If I run into a problem where I can't interpret the tax code myself, I'll schedule an hour appointment with a tax expert to get the answer to that specific question. If their answer sounds too good to be true, I'll schedule some appointments with other experts and take the most pessimistic answer. Ultimately, it's my responsibility that my taxes are correct, so I need to understand how they work.
I switched off of using tax software and do my taxes by hand, including rental income and stock sales. I'd estimate my tax return is 20-30 pages at this point.
If I ran my own company, I'd hand my taxes off to a tax expert at the point where filling out all of the forms represented such a significant investment in time that it detracted from my ability to run the company, but they would have to be significantly more complicated than anything the average person encounters. I would also hand them off to a separate firm if they reached the point where I needed credentials for the tax return to be valid - such as to assess the value of inventory.
It really doesn't take that much effort to learn how to do your own taxes, and the VITA program provides good free training in exchange for volunteering, which provides essential practice time anyway.
It's actually pretty simple. "Where I can't interpret the tax code myself" means "where my attempt to interpret the tax code leaves me with two or more possible interpretations."
The tax forms are very comprehensive. I go through each line of the 1040, following the instructions. Wherever the 1040 references some other form, I find that form, go through every line and follow the relevant instructions there. This approach has even gotten me through obscure edge cases like a company over-contributing to an HSA.
The tax code isn't magic and isn't full of gotchas. The rules may be arbitrary, but they're easy to follow and the IRS won't punish you as long as you're making a reasonable effort and report all of your income. There's an IRS help line you can call. People only really run into trouble when they try to take absurd deductions or claim that whatever tech investment strategy they've invested in doesn't count as income.
If you're scared of filing your own taxes, I really recommend volunteering for a local VITA program for a year.
As a generalist myself, I have decided not to require myself to become an expert in some tax issues, and so as a corollary decided not to complicate my finances with things that could invoke those issues.
From my perspective, writing comments on Hacker News and posting submissions are completely different skills.
When there's a topic on Hacker News that I'm knowledgeable about or that sparks my curiosity, I know how to write a comment. It's a skill I've built up from all of the other internet forums I've participated in.
On the other hand, the primary place where I learn about news that would be an interesting submission to Hacker News is... Hacker News. There's also a fair amount of randomness to what is ranked as a good submission. If I had to find 3-5 quality submissions before I could post on Hacker News, there's no way I would be involved in the community.
The comments are also the primary value add of Hacker News for many users, myself included. Sights like Stack Exchange might have a much higher barrier to commenting, but in those cases the central way users interact with the site is something else (questions and answers for Stack Exchange).
If you grew up with even the slightest feeling of financial insecurity, dipping in to savings can already feel like the end of the world.
I can't imagine living with only 6 months of savings. There's no guarantee that I could find another job in 6 months, and unexpected expenses (medical, car trouble, housing repairs) can easily wipe out a month of savings anyway. In fact, given that a layoff means likely also an economic downturn, finding a job at the same salary within 6 months seems highly unlikely.
I have probably 3 years of no-risk savings at this point, have managed to reduce my living expenses to the point where I could work a 40-hour minimum wage job and still pay for my expenses, and have multiple back-up careers, and I'm only now starting to feel that taking money out of savings is an acceptable risk. That took years of frugal living on a high tech salary. People in their first few years at a tech job or with families will probably never achieve that.
It's so frustrating reading the comments around here. It's like the conversation is driven by people whose circumstances fall on the upper tail end. No concept of financial insecurity. No long-term financial commitments to worry about. Infinite flexibility. Like jeez, congrats. Now try imagining somebody else that's not you.
Have you modeled to them how to make and develop friendships? Have you tried asking them what they've tried to do to make friends?
Limiting negative stimuli isn't enough for people to automatically replace it with good stimuli. It's the same struggle as leaving an abusive relationship or toxic job. People can know something is bad, but they're much less likely to leave a bad situation if they can't imagine what the better alternative is.
For example, my Dad is terrible at making friends. His co-workers and acquaintances like him, but most of the time his only significant relationship is with his spouse and his kids. My mom was great at making friends and finding community, but her ways of relating to people seemed inaccessible and indecipherable to me as a guy.
I did and do go to clubs of various sorts, but it's a real struggle to figure out how to turn those casual acquaintances into meaningful, reciprocal friendships. As soon as I had my own struggles or wasn't obsessively invested in the club, those friendships vanished overnight. I don't know any good books or resources to learn the skill of making friends. I can definitely see how someone who had more mental health struggles or was less extroverted than I who struggled to make friends in these situations would give up on trying.
Do you realize that these laws that are supposed to "protect women" mean that I, a trans guy who was assigned female at birth but now have a full beard and look completely male in any clothes considered acceptable in public settings, am required to use the women's restroom and changing rooms in Florida? Is forcing an angry (trans) man to use the women's restroom your idea of "protecting women's spaces"?
I would certainly be a better person if I was the sort of saint that can talk to people who hate my guts that badly, but not all of us are saints.
It's currently illegal for me to use a public bathroom in Florida. Or rather, technically I am legally required to use the women's bathroom, but since I have a significant beard it's quite likely the police would get called on me for attempting to do so.
The next best solution would be protest. What I should really be doing is flying to Florida, using the women's bathroom as legally required, and making sure that as many journalists and lawyers as possible know about the arrest. I haven't quite worked up the courage yet, though. Plenty of trans people can and do flee the states that have successfully deprived them of bathroom access and healthcare because they don't have the energy to stand and fight. The descent to attempted murder has already happened, and it's not the trans people starting it.
It's only a matter of time before so-called "pro-life" policies start killing people too. Hospitals in Idaho are flying women to other states because they're not legally allowed to end ectopic pregnancies - which are never viable and always result in the death of the mother if not terminated - until the woman is too close to death. (https://www.npr.org/2024/04/25/1246990306/more-emergency-fli...)
I don't quite follow this. Surely each poker player who raises thinks that they will take the pot and the other players will lose. So they don't each think that the raise is mutually beneficial. Player A thinks that the raise is beneficial for player A and detrimental for player B, and player B thinks that their call is beneficial to player B and detrimental to player A. Which seems like the definition of 0 sum.
Compare this to something like trading apples and oranges, where one person gets an orange (maybe they are tired of apples) and the other gets an apple (maybe they are tired of oranges). Both gets something they want in exchange for something they don't want.
I think you might be conflating two different skills because you haven't seen good examples.
First is the skill of being an effective and persuasive communicator. This is an important skill to learn for anybody. The best resource I know for this is How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. You need to actually read the book, not a summary someone posted on the blog.
People who only read the table of contents or a blog summary usually interpret How to Win Friends and Influence People as a book about flattery and manipulation, but that's not the actual message. The book has strategies for asking people questions about themselves, and presenting an argument in a way that will allow the other person to "save face" by making their change of heart look like their idea. It will make you a little bit of a better person in addition to a good communicator. If you're having trouble getting some of the concepts to click, you may want to find some friends to work through examples with. This type of practice isn't quite the same as Toastmasters, but Toastmasters is also helpful and you might find some interested folks there.
The second is the skill of talking a lot without saying anything of importance. This is used by Public Relations folks and politicians to persuade people to ignore the real issue at hand. It might be a useful skill for cover-ups or duping people who don't actually understand what you're talking about, but I think most people with a decent understanding of the topic at hand see through this sort of pandering. Politicians and PR reps probably still do it because people expect a response and - even for those who don't fall for the ruse - it's still impossible to figure out exactly how badly someone messed up after listening to a meaningless conversation.
A variation of this question gets asked semi-regularly on HN, but I think the reason the results so often seem unsatisfying is that the people who actually find a meaningful answer and switch careers aren't hanging out on Hacker News anymore. They're living their life and have found community with other people doing what they actually want to do.
As a result, the Hacker News responses are often incredulity that anyone could ever leave the software industry (even if it's a miserable soul-draining place), or slight career shifts that aren't really career shifts, with a little bit of Financial Independence Retire Early thrown in.
Now, where to find the community of folks who have left Hacker News for something they genuinely enjoy, that would be great to know.
There are plenty of good answers here. There just really isn't anything out there that is remotely close to SWE in terms of comfort, pay, and accessibility.
For the last decade or so, SWE has been one of the most accessible and lucrative professions that mankind has ever seen. Before that, most folks needed to go the finance/lawyer/doctor route to access similar levels of financial security. And those professions require significantly more trade offs than SWE (more training, worse work life balance, etc...)
The fact is, you are not going to make SWE level salary doing hobby level woodworking in your garage. You can get into the trades and with a fair amount of time and effort you might be able to pull in the equivalent of a junior level SWE salary. But the trades are rough on your body and you will pay for that later. Or you can try and transition to other types of white collar work, most of which will never come close to what a SWE gets paid.
And of course, these answers are pretty personal. I have a few too many hobbies and would be more than happy to spend a few years making not very much money trying to turn some of those into paying gigs, but I also have a wife who has a well established career and we have kept our expenses in check. If you are the sole bread winner and sitting on an expensive mortgage and sending your kids to pricey private schools, then your options are going to be much more limited.
Also, just to keep this conversation a bit more productive. I would recommend looking into jobs that are software related (or software adjacent) in interesting fields. i.e. construction, energy, biotech, government labs, etc... You will almost certainly take a pay cut, and you will still get some of the typical SWE BS, but it is much less pronounced in my experience.
>> There just really isn't anything out there that is remotely close to SWE in terms of comfort, pay, and accessibility.
Making the jump from there to keeping a software job being the right choice for everyone makes a lot of values assumptions, though. I personally can't stand working at a desk all day. If I stick to software engineering, there's no way to get away from the desk. Similarly, I value sending my kids to a public school where they aren't limited to a bubble, and I don't need an expensive house.
There are people who genuinely love physical labor. I have family who still live on a farm and didn't even own a computer last I heard. Sure, they're not making SWE money, but they're happy with their life. Their son went off to school but chose to come back to the farm. I have family who happily spent their entire working lives as carpenters/woodworkers and are still very able, but there are plenty of Hacker News responses that claim all carpenter/woodworkers end up cripples.
If I run into a problem where I can't interpret the tax code myself, I'll schedule an hour appointment with a tax expert to get the answer to that specific question. If their answer sounds too good to be true, I'll schedule some appointments with other experts and take the most pessimistic answer. Ultimately, it's my responsibility that my taxes are correct, so I need to understand how they work.
I switched off of using tax software and do my taxes by hand, including rental income and stock sales. I'd estimate my tax return is 20-30 pages at this point.
If I ran my own company, I'd hand my taxes off to a tax expert at the point where filling out all of the forms represented such a significant investment in time that it detracted from my ability to run the company, but they would have to be significantly more complicated than anything the average person encounters. I would also hand them off to a separate firm if they reached the point where I needed credentials for the tax return to be valid - such as to assess the value of inventory.
It really doesn't take that much effort to learn how to do your own taxes, and the VITA program provides good free training in exchange for volunteering, which provides essential practice time anyway.