I have one, but can see how this leaves a bad taste in mouths. I can "donate" money to my DAF, get the tax break, invest it and it doesn't do any real good by going to a charity until I decide to recommend a grant.
On a related theme, I really like the sentiment shared by the Gates and Buffett families to try and "spend all of our resources within 20 years after Bill's and Melinda's deaths"
> The decision to use all of the foundation’s resources in this century underscores our optimism for progress and determination to do as much as possible, as soon as possible, to address the comparatively narrow set of issues we’ve chosen to focus on.
An agency I worked with handled this liability via a support contract.
It was structured as, pay us for N hours a month of retainer, we will keep your servers patched and secured with updates and maintain all of your credentials.
Otherwise, we don't want the liability of having access to all of your systems, so we need to expire our access and hand it over to someone on your team.
Sometimes the company had an IT dept that had no idea what to do with the info, but would be in charge of keeping it. Or they would be happy to pay for us to stay on top of things.
I write very clear instructions in a Google Doc and share with multiple key people at a client that sum up a high level of:
Here's where all of your stuff is.
Here's what the next technical person would need to find and get access to everything.
Then a USB key with all of their keyfiles.
And a Keepass file with all of their passwords.
I keep a copy encrypted and saved for myself for the inevitable 2 year later email of 'we lost access to everything.'
I've also put all of this info on a box not publicly accessible to the internet, but in their VPC.
Basically, Dear Future Tech person - ssh in here and you can get all of the instructions and access that you need.
Lots of very good advice in this thread so I'll take a different approach.
What's your goal? Why are you looking for a $200 rate?
Do you want to make 400k a year?
Do you want to make 160k a year but only work for 20 weeks?
Do you want flexibility in schedule?
As a contractor, you'll spend way more time than you think you will developing contacts and trying to sell the ways you can provide value to a client.
I quit a job when a former employer offered me close to that hourly rate to work on some very specialized software. Worked for about 9 months, then I spent the next 4 trying to look for more incredibly lucrative freelance work. Eventually met a startup who gave me an full-time offer I couldn't refuse so I took it.
I'm much happier not intermittently searching for work and sinking my teeth into helping a company grow.
I really like Warren Buffet's description of the ovarian lottery, below.
I think about this question a lot now that I'm a (relatively wealthy) parent with two small children. If I have the opportunity, is it acceptable for me to provide them with a privileged life. Maybe so, if I can also teach them to be grateful for what they have received and understand that it's their job (as well as mine) to make a more fair world.
Warren Buffet:
"My political views were formed by this process. Just imagine that it is 24 hours before you are born. A genie comes and says to you in the womb, “You look like an extraordinarily responsible, intelligent, potential human being. [You're] going to emerge in 24 hours and it is an enormous responsibility I am going to assign to you — determination of the political, economic and social system into which you are going to emerge. You set the rules, any political system, democracy, parliamentary, anything you wish — you can set the economic structure, communistic, capitalistic, set anything in motion and I guarantee you that when you emerge this world will exist for you, your children and grandchildren.
What’s the catch? One catch — just before you emerge you have to go through a huge bucket with 7 billion slips, one for each human. Dip your hand in and that is what you get — you could be born intelligent or not intelligent, born healthy or disabled, born black or white, born in the US or in Bangladesh, etc. You have no idea which slip you will get. Not knowing which slip you are going to get, how would you design the world? Do you want men to push around females? It’s a 50/50 chance you get female. If you think about the political world, you want a system that gets what people want. You want more and more output because you’ll have more wealth to share around."
Nearly every website owner I've worked with is obsessed with users getting 404s from old incoming links. First I wrote a cron to summarize apache logs and email a report, but that involved me building redirects or a cluster of cms changes. Its evolved into a super simple tool to help site owners see user 404s in near real time and setup their own redirects until our team gets around to fixing them. Super simple from a tech pov, but it's completely removed a huge set of annoying tasks from my plate.
Lets assume I am an engineer that has decided I want to transition my career and devote my career to helping non-profits because I will be professionally happier. What could I do to demonstrate to you my commitment and interest in this new career path?
Maybe I could show how much I care about the cause, by volunteering at an event. Or helping out running a fundraiser.
I'd ask yourself the same question for engineering.
I think a good answer would be something like:
"I thought building cool web frontends was a really interesting problem, so I taught myself the basics (books, online courses, classes) and built (INSERT THING HERE) to build the kind of thing I would love to see in the world."
I have one, but can see how this leaves a bad taste in mouths. I can "donate" money to my DAF, get the tax break, invest it and it doesn't do any real good by going to a charity until I decide to recommend a grant.
On a related theme, I really like the sentiment shared by the Gates and Buffett families to try and "spend all of our resources within 20 years after Bill's and Melinda's deaths"
> The decision to use all of the foundation’s resources in this century underscores our optimism for progress and determination to do as much as possible, as soon as possible, to address the comparatively narrow set of issues we’ve chosen to focus on.
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informati...