Do you have kids? I would love to move out to the country but I'm really worried about impacting my kids ability to develop skills and build a business/social network.

My parents moved out to a very small town from Toronto, Ontario when I was small. There was nothing for me there when I grew up, and all of the friends I had that stayed in the area are struggling. I went away to school and never really returned. I found that I was at a real disadvantage by having zero network and no relevant job skills pre-university. I've since made up for it and am doing quite well now, but I have 2 kids and them going to a good school is very important to me. I always wonder how people do it well, so I'm looking for information.

"you could sit with your back to the wall instead of to the heavily trafficked area"

In many offices, you can't just re-orient your desk or choose to move.

What state/city? I'm assuming you live in the US. I live in Canada and I've never heard of a poor kids childcare of free summer camp paid for by the city even here.

People talking about saving money by not spending money on clothes and toys really don't know what they're talking about. Brand new clothes and toys today are super cheap compared to what they were when I was a kid. For example, I just bought some brand new baby shoes and shirts on sale for $2 at the grocery store. If I was poor it would cost me more in bus fare to get to the used clothing store than I would have saved had I just bought stuff new at the grocery store. The biggest cost for me _by_far_ is childcare and summer camps.

Maybe you gotta live in a low income area. I went to the YMCA, YWCA, Boys and Girls Club, some place that is run by a couple nuns and sponsored by a charity... I think we may have gotten subsidies from somewhere though? Honestly I am not sure, I just know that they were cheap and that's where all the poor kids went (including me).

These places were pretty friggin boring though, just a bunch of sitting around doing not much of anything except playing with yarn with minimal supervision.

The "free camp" (as we called it) was especially boring.

In general, I'm really starting to question any reports on salary alone once it gets past $100K/year.

After that point, performance bonuses in their many forms can have such a large impact and that doesn't seem to be represented in salary comparisons.

I always thought that technical book writing wasn't about making money directly, but for up selling in other areas.

I.e. improving your resume, looking prestigious to potential consulting clients, or landing paid speaking gigs.

This is correct. I was doing well in my career before the book, but it really took off after the book. However, I was already co-author of one book before that, and I blog prolifically, so that skews this.

The way it works is simple. Publishers hope to sell about 5,000 or so copies of your typical tech book. That's enough to keep the publisher going, but not enough to really make money for them. The publisher keeps those "filler" books going to keep up street cred and hopes to sometimes land the "killer" book that makes them a nice profit.

I can't share the sales info for my book, but let's just say that I think the book is doing better than one might expect for its category.

If you want to write a tech book, you want to go with O'Reillly. My advance was much larger than what O'Reilly would offer, but they sell more tech books in the long run. However, O'Reilly's Perl book section is saturated and they generally don't take new authors.

What I did to reposition my book was a strategy I wish more tech books would take: I focused on jobs. Instead of teaching every esoteric niche of a language (though I covered it well), I focused very heavily on skills that employers look for. I've been doing this for a long, long time and am very familiar with employer needs, so I was well-positioned to do this. That has led to my book doing better than expected: here's what you need for a job!

I now have a successful Perl consulting firm (http://www.allaroundtheworld.fr/) and that book, while I can't prove it helped, definitely didn't hurt.

Oh, and my publisher has spoken to an Amazon rep and a contact I have in Amazon tells me that they're aware of the situation and are looking into it. I don't have much hope, but who knows?

I would argue that content still works, it's just that the bar is higher.

can you elaborate what you mean by bar is higher?

Sorry, I'm not sure if you want me to address the colloquialism or the statement so I'll address both.

"The bar is higher" essentially means that a task is more difficult than it previously was.

In the past it used to be easier to create low-medium quality content around a subject and be ranked well for specific phrases in search engines. This has gotten progressively harder to do and will likely only get harder going forward.

However, if you create high quality content in the area around your product then people will seek it out and you will also get the benefit of good search engine ranking. High quality content can vary, but it is essentially stuff that truly adds value in the area of your product.

You can look on Hacker News and other similar sites for companies that are doing this well. In some extreme cases you even have companies generating content that doesn't seem to be remotely related to their product, but it is still getting eyeballs and very likely sales (e.g. http://priceonomics.com/ and their blog).

In addition to blogging and generating content you should also be spending time cultivating and nurturing an email list of potential prospects.

Does this take a lot of time? Yes. I believe that it is a generally accepted rule that you should spend as much time marketing as you do developing. This is something that is easy to say and hard to do though. I know that even I, a full-time digital marketer in my day job, spend more developing my product than I do marketing it.

Yeah you addressed it fine. It's interesting that priceonomics seem like a blog directed towards their web crawling service. This is a very interesting play.

I have high hopes that the time I'm investing in my kids will not only benefit them, but long term will benefit me as well.

At 5 my oldest son is doing a lot of small chores around the house. He just passed the tipping point of where I can spend less time giving him directions than it would have taken for me to just do the job myself. I see this scaling over time.

A part of the "playing" that I do with him is building and repairing stuff around the home. He loves it. It takes much longer to complete anything that if I was just doing it myself, but I'm doubling up "play" and "chores" so it works out. For things that he can't help with I try to outsource.

I like some of the ideas of past generations who often viewed kids as resources.

I don't mean to offend, but have you considered what your child might think of you when they grow a bit older and find this comment?

They'll probably thank him for raising him well, and teaching him/her the value of a good work ethic, rather than being spoiled and lazy.

Ideally he won't think anything of it because I've spent so much time with him we're working side by side building his first business by that point.

I'd be careful, the more expectation you load onto a child, the more they push back in the teen years.

Opportunity cost and the potential of leaving a good company for a potentially toxic work environment are two bad outcomes that I can think of off the top of my head.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to better your position, but saying that there isn't a possibility of a downside is not fair.

I'm not the GP, but I've helped others by sending them market rate stats etc, and talked about negotiations generally (e.g: ALWAYS negotiate an offer).

Jealousy is real, it will impact your day to day relationships with people.

I'm very curious what your take is on revealing your current salary to recruiters/potential employers early.

Do you tell them early to avoid wasting your time?

For myself I'll just say that I've done well since I realized that I should negotiate for EVERY offer I'm given no matter how high. There are no more exploding offers after you've had a couple jobs - we're not in kindergarten and our parents aren't going to take things away because we're acting selfishly.