David Singmaster, author of the first book on how to solve the Rubik Cube, had a vast collection of mathematical books, papers, ephemera, and a huge collection of twisty puzzles, and other puzzles.
His wish was that it remain in the UK, and he really, really wanted it to stay as a collection. But it's effectively impossible.
Collections, even significant collections[0], are hard to keep together. I wish I had the money necessary to acquire and make accessible collections like this.
[0] I'm not saying David's collection is significant, but it is substantial, and contains many things potentially of interest.
I feel this somewhat but I’ve realized it’s somewhat seasonal and more a matter of perspective.
I’ve had good times and bad times at work and they just come and go. During the good times I double down on my work. I put in more because I get more out. During the bad times I focus on personal projects. I do the job as a professional but don’t waste time trying to knock it out of the park when I know I won’t.
I just look for fulfillment where it comes naturally and don’t try to squeeze it out where it doesn’t.
> I'm not terribly convinced that software engineering is harder on someone mental health than being a ... lawyer ... is.
I am.
I worked alongside lawyers for almost a decade, providing them with non-engineering professional services. I also have a couple decades of experience in software engineering and startups.
The pressure in software engineering is something entirely different, and far worse, than what I experienced in the legal environment.
By and large lawyers are lawyers, not managers. Yes, there's a hierarchy of junior associate to senior-most partner but it's lawyers all the way up and down the chain. You don't have lawyers working under managers. And there's something about this that makes the pressures different. Pressures are there, hours are long, spouses are unhappy because the lawyers are always at work or distracted at home... but I never had anxiety attacks or mental health issues working in the legal environment whereas in the software and startup environments I did.
In legal, everyone knows the drill and you do the drill. And your superiors have done the drill.
In software, you often don't know drill. You just grind, often to satisfy someone who hasn't done the grind themselves. A company I once worked for – a successful public company – has constant openings for senior software engineers for this very reason.
There's no way to get around the feeling that many people are NPCs if you spend time in sterile urban or suburban environments. The amount of people whose existence consist of very little more than work to fuel consumption is really high.
On the contrary if you are in a place where no one really works a normal job and things you bought or paid money to do are rarely topics of conversation then the interactions feel much more living.
I learned this after our company wasted 144+ man months creating a web app no one wanted to purchase, while this nearly computer illiterate person built a profitable SaaS in only 3 months with no coding skills. Eventually he scaled it to $50,000 MRR and beyond. He explained how he did it, and his secret was marketing. When I say "marketing," in this context I mean a special type of marketing that focuses on the user.
- You will almost certainly need sales/marketing to sell your product/service.
- Marketing will tell you if an idea is worth building, even before you start development.
- (Job search/hiring is just another form of marketing.) You can use marketing to hire the best developers to build both a web app and mobile app.
- Marketing (market research) will tell you which to build (app vs. web app)
Even marketing isn't a silver bullet, but I think it maximizes your chances of success. Dane Maxwell developed the most risk-free way to start a business (based on marketing). He currently teaches his method here: https://startfromzero.com
https://30x500.com is a very similar course, geared more towards techies.
And this is like a "greatest hits" collection of the best marketing lessons compressed into a single book: https://expertsecrets.com
I was lucky that my wife convinced me to move close to her family (it would have never occurred to me.) Now we live just a few doors down from her brother who's got 4 kids, and we have 2. Watching the cousins intermingle is an amazing and unique experience.
It's kinda sad but it's also obvious that people are majorly missing out. On having kids, on living close to family, on all of it.
Ironically, this is evolution in action. The folks that "remember" how to have a family and raise kids have an uncontested claim to the future. The "it's too hard to have kids" crew is selecting against themselves, evolutionary speaking. That won't last.
It definitely ruined a friendship of mine. His startup was making insane amounts of money. He offered me a position, then his business priorities changed and forced me into a poor role with no long term prospects. I struggled in that new role and he noticed that. He then terminated our agreement two months early.
There are reasons he's right about what he did and there are reasons I'm right about being upset about it but it definitely cost us our friendship.
I think back that if he had operated with integrity and honored his agreement to keep me on for two extra months it would have not been upsetting to leave then. As it was it left me scrambling with three small kids.
The lesson to me is that even if the startup is flush with cash, there will be issues. How the founder manages those issues matters.
I recall when I had my startup I did a bunch of business coaching and really had to take on a lot of uncomfortable things about myself. I'm grateful for that. I invited him many times to participate in that work and he never did. When the money is good you think you don't need it.
A coworker took one of his scenic photos from a weekend trip and printed it out in quadrants. This was done as a cheap way of enlarging the print, but it also gave the sense of looking out a four pane window. It was later upgraded to have an actual frame to complete the look. He was the only one to have a window in his cubicle.
you've never 'made it'. every day is a struggle to start afresh and prove your worth. the moment you think 'you've arrived' is the day your downfall starts/
Same for me. I’ve had mine my whole life probably due to ear infections as an infant.
As a small silver lining, my tinnitus now serves as an audible “alarm system”: too much stress in my life? Drank too much coffee? Overdoing it at the gym? All of these will raise the ringing volume and signal me to make changes.
Here is what I did (I have no idea if this is helpful):
- Pulled all my changeset comments within the range I care about.
- Put them into Excel and strip dupes, shorts, and general cleanup (e.g. remove anything with "fix" + "bug"/"exception"/"crash" in it).
- Put the remainder into ChatGPT and ask it to make me a bullet list of my projects.
- Expand and clean up the resulting bullet list by hand.
Then take that to interviews with me, and when someone asks me I unapologetically change to that page and skim it as I talk. I don't pretend I don't come prepared or even over prepared, I want them to know I am ready for their questions.
I don't understand where people got the impression you need to memorize this stuff; it is a professional business meeting, and you wouldn't turn up to any other meeting without notes or references to what you're going to talk about.
The functionality of achievements as transparent telemetry seems entirely accidental, but may be the most valuable aspect of them. Now a developer can look at similar games to the one they're developing and see what filtered players (although it won't tell them why it filtered players, since 'too difficult' and 'boring' look the same in the stats). They can see what endings were popular (which usually translates to some measure of popularity score for characters, factions or whatever. That kind of info is usually traded behind closed doors for extortionate sums.
Same. My friends in other white-collar-ish jobs, which require lots of writing, are smitten with ChatGPT and think it's amazing. Friends in tech are largely dismissive/critical of it's abilities while being skeptical/fearful of its impact.
My take is that, for most non-tech people, this is their first experience directing a computer to perform a precise task - ie programming. They're accustomed to using applications, not having a hand in making them. Maybe they've used Excel before and felt a bit of this power. But ChatGPT allows them to dream up a novel idea and get the computer to execute it - something that feels like magic to non-tech folks but is rather pedestrian for most of us in tech.
As a kid working in a fast food joint, whenever someone would notice a bus of any sort pull into the parking lot, the cry of "bus!" sent everyone into oh-shit mode. I imagine a cruise ship pulling into a small tourist town dock is similar but much larger.
No intrinsic use. No mass. No degradation. Transports at the speed of light. Perfectly scarce and not debaseable.
All other commodities exist at various vectors outside of this null point. They have various usefulness in and of themselves. They have mass and volume. They degrade at different rates. They take a lot of time and energy to transport. They aren't perfectly scarce and some are absurdly abundant.
Humans have overloaded various commodities throughout history with the memetic concept of "moneyness". Mostly gold and other precious metals because they have properties close to the null point that we find most important (primarily scarcity and close to zero degradation). We hoard these non null commodities because we came to collective consensus to imbue them as the database of our debt to each other, otherwise known as money. However, this had the negative effect of tying up otherwise useful commodities that we might have been able to put to productive work. This money also had the negative effect of being difficult to transport, store securely, and fractionalize.
Then came government backed, faith based currency. It's a near null point commodity and we really like that when choosing something to imbue our collective moneyness concept in. No intrinsic use. Low mass (paper) to no mass (digital). Limited degradation (paper with replacement service) to no degradation (digital). Easy transport (paper with high denominations) to light speed transport (digital). However, it's scarcity is highly questionable. To quote Satoshi, "The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust."
Bitcoin is the null commodity because it solved the final piece of the puzzle that we tried to solve with fiat currencies. Eliminating trust in central authorities and perfect scarcity.
You may want to check out the healthy gamer youtube channel. He’s a psychiatrist who specializes in burnout. Seems to know his stuff best as I can tell. I’ve found I like when he geeks out on some of the physiological effects related to psychology, but you may benefit from some of his more general episodes on the topic of burnout.
It was so funny. I heard her half of the conversation getting into an argument with him and she goes, “No, I don’t know who ‘Seth Godin’ is and I don’t care.” I guess he threatened to write about how bad her customer service was on his blog.
To be fair our customer service was terrible. When a customer asked for our manager, I had a fake email address that I’d give them that I was in charge of. I probably fired myself about a half-dozen times.
I used to be _into it_. Self taught, burning the midnight oil, loved the challenges, loved the highs.
But canceled projects, inept managers and deadend startups led by brain dead CEOs knocked it all out of me. I’m heading into my 40s and I’m officially a clock puncher. Could not care less who knows it.
I wish I could work somewhere that would just get the fuck out of my way and let me build, fix and make, but tech is full of people riding on the coat tails of engineers now, pretending we’re all on equal footing. We’re not. We don’t need the middle managers and HRs and dozen VPs. We just need some good designers and some good engineers and we can blow peoples’ minds.
But makers making things makes people who can’t make anything uncomfortable.
Well, programmers provide a natural language interface and somehow we usually manage the ambiguity and complexity OK.
In my experience, a lot of support requests for bespoke/in-house software go like this:
> User: Why is my wibble being quarked? This shouldn’t be happening!
> Dev: Wibble ID, please?
> User: ID 234567. This is terrible!
> Dev: [rummages in git blame] Well, this wibble is frobnicated, and three years ago [links to Slack thread] you said that all frobnicated wibbles should be automatically quarked.
> User: Yes, but that was before we automated the Acme account. We never frobnicate their wibbles!
> Dev: ...so, is there a way for me to tell if a client wants their wibbles unfrobnicated, or should I hard-code an exception for Acme?
(And then, six months later: “Why are none of Acme’s wibbles being frobnicated automatically?”)
If you could introduce an AI assistant that could answer these questions instantly (instead of starting with a support ticket), it’d cut the feedback loop from hours or days down to seconds, and the users (who are generally pretty smart in their field, even if my frustration is showing above) would have a much better resource for understanding the black box they’ve been given and why it works the way it does.
Perhaps managers are missing a very particular type of non-virtual interaction. Surprised this isn’t mentioned more in this era of #MeToo. And I’d imagine that would provide a very strong incentive for many managers to push RTO.
Sometimes - perhaps even often - the victims of burnout have been working (only just!) within their means, until external factors bring additional layers of pressure, causing everything to crash down.
The closer to-the-edge that we work, the less tolerance we have for these factors. We need to consider the headroom needed to weather life's (and the world's) ups and downs. We know that sprinting during a marathon comes at a cost, but the sentiment is less often applied to mental and career long hauls.
Is "couples" the reason? I (implicitly, no idea why now that you bring it up) read the other descriptions of weeklies as not-with-partner events. Perhaps not strictly not-with-partner, but default without.
"Couples" puts everybody in involuntary performance mode. It starts super harmless, the "and" element (the side in a couple that came along) having a natural desire to be good with the friends of their partner (the "and" side is prone to greatly overestimate the depth of the relationship that lead to the invite!), the other side (the one that had the "link") trying to make their partner feel good with that group. So far so good, everybody does the reasonable thing, sounds super nice. But that very same thing happens within every couple, nobody in the room who isn't in "prove myself to my partner" mode. Before you know it escalates into a take-no-prisoners battle of showing off which couple functions best. It's certainly possible with couples despite all this, but there is infinitely more that could go wrong along the way.
back in the day when I was first starting out I had to do the odd audit (eg listing network ports or checking computer inventory numbers in offices - v boring)
one of the best things I did (which was dependant on how much spare time I had), was to ask the people I visited, what do you do? I tried to make sure I asked a mixture of low to high ranking people
The responses was amazing, with some people giving up loads of their time up to explain their jobs. I even made some good friends ouside the computer dept
The folks making Open Assistant [1] (opensource ChatGPT clone) gathered enough data to start initial training, so hopefully there will be something to play with soon.
I’ve been around the bush enough to know the basic truth of layoffs:
Layoffs are only about performance when considering /business/ performance, almost never about individual performance. At the individual level they are arbitrary to the point of seeming random.
Business units which are profitable, even the bedrock of the business, can and will undergo layoffs if they’re not showing growth. Payroll is an expense tied to growth, especially for technical roles that get booked as R&D CapEx.
The best way to avoid layoffs is to always work for a part of the business that is showing strong revenue growth, good fundamentals, and is a focus area for top leadership.
His wish was that it remain in the UK, and he really, really wanted it to stay as a collection. But it's effectively impossible.
Collections, even significant collections[0], are hard to keep together. I wish I had the money necessary to acquire and make accessible collections like this.
[0] I'm not saying David's collection is significant, but it is substantial, and contains many things potentially of interest.