HN user
Computers were a mistake.
Google Workspaces or Microsoft 365. If you don’t need the collaboration tools Fastmail is pretty good.
Don’t waste time self-hosting. You job is to make sure your company is successful, product-market fit, blah, blah, you know the drill: that is core. Everything else is context.
38, recently diagnosed with ADHD. Everything in here is absolutely true. Even the analogy about the TV: I used something very similar with my doctor when describing how my brain works...
I’m currently a Staff+ Engineer at a huge multinational company. Had that conversation when I came here because the role was not very well specified and you were supposed to do both people management and continue working as an IC. I spent months trying to get this clarified while doing both roles and it was a mess. I spent 90% of my time doing management things and very little IC work or keeping up to date on the technical side.
This year I pushed them to set a date for me to transition to an actual Staff+ role or my time with the company would come to an end. My manager moved heaven and earth for me to get this and we have a finally have a plan, so we will see how that goes.
If it is something you really want, push for having a technical leadership role with clearly defined responsibilities (and actual ownership and empowerment). There is nothing worse than turning a great engineer into a mediocre manager.
If/when you actually have that, you will still spend most of your time attending meeting, doing planning and providing input into tons of things but not actually contributing directly. So in order to keep up-to-date you will have to define how you will do it, while still using company time. Myself, I usually book a full day to try new technologies, do PoCs, read books, watch talks, attend courses. Not always possible but I at least try to spread those 8 hours throughout the week and actually make use of them to keep learning.
A question that a lot of people that reach the higher-level of a Senior role is how to keep progressing in terms of career/compensation but still be able to keep coding during a large part of my time? The answer is you don’t (not on most companies at least): after Senior Level your value to the company is in you experience and your domain/company knowledge that you accrued over time. The best possible way to make use of that is to have you help other people grow and cross-pollinate multiple people/teams using that knowledge.
Good luck!
I always had difficulties in school and have always suffered from being a daydreamer, had trouble remembering stuff that does not interest me, emotional deregulation, periods of hyper-focus but also complete lack of focus, etc. Because of that I had trouble finishing high school, never finished college and would jump around jobs every couple of years… After suffering from this for years (I’m in my late 30s) and after seeing some Youtube videos about ADHD by chance, I decided to get diagnosed. Booked an appointment with a doctor that is an expert on ADHD and focus specifically on treating undiagnosed adults.
The results after multiple tests (my doctor even asked to talk with my wife) came back positive.
For the past few months I have been trying different medication and dosage and the improvement in life quality has been massive. I’m super productive at work, my mood swings are gone, I can recall stuff much more easily and I’ve been doing things I’ve been postponing for years: learning new technologies, reading a ton of new books, doing side-projects, etc.
My recommendation is to get properly diagnosed and if things come back positive discuss starting on medication. I know that in the USA (I’m in Western Europe) ADHD and medication for it have a lot of stigmas and misconceptions associated and some doctors are reluctant to put people on meds (especially adults from I’ve read) but doing nothing and just trying to live with this condition without any help is hell…
Good luck!
Some that I've read and enjoyed:
- Introducing Python, 2nd Edition by Bill Lubanovic (Beginner Level)
- Python Distilled, David M. Beazley (Beginner to Intermediate Level)
- Effective Python (2nd Edition), Brett Slatkin (Intermediate Level)
- Fluent Python (2nd Edition), Luciano Ramalho (Advanced Level)
- CPython Internals, Anthony Shaw (Advanced Level)
- Architecture Patterns with Python, Harry J. W. Percival & Bob Gregory (Advanced Level)
Your can buy O’Reilly DRM-free PDF and ePUB ebooks from eBooks [dot] com. I love the amount and variety of content of O”Reilly platform but the web application is pretty mediocre and the mobile apps are buggy as hell.
I've seen somewhere that "everyone learns differently" might not actually be true.
I found this video from Veritasium that explains it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA