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Poll: How are you doing currently?

news.ycombinator.com

151–160 of 231 posts

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#151
post #141

Super burnout angst BUT I'm about to quit in a week for a three month or more sabbatical I've been planning over a year. Been at the same company and same project for almost ten years. Completely burnt out on code for enterprise crud web apps. I just lost all interest. Spent a few years deep diving into testing and ops, but even that now I can only see the obvious best practices while the only challenge left is beggi…

I did something similar many years ago.

It is going to feel even better than you think.

"Hey boss, I've decided to leave the company" "Oh.. to where?" "No where" "What are you going to do?" "Travel, play music, anything but work"

They have no cards. There's no counter offer they can make. They'll know they lost you purely due to their own fault. I was offered a "come back anytime please" deal lol. So essentially a ZERO RISK SABBATICAL WOOOOO

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#152
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…

> Today, us second floor teachers pooled our personal money.. > If you're well-off, or even not as much, understand that your profession is (wrongly or rightly) valued more than ours It's some weird science fiction reality we live in where those responsible for raising the next generation of our race are compensated minimally and asked for so much. While a lot of us reel in 10x a teacher's salary to improve business…

First I'm hearing about this, but sounds wonderful. We were told we would be reimbursed, and they're generally good about that sort of thing, but thank you!

Please consider looking at places like DonorsChoose if you'd like to donate money, especially to towns away from large cities. It's my hope that we can get more active citizen participation in education reform, so if possible consider local activism. The scene can be messy and frustrating but it should offer you greater visibility in the ways money can change the paradigm and expectations of the system.

And to be fair, I've been looking at getting out of teaching and landing a job in data analysis myself, so I'm not as pure of motive as many think teachers are. This last week has just really pushed me to make this my last year of teaching.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#153

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…

"Stopped watching the news"

I did this back in the early `80s when living in Los Angles. Back then I'd get off work, grab some fast food on the way home, and then turn on the TV News and watch it. The station I'd watch was, at the time, a model for today's "FOX News" and is now a FOX station. They had 3, 1/2 hour news programs back to back. The first 1/2 hour was local LA/Californa news, the 2nd was US news, the 3rd was World News.

In each of those shows they focused on murders, robberies, car crashes, etc. By the end of the 3rd show I'd be so depressed I felt like shit. Finally, one day, I realized I couldn't consume every awful thing they broadcast because, and more importantly, most all of it didn't effect me personally.

So I quit watching the "News", and it didn't take long at all before I was enjoying life again.

Nowadays I "monitor" the news as opposed to "consuming" it. I don't watch any News at all on TV. I watch selected videos on YouTube to get the gist of a story and when the opining starts I move on.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#154
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 co…

You're absolutely right about just biting the bullet and grinding as it should pay off tenfold for a salary increase. I know it's all really just a numbers game.

The """problem""" is I already make $250-300k. Last year I went through 30 interviews. They either fell through because of salary (they couldn't even come close to my current) or they just straight up lied until the very end about it being remote (name & shame: Notion, Lune, and Spotnana). The time-cost was sunk and net zero value.

The worst taste in my mouth was the recruiters basically negging and gaslighting me for asking as much as I did or saying I couldn't possibly know all the things on my resume. I'm literally doing those things daily and collecting the paycheck every month.

Maybe I'm just in a local maxima? My plan was to rest-and-vest but the vest part ain't happening at the level it was supposed to.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#155
Very good: I'm healthy and my wife is healthy with our first baby on the way. A couple siblings+spouses and my parents live in the same town, I see them all regularly, and they are all healthy. I lost 10 pounds over the past couple months. Blood pressure is still a little high though.

I'm 7 months into a new job, good pay in a LCOL area, 4 minute commute, enjoy going into the office, learning a lot, and have a great boss.

We have a fixer-upper house with several ongoing major projects to keep me busy and entertained. Also we have plenty of new trees, flowers, and bushes to nurture.

Winter is gone and the trees around the neighborhood are leafing out--I really love having four seasons! In six months I will have equal excitement for snow and blizzards.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#156
post #98

Very bad. Struggling dealing with an autism / aspergers diagnosis and trying to understand how to re-enter the workforce after a few years of being under or unemployed. It's a complete nightmare. I want to work but I struggle with communication and being understood (or understanding) the world around me. I have been waiting on news about a job all week and not a peep. I'm pretty sure they are waiting till EOD Friday…

I'm sorry to hear that. From a faraway stranger, I'd say: • Your written communication, in this comment, and via a quick look at other recent comments, appears excellent. Whatever your other comms/awkwardness concerns, writing can be a channel-for-connection, & for productive-economic interactions, for you even long before other relationships & skills find-their-grounding. • You're right to prioritize finding employm…

Thank you for this comment.

It's been a long process but I hope whatever job I end up at next is something new or different from my previous experiences.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#157
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'…

Current day USA is the love child of South Park and GTA. You can't even parody it properly anymore, because it's become a continuous self-parody.

And best/worst of all, its inhabitants don't even notice.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#158
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Over the past 20 years, more people per capita have died in school shootings in Germany than in the US.

This is absolutely not true and can be verified by a few minutes research on Wikipedia

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#159
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'…

The US education system is a patchwork of schools systems of wildly different quality based on the student population.

>how simultaneously awesome and terrible the US has become

It's still significantly better than it used to be.

Re: Poll: How are you doing currently?

#160
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Wikipedia lists 90 deaths in "mass shootings" in Germany for the almost 32 years since 1990 [1]. I'm quite surprised its that high tbh.

Wikipedia also gives a total of 118 deaths in mass ahootings in the US for just the two years 2022 and 2021 [2]. There were no year totals and tbh I gave up counting at that point. But a crude extrapolation back to 1990 gives 1770 deaths.

The population of Germany is 84 million, and the population of the USA is 331 million - ie 4 times larger. So for Germany to have the same number of deaths in mass shootings over that period would have required 442 deaths - almost 5 times the actual number.

So I dont think this statement stands up to scrutiny.

Caveats: These numbers are mass shootings that include school shootings as well as other siruations. The data comes from different sources. Extrapolation of us numbers from two years data. And I did some of the adding-up in my head. I could try to get better data but its friday night and I'm tired.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_Germ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

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