I live in WA state and really just get to WFH when I want to. Many of my team members are full time remote though and there are many wonderful things about WA.
Seattle (where I live) is pretty expensive now.
But living on one of the islands (Bainbridge, Vashon, etc.) could be wonderful (better cost of living, access to beautiful nature, good schools, small community vibe).
Bellingham is lovely and has a university in town and also in a really beautiful part of Washington with access to lakes, Puget Sound, mountains, and so on. It's also right by I5 and Canada is not far away.
If you noticed the running theme is if you love nature, water, and mountains and want to share that with your kids consider WA.
WA state doesn't have state income tax for now, and I've loved the 10 years I've spent here.
Oh yeah, and I guess Portland, OR is cool too. Also pretty, and a happy new more low key than Seattle.
Yeah, I feel you. Like I wrote about, I can feel myself growing toward the middle though I like to feel like I care about my company's raison d'être. On the same token, I regret seeing good candidates get passed up because of some undefinable sine qua non (I swear I don't use so many French sayings, these just happen to work).
Here are a few thoughts I have in response:
- "passion" as a term has sort of been hijacked by Silicon Valley-esque startups, particularly in B2B spaces. This is a cynical take, but how else are you going to convince someone to take crappy pay with poor chance of equity return to work on a risky idea?
- passion doesn't always have to mean cause-oriented. Can you be passionate about good engineering? About boring, reliable, predictable success? Maybe there is a value you are "passionate" about but you haven't encountered many companies also passionate about that. I write about this too. It's just useful to be open-minded about defining what it means to you, but you probably do care about how you spend your time away from home
- there is also the matter of being passionate about just straight up doing great work. I used to think I wouldn't like contracting or consulting, but I've met some awesome firms in Seattle and they are full of people who like swooping in, solving hard problems and moving on to the next thing
And finally there are lots of industries where "punch in, punch out" is ok. My friends working in healthcare info systems come to mind. Government work (18F and sundry contract companies) is getting more interesting.
I am totally with you about being honest. It's a good way to discover where you don't want to work. I want to recognize though it is a privileged position to being in a position where you can survive not getting or turning down a job.
Thanks for taking time from your day to read and reply!
It has been a while since I contributed to HN! I sat down to share some thoughts and ideas that have been useful to me weighing new jobs against my career goals. Hope you find something useful!
Howdy folks! This is for my Startup Weekend project, Codealong http://codealong.org/.
We want to help connect innovative educators with developers who want to volunteer their time and expertise.
I'm busy hacking all night, but I'd love it if you could help me validate some of our ideas so far by filling out the survey. I can try to check back here every once in a while to answer questions.
Hi! I'm also a Startup Weekend employee. You might check out http://startupweekend.mx/ and say hi to our colleagues Gustavo and Melina. They may also have some insights into the Mexican entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Great question, and I would invite any other developers in here to reply as well.
Where to start...having open conversations with your developers is a great place to start. It turns out we love studying and talking about our field.
If you don't have ready access to developers, you can try reading through "Coders at Work" that I linked to at the bottom of my post. Another great idea is to just go to Wikipedia with any of the terms you don't know.
Codecademy or things like it might teach you a little more about a specific language, but these are general principles that are not dependent on a given programming language. This is more about software engineering as a discipline.
You might also try "The Agile Samurai" by Jonathan Rasmusson. I've never personally read it, but it's in our office and I didn't hate what I saw in the table of contents.
With regards to technical debt, I feel like it's trading one form of dying for another. Eventually bugs and performance issues will bring product quality down to the point where it starts to affect your brand. I heard a quote at Mongo Seattle along the lines of "customers will forgive delay, but they will not forgive a bad product."
Obviously 10gen has been around for a while and has a sustainable product, so their notion of survival has shifted more to quality than velocity.
In the article, I am hoping to at least raise awareness that technical debts exist when there are trade-offs. This would hopefully save developers from the awkward conversation when the co-founders come around asking why the site is so slow.
Addressing your last point, that is what I was hoping to drive toward with "A good developer will know the right questions to ask about a problem, so be sure to provide as much information as you can."
At Startup Weekend, we don't have PM's, so it is my job to ask lots of questions about "who, what, why." Unfortunately, I have worked with folks who find it unfathomable that I should ask questions about use cases and customer goals.
So the point here, is give developers specifics about the customer goals and scenarios when they ask for it so they can accomplish what I think you are saying.
Thanks for your comments though! I'd be interested to hear more about your experiences with dev teams in startups. My experiences are mostly from working at a 2-3 year old company as well as some freelance work I've done.
I'm glad! I had to keep the list short for the blog, but I think this would be a great place to collect other ideas. What 10 points would you have written?
Hey all. This is my first post to HN and also my first contribution to the Startup Weekend blog as an employee.
I think the subject matter would be interesting here and would love to hear if there is anything you think I missed. Startup Weekend gets to be in a cool place to lead among tech entrepreneurs and I'm always to happy to advocate for those in our field.
Seattle (where I live) is pretty expensive now.
But living on one of the islands (Bainbridge, Vashon, etc.) could be wonderful (better cost of living, access to beautiful nature, good schools, small community vibe).
Bellingham is lovely and has a university in town and also in a really beautiful part of Washington with access to lakes, Puget Sound, mountains, and so on. It's also right by I5 and Canada is not far away.
If you noticed the running theme is if you love nature, water, and mountains and want to share that with your kids consider WA.
WA state doesn't have state income tax for now, and I've loved the 10 years I've spent here.
Oh yeah, and I guess Portland, OR is cool too. Also pretty, and a happy new more low key than Seattle.