We just integrated launchdarkly recently and I like it, they provide multiple flag types that I haven't seen on other services, the main one being migration flags (can be either 2, 4, or 6 step migrations) that allow you to control the migration from one system to the other.
It's been pretty helpful for us moving our analytics queries from mongoDB to clickhouse.
An alternative scalable way is to switch from a full time job to becoming a freelancer/consultant and set your own rates.
In order to be able to land high paying projects as a consultant, you would need to showcase your skills somehow (open source, portfolio, etc...). This can happen later on though and as a start the easiest way would be to ask for referrals and make it known to your network that you're looking for consulting opportunities.
Making this transition though would imply that you'll need to think about it as a business instead of a job, and start cultivating new skills i.e. communication, marketing, sales, etc...
20k a month is 1k a day, for 20 work days a month.
How to make 1k a day? Write 2 technical articles.
Btw. as a freelancer you could end up paying less taxes, because more things are deductible. This could mean, you can end up with the same money after taxes without making 250k a year.
Freelance writing these days is not very lucrative. Personally I won't touch it for less than $1/word (so about $1K/article = ~ 1 day). Which, if you do the math and account for all the unpaid time needed to be in a position to write a $1K article still isn't a lot of money.
The technical articles can serve as highly effective ads to lure your potential customers. The kind of technical writing that will leave no doubt in the minds of your readers that you demonstrate deep expertise in the technologies you are an expert in.
This is generally true of writing in tech whether articles or books. You can usually make more as a side effect (or as part of a salaried position) writing than you ever will with someone paying you directly.
> How to make 1k a day? Write 2 technical articles.
The going rate for a technical article written in ~4 hours is $500? That blows my mind. I'm not saying it doesn't happen -- I've only done non-technical articles -- but that it's hard for me to imagine it being profitable for the publication.
800-1000 words produced from scratch in 4 hours, including research, editing, and graphics, is going to be garbage one step above what you'd find in a content farm. The same derived with minor modifications from an existing article will be little better than scraped content.
As someone who does a fair bit of writing, I'd say a 1,000 word article is more like 1-2 days depending on research (including perhaps attending an event/interviews), administrivia, editing, procrastination, etc.--and can certainly take more than that. Not that I'm generally working freelance, but I'd certainly expect around $1K as the bare minimum. Which, if you do the calculation, probably only translates to about $100K/year best case before expenses, etc.
And, yes, a lot of publications pay less than that which is why you see a lot of writers with technical knowledge working for product companies doing content marketing and related.
> Btw. as a freelancer you could end up paying less taxes, because more things are deductible.
But you're also paying a lot more in base taxes and lose out on a bunch of bottom line income. I've been a freelance worker for ~20 years and recently switched to a full time position to mix it up.
Your employer pays half of your social security taxes but as a contractor worker you need to pay both ends, that translates to about an extra 7% in taxes. On $235,000 income (let's say you wrote off a total of $15,000 in the year) that's an extra $16,450 in taxes.
Your employer usually matches 3-4% of your salary into a 401k which is yours without any vesting period. On a 250k salary that would be $7,500 at 3%.
Your employer usually pays your health insurance. The absolute bottom of the barrel worst insurance you can get will cost you around $450 / month if you're a contract worker or $5,400 a year. There were even years (2016-2017 I think) where if you didn't purchase your own insurance you ended up paying thousands of dollars in fines.
Your employer may contribute to a number of nice to haves like tax free stipends for internet / phone bills as a remote worker. Let's call that $1,500 a year for everything combined (some of which is direct money in your pocket and some are services you might have access to).
So in the end being self employed results in paying an extra $16,450 in taxes and you net lose $14,400. That's a total of about 30k less. You also have the extra burden of filing quarterly taxes or you pay fines. You'll likely end up having to pay for an accountant too which will be another $500+ / year (not included in the above totals).
Yes, as a freelancer you can deduct a portion of your home office as business rent, computer supplies and other things you need to do your job but for a remote worker there's really not as many deductions as you may think.
I'm not saying doing contract work or being self employed is bad but I think it's important to be aware of these extra costs and things to think about.
There are some tax perks of being self employed too, like being able to fund a SEP account. For most self employed folks you can put 20% of your income or up to 58k in 2021 into this account. It's somewhat comparable to a 401k in the sense that it's a tax deferred account, AKA any amount you put into there will be taken off your income taxes today and you will pay taxes when you start withdrawing the money at about 60 years old based on whatever your income is then.
So in our example above if you had 250k income, wrote off 15k and then maxed out your 20% into a SEP for another 47k you'd really pay income tax on 188k. Keep in mind as a salary worker you'd have 19.5k into a 401k so it's mainly a benefit of about 27.5k of extra income that you're tax deferring.
Note: I'm not an accountant and I might be calculating things incorrectly but it's in the ballpark of a few percent.
One way to reduce your tax load is to contract through your LLC, pay yourself a salary from that, and get taxed as an S Corp. It helps to hire an accountant who knows how to handle most of this for you.
yeah i was coming here to suggest this. LLC with the S-corp election will save you ass-tons in taxes. the paperwork isn’t worth it until you get to around 100k in consulting income but from there on you can basically cut your SE taxes in half (although technically you don’t pay SE taxes with this setup, you’re paying yourself as w2 so their employer taxes)
> yeah i was coming here to suggest this. LLC with the S-corp election will save you ass-tons in taxes
Where did you hear that? No accountant I've ever spoken with mentioned it's worth setting up an LLC to save money on taxes as a typical set up where you're a solo developer who runs their own tech business.
I mean, paying yourself less of a salary through an LLC is going to result in paying less income tax but it's not a system where suddenly you're paying way less in taxes AND you get to keep the remainder to do as you please right now as if it's some type of easy loop hole.
There's also regulations around single employee LLCs around all profits being taxed as income for the owner.
i did it for years. You don’t pay employment taxes on dividends/distributions, just income taxes. so you’re still paying taxes on those but you’re saving 7.5% on the employment taxes side. maybe “ass-tons” is over selling it but coupled with business deductions you can take you can save quite a bit.
the IRS may take a closer look at you if you’re taking less than half your revenue in W2 income but otherwise it’s perfectly legitimate.
[edit: the S-corp election is key. look into that.]
> You don’t pay employment taxes on dividends/distributions, just income taxes
Did you have multiple employees? I think that changes everything, we're talking about a solo business owner in this case.
All profits from a single employee LLC get treated as income tax. Here's a quote from Intuit[0]:
> Single-member LLCs are disregarded entities. A disregarded entity is ignored by the IRS for tax purposes, and the IRS collects the business’s taxes through the owner’s personal tax return. Single-member LLCs do not file a separate business tax return.
This also applies to S-corp election. It's why a few accountants that I've spoken with have suggested that creating an LLC for tax savings as a solo business owner isn't worth it. It just complicates things for no real benefit. You have reduced liabilities but that's separate from saving money on taxes.
As you mentioned it would be a good idea to give yourself a reasonable salary as an LLC employee to not get audit by the IRS which is why you can't expect to hire a friend for $10 / year to instantly make yourself a multi-employee business.
> If a single-member LLC does not elect to be treated as a corporation, the LLC is a "disregarded entity," and the LLC's activities should be reflected on its owner's federal tax return.
(emphasis mine)
That “if” is significant. As an SMLLC you can elect either C-corp or S-corp (pass through) status, and that changes things completely.
This was the way I did it, I worked as a freelancer charging 1k a day based on me having both nice specific skills and language skills that are uncommon. eventually some of my clients approached me to work full time for them.
Furthermore, relatively few consultants have an endless stream of work that allows them to just work as much or as little as they want to each week. And, even if they do, some non-trivial percentage of even their working time is going to be non-billable hours related to administration, education, running errands, etc.
I'm personally suffering from back pain when staying in the same position for prolonged periods of time (working, sitting somewhere, laying down).
Work wise, I've tried many chairs, which evidently were not all the most ergonomic, but what I noticed was that it's mainly caused by weak core/back muscles.
So I just want to mention that an ergonomic chair wouldn't be a solution by itself if you're in the same situation as me, strengthening your core should be a very important thing to take into account as well.
I quit my job in 2018 without any other opportunity lined up.
I used all of my savings to go on an extended trip to Asia, the idea being that I'll travel around, work on my own projects, and do some freelancing to cover my expenses.
Things didn't go as planned though, I got robbed in the hostel I was staying at and lost my macbook. Eventually I decided to cut my trip short and go back home where I started freelancing (which I'm still doing currently) and I would say it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Agreed, the worst part was the fact that I had actually just purchased that macbook a few days before getting on the plane and I moved all my data to it without having it backed anywhere (Rookie mistake).
I could have:
- Picked a better hostel to stay at
- Backed up my data properly to minimize damage if it eventually happens
- Been more wary of other guests (99% of them were cool people but you still need to be aware of who's there with you)
- I used filevault, but forgot to enable find my device
I have no direct knowledge of how US government contracts work, but if I were somehow involved in the process of reviewing bids/proposals I would definitely not take a company that offers a $1 bid seriously.
Well, I think being promiscuous with "NA", "N/A", nan, etc. is a separate issue from a blank cell. A blank cell is literally missing. That should be filled with NA.
haha. You are right "NA" stands for "Not Applicable". That is not always how people/programs using it though. What are some alternatives that you would suggest? I am happy to learn.
I would suggest similar to what other people have suggested where you color the background of the cell red and then just display the literal content of the cell. I think it would be reasonable to have this configurable via command line arguments though, so if you like the "NA" that could also be a mode.
Perhaps it would make sense to have a "pretty" mode and a "literal" mode (which would also turn off the clever processing of numbers)?
I find that HN/Twitter are a good place to know about most tech related news, and sometimes important mainstream news as well.
My usual strategy is to be completely ignore all other sources.
For local news, if something is important I usually end up knowing about it through friends/acquaintances.
1. Don't automatically click on short links. There are plenty of url expanders online that you can copy & paste the link into that will tell you where the link goes.
2. Be very carefully clicking on links you don't already trust. That doesn't mean they are all malicious, most aren't. Just use your judgement.
3. Use https whenever possible. Things like banking sites & anything your are entering your banking info into or social security number etc; should always use https, no exceptions. Otherwise it's possible for hackers to monitor your traffic & steal your info. Look for the "https everywhere" extension. It's available on Chrome & Firefox & maybe others.
4. Watch the end of the url (the .com, .org, etc;). They're called Top level domains (TLDs for short). Government sites will always end in .gov, Military is .mil .org is generally organizations, .biz is for businesses .com or .net can be pretty much anything else. Two letter TLDs are generally for countries, .us is The US for example. There are also special ones like .bike for bike shops. There used to be a whitehouse(.com) that targeted people who didn't realize it should be .gov & when they clicked on it, they were redirected to a bunch of malicious sites that downloaded & installed malware without their knowledge.
5. If possible avoid using sites like banking sites in coffee shops/restaurants or anywhere else where you don't know you can trust the wifi connection like at home. Hackers sometimes create fake (but working) wifi networks hoping people will connect to them thinking they are the one setup by the business & when people connect them they can see everything users do & steal any data they send like login info for websites they visit. If you must use them there at least use something like tor to hide & secure your traffic from potential hackers.
It's been pretty helpful for us moving our analytics queries from mongoDB to clickhouse.