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I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

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Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#651

Post by jazzdev »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #572
dxy3 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some ideas (from a guy in his 40s who interviews every 6 to 12 months for high paying short-term project work): - 25 years at a single company is working against you. Remove all that from your cv and just list the recent stuff you built. - Most of your cv should be description of the repos with links. Cut out and summarise past experience ruthlessly, like you’re refactoring someone else’s old code. - Remove the link…

Thanks! Well, the long-term work is staying in the CV. I worked for 27 years at one of the most storied and respected Japanese corporations on Earth, at a very deep level. This says a lot about my aptitude, ethics, Honor, Integrity, team dynamics and loyalty. I sure as heck don't want to work for any company that thinks of that as a bad thing. Most of my tech work has been done in the open. I've been doing open-sourc…

Applying the most generous interpretation principle[1] I suspect the binary tree test is not an old fart screen. Just a poor test of job aptitude.

Unfortunately, hiring is fairly broken in our industry, if you want a job, the best use of your time is probably to practice those coding tests.

[1] https://www.omahaic.com/blog/mindful-moments/mindful-moment-...

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#652

Post by kamaal »

TrackerFF wrote: post #650
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #102

I've been mentoring CS college students and new grad SWEs for a while. It's shocking to see how many of them perpetually feel like they're overwhelmed and short on time, yet they can't account for where they've actually spent their time. It's not uncommon for new grad SWEs to complain that an 8-hour work day is somehow consuming 100% of their weekday hours, leaving them without any time to do anything else. On furthe…

Tbh, I'd hate to be a motivated CS-student today. You're just bombarded with the stuff that you should know - well, according to internet forums, at least. On top of your basic CS curriculum, you should also be "crushing it" in: - Full-stack development - Research-level Machine Learning - Heavy side projects like creating your own crypto currency, algorithmic trading platform, or whatever. All while burning through t…

>>There's this myth being perpetuated on most CS career forums (where 99% of the posters are other CS students) that you need to be some super-human rock star to even be worthy of the most lowly position. It's that, or bust.

This is of course given you are in your prime health, family, and other life situations. Its like CS and programming jobs in general are acting like a filter to promote only the candidates who in their best form at the moment.

My guess is this illusion will shatter around the next recession/depression. When people will realize they had more than work, and bazillion tons of luck going on for them, to be the superstars they thought they were.

The gravy train always stops somewhere.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#653

Post by chansiky »

gstipi wrote: post #367

I love life. I'm 37. Being alive in itself is truly remarkable. I've made great friends. I've met people who ended up disappointing me greatly. I've married a smart, beautiful, ambitious woman twelve years ago. We've went through exhilarating ups and soulcrushing downs. I've worked for a startup, which almost went under several times. I've worked for a corporate thresher which sucked life right out of me. I've worked…

This needs more upvotes. Life really should be about what you spend your time doing, not letting it waste away, not living for achievements, nor comparing ourselves to others, others from completely different worlds, but really making the most of the short time we have, whatever it is we are doing - having fun, doing work, taking a break, living life.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#654

Post by nudpiedo »

voidhorse wrote: post #13

Funny piece. It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet. I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news. Such an activity is useful every now and then, but at least for myself I often scroll around only to realize later that it was a massive waste of time I could’ve spent working on something I care…

I completely agree with you. Some other distractions are the many intelectual hobbies overpraised out there, two of them which I know very closely: learning languages and reading lots of books (novels).

These activities by itself don’t yell any value by themselves and still free like a super productive to the extent of feeling incredibly productive. One should not forget that intelectual hobbies are in fact still hobbies.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#655

Post by giantDinosaur »

danielheath wrote: post #579
giantDinosaur wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a reasonable perspective? What about the labour movements of the 19th and 20th centuries that in many cases were about balancing work with life? Adopting this perspective isn't great unless you want to accept the status quo.

> Adopting this perspective isn't great unless you want to accept the status quo Adopting this perspective is the only way you're going to change the status quo. Change isn't created by endlessly scrolling or complaining on twitter; recognizing that you must be hardworking and focus your energy where it's most effective is a precondition to creating it.

I mean more the perspective that we don't really have time to focus on other things in life when doing 8 hours of work a day. To me it seems like we don't have enough push-back against the status quo here - which is that 8 hours is incredibly wasteful in a lot of industries and jobs, and it's ruining our ability to think and focus throughout the week.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#656

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jazzdev wrote: post #651
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Well, the long-term work is staying in the CV. I worked for 27 years at one of the most storied and respected Japanese corporations on Earth, at a very deep level. This says a lot about my aptitude, ethics, Honor, Integrity, team dynamics and loyalty. I sure as heck don't want to work for any company that thinks of that as a bad thing. Most of my tech work has been done in the open. I've been doing open-sourc…

Applying the most generous interpretation principle[1] I suspect the binary tree test is not an old fart screen. Just a poor test of job aptitude. Unfortunately, hiring is fairly broken in our industry, if you want a job, the best use of your time is probably to practice those coding tests. [1] https://www.omahaic.com/blog/mindful-moments/mindful-moment-...

Nah. I like writing code that ships. If it means that no one wants to hire me, I can live with that.

It does say a lot about the industry, though, that people don't care about shipping software.

Might explain some of these Jurassic-scale disasters we're constantly reading about...

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#657

Post by x87678r »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #613
x87678r wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't going to go up every decade. Also Check markets in Japan and Europe which have been flat 30, 20 years.

That’s because GDP is very tied to population growth, which essentially stoped in Japan and the EU. It still happens in the US due to immigration, but once that stops, then we will stall out as well.

Maybe but the link between GDP and stock market isn't strong either.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#658

Post by papito »

laurent92 wrote: post #337
sirspacey wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an avid screentime user. I never run out of new ideas. Often my surfing feeds my ideas. My latest creation is derived from downloading Reddit to my brain on the regular. Boredom is a great stimulus. It’s not a pre-requisite.

I’m afraid of boredom because I’m not loved. When we had no phone addiction, other people were talking more too. If I get my dose of speech/interaction during the day, I could quit twitter anytime. But since I regularly don’t get it, especially as a programmer where written chat is the norm as an ersatz of human interaction, then I compulsively need to read and write information and watch (*gobble) videos, and genera…

This happened to me as I got older. Now I MUST have something like Seinfeld on to fall asleep. I cannot fall asleep in silence and darkness alone - the angst takes over. Also the accupressure mat is a life saver.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#659

Post by nnt38 »

tayo42 wrote: post #153
papito wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are now terrified of putting down a screen and being left alone with their own thoughts for more than 30 seconds. It's horrifying what's bouncing around up in that dome, and having to process it. But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored , we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.

Idk if it's just terrified, but I think we're addicted. This probably sounds ridiculous but I recently blocked some apps and sites on my phone and actually felt a little off for a day, like my sleep was weird. I think there was a slight withdrawal from the constant bombardment of stuff. It is helping kill my Facebook habit. I don't even really like the site, I just check it impulsively. It's weird. Reddit is another…

I would recommend using https://old.reddit.com/ and not going past the first page :)

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#660

Post by [deleted] »

thelazyoxymoron wrote: post #550
grugagag wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for reminding me to turn on screen time on my phone. I am indeed wasting a lot of time on my phone reading things that don't get me much value while procrastinating on real work or things that I consciously want to spend my time on. This problem is a lot more prevalent on my phone than on my laptop. I catch myself browsing HN without any intent and without any goal, mostly reading comments and skimming on arti…

I was in a similar boat until recently. One thing that has worked brilliantly for me is to use any service that gives you a notification/curates your feed for the top posts on HN. I personally use Pushbullet for this. Since I was already using it in my phone as well as my laptop and desktop (it's a pretty handy tool to share stuffs quickly between devices), I set up the Hacker News 500 channel which sends me notifica…

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