"... I spend most of my time on maintenance, and I offer retainers to companies that benefit from my work and from access to my planning and my expertise. I now have six amazing clients, and I’m making an amount of money equivalent to my Google total compensation package"
Well done and keep it up! I highly recommend that you find say two other individuals like yourself and form a triumvirate. An individual can have trouble taking time off, dealing with life's inevitable adversity etc.
That can work well for a fledgling org because two can out vote the one who gets it "wrong". This model does require a certain amount of trust and the ability to accept being wrong.
A few people seem to agree with me, so to flesh this out a bit:
Not all of us are going to fly a unicorn to a glorious multi billionaire finish. Most of us would like to be able to sleep at night, have a reasonably comfortable income and basically "get by". As this is HN, I will require a certain amount of "get up and go" but not too much!
I fell into the triumvirate thing 23 years ago. I became an IT contractor at a helicopter factory in the UK around 1996. Helpdesk n that. I learned quite a lot quite quickly and by 1999 ("party like it's") I was in the NETS team - sysadmin land. 2000 - we were Facility Managed off to ... ourselves and our company was started. I was recruited by two other NETS chaps to be the MD of their idea. It wasn't my idea.
So we have three blokes with equal shares of a nascent company. It works really well out of the box. Two can always gang up on one. We would have screaming arguments about direction or whatever but in the end there was always resolution.
23 years later, it still works. The three of us are quite different but we do completely trust each other. The trust thing is where my advice might become unhinged but the model is still very decent 8)
There's a saying, I don't know if its actually old or not, along the lines of: go to sea with one watch or three
the point being that with one watch you just accept whatever it says, with three you pick the closest two, but if you have two... fuck it man who knows: coin flip
If it's old, could it be about watches in the sense of a period of time that one person keeps watch on the ship. So the meaning is go by yourself or as three people. Not about teling the time.
It's about using clocks to compare local noon to Greenwich noon in order to calculate longitude. Thing is that about 50% of all English expressions relate to the British navy and the other 50% are falsely attributed to the British navy so it's hard to say if 1-or-3 was actually real advice.
Navy sailor here. Trained in celestial navigation. The 3 clocks thing is for real. On my first ship we still had mechanical clocks, on the theory that an EMP wouldn't bother them.
Captains have navigated oceans in rowboats to fetch rescue and survive mutiny.
It all starts with knowing where you are and where you intend to go.
Also: Ships aren't neccesarily killed by EMP - mechanical engines still work, they can be tuned by hand, rudders are operated by levers and hydraulics, these can be manually moved, etc.
Yes, but the scenario where you're relying on a mechanical clock because it survived an EMP attack is the scenario where you're getting attacked with nuclear weapons. Which... I dunno, the idea of rowing to safety seems a bit implausible in that scenario?
As for mechanical engines still working -- I would assume there's electronics in any modern hydrocarbon engines, for efficiency reasons (adjusting engine timing etc), never mind nuclear powered ships.
Well, EMP bursts going off overhead is not the same as being attacked by such weapons - the scenario planned for would be maximal operation after an EMP burst.
Dunno about you but I still have my working early model Sun workstation (pizza box years) rated to survive EMP with shielded casing, monitor, etc.
> I would assume there's electronics in any modern hydrocarbon engines
assume .. so, you've never worked on a container ship as a mech engineer babysitting a Wärtsilä RT-flex96C and you think the navy has a lot of nuclear powered ships then?
Have a deep think on this - do you think the US military designs ships to be useless when the electronics go?
No capability for manual weapons aiming, no ability to operate the engines or steer?
We've got a navy person commenting upthread here about having three mechanical clocks for longitude estimation in the event of no GPS .. what do you think that's all about?
early model Sun workstation (pizza box years) rated to survive EMP with shielded casing, monitor, etc.
Obviously, while it might survive some EMP, there's a limit to the efficacy of the shielding. Anything your Sun workstation would survive is trivially survivable by a quartz watch sitting in a shielded box.
you think the navy has a lot of nuclear powered ships then?
My understanding is that the entire submarine and aircraft carrier fleets are nuclear powered, yes.
Have a deep think on this - do you think the US military designs ships to be useless when the electronics go?
I think in a nuclear war scenario, surface ships are already useless (and most likely vaporized) so maximizing the efficacy of their navigation systems in such a scenario is probably not a priority.
We've got a navy person commenting upthread here about having three mechanical clocks for longitude estimation in the event of no GPS .. what do you think that's all about?
My guess is that the three mechanical clocks was more a matter of tradition than efficacy in modern warfare.
> Obviously, while it might survive some EMP, there's a limit to the efficacy of the shielding.
It was EMP rated by US nuclear agencies and used for nuclear test monitoring and radiometric surveys.
> the entire submarine and aircraft carrier fleets are nuclear powered
which leaves a lot of other ships .. and avoids the puzzle of why they wouldn't be able to function after an EMP burst - do you think you're the first to think of such a thing and no one has modelled about such an event?
> surface ships are already useless (and most likely vaporized)
You're assuming that an EMP burst high in the skay also vaporises all ships (or other weapons do), the design of military ships is to assume that they still need to function when damaged to a degree.
> My guess is that the three mechanical clocks was more a matter of tradition than efficacy in modern warfare.
You're hung up on warfare .. navigation may fail for all manner of reasons and three clocks for reference in determining latitude (after allowing for mechanical error) is a matter of sound numerics rather than crusty tradition.
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel is decent introductory read if you'd care to guess less and learn more.
Digging old quotes is actually one of the perfect ChatGPT use-cases:
me: Quote along the lines of "go to sea with one watch or three"
bot: "Take one watch or three, but always be on time."
me: Origin?
bot: This quote is often attributed to British admiral and explorer, Horatio Nelson. However, there is no definitive evidence to support this claim. It is possible that this phrase has evolved over time and has been adopted as a quote attributed to Nelson due to his association with naval and maritime history.
Yeah, I was wondering how his kind of arrangement could work if one needed or wanted to take weeks/months off at a time. The traditional model based on features or projects might be a better fit, unless one partners with others as you describe.
I'm so isolated. I never got a degree in this field and I don't socialize much. So I feel permanently trapped working for a company. It sucks, but not enough apparently to get me to change.
Well done and keep it up! I highly recommend that you find say two other individuals like yourself and form a triumvirate. An individual can have trouble taking time off, dealing with life's inevitable adversity etc.
That can work well for a fledgling org because two can out vote the one who gets it "wrong". This model does require a certain amount of trust and the ability to accept being wrong.
Then you take on staff ...