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Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers

Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again. I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, customer support, customer success, and inside sales at a B2B SaaS company. Modestly obsessed with mobility networks. (like... roads, streets, bike paths, sidewalks, and the vehicles and people that occupy that space) Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more. Just started recently, partially inspired by spending a few weeks in Bali. (Being a laid-off tech worker has its upsides). If I can get traction around this business idea, I'll move sideways into guerilla action road network improvements, to make the junctions around the businesses I work with more habitable and safe for scooters, pedestrians, and cars. Soooo I'm trying to make my job something like "one who improves the functioning of road networks, sponsored by the direct beneficiaries of those improvements." With a little success, I'll be able to start hiring people to help. Maybe I'll find a few other tech people to help. There's plenty of room for software developers to make meaningful contributions to these projects, but only after spending a lot of time not behind a laptop.

sjf 4y ago
How many other laid off tech people are there in Bali?
- wonder_er 4y ago
  good question. No idea. I didn't ask, and wasn't there as a laid-off tech worker. :) I was visiting a friend who moved there a decade ago, and scootering around the island. So, I had good food, met lots of interesting people, read books in beautiful places, and saw beautiful sites. I called it 'a research trip for bringing better scooter norms to the USA'. Bali's scooter game is fire!
  - sjf 4y ago
    You're not first one I have heard from.
    - wonder_er 4y ago
      Tech workers in Bali? Yeah, no doubt. There's lots of tech people there, but I was kinda trying to avoid them/us.
      - wyclif 4y ago
        I'm in the Philippines. Backend dev still working from home, but not making the kind of money I want to make and probably will not be able to make given the current state of tech. Maybe I need to think about a career change. Not getting any responses to applications at all.
        wonder_er 4y ago
        I hear it's a hard world for engineering applications rn. That's part of why I didn't wanna go back into tech. We'll see. The world is in a strange way right now Good luck!
- bradlys 4y ago
  It's just a popular place for remote people. The usual white digital nomad bro who goes there to sleep around. (Plenty of women doing this too btw) It's a nice spot but it's just for fucking around in your 20's. (Or 30's if you live an alternative lifestyle or are a terrible romantic partner)
  - wonder_er 4y ago
    'just' feels slightly de-dignifying, but overall this is not totally wrong. I'd say there's a lot more to do there than sleep around, but there seemed to be plenty of that. (I'm white-passing, have done the nomad thing in the past, didn't go to sleep around, don't consider myself to be a terrible romantic partner, but am recently divorced, so you shouldn't take only my word on that). I'm nearly autistic when it comes to land development regimes, and Indonesia is widely regarded as having some of the best land use regimes in the globe, and I wanted to go experience it. Turns out... It does! It hurts my soul to return to the USA, where urban planners are the land-use equivalent of flat earthers.
    - zhivota 4y ago
      Interesting, I've gotten very interested in land use recently and had not heard this about Indonesia. Are you talking specifically about Bali here? Because I've been to Jakarta and I can't say I endorse the land use there based on the few business trips I've taken. Where can I read more about what you're talking about?
      - wonder_er 4y ago
        Huzzah! Another aficionado of land use issues! Alain Bertaud wrote a book called "order without design". He's an urban economist, and... his book is all a city planner needs to do their job correctly. Towards the end of the book he talks about the indonesian Kampung, briefly touched upon in this interview here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-11/urban-planner-alain-bertaud-s-case-for-bottom-up-design https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-11/urban-pla... I had long wanted to visit this sort of place, so in Bali, I walked into (and around) many, many, many kampungs, and sure enough, they were beautiful, affordable, and served the people that lived in and around them so well. I believe all 'big' cities have adopted the 'american'/euclidean zoning version of land use policy, which was implemented by southerners in the 1920s to implement a regime of social control, allowing one ethnic group to use the political process to dominate another ethnic group. Jakarta follows the american land use policy, with the expected deleterious effects. more on the land use policy as social control/ethnic cleansing: https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan I'd strongly recommend getting a copy of Alain's book. It's the most concise take on land use policy I've encountered, and I've sorta 'read the canon' when it comes to these kinds of things. Another recommendation: "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing" https://www.fidelitypress.org/slaughter-of-cities https://www.fidelitypress.org/slaughter-of-cities I write about all of this stuff on my website (in my profile) and tiktok. I talk too much about zoning-as-ethnic-cleansing, according to some people, but i don't mind. https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
How does a business like this make money? It sounds almost like it could be a nonprofit.
- wonder_er 4y ago
  I'm working on a model of charging the business for this service. A monthly fee, or project based fee. This week is the beginning of my sales process, and I've talked to many people that are super interested, working my way to the people that sign checks. I'm hoping to get a spend of a few grand per month per company I work with, and get them to commit to a few months of my efforts. It costs $1500 to pave a new asphalt parking spot (and $25k for a parking spot in a parking garage) so a service that "adds 10 parking spots", roughly, is valuable, and, more importantly, adds capacity to the business when they're otherwise maxed out. I'm talking to restaurants, breweries, and climbing gyms, at the moment. All of these institutions are sensitive to their customers and staff not being able to find parking.
ecshafer 4y ago
> Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more. How do you make money doing this? I also don't see how you really achieve this as a business. The best way to do this would imo run for city council with the backing of developers, remove zoning, and then implement road improvements. Most cities have parking requirements for cars, so they legally can't remove paring spaces. This needs to change at a legal level.
- inconceivable 4y ago
  you sell the scooters and get a commission for the people re-doing the parking lots. the customer company is incentivized by green initiatives and they have budgets to spend.
  - wonder_er 4y ago
    Critically, no re-doing of the parking required. It'll just be adding scooter parking spots in existing nooks and crannys around the building/parking lot. Company is incentivized by adding available vehicle parking spots. Sportique scooters, the local scooter dealer to Denver, is down and happy to offer me some commission for scooter sales that I bring in, but that's not the main thing for me. I want corporate buy-in from the companies I'm courting, cuz I'll need their permission to access staff and customers. (I'll be adding signage, and the companies will make some concession to scooter riders, to make it a bit more appealing. A free drink, $20/mo in free food, etc. It'll be a case-by-case decision, based on what they can offer that's easiest/most useful to the customer, etc) Scooters are super cheap, and let you move through a city way fast, and can be parked nearly anywhere, regardless of how busy the area is, and it's literally $6 for a tank of gas. And they get 100 mpg. I think a little progress will lead to a lot of progress.
- wonder_er 4y ago
  How to make money: Offer this as a service to a business. The service (which I'm charging for, but don't yet have customers) is: 1. Paint some scooter parking lines in a reasonable spot, and add a signage explaining why the org wants to incentivize scooter usage. 2. The scooter parking would make use of existing nooks and crannys in the parking lot, so it wouldn't take away existing car parking. 3. Work with the staff to find the staff that lives relatively close to the business, and is amenable to scooting. Teach and train and hand-hold through their scooter purchase, so when they're working, their scooter is parked outside. 4. Once there's staff using scooters regularly, there will nearly always be a scooter or two parked outside the building, which will start to normalize scooter usage for customers 5. Hand-hold early adapting customers through the same process. 6. Add signage and website and email campaigns to let interested customers learn more about the whole thing. Done. Every time there is a scooter parked in front of a business, that's a car parking spot freed up. Keep refining the process until during busy hours, there is a number of scooters in front of the business equal to ten percent of the number of parking spots. I won't be removing any parking. Only creating new parking, and helping more people start scooting. I ran for city council in golden, Colorado, a few years ago, and saw far too much of how the sausage is made. City councils have no power, by design. They exist to absorb the ire of angry citizens, and to insulate the city staff from the effects of their decisions. There is no world where city council is helpful. They're a lagging indicator of the social norms of middle and upper class white people. The legal changes will lag social changes, so it's not helpful to directly target legal changes.
worldmerge 4y ago
Sounds interesting! Any way to follow your progress?
- wonder_er 4y ago
  Ummm good question. Maybe pop your email into the email sign up form on my website (check my profile) I write to that list about random things, which is inclusive of more than scooters. Currently, the next thing I'll be emailing about is about my journey out of evangelicalism, so... Consider yourself warned. ;)
deleted 4y ago
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ericmcer 4y ago
A career change is really attractive but adjusting salary expectations is brutal. Skilled jobs I was interested in and assumed were making $30+ an hour I looked into and found they are closer to $18-20/hr. After tech gigs making 250k+ with equity it is a pretty brutal downgrade. My interest is in starting an all electric gardening company, electric tools have caught up to gas ones, they are almost silent and have 0 emissions. If you live in the suburbs you will know that gas blowers are the death of quiet afternoons and I am not sure why the transition to electric is taking so long. It would just require a large initial investment followed by a huge pay cut and the uncertainty of being able to build it into something larger :P.
- wonder_er 4y ago
  yep! I wonder if you could start by buying the equipment, and popping fliers around your neighborhood, and doing the work yourself nights-and-weekends, sorta dog-food your own business, until it's stable enough to hire a neighborhood kid to do the work for you. I mowed lawns and shoveled driveways growing up (suburban kid) and found it to be rather enjoyable and satisfying. But yeah, tech salaries have been drafting on the VC over-investment for a while. I was never at $250k+ with equity, but it's a bitter pill to swallow. In some ways, though, it'll build empathy for how the rest of the world lives/works. Earning so much money doing nothing more difficult then pressing buttons on a box is pretty cool.
- kubectl_h 4y ago
  Agreed, I'm probably past the point where I could make a jump into the career area I wish I had gone into with hindsight (forest ranger, fisheries & wildlife, land management for land trusts, etc), but if I was <= 35 I would consider it. However at the age of 41 I've crossed into the 250k+ total comp territory and it's hard to imagine taking that significant pay decrease and making a move where I'm at the bottom of the ladder.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Maybe it depends how you view it (and your financial position, obviously high income doesn't necessarily mean any saved/significant assets) - one could think of it like early retirement, not a career change and pay cut, but something to occupy some time, do for interest/meet people/see things/be outdoors, etc. (By the way, as an almost 30yo SE with a younger brother doing exactly what you describe... I'm not sure quite how to feel!)
DrOctagon 4y ago
We need a descriptor for the ideas people come home from Bali with :). I'm teasing, but in good spirit. All the best with your new path!!
- wonder_er 4y ago
  Thanks! I didn't get the idea in Bali, but decided to start working on it while I was there.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters… Denver gets really cold.
- wonder_er 4y ago
  Quite! Adequate layering and safe judgement around inclement weather is a non-trivial part of being safe. It's not just cold, but rain, snow, darkness, sandy roads after snow is plowed, even when warm, etc. It's all part of exercising good judgement. Skills can be built incrementally.
eadmund 4y ago
> Working on going independent here in Denver … to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot What will the scooter-users do when it snows? Don’t the parking lots still need to be scaled to the max likely number of cars?
- danaris 4y ago
  My understanding is that Denver gets 300 days of sun a year. Personally, I'd hate it, but it sounds like it's probably a good place to try something like what the GP describes.
- wonder_er 4y ago
  when it snows, scooter-users probably won't scoot. Denver remains surprisingly usable in times around snow, though. a 5a trip in the winter with snow is quite different than a 1p trip that same day, when the sun is out, the roads have been cleared, and the temp is 38 degrees.

sjf 4y ago

How many other laid off tech people are there in Bali?

wonder_er 4y ago
good question. No idea. I didn't ask, and wasn't there as a laid-off tech worker. :) I was visiting a friend who moved there a decade ago, and scootering around the island. So, I had good food, met lots of interesting people, read books in beautiful places, and saw beautiful sites. I called it 'a research trip for bringing better scooter norms to the USA'. Bali's scooter game is fire!
- sjf 4y ago
  You're not first one I have heard from.
  - wonder_er 4y ago
    Tech workers in Bali? Yeah, no doubt. There's lots of tech people there, but I was kinda trying to avoid them/us.
    - wyclif 4y ago
      I'm in the Philippines. Backend dev still working from home, but not making the kind of money I want to make and probably will not be able to make given the current state of tech. Maybe I need to think about a career change. Not getting any responses to applications at all.
      - wonder_er 4y ago
        I hear it's a hard world for engineering applications rn. That's part of why I didn't wanna go back into tech. We'll see. The world is in a strange way right now Good luck!
bradlys 4y ago
It's just a popular place for remote people. The usual white digital nomad bro who goes there to sleep around. (Plenty of women doing this too btw) It's a nice spot but it's just for fucking around in your 20's. (Or 30's if you live an alternative lifestyle or are a terrible romantic partner)
- wonder_er 4y ago
  'just' feels slightly de-dignifying, but overall this is not totally wrong. I'd say there's a lot more to do there than sleep around, but there seemed to be plenty of that. (I'm white-passing, have done the nomad thing in the past, didn't go to sleep around, don't consider myself to be a terrible romantic partner, but am recently divorced, so you shouldn't take only my word on that). I'm nearly autistic when it comes to land development regimes, and Indonesia is widely regarded as having some of the best land use regimes in the globe, and I wanted to go experience it. Turns out... It does! It hurts my soul to return to the USA, where urban planners are the land-use equivalent of flat earthers.
  - zhivota 4y ago
    Interesting, I've gotten very interested in land use recently and had not heard this about Indonesia. Are you talking specifically about Bali here? Because I've been to Jakarta and I can't say I endorse the land use there based on the few business trips I've taken. Where can I read more about what you're talking about?
    - wonder_er 4y ago
      Huzzah! Another aficionado of land use issues! Alain Bertaud wrote a book called "order without design". He's an urban economist, and... his book is all a city planner needs to do their job correctly. Towards the end of the book he talks about the indonesian Kampung, briefly touched upon in this interview here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-11/urban-planner-alain-bertaud-s-case-for-bottom-up-design https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-11/urban-pla... I had long wanted to visit this sort of place, so in Bali, I walked into (and around) many, many, many kampungs, and sure enough, they were beautiful, affordable, and served the people that lived in and around them so well. I believe all 'big' cities have adopted the 'american'/euclidean zoning version of land use policy, which was implemented by southerners in the 1920s to implement a regime of social control, allowing one ethnic group to use the political process to dominate another ethnic group. Jakarta follows the american land use policy, with the expected deleterious effects. more on the land use policy as social control/ethnic cleansing: https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan I'd strongly recommend getting a copy of Alain's book. It's the most concise take on land use policy I've encountered, and I've sorta 'read the canon' when it comes to these kinds of things. Another recommendation: "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing" https://www.fidelitypress.org/slaughter-of-cities https://www.fidelitypress.org/slaughter-of-cities I write about all of this stuff on my website (in my profile) and tiktok. I talk too much about zoning-as-ethnic-cleansing, according to some people, but i don't mind. https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

How does a business like this make money? It sounds almost like it could be a nonprofit.

wonder_er 4y ago
I'm working on a model of charging the business for this service. A monthly fee, or project based fee. This week is the beginning of my sales process, and I've talked to many people that are super interested, working my way to the people that sign checks. I'm hoping to get a spend of a few grand per month per company I work with, and get them to commit to a few months of my efforts. It costs $1500 to pave a new asphalt parking spot (and $25k for a parking spot in a parking garage) so a service that "adds 10 parking spots", roughly, is valuable, and, more importantly, adds capacity to the business when they're otherwise maxed out. I'm talking to restaurants, breweries, and climbing gyms, at the moment. All of these institutions are sensitive to their customers and staff not being able to find parking.

ecshafer 4y ago

> Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more. How do you make money doing this? I also don't see how you really achieve this as a business. The best way to do this would imo run for city council with the backing of developers, remove zoning, and then implement road improvements. Most cities have parking requirements for cars, so they legally can't remove paring spaces. This needs to change at a legal level.

inconceivable 4y ago
you sell the scooters and get a commission for the people re-doing the parking lots. the customer company is incentivized by green initiatives and they have budgets to spend.
- wonder_er 4y ago
  Critically, no re-doing of the parking required. It'll just be adding scooter parking spots in existing nooks and crannys around the building/parking lot. Company is incentivized by adding available vehicle parking spots. Sportique scooters, the local scooter dealer to Denver, is down and happy to offer me some commission for scooter sales that I bring in, but that's not the main thing for me. I want corporate buy-in from the companies I'm courting, cuz I'll need their permission to access staff and customers. (I'll be adding signage, and the companies will make some concession to scooter riders, to make it a bit more appealing. A free drink, $20/mo in free food, etc. It'll be a case-by-case decision, based on what they can offer that's easiest/most useful to the customer, etc) Scooters are super cheap, and let you move through a city way fast, and can be parked nearly anywhere, regardless of how busy the area is, and it's literally $6 for a tank of gas. And they get 100 mpg. I think a little progress will lead to a lot of progress.
wonder_er 4y ago
How to make money: Offer this as a service to a business. The service (which I'm charging for, but don't yet have customers) is: 1. Paint some scooter parking lines in a reasonable spot, and add a signage explaining why the org wants to incentivize scooter usage. 2. The scooter parking would make use of existing nooks and crannys in the parking lot, so it wouldn't take away existing car parking. 3. Work with the staff to find the staff that lives relatively close to the business, and is amenable to scooting. Teach and train and hand-hold through their scooter purchase, so when they're working, their scooter is parked outside. 4. Once there's staff using scooters regularly, there will nearly always be a scooter or two parked outside the building, which will start to normalize scooter usage for customers 5. Hand-hold early adapting customers through the same process. 6. Add signage and website and email campaigns to let interested customers learn more about the whole thing. Done. Every time there is a scooter parked in front of a business, that's a car parking spot freed up. Keep refining the process until during busy hours, there is a number of scooters in front of the business equal to ten percent of the number of parking spots. I won't be removing any parking. Only creating new parking, and helping more people start scooting. I ran for city council in golden, Colorado, a few years ago, and saw far too much of how the sausage is made. City councils have no power, by design. They exist to absorb the ire of angry citizens, and to insulate the city staff from the effects of their decisions. There is no world where city council is helpful. They're a lagging indicator of the social norms of middle and upper class white people. The legal changes will lag social changes, so it's not helpful to directly target legal changes.

worldmerge 4y ago

Sounds interesting! Any way to follow your progress?

wonder_er 4y ago
Ummm good question. Maybe pop your email into the email sign up form on my website (check my profile) I write to that list about random things, which is inclusive of more than scooters. Currently, the next thing I'll be emailing about is about my journey out of evangelicalism, so... Consider yourself warned. ;)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

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ericmcer 4y ago

A career change is really attractive but adjusting salary expectations is brutal. Skilled jobs I was interested in and assumed were making $30+ an hour I looked into and found they are closer to $18-20/hr. After tech gigs making 250k+ with equity it is a pretty brutal downgrade. My interest is in starting an all electric gardening company, electric tools have caught up to gas ones, they are almost silent and have 0 emissions. If you live in the suburbs you will know that gas blowers are the death of quiet afternoons and I am not sure why the transition to electric is taking so long. It would just require a large initial investment followed by a huge pay cut and the uncertainty of being able to build it into something larger :P.

wonder_er 4y ago
yep! I wonder if you could start by buying the equipment, and popping fliers around your neighborhood, and doing the work yourself nights-and-weekends, sorta dog-food your own business, until it's stable enough to hire a neighborhood kid to do the work for you. I mowed lawns and shoveled driveways growing up (suburban kid) and found it to be rather enjoyable and satisfying. But yeah, tech salaries have been drafting on the VC over-investment for a while. I was never at $250k+ with equity, but it's a bitter pill to swallow. In some ways, though, it'll build empathy for how the rest of the world lives/works. Earning so much money doing nothing more difficult then pressing buttons on a box is pretty cool.
kubectl_h 4y ago
Agreed, I'm probably past the point where I could make a jump into the career area I wish I had gone into with hindsight (forest ranger, fisheries & wildlife, land management for land trusts, etc), but if I was <= 35 I would consider it. However at the age of 41 I've crossed into the 250k+ total comp territory and it's hard to imagine taking that significant pay decrease and making a move where I'm at the bottom of the ladder.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Maybe it depends how you view it (and your financial position, obviously high income doesn't necessarily mean any saved/significant assets) - one could think of it like early retirement, not a career change and pay cut, but something to occupy some time, do for interest/meet people/see things/be outdoors, etc. (By the way, as an almost 30yo SE with a younger brother doing exactly what you describe... I'm not sure quite how to feel!)

DrOctagon 4y ago

We need a descriptor for the ideas people come home from Bali with :). I'm teasing, but in good spirit. All the best with your new path!!

wonder_er 4y ago
Thanks! I didn't get the idea in Bali, but decided to start working on it while I was there.

UncleEntity 4y ago

> Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters… Denver gets really cold.

wonder_er 4y ago
Quite! Adequate layering and safe judgement around inclement weather is a non-trivial part of being safe. It's not just cold, but rain, snow, darkness, sandy roads after snow is plowed, even when warm, etc. It's all part of exercising good judgement. Skills can be built incrementally.

eadmund 4y ago

> Working on going independent here in Denver … to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot What will the scooter-users do when it snows? Don’t the parking lots still need to be scaled to the max likely number of cars?

danaris 4y ago
My understanding is that Denver gets 300 days of sun a year. Personally, I'd hate it, but it sounds like it's probably a good place to try something like what the GP describes.
wonder_er 4y ago
when it snows, scooter-users probably won't scoot. Denver remains surprisingly usable in times around snow, though. a 5a trip in the winter with snow is quite different than a 1p trip that same day, when the sun is out, the roads have been cleared, and the temp is 38 degrees.