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The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

zarar.dev

261–270 of 286 posts

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#261

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…

> 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…

Then you are living above your means. Having $2M in assets puts you in the top 5% in the USA, let alone with world. If you can't figure out a way to pay for food with this much money tied up in assets, you should spend some of your savings on a financial advisor.

There are literal minimum wage workers getting by in the bay. I really can't understand this obsession with not wanting to admit that you are well-off.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#264
post #236
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't purchased from them yet. > What would you have done if after clicking the ad/link, the page didn't load? archive.org first just to check if it's down temporarily. But if you're a vendor just reselling Alibaba, then there's not a lot of reason to shop from you. But with real value add, you can get customers. That's exclusive products, support/warranty, niche product, etc beyond just "fulfillment".

> if you're a vendor just reselling Alibaba There's an entire ocean between Alibaba flippers and strongly branded products sold first-party by mega-corps. Consider the physical space and walk into a Target or Walmart - how many products on the shelf are Alibaba flips, and how many are sold by the manufacturer? Target has house brands, but Dawn Dish Soap is not one of them. You can get Dawn Dish Soap from most stores…

If Target's website is down for an hour, I'll just wait.

> sit out front and wait for them to open, or are you going to another store?

Many times I've wanted to get something from my preferred grocery store, but they're closed so I... just went a different time.

Most people aren't going to shop a bunch of random websites to buy "Callaway golf clubs". They're going to buy it from Dick's or Amazon. And if those websites are down the moment they check, they'll just wait an hour because it isn't urgent or figure it's a problem on their end.

Fuck, b&h photo takes their website down a whole day every week!

> I guess we can't really blame people for not understanding this - people rarely understand how their beef and carrots got to the grocery store either.

Thanks for the lesson, I learned how smart you like sounding.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#265

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…

Then you are living above your means. Having $2M in assets puts you in the top 5% in the USA, let alone with world. If you can't figure out a way to pay for food with this much money tied up in assets, you should spend some of your savings on a financial advisor. There are literal minimum wage workers getting by in the bay. I really can't understand this obsession with not wanting to admit that you are well-off.

> There are literal minimum wage workers getting by in the bay.

And there are people that don't have a job and live off the land. Each type of person has different expectations and commitments.

- The person making $80k/year is well off compared to the person making nothing because they can't hold down a job; but they're still reasonable to be worried about losing their job, being unable to pay for their apartment, and being out on the street.

- The person making $150k/year is well off compared to the $80k person, but can have the exact same fears. Maybe they're worried about losing their house because they won't be able to pay their mortgage.

It can be very hard to pay your bills after being out of work for a year, even taking minimum jobs to help make ends meet; because people make commitments based on their earnings. And even _reasonable_ commitments can be rough if you're out of work long enough.

> I really can't understand this obsession with not wanting to admit that you are well-off.

The poster with $2M in net worth never denied they were well off. You're the one that seems to be denying that it's possible to be well off and _also_ be worried about the impact of losing your job. Your stance is... mind boggling to me.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#266
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are valuable lessons for sure, but then someone from the marketing comes and demands you add PostHog or any other tracking script to the site and won't take no for an answer.

Then communicate clearly the trade-off the project leader is making.

While I agree with you, this sounds like it could lead to a classic case of "that escalation worked, in the sense that it was heard".

Unless someone with decision-making power is going to be woken up at 4AM for a problem, they have very little incentive (intrinsic or extrinsic) to block a project on such nebulous claims as "Reducing dependencies" or "Less things on the critical path", if a business leader has come to them with a request.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hip and knee replacements are amongst the most common surgeries performed. I'm quite unusual in how young my issue struck, but everyone gets older.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#268

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%?

The 5% HYSA minus the FED-targeted rate of 2% is back to 3%. But high quality dividend companies generally raise their dividend each year, plus you get the increase in stock value. So you only get 3% in income, but your total return is much better.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#269
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

With the right analysis I can show how your outage increased your business value.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#270

I know that it's not a real post-mortem, but this is the opposite of what a good post-mortem looks like. It includes: * Blaming the tools (and the author) * Not focusing on facts in the timeline * Not considering improvements But that doesn't make for engaging content, right? > * At $TIME we observed HTTP POST calls failing > * At $TIME customers reported inability to make changes to ticket prices and promo codes > *…

The trouble with post-mortems is always the things that you can't say. Are we going to talk about how someone wanted analytics everywhere even though it's expensive and they don't use it, that they chose the vendor and didn't provide time to evaluate it, that they wanted it added now-now-now to production even though it hadn't gone through dev, even though it was unplanned work in a busy sprint with other risky work,…

Let’s not pretend it’s just PMs. I’ve worked with PMs who fought against shipping fast but ultimately an engineering manager or engineer comes in and forces a fast ship.
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