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The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

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Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#211

Post by jjav »

maeil wrote: post #164
RHSeeger wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're scared about your financial situation with over a $2M net worth either you are prone to paranoia or you're living well above your means. As someone who was layed off and went without a job for 13 months (tech bubble), I am _always_ scared about my financial situation. Sure, if I lose my job, I have the resources to hold out while I find another, but - It _will_ impact my lifestyle, because I'll need to be…

You intentionally moved to that area, and it even sounds like you own real estate there. Yes, it will impact your lifestyle, and you may have to be more careful about what money you spend, depending on how you're currently spending it. So what? 99% of people on earth live like that, and most do just fine. The fact that having to live a non >$2M net worth lifestyle would make your family unhappy sounds concerning.

> The fact that having to live a non >$2M net worth lifestyle would make your family unhappy sounds concerning.

The phrase "$2M net worth lifestyle" does not mean anything.

A 2M net worth could be a 1.5M house (which in the bay area is a simple nondescript house) and 500K in a 401k (which you can't touch until you're 60, so it's off limits). That's it. Neither of these can be used to pay any monthly bills.

So this person with a 2M net worth (locked in assetts) is still 100% dependent on that monthly paycheck to cover all expenses.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#212

Post by iwontberude »

JohnMakin wrote: post #13

Working as a SRE for a year in a large global company broke me out of this "panic" mode described in this post. To a business, every problem seems like a world-ending event. It's very easy to give in to panic in those situations. However, in reality, it's rarely that bad, and even if it is, you'll probably survive without harm. The key in these situations, and what I try to do (totally relate to breaking out in a swe…

Same experience working for a major streaming provider as SRE. Even when it's a million dollars per minute, the stress never will help you to get the bleeding to stop. It's very helpful everywhere else in life. I can handle social, physical, and other stressors better after this exposure. Nothing in business is as bad as your biology can fool you to believe.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#213

Post by xxr »

zer8k wrote: post #126
sillysaurusx wrote: post #61

For what it's worth, I'm not sure this is a mental breakdown, and it might give the wrong impression to people who do legitimately suffer breakdowns related to stress about tech. For me it's only happened once. It was an anxiety attack, and I'm very lucky my wife was there to talk me through it and help me understand what was happening. She's had them many times, but it was my first (and thankfully only). It turns ou…

I shouldn't have to drug myself to cope with the stress of constantly half-assed released, features getting pushed in without thought, and 3AM pagerduty alarms because of these things. We will likely see a large cohort of people who got into tech in the mid 2000s dying off from stress related disease.

My wife is a critical care nurse, and she used to work at a hospital in an area with a lot of tech workers about five years ago. She saw a lot of heart attacks in men in their late thirties and early forties that she rarely saw elsewhere.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#215

Post by jjav »

camdenreslink wrote: post #90
mtnviewer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you get to this point? I have $2M+ net worth, and while I live somewhere rent controlled, $2M isn't that much in the Bay Area. I'm still scared to lose my job.

With a $2m+ net worth you could move to 90% of the country, retire and live off of the interest.

> With a $2m+ net worth you could move to 90% of the country, retire and live off of the interest.

Not really for most scenarios.

For someone who is single and has no kids and plans to stay that way forever and is happy to live a very simple lifestyle, perhaps. Anyone else, no.

You'd still need to buy a house even if you move to a real cheap area, so you don't have 2M in cash. Then, how are you paying for health care? Kids education?

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#216

Post by jjav »

fragmede wrote: post #121
prewett wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your $2m generating? For instance, if you invested in high quality dividend stocks, you can get 3% and it should generally grow about what GDP does (which should also include inflation effects). So that's $60k/year, or after 15% dividend tax + let's say 5% California state tax, for a net of $48k. If you're in somewhere rent-controlled, seems like even with a family you're not going to on the streets starving.…

if you're only getting 3% with dividends, can I interest you with an HYSA paying 5%?

> can I interest you with an HYSA paying 5%

Don't plan a retirement around a HYSA at 5% because those rates will go back down.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#217

Post by burntwater »

burningChrome wrote: post #177
everdrive wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind that when something "breaks" a business can freak out, but they're not freaking out about lots of other arguably more important problems: - The software they purchased doesn't do anything because it was never staffed or configured correctly. - Employees as a whole lose thousands of hours a year to terrible UX or meaningless requirements. - Some capability doesn't actually do anything, but no one cares en…

>> Bear in mind that when something "breaks" a business can freak out, but they're not freaking out about lots of other arguably more important problems THIS. Worked for a huge corporation when I first started contracting as a developer. This was a daily occurrence. Someone would push some stuff to prod and it would break their very large e-commerce site. Sometimes it was minor stuff, other times it would cripple the…

>> At my previous job if something went down on our site, it was a four alarm fire, war room, and all hands on deck to get it resolved or heads would roll. It was so dysfunctional to work somewhere when something broke or stopped working, nobody was in any hurry to fix it. Several times I just thought, "Is this what they mean when they say "the inmates are running the asylum""?

That's funny, because reading your first sentence I was thinking that was the dysfunctional place. I had a boss that would take problems from 0 to 10 in a flash, when the problem was really a 4 or 5, and it really was not a great environment.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#218

Post by 9659 »

linuxrebe1 wrote: post #49

Based on the way you were troubleshooting it. You can tell you're a programmer first. You went to your code, you went to your logs. Both reasonable, both potential causes of the problem. Both ignore the primary clue that you had. It worked on localhost. As an SRE/devops/platform engineer or whatever the title of the day is people want to give. I would have zeroed in on the difference between the working system. And t…

many years ago, i was working as an electronic technician. we had a stack of processor boards (from a Perkin Elmer 7/32) that were removed from service. broken. many different revisions, and only schematics for one revision of each board. i thought it was hopeless. an older wiser tech taught me how.

plug a good board on an extender. run a diagnostic that fails in a loop. using a scope, look at every pin on the connector. write down what you see. replace with a bad board. repeat.

which signals are different? chase them back. if the schematic does not match, get out a voltmeter and your eyes and draw a schematic that reflects how the board is wired.

he called this "good card - bad card".

and it worked. not going to make any claims about cost effectiveness, but we fixed every board. and my troubleshooting skills in digital electronics were greatly improved.

this was a 'fireman' kind of job. waiting for the system to break, so it didn't matter if 2 techs put a week into 1 circuit board.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#219

Post by phkahler »

roywiggins wrote: post #39
foodevl wrote: post #34

> This is no good. Let me just try reverting to a version from a month ago. Nothing. Three months ago? Nothing. Still failing. A year ago? Zilch. Reverting your own code, but still using a broken PostHog update from that same day? For me, the lesson is to make sure that I can revert everything, including dependencies.

It seems that PostHog just always loads the latest version of this piece of itself: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/24471#issuecomment... Though you can opt to bundle it yourself: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/24471#issuecomment...

>> It seems that PostHog just always loads the latest version of this piece of itself:

Now there's a supply chain attack vector...

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#220

Post by Alupis »

coryrc wrote: post #204
Alupis wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's quite literally why branding is so important. Most of the goods you purchase are from brands not owned by the retail website. Pick a hobby and consider the prominent brands, then consider the prominent websites people in that hobby often patronize - they are very often not the same. > and are acting like this is a world ending event for a small-medium sized ecommerce site to be down for a while Because it kind…

I'm about to order some electric bike motors. Probably from ebikes.ca. If their website goes down I'll just wait until it comes back up. If it was groceries, I'd go to the store. Unless in-person-purchasing is an option, I'm just going to wait for my preferred vendor. My account's already set up and clearly they have what I want.

> I'm just going to wait for my preferred vendor

By the numbers, most customers are shopping on any particular given ecommerce website for the first time. It's expensive and difficult to gain new customers - and even more difficult to gain repeat customers.

What would you have done if you had not purchased from ebikes.ca before and just happened to stumble across them after a google search? What would you have done if after clicking the ad/link, the page didn't load? Would you try again tomorrow? Probably not... that is the issue. Instead you would be naming some other small business that was online when you needed them to be.

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