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Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

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Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#361
I'm working full-time on polishing both SaaSHub & LibHunt. Both platforms are focussed on software alternatives - one of them on software products, the later on open-source software projects.

...and I'm building an RSS reader on the side. In fact, it's already working, but it needs some improvements before being presentable to a wider audience.

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an aimless 24 year old as well. I often feel sad that the friends I have aren't very interested in the programming / tech things I like to think about. I'm hoping to find some meetups or other communities where I can build those relationships in person

I'm an aimless 24 year old as well. I love programming! How about we start a Discord - club for aimless 24 year olds....

Might actually work, also 24 and a bit clueless.

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#363
post #279

I won the IPO lottery and I’m in the middle ground between rich enough to never work again but not quite rich enough for the yachts/mansions/private jets lifestyle. I haven’t worked in 6 months and I’m struggling to find a larger meaning to my life beyond getting yet another tech job. I’ve considered going to college for a math degree, moving to my parents home country, and joining the military (among many other opti…

Apart from philosophy mentioned by the other poster, you can also read into psychology. Some branches in psychology deal with the question of how to live a fulfilled life, eg. positive psychology [1] and humanistic psychology [2]. Also Buddhism has similar goal and teachings interleave with these psychology topics [3]. To start, you can pick a Psychology 101 textbook (I like Psychology and Life [4]) and then read the…

Agreed. On my journey to some sort of personal meaning I ended up going through psychology, physical sciences, philosophy & meditation - roughly in that order with poetry and literature interspersed…

But understanding life has, in my experience, been similar to the hermeneutic circle: to understand a part, you must understand the whole, and to understand the whole, you must understand the parts…

That is: the entry point is here - learn about the world and about how humans think about and perceive it. Start anywhere, but start.

*edit: I forgot to add also history. It also helps to shed light on the different meanings people have discovered over time.

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#364

I won the IPO lottery and I’m in the middle ground between rich enough to never work again but not quite rich enough for the yachts/mansions/private jets lifestyle. I haven’t worked in 6 months and I’m struggling to find a larger meaning to my life beyond getting yet another tech job. I’ve considered going to college for a math degree, moving to my parents home country, and joining the military (among many other opti…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#365
post #254

Since I work in a large enterprise, and I got tired of our dog-slow Jira instance, I’m building an offline client for Jira that syncs up every so often. More importantly, it responds to everything you do locally instantly (still kind of figuring out how large you can make the local database before that isn’t true any more). I’ll release it at some point, but it’s still missing a bunch of (probably not quite essential…

It's been a blessedly long time since I used Jira, but I vaguely think a lot of slowness came from just the front end - a local client hitting the API, even synchronously , was actually okay even when the web UI was molasses. Probably varies by instance, YMMV.

Yeah, API can be fast, depending on what you are requesting.

I could make it use the API for everything, but since it’s already local, I might as well :)

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#366

I wish I had something interesting to say here but honestly, kind of depressed. Not the clinical kind of course but more the aimless 24 year old kind. I've been working at this startup (or perhaps scaleup would be a better term considering they're already worth 7 billion dollars). It's great career-wise. I'm learning a lot and I feel like I'm being compensated fairly. But I thought my life would feel "complete" once…

It helps to understand that life is about much more than your career or material success. Really internalize that idea. It's counterintuitive, because it feels so certain that hitting ProfessionalGoalX will make you permanently happy. But it won't. It never does. Even if that goal is wildly ambitious and makes you famous or makes you millions of dollars, it'll feel great for a while, but those feelings will dissipate, and in ~18 months you won't be any happier for it. This is one of those lessons that's better to learn vicariously than it is to learn by wasting years of your life and sacrificing your happiness ;)

As for friends, I'd recommend four things:

1) Build a habit of making friends. It's not good enough to make friends once or twice in your life and then hope they'll stick around forever. It should be a continual process that you do for its own sake, from now until you die. Otherwise the number of friends in your life will always be declining (or at risk of doing so). Also, since this should be an ongoing process, you need to find a way to enjoy it so it's fun and sustainable.

2) Be proactive. Be open to things. Get out of the house. Go out and do real-world events with people. Reflexively say yes to things people invite you to. When you meet new people, be interested, agreeable, and pleasant, yet forward. If you hit it off with someone, ask for their number and casually invite them to future hangs.

3) Prioritize people who are also open and proactive. Not everyone has time to make friends. Not everyone wants to maintain friendships. Spend more of your time on the people who do.

4) Rather than make individual isolated friendships, build a tribe. What that means is you should make an effort to introduce the friends you meet to other friends. Do group hangs. You want it to be the case where the people you know also know each other. This solidifies relationships and helps them last longer, because like any other network, the value of your tribe will increase to the people in it as the size of the tribe grows. It also leads to a higher frequency of hangout opportunities, as everyone in your network now gains the power to catalyze hangouts with everyone else in your network. It also makes serendipity easier -- the more people you know, the easier it becomes to meet new people who are friends of friends.

These things have helped me tremendously. I'm 34 years old, I moved to Seattle last year after living in SF for 10 years. I spent most of my time quarantining after I moved, but after getting vaxxed in April I've been much more social, and I've already made encouraging progress toward building a new tribe.

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#367

I wish I had something interesting to say here but honestly, kind of depressed. Not the clinical kind of course but more the aimless 24 year old kind. I've been working at this startup (or perhaps scaleup would be a better term considering they're already worth 7 billion dollars). It's great career-wise. I'm learning a lot and I feel like I'm being compensated fairly. But I thought my life would feel "complete" once…

This is super common at that age and I totally feel you with the university friends thing. I lost touch with many of my uni friends and only have a more shallow friendship with other friends I made after that (maybe I'm a shitty friend?) - I've thankfully made a few more friends at my last couple of jobs and through some hobbies but not super close ones, however I then had a kid and have lost touch with a whole bunch of them over the past couple of years :')

Anyway, there's a stereotypical lifestyle that we've associated with being a professional coder, especially in your early-mid 20s. We've all heard it: "eat, sleep, code, repeat". At some point IMO this should be considered harmful. First, it enforces a narrow, diminished lifestyle without additional hobbies or interests. Second, it reifies coding as an end rather than a means - yes sometimes we want to build something pretty for its own sake, but a lot of the demotivation I've personally experienced has been from building stuff I don't give a flying fuck about. Insurance systems, legal bookkeeping systems, even a fucking recruiting portal for my country's military... I actually feel guilty about getting pulled into that one.

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#368

A 2D slippy map that shows sun and shadow around the world. Today’s sunset around Puget Sound: https://shademap.app/#47.89056,-122.66785,7z,1635813675213t

This is awesome, I can definitely see landscape photographers using something like this in order to get the right timing for the shadows.

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#369

I won the IPO lottery and I’m in the middle ground between rich enough to never work again but not quite rich enough for the yachts/mansions/private jets lifestyle. I haven’t worked in 6 months and I’m struggling to find a larger meaning to my life beyond getting yet another tech job. I’ve considered going to college for a math degree, moving to my parents home country, and joining the military (among many other opti…

I went back to university at 36 after achieving a very, very modest degree of stability in my life. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Gave me a completely different perspective on who I am, what I'm interested in. It gave me the skills to start working in a sector I actually enjoy.

My friend, if I had never work again money, I'd just pile up Masters and PhDs.

Re: Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

#370

I won the IPO lottery and I’m in the middle ground between rich enough to never work again but not quite rich enough for the yachts/mansions/private jets lifestyle. I haven’t worked in 6 months and I’m struggling to find a larger meaning to my life beyond getting yet another tech job. I’ve considered going to college for a math degree, moving to my parents home country, and joining the military (among many other opti…

I was in a similar circumstance. I drove a city bus in Las Vegas for a year. The experience opened my eyes to many things and changed my life in good ways.

Would love to read a blog post about this kind of experience!
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