81–90 of 265 posts
Where do you plan on retiring to? Moving back home? Why not move back get paid less and start retirement early. Wasting all your money on London rent means you are breaking even over a lower salary.
The problem is that I want to create a life with my partner... and I don't want to ruin his career. If I were single I would move back in a heartbeat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, for any job, there will be periods when you're more or less engaged, but at the end of the day, there's no substitute for believing in what you're working on. I am leaving a lot of money on the table because I was depressed working on something I didn't believe in, so I changed jobs to something that pays less but means more to me.
Do you work on the sell side or buy side? If buy side prop or fund? Have you considered other quant jobs? Maybe they will be more exciting.
I used to work insane hours trying to get ahead and when I was doing that I always thought badly of people who left when the clock struck 5pm. The older I've gotten the more I've realized how much those folks had right.
Work to Live. Don't Live to Work. You'll be a heck of a lot happier.
I am seeing a lot of comments here about depression, though it doesn't ring true to me - the situation you're in is one that myself and a lot of the other comments can understand from our own experience of similar situations and it really does suck. My take is that you're feeling the way you do in response to the situation you find yourself in, and perhaps due to the loss of control and ensuing hopelessness. As a fir…
There's a couple of constraints here that seem to be dominating your decisions. One: early retirement Two: the idea that the recruiter was right about not being able to find the money elsewhere You have a PhD in Computer Science , one of the highest academic accomplishments in one of the hottest fields for the last 30-40 years. I want you to know how far ahead you are of people like me who just taught themselves to c…
Don’t want to be a buzzkill but OP can as well be a mediocre engineer, even with a CS PhD. It’s important to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses.
> I could probably grind leetcode for a couple of months to try to get into Google, but I would find working at Google utterly meaningless as well. How are you so convinced you'll hate Google as well? The big plus of working at FAANG is that they have lots of projects and you can switch to something you are interested in. You don't to working on ML in Ads, you can always switch to compilers (dart?), databases (spanne…
how does that work? I got stuck in a wildly inappropriate group and there there was no clear way out except the internal jobs boards...where the positions looked even less appropriate than the one I was in. for every developer working on Go there are 1000 working on the most banal corporate crap you can imagine. I'm not saying its a bad tradeoff - plenty of money. but if you care about what you do with your time, it…
Another way to do it is to ignore the official process and go make friends on teams you're interested in. If you're looking for Go jobs, maybe just do a code search and figure out who's writing a ton of Go, and see if any of those look like fun. I know there's a lot of Go code in Cloud, which is usually hiring. There's some Rust in Chrome and Chrome OS, if you're into that.
I've never done a 20% project myself, but I hear those are good too. I gather that lots of little teams hardly ever get headcount, and starting out as a 20 percenter is the only way to get into one of them.
It sounds like your job is tightly-coupled with how you see yourself, so perhaps consider things outside of your job (volunteering, extra-curriculars, investing, etc.) that are closer to what you value.
One way to handle getting through these low periods is to shift your mindset of your job being a reflection of what you like and more your job enabling you do, participate what you like.
Personally, being of service of others, using my vacation days to help others, and investing in projects and people I believe in has helped offset some of the feelings you may be feeling.
80,000 hours have some resources, that might help guide your choices, if this is something you would be interested in.
There’s a framework for thinking about it though. Start with your goal(no matter how unrealistic it seems to be). Then go backwards to where you’re now. Ray Dalio laid it out pretty well in Principles.