ac2022

Originally from Pakistan, grew up in Middle East.

Of course, my parents wanted me to be a doctor. As a software engineer, I have disappointed them for a life. It doesn’t bother me anymore, they are from different generation where security especially financial security was hard.

There were other pressures too like as kids we were constantly reminded about our duties to take care of them when they are in their old age. And how we will never be able to take care of them because of our average grades, which means we won’t get decent jobs, which means we won’t have enough money to take care of them. I used to worry so much about that I never spent my pocket money. Still bitter about it.

They pressured us but never provided any support. Other kids who did good in the school had tutors, parents were very involved in their lives. My parents just yelled and said work harder.

Same with sports, never played cricket with us. Never even taught us how to play it. But expected 5-7 years olds to know how to play cricket when we met up with our cousins in Pakistan.

Try Toptal. I applied there for practice and as a backup. It seems they have plenty of projects.

Also SaaS like Deel make it easy for employers to hire anyone around the world. The problem is educating the employers. I would perhaps add a blurb about getting paid via Deel in cover letter.

Yes, it is amazing. They say Heart Rate Variability is pretty good indicator of stress. My HRV graph for last 6 months clearly shows when I made decision to change job and when I gave 2 weeks notice.

Yeah, with recent economic developments, I am a little worried but stock of my previous company is also down. I am hearing rumors of layoffs there. So I could still be laid off even if I had stayed with the big company.

A new goal for myself is to always be interview ready. I ll resume LeetCode pretty soon.

I agree in principle but where I worked a lot of it was just for show. We had a lot of security people who only knew how to generate pdfs. They were very hard to work with.

Or some day, they will decide that one part of our service should move from one network to another for security or compliance reasons. But they have no idea how to do it, who to talk to, etc.

But since it is security issue, we will need drop everything and figure out how to move part of our infrastructure to another network. Things like these were pretty common.

True, I have taken break from LeetCode but not for too long. I will probably restart it in couple of weeks. Going forward, I always want to be interview ready.

Sort of, yes. We have signed the contract and should be closing in the fall :)

The house is a bit more expensive than I would like but we can afford it. And we could have afford it before too, but I probably subconsciously thought that I don't deserve it.

Thank you and yes we are working on it.

BTW I thought about divorce but never said that word to my wife. Those thoughts luckily were very brief.

Thanks, we are.

But I highly doubt there are many people who can prevent their internal mental state from affecting their relationships.

I was not able to see her point of view when I felt like a loser. Once I decided that I will get a new job, we were better able to communicate and figure out our next steps.

When you yell at your significant other after the work day is done.

This is really important. We were fighting over nothing. Switching jobs is cheaper than couples counseling or divorce.

For me it was lack of control that was causing burn out. Exercise definitely improved my mood but it was only for couple of hours. Once I decided that I will switch job, I was 1000x better although I was working longer and harder.

Pretty funny, I was going to order a balance board that I had been eyeing for a bit. Went to Amazon but it was not loading the page correctly, so I went to company's website to look up specs and found out they had 10% off coupon & no taxes. So I purchased it from them.

Wondering how much Amazon outages can actually increase revenues for smaller companies.

5 months ago, I was depressed about my work and feeling like a failure. Both in career and life. I thought I was going through midlife crisis. And my inability to make FAANG money was the cause of my problems. I posted about it here [1].

My job was not bad, I worked 30 hours or so. Had excellent benefits. My team was great and my manager was super flexible. So I thought it cannot be work that was causing me feel depressed. But I decided that I need to get into FAANG and started studying LeetCode. Also my backup plan was to move into management in my current company. I worked longer hours, and studied late into night.

However, my happiness increased, I was motivated.

About a month ago, I gave my 2 weeks notice. I didn't get into FAANG or got FAANG salary but still got a decent bump in pay raise. More importantly, I cannot remember when was last time I felt this relaxed. My average HRV increased from 40ms to 100ms.

I realized that I was not going through midlife crisis but rather feeling burned out because in my cushy job, I had no actual freedom. We were doing checkmark driven development. I could not use my best judgement to do anything but most trivial things.

It wasn't the money that was the issue also. At my new job, I believe in company's overall mission. My last company is known for being backward and surviving by financial engineering. My new company is a smaller company, so it seems I can actually make important decisions.

And most importantly I feel I am in control of my career now. However, my default will be to leave after every 1 year, unless company and work convinces me to stay for another year.

And yes I realize that I am feeling excited because of my new job and may settle back into my low state. If that happen then I will focus on moving into management or different career.

But I guess to answer your question, work has a great influence on you. If you are not feeling good about it or life, then change work now! I say that because I almost thought about divorce because I thought my wife was giving me stress.

EDIT: Thank you, HN!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709273

I agree especially with kids. I got kids, I close shop at 4pm.

I get kids, go to park, pool, etc. Bring sandwiches or pick up junk food. One kid is baby, so usually drop him at home with mom.

Sadly most parents especially dads work late. So I am not able to make plans with moms for after school playdates. And my wife is not very social and she doesn't like Texas afternoon heat.

But there are a few dads who leave work early and we try to arrange pladates after school.

Not sure if one whole day off would create as many opportunities for play as shorter work days.

Actually, in certain situations, yes. My running shorts have pockets that barely fit iPhone mini. Yes, I know there are other accessories that I can buy to fit giant phones in but I rather not.

I think this depends on persons internal happiness. Happy people feel happier and sad people get sadder. This is based on my own experiences.

In my 20s, I was as happy as one can be. I posted a lot on social media and enjoyed posts of my friends. Loved food posts cause that gave me new resturants to try out.

Vacation pictures, I couldn't afford a nice vacation but vacationed via those pictures. Asked friends to post more pictures.

Friend got a job, it meant time for a party.

Now I am not as happy as I used to be. Now I do get annoyed with food and vacation photos. Feel jealous when friends are promoted. I rarely go on social media but when I do I immediately feel bad about myself.

Maybe I am just getting old.

Oh and yes when I was on Facebook, no one posted about politics. In fact, I remember reading my first few political posts of my friends and thinking whats wrong with them.

Sadly, there not many options if you want comfortable life and do good at the same time.

My fiends and I really wanted to do good when starting our careers and looked at many non-profits, all of them pay sub-market rates. And then we learned secondhand that most of these non-profits were run by narcissists leaders with worse office politics than regular offices.

We got jobs in regular companies building some of most critical infrastructure of the internet. We felt like we were contributing to advancement of humanity and freedom. But after 10 years, we realized we just made rich kids richer, divided humanity like never before, destroyed privacy, and made sure everyone is addicted to their screens.

I mostly helped in the building of the cloud, and I know what business most of our clients are in. Very few are doing something that is not harmful.

Teach in bootcamp? So that these rich-kids will have more workers?

Start your own business? Consulting? Helping other companies do evil? Another app to get hooked on? Restaurants? There is already obesity epidemic? Build new homes or rehab? I can respect that but it is capital intensive.

Anyways, I see whenever trading is mentioned people call it a useless activity while most of us are engaged in actual harmful activities.

It is also because devops is shoved down devs throats while claiming that it is easier and better. So now many of developers don’t want to spend time rewriting their code for something that is supposed to reduce their workload not increase it.

While I am not as successful but I live comfortable life and I feel same way as you.

A few weeks ago, I was feeling really low and asked for similar advice. It really helped writing down my thoughts and reading various comments.

Since then I am feeling really motivated and sort of high on life. I think having an achievable goal is really important in life.

I decided that I was not happy with my work, so I will definitely make a change. Which was a huge stress reliever.

Then I told my boss that I am not feeling motivated at work and I need to move into management. We will see what comes of it but that made everything concrete.

I also started doing leetcode daily, it is boring and pointless but gives me peace of mind since this is plan b.

Then in personal life I am really focused on getting 8 hours of sleep, and other relaxation related activities.

Anyways my suggestion would be start with relaxation. Fix sleep, get massages, hire nanny or housekeeper.

I was also minimalist before marriage, and my wife’s consumption habits are really stressful for me. It is not even about money. I hate stuff and give away things for free rather have them take up space in my house.

I realized I cannot change my wife’s habits, so I am just focused my reaction to her habits. I have all my minimalist gear in one backpack in the house. Working on reducing my wardrobe right now.

Since you have a successful business, Selling it would not be my first step. But if business is still making you feel miserable then sell it.

I think my main point is make a decision to change something and work towards it.

GP seems to exhibit lack of social and cultural awareness. Not all but many people on spectrum also lack social and cultural awareness. They have more in common with autistic people than they would like to.

Same here, I personally can move anywhere in the world. But restriction come from wife.

Yeah I am Texas. Before 2021, one could buy a beautiful home with a pool in a top rated school districts for $450K easily. Now same homes are going for $650K+.

I personally am not in rush to buy new home but it just made me feel like I didn't keep up with inflation and should do something about it. Wife is in slightly more rush but I am very strict on our loans to income ratio.

Thank you, this is what I decided to pursue. It makes a lot of sense.

Yeah I am exactly at $150K.

First, I want to say thank you to everyone who responded. I really liked what jameshush said about writing down my top values. After some thought, I think my top values are:

1. Kids - I will not do any job or business that will negatively impact our time.

2. Autonomy/freedom - In long run, I rather have more autonomy than money.

3. Money - This is not to say that money is not important to me but rather it is one of top 3 things I value. In short term, I need to optimize for money.

After thinking about my values and reading comments here, my plan is to combination of option A and C.

At my current company, I will start conversations with my management about moving up the ladder. And do whatever they suggest. This may take several months before they actually promote me to any leadership position, if they do. I have a lot of freedom at my current company, like I can run errands during day and catch up on work later etc. It is safe and there is possibility that in a couple of years, my salary can be close to FAANG engineers.

At the same time, I will do 30 mins of Leetcode/interview prep daily. This way if things don't workout, I will have something to fallback on. I will not stick with my company for vague promises of more money in future. If they don't offer me any concrete plan for my career progression, I will jump the boat as soon as I am ready for FAANG interviews.

This is an excellent choice, my current job is already remote. We are stuck in our current general area due to school for 2 years or so. After 2 years, we can move to country if things don't change.

Oh yes, we are working hard to optimize current space. But I think the real issue is 12 months ago we could have bought any home in any of nice middle class neighborhoods. Now homes are so expensive for us. This made me start comparing my career with some of my friends.

I don't even care for a bigger home but my kids ask for backyard. That is what kills me.

I love this.

I agree that owning a business that doesn't require too much of your time is better than a business like consulting. This might be something I would do on the side. One of my old manager owned several rental properties, it rarely took any of his time.

Thank you for honest and brutal feedback.

First off, you think you're having a mental health crisis so you're going to HN for advice?

I have seen a lot of these posts on HN and gained a lot of value from other people's experiences suggestions. Last night I went to bed feeling lost, but writing out this post and then reading reviews been really helpful. Yes a professional can help with mental health issues better than internet strangers but this is what I have for now. I will contemplate a bit more but I think I am close to seeing clear choice for me.

A. "Aggressively move into management" Why do you even think this is an option?

I have seen many "I will never be a manager"-developers becoming managers, directors, VPs, both in smaller and larger companies. I think it is a skill that one can develop. One of my friend is a senior director at a 5000+ people company. He has been telling me I have natural leadership skills and I should move into management. Also I have held team lead roles several times, I also enjoyed mentoring junior developers. As a manager my biggest weakness would be project/time management.

. Again, so you're so good at what you do that you can just decide to become a thought leader.

Doesn't hard work make you good at what you do? Thought leader is a loaded term. It is company lingo. I guess what I really should have said I should work on internal Individual Contributor track. The final stage of our IC track is basically thought-leader.

As for feeling like failure, I failed in my side projects and ignored my career. And really feeling depressed that our dream home that was so attainable is complete out of reach now. Anyways, if I really focus on my career, I think I have a good shot of having a successful career.

C. "I could easily make 2x - 3x my salary [at a FAANG]" If it was that easy why the hell aren't you doing that now?

Because I was not focused on money until now. I was happy and comfortable. I had a few interviews where I went in with a little Leetcode practice and I failed them horribly.

D. Again, you can just walk in anywhere AND get a salary bump? Again why aren't you doing that already.

Again I was mostly happy and honestly I don't know if 1.6x bump in salary is worth giving up the comfortable job and the potential to move within my current tech giant.

And thanks for pointing this out. More I think about it, this won't be worth it.

E. This is just pure fantasy

I forgot who but someone said ask yourself what would you do if you were not afraid. Then do that thing. I guess this is what I would do. Having a family makes it harder.

If your day job is soul-sucking then at the very least go with option D, take your 1.2x to 1.6x salary bump and reassess.

I think you can change your mindset and turn subjectively bad things in to positive things. Now option D doesn't seem worth it. I rather try to go in management than get a small pay raise in another company and start over.

Thank you, I am leaning hard on this choice.