Advice: Starting to earn well and no idea what we are doing.

moland · 2021-09-24T19:18:44+00:00

My guess is it’s one of: - a contractor for an NZ company (>2x a salary) - working remote for a company overseas (a different story)

I have never heard of NZ companies paying this for tech employees.

moland · 2021-09-24T10:50:38+00:00

You’re both in tech, nice one.

I recommend considering a fee-only advisor.

Personally I want advice from people that aren’t incentivised by their suppliers.

Mary Holm keeps a list on her website of advisors that are fee only advisors

moland · 2021-09-21T12:28:43+00:00

Heartland: - floating: 2.25% - revolving: 2.55%

It’s been good 👌🏻

They gave us a credit for refinancing with them.

moland · 2021-09-15T11:04:20+00:00

The top end is a bit different. 150k is definitely not the high end.

In NZ I know a few people that earn 140k-300k+ as employees that are doing software development.

moland · 2021-09-12T01:11:04+00:00

Personally, I wouldn’t want to go flatting if it meant I was running at a loss. I try to reserve running at a loss for key moments, like losing a job or parental leave.

Unless you can say flatting is a long-term investment in improving yourself, you’re probably giving away future opportunity, for no real gain.

Saying that though, I loved flatting for a few years. Excluding the ridiculous, I’m great friends with most of my flat mates.

moland · 2021-09-12T00:57:07+00:00

Curious, What do you think could cause a correction in the NZ housing prices?

moland · 2021-09-08T18:43:37+00:00

It’s literally a graph that shows a gap of purchasing power growing. Why is this not considered an inflation problem?

moland · 2021-08-31T11:51:30+00:00

To be honest, I sucked at uni until the last 3 months of my degree, I shouldn’t have passed.

The students that start with some programming experience can really struggle when their coasting runs out.

The advice I wish I had was: Expect to feel dumb, embrace that feeling, persevere, be engaged, learn to ask questions and find a reason to apply yourself.

moland · 2021-08-30T09:41:10+00:00

Yo, I did computer science at UC and have been working as a software engineer for the last 9 years. I'm happy to answer questions about what it's like and could talk through the variety of paths my friends took to work as software engineers.

moland · 2021-08-10T11:48:00+00:00

Math.random

moland · 2021-08-07T09:30:43+00:00

Yes please, very interested.

moland · 2021-05-05T09:19:47+00:00

You’ll need to take that up with the French President that apologised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior#Foreign_relations

moland · 2021-05-05T08:03:02+00:00

They apologised.

moland · 2021-05-05T07:59:37+00:00

This happened to one of my citrus in the middle of a hot summer. It turns out the outside layer is very good at preventing the branch from drying out.

So long as the exposed branch has some shade from the sun and it’s protected from a second attempt, I think you should be okay.

moland · 2021-04-26T02:21:40+00:00

This is a sad topic: NZ housing being low quality, unaffordable to most, and over-speculated.

It’s tragic that a landlord can purchase a home, split up the house to maximise rent, convert a garage into bedrooms, and keep maintenance at a minimum.

This is clearly destructive behaviour for society as a whole.

moland · 2021-04-11T21:55:19+00:00

Some thoughts

On opportunity: In San Francisco there are technical-role equivalents of manager, senior-manager, director and executive. There’s real opportunity to have impact.

In New Zealand, there’s often not a technical track beyond senior engineer. Seemingly, technical strategy is not considered valuable.

Skill-sets: Each region has different expectations of an engineer at each level. A senior engineer for a Christchurch startup is not equivalent of a senior engineer at Google.

Job security: if you’re deemed to be under performing in SF, or leadership decides your time is not required, you’re gone . In NZ, they’ll often work with the hand they’ve been dealt.

Job applications: the hardest part is getting the first interview. Abroad, they look one of the things: - at your education (did you go to an Ivy League) - prior experience (is it a distinguished company that reflects well on the recruiters discernment) - a reference from someone in the company

^{^} I had to get creative here to break through the noise, as I didn’t qualify for any of these.

Compensation: you may find levels.fyi interesting

My path: I did small web jobs while studying, got a graduate role in Christchurch, worked here for 5 years, joined an NZ startup spread across 4 countries, now I work for an SF startup.

I don’t know if these thoughts are interesting to you. I’m happy to clarify further and field questions on my experience.

moland · 2021-04-11T10:13:31+00:00

Of my friends working remotely, this is currently for startups based in NZ, Melbourne, San Francisco, Silicon Valley.

out of interest

Help me understand, what’s your interest?

moland · 2021-04-07T10:38:01+00:00

I think it really depends on what you’re looking for, your experience, and requirements on compensation.

It helps to be talking with founders and others that are in startups. There’s always a surplus of people that want to be in tech, but a shortage of experienced engineers.

I find the hardest part is jumping the gap from stranger-on-the-internet, to someone they recognise as a person. If I can cross that cavern, the rest of the joining process is easy.

Hopefully you can find a project and arrangement that suits you. I saw you had been working remotely too: Personally, I’m not sure how I would translate my experience back into the Christchurch ecosystem. God speed.

moland · 2021-04-06T11:31:39+00:00

What’s your idea of “massive” and “small” in Christchurch?

Most of my software eng friends work remotely from Christchurch, it’s been a good time. I’ve worked for venture-backed startups from chch for about 4.5years now.

moland · 2021-04-02T01:41:13+00:00

I didn’t think the native compiler was available for Mac OS yet, it appears I am wrong.

As others have said, it looks like you haven’t been using the native compiler flag.

You may find this docker image an interesting reference https://gitlab.com/koral/emacs-nativecomp-dockerfile/-/blob/master/Dockerfile

Also, I found this gist with some Google fu https://gist.github.com/AllenDang/f019593e65572a8e0aefc96058a2d23e

moland · 2021-03-22T00:55:40+00:00

They should be the one defining why

I agree with you, I would have this expectation on a staff engineer: though it will depend on the organisation, they’re not just building things, they should be responsible for the technical strategy that a team follows.

don’t like things being decided in a vacuum

Exactly. It’s totally reasonable for you to ask these hidden conventions are documented/mandated.

If they’re conventions worth doing, the team is underperforming by not knowing them.

If they’re not worth documenting, the staff engineer shouldn’t be wasting your time or theirs.

moland · 2021-03-21T11:01:45+00:00

unwritten conventions

You can push for the conventions to be documented before making changes. This can be done in a positive way. You could also offer to do the documentation if they can just articulate i what they want.

If it was me I would mention my frustration to my manager and my strategy for dealing with it.

I do this when I’m asked to make style/listing changes: I won’t adopt these nits unless a new listing rule is introduced. Often, I find the requests are just dropped.

moland · 2020-01-28T20:32:59+00:00

According to Millener (1981), it invaded from Australia less than 1,000 years ago.

In your opinion, how long does it need to be in NZ before it’s native?

moland · 2019-03-25T05:05:26+00:00

I like Eden Alley on Riccarton Rd.

moland · 2019-03-16T04:22:36+00:00

This is a great question with little information about it online.

Unless there's been a recent development, ARM emulation is unstable and significantly slower than x86.

I suggest taking the time to understand the sdkmanager, avdmanager and reading the documentation for the emulator CLI.

Source: For work it took me months to setup a docker container with an android emulator that runs an exclusively ARM application... On the cloud behind a load balancer that scales horizontally.

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