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The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

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Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#271

Post by Alupis »

coryrc wrote: post #264
Alupis wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 website…

> 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?

You were asked if the physical store was closed - because that's the analog you are deliberately overlooking.

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

Some people unwilling to learn. Even worse, some people insist they understand an entire industry, having spent exactly zero time in that industry. The hubris on display is amazing.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#272

Post by camdenreslink »

vundercind wrote: post #224
camdenreslink wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To support a sibling post, depends very much on age and circumstances. 50, healthy, no wife or kids and no plan to have them? Might be fine retiring at $2m. 30 with a family? Ehhhh… Likely-time-remaining is a huge factor in figuring out how much it’ll take to retire at a given level of risk (of running out of money too early).

It's $80k/year at a 4% withdrawal rate. If you were 30 with a family it might be cutting it close (depends on things like student loans, cost of health insurance, car payments, cost of mortgage, etc). Bumping it up to $2.5m would probably make things a lot more comfortable, but the point remains that OP has no reason to worry.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#273

Post by lukan »

cma wrote: post #192
lukan wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Splashing my face and hands with extremely cold water is my trick." Yes, literally cooling down. Combined with conscious breathing. And then go on doing, what you can do.

It's the mammalian diving reflex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_reflex

[dead]

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#274

Post by zappchance »

RHSeeger wrote: post #265
zappchance wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

If you're making enough to sustain a $2M net worth, either you are skilled enough to be able to find another job quickly (highly experienced individuals are always in demand) and you are just not confident enough to realize your worth—or, you are not skilled enough to get another job quickly and are being paid above your worth.

In any case, I would suggest saving up an emergency fund to the point that you are not scared of losing your job. I understand making that people must make commitments (car payments, mortgages, student loans, etc.) and that the risk of not paying them off is always there. But I would hope that a millionaire of all people has enough collateral for a loan if necessary, and that they would have good enough credit to be approved.

If you have your finances in order, you should not be scared of losing your job. Having actual fear from the thought means that maybe your assets aren't working for you (they are all deprecating assets or the cost of their upkeep is higher than the return). The one thing that can and should terrify you is illness or injury that makes you unable to work.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#275

Post by RHSeeger »

zappchance wrote: post #274
RHSeeger wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, an…

If you're making enough to sustain a $2M net worth, either you are skilled enough to be able to find another job quickly (highly experienced individuals are always in demand) and you are just not confident enough to realize your worth—or, you are not skilled enough to get another job quickly and are being paid above your worth. In any case, I would suggest saving up an emergency fund to the point that you are not sca…

> If you're making enough to sustain a $2M net worth, either you are skilled enough to be able to find another job quickly (highly experienced individuals are always in demand) and you are just not confident enough to realize your worth—or, you are not skilled enough to get another job quickly and are being paid above your worth.

As someone who was out of work for ~13 months during the dotcom bust; this is absolutely false. Sometimes, things work out such that getting a new job is more complicated than just having a good skill set. And honestly, the idea that "if you can't find a another job quickly, you're clearly not very good at your job" is flat out insulting.

> I would suggest saving up an emergency fund to the point that you are not scared of losing your job.

13 months eats a lot of runway.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#276

Post by languagehacker »

photonthug wrote: post #161
languagehacker wrote: post #116

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,…

Good post-mortems should provide ammo and action items to review existing business processes. If you don't have an advocate in your engineering organization who is working across departments to improve these processes, that may be a sign of organizational immaturity or dysfunction. No organizational function happens in a vacuum, and in the right company, collaboration can help influence the things that engineering doesn't directly control.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#277

Post by zappchance »

RHSeeger wrote: post #275
zappchance wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're making enough to sustain a $2M net worth, either you are skilled enough to be able to find another job quickly (highly experienced individuals are always in demand) and you are just not confident enough to realize your worth—or, you are not skilled enough to get another job quickly and are being paid above your worth. In any case, I would suggest saving up an emergency fund to the point that you are not sca…

> If you're making enough to sustain a $2M net worth, either you are skilled enough to be able to find another job quickly (highly experienced individuals are always in demand) and you are just not confident enough to realize your worth—or, you are not skilled enough to get another job quickly and are being paid above your worth. As someone who was out of work for ~13 months during the dotcom bust; this is absolutely…

> And honestly, the idea that "if you can't find a another job quickly, you're clearly not very good at your job" is flat out insulting.

To be clear, I was only referring to leadership or management roles (given the context of a millionaire in this industry). At that point in your career I would expect one to have many career connections and/or enough sheer charisma and experience that makes landing a job doable if not a breeze.

It's not meant to be particularly insulting, just realistic.

> As someone who was out of work for ~13 months during the dotcom bust; this is absolutely false.

I didn't consider exceptional events such as the dotcom bust, or the 2008 financial crisis or the Coronavirus pandemic and subsequent inflation. If we include those, I do agree that if makes sense to fear losing your job.

I do concede that we've had multiple "once-in-a-lifetime" industry upsets in a very short while and with that context it could make sense to panic. But in normal circumstances, I still think fearing job loss as a millionaire comes from somewhere more emotional/instinctual than rational.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#278

Post by anonfordays »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #166
anonfordays wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This affected users that did not have a specific version of the JS library pinned and deployed a new version Par for the course honestly. The amount of garbage that gets called "production" these days is mindboggling. No blue/green or canary deployments, shipping code that has nothing pinned, no clear rollback, etc. This is what happens when anyone can become an EngineerTM after a two week JavaScript boot camp.

No, actually, it's because Posthog explicitly recommends that as the way to do it, makes their standard npm package unpinnable (as it will always lazy load the most recent version of its modules) and calls version pinning via npm as an "advanced" installation[1]. The ecosystem has plenty of versioning and best practices, but they do jack squat when you recommend to your customers to bypass them and trust that you'll…

>No, actually, it's because Posthog explicitly recommends that as the way to do it

Just because a project recommends "curl whatever | bash" to get started doesn't mean it's something you should productionize. You need an engineer that's done more than a bootcamp to understand code pinning, packaging, and deploying in order to ship a supportable, observable system. You're making my point for me.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#279

Post by caseyy »

fragmede wrote: post #128
caseyy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard "catch a falling knife" for this.

Hmm, I will use this one. Thanks.

Re: The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown

#280

Post by caseyy »

prerok wrote: post #157
everdrive wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you think some managers intentionally play up the severity of problems to push their teams into this panic mode? I'm sure some do. Much more often I observe that the managers themselves are just reacting to the incentive system in their environment -- and that those incentive systems are complex, not-widely-understood, and often built "accidentally." ie, companies are often accidentally incentivizing the wrong be…

I am almost convinced most middle management are like small babies. That's not meant derogatively: there's a problem, they have been notified, yet they cannot do anything about it. They need someone else to fix it. So, they cry loud and clear that there is a need to fix this. It's difficult to understand sometimes, but they are pressured from above, and they don't have the means to fix it by themselves.

Good management is a tool they have to fix the problem. But yes, sometimes they have mismanaged things so much that they can only kick up a fuss or pester people. It causes a lot of stress and is not very effective from my exp.

On a more positive note, other managers will have a rapport with their teams where if the team only learns of a problem, it will be addressed. They only need to act as liaisons — stick something on a kanban board somewhere, and it will get resolved. No loud crying necessary, just business as usual.

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