It was a bit of a winding process, but essentially early on in my career I learned that I fit this[1] description very well. And stumbled upon the same fact that patio11 did: it's incredibly hard for most companies to consistently fill that type of role. And now that I have a history of succeeding in those types of roles, it's a lot easier to talk my way into new ones.
That said, you're spot on that the core of what I do is data consulting, although most of it falls under a domain-specific name and has been W2, internal consulting roles. I'm actually in the process of switching my full time role to a less demanding one so I can focus on ramping up my actual consulting business.
People take stock of their lives in many different ways: using happiness as the unit of measurement is called hedonism. Pursuing hedonism is a defensible position to take but I'm alarmed by its rise as the default system of value in the educated/cosmopolitan world that most HN readers presumably inhabit.
Things like raising children well, championing unfashionable but important positions, fighting injustice and poverty - the really worthwhile things in life - are often extraordinarily difficult and can cause more despair than pleasure. But I choose to believe that they are nonetheless important, and not only because there is the promise of the glow of contentment in the case of a possible future triumph.
Many in the tech industry achieve extraordinary success in modern society. But when someone rises to that position, the single-minded pursuit of stimulating one's own reward circuits can look quite callous in the eyes of those who haven't been able to rise to wealth and power. In the days of the hereditary aristocracy, there existed the idea of "noblesse oblige", or the obligation of the upper classes to be a positive force for all those who lived in their society. It might do us some good to revive that idea.
Probably because it's a just-so story not based on reality. Building a career and finding a mate surely must be more influenced by the breadth of your social network than is your ability to help your children and grandchildren. Think about how many people you know who have gotten jobs or met their significant others through friends or acquaintances. I think anyone who sees interactions with strangers as adversarial should take a closer look at why their own stance is so suspicious. Getting to know new people definitely isn't easy, but it's incredibly rewarding in itself and opens so many doors.
I said it was a fantastic insight. I didn't say it was right. :)
Actually, I think you're both right. The idea that young adults should be suspicious and selfish is limiting and wrong. But the idea that older adults have different motivations socially is spot-on. In part, even the introverts and misanthropes have learned to value just talking to people, eventually.
I think he's getting at the fact that the iPod and iTunes were what first made people think of music in digital terms. An audio CD might as well be analog as far as people's perception goes, since until MP3 players came around, ripping CDs was not the typical use case.
In this case, probably because when you're being tortured, it's small comfort to know how the synapses of your tormentors' brains are firing. Things like defiance in the face of adversity or finding meaning in life seem to be universal across cultures, and a lot more fundamental to the way our brains work than something like scientific understanding.
I'd like to disagree - at least for my university, which to be fair is notorious for being brutal in terms of workload. It's not unusual for me and many of my friends to have so much work for classes and extracurriculars over the course of a week or month that there literally isn't enough time to do all of it and also eat and sleep in the 168 hrs/week that you have.
Allowing that there may be exceptions such as your own case (assuming you are properly assessing your situation), would you still agree that the generalization holds for the vast majority of cases?
Not at my university, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhat true generally. I think a valid comparison might be between a hard sciences student at a top school who's also involved in a lot of extracurriculars and up at all hours just to stay on top of everything, and someone working on an early stage company where there's always something burning. The opposite end of that would be the investment banking intern spending 100+ hours a week at the office spinning their wheels or college student who does nothing all week and then stays up to make themselves feel better about failing the exam. That's sleep deprivation for the sake of appearances.
Thanks for that point of view, and that's totally how I'd approach it, but because of the new joint program I'd be able to get the master's in the same amount of time that I would spend on a bachelor's anyways, sorry if I didn't make that clear. I definitely wouldn't spend an additional year or two doing a master's otherwise, but this program reduces the opportunity cost pretty significantly.
The app is basically a service for ordering/dispatching couriers/deliverypeople, so it's definitely real-time(ish) - the core functionality is for users to be able to order a delivery (with real-time cost estimate) and for human dispatchers to be able to process the deliveries through a private portal. At the bare minimum I could honestly just do it through a basic form that sends emails to a dispatcher account, so I might do that for an MVP (didn't know that term before), although that would be a very, very temporary solution. You guys have suggested a ton of useful options, so I'm going to have to spend some time just reading up and seeing what would be a good approach. Thank you for the help, everyone - it's been really useful information, and I'd appreciate it if anyone has more to add as well.
That's not really realtime. Realtime is a chat app - i.e even a delay of 10 seconds is too much. Realtime is a multiplayer game with 1000 users all at once. I'm afraid I was a little vague when I said realtime. Node.js is for concurrent realtime. Meaning it's good for a product where you have thousands of users that need to be connected all at the same time all communicating with one another.
Your app seems like a fairly standard SaaS app. The cost estimate is only "real-time" in the sense that there is some data that is crunched on the server before it's served up to the user. Users just deal with a form and they punch in their data, and then that data is shown to couriers. That's pretty standard CRUD and you don't need anything fancy. Node.js is really cool, but you're going to be a lot more productive and you're going to have a much easier time by sticking to a standard, mature web framework like Django (or Rails).
Are you fluent in Javascript, PHP, or Ruby? If not, that's even more of a reason to stick with Python and Django, because you can literally start learning Django and have your MVP up by Monday.
I am (or was, a couple of years ago) fluent in Javascript/AJAX and PHP so I could definitely hack something together with that, but Django sounds like a cool technology to learn as well.
How are the different online-education websites in terms of being able to take courses at your own pace? I'm interested in trying an online course out to pick up some statistics and machine learning, but I probably wouldn't be able to follow it week-by-week (and not having to wait for a given start date would be great).
All Coursera courses are deadline based. Some of the courses remove their material at the end of the course. Others, such as the database one, are later opened up as self-study but do not offer a certificate of completion.
In the case of edX, MIT's 6.00x course is strictly deadline based. CS50x allows you to take the course at your own pace as long as you finish everything before the 13th of April, 2013.
But those aren't the ones you're looking for. Udacity meets all your requirements. They have open enrollment, meaning you can join in at any time. Furthermore, they have no deadlines. As long as you complete all the problem sets and give the final exam, you get a certificate.
Here are some Udacity courses that might interest you:
Something I found out recently: there are many courses that pull their course material when the course is finished. Even if you are/were enrolled, you lose access. I found this out from the Statistics One course (since you mention statistics), which cut me off in the middle.
Obviously, you can avoid this by downloading all the videos and slides as soon as you have access.
