Same. We live in Manhattan with two kids and owning a car is just an added expense without much benefit. To be fair, if you lived further out in Brooklyn (Bayridge, Sussex Beach and Coney Island) you probably need a car for the day to day.
We are committed to staying here for the long term. I think it is a matter of perspective and what one wants to prioritize. From a cost perspective, I think the cost of raising 2-kids in the suburbs or cute towns outside the city within commuting distance nets out to about the same.
The advantages I see are the following:
* Children are just more active on average, kids end up walking 45 minutes or more every day going back and forth from school, activities etc.
* Subway and general community interaction. I get the subways are a pain, but it is a great way for children to interact with different classes of people and communities, understand social risks etc.
* Meritocratic public high school system. I have some reservations about the elementary and middle school systems, but there are 4 elementary schools within a 15 minute walk radius so there is optionality, admittedly it is a bit hard to exercise.
* So many play grounds. We take our kids to various activities and classes on the weekends, and we are never far away from an interesting playground.
I think it really depends on what will keep you and your family happiest. We have friends that determined they want more space and privacy and ended up moving to the suburbs and are happy. Know enough families that moved out and couldn’t handle the sedentary lifestyle and moved back. Feel free to message me if you have more questions.
You didn't ask me, but I can say that Manhattan and Brooklyn both are great for kids. It does vary be neighborhood though and I can speak to Brooklyn the most. Overall great parks, good schools, lots of culture and things to do. Beaches accessible by subway etc.
If you are considering a move to NYC with young kids the real thing to look at are the public elementary schools and the zones for them. That should be the north star for choosing where to live unless your kids are older.
I put a generic “out of office” block on my calendar if I have personal business and it’s rare enough that I don’t get why it needs a solution. Maybe other people are scheduling things during work hours a lot more often than me?
That totally works if it is rare for you! The last 2 months I've had a few things I've added to my personal calendar that synced with work calendar: lunch with a family member, dropping off or picking up car from service, haircuts, contractor stopping by, dentist, vet appointment, etc. It's nice to not worry about it since it marks me as Busy right when I create the event.
This looks super interesting. I’m interested in the professional services position but definitely can’t relocate to Vienna at this time. Is that absolutely required?
My advice. Attend tech meetups and networking events that quants frequent. Socialize with them, and try to get them to refer your resume for open positions. Side projects and contributions to open source projects will help get their attention too.
My activity on Reddit has gone way down since they stopped supporting .compact view on mobile. I definitely miss it and want to go back but it’s incredibly hard to engage with the content on mobile browsers now.
Wow. Thanks for sharing. I had no idea that Professor Remzi and his wife Andrea wrote a book on Operating Systems. I loved his class (took it almost 22 years ago.) Will have to check his book out.
Indeed. Thanks to snow day here in NYC, my first grader has remote learning and all academic activity (reading, writing and math) was restricted to 20 minutes in her learning plan.
We’re in the same boat. We live in an apartment building in a neighborhood we love. Recently, a larger apartment in our building came onto the market. The seller is desperate to offload and the size would really suit our family’s long term needs. However, the double whammy of the loss we’d take selling our unit while paying a higher mortgage at a higher interest rate is just too much to stomach.
I’d worry way less about what other people thought of me and focused instead on quieting down the insecure voice in my own head. I might not be anymore successful financially or politically, but I certainly destroyed several professional relationships that could’ve grown into meaningful friendships or partnerships.
What alternatives are you currently looking at? I’ve just begun scratching the surface of Generative AI but I’ve found the OpenAI ecosystem and stack to be quite excellent at helping me complete small independent projects. I’m curious about other platforms that offer the same acceleration for content generation.
Yeah I just watched the keynote on Amazon’s Q product. I’m going to tinker with that in the coming days. Pretty excited about the Google drive/docs integration since we have a lot of our company documents over the last 15 years in Drive.
That’s fair but I’m mostly building prototypes with the API intended for exploring the space so I’m not too worried about productionizing these yet. I was curious if there’s another solution that meets or exceeds OpenAI for quality of content and ease of use. I’m an ex-programmer working as a PM so most of this is just learning about these tools.
