economics

Homefinding As A Skill

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Viewpoint Telescope

We’re going to have a bit of a break from geek culture and career-specific advice to focus on a life skill that’s kind of high on my list. It all has to do with the rent and living.

I just got my lease renewal – and my yearly rent increase – I had a lot to think about. Where I was living. Where I might live. Potential roommates. How the hell high was the rent going to get in Silicon Valley?*

I think about this a lot as I’m sort of an accidental expert in living in Silicon Valley. I went through a phase where various current and potential roommates kept changing, and every change meant I had to research another place to live. I ended up learning a lot about locations and economics.

Then people just kept asking me advice due to that knowledge, so now it’s kind of “my thing.”

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A Few Dollars Makes The Difference

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In the Bay Area, rent and housing prices are an important topic of discussion since that’s where no small amount of your paycheck goes.  I was out recently with friends, when the subject came up, and someone mentioned a person they knew who took an insane commute so they could avoid insane rents.  They had few options.

In The Bay Area, there seem to be these weird cutoff points in rental options.  Make X amount of money and you can live in this area, but X plus even a few hundred more a month opens up new options.  As one gets more and more options, you end up almost being able to save money – because you can, say, afford an expensive apartment on public transport and ditch a car.  Or one can live near work and cut commute time – and use that to do a part-time job or run a startup.

It’s not just that you have to spend money to make money.  When you have money, sometimes you can save time and money or make more time and money.

A boss of mine once ditched her car, lived in a small studio near public transport in the expensive area of San Francisco – and came out ahead financially.  She had all of San Francisco as her playground, a great job, and plenty of options.  But ironically, to save that money she needed to make enough to live in a place where she needed less.

Respectfully,

– Steven Savage
http://www.musehack.com/
http://www.informotron.com/
http://www.seventhsanctum.com/

 

How I Went In Search Of The IT Gap

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OK, we all know the story, or at least those of us trying to hire people with IT skills do – there’s not enough people out there to hire! We can’t find anyone. Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, and those empty desks that should be filled with busy geeks.

If you haven’t heard this complaint you’re A) lucky, B) ignorant, C) a liar, or D) better at hiring than a lot of people – a whole lot of people.

For over a year I’ve been hearing that there’s some kind of IT hiring gap. This isn’t new of course, complaint about some kind of “skills gap” goes back for years in many fields.  I think I’ve been hearing about this for about four years, even when unemployment was higher.

However among these claims I’d occasionally hear a dissenting voice. That there’s not a gap, or that these claims were ways to get in cheap H1B visa employees, or someone had no trouble in hiring and just thought this was BS.  It made me wonder if this is for real.

Let’s face it, it’s important to know what the heck is actually going on in IT.  IT is vital to the economy.  It’s  close to we geeks who are so tied to technology industries and areas. Some of us want a damn job and we’d like to know what’s going ob.  Some of us are trying to hire people and want to know why it isn’t working.  If this gap is BS then people claiming there is one are ignorant, deceptive, or both and we’ like to know.

So is there an IT Gap, where we don’t have enough people to do the IT jobs of today?

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