Part I here.

This seems to especially affect younger people. I don’t know if they are indoctrinated or cowardly or just plain naive. You don’t owe anything to anyone. You do your job, you get paid. End of transaction. Giving you a job isn’t an act of charity deserving reward any more than giving them your labor. If you are paid well then work hard. If you aren’t then demand a raise appropriate to the greater of your market and organizational value.

Don’t ever “take one for the team”. There is no team. They will fire you in an instant if it saved fifty bucks. The executives will Zuckerberg you without hesitation. VC’s will demand entire divisions to be laid off in order to meet arbitrary quarterly profit numbers so they can dump the husk of a company on Wall Street next year. One naive friend of mine still hasn’t been compensated as promised for working with no pay for six months to help found a startup, after three years and over $2,000,000 of subsequent funding. Did I mention he moved across the country to do this?

Does your title start with C and end in O? If not then the company’s finances are not your problem. If they can’t afford to pay an agreeable wage then move on to someone who can. You are not the company’s rich grandparents. You should not ever “bail them out”. If an executive ever says they can’t afford your reasonable wage requirements because the company has no money, look them in the eye and say “then take it out of the salary of those who are responsible for the company’s finances.” I know several executives who have taken it out of their own pay.

What has “the community” ever given to you that it deserves to be “given back to”?

Are you afraid of hurting someone’s feelings by demanding a fair wage? What about your feelings? What about your family’s feelings? You spouse, your kids? Whose feelings are more important to you: your manager or your child?

Remember there are always secondary consequences. By working for low pay at a company that “gave you a shot” you are depriving another company of the opportunity to give you the next step. By working for low pay for one friend you are depriving other potential new friends of the value of your work. Offering your services at below-market wage “to a good cause” deprives your services to “a better cause” somewhere else. Life consists of an endless series of trade-offs. Money is how we compare them. Make sure you charge appropriately too. I charge an extra $20k per year to have to occasionally use Windows. $15k for OSX. No amount of money could bribe me to work on Android or iOS again, nor to infringe on my family time.

The reason you watch out for yourself first is that nobody else is. Want to help others? Become strong first. Weaklings accomplish nothing.

“Whoever can least afford to walk away, loses.”

That’s what the best negotiator I ever met told me when I asked how he was so good. He had a new car every six months or so, usually top of the line. He bought them new, drove them for a while, then sold them for a small profit. Consistently. For years. While the details of his car flipping magic are interesting they are not germane to this post.

If you need a job to put food on the table next month you are screwed. There is an old saying that goes “For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away.” When I was a child this seemed nonsensical, even unfair. The older I get the more I realize how deeply the concept is woven into reality. Management can walk away from the negotiation table at any point with little consequence. Can you afford to walk away from the job? With a nice pile of Fuck You Money you have a strong position for negotiating salary and growing your bank balance further. Without it you will end up being forced to accept lower salaries and smaller titles. It’s hard to claw your way up from the bottom.

Yard sales are an interesting phenomenon. People set their beloved treasures and unwanted birthday presents out for complete strangers to bid on. Prices are often little more than suggestion of magnitude. My grandfather used to buy lawnmowers for a few dollars, perfectly good tools for pocket change, and heaps of junk for almost nothing. It was better than watching Bonanza reruns I suppose. One amazing thing about watching him bargain with strangers over kitsch was the suave nonchalance as he went about it. He would hem and haw and beat around the bush but never let emotions get involved. Never underestimate the spite of a manager with a damaged ego. Losing your cool is fatal; they may even fire you out of pure spite ( a few weeks later under false pretenses of course). Desperation stinks, insolence breeds contempt, and impatience induces stubbornness. Your approach must be professional, relaxed, and unemotional.

It is important to know how much you are worth. Market value is how much other people at large are willing to pay for your skills on average. Organizational value is how much you are worth to a specific company in a specific role. Job boards are full of lies and incomparable situations; ask around to find out how much other people with similar experience in similar niches in your town are making. Use some common sense. If someone with 5 years on you is only making $100k there’s no way you can expect to get $95k for a job at a poorer company. If someone with half your experience is making $120k for doing half the job you can easily get more. Figuring out how much you are worth to a specific company is much harder. You can gather clues through the grapevine and compare against coworkers if you already work there. An accurate figure will be hard to come by beforehand. These two numbers provide perspective during negotiation. If you can make substantially more elsewhere go do so. If they are already paying you more than you’re worth to them it’s time to polish up your Github account. If they offer a fair market wage but you know they desperately need you there is room to demand more.

Ridiculous offers have their place. Using them out of place can ruin your position. A high or low ball offer is useful for deflecting the opposite. Suppose $100k is the market wage. They offer $60k. You laugh and counter with $150k. Reasonable offers have a tendency to meet in the middle. Plan for this. Suppose they say $150k is way to much so you come back with $100k as a fair wage. They counter with $90k then you end up settling for $93k and an Aeron chair.  Don’t ever give what you think is the center point; you will only get argued down from there. Supposing you offered $110 instead, still a very reasonable offer, there would have been room to come down and still arrive at or above the market wage.

Don’t try to negotiate with the HR ditz. She can’t make decisions outside of a limited scope. If “salary requirements” are requested by middlemen, deflect and evade. “Ha ha, let’s see if we want to work with each other before talking money. First things first, you know what I’m saying?” People with actual authority tend to act like it. Know who to negotiate with and when to do it. Generally the later the better. Nobody cares if a stranger walks away. Questions will be asked why the charming young candidate rejected an offer. Perhaps a second will follow.

These tips are not exhaustive by any means but should provide a decent foundation for negotiating. More to follow.

This is not a personal finance blog but we have to touch on an important subject. Everyone needs to maintain a respectable buffer of cash to maintain their bargaining power at a job. If your boss thinks you can’t afford to quit he can force you into an unreasonable work environment. If he knows you can afford to quit at any time with little consequence he is forced to respect you.

It is important for those with authority over you to remain aware of your Fuck You Money. Bosses rightly assume everyone is broke, at their beck and call. Be tactful but explicit. Even use the phrase “F-You Money” explicitly. Don’t make overt threats unless you absolutely have to. Many managers have fragile egos and will often fire you out of pure spite regardless of the consequences to them. Lunch is a great time to let it slip. Giving advice to interns or young coworkers is a great time to incidentally be overheard. Frame the conditions of your employment in the interview if you already have savings. I tend to get involved in personal finance conversations with coworkers and occasionally use my bank balance to support my points. Don’t shove it in everyone’s face but make sure you position is kept in mind.

Never bluff. You are likely to be called on it.

So how much do you need? That depends on your circumstances. A full year of expenses should be sufficient for most people. If you live in a hot market and have a resume with decades of experience and in-demand skill sets, then 6 months will cut it. Not that you shouldn’t have more. A decade in the bank affords you Fight Club level zen.

Fuck You Money is on top of normal savings for unexpected expenses. It’s not the money you keep just in case your car dies or your wisdom teeth need to be removed. Be sure to include the replacement value of any employment benefits you can’t go without while unemployed. It’s also not your retirement savings or vacation fund.

Borrowing potential does not count. For one it’s not dependable. Second, it does not provide the same psychological effect to you or to your boss. Three, don’t be willing to go into debt over such a trivial matter.

It’s easier to achieve with a more modest lifestyle. Remember that nobody will rent to an unemployed person; don’t expect to suddenly lower your expenses. Also don’t assume you have the willpower to suddenly reduce your discretionary spending.

Don’t assume you can get a good job in a month or two. Hiring slows down during some parts of the year. Some hiring processes can take a month or more. Don’t assume you will pass every interview.  Don’t assume that what’s hot now will still be hot in a few months. Don’t assume you are as marketable as you think you are. Don’t assume there won’t be a recession.

Your life will be much less stressful with a pile of Fuck You Money in the bank. You can also afford to take risky fun jobs at small startups with more dreams than funding.

1. You will get a raise after 90 days, pending review. This is just a way to get you to agree to a lower salary. After 90 days, if they get around to it at all, your raise will be smaller than could have been negotiated up front. You’ve already declined other offers and closed other lines of inquiry. Nobody wants to go looking for a different job over $10k or $20k. You may even have moved. The company knows that and will use it against you.

How to combat this? Call their lie by bringing up past lies. “They said that at my last job.” Demand appropriate compensation up front. Flip it on them if you have to. “Pay me the asking rate now, then lower my pay if I fail to meet concrete performance metrics. After all, you can always just fire me.”

2. If things go well, you can work from home sometimes. In the best case scenario, you might be able to strong-arm them into working at home one day a week after entrenching yourself into some vital business process. They will still resent you and find every excuse for you to be in the office by 8am. If you can’t work from home starting the second week you never will.

3. We will fix X, Y, and Z after our next round of funding. Why didn’t they fix it last round? Or the round before that? The truth is they have bad management. Wrong priorities, incompetent developers, rampant scope creep, religious wars, crippling bureaucracy, indecisiveness, or complete lack of vision. Most likely several. All of those things are management problems. They will not go away after the next bag of helicopter money any more than a yard full of broken cars after someone wins the lottery.

4. Our next round of funding is right around the corner. If the next round was a sure-thing, why try to sell me on it? Is the company profitable? Break even? …Does it at least have users? Those are some good questions to ask in the event a company keeps hyping up its impending next round.

5. Your stock will be worth thousands of dollars after we IPO/sell to Microsoft. Stock has no value unless you can sell it. SEC regulations require potential buyers to have a shit-ton of money for you to legally be able to sell to them. In reality, you don’t even own stock. You will get options, not real stock. Your options will be “non-transferable”, which means that even if you could find a buyer, you can’t sell them. But you won’t even actually get the options. See, they need to “vest” over time, and you lose any unvested options if you are fired, laid off, or quit before then. Or if you get Zuckerberged. In the mean time the company will hold the unvested stock hostage to force you to put up with whatever BS they want. Oh, and don’t even think about asking for a raise or rocking the boat.

Not that the stock would ever be worth anything. Don’t forget that 99% of startups fail miserably.

6. It’s an industry standard employment contract. No need to read it. Except the part where they own your side projects. Oh, and the part where they can sue you if you dare to get a job for 3 years after they outsource your job to India. And that other part where you waive your right to a trial in any lawsuit. And the fact that violating a single line in the completely arbitrary “Employee Handbook” is considered breaching this contract. READ AND UNDERSTAND EVERY SINGLE LINE. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH ON THE LEGAL MEANING OF WHAT YOU DON”T UNDERSTAND. DON’T SIGN A CONTRACT YOU FIND UNREASONABLE. You can always demand they change it. I have and they did. Usually managers don’t understand anything in the contract themselves.

Don’t go to school. DON’T GO TO SCHOOL. You will go many thousands of dollars into debt. Worse, you will not be taught how to program. Worst, you will pick up the bad habits and foolish ideologies of your washed up professors.

Don’t waste your time on “code schools” or “bootcamps” or any such nonsense. You learn a few dozen buzzwords and not much else. The “job guarantee” is a lie. You will end up as a glorified intern at a sweatshop. I know. I was a manager (by attrition) at one of them. The code school graduates couldn’t even write a for loop unsupervised (no kidding). Applicants fresh out of these bootcamps didn’t even know basic terminology.

The primary skill of a programmer is learning. If you can’t learn under your own direction you won’t make it in the industry. The internet is full of tutorials and documentation for every programming language and framework ever made. For free. Study and code for several hours every night and at least one whole day per weekend. Do this diligently for six months and you might be ready to apply to the lowest entry level job. Don’t do internships. If you work, get paid. If nobody is willing to pay you, study harder on your own.

Your Github profile is everything. Your resume might as well be a description of your interesting Github repos. Nobody cares if you have a degree or a certificate or a participation award. All they care about is whether you can finish their projects and make them money. Why would a company hire you except to make money? Show them you can handle projects through your Github profile.

(As a side note, don’t use BitBucket. It makes you look like a weirdo, like you have no roots in the larger culture or community.)

Make sure those green activity squares look nice. I’m skeptical of self-taught applicants when I see a handful of squares over the past year. Do they not know to “commit early, commit often”? Do they understand the point and purpose of revision control? Of remote backups? Or do they lack the innate interest in programming? Perhaps they’re lazy. Perhaps the code is just lifted off some old site somewhere. It doesn’t look good from any angle. You don’t have to commit every day. You can have a few weeks empty. But the sprints of activity should be natural looking and frequent. The commit comments should be concise. Show them you have work ethic.

The last part is that you should run Linux. Natively. Preferably Ubuntu. Know how to use it and how to configure it. Know how to solve problems and set up application stacks. Most of the web is running on Linux and Ubuntu is most common. Startups can’t afford dedicated system administrators. Several of my development jobs were attained in no small part to being able to administrate the Linux servers when needed.

The entire point of a captcha is to determine if the user is human by requiring a task that is difficult for automated systems to do quickly and reliably. Spammers are sophisticated and well funded. At very least they have a couple high end gaming rigs. (What else would you do with all that spam money?)

As of the writing of this post, Google’s image captcha asks users to identify photos of cars. This means that a dude sitting on top of four TITAN XP’s and three standard deviations of IQ can’t make a program to identify photos of cars faster than a six year old trying to play some cheesy Android game.

So what then of Google’s “autonomous” cars? They are powered, effectively, by just one of those TITAN’s. Maybe a bit more. Definitely not four of them. Safe driving requires you to identify cars, above all things, nearly immediately. Compared to driving, captchas allow veritable eternities to identify a photo. Never mind the car needs to do other things with that chip too.

Still want to take a ride in one of those things?

There is a phrase in the industry, “Kill it with Iron”. It means to throw more hardware at a performance problem rather than trying to improve efficiency in the application. Usually it’s cheaper. Much cheaper. This will not always be the case.

Many people seem to forget that the rapid advancement of computing power in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is an artifact of one specific technology, semiconductor photolithography. This technology has an inherent end and becomes increasingly difficult with decreasing returns as that end is approached.

Node size follows a similar curve lagged by a few years.

In the early days cpu power advanced rapidly. Smaller processes meant faster chips. One could draw an exponential curve, but it only fits over a short span. Semiconductors hit a wall a few years after 2000. Progress has been slow. It will stop soon. There is no similar replacement in the tech pipeline. For all the talk of carbon nanotubes, they are still only slightly better than semiconductors. Not to mention severely underdeveloped from a manufacturing standpoint. Alternate semiconductor formulas have been around for years and have been overshadowed by silicon for good reason. The much lauded Indium-Gallium chips can achieve very high clock speeds and survive extremely high temperatures. They have been used extensively in spacecraft. Unfortunately the crystal structure limits process size to that of decades old silicon chips. Chips are going vertical but power dissipation will limit that.

Soon, exactly depending on who you ask and the phase of the moon, there will be no smaller silicon processes. Even now only certain components are being shrunk because others have hit their absolute limit. In a few years there will no longer be any significant improvement in processor power or memory capacity per cubic centimeter. Put more simply, power, price, and size are about to be tied directly. Want twice the power? Buy twice as many chips.

Kill it with Iron is about to die.