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Poll: How are you doing currently?

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Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#121

Post by prash_ant »

moitessier wrote: post #101

Have a high-paying job in IT (DevOps, Cloud), same company for 10 years, two kids and a loving wife that are luckily supportive of my situation. February Had my first depressive phase in January. 2 days where I could not get out of bed and don't remember what happened. The weeks after that were kind of blurry, almost like watching myself from the outside. I could not trust my own judgements and had to refrain from ve…

Your timing matches with the winter "seasonal affective disorder", where you felt depressive at the peak of winter and became better in spring.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#122

Post by jaywalk »

devin wrote: post #118
farmerstan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Respectfully, nobody asked your opinion. Your reply is not responsive at best.

This is a discussion, and there was nothing disrespectful about what he said. Respectfully, nobody asked for to jump in and be an ass.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#123

Post by throwawayvmw »

I'm pretty down right now. Some months months ago I passed on a good job offer for opportunities for continued growth at my current employer, promises of career advancement and better work responsibilities. Now, I learned we are being bought out and sold for scrap. I'm a mediocre engineer who rarely gets in network offers, and I turned down something that was a big step up for me.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#124

Post by fredcy »

Kind of okay. I came down with COVID on May 10. Took Paxlovid (I'm 64) and felt recovered in a few days (but I continued the 5 days of Paxlovid, of course). Then on May 23 a bad cough started up and it's been bothering me ever since. My family doc could not see me so I went to a clinic in a CVS where she diagnosed bronchitis and said it's likely a lingering effect of the COVID. Damn. And now I read this in Nature: "Long COVID risk falls only slightly after vaccination, huge study shows", https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01453-0>

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#125

Post by wnolens »

I've felt very much in limbo for a few years. I'm facing some one-way doors about where I want to spend the next chapter/decade of my life. My reaction is mostly of fear.

Move back to my home country where my friends and family are. I only really like the lifestyle of the downtown core of a single city there. I'd give up permanent residency to the U.S. Pay cut would be to 1/3rd my current salary with a similar cost of living - probably never afford to buy a home. But I'd be closer to people I care about. And maybe live a life of not striving for more.

Or stay in the US where I currently am. I'm quite lonely, but enjoy a very comfortable lifestyle and US cities are beautiful and culturally interesting to me. I'm well compensated in my field, and not even near the ceiling. Could retire 15 years earlier here than otherwise. But always feel like I chose to be away from the people I love.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#126

Post by taesu »

valbaca wrote: post #31

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 th…

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.)

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#127

Post by nsriv »

lnwlebjel wrote: post #95
nsriv wrote: post #26

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…

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.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#128

Post by BrianOnHN »

Very bad. Haven't been able to focus on work since late Tuesday. My last meeting I said, "it's been great, I haven't looked at the news in two days." Less than an hour later, I looked... Ugh.

Fortunately, I've been around this block before and have learned not to make it into a downward spiral. For example, my SO and I went blueberry picking today. Haven't looked at the Twitter yet.

The planet is in a bad place right now. I think it's a mistake to ignore that. However, as long as we're breathing, there's still hope. And hopefully, some signal of progress will give people like myself the motivation to continue pursuing what matters to me. But, long-term personal goals seem irrelevant while distrust and discrimination are fracturing our society and leading to violence. In other words, we're regressing in Maslow's hierarchy.

Until then, what matters to me is knowing that at least someone is acknowledging the sad state of the planet and thinking how we might improve it.

Edit: to be clear, that "very bad" is relative to my incredibly privileged existence, as that's how I interpreted the question.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#129

Post by uxp100 »

skrebbel wrote: post #75
nsriv wrote: post #26

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…

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'…

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.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#130

Post by groby_b »

valbaca wrote: post #31

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 th…

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)

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