how to save money: never buy a box

I've never been too concerned about minor moving expenses. Last time I moved, I probably spent about $50 on cardboard boxes to move my stuff in.

This time, I decided to keep my $50. You can get boxes free from most liquor stores. I'd never done this before, but I have a friend who has done it. Still, it was really hard to resist the urge to just go out and buy boxes. I was especially resistant to just walking in and asking (fear of rejection). If you don't have this problem, good on you. If you're like me, you can solve the problem by doing what I did: I just drove around to the back of the store and did a little dumpster diving. Yes, it felt a little disgusting. The cardboard boxes had all been flattened and were in a dumpster specifically labeled for recycling, but I still wondered about cleanliness... Nevertheless, the boxes are only intended to move my stuff from point A to B, and they can be discarded without misgivings once I'm through with them.

Cost saving measures like this give me a bit of pleasure. I know some people sneer at this; but then I guess they don't feel like corporate slaves in their jobs. I'm not as extreme as the retire early extreme guy. Some of the things he does make me cringe. But I'm very willing to make some sacrifices in pursuit of my own freedom.

how to save money: move

As I mentioned in a previous post, I don't have enough savings to cover my expenses indefinitely, so I look pretty carefully at every dollar I spend. Clearly I have two options: make more income, or trim expenses. The latter is the easiest thing to do in the short term. I already know the breakdown of my yearly expenses. Like any good developer, I decided to optimize by working on the most expensive operation. Excluding taxes, my number one expense is rent. The solution is obvious: I need to move!

Where to? Personally, I'd be happy to move to various locations around the world, but practically speaking it's a bit difficult for a couple of reasons.

First, I have an elderly relative who is within driving distance, currently. This person is not really dependent on me, but I feel some qualms about moving so far away that it would require a plane flight for a visit. I am definitely reconsidering these qualms, because I don't want to let this constraint affect my life too harshly. In effect, I already have let it chain me to a certain region. If I were free from this constraint, I would have moved around much more in the past.

Second, there's the whole health insurance trap. I know my health insurance costs where I live now. Moving blindly to some other area, I have no idea what my health insurance costs will be. (And going without health insurance is a risk I just won't take.)

In the past, whenever I moved from state to state, I didn't pay much attention to health insurance. I was always moving from one job to another, and I knew I would automatically be covered by my new job's group plan.

Health insurance for individuals in the US is a game designed in hell. But that's a rant for another day. Meantime, I'm somewhat afraid to move out of state without knowing definitely what my health insurance options are.

So I decided on a move in-state, at least for this first year.

I used hotpads and similar sites to help me search for low rent apartments. One thing I quickly learned is that certain things scale with rent: privacy, space, and safety.

1) Privacy. Initially I considered all options, including house shares. It did not appeal, since I value my privacy and autonomy. Some people doing the house sharing thing make demands that I just won't tolerate (no visitors, group meals etc). I was hoping to find a "hacker house" to share with like-minded people, but I never did, and pretty quickly abandoned this tactic.

2) Space. I was shown rentals for rooms that were approximately 12 ft x 12 ft with rents of $600/mo or so - about 1/2 the price of my current 800 sq ft apartment. I considered these prices outrageous. These were rooms way out in the suburbs of my tech hub, mind you, not smack in the middle of the city. My advice to you if you encounter these places: unless there's some special appeal to the situation, keep looking. You can almost certainly find something better. Leave these apartments for more desperate people.

3) Safety. When researching a rental, take a look at the crime situation using a site like Family Watchdog. If you're looking at a place with a steep rental discount, it's very likely in an "undesirable" area.

In my case, I finally compromised by taking a small place, with a lot less safety than I'd like. I drove through town and it didn't creep me out, but the statistics are not great. Clearly I will need to take precautions. On the plus side, I'm still close enough to a tech hub so I can get to that once in a blue moon meetup or tech event without a day of driving.

Once I signed the lease, I had a huge case of buyer's remorse - I felt like I'd grabbed the first acceptable place and should have continued looking. My new space is about half the size of my current place, and I'm afraid it will seem incredibly cramped, since I'll be working from home. I'm worried that I won't feel safe. I'm worried that the place will be depressing because it just has a few small windows. And while I've managed to cut my rental expense in half, this new rental is clearly not a permanent solution to my problem.

So I'm looking at this first year as an experiment. I didn't have much time to put into finding a place, and I needed to cut expenses fast. Over the next year, I will research other ways to solve the rent problem. Meantime, I've reduced my rental expense by over 50%, which is a big help.

women want to be founders

Thank you, Laura Klein! People, go read her well-spoken rant about the fact that some women want to be in start-ups and run their own businesses. I mean, if you didn't already know that.

When I was much younger than I am now, I would have been a great start-up founder or employee. I had a very driven personality, and was quite the workaholic. I put all my efforts into academic studies, but the same kind of drive can be successfully pointed in the start-up direction.

Way back when, I didn't even know what a start-up was. I thought you had a choice between working in academia or working at a boring faceless corporation.

When I left academia, I was drawn to start-ups, and even talked about doing one with some friends. It never got very far. I should point out that my erstwhile co-founders were always white males, so it wasn't me alone failing to start. I didn't have any kids or obligations and was willing to throw myself into the business. In contrast, my co-founders would talk about family obligations. Hm, white males putting their families above founding a start-up? Sound familiar?

bye-bye, rat race... or should I say, au revoir?

Rat Cage, a photo by deborah|silverbees on Flickr.

Well, I did it. I quit my job, which was making me crazy. Quit the rat race altogether, at least for a while.

I never planned to work until retirement age. The idea was to work for a while, accumulate a big nest egg, and live off the income stream from that. Some people appear to happily turn their lives over to corporate America. Not me. I have a ton of stuff I want to do, and I found the extent to which my time was wasted in a corporate job to be incredibly frustrating.

Well, I'm not getting any younger. And I don't have enough savings to live off of for the rest of my life. It was starting to look like I'd be working for another 10 years before I could be relatively safe, and who knows, maybe not even then. I finally lost my patience for deferring living. Fifteen days of vacation a year was not cutting it. I had to try plan B.

Now you hear about people who quit their jobs, and say it was a terrible mistake. And that kind of scenario ran through my mind over and over again as I made my decision. You unplug yourself from the Matrix, and you wonder if you'll ever be able to plug yourself back in again. Even if you don't want to, what if you need to? Yet somehow you can't... and then you're homeless. Big scary thoughts.

Well, I'm smart enough to quit with substantial savings. It will take me a couple years until I have to start eating into retirement savings. I have to trust I can find some other way to make a living before that happens.

So here I go.

women and their shoes

I just heard a male coworker refer to "women and their shoes!". Then he back-pedaled, probably because he knew I might have heard him and said "not all women of course, though many of them!".

I do not own many pairs of shoes.

Why do some people feel a need to randomly spout statements based on stereotypes?

the benefit of being a female software engineer

Toilets / CC BY-ND 2.0
Originally uploaded by
jscatty (Jed Scattergood)

Jean Hsu recently blogged about the The Benefits of Being a Female Software Engineer.

Being a female software engineer, myself, I didn't find her comments very applicable:

1. Casual attire: in fact, many other jobs allow casual attire, and many companies require that engineers wear business casual. It's true that I'm getting away with ratty jeans at my current company, but that has nothing to do with me being a female software engineer.
2. Good odds for catching a mate: I have yet to find a suitable mate in any of the offices where I've worked as a developer. In fact most of the guys I've met are already part of a couple. I admit, though, I'm not looking for a mate, so maybe that's part of it.
3. Less drama: she claims women are more likely to be "drama queens." Really? In my experience, men are as likely to throw tantrums as women. All highly unprofessional, but it happens.
4. Being memorable: and how is this an advantage? If people simply remember you as "that female engineer who works at X" not as "the most talented engineer who works at X", how does that help? In fact, women are often put in their own separate category, as in sports events, so they're not even compared with the top men at all.
5. Being liked: She says women shower, and bring brownies, and are therefore liked. I've never brought food in to share with coworkers, although some of my male colleagues have. I shower daily, and so far as I can tell, all my male colleagues do also. So far as I can tell, "being liked" has more to do with your personality than anything else(avoiding being an ass helps).

Jean neglected to mention the most important (probably the only) advantage to being a female software engineer. If you work in an area dominated by the engineering department, you will find that the ladies' restroom is almost always quiet, clean, and empty.

The Social Network

I went to see The Social Network this week. Wiki says that no Facebook staff were involved, which is believable. Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg's "friend" who initially got into FB on the business side, was a consultant for the book , which explains why he is portrayed in the kindest way. The rest of the crew (aside from innocent bystanders) are skewered. BTW I put "friend" in quotes because the movie makes it doubtful that Zuckerberg ever had any real friends.

I'll repeat what others have said: the movie is thin, apparently largely based on transcripts from lawsuits. Zuckerberg is a one-dimensional character, portrayed as having zero self-esteem, craving approval, and emotionally stunted. His lack of an inner censor makes him seem a bit like an overanxious nine year old.

Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay. I have really loved his past work. I felt he didn't have the opportunity to really shine here, because of the nature of the plot (Ken Levine disagrees).

The movie depicts an environment that is steeped in sexism. Aaron Sorkin says the screenplay depicts the reality of the story. Here's a snippet from Sorkin:

I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren't the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80's. They're very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now.

This is recent history. Another reminder that sexism is alive and well.

It's unusual when a movie comes out where computer programming is a main feature. I wonder if the nasty culture depicted will turn off more young people considering programming as a career - men and women both. After watching the movie, you have to wonder about anyone who would consider that field an endeavor worth pursuing.