Job offer in name only. in Journal of life stuff

I got a verbal job offer yesterday. I spent much of the day very excited and happy. I’ve mellowed a bit since then. I am writing this as much for me as for anyone who reads it. In my life, many things have not gone according to plan. I spent the first 7 years of my career being underpaid by between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, depending on the year. It’s only been in the very recent past that I finally got a salary that was anywhere remotely close to market midpoint for the work I was doing, and I’m an above average employee! I got jaded.

I always wanted to have a job where I could work for the same company for 20 years. I wanted to buy a house, have a yard, have a wife, maybe have a family (depended on the wife). I wanted that normal white suburban life. That didn’t happen. I ended up getting the job that I could have spent 20 years at in a state where home prices were easily triple (if not more) that of what the same house would be basically anywhere else in the country. Making $80k/year is awesome right up until a house costs $500,000 instead of $145,000. Making 80k a year is awesome until the cheapest house you can find is $70,000, and that house is only 600 square feet, has no basement, needs structural roof repairs, has a cracked foundation, and, generally speaking, would cost over 150k to repair to a condition suitable for living.

I hate New England for a litany of reasons. Do I regret moving here? No. I learned so many skills and gained so much experience at my first employer that it was worth it to live in a place I hated. My mistakes were two fold:

1. I saw the writing on the wall before I got laid off and I renewed my lease anyway.
2. I looked at my brand new lease and decided to stay instead of eat approximately 4k in early termination fees.

I should have left New England at that point. I should have dumped my savings into bitcoin instead of the stock market. I made a LOT of mistakes between the start of 2017 and the start of 2018. But failing at things gives you the opportunity to learn from what didn’t work. When I got laid off in September, I didn’t accept or consider any job within New England. I told nearly 100 recruiters that I was not considering any position within the New England area. I turned down friends who had jobs that seemed like good fits, purely because those jobs would have required me to stay here. I wanted to get out of this place I hate. The point in time where I wanted that white suburban life seems so long ago that it was in another lifetime. Yet…I remember the year 1999 with more clarity than I remember that dream! Wtf!

How does this relate to the verbal job offer? I’m jaded from life. I have been trying to explain even 1% of why. Unlike every other verbal job offer I’ve ever had, this one doesn’t have any reason or incentive to go back on their word and change the terms of the agreement against me. I have had job offers in the past that made the verbal offer at one pay level, and then made the actual written offer at a totally different level (20k/year less!). But they reason they did that was because they knew they had me by the balls, and if I said no, I’d be jobless. I think, now, that won’t happen. Yet I can’t shake that fear/dread/past from my mind entirely. I can’t hop and skip through my life being fully happy about the opportunity because if I do, the hammer blow of being proven wrong, yet again, and having that faith not rewarded would be devastating. The last time such a hammer blow hit me I gained 20lbs inside of two weeks. I can’t afford to have that happen again. Emotionally, physically, in any way. I must not put myself in a place where that sort of disappointment can happen.

But I wanted to write down that the event happened at all because that way I’ll remember, going forward, whether it went well or not. Whether I’m overly cynical or accurately cautious will remain a fixed point in memory. I’ve noticed a trend among people that if you speak with anything other than the belief that butterflies and rainbows will come out of life, then you are labeled a despot who isn’t fun to be around, listen to, or associate with; even if you’re accurate and correct. I want this as an empirical record of exactly what I thought and felt at a given point in time when I didn’t yet know the outcome. Revisionist history is easy to write. Accurate prediction is much harder.

Just now I went on zillow and looked at homes in and around Indianapolis, because I think that’s where I’ll be moving when my lease is up. House flippers are very much active in the area and I thank my lucky stars that I’ve spent years working with Habitat for Humanity on both new construction and refurbishing existing buildings. I can tell the difference from the photos between a newly built home and one that was refurbed by house flippers. I just saw a beautiful new construction home for $120k in a nice suburb with wide open streets, a fair yard, and a garage. At 1000 sqft it’s not massive by any means, but I simply don’t need a monsterously large home. It has enough of a yard that I could get a dog and he could sprint back and forth as we played catch. Perfect? Far from it. Good enough? Hell yes!

I own a VR headset, an HTC Vive specifically. I spent about 2 hours last night in Google Earth VR flying around the country visiting different cities. I was able to definitively rule out Cincinnati and Dallas as places I would consider moving to. Cincinnati’s problem was that the economic depression of the area is apparent in so many ways. The homes that are newer are all these extremely narrow designs on steep winding hills. None of the roads are straight lines, everything is a curved clusterfuck of a roadway. The road network makes it so getting somewhere you want to be is an exercise in frustration rather than a simple matter of memorizing a few right and left turns.

Dallas is a good city, but VR made me appreciate just how utterly massive it was. When you’re flying over the city 4,000 feet in the air and it takes you 10 seconds to go from one side to the other at a speed roughly equivalent to a supersonic jet…holy shit. Especially considering the same feat over Cincinnati or Indianapolis takes less than 2 seconds. Like any large, old, city there are better and worse parts of town. This means that a rising tide DOES NOT lift all boats equally. In Indianapolis, I spent an hour looking around and never found anywhere that looked especially destitute. Even then bad parts of town were on par with the average parts of Dallas. Maybe I didn’t look closely enough, and I do plan to do a more exhaustive search, but the difference is there.

The streets in Indianapolis are wider, there are fewer cars and people, there are local shops, restaurants, and stores. Parking in the middle of downtown is just $5 for all day parking (in Boston it’s usually $65-100!). I couldn’t see any prices in Dallas.

I also checked out Durham, NC and the Research Triangle therein. Man that was a trip. I found the places where broke white people live almost instantly. It was like being transported back to my youth. Literal garbage strewn about on the roads. Plastic white lawn chairs in various states of neglect, grills outside every building, pickups trucks, window AC units, cracks in the walls due to failing foundations, all of it. It’s not their fault that they are poor. In any society not expressly focused on removing the factor, there will always be winners and losers. It was just interesting to see a stereotype of life I haven’t seen in nearly 10 years.

I need to check more cities tonight. I had to stop last night because I was getting motion sick. After not using VR for nearly 2 years I had lost my VR legs. I also wasn’t doing myself any favors by both turning my head and rotating myself with the in-game controls. The reason I wouldn’t just turn my body with my legs is because it’s easy to get wrapped up in the cable if you do that. I’ve kept an eye on wireless VR technology over the years. The current offering of wireless VR can actually do the job, but it’s expensive. Around $1000 just for the wireless adaptor kit. There are cheaper options, but they suck. The only option that works suitably well is around $1000. I’m…it’s not worth that much money to me. I’ll wait a few more years. What I really, really, want to see is Tesla develop some new battery technology that can be mass produced cheaply and is suitable for both cars and consumer electronics. Something with 3-10x the energy density of lithium-ion, but better endurance and lifetime, with less need for thermal management. Why do I want this? So that the mass I have to wear in order to do wireless VR is reduced from 10lbs to around 2lbs. Probably in another 5 years the technology will be both affordable and light. Right now, it’s gen 1 stuff. It’s bulky, it’s heavy, it’s power hungry, and it’s expensive. Avoid, annoyingly.

But yea, Google Earth VR is SUPER useful for location scouting. Want to visit a city anywhere in the world? Plan your trip in Google Earth VR. It now integrates with Street View, so you can fly over the city to get a sense of where the roads are, what lines of sight are like, etc, but then you can also pop down to street view and see much higher resolution images of what the world around you would look like. The perspective isn’t accurate though. The first time I used it I felt a bit sick because I realized I was standing almost 12 feet above the ground I was standing on. This, obviously, warped some of the perspective around me to be ‘wrong’ and my brain saying “THAT’S NOT WHERE THE SIDEWALK SHOULD BE! AND THAT PIPE SHOULDN’T BE THAT BIG!” was the source of me feeling sick to my stomach. As good as VR is, your brain REALLY hates it when it is given information it knows is false. Like…your brain REALLY hates that. Reactions to such false data will manifest either as motion sickness or a headache, depending on your specific body and mind.

My main complaint against Google Earth VR is that I would love to be able to click on a building and see what was at the address. Is it a hotel or apartment complex? How much per night/month? Is there a fee to park? It would make researching a city or planning a trip so much easier. I also understand it would DRAMATICALLY increase the complexity of a program that Google mostly released just to appease some engineers who wanted to work on VR.