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I don't mean to discourage you from moving to CA. I love it here and honestly couldn't see myself living anywhere else, but you need to have reasonable expectations of costs / commute times.
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Apr 24, 2015 17:40
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Hm yes that gave me a little sticker shock with those rent prices and income tax. Alright. I still like the idea, but we would need to make enough to reach our goals. My wife's immediate family lives in Rocklin CA, and her brother is in Sacramento. That seems to be too far to commute. We did really like San Jose when we stayed there for a weekend trip though. Thanks for the input guys. Edit: and just for clarity... no hurry still.
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Apr 24, 2015 17:54
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I just want to say I grew up in Memphis and gently caress that place so hard. It's super dangerous and all the politicians wrote the book on corruption. My mom was a cop and is literally retarded and they hired her. You will rue ever taking a job there. Also no good schools at all. My brother, sister, and I all left as soon as we turned 18. There wasn't a single good reason to stay and the only people who stay there generally stay for family reasons or because they got knocked up and tied down in high school. My entire graduating class at white station gtfo in 2006 By the way, white station, the school in that recent fight video? Literally the best public school in Tennessee. That sort of fight isn't uncommon there. My brother and sister were both jumped and beaten. Sister got shoved down a flight of stairs and the school never called 911. silicone thrills fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 18:11
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Why not look for a job in Reno or a job that allows you to remote for 3-6 months before trying to find a job that involves relocation?
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Apr 24, 2015 18:15
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n8r posted:Why not look for a job in Reno or a job that allows you to remote for 3-6 months before trying to find a job that involves relocation? I will explore this option as well. Another lead just popped up in Lexington, KY. I'm flying to Memphis on Friday. The recruiter was pushing hard for me to take a 3-day trip for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Like poo poo man I'm not going to leave my boss hanging with such little notice. I have to protect my job still. Tigntink yeesh. Well I just want to try some Memphis ribs. Too bad my wife can't come we could visit the tourist areas. Knyteguy fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 18:26
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Please tell me you're using PTO or sick time to cover interviewing and not going unpaid.
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Apr 24, 2015 18:30
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Bugamol posted:Please tell me you're using PTO or sick time to cover interviewing and not going unpaid. Yes I just requested a PTO day for Friday. If I don't get it they can reschedule or something.
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Apr 24, 2015 18:31
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Yeah housing in the bay area super sucks but I think SV is still a great career move for a programmer; we're talking about the software capital of the world, here. You won't want to settle down here permanently but getting a handful of years of experience at some hotshot well-known tech company is very useful.
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Apr 24, 2015 18:49
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Knyteguy posted:I will explore this option as well. Haha the food is literally the only reason I ever consider visiting, however I haven't been back in 10 years despite being raised there. This is the best time of year though, Memphis in May BBQ fest is right around the corner so everyone is jazzed for that. Words of wisdom: Don't leave anything in your car. Ever. And I mean like even a single thing sitting on the seat of the rental car. poo poo will get stolen lickity split.
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Apr 24, 2015 18:51
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Knyteguy posted:Yep that is to the moment. Can someone explain to me how this works? Because I thought take -out would come out of the restaurant budget and any overage would come out of discretionary? Immediately taking it out of discretionary feels like cheating. Although, hey -- he hasn't spent $300 on restaurants!
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Apr 24, 2015 19:07
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Omne posted:Memphis is fine, don't let the naysayers scare you off. Statistics aren't naysaying.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:29
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Nail Rat posted:Statistics aren't naysaying. Downtown Memphis is the safest zip code in Shelby County. Those statistics are county-wide. Yes, if you go to North or South Memphis, you'll probably die. But live in the Core or South Main, you're fine. Chicago isn't the safest place in the world; you regularly read about 40+ people getting shot over a weekend there. So is all of Chicago bad? No, certain parts are. It's the same with Memphis. There are good parts and bad parts. If you avoid the bad parts, you're fine. Do I plan to live here forever? Hell no. But I have seen some pretty big changes in the few years I've lived here. The energy downtown is incredible, with new restaurants, bars, shops, and events going on. Memphis is a perfectly fine place to live. If you want good ribs, go to Central BBQ. Ignore the tourist trappings of Rondezvous.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:51
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Memphis is alright, honestly. The low cost of living plus lack of state income tax have made it hard for me to escape. I feel like the tech opportunities can be a bit limited here though.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:15
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Omne posted:Downtown Memphis is the safest zip code in Shelby County. Those statistics are county-wide. Yes, if you go to North or South Memphis, you'll probably die. But live in the Core or South Main, you're fine. Chicago isn't the safest place in the world; you regularly read about 40+ people getting shot over a weekend there. So is all of Chicago bad? No, certain parts are. It's the same with Memphis. There are good parts and bad parts. If you avoid the bad parts, you're fine. I live in Chicago, and I would say most of it is really bad. But there's only about 10% of it where people who aren't poor will work/live. The only reason they go outside of that 10% is for Sox, Bulls, or Blackhawks games. Yeah there are good parts and bad parts everywhere, but Chicago and Memphis seem to have more bad parts than some other cities and their bad parts are worse. That is something to keep in mind when moving to an area, just because you'll have to be mindful where you end up at certain hours. i.e., if you're on the red line after midnight in Chicago going south, you had better not fall asleep and miss your stop.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:15
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Have you run the numbers on how much you'd need to be making to have a significantly greater ability to pay down debt while living in a city with no family assistance? How much assistance has your local family been able to offer since your kid was born?
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Apr 24, 2015 20:18
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Hey Knyte, can you lay out what you do at your job that gets you these interviews so fast? I have a CS degree and 4 years development experience and another 5 years of precision metrology experience and associated programming experience (CMM). I lost my position as a developer in FORTRAN doing high performance computing about 5 years ago now (because of the deepwater horizon blowout) and it's been a struggle ever since to find jobs in my field (computer science). I'm really curious what you do so I can do it too because I'm sick to loving death of working like a slave for $20.25/hour plus 1.5x overtime. Shop's cutting hours because oil is down. I need to get back into CS because I don't forsee ever making anywhere close to my old salary with this bullshit (precision machining/ebeam welding/CMM programming) Last time I went out there, it was a LOOOOONG time between interviews and all with bullshit headhunters that never amounted to anything.
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Apr 24, 2015 21:45
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He posted his resume a few pages ago, he does frontend/full stack web development.
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Apr 24, 2015 21:56
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Iron Lung posted:He posted his resume a few pages ago, he does frontend/full stack web development. Oh, web dev. Why do the HPC guys always have to toil while 'easy' poo poo gets the money?  I was never as good as a full stack guy because of specializing in what I did  I guess I should just hang myself with a crane at work.
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Apr 24, 2015 22:01
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Taco Box posted:Oh, web dev. Why do the HPC guys always have to toil while 'easy' poo poo gets the money?
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Apr 24, 2015 22:24
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Five years ago the economy was in the crapper. Developer job market is very strong right now.
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Apr 24, 2015 22:25
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Taco Box posted:Oh, web dev. Why do the HPC guys always have to toil while 'easy' poo poo gets the money? Well I am a web dev, but I'd say I do half full stack web dev, half software dev, and I've got about 10 months of recent mobile dev as well. These fast interviews are all for X++ which is a great field for jobs, but a little boring. I wouldn't expect the same results for my other skills, but I haven't tried yet. edit: but I defer to these guys ^^
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Apr 24, 2015 22:27
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Knyteguy posted:Eh I'm not telling this one. It was expensive though. Wow, a lot happened while I was out of town and away from this thread. Knyteguy, your resume isn't bad, clearly the other advice you got from posting helped. I would encourage you to 1) quantify the benefits of your work as much as possible and 2) make a LinkedIn profile. Start with what is on your resume and refine. Lots of websites with advice on making good linked in profiles. I will also echo the advice to never, ever talk about your current salary. You are underpaid. It means someone can pay you more and you will still be underpaid. You will consider offers that are fair market value for the position and the value you provide (note I did not say your level of experience since you are pretty junior). If you are doing work that is billed out at $200 an hour and they want to pay you the equivalent of $30, that isn't in line with the value (if you are in a billable type position). Be smart about negotiating offers. There are good threads here on resumes and job searching and interviewing and negotiating offers. Take a break from this thread and go take your resume to the next level, become a master interviewer, and negotiate the heck out of your next job.
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Apr 24, 2015 22:36
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foxatee posted:Can someone explain to me how this works? Because I thought take -out would come out of the restaurant budget and any overage would come out of discretionary? Immediately taking it out of discretionary feels like cheating. Although, hey -- he hasn't spent $300 on restaurants! Since he went over $300 on restaurants, he's not spending anything out of the restaurant budget until it's back in the black (which will be June). I'm fine if he's using discretionary for eating out, in that he's still sacrificing something (a new game, golfing, something else fun that is discretionary) for it. It's kind of ironic that he doesn't think he deserves kudos for this, which is an actual sacrifice over, say, deciding not to buy an elephant.
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Apr 24, 2015 22:46
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Aagar posted:Since he went over $300 on restaurants, he's not spending anything out of the restaurant budget until it's back in the black (which will be June). Ah, okay. Thanks for the clarification.
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Apr 24, 2015 23:57
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Taco Box posted:Oh, web dev. Why do the HPC guys always have to toil while 'easy' poo poo gets the money? You should look again. If you're willing to relocate, look at places like Cray or VMware or some of the virtual reality shops. NVIDIA, Amazon, Oracle, etc. would also be interested in HPC. Focus on that part. Downplay FORTRAN unless you know it's a FORTRAN shop.
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Apr 25, 2015 04:06
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Horking Delight posted:$100 to the charity of your choice if you come under budget for three months in a row, starting in May, budgets posted before the first of the month and spending posted within 2 weeks after the end of the month. If a legitimate ("lost my job", "hit by car", not "sister had a bad week" or "I needed new shoes" or even "I needed cab fare for interviews") emergency happens, the month isn't counted but you'll need one more good month (3 good months and one emergency month in total then, instead of 2 good and one emergency). May Budget Rough Draft:  Need to confirm with the wife before this is official. Need to confirm with the wife before this is official. So the budget is very similar to what we've been doing so far. Just a couple tweaks. Using this budget we should have our emergency fund to $10,000 by July (including 1 month ahead money of $5,155). And then starting in July we should be in a position to start paying down debt. It's extremely difficult to estimate accurately how long it will take us to get out of debt, but using our current debt paydown rate of $500/mo (after interest), and adding our moderately conservative debt paydown of $700-$800/mo to that, and using that against our total debt of $54,500... we should be out of debt in 3.5 years. However that assumes that all debts continue to accrue interest even after they're paid off. Assuming we tackle the car first however, we can have that paid off by December 2016 using the same relatively conservative estimate of $800/mo. 1.5 years after that medical debt of $20,000 would be paid off. About a year after that student loans. So applying $800/mo additional to each individual debt would take this long: Medical Debt ($22,000 @ 0%): 2 years 3 months Car: 16 months Student Loans: ~8 months Grandma Debt (~1600 @ 0%): 2 months Now this process would be expedited by freeing up money as we pay off debts (snowball). So for example if we paid off the car we would have an additional $510/mo to use towards other debts. If we just spent that $800/mo on whatever and made minimum payments forever we would have debt paid off by February 2024. I would be 37 years old. My son would be 9. Holy poo poo. So basically stuff will get more interesting come July. Just as a note my time estimates to payoff debt are probably imperfect. Flying to Memphis on Thursday or Friday I got the PTO approved.
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Apr 27, 2015 17:23
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n8r posted:Have you run the numbers on how much you'd need to be making to have a significantly greater ability to pay down debt while living in a city with no family assistance? How much assistance has your local family been able to offer since your kid was born? Not yet. Definitely some assistance has been provided. Ultimate Mango posted:Wow, a lot happened while I was out of town and away from this thread. Knyteguy, your resume isn't bad, clearly the other advice you got from posting helped. I would encourage you to 1) quantify the benefits of your work as much as possible and 2) make a LinkedIn profile. Start with what is on your resume and refine. Lots of websites with advice on making good linked in profiles. Thanks yes I got a lot of good help. I have a LinkedIn but I don't think it's very great. I do bill for $150/hr currently. I'd like to explore consulting in the future. I won't bring up my salary anymore. I was caught a little off guard by the recruiter late on a Monday and I spilled the beans. After everything slows down I'll be refocusing on finding remote jobs for a time, and then expanding into the SV area. I don't feel like there's a big hurry now that I had a weekend to reflect on everything. My new words when presented with anything beyond a minor decision will be "Let me think about that.", or similar.
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Apr 27, 2015 17:35
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Honestly, I don't think you should be considering anything that isn't local or remote work right now. Ideally I hope you can just get a raise at your current position to bring you closer to market rate since you seem to like the job and work environment. Get some more experience, maybe do some freelance on the side, and then in a few years you'd be in a hopefully much better financial position to do whatever you'd like. Right now I could see you making a hasty choice, jumping at a job that pays you maybe $30k more and then your wife not finding a job, and between that and maybe getting state income tax now you'd be effectively no better off than you are now.
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Apr 27, 2015 18:57
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So, what stands out of me is that you don't appear to have any space in your discretionary for a non-emergency unexpected expense. On the one hand, this makes sense, because you really don't have much leeway if you want to claw yourself out of debt and look into buying a house before your child starts school or whatever. On the other hand, what are you going to do if your wife has a super lovely weekend or your boss wants to go out for drinks? Do you think you'll have the willpower to just be like "hey, sorry, I can't go out right now"? What are you going to do for food when you're in Memphis, or in other remote interviews? I don't want to encourage you to spend more, obviously. But I would really like you to self-reflect and consider raising it a little bit (in an ideal world, you wouldn't spend the extra money there, you'd just let it roll over until you do have a "needs dinner or drinks" non-emergency anyways).
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Apr 28, 2015 03:04
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Don't forget to negotiate on that $20k medical debt. If it's been out there a couple years with no payments on your part, they will definitely be willing to talk.
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Apr 28, 2015 03:22
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Horking Delight posted:So, what stands out of me is that you don't appear to have any space in your discretionary for a non-emergency unexpected expense. On the one hand, this makes sense, because you really don't have much leeway if you want to claw yourself out of debt and look into buying a house before your child starts school or whatever. On the other hand, what are you going to do if your wife has a super lovely weekend or your boss wants to go out for drinks? Do you think you'll have the willpower to just be like "hey, sorry, I can't go out right now"? Ummmm, he should be reimbursed for all his food expenses on remote interviews. If not, he shouldn't take the interview. Companies too cheap to provide a food allowance, also are probably not flying him in cuz a couple of meals don't cost them much when flight + hotel is already part of it...
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Apr 28, 2015 03:27
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lord1234 posted:Ummmm, he should be reimbursed for all his food expenses on remote interviews. If not, he shouldn't take the interview. Companies too cheap to provide a food allowance, also are probably not flying him in cuz a couple of meals don't cost them much when flight + hotel is already part of it... Is being flown in for an interview something that's expected in the US? Because that seems really strange to me for jobs that aren't things like CEO or highly specialised where the talent pool is small.
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Apr 28, 2015 03:35
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Rudager posted:Is being flown in for an interview something that's expected in the US? Because that seems really strange to me for jobs that aren't things like CEO or highly specialised where the talent pool is small. For software devs with skills in demand, it is very common.
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Apr 28, 2015 03:36
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Rudager posted:Is being flown in for an interview something that's expected in the US? Because that seems really strange to me for jobs that aren't things like CEO or highly specialised where the talent pool is small.
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Apr 28, 2015 03:49
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There are also usually a round or two of phone interviews and skill tests before they fly someone out.
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Apr 28, 2015 04:21
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Yea regarding the work I'm slowing everything down quite a bit.Horking Delight posted:So, what stands out of me is that you don't appear to have any space in your discretionary for a non-emergency unexpected expense. On the one hand, this makes sense, because you really don't have much leeway if you want to claw yourself out of debt and look into buying a house before your child starts school or whatever. On the other hand, what are you going to do if your wife has a super lovely weekend or your boss wants to go out for drinks? Do you think you'll have the willpower to just be like "hey, sorry, I can't go out right now"? To my credit one thing I learned this April was how to say no. However I do agree with your logic here, because sometimes saying no is the incorrect answer. I upped both mine and my wife's discretionary by $30/mo. We did it with the condition that we will try to spend $100 or less.  I'm confident May will be a successful month. It has to be for the charity, but even beyond that. In April one way I've changed my outlook is to see budgeted values as a hard limit. So now I have some mental soft limits I'd like to hit for many of the values (ala the discretionary), but budgeted values will be actual hard limits. Unfortunately the ranch owner flaked and probably isn't interested in the dog anymore (passive no I guess). We had one guy considering trading us $400 for her, but I said (probably much to the horror of BFC) no. He had a big yard, but that's it. We have a big yard too. I'll keep looking for a ranch owner. I do have a dune buggy frame that I'm considering selling. It was going to be a project, but I think it will be more hassle than it's worth. I'd bet I could get $500-$600 since I have some big pieces to it as well (transmission, axles, etc). Not sure yet it was pretty much the gift of a dead man my step dad was great friends with. I'd have to get my step dad's OK first.
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Apr 28, 2015 17:27
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edit: Memphis trip cancelled. PTO day wasted. C'mon companies get your poo poo straight before having people commit to things. /grumble I think I'll proceed without the recruiters after the interview Thursday. The work truly is crazy boring so I'm not too upset the company got fickle on me, I'm just mad I wasted yet another PTO day. Knyteguy fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 22:37
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Knyteguy posted:edit: Why would it be wasted? Just go to work that day, and don't take the PTO. Why was the interview cancelled?
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Apr 28, 2015 23:32
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lord1234 posted:Why would it be wasted? Just go to work that day, and don't take the PTO. Why was the interview cancelled? Not entirely sure on the interview, but from what I know apparently the company I was interviewing with is unhappy with their entire interview process (and rightfully so it's awful for developers; there wasn't a single technical question). They were probably debating flying me out after looking at the cost of doing so and realized they don't even know if I'm competent. It's not 100% for sure cancelled, but I'll know more tomorrow. I'm not counting on it. I could go into work Friday I didn't consider that. I may just spend the day taking the dogs to the lake or something though I'm sure they'd love that. I'm just grouchy right now. What a waste of my time and theirs. Knyteguy fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 23:43
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Interviewing is stressful, time consuming, and can be very depressing. You need to be ready to continue to face these ups and downs without letting it reflect poorly on the work you're doing at your current job. If you think it sucks to have an interview cancelled for a job you didn't even want, wait until you find the job you LOVE and get told you were their second choice. Job hunting is a bumpy road, you shouldn't expect it to be sunflowers and rainbows unless you're a subject matter expert in a high demand low supply market. (Hint: You're not.)
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Apr 29, 2015 00:38
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