Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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A year back, we moved from Santa Clara, CA to Bellevue, WA in the US. A year is enough time to get some perspective on how the places compare and what makes one better than the other.

The notes and areas of interest are from a point of view of an Indian immigrant working in the IT (Software) industry and with a family.

1. Housing. Advantage: Seattle

The Housing situation is slightly better in Seattle when compares to the bay area and the Seattle market is traiing the bay area market by a year or so, that meant 15% price increases in the last year while a almost flat market in the bay area. If considering single family house. one can buy a decent livable house in Greater Seattle area for U$500k (A new one in Snoqualmie or a older one needing renovation in some Bellevue zips: 98008)

Our preferred criteria is to avoid too much commute (<= 20 minutes each way) from current and future work (Bellevue, Redmond, Seattle, Kirkland) and good feature set in the house.

Seattle market: Areas worth considering to stay: Bellevue, parts of Redmond (much lesser commute). Areas within 30 minutes commute any time of the day are Snoqualmie, Kirkland, Woodinville and Redmond Ridge. The lowest house prices are around 500k (30+ year old small (1500 sq ft.) 3BR, 2BA rambler in good living places, average school district in Bellevue or a new larger house (2500 sq ft.) with good features(hardwood floor, island, etc) in Snoqualmie. Next level of houses are in the U$ 700k-850k range, these are newer (<10 years), good school district (Eastgate, etc), basically these are snoqualmie or better houses with lesser distance from work, shops, etc. Rents in Eastside for Houses is typically from 1400 to 1800, 1600 to 2000
Bay area market: Areas worth considering to stay and affordable: Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and parts of Mountain View. Areas within 30 minutes commute are San Jose (Evergreen, etc) and Fremont. The lowest house prices are around 800k (30+ year old (2000 sq ft.) 3BR, 2BA house in Evergreen.) Typically prices are U$ 900k-$1 million in and around Sunnyvale and highend comparable houses are in the US$ 1.3-1.5 million range (v/s 800k.) Rents for Houses is from 1800 to 2200, 2000 to 2400
Summary: Even with a house market slowdown, bay area requires both couples working and a singular focus on making more money. In the Greater Seattle area, buying one of the good houses creates the same requirement and the 30% or so lower salaries partially offset the 40% or so less higher end house prices. The key difference in Seattle: Lower cost homes are available(yes, 500k is lower these days) if you want take lower quality or larger commute and dream houses which would be US$2-3 million in Saratoga are available for US$1 million in Woodinville.

2. Tech Job openings and salaries. Advantage: Bay area

In Seattle, the total number of tech job openings are much less than bay area, I would expect them to be 1/3 or 1/4 of bay area.

Bay area has job openings for much wider area of expertise. Another key point, if you (as I have) worked in non-Microsoft technologies, these jobs are very few in the Seattle area. When I was looking last year, there were maybe 6 companies that were looking for Software developers for Unix\Linux\Kernel skillset. Skillsets Seattle are Windows (C#, dot-net), gaming and internet.
In Seattle, the typical software engineer salaries for mid level experience C++ engineer are in the 75-100k range. In Bay area, the typical software engineer salaries for mid level experience C++ engineer are in the 90-130k range. This is a large advantage even after the CA state income tax of around 9%.
Disclaimer: In both places, if you stay in one company for > 5 years and perform well, you can and will get into higher range and develop depth in the company\group’s area of expertise.

The other article in this series:

• Comparing living in Seattle (Eastside) or Silicon Valley (SF Bay Area): Part 2 (Weather)
• Comparing living in Seattle (Eastside) or Silicon Valley (SF Bay Area): Part 3 (Traffic and Miscellaneous)

Articles by others:

• Andrew Chen writes on the Entrepreneur culture in Silicon Valley as compared to Seattle: Meeting people in Silicon Valley
• Dustin on Rain City Guide: 10 Things You Should Know Before Moving to Seattle

Last Updated: Feb 15 2007

Chapter 29: Say No ‘or’(my alternative title) Say No to unrealistic schedules or deliverables

from My Job Went to India And All I Got Was This Lousy Book: 52 Ways to Save Your Job by Chad Fowler.

Excerpts from the chapter

• The quickest path to missing your commitments is to make commitments that you know you can’t meet. Saying “yes” is an addictive and destructive habit. There’s a big difference between a cando attitude and the misrepresentation of one’s capabilities.
• If I have a team member who has the strength to say “no” when that’s the truth, then I know that when they say “yes,” they really mean it.
• “I don’t know” is also a great thing to say when it’s appropriate. You might be responding to whether you can meet a date and need time to research the task before committing.
• Act on it: Keep a list of deliverables and dates promised and see how many did you meet. Do this for each project

My notes and comments

• Very useful advice. It is important to give realistic deadlines and meet them.
• My own guidelines for schedules:

1. Start with a range instead of a date and put a note and reminder saying when you will convert to specific date, this could be post design or in first week of development.

2. It is difficult to be accurate if the task is not broken down into small items, each being less than 4 days.

3. The chances of hitting the deadline increases if you have worked on the technology and area before.

4. Keep in mind other work\deliverables which are planned or might come up.

5. Sometimes one has to work to a schedule that they do not agree too, mention that to those in charge including probable delay and do your best.

6. Whenever possible, always do a complete reevaluation on a deadline miss and give it a new well thought of deadline instead of the tomorrow or monday morning deadline

Final verdict: Agree

Rest of Entries and Main Post: My Job Went to India, 52 Ways to Save Your Job: TOC, Notes and Comments

I read the post on Paul’s Tips: How to work out if you’re better off renting or buying a place to live and found a problem with this quick back on the envelope calculations.

What the cost of renting a house is compared to buying it

House number one
Price: $1,000,000
Rent: $31,285 per annum ($600 per week)
Current interest rate: 7%
Interest on $1,000,000 loan for one year: $70,000

In this example, buying the house costs over double what renting it does for a single year. A lot of factors would have to change before buying could be considered more financially attractive.

This is incorrect as the comparison should be to the real impact of interest, which is total minus income tax deduction+property tax. My modified version would be:

If rent >= 60% of interest or 55% of total payment+1% of payment, it is better to buy on a pure cost basis as interest is tax deductible(25-33% off) if you do not hit the AMT limit.
For a 500K house, it has to be >= 2025 per month
For a 600K house, it has to be >= 2375 per month
For a 700K house, it has to be >= 2900 per month
For a 900K house, it has to be >= 3750 per month
For a 1.15M house, it has to be >= 5000 per month

The market should not be about to fall though and this does not cover property taxes, closing costs, insurance (House as well as Mortgage).
Now back to my usual topics.

Update: The deduction of interest rate from your federal income tax is a US law.

Chapter 28: Learn How to Fail ‘or’ (my alternative title) Handle errors in code and work life

from My Job Went to India And All I Got Was This Lousy Book: 52 Ways to Save Your Job by Chad Fowler.

Summary: Fairly standard advise on handling errors in code(asserts, unit test) and in work life(accept, fix, improve)

Final verdict: Agree

Rest of Entries and Main Post: My Job Went to India, 52 Ways to Save Your Job: TOC, Notes and Comments

Coincidence

Twice is a coincidence, thrice is a pattern. By Amit (Me) derived from
Once is an accident; twice is a coincidence; three times….a conspiracy. By A.C. Clarke

Life

My life is my message. By Gandhi

Private Victory

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey writes that private victory should precede public victory. For example, if you can’t discipline yourself to get your own work done, then you won’t function well as part of a team. I think it’s equally true that physical victory should precede psychic victory. That isn’t a requirement of course, but I think it’s best to achieve a reasonable degree of success with your health, home, career, and finances before you go full out trying to communicate with spirit guides. By Steve Pavlina

Unconsenting soul

He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul. From Wizard of the EarthSea by Ursula K. Le Guin

A good way to live

This is how a man should live. Well, it’s one good way. There are others. From Wizard of the EarthSea by Ursula K. Le Guin

HDR Image courtesy Matty_P on flickr

Chapter 27: Eight-Hour Burn ‘or’(my alternative title) Work less hours with more focus

from My Job Went to India And All I Got Was This Lousy Book: 52 Ways to Save Your Job by Chad Fowler.

Excerpts from the chapter

• Bob Martin renamed 40-hour workweek to “eight-hour burn.” The idea is that you should work so relentlessly that there is no way that you could continue longer than eight hours.
• When it comes to work, less really can be more. The primary reason cited by the Extreme Programmers is that when we’re tired, we can’t think as effectively as when we’re rested. When we’re burnt out, we aren’t as creative, and the quality of our work reduces dramatically. We start making stupid mistakes that end up costing us time and money.
• Most projects last a long time. You can’t keep up the pace of a sprint and finish a marathon.
• You get to work and think, I’ve only got eight hours! Go go go! With strict barriers on start and end times, you naturally start to organize your time more effectively. You might start with a set of tasks that need to get done for the day, and you lay them out in prioritized order and start nailing them one at a time.
• Budget your work hours carefully. Work less, and you’ll accomplish more.

My notes and comments

• I believe and try to follow this philosophy in my career. it is also been a crucial reason that I did not burnout when we had our baby and that I can explore spirituality and other areas of life.
• However, I do not deny that productivity is a multiple of ‘output rate’ and ‘hours worked’ and also thay given age, priorities and motivations, some engineers will work long hours for a longer time without a burnout. And that compensation and promotion should be based on productivity and impact.
• It will be good to have more companies including startups with this philosophy, kind of like the Patagonia ( Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard)

Summary: I agree completely with the premise of the chapter. Move towards balance.

Final verdict: Agree

Comments, Thoughts?

Rest of Entries and Main Post: My Job Went to India, 52 Ways to Save Your Job: TOC, Notes and Comments

I read a blog posting by Erin Pavlina: Children vs. Purpose: Do the two mix?

It’s timing was interesting as a few people I know have or are having children and our child became 3 year old recently, giving me enough space to think with somewhat experience and hopefully insight.

My own difficulties were not from if I do someother things, what will it take away from my child, but more of, what should I drop from other areas of my life due to the new things in life.
My letter to new parents, especially for the first two years in forms of suggestions

• Get help when the new born comes, particularly for the first few months. Ask grandparents to come(if possible) for a few months, one at a time, get a maid to clean up, iron clothes and even cook a little. Grandparents are great also because they have done it all and are mostly wise and cool at handling child issues.
• Make a conscious decision of what you will drop from your life else things will drop anyways, but without your knowing. Hints: Meeting with friends will happen less, so will Movies or or TV books that you read for leisure. The career and success by hard work (> 40 hours per week) will go on a hold or take away from other areas including sleep and health.
• Get healthy and stay healthy, especially if you have a sendetary career (like software development.) I would highly recommend Yoga.
• Finally some guideposts from a parent’s POV: First 3 months: Will be a blur, lot of tiredness and lack of sleep. Stick together and share the burden. Next 6 months: Getting better, but still tough going and requiring stamina but with more free time and energy. Go slow in bringing up old or new activities back. Next 9 months: The best and great fun, the baby responds, smiles and laughes, even walks and some words come out. Sleep times are now much longer (6-8) It is a delightful time. Try to ensure, baby sleeps in her bed\room by this age, 9-18 months. Next 12 months: It is easy from here on, things only reduce including no diapers and so on.

And if I were to reply to the question to Erin, it would be:

Question: Can one live their life with purpose if the purpose seems to be almost entirely for or through their children? And if a person feels like they need to be doing more, how do they do so without being as invested in their children as they could have been? - Laura

Yes one can live their life with purpose, if their purpose is entirely for their children. I know people who do and are happy. It is same as people who can work in a single company and job all their life and be happy. Satisfaction is a personal goal, everyone needs to find their own.

If I were to look at purpose as find one’s calling or even increase in one area of life (Career, Spiritual, Money), early parenthood is a tough time to make new leaps. Things are better off put on a hold for say 2 years.
If a person feels they need to do well and can(say afford daycare) and are happy with things happening in their child’s life, they should make changes to go and explore their purpose. It will take away from other parts of life including parenthood, however after a certain threshold, the impact of this will be less and less. Think of what will benefit the child as well as you, playtime or daycare will take the child away from the parents, but teach them social skills and let them have fun.

This threshold is yours to choose and know, for example, one threshold would be, you are happy making the child and having dinner, playing for an hour and teaching\learning for one hour each day. Another threshold would be, tucking in every night and reading a book. Choose it consciously.
Finally, I would point to the song, Cat’s in the cradle by Ugly Kid Joe among others.

Though I never worked at Amazon and once did not make it beyond the screening test, there are lessons I learnt from Amazon, from friends who work(ed) there, from others in neighboring companies and from the web.

These are views as a software developer, as a customer I love the company and if all the internet companies were to go away, I would want amazon.com to be last.
1. On work distribution: It is important for developers to know and even run their software, but it should not be more than say 10-15% of a developers job.

Reason being it is a overkill, both in terms of capability and money (Read reason 5. in Joel’s article: Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don’t Have Testers)

Background: Amazon teams manage their environment. This means, they know their web servers, the queues and database. It also means, it is common for software engineers sit for hours and upgrade web servers do other similar tasks. Typical backend Amazon engineer will spend 25% of their time, a decent IT person can do.

2. Monitor workload during oncall days\weeks and take steps to reduce it if it is getting out of hand.

If a software developer is on call one week every month and there are enough escalations to keep them too busy, something(quality, workload) is broken.

3. If nothing on core work gets done during certain months or more (Christmas, Harry Potter release), new work will suffer.

Background: Most of software development comes to a halt during these times at Amazon. That is 3-6 months of support and recovery time.

4. Watch why candidates are getting rejected.

Background: An interview candidate got low points on fit and got rejected as he did not seem hard working (12 hour days, 6 days a week.) On the other hand, software development members quit as the work pressure was too much. Another interview focused on advanced core language skills (C++ Template Meta Programming.) which then one never use once you join.

5. Know where small teams fit (Called Two Pizza in Amazon) and where they do not

This will also show up as hurdles due to mixed up priority, lack of predictablity or missed deadlines of cross team projects. Small teams fit well for new projects with minimal dependencies like say, Amazon web services, however for large leaps like search in books. you need VP or Director level buyin and priority setting.

6. The CEO on down should know what is being done at the lowest (Developer) level

Bezos does it like few do. I believe, if it is a startup, a CEO should interview or meet every candidate.
Background: Bezos: I am not worthy on Geeking with Greg

PS: This post got triggered by the Amazon CTO, Verner Vogels posting a comment as follows

the best way to completely automate operations is to have to developers be responsible for running the software they develop. It is painful at times, but also means considerable creativity gets applied to a very important aspect of the software stack. It also brings developers into direct contact with customers and a very effective feedback loop starts.

Hat Tip to Eighty-Twenty