Took a new job this month, my first working on a product at any real scale. Maybe it's just the honeymoon phase, but I couldn't be happier. Sure it's a little awkward, but I'll take a remote kubernetes cluster over working in an airgapped network any day. Gladly take Jira over Gantt charts. Pay is excellent. Team is outstanding — and wow (!) is it diverse. It looks like the world.
I feel thankful that:
1. I got in when I did. I don't get the sense that our platform is directly impacted by the turmoil in the markets, but I do think it would've been a lot harder to negotiate my current salary, today.
2. I trusted my instincts over Glassdoor. At the end of the day, I had enough high-quality data points to look beyond the company's abysmal employee reviews there. Namely, all 4 engineers I met during the interview process were kind and patient with me during technicals, and incredibly sharp. Seemed like people I'd want to work with. Really glad that I chose to focus on the right signals, because the company that's described online seems like an entirely different place than where I work.
You know how they say the least 20% of a project takes 80% of the time. I'm at that phase of one. I've the strict feature-set and roadmap ready but I can't just can't seem to finish it.
I'm not burnt out. I just want to start another project, learn another thing, but I'm forcing (in a good way, I believe) to complete this project and release it to friends and in a couple online forums. And yes, start using it myself! :)
Thanks for asking. Thanks for reading. I wish every one well!
Oof I’m in exactly the same spot at work for a project I’m running. It seems so close but every step forward seems to be uncovering one more step before the finish line.
I have been procrastinating on finding a new job for about a month now. I am seriously questioning whether I want another web development job. I'm almost 40 and the web space stopped being interesting for me about 8 years ago. I suspect I'll procrastinate until my bank account balance gets low enough to cause me to panic and then I'll get serious about getting another web job.
The current chapter is coming to an end. It will get messy, and it will be expensive. The next chapter will be different (solo), in another environment. I've stopped caring about money (or running out, at least). Whatever will be, will be.
Not OK, but I'm OK with not being OK…for now, anyway.
I worked at Apple back when they had a sabbatical - 5 weeks after 5 years. I never took vacation. Took off during the Fall vaction+holidays+sabatical=3 months trip around the world. I was deathly afraid that when I returned I'd be so far behind. Guess what - everything was the same. Lesson learned: Take your time off.
It sometimes helps me to remember that resting can be a way of investing in future productivity. A good multi-hour activity, especially one without checking your devices, can have a really non-linear effect on my productivity especially if I have been feeling stuck on a problem. So sometimes the most productive thing to do is to rest :) Hopefully that helps
> Just wish I had more time off. Got a lot of vacation days. But our team is so small that taking the time off makes me feel guilty.
Try to remember: If you take time off and the business/team/project suffers, it's not your fault, it's your company's fault for failing to build in a staffing safety margin and failing to plan for the 100% expected event of people using their vacation time.
I will preface this with the caveat that the advice I am giving is easier said than done.
Take vacation. Even if it feels like it will hurt the team, the real thing hurting them (and you) is that there isn't a system of trust between everyone. Take a week off, when you come back, figure out what people were blocked on, what broke that only you could fix, etc. and then work on improving those single points of failure. Driving yourself towards burnout is not doing yourself or your team any favors.
> But a part of my brain says that I can't spare the 3+ hours that it takes to go to the theatre. That it would be unproductive.
This kind of thing invades my decision making daily. I "blame" the high-demand for excellence at the tech firms I've worked at, and a personal obsession with self-help. It's whittled down my capacity for fun.
The only thing I've found help is to invest in something else I value highly - a hobby, friendship, family time. At the end of the day TV and movies (while enjoyable) aren't all that important compared to the obligation you feel to co-workers.
are you unproductive if you are making income and you are doing enough at work to not cost your job. if you are pursuing goals, at work or otherwise, like a promotion, then you feel unproductive doing other things. it will come down to prioritization of tasks. modern day requires a lot of admin work and we are bogged down not knowing how to delegate and manage.
Why do you think you have to be productive all the time? What a strange idea! Isn’t the point of working that you can then afford to kick back and do whatever you want outside of work?
Take slowly increasing amounts of time off - think of it as helping to build team resilience. In all seriousness it's a necessary part of team health, and a pre-planned, well-communicated few days is absolute "easy mode" that they can use to ladder up to the inevitable unknown-unknown they will someday have to face.
1. Son graduated High School and was excepted at college
A bit sad
1. 19 families will not be able to watch their children do the same.
2. Americans cannot seem too differentiate between a right to own a gun and the right to own a gun that can commit mass murder.
No there's no "DMs" on HN as far as I know. I was tempted to add my mobile number, but being the public internet and all probably not the wisest choice.
So sorry to hear that. Hang in there! I know I'm just some rando on the internet, but if you need a listening ear, shoot me a note, as I'd be more than happy to chat - sometimes just talking things over with someone has really helped me a lot.
Been there the last 30 months, then because of that work stopped being fun. Now taking a time out, work gives me as much leave as I need, family/personal is harder to take vacation from. Sometimes you have to.
Past few months were going really well, until Monday I would have answered “very good”. This week went downhill very quickly. So, currently quite bad and taking time off to take care of myself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Well, today I looked at symptoms of nervous breakdown and realised that I have had nervous breakdown every time there has been an infra outage. So I guess nervous breakdowns == BAU for infra engineers.
I voted kind of okay. Feeling somewhat trapped in basic loop, which is particularly annoying considering how it's no longer winter and nice outside.
Job's doing pretty well, pays pretty well for my geographic region (nowhere close to SV wages though), main client is pretty good and the project should have high impact and I'm doing significant work on it, but it's not in a field that particularly interests me.
In my spare time I'm helping a non-profit as kind of a mentor for junior engineers as well as a little dev work here and there. Sometimes I feel guilty about not putting more time and effort into it than I do.
Also trying to work on my own video game projects in my spare time as well, but finding the energy and motivation for it has been pretty low lately.
But it really just feels like my life revolves around three C's: coding, cleaning, and cooking. And taking the dogs on walks a 3-4 times a week. Haven't done a whole lot social lately, most of my friends have kind of drifted a bit since the pandemic. Wanting to go out in nature more but it feels like I need most of that time to make any progress on projects.
And I want to go on trips but they've gotten so expensive and my wife has very limited PTO this year anyway, so we only have one significant trip planned much later in the year and even that is a compromise from what we originally planned (now only driving one state away for a week, instead of go halfway across the country to see a couple national parks for two weeks).
But hey, could be a lot worse. And financially we're a lot better off than most Americans, especially right now.
When student loan payments start kicking in again in September that's going to hurt, though. Not for me, mine are paid off, but my wife has some pretty large ones. She's been paying them down some during this time, but not with as large of payments as she'll need to when they start up again (it's a little over half a mortgage payment every month).
I teach on the second floor of a city school where budget issues mean we don't have metal doors to the classrooms (older building, first floor has them). Every room has a metal cabinet though, and so our barricade procedure for the room is to lock the door, slide the cabinet in front of it, then kick out the furniture sliders from underneath the cabinet. Today, us second floor teachers pooled our personal money (near end of the school year in the US, discretionary funds are low) to buy reams of printer paper to stack inside and fill the cabinet, so that it has stopping power for bullets. Office supply store was nice enough to give for cost when they found out what it was for.
I don't mean to set off an arms control debate here, especially since I have a particular viewpoint on this, but I've found among many tech workers there's a certain blindness to ground reality. If you have a teacher or educator in your life, please check in on them this week. If you're well-off, or even not as much, understand that your profession is (wrongly or rightly) valued more than ours, so if you organize and amplify the voices of other roles, it will help immensely.
I think it's extremely scary that in the world's richest country, writing stuff about schools like "we don't have metal doors", "our barricade procedure" and "stopping power for bullets" is considered perfectly normal.
I was reading your comment and I just WTF'ed 5 times in a row. As a European, it's hard to wrap my mind around how simultaneously awesome and terrible the US has become. I feel terrible for you, and I'm extremely happy my kids go to a school without guards, without metal doors, with multiple, unguarded entrances, and so on. I hope your countrymen get their shit together and that someday this stuff feels like scary shit from the past. All the best to you until then, this stuff isn't OK and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
I appreciate this, thank you. I have quite a few friends that went to Germany for graduate school and really cherish that lifestyle, to the point where they're hesitant to come back and are considering starting a family there.
Who says it's considered normal? It reads like unproductive catastrophizing to me. In the unlikely event of a school shooting, I doubt "metal doors" or "barricade procedures" will make any difference.
To be fair, part of my post was getting it off my chest. There's definitely a backlash to when these things happen that attempts to rationalize them i.e. "They don't happen that often!" and "The media seizes on these grandiose events to fear-monger!" Every school in America has devoted thought to this after Sandy Hook. Robb Elementary in Uvalde did too. Metal doors and barricading may have limited the loss of life to one or two classrooms.
This is a thread about "how do you feel". GGP's comment started with metal doors, not with "we're freaked out about shootings". I might have been reading their tone wrong, but to me, the comment reads as if metal doors are a staple ingredient of any decent school, and not having them is a source for stress. That very much suggests that in the author's circles, such talk is commonplace.
For context, I've never seen a school with metal doors in my life and my only association with metal doors (until today) is prisons.
It's both insane that we have so many school shootings, and insane that we've spent so much money fortifying schools and traumatizing teachers and kids (find some teachers and ask them how people react even to pre-announced active shooter drills—people break down shaking and crying, have actual fight-or-flight responses kick in, et c., when those fake gunshots start, and that's the adults) in response.
The former is part of a broader sickness with our country, and the latter is part of an entirely different sickness in our country (must "do something", even if it's not justifiable and is net-harmful)
I'm sorry, there are fake gun shots in active shooter drills? What the fucking fuck? That is insane. What possible benefit could there be to that bit of simulation that would outweigh the additional trauma that would cause?
Not to mention all the survivors of school shootings who presumably have the dubious pleasure of being retraumatised on an annual basis. Fuck.
You're right on "do something". But fuck. I never guessed anyone would make it deliberately more traumatic.
I will not argue the efficacy of the drills. I don't support them, I don't know the data, etc.
But, if you're going to do a drill, and it's known to be a drill, practice like you play the game; if loud gunshot sounds freeze your escapees or their teachers to the point where they're not preserving themselves, the drill was for nothing.
They wouldn't tell any of us that the drills were coming. Everyone had to take cover in the classrooms and barricade the doors as the "Intruder Alert" message blared over the loudspeakers. Then someone would come through the halls and bang on every door. It's beyond insane.
Different schools do it different ways, often in cooperation with local law enforcement. Some do things like playing gunshots over a speaker somewhere in the building, others do different things. Most are the kind of activity that can mess people up in perhaps-unexpected ways—and again, that's the adults, let alone kids. There have been some cases of schools & police going way overboard with these things and doing much worse than playing some fake gunshot noises, and those have gotten some press (I think some are on YouTube?) but I don't think that's common. Regardless, even the more "normal" versions are pretty bad.
This is not so alien to Europe as you seem to think. Over the past 20 years, more people per capita have died in school shootings in Germany than in the US. A European nation was in a similar situation very recently.
What is maybe unique about the US is that nothing will be done, where as Germany added additional gun control laws, and probably will not ever have as deadly a decade for schools as the 2000s again.
I'm not attacking you, it's just a weird side effect of the US dominating discourse on the internet, but there is a certain habit of European HN posts exaggerating differences, one of favorites being something like: "I can't imagine living in the US, it only costs a few euros for my library card, in the US they charge per book, how dystopian" which is uh, just false, but also, Japan actually has a history of fee based lending libraries, and you would never see a similar comment about Japan, it would be celebrated as twee small business.
You can see the basic methodology in sibling comments, just some counting on wikipedia, really hinging on whether you include Universities (I did not).
But a less controversial way of putting it is that other countries, including European ones, have had comparable incidents, and we can compare what they did with the US.
> Over the past 20 years, more people per capita have died in school shootings in Germany than in the US. A European nation was in a similar situation very recently.
Wikipedia lists 90 deaths in "mass shootings" in Germany for the almost 32 years since 1990 [1]. I'm quite surprised its that high tbh.
Wikipedia also gives a total of 118 deaths in mass ahootings in the US for just the two years 2022 and 2021 [2]. There were no year totals and tbh I gave up counting at that point. But a crude extrapolation back to 1990 gives 1770 deaths.
The population of Germany is 84 million, and the population of the USA is 331 million - ie 4 times larger. So for Germany to have the same number of deaths in mass shootings over that period would have required 442 deaths - almost 5 times the actual number.
So I dont think this statement stands up to scrutiny.
Caveats: These numbers are mass shootings that include school shootings as well as other siruations. The data comes from different sources. Extrapolation of us numbers from two years data. And I did some of the adding-up in my head. I could try to get better data but its friday night and I'm tired.
My number for these murders in the US was 119, basically taking a similar wikipedia page as the one that you linked to and adding up mass shootings (I used 3 or more as criteria, chosen because of one definition used in one particular US law) at schools, which I defined as k-12, pretty arbitrarily, just what I thought of as "schools."
That gives more in killings in Germany than the US, really due to their particularly brutal 2000s decade, and which does not seem likely to recur, and the US might benefit from looking at the actions Germany took.
The page you linked to is mostly not school shootings, so I don't think it is a good way to examine my statement.
I'm willing to give this the benefit of the doubt if there's a lack of english-language reporting, and I don't want to trivialize as it's tragic wherever it occurs, but
- Wikipedia[1] has six events dating back to 1983 plus one from 1913, with a total of 46 deaths.
- CNN[2] only covers 2009-2018, with one German school shooting (to 288 American)
- Infoplease[3] lists mass shootings (not just schools) worldwide from '96 to 2021, with four German shootings and 36 deaths.
At 4x the population of Germany, the US (again, Wikipedia[4]) passed 180 deaths counting from Jan 2000 to June 2014 across 65 fatal shootings (there's many more with just injuries).
Looking at just "mass" incidents (5+ deaths) to filter out all the 1-2 casualty isolated incidents in the US that get overreported, those two wikipedia sources list two German shootings with 17 and 16 deaths since 2000 compared to the US with thirteen: 10, 6, 33, 6, 7, 27, 6, 5, 10, 6, 17, 10, 22, which is a ratio over 1:5. The math for your claim does add up per capita for just the decade 2000-2009 (both German @ 33, first four US @ 55).
I'm not suggesting under-reporting of German mass shootings in English (well, outside of the 1-2 casualty incidents which you also note), I just used a count from wikipedia. I suspect the difference in our numbers is whether you include shootings at University. I didn't, but that is a completely arbitrary call, maybe they should be included. I'm not trying to create a ranking or hierarchy, just emphasizing that not everywhere is say, the UK, which as far as I know has had 0 school shootings since 2000.
I actually think focussing on the mass casualty count aspect is misplaced. I don't spend my time at work worried about how wrong things went, I worry about how bad an incident of that sort could have been given a less favourable set of circumstances.
ie. Yes someone got onto the network, but they were dumb and got blocked having done no damage. Is it serious because of the potential or not because of the lack of impact? I claim the former!
As such, the only ratio I care about is frequency of people shooting other people at schools (per capita, sure). On that measure, I am expectant USA is a world leader?
I suspect if not the world leader, the world leader among wealthy countries (Some South American countries have shockingly high murder rates overall, so those would be the others to check I think, though those murders might have a different sort of etiology).
It would require a little more work to determine, since lower impact incidents in other countries are less reported on English wikipedia than those in the US, and even in the US I suspect they're not comprehensively cataloged.
It’s “My cousin who is studying video editing through YouTube because college was too expensive is helping us make a video for my daughter’s Gofunme cancer treatment“-dystopian.
I do value the teaching profession, I wish the pay was better. Despite the current events, I do not think they need more protection. I am in favor of gun control and I am in no way saying there are not issues.
The collective trauma to kids in the USA who don't feel safe at school is heart-breaking. Trauma doesn't evaporate, it warps you. Especially at that age.
The statistics of it being improbable to die at school are no salve.
Appreciate your wishes for better pay and stance on gun control. One of the subjects I teach is stats, and I wish I could draw comfort from that statistic myself.
"The Education Department reports that roughly 50 million children attend public schools for roughly 180 days per year. ... That means the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was roughly 1 in 614,000,000."
So in a given (180 day) year, such a child has a 1 in 3.4 million chance of dying, which means the equivalent annual death rate out of 100,000 children is 0.029 children.
The article you link to says that the annual death rate per 100,000 "Police and sheriff’s patrol officers" is 14.6 which is a few orders of magnitudes bigger, although children don't have as much control over whether they go to public schools as cops have over which job they do.
You appear to be conflating children with teachers. I was commenting on teacher risk, and linked deaths by profession. What you responded with was children, which are not teachers, or even a profession.
Forgive me if my statistic caused the topic to stray away from the issue of teacher safety. The recent tragedy in Uvalde did involve the deaths of more students than teachers, which I assume is typical for such events, but on the other hand there are probably more teachers than school students leaving comments on this topic, so you're right, it may be better to limit consideration to just professions for now.
I think the answer to education is to break up large schools and have schools that are no larger than 100-150 kids in total. 10x the number of schools and have individual attention to kids and teachers both. Fire the bad teachers quickly. Have larger communal facilities for things like sports and more outdoor activities like a form of scouts.
This is one of those issues that people have a myriad of solutions for that they want to share, and I've just learned to appreciate the mental effort as it's usually coming from a genuine place. Too often though it's like, "if we just changed urban zoning laws and new construction requirements and how society operates and the societal expectations of parents, children, and child-rearing, we could really solve this gun problem!"
Sure, but IMO let's get guns out of people's houses and harder to get period.
I understand the impulse for smaller schools, trust me. I think you'd be surprised to look into city schools and the capacities they were originally built for, compared to the amount of students they serve today. Part of that is land value and construction costs, but many urban schools are in a version of just-in-time maintenance. Your solution for more smaller schools is at play in suburban areas, and result in some really high-quality private schools. In the US at least, most school expenses are funded through property tax, so higher land value and wealthier areas are able to support better schools.
IMO there's a lot of credentialism in education already, need a master's degree to be certified (I do not, so I am a beneficiary of the shortage of math teachers since they needed to relax requirements to get people in classrooms). You can imagine my views on teachers' unions differ from yours, but firing bad teachers presumes supply outstrips demand.
High schools in particular have already become those communal neighborhood facilities for sports with baseball, basketball, tennis courts.
I think a lot of people don't realize the class size disparity across the country: I certainly didn't.
A few years ago I had to write a software application for a non-profit running a program for schools in the Los Angeles (I think: somewhere in Southern CA) area. In our rural school district, a class with 30 students would be a lot. In her school district, there was no class that had fewer than 30 students. I was in shock; she probably already knew that.
And before anyone asks, yes, my kids go/went to public school.
It is so sad, and infuriating(!) that you have to do this. It seems that an immediate action the federal government could do is devote funding toward 'fortification' of schools. Others know better that I how best to do this but it seems like something realistic that could happen now (unlike almost any gun control measure, or even something foolhardy like arming teachers (IMO)).
When I came in as a new teacher, I had the same thoughts regarding school fortification. We have two armed guards at school and metal detectors. One guard at front door, the other roving. Our district actually got low 9 figures in stimulus to pay off decades of loan debt resulting from mismanagement and to make significant infrastructure improvements last year. We get metal doors next year, need the summer to install everything.
This is all to say that my opinion of fortifying schools has drifted closer to our shared opinion of arming teachers; it creates a prison atmosphere (one that I've seen at other schools, I'm lucky to teach in the best one in the city), and that low-trust environment is not conducive to learning.
At my most frustrated I am 100% "take everyone's guns away," then being pragmatic I'd rather the money go to mandatory buybacks and background checks and a registration system like the one we have for vehicles that puts pressure on manufacturers and sellers, as well as buyers to renew and recertify or else be in breach of regulation.
> Today, us second floor teachers pooled our personal money..
> If you're well-off, or even not as much, understand that your profession is (wrongly or rightly) valued more than ours
It's some weird science fiction reality we live in where those responsible for raising the next generation of our race are compensated minimally and asked for so much. While a lot of us reel in 10x a teacher's salary to improve business processes which are mostly just selling non-essential goods.
I used to participate in reddit's teacher gift program. Are you on this?
First I'm hearing about this, but sounds wonderful. We were told we would be reimbursed, and they're generally good about that sort of thing, but thank you!
Please consider looking at places like DonorsChoose if you'd like to donate money, especially to towns away from large cities. It's my hope that we can get more active citizen participation in education reform, so if possible consider local activism. The scene can be messy and frustrating but it should offer you greater visibility in the ways money can change the paradigm and expectations of the system.
And to be fair, I've been looking at getting out of teaching and landing a job in data analysis myself, so I'm not as pure of motive as many think teachers are. This last week has just really pushed me to make this my last year of teaching.
Very bad. Struggling dealing with an autism / aspergers diagnosis and trying to understand how to re-enter the workforce after a few years of being under or unemployed.
It's a complete nightmare. I want to work but I struggle with communication and being understood (or understanding) the world around me.
I have been waiting on news about a job all week and not a peep. I'm pretty sure they are waiting till EOD Friday to tell me no.
The idea of starting the job hunt over again makes me sick and trying to concentrate and focus when I'm stressed like this every single day is destroying me as a person.
I got to go fishing yesterday though, that was nice. My life would be perfect if I could find a way to stop failing as a person. Every day I'm afraid I'll lose everything because I can't "make it happen" and turn things around.
> My life would be perfect if I could find a way to stop failing as a person. Every day I'm afraid I'll lose everything because I can't "make it happen" and turn things around.
For what it’s worth, you’re definitely not alone in feeling like this.
Best of luck with the job hunting. You’ll get there!
> I want to work but I struggle with communication and being understood (or understanding) the world around me.
I struggled with this a lot because it didn't come naturally to me at all. These particular resources had an outsized impact on my ability to communicate (but they were by no means all of it.) I hope they can help you too.
I’m currently not working due to disability. I’m applying for SSDI right now which is a bummer process.
It’s hard: I’ve been essentially out of work for a few years as well and I feel like my life has fallen out of sync with the rest of reality.
You’re not failing as a person. The world we live in isn’t made for us. We have to adapt just to meet the baseline that everyone else shows up with every day and it takes a lot of effort.
I don't know about the support network for your condition but surely there are some? I'm making an assumption, but you write as if you are trying to manage things all by yourself, which is commendable but perhaps making things more difficult than they need to be. Are you working with any kind of local autism support group? I would hope there are some resources to help people such as yourself navigate the difficulties with finding employment. And there are some employers who specifically want to hire in this area. Maybe you just need help with connecting to the right opportunities?
You are correct in that I take on too much myself. Difficulties in communication leads to situations where what I ask for is disregarded or people take offense at the idea I'd need or date to ask for accommodations. "Just do it yourself, why do you need help?" "Stop asking questions just do it" These are knee-jerk reaction of neurotypical society and not something I can ever really change (the world is as it is).
This pattern of being ignored when I ask for help has led to a negative feedback loop where I avoid asking for help and struggle to get or ask for help when I need it most.
> I don't know about the support network for your condition but surely there are some?
I am on my second therapist and he's really awesome, I would recommend him highly. I have two local mentors who have also been incredible but there is only so much you can lean on other people for. I have an incredible wife who is being super patient while her husband struggles to be a partner instead of a dependent.
> Maybe you just need help with connecting to the right opportunities?
Yes. See negative feedback loop above, but if I am lucky enough to connect with decent or like minded people I DO have some success. When I describe these things (desire for a more fair work situation) to people I get responses like "oh so you want the perfect job?" No I just want to be treated with dignity and respect like an adult.
> I have an incredible wife who is being super patient while her husband struggles to be a partner instead of a dependent.
As someone also facing (different) employment challenges stemming from autism, this feeling is very familiar. I was only diagnosed last year, finally bringing clarity to a long struggle. But I dug myself into a deep hole by trying to power through special needs I didn't know I had, and it's a long climb out.
My wife has been amazing and supportive and critical to my recovery, but I became debilitated enough that it's hard to feel like a partner. I'm getting there though, little by little. Even if I can't see the progress each day, I can see it clearly quarter by quarter.
Failing as a person is if you betray your friends, if you kick someone who is already down, taking advantage of people, etc. THAT is failing as a person.
You are not failing as a person. Do not define your self-worth as you having a job or money. You are going through hard times. Everyone goes through hard times. That doesn’t mean you are failing as a person.
Take a short break from job hunting and pick it back up again. You tying your self worth to your job may be what’s causing undue stress thsts making it harder on you. It’s a job. It’s not who you are as a person. Understanding that even if you get a shitty job that pays the bills, it doesn’t decrease your value. Get any job you can, just use it as a breather, collect your emotions and thoughts and when you feel better level up to a new job.
I tried working at a commercial pizza kitchen for about six months. I loved the creative cooking aspect of it. I hated the monotonous, thankless backbreaking work.
At the end of the week I lost all my time, and I had hardly enough money to pay the bills let alone disposable income. It was a net negative on my wallet and it was physically destructive to me, I was sore and worn out and that was a huge motivator to finally quit (getting a job offer helped).
I just want people to understand that the whole "take a break" thing is an incredible luxury not everybody can do. I don't have a job yet every day is stressful not knowing how I will solve the problems of tomorrow. Even if I do things to try to get my mind off it, those problems still exist when I return and often are worse because I ignored them to focus on myself.
> collect your emotions and thoughts and when you feel better level up to a new job.
I burned out a few years ago and while I am trying to recover I am starting to wonder if I ever will
I didn’t mean an extended break. I meant a break like a long weekend where you try not to think about it. Bra does like that at help clear your mind if possible.
The biggest things is stop feeling like a failure. That causes a negative feedback loop that will continue a pattern of bad decisions making. Forgive yourself and Clear your head.
I agree with everything in your original post. Its like riding a bicycle you can't grip the handlebars too hard or you negatively impact your ability to steer properly.
Cultivating forgiveness and empathy for myself is a lifelong journey. It's really hard but positive comments from people like yourself helps a lot. Thank you.
I'm sorry to hear that. From a faraway stranger, I'd say:
• Your written communication, in this comment, and via a quick look at other recent comments, appears excellent. Whatever your other comms/awkwardness concerns, writing can be a channel-for-connection, & for productive-economic interactions, for you even long before other relationships & skills find-their-grounding.
• You're right to prioritize finding employment. The rhythm of doing something useful, with other people, at any scale, can have beneficial spillover effects on mood, self-worth, etc – even after accounting for all the day-to-day frustrations of imperfect/difficult teams/coworkers. Concentration on the work can give the other anxieties/injuries "time to heal".
• Beware over-focusing on any one opportunity, however. The world is very big. The kinds of work/teams/cultures available vary massively, so there is some work/team that's suitably fit to both your talents & weaknesses & future potential – but it may take time, & even many abortive relationships, to find. Give yourself permission-to-"fail" N times, and N+1 times – as long as any new info & practice is acquired each cycle, it's a success at sampling-more-of-the-possibility space. Try to focus on what the world told you about the world, good and bad, rather than primarily self-ruminations.
• Also, we're likely entering a somewhat more-challenging economic time, with more delay/rejection from employers – and you should remember that's nothing to do with you specifically. Don't let outside things not under your control falsely imply any extra negative-self-evaluations.
• Get "out of your head" with things like fishing, physical activity, outdoor activity, etc as much as possible. They inherently remind people of the larger world, of essential human capabilities to move and interact, even when any number of other things aren't working. All exertion helps build background capabilities, in the mind & body, even unconsciously – and even just "stewing-in-thought" usually goes better if you're moving, in nature, with varied (not overly-familiar) surroundings.
You're obviously at a low point, but the fact that you can see that, talk about that, and consider other things that might remix your situation means it needn't last too long.
I'm looking myself after my last role turned out to be a bait and switch from a very toxic founder who was chasing everybody who reported to them away; Anybody who is unemployed can ping me on twitter using this username (I have open DM's) and based on your resume, I might be able to refer you to roles I have to turn down. If not, at least you wont feel so alone.
I followed your twitter username and found your website... the availability page is a work of art.
I especially resonate with your feelings on front-end / backend and I really like the way you make it sound vs my usual spiel about "I like backend because I hate CSS"
In the middle of selling and buying a house. Good problem to have, but very stressful, and it's a great way to see your savings disappear. "Someone wants another check for $3000? What's this one for? Never mind, I guess it doesn't matter."
Very good because it'll all be over someday, and this is a problem I asked for — indeed, worked for years to have.
I went though a similar life event nearly 18 months ago - just keep going, eventually, once all the legal stuff is wrapped up the rest can just stay bubbling away for a while itself at a low volume. Pick the biggest challenge, and get that (mostly) done, then on to the next until you're relaxed.
Also - never trust the trades to turn up on time or to have everything ready for them to start work. We had carpenters who said they couldn't work on a day because it was 2 degrees lower than some minimum for them to put in floors.
I think overall things are better but definitely some areas of worry.
I took last week off and really just enjoyed a staycation of doing whatever I felt like. Practiced guitar, read some, played Magic like every day, and had the time & stress capacity to handle our fridge going out suddenly.
The main thing is I'm worried where things are going. For the first time, because of the market, I'm projected to make less this year than I did last, which is a first. I'm not on board with where my team's roadmap is going. The project I've been working on for two years has been on the chopping block the entire time...while I'm simultaneously told it's "super important." I get calls from my family in Texas as they're having to prepare for major power outages. My wife's super stressed from the school shooting (and we don't even have kids).
For the pay thing, I know I should be looking and applying, but just thinking about interviewing gives me dark thoughts. I just cannot believe that after 10+ years of doing this job and doing it well, I still have to explain to these dipshit recruiters that "no really, I'm a FULL-stack developer. I may not have direct experience with Your Thing but I've worked on a hundred things I didn't know because I can fucking Figure It OUT. I have the degrees, I have the experience. Oh and your little LeetCode problems are bullshit. NO ONE is out there finding the longest increasing subsequence of an integer array." Then I feel guilty for even applying because nearly no one will pay me more than what I currently make and still let me work the strict 9-5 I do. My work isn't stressful, it's just frustrating and pointless. But isn't all work? But how can I stand by a "promotion" that literally resulted in me earning less b/c of how much is in stock?
I guess I should count my blessings. Good health, decent wealth, and good free time. I've been enjoying my hobbies of playing Magic and guitar. The weather is getting to be nice enough for a cookout and I've got a 3day weekend in a few hours.
> stack developer. I may not have direct experience with Your Thing but I've worked on a hundred things I didn't know because I can fucking Figure It OUT. I have the degrees, I have the experience. Oh and your little LeetCode problems are bullshit. NO ONE is out there finding the longest increasing subsequence of an integer array."
If it's any consolation, I have a decade's worth of experience on the job, and I once didn't pass the first-stage leetcode test. I ground leetcode using one of those websites for a week, then failed at one of their questions; one of which I didn't think made sense.
I spoke with the internal recruiter, who attempted to give "feedback" but I said, don't bother, as it isn't really useful. They said my response wasn't the first time he had heard that from people with a lot of experience, but that his hands were tied as the tests were deemed important by their head of technology.
This resonates with me SO MUCH. One time I aced a code test but didn't answer the questions about complexity in "big O" notation because I lack that formal training. My code 100% exposed my understanding of computational complexity but they wanted specific words regurgitated. Ran into that manager at a burn, bagged on him (we're friends!) a bit about it.
Interviews suck as SDE and it's projected to get worse. I'm not happy with that. This means we have to leetcode forever until we die. (I know there are jobs that don't leetcode test you but, still, I'm talking about big corps.)
Pay the price, study leetcode, find that stupid subsequence. That's a few weeks of your life, which is an ok price if it results in a better pay package/more stable environment/whatever it is you really want.
Would it be better if interviews didn't suck? Sure. Not going to change any time soon.
(OTOH, if it's just an incremental change, maybe not worth it. Do the math, figure out how highly you value a change, and compare to how highly you value, say, three weeks of vacation)
You're absolutely right about just biting the bullet and grinding as it should pay off tenfold for a salary increase. I know it's all really just a numbers game.
The """problem""" is I already make $250-300k. Last year I went through 30 interviews. They either fell through because of salary (they couldn't even come close to my current) or they just straight up lied until the very end about it being remote (name & shame: Notion, Lune, and Spotnana). The time-cost was sunk and net zero value.
The worst taste in my mouth was the recruiters basically negging and gaslighting me for asking as much as I did or saying I couldn't possibly know all the things on my resume. I'm literally doing those things daily and collecting the paycheck every month.
Maybe I'm just in a local maxima? My plan was to rest-and-vest but the vest part ain't happening at the level it was supposed to.
i'm halfway done with university now. i want to use some free time to be outside more (i hear sun is good for health), and i can't wait to start my internship
I've been at the same company (more-or-less, due to acquisitions) for nearly 25 years, and I'm burning out, edging closer to pulling the eject lever. It's a bit daunting, since I haven't been to a job interview since the 90s. And I strongly suspect the reasons I want to leave won't necessarily be any better elsewhere.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadI feel thankful that:
1. I got in when I did. I don't get the sense that our platform is directly impacted by the turmoil in the markets, but I do think it would've been a lot harder to negotiate my current salary, today.
2. I trusted my instincts over Glassdoor. At the end of the day, I had enough high-quality data points to look beyond the company's abysmal employee reviews there. Namely, all 4 engineers I met during the interview process were kind and patient with me during technicals, and incredibly sharp. Seemed like people I'd want to work with. Really glad that I chose to focus on the right signals, because the company that's described online seems like an entirely different place than where I work.
I'm not burnt out. I just want to start another project, learn another thing, but I'm forcing (in a good way, I believe) to complete this project and release it to friends and in a couple online forums. And yes, start using it myself! :)
Thanks for asking. Thanks for reading. I wish every one well!
Not OK, but I'm OK with not being OK…for now, anyway.
hellopetespeaking@protonmail.com
Conversely, if I don't have at least 4 days off in a row I don't know how to just relax and not try to do work.
I don't enjoy watching movies or TV anymore cause all I can think about is the fact that I'm not being productive.
I haven't gone to the movies since 2019 (since COVID) and I've been wanting to go.
But a part of my brain says that I can't spare the 3+ hours that it takes to go to the theatre. That it would be unproductive.
I don't know how to force myself to relax.
But other than I'm mostly good. I'm relatively healthy and am happy to have work and income at a time when people are struggling to get by.
So I honestly have it better than a LLLOT of people. I try not to take my blessings for granted.
Try to remember: If you take time off and the business/team/project suffers, it's not your fault, it's your company's fault for failing to build in a staffing safety margin and failing to plan for the 100% expected event of people using their vacation time.
Take vacation. Even if it feels like it will hurt the team, the real thing hurting them (and you) is that there isn't a system of trust between everyone. Take a week off, when you come back, figure out what people were blocked on, what broke that only you could fix, etc. and then work on improving those single points of failure. Driving yourself towards burnout is not doing yourself or your team any favors.
This kind of thing invades my decision making daily. I "blame" the high-demand for excellence at the tech firms I've worked at, and a personal obsession with self-help. It's whittled down my capacity for fun.
The only thing I've found help is to invest in something else I value highly - a hobby, friendship, family time. At the end of the day TV and movies (while enjoyable) aren't all that important compared to the obligation you feel to co-workers.
If nothing else, you will someday retire!
Why is it important to always be productive? What bad things would occur if you were less productive?
1. Son graduated High School and was excepted at college
A bit sad
1. 19 families will not be able to watch their children do the same. 2. Americans cannot seem too differentiate between a right to own a gun and the right to own a gun that can commit mass murder.
is there anything we can do for you?
Take care of your mental health folks!
Job's doing pretty well, pays pretty well for my geographic region (nowhere close to SV wages though), main client is pretty good and the project should have high impact and I'm doing significant work on it, but it's not in a field that particularly interests me.
In my spare time I'm helping a non-profit as kind of a mentor for junior engineers as well as a little dev work here and there. Sometimes I feel guilty about not putting more time and effort into it than I do.
Also trying to work on my own video game projects in my spare time as well, but finding the energy and motivation for it has been pretty low lately.
But it really just feels like my life revolves around three C's: coding, cleaning, and cooking. And taking the dogs on walks a 3-4 times a week. Haven't done a whole lot social lately, most of my friends have kind of drifted a bit since the pandemic. Wanting to go out in nature more but it feels like I need most of that time to make any progress on projects.
And I want to go on trips but they've gotten so expensive and my wife has very limited PTO this year anyway, so we only have one significant trip planned much later in the year and even that is a compromise from what we originally planned (now only driving one state away for a week, instead of go halfway across the country to see a couple national parks for two weeks).
But hey, could be a lot worse. And financially we're a lot better off than most Americans, especially right now.
When student loan payments start kicking in again in September that's going to hurt, though. Not for me, mine are paid off, but my wife has some pretty large ones. She's been paying them down some during this time, but not with as large of payments as she'll need to when they start up again (it's a little over half a mortgage payment every month).
Resilience, in other words. That everyone else seems to think the sky is falling paradoxically strengthens my resolve. I don't know why this is.
I don't mean to set off an arms control debate here, especially since I have a particular viewpoint on this, but I've found among many tech workers there's a certain blindness to ground reality. If you have a teacher or educator in your life, please check in on them this week. If you're well-off, or even not as much, understand that your profession is (wrongly or rightly) valued more than ours, so if you organize and amplify the voices of other roles, it will help immensely.
I was reading your comment and I just WTF'ed 5 times in a row. As a European, it's hard to wrap my mind around how simultaneously awesome and terrible the US has become. I feel terrible for you, and I'm extremely happy my kids go to a school without guards, without metal doors, with multiple, unguarded entrances, and so on. I hope your countrymen get their shit together and that someday this stuff feels like scary shit from the past. All the best to you until then, this stuff isn't OK and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
For context, I've never seen a school with metal doors in my life and my only association with metal doors (until today) is prisons.
The former is part of a broader sickness with our country, and the latter is part of an entirely different sickness in our country (must "do something", even if it's not justifiable and is net-harmful)
Not to mention all the survivors of school shootings who presumably have the dubious pleasure of being retraumatised on an annual basis. Fuck.
You're right on "do something". But fuck. I never guessed anyone would make it deliberately more traumatic.
But, if you're going to do a drill, and it's known to be a drill, practice like you play the game; if loud gunshot sounds freeze your escapees or their teachers to the point where they're not preserving themselves, the drill was for nothing.
They wouldn't tell any of us that the drills were coming. Everyone had to take cover in the classrooms and barricade the doors as the "Intruder Alert" message blared over the loudspeakers. Then someone would come through the halls and bang on every door. It's beyond insane.
What is maybe unique about the US is that nothing will be done, where as Germany added additional gun control laws, and probably will not ever have as deadly a decade for schools as the 2000s again.
I'm not attacking you, it's just a weird side effect of the US dominating discourse on the internet, but there is a certain habit of European HN posts exaggerating differences, one of favorites being something like: "I can't imagine living in the US, it only costs a few euros for my library card, in the US they charge per book, how dystopian" which is uh, just false, but also, Japan actually has a history of fee based lending libraries, and you would never see a similar comment about Japan, it would be celebrated as twee small business.
Any stats to back that up? Seems completely counter-factual.
But a less controversial way of putting it is that other countries, including European ones, have had comparable incidents, and we can compare what they did with the US.
This is absolutely not true and can be verified by a few minutes research on Wikipedia
Wikipedia lists 90 deaths in "mass shootings" in Germany for the almost 32 years since 1990 [1]. I'm quite surprised its that high tbh.
Wikipedia also gives a total of 118 deaths in mass ahootings in the US for just the two years 2022 and 2021 [2]. There were no year totals and tbh I gave up counting at that point. But a crude extrapolation back to 1990 gives 1770 deaths.
The population of Germany is 84 million, and the population of the USA is 331 million - ie 4 times larger. So for Germany to have the same number of deaths in mass shootings over that period would have required 442 deaths - almost 5 times the actual number.
So I dont think this statement stands up to scrutiny.
Caveats: These numbers are mass shootings that include school shootings as well as other siruations. The data comes from different sources. Extrapolation of us numbers from two years data. And I did some of the adding-up in my head. I could try to get better data but its friday night and I'm tired.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_Germ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
That gives more in killings in Germany than the US, really due to their particularly brutal 2000s decade, and which does not seem likely to recur, and the US might benefit from looking at the actions Germany took.
The page you linked to is mostly not school shootings, so I don't think it is a good way to examine my statement.
- Wikipedia[1] has six events dating back to 1983 plus one from 1913, with a total of 46 deaths. - CNN[2] only covers 2009-2018, with one German school shooting (to 288 American) - Infoplease[3] lists mass shootings (not just schools) worldwide from '96 to 2021, with four German shootings and 36 deaths.
At 4x the population of Germany, the US (again, Wikipedia[4]) passed 180 deaths counting from Jan 2000 to June 2014 across 65 fatal shootings (there's many more with just injuries).
Looking at just "mass" incidents (5+ deaths) to filter out all the 1-2 casualty isolated incidents in the US that get overreported, those two wikipedia sources list two German shootings with 17 and 16 deaths since 2000 compared to the US with thirteen: 10, 6, 33, 6, 7, 27, 6, 5, 10, 6, 17, 10, 22, which is a ratio over 1:5. The math for your claim does add up per capita for just the decade 2000-2009 (both German @ 33, first four US @ 55).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:School_shootings_in_G...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/21/us/school-shooting-us-versus-...
[3] https://www.infoplease.com/us/crime/timeline-of-worldwide-sc...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
ie. Yes someone got onto the network, but they were dumb and got blocked having done no damage. Is it serious because of the potential or not because of the lack of impact? I claim the former!
As such, the only ratio I care about is frequency of people shooting other people at schools (per capita, sure). On that measure, I am expectant USA is a world leader?
It’s “My cousin who is studying video editing through YouTube because college was too expensive is helping us make a video for my daughter’s Gofunme cancer treatment“-dystopian.
And best/worst of all, its inhabitants don't even notice.
>how simultaneously awesome and terrible the US has become
It's still significantly better than it used to be.
If you look up professions with the highest death rates. Teacher's are fairly low on the list, if they show up at all. https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/15-professions-with-the-h...
The statistics of it being improbable to die at school are no salve.
"The Education Department reports that roughly 50 million children attend public schools for roughly 180 days per year. ... That means the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was roughly 1 in 614,000,000."
So in a given (180 day) year, such a child has a 1 in 3.4 million chance of dying, which means the equivalent annual death rate out of 100,000 children is 0.029 children.
The article you link to says that the annual death rate per 100,000 "Police and sheriff’s patrol officers" is 14.6 which is a few orders of magnitudes bigger, although children don't have as much control over whether they go to public schools as cops have over which job they do.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/school-shootings-are-...
Sure, but IMO let's get guns out of people's houses and harder to get period.
IMO there's a lot of credentialism in education already, need a master's degree to be certified (I do not, so I am a beneficiary of the shortage of math teachers since they needed to relax requirements to get people in classrooms). You can imagine my views on teachers' unions differ from yours, but firing bad teachers presumes supply outstrips demand.
High schools in particular have already become those communal neighborhood facilities for sports with baseball, basketball, tennis courts.
A few years ago I had to write a software application for a non-profit running a program for schools in the Los Angeles (I think: somewhere in Southern CA) area. In our rural school district, a class with 30 students would be a lot. In her school district, there was no class that had fewer than 30 students. I was in shock; she probably already knew that.
And before anyone asks, yes, my kids go/went to public school.
$40b to Ukraine though? Full bipartisan support, passed in no time at all.
You do the math.
This is all to say that my opinion of fortifying schools has drifted closer to our shared opinion of arming teachers; it creates a prison atmosphere (one that I've seen at other schools, I'm lucky to teach in the best one in the city), and that low-trust environment is not conducive to learning.
At my most frustrated I am 100% "take everyone's guns away," then being pragmatic I'd rather the money go to mandatory buybacks and background checks and a registration system like the one we have for vehicles that puts pressure on manufacturers and sellers, as well as buyers to renew and recertify or else be in breach of regulation.
> If you're well-off, or even not as much, understand that your profession is (wrongly or rightly) valued more than ours
It's some weird science fiction reality we live in where those responsible for raising the next generation of our race are compensated minimally and asked for so much. While a lot of us reel in 10x a teacher's salary to improve business processes which are mostly just selling non-essential goods.
I used to participate in reddit's teacher gift program. Are you on this?
Please consider looking at places like DonorsChoose if you'd like to donate money, especially to towns away from large cities. It's my hope that we can get more active citizen participation in education reform, so if possible consider local activism. The scene can be messy and frustrating but it should offer you greater visibility in the ways money can change the paradigm and expectations of the system.
And to be fair, I've been looking at getting out of teaching and landing a job in data analysis myself, so I'm not as pure of motive as many think teachers are. This last week has just really pushed me to make this my last year of teaching.
Grinding for an early retirement before 30.
Full time work and university takes most of my time.
Rest is spent on building side projects which I'm betting on making me money.
I don't have good elite creditionals or connections so raising money is impossible right now.
Too much to learn and do but too little time and lacking in conviction.
It's a complete nightmare. I want to work but I struggle with communication and being understood (or understanding) the world around me.
I have been waiting on news about a job all week and not a peep. I'm pretty sure they are waiting till EOD Friday to tell me no.
The idea of starting the job hunt over again makes me sick and trying to concentrate and focus when I'm stressed like this every single day is destroying me as a person.
I got to go fishing yesterday though, that was nice. My life would be perfect if I could find a way to stop failing as a person. Every day I'm afraid I'll lose everything because I can't "make it happen" and turn things around.
For what it’s worth, you’re definitely not alone in feeling like this.
Best of luck with the job hunting. You’ll get there!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OQQFVLZddw
I find this to be helpful to listen to sometimes when things seem bleak
I struggled with this a lot because it didn't come naturally to me at all. These particular resources had an outsized impact on my ability to communicate (but they were by no means all of it.) I hope they can help you too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gtU-otxtPA&list=PLaZ37TOxDl...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MWYZPCR
It’s hard: I’ve been essentially out of work for a few years as well and I feel like my life has fallen out of sync with the rest of reality.
You’re not failing as a person. The world we live in isn’t made for us. We have to adapt just to meet the baseline that everyone else shows up with every day and it takes a lot of effort.
This pattern of being ignored when I ask for help has led to a negative feedback loop where I avoid asking for help and struggle to get or ask for help when I need it most.
> I don't know about the support network for your condition but surely there are some?
I am on my second therapist and he's really awesome, I would recommend him highly. I have two local mentors who have also been incredible but there is only so much you can lean on other people for. I have an incredible wife who is being super patient while her husband struggles to be a partner instead of a dependent.
> Maybe you just need help with connecting to the right opportunities?
Yes. See negative feedback loop above, but if I am lucky enough to connect with decent or like minded people I DO have some success. When I describe these things (desire for a more fair work situation) to people I get responses like "oh so you want the perfect job?" No I just want to be treated with dignity and respect like an adult.
As someone also facing (different) employment challenges stemming from autism, this feeling is very familiar. I was only diagnosed last year, finally bringing clarity to a long struggle. But I dug myself into a deep hole by trying to power through special needs I didn't know I had, and it's a long climb out.
My wife has been amazing and supportive and critical to my recovery, but I became debilitated enough that it's hard to feel like a partner. I'm getting there though, little by little. Even if I can't see the progress each day, I can see it clearly quarter by quarter.
You are not failing as a person. Do not define your self-worth as you having a job or money. You are going through hard times. Everyone goes through hard times. That doesn’t mean you are failing as a person.
Take a short break from job hunting and pick it back up again. You tying your self worth to your job may be what’s causing undue stress thsts making it harder on you. It’s a job. It’s not who you are as a person. Understanding that even if you get a shitty job that pays the bills, it doesn’t decrease your value. Get any job you can, just use it as a breather, collect your emotions and thoughts and when you feel better level up to a new job.
At the end of the week I lost all my time, and I had hardly enough money to pay the bills let alone disposable income. It was a net negative on my wallet and it was physically destructive to me, I was sore and worn out and that was a huge motivator to finally quit (getting a job offer helped).
I just want people to understand that the whole "take a break" thing is an incredible luxury not everybody can do. I don't have a job yet every day is stressful not knowing how I will solve the problems of tomorrow. Even if I do things to try to get my mind off it, those problems still exist when I return and often are worse because I ignored them to focus on myself.
> collect your emotions and thoughts and when you feel better level up to a new job.
I burned out a few years ago and while I am trying to recover I am starting to wonder if I ever will
The biggest things is stop feeling like a failure. That causes a negative feedback loop that will continue a pattern of bad decisions making. Forgive yourself and Clear your head.
Cultivating forgiveness and empathy for myself is a lifelong journey. It's really hard but positive comments from people like yourself helps a lot. Thank you.
• Your written communication, in this comment, and via a quick look at other recent comments, appears excellent. Whatever your other comms/awkwardness concerns, writing can be a channel-for-connection, & for productive-economic interactions, for you even long before other relationships & skills find-their-grounding.
• You're right to prioritize finding employment. The rhythm of doing something useful, with other people, at any scale, can have beneficial spillover effects on mood, self-worth, etc – even after accounting for all the day-to-day frustrations of imperfect/difficult teams/coworkers. Concentration on the work can give the other anxieties/injuries "time to heal".
• Beware over-focusing on any one opportunity, however. The world is very big. The kinds of work/teams/cultures available vary massively, so there is some work/team that's suitably fit to both your talents & weaknesses & future potential – but it may take time, & even many abortive relationships, to find. Give yourself permission-to-"fail" N times, and N+1 times – as long as any new info & practice is acquired each cycle, it's a success at sampling-more-of-the-possibility space. Try to focus on what the world told you about the world, good and bad, rather than primarily self-ruminations.
• Also, we're likely entering a somewhat more-challenging economic time, with more delay/rejection from employers – and you should remember that's nothing to do with you specifically. Don't let outside things not under your control falsely imply any extra negative-self-evaluations.
• Get "out of your head" with things like fishing, physical activity, outdoor activity, etc as much as possible. They inherently remind people of the larger world, of essential human capabilities to move and interact, even when any number of other things aren't working. All exertion helps build background capabilities, in the mind & body, even unconsciously – and even just "stewing-in-thought" usually goes better if you're moving, in nature, with varied (not overly-familiar) surroundings.
You're obviously at a low point, but the fact that you can see that, talk about that, and consider other things that might remix your situation means it needn't last too long.
It's been a long process but I hope whatever job I end up at next is something new or different from my previous experiences.
I especially resonate with your feelings on front-end / backend and I really like the way you make it sound vs my usual spiel about "I like backend because I hate CSS"
In the middle of selling and buying a house. Good problem to have, but very stressful, and it's a great way to see your savings disappear. "Someone wants another check for $3000? What's this one for? Never mind, I guess it doesn't matter."
Very good because it'll all be over someday, and this is a problem I asked for — indeed, worked for years to have.
Also - never trust the trades to turn up on time or to have everything ready for them to start work. We had carpenters who said they couldn't work on a day because it was 2 degrees lower than some minimum for them to put in floors.
I took last week off and really just enjoyed a staycation of doing whatever I felt like. Practiced guitar, read some, played Magic like every day, and had the time & stress capacity to handle our fridge going out suddenly.
The main thing is I'm worried where things are going. For the first time, because of the market, I'm projected to make less this year than I did last, which is a first. I'm not on board with where my team's roadmap is going. The project I've been working on for two years has been on the chopping block the entire time...while I'm simultaneously told it's "super important." I get calls from my family in Texas as they're having to prepare for major power outages. My wife's super stressed from the school shooting (and we don't even have kids).
For the pay thing, I know I should be looking and applying, but just thinking about interviewing gives me dark thoughts. I just cannot believe that after 10+ years of doing this job and doing it well, I still have to explain to these dipshit recruiters that "no really, I'm a FULL-stack developer. I may not have direct experience with Your Thing but I've worked on a hundred things I didn't know because I can fucking Figure It OUT. I have the degrees, I have the experience. Oh and your little LeetCode problems are bullshit. NO ONE is out there finding the longest increasing subsequence of an integer array." Then I feel guilty for even applying because nearly no one will pay me more than what I currently make and still let me work the strict 9-5 I do. My work isn't stressful, it's just frustrating and pointless. But isn't all work? But how can I stand by a "promotion" that literally resulted in me earning less b/c of how much is in stock?
I guess I should count my blessings. Good health, decent wealth, and good free time. I've been enjoying my hobbies of playing Magic and guitar. The weather is getting to be nice enough for a cookout and I've got a 3day weekend in a few hours.
If it's any consolation, I have a decade's worth of experience on the job, and I once didn't pass the first-stage leetcode test. I ground leetcode using one of those websites for a week, then failed at one of their questions; one of which I didn't think made sense.
I spoke with the internal recruiter, who attempted to give "feedback" but I said, don't bother, as it isn't really useful. They said my response wasn't the first time he had heard that from people with a lot of experience, but that his hands were tied as the tests were deemed important by their head of technology.
A burn: Have you heard of Burning Man? It's kinda like that, except not in Nevada.
Would it be better if interviews didn't suck? Sure. Not going to change any time soon.
(OTOH, if it's just an incremental change, maybe not worth it. Do the math, figure out how highly you value a change, and compare to how highly you value, say, three weeks of vacation)
The """problem""" is I already make $250-300k. Last year I went through 30 interviews. They either fell through because of salary (they couldn't even come close to my current) or they just straight up lied until the very end about it being remote (name & shame: Notion, Lune, and Spotnana). The time-cost was sunk and net zero value.
The worst taste in my mouth was the recruiters basically negging and gaslighting me for asking as much as I did or saying I couldn't possibly know all the things on my resume. I'm literally doing those things daily and collecting the paycheck every month.
Maybe I'm just in a local maxima? My plan was to rest-and-vest but the vest part ain't happening at the level it was supposed to.
i'm halfway done with university now. i want to use some free time to be outside more (i hear sun is good for health), and i can't wait to start my internship
So much variety in workplaces, especially now, and you being senior, you should have your pick.
What are you trying to avoid?