The city you live in may have more impact on you than which particular company you start at.

Banks and consulting companies may pay you more than a company focused on a software product, but the work is generally unsatisfying for software developers. Avoid those, unless high pay is more important to you than happiness. Though if you are choosing between them, banks are better than consulting companies. If you can find a company that has some understanding of how to treat software developers well so that they can do good work, and that makes money by research and developing their software, rather than by something else (eg. mergers and acquisitions to acquire customers) then you'll likely be happier.

As to topic it depends what you mean by topic. If you mean is it ok to make software that you're not particularly interested in using yourself, then I'd say the answer is yes. If you mean, you don't enjoy using the languages and technologies involved in the job, then I'd say the answer is no. For example, if you want to make software for chicken farmers, even though you may not be making software for chicken farmers the rest of your life, using the software language that you like working with, in a company that treats you well, I think that's ok. The next company you work for may not care how much you know about chicken farming, but may care that you have 3 years of experience using C++ (or whatever language.)

Getting involved in an open source project, or doing side projects, is another way to build up your reputation.

Before taking a job at a company talk to some people who have worked there. If you have connections on Linked In, for example, use them to find someone to talk to. Get a sense of what they like about working there. It's harder to ask about what they don't like, since people have to be careful how they answer such questions, although some will be forthcoming.

There are various ethical issues involved in creating software. It is good to be aware of them, and to think about them when considering whether to take a job. Many people around you will not think about them, so it's up to you to think it through and bring your ethics to your work.

Creating complex software is mostly about people. It's probably more important to like the people you are working with than to like the project you are working on, though that matters too. There are some work environments that can be toxic...avoid those and/or work to make them less toxic.

In fact, you may want to treat the job search as looking for a person to work with, more than looking for a particular company or task.

Regarding negotiating for a salary, these blog posts made me think.

Patrick McKenzie, a person who runs a software company in Japan, has written about salary negotiations in this blog post. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Mark Suster who has been both an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist, has written several posts abount negotiation. There's a list of them here. http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/negotiations/

The one that stuck in my mind the most was the post titled "Never negotiate piecemeal" http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/03/10/never-negotiate-piecemeal-heres-why/

Also, regarding job interviews, if you're not used to them you might think that the questions that they ask you are the ones that they want an answer to. Not so! Most job interview questions have some sort of hidden purpose to them. If you take them literally, you might miss the point.

For example, "Why should you get the job, instead of another candidate?" means something more like "Tell me something that I can tell my boss to cover my ass about why I gave you the job." "Tell me how you see yourself in 5 years" has multiple purposes. Read up on interview questions and why people ask them and what they are actually asking.

You might know this already, but iterative design is better than the waterfall method of software development, since it allows people to catch problems early in the design stages. Nevertheless, many companies still use the waterfall method, or pay lip service to "agile" but don't actually do it well.

Writing software for nuclear reactors or medical devices is qualitatively different than writing software for lower stakes purposes that can have more bugs in the software.

I probably have more advice, if you have more specific questions. It's hard to know what to tell you, since I don't know much about what your concerns are, or where you're starting from.

This is a cool idea, and a cool source for a rational anki deck. I'd post mine, but I don't add any custom spellings to chrome.

Other easy wins: The Squatty Potty, magnesium supplements, meditation, and donating blood if you are male.

We had similar data on the survey I ran (which I still need to write up the results of). I don't know that the numbers past 140 are intelligence-indicative, but I suspect people really did get their reported scores on IQ tests.

Dealing with serious clutter-- the kind of situation where the house has never been in good order and there isn't any obvious place to put most things.

Sometimes I take a crack at it, but there's so little progress and so many non-obvious decisions to be made.

Can you help me understand why people are being hostile to my claim that I have orders of magnitude more subject matter knowledge than they do? The most obvious explanation is ugly – that it makes them feel inferior by comparison, independently of whether or not I have any smugness about it (which I don't).

Well, let me tell you: academics often come across as somewhat smug to everyone who's not an academic.

But, you missed an even more abundantly obvious explanation: you're an outsider, so anything you say, other than blatant gestures of joining-the-ingroup, comes across as more hostile than it should.

With due respect to those involved, this is not "upper echelons of society", this is a set of people highly respected in a small and isolated bubble.

This is a semantic distinction. They're much higher status than most people in mainstream society, the same is not true of most LWers. That's what I meant.

It all depends on the baseline, but these advantages don't sound huge to me. Going to a magnet school and to Swarthmore is nothing extraordinary.

The more significant thing was growing up around my father: that gave me a large advantage over the people who I went to school with as well.

But even putting that aside, what fraction of LW commenters do you think had better environmental conditions than I did? In particular, what about yourself?

And what evidence do you have to support this view?

There are surface indicators, e.g. I have a PhD in math, which isn't true of almost any LWers. But even stronger than that, I've met with a number of elite mathematicians (advisors of multiple Fields medalists, etc., professors at the Institute for Advanced Studies, where Einstein, Von Neumann and Godel were, etc.) who have expressed high regard for me as a thinker.