Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again.
I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, customer support, customer success, and inside sales at a B2B SaaS company.
Modestly obsessed with mobility networks. (like... roads, streets, bike paths, sidewalks, and the vehicles and people that occupy that space)
Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more.
Just started recently, partially inspired by spending a few weeks in Bali. (Being a laid-off tech worker has its upsides).
If I can get traction around this business idea, I'll move sideways into guerilla action road network improvements, to make the junctions around the businesses I work with more habitable and safe for scooters, pedestrians, and cars.
Soooo I'm trying to make my job something like "one who improves the functioning of road networks, sponsored by the direct beneficiaries of those improvements."
With a little success, I'll be able to start hiring people to help. Maybe I'll find a few other tech people to help. There's plenty of room for software developers to make meaningful contributions to these projects, but only after spending a lot of time not behind a laptop.
A career change is really attractive but adjusting salary expectations is brutal. Skilled jobs I was interested in and assumed were making $30+ an hour I looked into and found they are closer to $18-20/hr. After tech gigs making 250k+ with equity it is a pretty brutal downgrade.
My interest is in starting an all electric gardening company, electric tools have caught up to gas ones, they are almost silent and have 0 emissions. If you live in the suburbs you will know that gas blowers are the death of quiet afternoons and I am not sure why the transition to electric is taking so long.
It would just require a large initial investment followed by a huge pay cut and the uncertainty of being able to build it into something larger :P.
I wonder if you could start by buying the equipment, and popping fliers around your neighborhood, and doing the work yourself nights-and-weekends, sorta dog-food your own business, until it's stable enough to hire a neighborhood kid to do the work for you.
I mowed lawns and shoveled driveways growing up (suburban kid) and found it to be rather enjoyable and satisfying.
But yeah, tech salaries have been drafting on the VC over-investment for a while. I was never at $250k+ with equity, but it's a bitter pill to swallow.
In some ways, though, it'll build empathy for how the rest of the world lives/works.
Earning so much money doing nothing more difficult then pressing buttons on a box is pretty cool.
I bought a house a few years ago and got all electric yard tools (mower, trimmer, blower, and more - all Ego). They're a joy to use. Such a step up from the gas tools of my youth.
I am also one that doesn’t really enjoy total specialization but every single thing I can come up with, looks like a hobby compared to being a developer financially.
Agreed, I'm probably past the point where I could make a jump into the career area I wish I had gone into with hindsight (forest ranger, fisheries & wildlife, land management for land trusts, etc), but if I was <= 35 I would consider it. However at the age of 41 I've crossed into the 250k+ total comp territory and it's hard to imagine taking that significant pay decrease and making a move where I'm at the bottom of the ladder.
Maybe it depends how you view it (and your financial position, obviously high income doesn't necessarily mean any saved/significant assets) - one could think of it like early retirement, not a career change and pay cut, but something to occupy some time, do for interest/meet people/see things/be outdoors, etc.
(By the way, as an almost 30yo SE with a younger brother doing exactly what you describe... I'm not sure quite how to feel!)
> Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more.
How do you make money doing this?
I also don't see how you really achieve this as a business. The best way to do this would imo run for city council with the backing of developers, remove zoning, and then implement road improvements.
Most cities have parking requirements for cars, so they legally can't remove paring spaces. This needs to change at a legal level.
Offer this as a service to a business. The service (which I'm charging for, but don't yet have customers) is:
1. Paint some scooter parking lines in a reasonable spot, and add a signage explaining why the org wants to incentivize scooter usage.
2. The scooter parking would make use of existing nooks and crannys in the parking lot, so it wouldn't take away existing car parking.
3. Work with the staff to find the staff that lives relatively close to the business, and is amenable to scooting. Teach and train and hand-hold through their scooter purchase, so when they're working, their scooter is parked outside.
4. Once there's staff using scooters regularly, there will nearly always be a scooter or two parked outside the building, which will start to normalize scooter usage for customers
5. Hand-hold early adapting customers through the same process.
6. Add signage and website and email campaigns to let interested customers learn more about the whole thing.
Done. Every time there is a scooter parked in front of a business, that's a car parking spot freed up. Keep refining the process until during busy hours, there is a number of scooters in front of the business equal to ten percent of the number of parking spots.
I won't be removing any parking. Only creating new parking, and helping more people start scooting.
I ran for city council in golden, Colorado, a few years ago, and saw far too much of how the sausage is made. City councils have no power, by design. They exist to absorb the ire of angry citizens, and to insulate the city staff from the effects of their decisions.
There is no world where city council is helpful. They're a lagging indicator of the social norms of middle and upper class white people.
The legal changes will lag social changes, so it's not helpful to directly target legal changes.
Okay, I commented below but you mean a MOPED type scooter not a lime / bird type e-push scooter.... I literally was imagining you out in the street marking lines on the pavement for lime scooters that are the size of... well the lines in the first place and was like "this dude is off his rocker"
I may indeed be off my rocker, but at least it's for slightly more sophisticated reasons than what would be implied by my choice to be hustling lime scooters!
'i went to Canada on a scooter' has such a a different implication...
revzilla, like revzilla.com, the motorcycle store, or magazine, as you say?
saw a dude yest cruising around on some type of etrike - i liked it, and i think the main reason was because it didn't seem as ugly and wide and low-quality as a typical non-e-trike.
i could see etrikes becoming a thing for older americans, and that matters because they have a ton of political power, relatively speaking.
i figure, all the hype around ebikes is great, but largely useless. all that really matters is infrastructure/policy -- i.e. bike tracks, bike sidewalks, cycletracks, protected bike lanes, whatever you want to call them.
i feel like the golf cart-oriented communities are a perfect example of re/designed infrastructure allowing people to get around by something other than cars. same might happen if a bunch of older, upper-income white people with tons of political power decide etriking might be something they might like to do occasionally. they wouldn't have to be older or white - it just so happens that's the demographic that is currently in charge and has been forever and prob will be for the foreseeable future, and so many of our policies are based on identity politics.
I think scooters could be great for older folks, too. Help them retain balance and stuff. Scooters are way more stable than bicycles, but can go fast and can ride as fast as a car, if needed.
Totally agree with old white people representing political power, so whatever they want is what happens.
Revzilla has a blog and paper magazine (yes, real high quality paper) and it's the some of the best writing on motorcycle culture anywhere right now. (Along with Zach Bowman at The Drive and Fortnine's YouTube.)
The pitch is that businesses can reduce parking congestion (is there a dollar value you can pin to this?) by paying you to act as a personal scooter consultant for their employees?
During research did you come across any mass-market applications of this sort of concierge service? It sounds very niche/upscale. I can’t think of any purchase I’ve made where I could have even found someone to hold my hand through it that wasn’t the person making the sale. The closest analogue I can think of is a travel agency.
A good (new) scooter costs $4500 out the door, and plan on another $600 for a jacket, gloves, a Snell-certified helmet, cell phone mount, and bluetooth headset so you can hear directions from your phone.
Take a motorcycle rider training course, and get the motorcycle endorsement on your drivers license.
Next would be skills-building around slow-speed turns on the scooter. It'll be pretty easy, but you'll have to practice it at least a little.
For that cash I can just have a motorcycle or an e-bike. Why would I want a scooter in this case? Not dissing on scooters, I don't get it though. Bikes and motorocyles are a lot more stable at speed than scooters.
OH YOU MEAN A MOPED... not a Lime Scooter. OK... we're on the same page.
Yeah I'll keep rocking my FJR but I'd do a e-moped if I had rides around my house, tho for that an e-bike is more compelling. FJR oddly gets 40+mpg.
Hah! I wonder how many other people have made the same mistake. There's really not a great word for this class of vehicle. I have been tempted to use the word 'moped', but got sternly corrected by the staff at sportique scooters when I was last there.
I think I might keep using the word moped though, motor scooter doesn't quite do it, and scooter is too confusing.
Or maybe I could say 'gas scooter' or '125cc scooter' or something.
I recently crossed paths with the the electric moped I met in the wild, and it was beautiful and quiet.
I'm not going to get rid of my 170cc scooter anytime soon, but I would totally consider adding an electric moped to the fleet.
There is indeed a dollar value one can pin to the extra parking availability. It's business dependent, but absolutely it can be tied to additional revenue.
And yeah, 'personal scooter consultant' is the pitch.
It's concierge and not traditional, but so am I.
As far as mass market application of this concierge service, I don't think there needs to be a mass market adaptation. Once there's some minimum buy-in, scooters will be normalized and more and more people will default into using them.
Its way more likely you would buy a scooter once you'd ridden on a friend's scooter from the gym to a local park for throwing a Frisbee. If, however, you didn't know anyone who owned a scooter, maybe you'd never own your own.
So... I'll hand-hold and concierge whatever is required to get critical mass.
I've already got two friends that have bought scooters, and they love it. I have four more friends now about to take the plunge. Scooters spread through friend groups, it seems.
Once you see how many problems they solve, and how much more fun and convenient they are, it's hard to unsee.
But it's damned hard to be the first person to make that choice.
I, too, don't know that I have seen this exact model before, but each scooter purchase saves a parking spot for another customer, so the businesses I work with will be invested in the results.
It's fun to work on, and everyone I've talked to has been super interested. Parking issues dominate the lives of general managers/directors/owners of Denver area businesses.
They'll try nearly anything to make those problems be less of an issue.
you sell the scooters and get a commission for the people re-doing the parking lots. the customer company is incentivized by green initiatives and they have budgets to spend.
Critically, no re-doing of the parking required. It'll just be adding scooter parking spots in existing nooks and crannys around the building/parking lot.
Company is incentivized by adding available vehicle parking spots.
Sportique scooters, the local scooter dealer to Denver, is down and happy to offer me some commission for scooter sales that I bring in, but that's not the main thing for me. I want corporate buy-in from the companies I'm courting, cuz I'll need their permission to access staff and customers.
(I'll be adding signage, and the companies will make some concession to scooter riders, to make it a bit more appealing. A free drink, $20/mo in free food, etc. It'll be a case-by-case decision, based on what they can offer that's easiest/most useful to the customer, etc)
Scooters are super cheap, and let you move through a city way fast, and can be parked nearly anywhere, regardless of how busy the area is, and it's literally $6 for a tank of gas. And they get 100 mpg.
I think a little progress will lead to a lot of progress.
I'm working on a model of charging the business for this service. A monthly fee, or project based fee.
This week is the beginning of my sales process, and I've talked to many people that are super interested, working my way to the people that sign checks.
I'm hoping to get a spend of a few grand per month per company I work with, and get them to commit to a few months of my efforts.
It costs $1500 to pave a new asphalt parking spot (and $25k for a parking spot in a parking garage) so a service that "adds 10 parking spots", roughly, is valuable, and, more importantly, adds capacity to the business when they're otherwise maxed out.
I'm talking to restaurants, breweries, and climbing gyms, at the moment. All of these institutions are sensitive to their customers and staff not being able to find parking.
> Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters…
> Working on going independent here in Denver … to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot
What will the scooter-users do when it snows? Don’t the parking lots still need to be scaled to the max likely number of cars?
when it snows, scooter-users probably won't scoot.
Denver remains surprisingly usable in times around snow, though. a 5a trip in the winter with snow is quite different than a 1p trip that same day, when the sun is out, the roads have been cleared, and the temp is 38 degrees.
good question. No idea. I didn't ask, and wasn't there as a laid-off tech worker. :) I was visiting a friend who moved there a decade ago, and scootering around the island.
So, I had good food, met lots of interesting people, read books in beautiful places, and saw beautiful sites.
I called it 'a research trip for bringing better scooter norms to the USA'. Bali's scooter game is fire!
I'm in the Philippines. Backend dev still working from home, but not making the kind of money I want to make and probably will not be able to make given the current state of tech. Maybe I need to think about a career change. Not getting any responses to applications at all.
I hear it's a hard world for engineering applications rn. That's part of why I didn't wanna go back into tech. We'll see. The world is in a strange way right now
'just' feels slightly de-dignifying, but overall this is not totally wrong.
I'd say there's a lot more to do there than sleep around, but there seemed to be plenty of that. (I'm white-passing, have done the nomad thing in the past, didn't go to sleep around, don't consider myself to be a terrible romantic partner, but am recently divorced, so you shouldn't take only my word on that).
I'm nearly autistic when it comes to land development regimes, and Indonesia is widely regarded as having some of the best land use regimes in the globe, and I wanted to go experience it.
Turns out... It does!
It hurts my soul to return to the USA, where urban planners are the land-use equivalent of flat earthers.
Interesting, I've gotten very interested in land use recently and had not heard this about Indonesia. Are you talking specifically about Bali here? Because I've been to Jakarta and I can't say I endorse the land use there based on the few business trips I've taken.
Where can I read more about what you're talking about?
Alain Bertaud wrote a book called "order without design". He's an urban economist, and... his book is all a city planner needs to do their job correctly.
I had long wanted to visit this sort of place, so in Bali, I walked into (and around) many, many, many kampungs, and sure enough, they were beautiful, affordable, and served the people that lived in and around them so well.
I believe all 'big' cities have adopted the 'american'/euclidean zoning version of land use policy, which was implemented by southerners in the 1920s to implement a regime of social control, allowing one ethnic group to use the political process to dominate another ethnic group. Jakarta follows the american land use policy, with the expected deleterious effects.
I'd strongly recommend getting a copy of Alain's book. It's the most concise take on land use policy I've encountered, and I've sorta 'read the canon' when it comes to these kinds of things.
I write about all of this stuff on my website (in my profile) and tiktok. I talk too much about zoning-as-ethnic-cleansing, according to some people, but i don't mind. https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists
i took a quick look at "Order Without Design" and am not digging what I've read so far.
to decide whether something might be worth a read, i usually try to get a quick feel for it from the title, subtitle, author, author's affiliations, the book's recommendations, etc.
in this case, it _seems_ like what I'm going to find as I cruise thru a couple articles and youtubes and possibly even the book itself as some point (tho, likely not), is just another bad justification for allowing markets (i.e. capital / investors / rich people / the right people) to shape cities -- or shape them more than they're typically allowed to.
if a book about... well, anything... mentions markets, it's probably going to be pro-markets -- that is, 'poor people must obey the markets', not 'markets are created by humans to _serve_ humans'.
couple of the recommendations come from City Journal (hard core conservative city planning, or non-planning), and Richard Florida (hard core liberal/monied city planning).
but, will check it out some more -- maybe i'll be surprised.
For what it's worth, those articles and reviews that you mentioned seem to come out of Western and capitalist mindsets, but the author of the book is very French and very much not of that genre.
I think it's likely enough that you might be surprised that it's worth getting the book and seeing what you think.
Of course you might not like it, but I am so starved for novelty that I will explore opportunities for that dopamine hit on principle even if they don't all pan out.
If you read it and find it novel and interesting, I would be honored if you let me know. My email is in my profile.
The author and his late wife are fascinating. Look up the 'order without design podcast', and you're bound to be entertained.
I'm already honored by the amount of due diligence you have done, so even if you don't get the book or get it and don't follow up with me, you've given me a lovely thing, kind internet stranger.
The zoning regime that was invented in the south went to the supreme Court as a result of it being implemented in the town of Euclid Ohio.
So you're right, Ohio isn't the south, but the regime that was approved by the supreme Court was invented by essentially the mayor of Atlanta.
It is just a re-implementation of Jim Crowe. The guy that invented it said:
> To maintain the harmonious relations between the races, care has been given to ensure adequate separation between them.
He was dscribing r1 verse r2 zoning. Pretty much every municipality in America still has r1, r2, r3 zoning on the books.
The guy that invented it said r1 zoning was for the white, r2 zoning was for the colored, r3 zoning was for the undecided.
When I bought a house in Golden, it was in an r2 neighborhood.
R1 is suburbia. It's genuinely horrifying that this travesty of a legal regime has not been ended yet, but most politically powerful white people can't be bothered to do a modicum of research, and they believe the propaganda they've been fed that says suburban neighborhoods, maintained by r1 zoning, are pleasant places to live.
Hmmmm, call me skeptical, but i'll check it out. From what I know off the top of my head, ton of people, bunch of islands -> requires concentrated land use like manhattan or hk or singapore or sf or choose your concentrated land mass -- not sure any would qualify as good or smart or sustainable or 'some of the best' land use, but will def check it out.
It's not about concentrated versus not concentrated, it talks about the origin of the decisions that lead to how the built environment environment is shaped by the needs and preferences of the people who inhabit it
The book is definitely worth reading. It gets a smidge academic at times, but a moderately interested high schooler could easily parse the entire thing, and it'll forever transform how you view land use issues throughout the world.
I know what you mean as far as skepticism. The modern /western world kind of resists at a philosophical level adopting norms coming from countries that it deems as second class.
Woah, while you might be right to some extent, it feels pretty harsh to judge someone else so superficially just on where they choose to travel, and what they do there, and at what age they do it.
The entire comment is judgmental and insecure. There are just as many women only there to do yoga and “find themselves”, and they have the nerve to be white too.
I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, customer support, customer success, and inside sales at a B2B SaaS company.
Modestly obsessed with mobility networks. (like... roads, streets, bike paths, sidewalks, and the vehicles and people that occupy that space)
Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more.
Just started recently, partially inspired by spending a few weeks in Bali. (Being a laid-off tech worker has its upsides).
If I can get traction around this business idea, I'll move sideways into guerilla action road network improvements, to make the junctions around the businesses I work with more habitable and safe for scooters, pedestrians, and cars.
Soooo I'm trying to make my job something like "one who improves the functioning of road networks, sponsored by the direct beneficiaries of those improvements."
With a little success, I'll be able to start hiring people to help. Maybe I'll find a few other tech people to help. There's plenty of room for software developers to make meaningful contributions to these projects, but only after spending a lot of time not behind a laptop.