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Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

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Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#601

Post by clomond »

NeverFade wrote: post #579
clomond wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Become a multi-deminsional, multi-faceted person. Starting with exploring genuine interests which have maybe not been 'listened to'. Being a bit adventurous (determine if things you've been curious about you actually care about), and trying new things (discover and identify new areas that exist) which could end up being interesting to you. From what I've seen, the key to being interesting is weirdly being more of "yo…

> Become a multi-deminsional, multi-faceted person. According to census statistics, there are 1.63 single men for every 1 woman in Marin County. 1.34 single men per single woman in San Mateo County. 1.55 single men per single woman in Santa Clara County. So I really like your advice; if every man in the Bay became a "multi-deminsional, multi-faceted person", they would transcend the boundaries of plain arithmetic so…

Solving the dating problem was not the question.

> "How does one become more interesting"

Sure, you can change your environment to be more *relatively interesting. But that was also not the core of the question as I understand it.

Rather, providing a method or tips to be more OBJECTIVELY interesting today than your yesterdays self is something useful in any kind of 'dating market'.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#602

Post by NeverFade »

leni536 wrote: post #599
NeverFade wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Become a multi-deminsional, multi-faceted person. According to census statistics, there are 1.63 single men for every 1 woman in Marin County. 1.34 single men per single woman in San Mateo County. 1.55 single men per single woman in Santa Clara County. So I really like your advice; if every man in the Bay became a "multi-deminsional, multi-faceted person", they would transcend the boundaries of plain arithmetic so…

The advice is for an individual, not all men collectively. But yeah the advice is not "be interesting", it's "be more interesting than a typical man in your area". The issue you describe is very real though.

My point is that it will be really hard for straight men to date when there's 130-160 of them for every 100 women.

Yes, each one of them could become ultra-competitive about it, and crawl on top of the others to be among the fortunate 60% who get dates, instead of the 40% who don't.

But do you really want to live in an area where 40% of men can't get a date because there's simply no women available to them?

We also haven't discussed the downsides to these fortunate 60% men. You worked on yourself, became interesting, and got a girlfriend. However, she knows with 50% more men than women in her area, she can easily replace you. That may make the relationship less pleasant than you think.

"Just become more interesting to overcome all adverse effects from 50% gender diversity" is unfortunately quite naive.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#603

Post by duelingjello »

apatters wrote: post #569
glangdale wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how a guy earning a fairly unremarkable-when-we-adjust-for-cost-of-living salary with a bunch of fairly unimpressive table-stakes credentials: "clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful" (whaddaya want? a cookie?) is meant to be a Amazing Pussy Magnet. One of the major factors - aside from the gender ratio - behind tech guys not finding partners is this weird expectation that if they shave, clip their f…

I suspect most of them were told (by their mothers, continuously for the first 20 years of their lives) that this was in fact the way to land a good woman. Be a nice clean cut guy and earn $120K a year. If you know so much then what's your prescription for them?

Women make boys into women. Men need to grow a pair, throw away some conventions, gain nuanced judgement by learning from thousands of interactions. There’s no substitute for experience. Build a fun life and fun people will seek out that wavelength; build a boring life and similar will surround you as well. Do it all while you’re still young and healthy because doors will gradually close.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#604

Post by barry-cotter »

ikeyany wrote: post #597
barry-cotter wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teachers do not work 60 hours a week. Bureau of Labor Statistics time use studies find that the only age group of teachers that work more than forty hours a week are those over 50. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

It looks like those statistics have summer months included. That changes things from "60 hour work weeks when school is in session" to "60 hour work weeks amortized over a year". In addition that study notes that teachers are more likely to work a second job, something a Google engineer wouldn't need to do to make a decent wage.

The median household income in California is $70K[1].

> The average salary of public school teachers in 2017 – 18 for the State of California was $80,680. [2]

Teachers make a perfectly decent wage as is, more than the average household .

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSCAA646N

[2] https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#605

Post by cosmodisk »

NeverFade wrote: post #366
cantrevealname wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life Ironically the Bay Area is among the worst places on Earth for improving your social life if you're straight and male. I noticed that you don't live in the Bay Area, you're married, you probably meant a much broader meaning of "social life", so your experiences are likely very different. But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respect…

> But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful, male SWE in the Bay Area making $120K+ a year in his 20s or 30s, who should be a magnet for women, turns out to be living in one of worst places because of male-female ratios among singles (and some other cultural factors). Yes, it's quite simple: there are many more men in the Bay than women, so women have their pick, and they can afford to raise th…

>Anecdotally, I know some women in the Bay, working in areas like recruiting and marketing, who are dating VCs and CEOs exclusively and consider dating "plain engineers" to be beneath them.

No matter ones income, it's better not to go anywhere with that kind of women. Also life tends to adjust this pretty quickly: they can be that picky until their early 30's, maybe even late 20's. After that available options narrow down substantially.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#606

Post by apersona »

Aeolun wrote: post #296
samplatt wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>everyone else is so incompetent because he doesn't try and still looks good I'd argue against the "talent lottery" idea. Over the last 10 years as a software dev I'd argue that the 10x "rockstar" dev certainly exists, but it's almost always a case of situation/environment matching an already-moderately-talented employee extremely well. I've seen a lot of slackers suddenly explode into a powerhouse when given the rig…

I think 10x engineers do not actually exist, but maybe 0.1x engineers do, and when a 1x engineer is in such an environment they may seem like 10x by comparison.

I think both 0.1x engineers and 10x engineers exist.

0.1x engineer: one of my friends works at a certain government contractor. One of her coworkers had difficulty understanding short circuiting in evaluating boolean statements, everything he writes she needs to fix, he thinks XML is a programming language, and it's just a huge mess amongst a huge list of other complaints.

10x engineer: Actually, he's still in undergrad. I was his TA for a VR class and he made a pretty great clone of Beat Saber before it was released just from watching the trailer, and in under a week. He's never heard of Leetcode, yet is absolutely comfortable with interview questions (well, I decided he didn't need practice after asking a few questions...). He's had an internship at a FAANG and finished his project early and got bored. I introduced him to a few of my other friends in the industry and they are intimidated by him too. He's this rare combination where he has the theoretical knowledge of CS, but also excels at actual engineering work.

Both 0.1x engineers and 10x engineers just feel like they re on a "different level". I don't know how else to describe it .

As for whether or not looking for 10x engineers is practical, I don't think it is.

1) It took me way too long to confirm that feeling (i.e. I imagine interview questions alone aren't enough; you have to see the engineer working).

2) I imagine most companies don't even need a 10x engineer to build the product they need.

3) They're too rare. How do I know? Because (a) none of my friends have felt that before meeting him and (b)the whole industry is still debating on whether 10x engineers exist.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#607

Post by pokepim »

nikhilbagde wrote: post #600

Grass is always greener on the other side. I work in Deloitte as a Java developer and I feel the same that I'm not using my knowledge what we learnt in Masters. But you work at Google. Guys like me are still trying to get out of this rut and try to get offer at companies like Google. But People like me are so into this routine life that it's hard to again go back and brush up skills. I just got married and I'm planni…

Thats funny. I work at EY (consulting team) and we use all those things you mentioned, be it JS, React, AWS (mostly Azure though), dockers, k8s. We do also some ML and DL. I think you can find it at Deloitte too, but maybe depends on the city.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#608

Post by colonCapitalDee »

thrills wrote: post #543
holografix wrote: post #277

You sound depressed, I think it takes one to know one. Working at Google in the US is a dream 99% of the world can only dream of make sure you value it. Also as others have said, don’t expect that your job will fulfil you completely, unless you’re curing cancer it’s just a job, talk to your manager about a different role or a bigger challenge but don’t give up a job at Google because you’re bored. And get some counse…

What people dream about doesn't really mean anything. They don't actually live and work at google, as a software engineer. They just see some kind of marketing version of "a day in the life of a software engineer at google". It has nothing to do with reality. Every programmer I met is depressed, hates computers, and spends all of their day just pretending to work because they burned out in the first month of programm…

Claiming that humans intrinsically hate programming is a real hot take. Have anything to back that up besides sketchy anecdotal evidence?

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#609

Post by brycesbeard »

glangdale wrote: post #494
cantrevealname wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life Ironically the Bay Area is among the worst places on Earth for improving your social life if you're straight and male. I noticed that you don't live in the Bay Area, you're married, you probably meant a much broader meaning of "social life", so your experiences are likely very different. But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respect…

I like how a guy earning a fairly unremarkable-when-we-adjust-for-cost-of-living salary with a bunch of fairly unimpressive table-stakes credentials: "clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful" (whaddaya want? a cookie?) is meant to be a Amazing Pussy Magnet. One of the major factors - aside from the gender ratio - behind tech guys not finding partners is this weird expectation that if they shave, clip their f…

I’ve been speaking with my girlfriends friends, about the paucity of eligible men in the SFBA. Most of them ask me to introduce them to a nice person. Looks aren’t as important, but having a decent job is. Maybe it’s the age, but I found simply being kind and knowing your target market (women who like kind guys, who are everywhere, and are often smoking hot) works.

Late 30s is a good time to date. I had the same issues as OP describes in my 20s, not in the Bay Area. It was all about how I subconsciously chose to approach things. I worked on myself, was genuine, and have had great success finding a mate up here.

(Not all that attentive, about 50 lbs overweight, fwiw)

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#610

Post by joelbluminator »

throwaway8291 wrote: post #389
snak wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe? Could you specify country?

Germany.

You are looking at the elite of the elites. How many developers work for google in silicon valley? I am sure there are developers in Ohaio that get paid non stellar salaries, also have a mortgage and by the time they are 45 they worry about the future a lot. On Average yes the German developer makes less but probably has better job security , work life balance etc. You make it out as if American developers live a stress free life
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