> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)
Highly recommend a journalism class at local community college.
Or just learn how to take notes. Notes should be made with the intent that someone new could understand what's going on. With that approach, if you can't make good notes, you're thinking too much about what you know and less about what others don't.
I studied journalism at college as part of a more general media studies course.
It does help but I am not sure I would describe _my_ education as a panacea.
The main reason it was good was because it helps frame how you think of writing,
The most important things go first. Statement of fact, then you go into what the implications are, then you start introducing less and less relevant elements.
when you’re writing you keep the 5 “W’s” in mind, make sure you answer them. (Who what where when why), for instructive documentation you add: How.
Obviously an education bakes this into you in a better way than I can convey here.
What I learned is probably only decent for writing overviews.
Personally I find structure to be the biggest bottleneck/difficulty when making documentation.
What do others normally struggle with that don’t have this education?
Rarely met a postdoc doing interesting work; it's more about "earning your way" (i.e. to be abused for all kinds of tasks) with various professors in hopes of having your own academic career.
Do you mean blockchain or technology inspired by blockchain? Lots of cool merkle tree stuff (trillion, certificate transparency); also several international shipping supply chains use blockchain for chain-of-custody (txns are irrevocable cosigned transfer of custody with no trusted overseer). I would love to see criminal evidence and deeds of ownership move onto a similar framework.
I expect digital ID will also benifit from an auditable, immutable log (e.g. sovrin)
Hi cs-szazz. I remember being in your situation; it's frustrating because you can't Google for answers. Here is advice I was given when in a similar situation.
- Find the other people at the company in your situation (size of grant, type of options). Share your learnings with each other. Consider getting professional advice, the Bay is full of attorneys and CPAs for whom this is a familiar situation.
- If you're at a unicorn, you probably have co-workers who are veterans of other unicorns and have been through this before. Ask them for advice (or an introduction to their source of professional advice)
- As a group, consider asking your board to arrange a limited second market sale to cover exercise costs and taxes. Many institutional investors are happy to buy a little extra stock, especially if it helps with keeping senior staff happy and focused on the right things.
- If you're going to be doing anything involving stock without board approval (like trying to build some kind off house-of-cards, pseudo-legal collateral package for a loan shark) you really need to hire an attorney.
- if you only have options, you might not be a shareholder. Your rights and access to information might be different once you've exercised a share.
- You can't extend the 90 day exercise window on ISOs, that's a federal law thing. The company can convert to NSOs to extend the window, but the setup for that conversion is complicated and expensive.
I think you hit the nail on the head, it's frustrating because there's no clear answers, very little resources on the topic.
I'm actually in Canada, so I'm not sure on the ISO -> NSO distinction.
I do think your advice about coworkers is good though, I know of a couple other early employees in my position (similar grant sizes, also unable to afford to fully exercise). I've often considered what would happen if all of us decided to push for an extended window (and convert to NSO's)
As for the secondary, I don't actually want to sell. I want the ability to wait until there's liquidity to sell, and do it on my terms. Selling now significantly reduces future upside. What I'm really trying to avoid is getting stuck at one company because I can't afford to leave in the future.
I do appreciate your advice though, always good to chat with someone who's been in a similar situation!
There's also no guarantee on the duration of this program. From their FAQ, it appears that it's renewed annually, so it would be very easy to dig in roots only to find out the program has been ended shortly after.
At the risk of going slightly political, if money is the reason for relocating there, I'm not sure I'd put much faith in it lasting given the elected officials for that state.
People in other areas don't respond very well to highly paid workers relocating to their neighborhoods and raising housing prices. I'd guess that as soon as this gets many people to move, sentiment turns and it vanishes.
>"Other side-effects of a larger population, like increased traffic"
Remote workers don't commute though. Vermont's population has also been declining for years though and before that trend it was stagnant for decades[1]. Also if you've been to Vermont you know there's plenty of room to build there.
That seems like less of a problem if all the new residents are working remotely though, yeah? There would of course be some new traffic, but it wouldn't be a huge mass of people commuting to the same place.
This. Vermont and NH residents are much more concerned by property taxes and education funding. I do not love having to fill out yet another tax form for the state in VT, but the income tax is a rounding error compared to other expenses. Meanwhile, I live somewhere that other people come to vacation. It is paradise year round (with an exception for mud season).
All are welcome, particularly if they want to start families. We could use many more young families with school age children.
We are an old state with a dropping population, hence why the government is trying to attract new residents. Seriously, grab your skis, get in the car and come on up; the more the merrier.
It's been twenty years since I lived in southern NH and worked for a company in Vermont, but I don't remember a lot of differences in the landscape, or frankly the culture. Yes Vermont has a reputation for being liberal and progressive, and NH has a reputation for being the live free or shoot me place, but the reality on the ground, at least when I was there, was a lot less contrasting.
I think there's a material difference between southern new hampshire and most of vermont. Vermont in general is far more rural (outside of Burlington, Rutland) whereas the larger towns in southern new hampshire that are fast growing are basically now suburbs of boston.
So it that why the state leans progressive? Liberal transplants from Boston? For a state that seems to be mostly rural without a large city, it is amazing Bernie Sanders is the senator.
Vermonter here. The average Vermonter voted for a Socialist Senator, a Democratic Representative, and a Republican governor in the last election. The person tends to be much more important than the party.
Vermont was reliably Republican until there was the perception that the GOP had an evangelical social agenda. Vermonters are not against private expressions of faith, but they believe it is deeply personal and have no interest in being lectured on it by politicians.
There's a lot of people from NYC that want to retire upstate but come to the realization that NYC has done a very thorough job turning the entire state into a dump and that the only way out is to move out of state.
However, as a sibling comment pointed out, even if you ignore transplants the people of Vermont tend to agree with the modern left on a certain set of social issues anyway.
Yup, at some point you consider, it's only $800 and maybe you're getting a lot for your money. Not to mention other factors in overall cost of living can totally swamp that $65/mo. You probably spend more on internet.
> New Hampshire is literally next door and has no income tax.
Really?! Has New Hampshire finally gotten their act together and extricated themselves from the boot of the federal government? Or do you really mean that NH has a slightly lower income tax because nothing gets added to the federal one?
This is a really good point. If you are after clean air, natural beauty, outdoor activity and the New England vibe you could just as easily live in New Hampshire and pay zero state income tax.
Also there are many parts of New Hampshire where commuting in to Boston is an option if your remote gig went away. Many people live in low tax New Hampshire and commute in to Boston or or other parts of Massachusetts.
>New Hampshire is literally next door and has no income tax
I wouldn't bank on it staying that way for long. Massholes from are moving in in droves and are voting for the kinds of politicians who would be very amenable to am income tax. Of course if they get an income tax all their other taxes will stay high too.
It has to do a lot with reliability and cost. A smart car has a lot of expensive sensors and an expected life of a few years with regular maintenance. There's also a huge market opportunity around smart cars. Those cabinets can last decades, in all conditions, with minimal upkeep. Adding sensors decreases reliability and increases maintenance cost. There isn't usually an appetite to put traffic signal upgrades or extra maintenance headcount in city budgets for non-critical infrastructure upgrades, so the financial incentives to innovate are more limited as well.
Thanks - interesting. I know traffic pattern/flow models and studies can be extremely complex. However, from the perspective of a 'dumb' commuter, it seems like the investment in smarter traffic signals would be offset by global savings from/economic benefits of reduced congestion (e.g. idle bus transit fuel/maintenance savings or generally increased standard of living and economic imprivements due to increased traffic flow).
It is useful to talk about both inefficiency (the thing you point out) and exploitability (the ability for any individual actor to make useful amounts of money out of fixing the inefficiency.)
Unless an area is both inefficient and exploitable, it is plausible that it will go unfixed for a long time.
When you start viewing it in those terms, you find obvious inefficiencies everywhere.
My SO and I have three MBPs between us. Two have had keyboard failures (one the "8" key, the other the space bar). Both took about a week for Apple to repair.
Highly recommend a journalism class at local community college.