In 2020 I had posted the same question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069693).
Now the world has quite changed in a little over two years and I would be curious to know if the "biggest problem" trends also changed.
This is the very simple (and purposely broad) question:
What is your biggest problem right now?The problem: am Ukrainian. It currently looks like I can get mobilized soon and go to war. If that happens, chances are that what awaits is not domain driven design and distributed systems but trench warfare. Even though I am likely to survive, my mental health and capacity for intense intellectual work may be permanently reduced.
Not just me: it's a trend. Ukraine is a major software engineering hub. The war doesn't care. Tons of talented people have to stop what they do and go defend the nation from the russian horde. Such a striking contrast where you can have cloud solutions and Ww1 style fighting within weeks from each other. Puts things into perspective.
I hope you and your loved ones make it through this alive and healthy.
Try to tell Google, Verizon, Microsoft, American Express, et cetera, that there's something wrong with their servers, or some security issue with their site, whatever, and you'll either not be talking with real humans (Google) or you'll be trying to explain email servers to first level phone support who think that if it works for some people, then the problem has to be elsewhere.
The same goes for companies that have no way for humans to contact them yet have, for instance, old people who need to use them. They ignore ADA requirements for TTD contacts. They have no way to skip their automated phone systems or voice activated systems. They have outsourced people who know nothing about the companies' products and no way to escalate anything. These problems are getting worse over time.
On a daily basis, my team (which consists of 2 people only, on a good day) deals with hundreds of partners facing dozens of different issues. We are only trained to deal with maybe 3% of the issues we receive -- the rest, we must redirect to other dozens of internal departments, or escalate to other teams.
The problem is: I (and my colleague) have zero idea who is the correct team to re-direct to/escalate most of the time. This is not because we don't want to know, but because most of the time even our leaders and their leaders have no idea who is the right person to deal with those problems.
The company is so big (and not properly organized) that some issues their business partners' face go almost 2 months without a solution, with endless email threads of one team pinging the other...
It is bad for the costumer/supplier, and also for the employees, who have been alienated of their job and are left to "none's devices" to do their job.
But I'd like to achieve something special in my life. Have some sense of fulfillment. Be it professionally or towards the local community, etc.
Want to learn too many things. All right now.
It's so bad it’s almost always crippling.
I can relate to that.
There are only a few ways I might get lucky:
- somebody uploads my mind into a computer
- somebody cures aging
- somebody cures sleep (extra 30% of each day would be nice)
- I decide that ~15,000 days is good enough
Pain and exorbitant medical bills will probably make my death feel small one day. I'll try to enjoy my easy life while I have it :)
So I rest content and confident that most of it will remain lucid dreams for the foreseeable future thanks to the intricate complexities of biochemistry.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate our general age rising due to improved nutrition and medicine, but I deeply believe we only have the chance to feel truly alive and get ahead because we know we are going to die one day.
Obligatory Steve Jobs quote:
> Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
> Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
> Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
I don't fear death because I'm utterly curious. All of your thoughts are functions of a brain, a brain that will stop functioning. So what will you experience? Religious people will say there's an afterlife. A non-religious person might say you experience a void. You see, hear, feel, smell nothing. But if experiences are a function of the brain, and the brain is dead, you can't even experience a void.
It's not possible to imagine a true nothingness. So it brings me back to the original question, what do you experience after death? It's an impossible question to answer without experiencing it. Sure, people have had near-death experiences and talked about them, but I question how many of those experiences are merely hallucinations created by a mind panicking about its demise.
To die is to finally get the answer to the question. I do not fear dying because I will finally have an answer to the unanswerable.
That said, my bigger fear is aging and becoming decrepit. I don't want to survive, I want to live. If I ever get to a point where I'm merely surviving, unable to walk without assistance, unable to wipe my own ass, then I think it'll be time to say I've had a good run and end it.
Same with falling asleep. At some point you are awake and at some other point you wake up from having slept. Death is like falling asleep. That’s why sleep in some cultures is called the “little death”. You practice dying every night.
We don't remember any of it because pain doesn't necessarily transfer to memory. I agree that death is like falling asleep and never waking up but you don't suffer hopelessly before you fall asleep. Many that are dying do.
My aunt was hopeless during the dying process. There were no singing angels, no great grace descended. It's not a magical experience, it's ugly and continuous suffering before you fall asleep and never wake up.
How could it no be, you will never see your children again. The party continues and you are abandoned for forever.
But it has arguably been “cured” in a sense, look into the Uberman Polyphasic sleep schedule.
Retiring at 45 seems pretty appealing. I could finally catch up on my massive library of games I've been wanting to play, not to mention reducing my alarm clock usage to likely 10 times a year, rather than 5 days a week.
I hope you’re not talking about a startup lottery
And I do recognize that it's just that - a lottery. We could fail and I end up unemployed with nothing. Or a funding round could dilute my stock options to worthlessness.
Source: worked for 7 startups in the last 20 years.
Total compensation is a little lower than market if you assume the options are worthless. But if we get to a $5B valuation, the value of my options would put me to a significantly over-market compensation, though not enough to retire. If we reached $30B, then that would give me ~$6M assuming no dilution.
But we've had 4 rounds of funding totaling $131M.
I landed two of my more interesting programming roles via jobs that started as something "other than" (for the change) and found myself migrating into industry specific problem solving internally as I had the knack (programming and higher math) and an inside track.