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The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

zarar.dev

251–260 of 286 posts

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 year US treasuries my good friend, no state or local income taxes and HYSA rates will decline as the Fed lowers the federal funds rate. 3% is on par for SCHD, which is a popular ETF dividend fund (that provides income, but also growth). Different risk profile than treasuries though. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SCHD/

We're still under a yield curve inversion, no? 3-month t-bills are paying 5.149% which is more than the rest.

Which will decline as the Fed cuts rates. Longer duration locks in risk free yields longer. Your portfolio goals and allocation will of course drive your strategy.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#252
During these situations, a prompt message can be very reassuring for users, for example:

"We're investigating an issue affecting $X".

As a user, I can rule out that the issue is at my end. I can focus on other things and I won't add to the stack of emails.

This is one of my biggest frustrations with AWS being slow to update their status page during interruptions. I can spend much of the intervening time frantically debugging my software, only to discover the issue is at their end.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#253
I remember as a junior dev getting a call at around 3am from Indian tech support about a failed deploy I had been heading. I stressed myself about it so much and only later reflecting back do I realize nobody but me cared.

Also funny that the culprit was posthog since I have some past experience with it.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#254
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$500k buys a very nice house in many part of the country.

Health insurance can be purchased from healthcare.gov in largely the same way home insurance works.

$1.5M would get you $60k/year without ever touching your principal.

That being said, waiting even a few years drastically changes the math into your favor. 5 years of a job, plus interest on your retirement fund could easily double it.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#255

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.

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. I'm constantly surprised how many well-off people try to pass themselves off as "one of the poors". My family and friends do okay with a net worth way below that, in the Bay Area. I've worked minimum wage jobs here in the bay, and had co-workers actually struggling to make…

For a software engineer, or really most professionals, $2M really is not _that_ much in terms of retirement.

It’s absolutely enough to live a frugal retirement on, but not some sort of massive nest egg. You can safely withdrawal about $80k/year from that without it diminishing.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s the average income in the USA, but most deep career professionals would be taking a step down in terms of purchasing power. No real source of income means you can’t really finance anything. Major purchases are essentially pulled straight from that nest egg.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#256
post #113
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The zero-downtime culture is pretty out of control. Your flight can be delayed for hours, your roads can be closed for weeks, your internet can be out for hours because someone cut a line, that's all ok, but someone can't get into your website for 3 minutes to check the status of their order and we all must lose our minds and publicly apologize and explain in detail what happened and why it will never happen again.

The obvious difference is no matter how long the county or city takes to reopen that road - you'll go right back to using it because you don't have an alternate choice. For a website - particularly ecommerce websites - you have many choices. Rarely is a product only sold on a particular website. Being down when someone is trying to place an order can and does result in losing the sale, and potentially the customer fo…

Sure. If you have a couple of short outages in a year and say 2% of your customers view the website during that time, half quit and never come back over it, that's it. You've lost 1% of your customers.

You seem to be stating that any loss at all no matter how small is a complete disaster without really qualifying it. Yet one could easily make the point - well, what about the customers you don't serve at all because they want to buy a rucksack and you don't sell them? That number could be far higher than the ones affected by outages.

I think this probably just depends on how big the numbers are to be honest. Yes, if 1% of people are millions of dollars, then sure, we care. Usually it's not anything close to being like that.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#257
The thing that struck me the most was how wildly unprofessional Paul D'Ambra's comments are in response to the bug report.

And then he rolled out a fix that was broken, too - showing incompetence in development, understanding the problem, and a total failure to do proper QA on the fix.

Royally fucked the pooch twice and he's all "gee golly whillikers!"

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the funnier situations (funny now, wasn't so much the first time I saw this) that I run into at new gigs or contracts is when a business has absolutely zero monitoring or alerting. Go into their backend, it's predictably a dumpster fire. Start plugging in monitoring and the business realizes everything is on fire and PANICS. It's very difficult to explain to someone who definitely doesn't want to hear that it'…

> It's very difficult to explain to someone who definitely doesn't want to hear that it's actually been broken for a long time, they just didn't care enough to notice or to invest in doing it right the first time. if no one noticed then can you really say it was broken?

Errors can go unnoticed or ignored until they cause a fault. For example you may not notice missing bolts on the underside of the bridge.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#259
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a few times I realized that everytime I step into blind-ish panic over a mistake, I should get as far as possible from the machines. Otherwise I try one bad idea after the other and create an actual catastrophic failure.

What is this response called? I see it in many people. It’s like trying to catch a boiling mug of coffee when it falls — panic and not thinking leads to severe consequences; inaction would be better. It seems to relate to fight or flight, as opposed to freezing. All three are not great and can significantly escalate a bad situation.

Politician's syllogism gets close.

> We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#260

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. I'm constantly surprised how many well-off people try to pass themselves off as "one of the poors". My family and friends do okay with a net worth way below that, in the Bay Area. I've worked minimum wage jobs here in the bay, and had co-workers actually struggling to make…

Try having a chronic health condition. My ability to continue walking will at some point depend on paying doctors to replace part of my skeleton; that doesn't come cheap in America.

I wasn't speaking to exceptions. There will always be those who require ridiculous amounts of money to live comfortably—this is not the norm.
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