Be a Better Adder PART 1 - The Salary Heuristic

Hello and welcome to the first in a series of posts where I shamelessly try to squeeze the word "better" into the title somehow.  If you're anything like me, your first reaction upon reading the heading for this post is to assume it's about some kind of totally epic hyper-evolved mutant snake monster (You know, because it's an adder.  Get it?  See what I did there?).

Ahhh, the elegant simplicity of Mother Nature.

But nope, no reptilian overlords this time.  Just a bit of math.

Read below the jump to learn how to go forth and multiply.  Then you'll be able to:

Figure out salary better 

The reason I love heuristics is because they help reduce an infinitely complex universe into bite-sized chunks.  They're basically a simplified way of thinking about a problem that allows you to solve it with a minimum of effort.  The solution you get is quick and dirty and not entirely accurate, but I find that it works well enough under most circumstances.

This is an easy mental trick for converting hourly wage to yearly salary:

yearly salary ≈ hourly wage × 2000

I rounded down the number of weeks in a year from 52 to 50 to take into account Thanksgiving and Christmas break.  So if you make $20/hr, that translates to about $40,000 a year.  

$20/hr × 40 hours/week × ~50weeks/year = 20 × 2000 = 40,000