Prices are not quite that high, even in our most expensive place, Burlington, which has great schools, is on a lake and has a great community. You can find places over 3k a month, but they are really nice places. I'd say you can find a decent 3-bedroom for 2k and up. (Most of the rentals for the state can be found on craigslist: https://vermont.craigslist.org/)
But let me tell you about Montpelier, the smallest state capitol in the country and the only one without a McDonald's. I think it is the best small community in the world, however this is coming from someone who has not lived many places. Near Montpelier things are a little cheaper (depending on how near) and if you go out 15 minutes drive or more prices begin dropping drastically. Montpelier has at least one of everything you need: Mexican place, one sushi restaurant, one pharmacy, one grocery store, one co-op, etc. It does not have much for shopping, which is true of all of central Vermont but there is a Walmart in neighboring Berlin.
If you want somewhere close to cool community events but super-cheap look into Barre, which is Montpelier's sister community--but it's that sister who has had a bit of a 'failure to launch' and everyone suspects is doing drugs. Houses are dirt cheap in Barre and it is 15-minutes drive to cool things in Montpelier. And while there are more 'bad elements' in Barre, it also has a ton of really cool people not on drugs, raising families and I believe things are starting to happen there.
Both Montpelier and Burlington are great for liberal-minded, community-oriented persons, Montpelier being a bit more into it. Burlington seems to be mostly made up of out-of-staters and can seem quiet transient as they come and go, where more people seem to stick around longer in Montpelier. If you are like this and live in Barre you will have to seek out your kind, but there are plenty there.
Vermont is great if you love the idea of hiking, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, of owning a few acres with your own woods on them. Vermonters, especially rural Vermonters, pride themselves on minding their own business and letting everyone do whatever they want as long as they aren't bothering anyone else too much. Also we just legalized growing a few pot plants at home for your own recreational use, if you're into that.
Is New England drug epidemic really as bad as the media leads one to believe? I mean, in Santa Barbara, a lot of people smoke weed, but it's rare to hear about anyone doing heroin or meth.
Sigh... That is just absurd. Our company is domiciled here but nearly all our income comes from outside the state so we provide the same economic benefit. Even if the state wouldn't pay moving expenses I'm sure we would for the right candidates.
> Personally I feel about $100-200 fee as well, if the candidate is looking for compensation to build something fictional in 2 hours, is that candidate really care about your company, and is it a good idea to hire people who joins to your company just because you happen to be paying decent salary and they don't have a better option at the moment?
The money is more of a token to show that the company values the candidate's time and is not having them complete this coding challenge lightly.
> The money is more of a token to show that the company values the candidate's time and is not having them complete this coding challenge lightly.
That's my point. If a candidate takes it lightly because you didn't pay some dollars, does she care enough? If not, is she still a good hire? Do you want to hire someone who doesn't care about the job or the company enough to even fail to provide full effort on their first assignment?
If I am not not their supervisor and they are not specifically impacting my ability to get my own work done, I would mind my own business. Because it is thankfully not any part of my job description to monitor the time my coworkers spend in office.
You aren't aware of what they have going on, who in management they have discussed his with, nor what accommodations have been made for them via management. And they shouldn't have to discuss it with you unless they choose to.
If it's affecting your ability to work (beyond the action itself making you cranky and anxious), then bring it up to your supervisor, and make sure it gets followed up on.
I once found myself unemployable as well, maybe what I did can help someone. This was quite a few years ago when the ColdFusion job I had just ended and the job I had before that was in Visual FoxPro (and a few other even less known technologies). Talk about unemployable. Also I am not in a major city, so I was getting pretty much no responses to my resume.
After a few months I realized I was unemployable and set out to change it. Being unemployed, I luckily had a lot of free time. I made a study of the programming job ads in my target market and if I didn't know what a technology was, I looked it up. I tried to figure out which language was the most asked for, and decided it was PHP (at the time). Also in my studies and in the job ads I noticed that most of the work involved these new-fangled Content Management Systems and so decided I needed to learn one of those, and I chose Joomla. It was a choice I would later come to regret but it got me a job.
To learn these, for both PHP and Joomla I ordered a book from Amazon.com. I limited my search to books published in the last few years and ranked them by customer satisfaction and chose one near the top. And then I made myself go through reading these books and doing the exercises at the end of the chapters. This was very very boring but I made myself do it. Then I created a few Joomla websites for local small businesses for free.
And then, after 6 months of unemployment, I had made myself employable again. I saw a job ad that I was now now barely qualified for, applied, and was hired to maintain a legacy Joomla website. Was it a glam job? No, but it was somewhere to start. And the rest is history. I do think if I found myself unemployable again I could repeat the process and figure out what is being asked for these days and learn that.
I haven't done a study of it lately but I would guess almost any kind of expertise in a major JavaScript framework like Angular, Ember, or React/Flux might get you a remote job fairly easily, as there are very few experts in this and many companies seem to want it. Also most developers don't want to do front-end/JavaScript stuff like that so there is less competition. That's where I'd start looking anyway.
I chose to write a hugely boring open source product that no one in their right mind would bother with. Old tech, competing with a ton of other similar projects. I focused on the documentation, make it as simple as 'cut and paste this code to get it working' every time someone had a question, bam - a cut and paste example.
Did some serious SEO and soon was racking up a couple of thousand hits a week. This soon hits the million mark. That gets me interviews, even with people who don't want that old tech, they just see results.
I am currently doing a bit of Drupal for a client, there are a TON of half baked modules. Take some of them and make them work. Make them work with the backup module, the restore, the import.... then your CV is padded with a ton of neat stuff.
This is super common advice, the trick is to actually take it. Get all OCD about it and make it work.
No, sorry, not millions a week. It was a thousand or so a week. What I meant, is that those thousands add up to a more impressive number. The numbers have dropped off over the years.
> After a few months I realized I was unemployable and set out to change it.
First, as 20 something I can't imagine how hard it must be to wake up with the realization that you no longer have a job. Second, I think you deserve some real credit for 1. identifying that you were unemployable and 2. fixing it.
However, the real trick is identifying when you're unemployable (or even starting to get close to it) before you're unemployed. This is a game - and one that you'll never really win. But like all games: you keep playing - you get better. The trouble lies in that this is a game in which you need to be ahead of the gamemaster (that is - current and future employers).
> I do think if I found myself unemployable again I could repeat...
I want to stop you right there. I think your objective from here out is to make sure you never find yourself unemployable again - rather than waiting and/or hoping it doesn't happen.
> almost any kind of expertise in a major JavaScript framework like Angular, Ember, or React/Flux might get you a remote job fairly easily
These are valuable skills and expertise to have - and they will land you a job - but don't let it make you a one tricky pony - as that's a fast-track ticket to unemployment. I think few of these front-end frameworks will be here for the long-haul.
If I were in your shoes (of course I'm not in your shoes - it's 100% your choice) I would take what you've developed so far and start to dive into the fundamentals and then get the expertise.
For example: get to know the architectures of these frameworks: analyze and criticize them, attempt to improve them if you can; learn design patterns and identify the anti-patterns (important !); learn your algorithms - as it is these features that make you a valuable professional in the long run. Not just another PHP/JavaScript/ColdFusion dev.
Then you can wade in deeper and build up deep full-stack expertise. You could think about:
"Oh how can I optimize view rendering in Angular?"
"How can I solve head-of-line blocking when using web sockets?"
"What is the optimal compression algorithm in order to serve JavaScript files for mobile devices?"
I can't imagine a huge number of people think about how to solve these challenges - but I would bet that a lot of people face them.
All the other stuff is just tools to enable you to apply your expertise easier and faster.
"I want to stop you right there. I think your objective from here out is to make sure you never find yourself unemployable again - rather than waiting and/or hoping it doesn't happen."
I think that's kinda like saying, "I want to stop you right there. Instead of buying auto insurance, your objective should be to not get into a car accident again." It's a nice goal, but you're gonna need a backup plan for if something goes wrong.
I should rephrase my original sentence. When I said what I said I didn't mean that fringedgentian could guarantee he/she would never be unemployed - but that these steps would minimize his/her risk from finding themselves back in unemployment.
To continue your analogy, you cannot guarantee that someone will never have an accident, but you can recommend precautions to minimize their risk. It is these precautions that I was trying to hint at in my prior post.
I was in a similar position with classic ASP/Coldfusion and VB6.
What I did was rewrite my resume to target the things I did like build reporting engines and dynamic web pages. I mentioned more of my impact on my job and accomplishments over what technologies I knew.
I highlighted more general skills like SQL programming and downplayed other language specific references like VB5/6.
I landed a job no problem. I spent the week leading up to the job studying up on the tech they used and was ready enough.
Do they all own the same amounts of equity in the company, as well? Or, in the case of a sale someday, do two of those guys get rich and the others find themselves having worked for lower-than-average salary for all those years in the name of "fairness to all".
What they are probably doing is multiplying everyone's options, including yours, by 4 and reducing the value of each one to 1/4 the original. Then everyone still owns the same % of the company but it is easier for the finance people work with them.
So your # of options is probably changed just like everyone's, but they don't bother letting you know usually unless it is time for you to sell them. If you get the opportunity to sell, they will let you know your actual number of stock and what each can be sold for. That's what happened to me anyway.
Seeing how quickly this entirely negative, picky-pants review got voted to the front page of hacker news has inspired me to purchase and start reading Lean In immediately.
It makes me think there must be something to this book.
If it is a non-publicly traded company, then you have no access to your investment. You wait and hope for two things to happen: 1. the company increases in value, or at least doesn't go bankrupt 2. you get an opportunity to sell your stock and get your money out. This can happen when it goes public or if they make some deal to sell part of their company to another company, but regardless you have no control over it and it's not something that happens quickly or frequently. Likely years.
I think 20% off is not a good enough bargain for you to take on that level of risk, with no savings and a family.
But let me tell you about Montpelier, the smallest state capitol in the country and the only one without a McDonald's. I think it is the best small community in the world, however this is coming from someone who has not lived many places. Near Montpelier things are a little cheaper (depending on how near) and if you go out 15 minutes drive or more prices begin dropping drastically. Montpelier has at least one of everything you need: Mexican place, one sushi restaurant, one pharmacy, one grocery store, one co-op, etc. It does not have much for shopping, which is true of all of central Vermont but there is a Walmart in neighboring Berlin.
If you want somewhere close to cool community events but super-cheap look into Barre, which is Montpelier's sister community--but it's that sister who has had a bit of a 'failure to launch' and everyone suspects is doing drugs. Houses are dirt cheap in Barre and it is 15-minutes drive to cool things in Montpelier. And while there are more 'bad elements' in Barre, it also has a ton of really cool people not on drugs, raising families and I believe things are starting to happen there.
Both Montpelier and Burlington are great for liberal-minded, community-oriented persons, Montpelier being a bit more into it. Burlington seems to be mostly made up of out-of-staters and can seem quiet transient as they come and go, where more people seem to stick around longer in Montpelier. If you are like this and live in Barre you will have to seek out your kind, but there are plenty there.
Vermont is great if you love the idea of hiking, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, of owning a few acres with your own woods on them. Vermonters, especially rural Vermonters, pride themselves on minding their own business and letting everyone do whatever they want as long as they aren't bothering anyone else too much. Also we just legalized growing a few pot plants at home for your own recreational use, if you're into that.