and many will extend your coverage for quite a long time depending on the circumstances. BC allows you to retain coverage for a 2 year trip during every 5 year period. They also (like many provinces) will extend your coverage as long as you're in school full time in another location.
BC does not cover care outside of Canada (assuming that’s what you meant by “2 year trip”) with the exception of emergency care at a max of $75 per day.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera...
Not the case in France (at least for the past 20 years), and I doubt it's the case in most other European countries.
Nope, your parent is right, in Austria you also don't get healthcare if you don't work or are looking for work via your local job center.
Maybe France is an exception due to having stronger social system that heavily favors the workers (insert memes about strikes) while in Austria the system is very rigid, designed to favor businesses and the government rather than the workers and to discourage abuse.
I know to a European this might sound like the only two options, but pre-Obamacare, and very possibly again if the US can't get its shit together, it was impossible to buy health insurance no matter how much money you had for a large number of unemployed or self-employed people.
If there are different pricing tiers based on employment status, then the healthcare system is contingent on employment by definition. It's commendable that the American and European healthcare systems aren't contingent on pre-existing conditions, but that's a distinct issue.
Now, yes insurance is expensive, but anyone can get it for about 2x what most people who get healthcare as a benefit are paying into an employer's health care plan.
Or your partner has health insurance. Or you are studying (even if you take gap year at university). Or you happen to have farming land. Etc, etc - lots of exceptions.
Or you pay for it yourself from your savings (under 100 USD a month last I've checked).
Someone who is single with no child earning 167% of an average wage pays ~35% income tax and social security contributions [1].
The effective VAT also for most ends up far lower as a proportion of income, as most people don't spend anywhere near their whole income on VAT-rated products. For starters, you can't spend what you've already paid in tax. As such the VAT rate has a relatively low impact on total tax paid - the difference between the UK vat rate when I moved here (at the time 17.5%) and the Norwegian VAT rate of 25% added up to only about 1 percentage point difference in total taxation for me.
[1] Source: OECD Taxing Wages 2021
First of all, the OP is including the social security tax in the 65% figure. But more importantly, arguing that "the average Swede doesn't pay that much in tax" isn't very consoling for the American who would have to (1) take a salary hit to live in Sweden and (2) have to pay that higher tax rate. Universal healthcare doesn't remotely make up the difference in take-home pay.
As a reference point, taxes, retirement/pension/social-security, and healthcare account for ~30% of my gross salary in the U.S. If I moved to just about any Western European country (not sure about Sweden in particular), my take-home pay would likely fall by 40% (conservatively) while taxes and cost of living would likely rise.
Of course, the tradeoff for the Swedish system is that you have a stronger social safety net, which is certainly worth something. But the issue at hand is the notion that the European systems are better than the American system for professional employees.
And yes, there are people who will end up paying more, and it sucks for them.
The point is there's always this scaremongering about tax rates when it comes to Europe, and most of the time the tax rates that comes up are marginal rates that are not at all representative.
(My point was not to dismiss that you might well pay a very high tax rate, by the way, because the rate you gave is certainly possible, but to point out that paying a rate that high is highly unusually high, even in Sweden)
As an American, I find the tax rates much less scary than the raw differences in salary. If I could keep my US salary, healthcare, tax rates, etc and move to Europe for a few years, I would do so in a heartbeat.
Tax rates also depends greatly on which locations you're comparing. Between e.g. California and the UK the difference was small enough when I looked into it that it'd be easily eaten up by healthcare.
For my part, I spend about $5k/month total on living costs including sending a kid to private school and mortgage on a 3 bedroom house in London, and ordering food in most days, and I'm being hugely wasteful and could make do with far less of I had to.
The rest goes into investments.
How does that work? Presumably if the median salary for a given field is 40% lower, then the jobs which pay at my well-above-the-median salary are going to be much fewer and farther between with more competition. Add to that laws that (understandably) favor EU citizens and it seems like it would be quite difficult to get one's hands on those positions?
> Tax rates also depends greatly on which locations you're comparing. Between e.g. California and the UK the difference was small enough when I looked into it that it'd be easily eaten up by healthcare.
Yeah, like I said, I'm less concerned about tax rates. No surprise that California tax rates are comparable to London tax rates though; California is notoriously expensive and many Californians seem eager to move to other parts of the country.
The point is that it's meaningless to make blanket statements about whole continents when the differences are so substantial within them, and mobility within them is much less than you might expect. E.g. consider the number of Eastern European developers who could significantly increase their salaries by moving to higher paid locations in Europe, but you instead stay and e.g. work for local agencies. As such, you're not competing against all of Europe if you go to the highest paid locations in Europe any more than you're competing against all of the US in Silicon Valley.
Apologies if I'm dense, but I still don't understand. You can have a lot of variance in Europe and the US, but if the median is 40% lower in the Europe than in the US, doesn't it still suggest that any given American moving to Europe would have a dramatically harder time keeping his American salary?
> E.g. consider the number of Eastern European developers who could significantly increase their salaries by moving to higher paid locations in Europe, but you instead stay and e.g. work for local agencies
Fair enough--I wouldn't be competing against all of Europe, but there are far fewer jobs that pay $200K in Paris than, say, Chicago and the number of developers competing for those jobs is probably pretty comparable. I suspect it would be a lot harder for me to make $200K in Paris, but I would love to be wrong.
I don't know. That would also depend on what the distribution around the median are in the respective locations. And again, a blanket comparison isn't really useful because you're unlikely to be looking to move to the lower paid places. If the distribution was the same, and you had to move, you'd have a point. But you don't have to move, and so you'll inherently discard a whole lot of places that doesn't fit what you want.
For my skillset and levels, all I know is the number of places in the US where I can earn more than I do in London is fairly small. They exist, and Silicon Valley is one of them, but it's not like there are a lot. So I'd likewise instantly disregard most of the US.
But last time I considered it (I worked for a Palo Alto based startup, and flew over every 6-8 weeks for a couple of years, and I do love the Bay Area - to visit anyway), the costs of living just didn't add up for me. If I'd wanted to, I could have made it work, certainly, but it was not like the financials looked attractive enough to sway me much (either direction).
Things like food were cheaper, but even compared to my house in London, housing in the Bay Area is insane. E.g. I just checked on Zillow again now, and to put it this way: I'd need a fairly massive raise to afford a house similar in size and standards within a similar distance to downtown SF as I am to the centre of London today just to break even on a move. It's likely doable, but it's not all that obvious I'd come out ahead.
[this is while disregarding the complicating factor that I've never had a need to take a drivers license, because I've always lived places where public transport is good enough]
But your mileage may vary - it'll depend greatly on what specifically you value, what niche skills you have, and what type of areas you'd like to live in - all of it greatly affect the financials.
In some countries, individuals often don't qualify for bankruptcy. In others you might be able to restructure your debts, but they might not be discharged. In some, you may need to give up significant possessions to pay for your debts.
The US, for all of its healthcare issues, actually has a relatively progressive and accessible bankruptcy system. The majority of people in the US who file Chapter 7 have all of their assets exempted from liquidation by law. For these people, bankruptcy is literally as simple as a matter of trading all of their debt for 10 years of a bad mark on their credit report.
My family of 4 pays about 1800 SEK/month for private insurance to actually have a chance to see a competent doctor.
It is hard to overstate how bad US healthcare is for the typical American. If you are wealthy, you have access to some of the best doctors in the world, but for the rest of us we are entirely dependent on our employer for access to reasonable health care.
This has the second-order effect that _I_ won’t have to worry about _someone dear to me_ will be personally bankrupted by a medical condition. It saves me having to decide whether or not I should indebt myself to pay for their treatment.
Not having to raise fundraisers for my family members cancer treatment is worth a whole lot of disposable income for me.
(Recommendations (in German): https://www.finanztip.de/krankenversicherung/auslandsreisekr... )
In eastern Europe it's normal for your degree to take anywhere from 1-3 year longer than it should have for various reasons including "taking a year off to chill", but actual, planned gap years where you're not in education are basically unheard of. Let alone gap years where you travel around and spend money.
I know a few people who signed up for master degrees in say Germany and found that almost everyone in the program is a few years older then them.
Is that because of gap years, or an interest in actually getting industry experience before continuing academic education? I think I was about 6 years into my career before I thought I could really squeeze a lot of value out of a graduate program. (I didn't ever go back for one, though.)
I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of people taking a gap year, especially people in tech. The industry pays well relatively early and there is a surplus of jobs. If you keep your expenses low relative to your salary, don't let your lifestyle inflate beyond your means, and are fortunate enough not to be burdened with debt, health problems, or other large expenses, a gap year seems completely doable.
I think failure to save money is by far the most likely reason sabbaticals are uncommon, though I've been told by hiring managers they're more common in tech than you'd think. There's also probably some stigma against being unemployed, especially in professional circles, as well as fear of the dreaded "resume gap." As far as I can tell, that concern is fairly overblown for those in tech as well.
I think option for this is required by law in some countries, though I've never taken it so I'm not exactly sure.
My former company allowed this after two years of continuous employment to let employees try their wings with building their own product. I thought this was pretty cool, and definitely a recruitment carrot. On the downside (for the company) lots of those colleagues ended up leaving after their sabbatical was up, but I figure that those people would have left soonish anyway. It's not like they would've had a problem getting a new job.
It's sad really. As a young person this is the time to be able to do it. Often as you get older life gets in the way. I've been wanting to do it ever since I found out about it but every time something else has gotten in the way. If you're young and reading this, and everything has aligned for you, take a gap year or two.
Anyway, I took a gap time at age 36 for a 3 months trip in South America. And this allowed me to take an turn in my career when I came back.
You're on a discussion board filled with software developers and tech employees generally. The vast majority of such workers make a lot of money. If you're working in tech and you can't bank enough to take 6m-1yr off, you're doing your finances wrong. It doesn't require a trust fund to avoid the hedonic treadmill and save up.
I did take a year off 2 years later.
So I take a year of now and then, if I feel like it.
I am not the same person you asked the question to, but I guess if you work on a couple of hobby projects and actually release those in your break year, you won't have holes in your CV.
But if you leave enough coworkers who want to work with you again at each job, you can always find jobs through them.
Having a family is partially a financial decision. People should make the decision with eyes wide open, having planned for it. Achieving a financial position above sustenance before having the expensive family is generally a good idea. Same as buying the house and cars.
You can have a family, a house be sustainable but not earning enough to be able to pay for a year off of work. Which is the lot of 99.99% of people on this planet.
I think we have different definitions of "sustainable", then.
What you're describing sounds one step up from living paycheck to paycheck. And the fact that "most people are in that position!" doesn't make it a good position to be in, or a necessary one.
But, you can go on road trips, go camping, you can take a cruise, or find an all inclusive resorts. You won't have as much time for yourself like you did in your youth, but you can still travel and you'll make memories with your family, and show them new things about the world.
Why would you assume to know what other people's financial situations are, let alone their wage scale in an industry where not everyone is a US-based SWE?
EDIT: Obviously (from the voting) I hit a raw nerve with that original comment. Who knew “save for retirement” was such controversial advice. I personally plan to ensure I do not have to eat dog food when I’m 80 because I partied in my 20s but I guess to each their own. Given the average American’s retirement savings rate, my plan is clearly unpopular!
That means you're either not living on a budget at all, or you're doing something ridiculous like paying out of pocket for prescription medication without using the ACA.
I took off 3 years in my 20’s. 34 now, and back on track to retire in my early 40’s. Saving for retirement and enjoying life today are not mutually exclusive.
Do you really think all these folks want to do is fill their Instagram with pictures of windsurfing in Ibiza?
That misses the entire point of travel. It isn't to show off on instagram (although that can be a fun component, it isn't the driver for 99% of people); it isn't to tell other people you did it.
It is to have this amazing experience with a foreign culture and place. And that is very hard to value.
Yes, planning for retirement is important. But you may also be dead before you get there. It takes balance.
There's a balance to find between saving for retirement and not spending your entire adulthood just working towards it.
You may not be able to windsurf anywhere in your 50s...
I was really burnt out. But I'm not sure that taking the time did anything for me. I was a little stressed about the "unknown" the whole time and I mostly wish I had left that money in my savings.
Your mileage may vary.
While I did figure out I didn't love single handing a sailboat long term I don't regret any part of that year. I came back significantly happier than I was.
Most the advice is quite the opposite (and I would agree with them). To me, this really shows just how toxic the control is across the labor force. Job mobility is about the only vote or voice you have if you're in the labor force and if empty positions can be readily filled, you have no voice. The only reason things are interesting now is because the mass layoffs and turnover haven't been well stagged due to the pandemic so labor has more leverage. When true unemployment returns to norms, positions are largely re-filled, and attrition begins to follow traditional rates, the voice of the labor market voting will their feet will again fall on deaf ears and your voice will again disappear in the noise. It would take another global catastrophe to change this balance and give labor a voice again.
What you can't do is continue to have an expensive quality of life if you're no longer producing income.
There are other cultures like this. I’ve seen kids from Europe doing a gap year staying in hostels for very little (they sometimes do some light work for the hostel to get a free place to stay)
In my industry, and the one my wife works in, if you have a gap year it's a red flag that makes potential employers wonder if you got fired from your last job and just aren't listing it, or did time in prison, or are simply unreliable.
It's great that in the tech bubble people don't think much about gap years. But in the real world, they can doom your chances of getting a new job.
Especially since these days you don't get to explain the gap since your application is vetted, filtered, and ranked by a computer and not a person.
When I finished university, I had a few weeks between graduation and my start date at a well known Midwestern embedded electronics company. I had a $7k signing bonus and I found a $500 round trip ticket to Rome, so I went to Rome. While I was there, I learned about the world of backpacking and hostels. I ended up spending 6 weeks in Europe before returning home. During that time I decided that travel was something I wanted to pursue in my life.
The salary at my entry level SWE job was $58k, which was pretty modest. I didn’t buy a new car. I didn’t buy a new house. I cooked most meals at home and I brought lunch to work. I tracked my expenses and budget using Mint, and set a goal to save $30k so I could leave and travel in SE Asia where I calculated the daily burn rate should be around $30/day. After three years I hit my savings goal and bought a one way ticket to Hawaii, then from Hawaii to Thailand. I ended up spending over a year outside of the country and returned home with a $10k cushion to get back on my feet.
The biggest leg up I had was graduating with $2000 in student loan debt, but that was made possible mostly through merit based scholarships. No trust fund.
I inspired a friend to do the same thing, except with a destination of Australia on a working holiday visa. Also no trust fund, just living below his means and saving over time.
My advice to you is to find a way to do the things you want to do instead of limiting yourself with beliefs that only the ultra-rich can take time off from work to pursue personal passions.
Bonus points, if you have all your stuff packed somewhere and not have to pay any rent. But it depends what you want, if you like your home, keep it. Have projects in your home ...
There are lots of things to be done. Doing nothing is also fine for a while, but gets booring very soon and puts you in lethargic state ... wasting your time.
Doing nothing doesn’t get boring for everyone. And it’s my time not yours so who’s to say what a waste is?
My biggest advice is to do what you want and don’t feel like you have to live up to some HN-gap-year fantasy. You might regret sitting in your apartment surfing the internet (I didnt) but you might also regret traveling. It’s your time. Do what you want.
I wasn’t wealthy in the HN sense though. This was 2010-2013 and my rent for a tiny studio apartment was $550 a month. Other major expenses were just internet (50 a month), groceries (few hundred a month), gym (35 a month) and electricity (20 a month). No cell phone. No car.
For the 5 years leading up to that I was working full time during the day and doing freelance SEO writing side. Was able to save quite a bit. But I was really fortunate to be in the right time/place. Rent in my city had basically doubled (and then some) since then, for example.
You didn't do nothing for 3 years. You enjoyed your time, and you did things, so no, you did not waste it.
Otherwise I very strongly agree with, that you just should do, what you really want and not what others want.
After I decided to leave university, I planned a bike trip from germany to portugal. I wanted to do this. And I did it. But then, along the way, on the border to spain, at a nice place I stayed for a while ... I decided I had enough. Or I realized, that I had wanted this for a while already.
It was fun, but "accomplishing" my trip would have only meaning for my travel blog and the expectations of other people - but not for me.
I enjoyed the trip very much, but did not felt like moving further and spend the whole winter in the south. So screw other peoples expecations, I am doing what I want, so I flew back home.
Unless you have some serious FU money saved up, I'd strongly reconsider. A "gap year" as an adult can make you radioactive to potential employers. And that cash goes quick when there's none coming in. Trust me I know. It's alluring to just walk away. But trying to get a job when you're unemployed is literally 10x harder than while employed, regardless of the actual circumstances of your departure.
Just try taking a few weeks off first. And if that's not enough, ask for a sabbatical. At the very least have something lined up for a few months after you leave. Don't fall for the "I can have another job in two weeks" meme. It's rarely true in reality for all but the very top of the market.
You're right, it doesn't. But it brings up all sorts of questions in the mind of your interviewer as to the true nature of your departure, and it immediately puts you at a huge disadvantage.
Being open-minded, seeing something different, meeting other people, working hard to be able to follow your objectives and take calculated risks. That can be a valuable experience and an advantage over ten similar candidates.
Great - it can add to the list of disadvantages I have with companies I would never want to work for.
Are you an employer in the US? Because that way of thinking is pretty rare in that group.
"Yeah, I was the CTO of a startup. I learned a lot. Call this guy who was the CEO, he'll tell you about it."
Ah yes, an intricate lie. The very foundation of a solid working relationship.
Not a joke -- what do you think resumes are?
Both interviewer and interviewee have to be diligent during interview process to dig out the truth about important aspects of what they expect, and not just take it at face-value (asking pointed questions usually reveals the truth, for either party)
you won't be marked as radioactive, but you will have to reassure people that you're not planning to do it again with little to no notice. apart from that, I would plan to get back a month earlier than planned so you have a money buffer to get a job you want, rather than _need_
That said, I forsee a lot of gap years in 2021-2023. The key is to have something to show for it. Did you spend a year in another country and learn the language? Do you have a series of open source pull requests? Do you have a game? A novel, even if unpublished? We live in a capitalist society and people expect that you are always working on something.
Plus if you actually use the time to work on OSS instead of traveling or whatever I have no idea how an employer (that you'd want to work at) could fault you for that. Seems like a huge asset.
You may enjoy this article by our friend NNT: https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person...
People aren't stupid. They'll have questions. And lies are extremely hard to keep straight in the long term. The sad fact of the matter is that you are not a person to them in the initial hiring process. You are a piece of paper. And unless you are some rock star 10x top level candidate with impressive credentials, they'll have a dozen other pieces of paper that look just as appealing and don't have those questions attached.
Id just been diagnosed which a chronic illness and though it would have been fair on the rest of the crew.
Ultimately I’m looking to hire the most effective person for that job.
I’ve got my own views on how terrible some HR depts. can be for an initial CV elimination round, esp. when hiring for technical positions.
i interview and i've never looked at the dates of employment on someone's resume. i don't care one whit when you did what in the past, just what you're capable of right now.
Maybe even more than distasteful, perhaps soul nullifying? (Pardon the awkward phrase, it's what I get when looking for an antonym for affirming.)
For myself, when I leave the engineering field it will not be to return to engineering again unless it's strictly on my own terms. More than likely teaching or similar would follow a "gap year".
When I'm interviewing candidates, a gap year is a data point - no more, no less. It may lead to more substantial data points, or it may be a non-issue. If you do as many here suggest and lie through your teeth about it ("I was a CTO! I was working on startup! Independent consulting"), you may get away with it, but likely not (even if you think you did); and if caught in prevaricating or lying about your experience and work activities, that is a far far bigger and more immediate red flag than the gap year itself.
Also - sure, knowledge doesn't expire, but oh boy skills do get rusty! A year into my new management-y role, I felt how rusty my sysadmin skills were getting. Two years in and you shouldn't give me root access again without some catchup :-).
As well, all of it is easily discussable during interview, and my team and myself will not see any of these in a negative light.
2. >> "It isn't "lying" to say time spent not working on a paid contract is time spent in service of contracting."
Of course not. At the time of my post however, a lot of advice in comments was explicitly to lie and "Say you were in a startup / independent consulting / working on OSS / CTO even if you weren't, rather than admitting to gap / traveling year", and my reaction to them is: That lie will harm you much more than any honest discussion of the gap year.
So again, I feel we are talking past each other here a bit. I've been a contractor, I've been a consultant, and I'm a full-time employee now; I've taken a time to write a book/techmanual, I've run a photography business for a bit,and I've taken extended paternity leave; so I don't think my mind is trapped into thinking of employment as binary. But I do think honesty during interview is paramount - on my team, I don't care how good your technical or functional skillset is, if we cannot trust your integrity. I understand that this is a tricky position for the candidate as market at times rewards dishonesty; but I try to be convincingly upfront in what we're looking for.
Lol, what? I did exactly that after getting pissed off with $LARGE_CRAPPY_EMPLOYER. Worked for 3-4 companies for 6-8 week periods over that time on a short term basis, and made more than $LARGE_CRAPPY_EMPLOYER by a factor n > 2, and did some work on a startup. But then $LARGE_EMPLOYER came along with an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Don’t project what “independent consulting” might mean for you onto everyone. It would be interview-ending if I caught a hiring manager suggested this was a euphemism, and I’d subsequently recommend every person that asked me about said company steered clear.
It's also the most densely packed section of my resume because it was by far the most interesting and diverse range of work in that time.
You're talking to the HN crowd. I get the impression that a lot of the people here think of $200k/yr as poverty level. "FU money" to them is probably on the order of $100M.
Nope. Not true in tech at all.
I'm not sure where you got this idea in your head but it is demonstrably false in tech right now.
I took a gap year after getting fired from an extremely toxic company. I didn't want to rush into a new role right away after such an awful experience.
Once I was ready to go back it took ~1 month to go from starting my search to signing an offer letter. I interviewed at a large range of companies and was pretty picky after my previous experience.
My apply -> interview rate was consistent with what it had been in the past, and nobody cared about either my being fired or taking time off.
> trying to get a job when you're unemployed is literally 10x harder than while employed
The only thing that changed for me interview wise was that I was much pickier after not having to work for an organization for such a long time.
The rest of the interview is much easier since you have much more time to do things like practice for coding interviews, doing take home work etc.
On top of all that, because I was so grossed out from looking at linkedin during that time, I've never bothered update my profile, and I still get the same constant stream of recruiters reaching out even though it looks like I'm still unemployed.
In retrospect I wish I had had the sense to just quit earlier. Very often interviewing when you're employed at a place you are not happy with makes you too eager to find someplace else, making you more likely to ignore warning signs during the interview.
I wonder, realistically, how many people out there actually get to be "pretty picky after my previous experience"?
At the same time, squandering that privilege out of some misplaced guilt only helps employers exert control of employees.
In tech? Virtually everyone has that level of privilege so long as they have some experience. I'm fairly certain I couldn't get hired by a FAANG company (I don't have too much interest in it, but I won't deny the possibility of sour grapes), so I'm not in some super-elite category of tech worker.
In addition, not everything lasts forever. I used to work for minimum wage in customer support jobs and I wouldn't be surprised if in 10-20 years (or sooner) I'm back in a much less desirable role.
It took me a long time to recognize that my market value had increase over time, and one of my biggest career mistakes was underestimating that and not acting on it sooner. As the saying goes, from a time when most people had to work on farms, "make hay while the sun shines".
It well be more experienced people though and you will need enough $ to do this.
Your attitude reinforces the corresponding attitude by many employers. If 50% of us signed a pledge not to have children, never to take any health risks, never to join a union, not sue our employers, etc, many employers would be delighted and would hire them preferentially, making things harder for the other 50%.
I do not consider this time to be "gap year", but rather an investment in, and a reward for, myself. Why do I need such luxuries? Because time is short and nothing is destined. None of us are guaranteed to make it to retirement age. My Dad died when he was 54; my brother when he was 53. My sister survived her heart attack when she was 60 - luckily it happened when she was at work; she was a cleaner at a hospital.
Keep a roof over your head, make sure you have enough food to live on. Don't leave it until the last minute to start looking for paid work. Most importantly, enjoy your time away from the capitalist treadmill - with good fortune this can become an investment in yourself that you'll never regret!
Financial Independence Retire Early
Among the actually old (my parents' generation - in their 60s and 70s) retirees I know, around half of those retiring from decent 'knowledge worker' jobs have kept on working part-time to some extent. They are consultants, advisers, board members, independent researchers, and so on. They seem to be very happy - they are working at something they are good and believe in, while not having any economic constraint forcing them to work more than they want to, or for anyone they don't get along with.
I can't imagine having 'Financial Independence', but not wanting to do something like this. I enjoy my work in general, and I would enjoy it much more if I had almost complete freedom to plan my day and to walk away from toxic situations. But all the FIRE people that I see online seem to be basing their lives on the other type of retiree - the ones who take leisure activities and sports such as bowling and tennis far too seriously, read and watch constantly but quite aimlessly, and go on endless trips to 'tick off' different world destinations.
The 'RE' sort of implies not working, but I've seen plenty of accounts of people who ended up with varying degrees of work and income after they quit their regular jobs. For the folks who seem to seek retirement above all else, I wouldn't be surprised if burnout is both a big part of the motivation and the reason for why that is their main focus.
Traveling the world is fun but it's not incompatible with work. You just need to ask for long chunks of vacation, say two to four weeks in a row. If all you do is work a 40 hour work week then given the right schedule you still have half a day plus weekends left for leisure.
What people truly want is FU money. They want negotiation power.
I wouldn't get hung up on the name. The main part is the FI, so you can pick and choose what you want to work on or if you want to work on anything. Arguing over whether it's a real retirement or not is missing the point.
He didn't notice any long term career effects although he had to re-establish himself somewhat with new people and projects that had appeared in his absence.
I have not met a single woman who would compare maternity leave to a travel leave and a “great” time.
Infants are a ton of work, and between recovering from the birthing process (a vaginal tear with a few stitches is considered one of the best outcomes), learning how to breastfeed, only sleeping 2 hours at a time due to breastfeeding, diastesis recti ruining your abs and making your core weak, pain from clogged milk ducts, pumping breast milk for storage since the US does not provide adequate leave so the kid has to go in daycare, hemorrhoids for a good portion of women, etc.
I have no doubt anyone who has been through this would rather work an office job for 6 months.
Maybe not this directly, but I expect more people quitting "megacorp" jobs, will lead to another big wave of "innovation" in tech in the next few years as people spin up small companies to 'scratch that itch' they've had for a while.
Was one of the best, most happy periods in my life.
It made me more focused on trying to reach early “retirement” so I can work fulltime on my hobbies. Hopefully I can achieve this goal before I’m 45 years old.
I am going to start off my gap year with full time skiing and working on side projects on off/rest days and evenings.
The one major issue of taking some time off right now to travel is that it is incredibly difficult to do so. Many countries are still closed, or if open, have some sort of curfew. In the US, national parks are overwhelmed with tourists. If traveling solo, social distancing (either laws or new culture) makes it difficult to connect with strangers.
For me, I went with "Take one great photo a day."
I think I learned a bad lesson by getting a much better and better-paying job than I had before the break, without putting much effort in.
I took a 1 year break and have had to answer a simple recruiter/interview inquiry regarding it for the next 5 years. I don't think it ever eliminated me from consideration but it was more like a necessary precaution. Not so great answers would include:
* Anything beginning with "uh uh uh". Answer confidently.
* "I was searching for work the whole time and just couldn't pass interviews"
* criminal activity
* anything indicating a bad work ethic or difficult employee
* apathy, indifference, numb, lazy. Even if you felt that way the whole time, LIE. You took a year off, you want to look like you had an undying passion for something every day even a hobby.
Easy peasy. It really depends on what you did. If you are an engineer and were keeping your skills sharp by doing a side project, then you shouldn't have any problem saying: I was working on my project/trying to do a startup.
99% of people will understand. Failed startups are neither a plus but not a negative thing either.
If long-distance hiking appeals, I'd be happy to discuss it.
Long-distance hiking isn't for everyone but
Good luck on the AT!
Good luck out there.
I'm not sure if it was a result of his experience in Korea, but I get the impression he really wanted some extended alone time. I never asked because I didn't want to risk dragging him into some terrible memories.
The back country is an environment where one is able to apply physical skills and tools, earned over years of experience, and to which most civilians attribute no value. The solitude is nice, however I think most veterans actually prefer company on activities like this, there just aren't many people who can cope with the mileage or the off-the-grid aspects.
I've never been in the military myself, but I'm a reasonably experienced backpacker. Discussions on the subject have made friends out of many coworkers, who had been deployed in the field while serving in the military.
You should ask your cousin about it, maybe even ask if you can join him sometime; he'd probably actually really enjoy you expressing an interest and wanting to tag along.
My brother hiked the length of the AT a few years back and spent about $300/month for the 5 months it took him end to end He had a great time. Even when new his gear was less than $1000 all in, though it was all 5+ years old and very well used when he started.
It's possible but I really enjoy getting into town and having a real meal. Everyone hikes their own hike.
I have seen others recommend a budget of $500/month as a reasonable amount.
Trying to figure out how much training / prep one needs to do. I want to do long distance cycling, I am not concerned about the stamina. I am concerned about camping in the wild, packing and repairing the bicycle when it breaks.
A week or so out there was invaluable to me, YMMV
Forests are wonderful. I grew up around forests, playing in them as a child. A few years ago while day hiking in a forest I came to a Sun-warmed opening in pine barrens from amidst taller pines. That specific scent of the ground and the pines etc., the heat and the wind -- all these, but mostly the strong scent, took me vividly back to my childhood. I remembered so many things as if I were there again, I saw these memories just flowing at me. For a moment, I was transported back to my grandparents place at a summer when I was 6-8 years old. I felt how much they loved me and what a good and carefree place I had been in.
For some time, I stood there in awe with my mouth open, trying to process what just happened. It was such a powerful influx of memories.
I don't know if you've experienced something like this, but I hope you will! Maybe some years from now your hike will come back to you.
I’m about 15 months into my “gap year,” similar story (except no immigration). I traveled on the cheap, switched careers, found a new city I love (and is way cheaper), and settled down with my gf.
Word of warning: depending on what kind of friends and family you have, you might lose some people along the way. Taking a leap like that brought out a new side of people I thought I knew. Most were supportive, but some not at all. Focus on the “keepers” instead of the “haters,” stay positive, and enjoy it!
Quit my SE role to drive across the country with my cousin. Definitely recommend taking time off to pursue anything you want to do for yourself.
During the early Covid lock down was the best time. Had a really good sleep. Learned cooking. Biked with my son everyday. Walked in the evening everyday.
Right before the covid-19, I visited my parents for a month in India and didn't do anything. Screen time reduced to 1-2 hrs a day - hardly any emails, no business calls, no Reddit, no HN or no news. That was the best time. Slept from 10pm - 6am everyday.
I can tell you as a non-elite, middle-class American that I've almost never heard of someone taking a gap year after beginning professional work. The one case that comes to mind was an ex's father who was burnt out on his accountant career. He took a year to follow his dreams on music-related stuff, which didn't pan out in terms of turning a passion into a career, and he went back to being an accountant (also, after causing his wife and kids some stress related to running low on money).
I did however take a 6 week gap between jobs a few years back. I think things like that are common enough. I flew to Costa Rica, intending to spend a month backpacking around the country ... and honestly I got kind of bored after 2 weeks so I flew home early. Then I hopped in the car and drove cross-country at my own pace, seeing sights that I wanted to see, etc. Absolutely one of my favorite memories and I'd love to do something similar again.
The important thing to remember is that this is for your growth, happiness, and well-being. You set the rules for your time off. If you travel the whole time or stay at home, or a mix, that's your call. If you do something to try to set yourself up for your next opportunity professionally or you completely stay away anything related to your profession, that's up to you. Don't follow a path just because you think it'll look good on Instagram or because you think it'll sound cool when you talk about it at parties in the future. (Or do, if those are high enough priorities for you). Good luck!
I've never had enough time off between (my few) jobs since grad school. The circumstances have never been quite right. I did get a 3-4 week vacation the last time and that was mostly because I had done everything except pull the trigger while waiting to see if an offer came through--then pushed things out as far as I could.
I actually had a month off the prior time as well but that was because of a post-9/11 layoff. As it turned out a conversation I had with someone I knew pretty much the following day panned out. But I didn't know that of course and it wasn't the time to just head off and vacation.
Personally, six weeks sounds more like an extra-long vacation. I always took four to six months off before looking for a new job, or when on-job an unpaid month or two every other year. But that's definitively nowhere near the norm, many people don't understand it. I usually end up coding 20h per week on geek projects or random open source stuff. After six months I predictably get bored with it.
I rarely end up doing the project I planned to do. So if you want any advice from me: Don't force yourself to do what you thought you wanted to do, before you had time. Look around and don't feel guilty for following that new interest you just discovered.
IMO what you find out is a year is a long time without work from a time perspective. Hope you enjoy your year off!
My "independent consulting" time was a mask for burnout. I certainly did consult independently, right down to paying too much for health insurance. My time off was extremely valuable and made me realize I needed to rest and reinvent myself. Plus, as I get older I realize I can use the b-word at certain stages of interviewing as a way to filter out toxic people and institutions.
But yeah, it's all a big game. Nobody is owed a tidy explanation of this.
In tech, we luckily have the luxury to take time off and recover when we need to.
I worked on some closed source personal projects and worked on getting into shape. When I was ready to return, the employer didn't really care that I had taken time off.
As a Westerner, I have never taken a gap year but I never met anyone who took one and wish they didn't. If you can make it work, take it, especially after the Pandemic because it's going to be an awesome time to travel.
I honestly try to maximize humanity, unhappy people can't do good work.
1. Cycle Eurovelo 6
2. Drive through the Pan American Highway
3. Learn different things at different places, Muay Thai in Thailand, surfing in Bali, Kali in the Philipines
4. Just travel doing nothing for a few months and then try 12 month 12 startups or something.
I also think that because a lot of people lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic, some industries moreso than others, the market may also be temporarily saturated (at least more so than usual) with candidates at the moment, which will dampen the number of resignations.
Having said that, I personally am receiving just as much recruiter spam as I was before.
Basically a year's worth of departures in a very compressed timeframe. Not a good situation for the acquiring business, especially since they prided themselves on a longer hiring process than comparable companies.
It's as though pandemic solitude gave many the mind-time to ponder their authentic values hierarchy.
I'm glad more bright minds will be spending less time working directly or indirectly on ads. It's hard to watch.
From how I perceive the definition of the 'crypto' domain, it's a lot wider in range than currencies/tokens. These are just one integral primitive of a p2p economy.
I don't think so.
And way more environmentally destructive than countless other things.
If we want to talk energy, maybe we look at what mindless streaming services consume?
I almost never see people obnoxiously talking about how ads are great. In fact, it's the opposite - constant ad bashing.
Whereas with crypto, while you have the skeptics and the haters, there are way more obnoxious fanatics.
Whereas with crypto, you can just ignore the subject entirely if you so wish. You won't be shouted at, when you open your digital newspaper to read stuff, that YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GET MORE DOGECOIN!!!
[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/google-new-policy-cryptocurrency-ad...
For many, their wealth is derived more from crypto / token capital gain than traditional income. Its increased risk no doubt. More upside & downside.
For example, people initially just had crypto tokens. Then came uniswap liquidity pools for exchanges. People could suddenly earn interest on their crypto. Uniswap creators profit.
Sounds like people are discovering it's actually not that hard getting off the teat of a boring 9 to 5 job ... I'm not sure why that would be a bad thing.
At the time it was hard work and a bit of serendipity. At this point I already found a great remote job I have no desire to leave. It's wild that currently there is a deluge of recruiters from very large west coast companies trying to get me to join without any relocation. That's been a big shift in the past year. Good time to live somewhere cheap with decent internet.
I'm not actively looking for a job, so I just tell them to have a look at my LinkedIn profile. But I wonder if that's keeping me from some worthwhile opportunities.
But Glassdoor is pretty ok and some other platforms(I can pm if you like) have proven good, they seem to have some kind of alert system whenever a keyword of a recruiter portfolio is triggered and on cv updates. I do think limiting oneself to LinkedIn will definitely make you miss on some opportunities. I spend no more than an hour a month to update etc. Most have auto apply button etc. It is easy to send 50-100 applications within an hour. Of course some of the contacts will be rubbish, just delegate to spam I it keeps happening, eventually unsubscribe. I got some interviews to places where I thought they would never, ever touch me. However, sometimes such companies are desperate to hire. I went pretty far with bitfinex, just for fun and because it's remote, despite knowing sweet little about what is needed to know . Many stories like that.
I wonder what the baseline is for this. I reckon loads of people are thinking about it all the same.
This will get interesting for both salaries and global movement.
Being a digital nomad certainly won't be as "hip" when everyone else can do the same thing. And now people are going to be competing with a lot of low-cost employees with equal skills.
This has already been the issue with offshoring, but now you can hire someone in Fargo, SD instead of San Fran, CA and pay them going market rate. For the same skills.
In the long-term, this might get people out of packed cities and horrific commutes and help become a rebirth of small-town America (or small-town Chile and everywhere else).
Perhaps. I think the shift will be to more healthy-livable cities, whether thats big or small.
Vast majority of humans seem love the benefits of high population density more than they dislike the costs, remote work or not.
Over these 8 years I've lived everywhere from NYC to small town America and other countries in AirBnbs.
They each have their benefits, they are just different.
If you have a family, small towns can be amazing. Good school districts, tight-nit communities, great charitable events to participate in. Of course you can find that in NYC but it's a completely different scenario and vibe.
It comes down to what works for the individual, which is perfect and exactly where we need to be moving to.
I'm now in Vancouver BC, quite a high population density, yet I find it's super easy to remain healthy & happy (air quality, access to nature, safety etc.).
Your definition of "small town" must be different than mine, or small towns in your area are a hell of a lot nicer than ours. Or maybe you mean suburban/exurban towns? Those are the only "small towns" with good public schools, around here. Cities (as in, actually in the city proper)? Bad schools. Rural small towns? Bad schools. Smallish cities? Bad schools. There's a belt of good schools in (some of!) the suburban and exurban towns around the major cities, and that's it. Few or none of those towns have the other characteristics you mention, because they're basically bedroom communities for the city they're attached to, with some lame chain retail and fast-food and you go to the city for anything that's actually worth doing.
I'm currently managing a team of offshore developers +11 from me on top of being the lead developer.
It's chaotic but members of the team adjust their schedule to partially overlap so it works, for the most part.
But I agree. We are a US company and we originally looked at South American companies to try to keep people around the same timezone. I was not involved in the final decision, which apparently came down strictly to financials.
For local market rate, [1] seems to match anecdata with new grads being 50-70k. MSFT is largely responsible for anything above that.
[1] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/software-en...
This obviously isn’t true for every single case. But the typical engineer at a sleepy regional bank is nowhere near talented enough to make it at a fast-paced, hyper-growth venture backed startup.
If there is any correlation at all it’s that the venture backed startups have a lower than average skill level.
Some VC pump and dump companies get by and make some headlines by being a fad electron app, but I am referring to those that stick around for years and develop products that require R&D. I have a hard time believing that people who work at companies that have transformed the way we live over the past few decades are "lower than average skill".
Similarly Microsoft and Amazon are not valley creations but are giant profitable companies that hire tech workers from a wide variety of regions.
When you hire as much of the industry as those companies do its not at all surprising that the talent in them runs the gamut. They represent so much of the industry it would be near impossible not to have a big distribution of talent within them.
But when you get into the rest of the ecosystem is when it gets pretty ugly pretty fast. So far as I can see the biggest correlative factor with engineers in the valley is a capacity to move there. That filter does not trend towards being good at the job. And I’ll stand by my anecdotal opinion.
I think the more amazing thing that some firms are able to overcome this talent problem is that it took a global pandemic for the opinion it being an issue to change.
And if certain geographical locations are known for being places where the chances of making a lot more money are significantly higher, then I would say the skill level of people there is probably higher on average. The proof would be the numerous leading companies and products coming out of these places.
Of course, those locations can change, and maybe widespread access to broadband will cause that to change that or reduce benefits of agglomeration. But it remains to be seen.
I for one have made more money in finance than valley style tech. That may change one day but there _also_ was no correlation in the finance firms for quality.
And while I personally do not know people’s financial histories, I can say that the part of my college class that went to tech seem to work far less than the part that went to finance. Even if gross income is similar, I doubt that $/hour worked, or the risk was better in finance than in tech over the past 15 to 20 years.
That isn’t to knock finance, it’s just my interpretation of the reality of how much access to broadband and advancements in certain technologies have underlined much of our economic growth.
How do you know? I've worked with extremely talented engineers from all over the globe at this point, 20+ years in. Do you think all the engineers in San Francisco were born there?
You would never guess where I'm living, and it's not San Francisco. I'd love to, but I'm waiting for tech to recede a bit and a sense of normalcy to return.
I guess the "focus on the mission" companies are trying to foster among their ranks is also useful to distract oneself from what your own mission actually is.
This hiatus on company focus might have been the best thing that happened to a lot of engineers I know.
Including, alas, myself.
If the work-from-home thing has given you thoughts about what you like, now is the time to go. I see very few firms insisting on onsite work though, having interviewed with quite a few over the last few weeks. Even guys that I know would rather have people in the office and would pay them very well are feeling forced to let people work from home at least a couple of days.
Salary wise it seems like it's breaking upwards too, though of course all I have is my own offers and the word of some recruiters. There's also just a lot of firms out there who are happy to create roles for people they like, or discuss new ventures with new people.
Also, don't forget if you're going to look, absolutely everyone is interviewing remotely. You can sit at home at interviews all day until you find the job for you, something you might not be able to once more firms go back in the office.
Don't wait on your company to make a remote work plan once they've got you all back in the office. Start looking around now while they don't have a monopoly on your time. That doesn't necessarily mean taking interviews during work hours -- my previous job was 10-6 eastern, and east coast companies would happily interview me at 9, while west coast ones interviewed me at 7. Once your current company has you back in the office, they have a much stronger grasp on you, and they know it. That's why they want everyone back in the office before they talk about remote work.
But if you're not going to a company that is itself 100% remote, I'd still be wary about being the stranger that they only see online. I went with a job where I was only an hour away from the office but could still work remotely, and plan to be there once every couple months, so I still get some face time.
There are a lot of cities in the USA with an underpaid, but experienced workforce. While you might not find these offers to be competitive, someone from Springfield making $65k would absolutely jump at a $95k offer, even if that's still pretty well below the median national salary.
It's a lot more "we're remote right now and haven't determined our remote strategy" which like my current place generally means we'll expect you back, but might be a little more lenient on why you need to do a special WFH day.
I've done both full remote and full open office. I think being close enough to go in and get together to determine project path and then going remote to work on it seems to be the way to go. It doesn't look like my current employer believes the same way - even though they are doing very well right now and we're all remote.
This is ludicrous to people steeped in tech, but I have had former colleagues or classmates or even myself work on all of those in the past year and a bit.
https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Technical+Product+Managers+%26...
Agreed on the salary uptick now. I'm not actively looking, but I'll entertain interesting companies. I've had a lot more companies say "yeah, we can do that" when I tell them I want at least $200k base (8 YOE, full stack developer) than before.
A) Is this annual? As in their unvested RSUs are nearly 4x this amount
B) This is not accounting for stock price appreciation?
or do I have it entirely wrong. Two years ago on Blind I could tell people were discussing their compensation packages in wildly differing ways. It was impossible to tell if people were discussing if they signed an offer that computed a particular dollar value that was only relevant a single year and they just liked to brag about it, or if they were discussing their annual tax filings from employment, or even something else. I feel like this discrepancy translates onto Levels as well.
Wages have stagnated for 30 years and, to me, progress is not achieved until a house in the same area as the economic center can be owned outright in 5 years or less just like the baby boomers experienced
This seems to accomplish that, but lets throw in paying off all other encumbrances like student debt as well
It's pretty rare to see an e7 offer though.
They should be reporting offer letters that get verified by Levels admins
So its $1,000,000
So its likely heavily factoring in stock price appreciation as the RSUs vest and have a portion withheld for taxes based on current value.
First of all, find out where the jobs are. Some board for your niche or something like that. For me it's efinancialcareers. Now efinancial is still a black hole if you try to use it to apply through, but what you're really after is the recruiter details.
You then phone up the rec, or you write to him on LinkedIn. A lot of them are crap at responding, but that's how it is. Phone a few, and convince them that you are the real deal for whatever it is he recruits for.
They'll all want an updated CV. They need it to be able to proceed, nobody will place you without one. Good news is it isn't that hard, just highlight the relevant bits for reach recruiter.
The rec will then say "I've got a job at X, Y, and Z. X is a this kind of co, Y is looking for blah..."
When they have some of those details it means they actually have something. Otherwise it's just a generic company that they will find later. By find, I mean they will forget you by the time the job comes. One guy told me straight up the ad I responded to was not a specific job, it was a honeypot to lure candidates.
So now the companies get your CVs, and they decide whether to interview. If the recruiter is good, they will interview you maybe 3/4 times. Companies often screw up their own internal hiring process and ask for CVs when they aren't ready. But the other companies should be willing to interview you. This is where you find out if the rec is crap, because a fair few of them will just not tell you anything about what happened to your CV.
It's still a numbers game. I've got over 20 recruiters listed on my Trello, most of them did nothing useful for me.
It's probably worth cultivating some relationships with the recruiters. You learn a lot about what the market is doing for free from them.
Now, from memory I seem to recall that depending on which staffing survey, and how you phrase it, 10-35% of all employees say they intend to quit.
I'm not saying that we will won't see and increase turn over. However I suspect that given the level of disruption we've already had, I would be skeptical that its going to get worse.
The counter argument to that is of course that the people who were forced to change jobs from ones they liked (ones that were heavily hit by covid) to ones that existed, will migrate back to their old profession.
I'm not talking about the work, it's everything else. The culture.
* I am currently employed with great benefits. If I am going to throw that away there needs to be something of value in exchange: leadership position, architecture, or some other increase of responsibilities. I wasn’t seeing this.
* If your primary platform or language is JavaScript everybody wants a tool jockey. They claim to want somebody full stack. But when you really press for details the really want somebody to do react on the front end and play around with their cloud provider. The services piece in the middle is where things get strained in a full stack interview. If tools are the direction of work I have already lost interest. Why would I want to give up stable employment with great benefits to wire tools together? I would rather just stare out the window.
* The idea of a senior engineer is incredibly convoluted. It sounds like people want somebody who can mentor in a vacuum. You can only mentor so much about dicking around with tools. If you try to mentor past that and the culture is just go dick around with tools you are either mentoring too much or not enough. Either way you are a horrible senior incompatible to the new organization. Worse is when they ask you to guide and train junior developers without leadership support. Really if that should work beyond vague hints you need a title. Excellent juniors have a passion for learning but many juniors aren’t excellent, just want a paycheck, and feel insecure when challenged.
From going through the exact same conversation several times in a row I get the impression many employers kind of know what they want to build, kind of guess at what they need, and completely guess at what qualifies as execution planning but cannot put any of that together into a single vision.
* Just about anything to do with the DOM. Its a standard tree model. You learn it and get comfortable with it and suddenly all that browser tooling you cannot live without becomes immediately unnecessary. Hiding from this, making a bunch of excuses, and complaining about how hard life isn't appealing.
* The file system is also a tree model. If you have an abstraction layer that normalizes file system access cross OS all you really need is a basic comfort of data structures.
* Tools that provide session management are there because planning for real time parallel distribution is challenging. This is yet another one of those that once you go through it a few times you just know how to do it.
IMHO, the "all JavaScript tech stack, connected together by a cloud provider via tooling" pattern is probably among the faster ways to get an idea from inside someone's head and in front of customers, all of the longer term problems aside.
To me personally, the "challenge" comes from being able to do all of that quickly and seamlessly, basically solid execution becomes the fun part.
Oh, also I would love to make a bunch of money relatively quickly. :)
Otherwise, I agree, it's all of: fucking boring; frustrating; and unrewarding. But, it's also most of the market for developers. :-/
If you current approach is entirely dependent upon tools it will be boxed in to a set of configurations and flexibility is lost. From what I have seen on HN the greatest challenge for most early stage startups is finding product-market fit, which means you need to pivot at a moment's notice. That ability to pivot is far more significant than whether you can have a website up in 2 days versus 2 weeks.
Honestly, as long as the tech doesn't fall over at 3am and generally lets me know when it's unhealthy, I'm just trying to grow enough to hire people who know more about making good long term tech choices than I do...
I guess people are living off of their savings, but that seems like a temporary solution. At the least I'd expect to see a similar wave of people re-entering the job market in 6-12 months. I'm still not sure what to make of this general trend, though
For some people, they have though. Quite a few people moved out of the bay area/NYC, some have partners that lost jobs and have chosen to focus on child care instead, some have sold 1 of 2 cars because remote work no longer requires a commute.
I feel a temptation to use that money. I also have a nagging feeling that it’s somewhat artificial (the govt pumped a ton of money during the pandemic) so I should cash out before it falls.
In the U.S., capital gains on your primary residence can be kept tax free up to $250,000 ($500k if you’re married).
[1] https://www.axios.com/post-pandemic-job-turnover-04cdedcb-dd...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/four-in-ten-cant-cover-an-...
Well. As long as you treat people like that it is now wonder that the leave you as quick as possible.
One problem being lack of social integration and interaction.
But honestly I don't think I can believe in the necessity of having a job, if I can't see purpose or meaning. There are few jobs that matter, and a lot of barriers and filtering.
/r/antiwork is really a viewpoint I can understand and defend.
Punishing unproductive people and encourage them to work in fast food or other wage-slaving do not make sense.
The main argument is UBI.
Not to mention fast food is generally of poor quality.
I'm not saying they don't know how to cook- but I'm saying that the least the rest of society who aren't responsible for sustaining us can do is make life better for those who do
I think what would really improve a job like fast food is if workers were part owners of their franchise. Most fast food restaurants are franchises owned by one person or a local corporation that owns several franchises. Putting ownership into the workers hands would mean profit sharing, it would mean when you bust ass over the hot grill working a double shift or cleaning shit and blood from the walls in the bathroom, you are actually rewarded for the increased demand on the restaurant. It would be like a built in hazard pay for when things got busy and stressful and awful. At least benefits would be nice, I know several people who burned their forearms really bad on the fryer.
"The main argument is UBI." - is that it? UBI will solve everything? Let's just print more money and give it to everyone. Problem solved.
As I said in my other comment, I am not saying that the current status-quo is right. I think there is plenty of inequality and injustice in the world, but I just don't think "antiwork" is the way to solve that.
Not all jobs are unnecessary, but there are jobs that are more important than others. There are a lot of jobs people wish they would not work or that they think nothing would change if they did not work those jobs. Just read about David Graeber and his book, Bullshit Jobs.
Just imagine all the workers in fast food. Look around and you will see a lot of people working jobs when they could spend time at university instead. You only listed the best jobs. People who work in insurance, sales, fast food, uber drivers, food delivery, clothing shops, etc.
> Let's just print more money and give it to everyone. Problem solved.
That's already what happens when there are bailouts. Giving money to people instead of giving it to the banks makes more sense.
I'm not saying that everybody should quit their jobs, I'm just saying that once you raise unemployment benefits, you will see a lot of wage slave quit their jobs and nothing will change.
Only 1% of the workforce in the US produce food. That feeds America and some other countries.
> Someone has to work to produce electricity.
Again, you need really very few people to make electricity.
I just commented that the basic necessities of life (food, water, electricity, etc…) can be covered with very few people.
Of course there are bullshit jobs out there, but I think we are under estimating
When you hit scale like that with specialization, it's conceivable a relatively small amount of jobs can provide a society with the base necessities.
Food production - planting seeds, collecting crops, watering the farms, creating anti-pesticides, creating all the farming equipment, packaging food, distributing food, storing food (for storing food just think about all the work that goes into creating a fridge - from mining metals from the ground, to designing the fridge and building a factory that create thousands of fridges quickly)
I don't agree with Graeber's conclusions, but his observations are solid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
It is not, but let's not pretend most of us work to increase societal good. It just happens to be that our rent-seeking behavior is aligned with society's interests.
Does everything have to be scalable to society at large?