1. Depending on your locality, set 30% aside for taxes. Unless you make a ton of money, have almost no deductions and/or don't have a very good accountant, you won't pay anywhere near that, probably much closer to 10-15% of your gross pay.
2. Get an accountant.
3. Get a lawyer.
4. Decide right now which you'd rather do - compete with outsourced labor and college kids on sites like oDesk and Elance for $15-20/hr, or bill $80-150/hr for a few clients. I went the second route and while it was a lot harder to get work, I didn't need to spend 40 hours a week just writing proposals.
5. It doesn't matter if it's a $150 job for your best friend from HS or a $25,000 for a national corporation, have a contract signed with a deposit check (usually 50%, can be smaller for larger jobs) before you do any work outside of a proposal. I usually did 50% unless the job was over $10k, then I might go as low as 20% if it was still enough to sustain me through to the next milestone & 20% payment.
It's easy to make the argument that per-hour productivity peaks around 30 hours. It's harder to make an argument that you shouldn't still be working hours 31-40/50/60 (e.g. that you will accomplish less in 40/50/60 hours than 30).
I've seen the arguments about bug count increasing as you're overworked and I'll buy that argument for huge work loads approaching 60+ hours/week. 40-50? I'm not as convinced.
I average 40-45 hours in my cube every week and I can't say I'd be more productive with 10 extra hours at home.
I answered one question on SO, and I haven't logged back in since. I'll use them to read others' answers but I refuse to participate in that site outside of occasional traffic.
It was a beginner-to-intermediate level PHP question but was very poorly worded. I asked a clarifying question and within 5 minutes my question was deleted and a mod told me answers were the place for questions. Seriously? It was directly related to original question and (I felt, at least) you couldn't give a thorough answer without the clarification.
Not surprisingly my message to the moderator about why I "wasn't allowed" to do that went unanswered, both on the question itself and via PM. IIRC the question was later closed for some tangentially related reason.
Don't take this comment as anything against Joel or Jeff - I think they've both done wonders in their respective careers, but the type of people they've got moderating SO is just ridiculous.
Yes, but a junior developer's role in any company regardless of size is most definitely not to come in and say how they could do it better and the company should change their workflow.
Doing the wrong thing (completely ignoring Norma) < doing the right thing for the wrong reason (RMA because of the bad publicity) < doing the right thing for the right reason (RMA because someone at NE screwed up) < doing the right thing in the first place (RMA when it was originally asked for)
Clearly Newegg is in one of the middle categories. Personally, I think as long as customers are taken care of it doesn't so much matter what the decision making behind it is.
What type of diversity are you referring to? Is this really something that factors into a decision about where to live?
I would think saying "I want to live somewhere where everybody is different than me" is almost as bad as saying "I want to live somewhere where everybody is the same as me"
