Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off?

135 pointsx86hacker1010130 comments

Life is pretty absurd and wonder more and more why we put so much stake into a job when the employer effectively doesn't care about you.

Anyone taking some time to do cool stuff?

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I am happy with my current employer but I always liked Paul Graham's idea of not having a boss[0]. I had read it quite a while back but here's the gist of it:

Paul mentions that we work best when we work in a group of 8-20 people in a flat structure like our hunter gatherer ancestors use to do. Each member have their own roles and responsibilities and each individual contributes the well being and future security of the group. Such a group is optimal communication wise and it also offers greater incentive for it's members to work harder as you are directly participating in your own growth unlike our current structure where people are helping other people get rich.

This is very extreme take but imagine if companies are capped at 20-50 employees. Will it work? I think it might. What do you guys think?

0: You were not meant to have boss - http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

Edit: rewording.

In Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990 book "Pacific Edge" (part of the California Trilogy) he envisions a utopian future where company sizes are legally limited to stop the formation of huge, multi-national corporations so that control and profits stay in the local community. I forget the exact number and some quick Googling doesn't help. I remember being really inspired by the book though.

Something similar he used in the Mars trilogy where there were COOPs where every employee owned a share of the company and there were no other shareholders. I don’t recall exactly how entering a company worked in the sense of buying or diluting stock.

The inspiration for the coop in the mars trilogy actually exists in the real world.

I think it’s called the mondragon collective and it’s a meta-coop ?

Here is the wiki about it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

I don’t have time to skim it now but it’s not small potatoes, it’s in the top ten of Spanish coorporation.

If it’s not in the Mars trilogy; it’s in another of Robinson book

I think corporate income tax should scale with headcount ^ 0.8

Not sure that will be enough to cover the welfare for all the unemployed. It'd make a nice experiment...

>This is very extreme take but imagine if companies are capped at 20-50 employees. Will it work? I think it will. What do you guys think?

I don't think.

I cannot imagine companies doing GPU, CPUs, Windows, etc. with just 20-50ppl.

Well you'd have to imagine a lot more collaboration between companies, so say company A just markets CPUs in the US nothing else, while company B works on just shipping logistics (to stores which handle the actual delivery to end customers). I think the real problem is that so many boundaries between disciplines make novel collaboration strategies between the parts much harder. It's difficult for say a marketing person to suggest a change to the box design

So, Intel would be split into ~2400 50-person companies. Coordination of those, through contracts, threats and lawsuits would be nightmare. A basic economic theory ("theory of the firm") says that large companies are created, because they decrease the friction that exists when many small companies (or even just individuals) cooperate to achieve a large and complex thing.

I think I agree it would be worse, though not without advantages. It’s really hard in the normal economy to work out how much a subunit of a company is contributing to the overall success and it can be hard to contain the urge to exaggerate. I think this is why big companies grow inefficiencies and at least with many small companies the individual parts could compete and occasionally fail.

I don't see how those small companies would make money

Some of those businesses arent really viable, meanwhile other are really good

I don't see it working with them not being together, working as teams under one budget, so just as normal company.

Valve would like to disagree with this sentiment ;)

Sure valve isn't making GPUs or CPUs, but they did make the steam deck, in addition to the largest online game store, and several high quality AAA games, and the valve index. They apparently have around 250 people according to a quick Google search, but that still goes against the mindset that you need 10s of thousands of employees to make a successful large scale tech product (whether that's software or hardware).

A 250 person organization assembling semi-off-the-shelf components and gluing mostly-preexisting software together is a very different proposition than 20-50 people building a modern CPU from scratch. That's an order of magnitude more complexity than the steam deck, and an order of magnitude fewer people.

How many people designed the CPUs we use? I read a few days ago that due to deadline pressure, a single man did most of the work on (I believe it was) the 8080. But that's obviously a "trivial" design compared to the monsters we have today.

Right. It means there's a lot of things that don't get created--or companies cooperate in some sort of fairly tightly coupled network that doesn't look that different from one big company. (But probably less efficient if you follow Coase.)

One specific example you agree isn’t even a good comparison does not make a case.

Presumably you would, only what are different departments within a single company now would be separate companies. Probably similar kinds of blessings and curses as microservices.

The once CEO of Sears tried splitting the corporation into thirty to forty companies: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ay... (I recall reading a more entertaining and detailed write-up, but this is what I could find on a quick Google Search)

In short, turns out aligning thirty to forty competing profit motives is hard.

Exactly... just as 50 people can not design, build and test a 747 jumbo jet.

You can work together with other organizations (but that quickly becomes a sliding scale towards megacorparations)

Wouldn’t companies collaborate with shared interest and risk?

For me, it feels like corruption would be more the risk from a cap.

Good point. Maybe companies working together? Like teams in a larger corporation.

> imagine if companies are capped at 20-50 employees. Will it work? I think it will. What do you guys think?

This theory conflicts with Bullshit Jobs' theory (or more likely the truth) where power in an organization is derived from amount of reports someone has therefore companies must endlessly grow, only being limited by the amount of cash they can give their employees compared to the money coming in.

having a boss is not so bad when you're making good money. Short-term pain for long-term gains and financial independence. Yeah, the boss is earning more, but how many opportunities are there in life to make solid 6 figures while someone else takes the risk; all you have to do is show up? Sure beats crypto gambling, shoppify, and shit like that which is marketed as an alternative, which has way more risk and most people make nothing.

I agree. From my experience a team of about 20 individuals treated as roughly equal works best. Their likely need to be some hierarchy, but it should be a high amount of trust. I think this works well to about 25-30 individuals at which point splitting the teams might be considered.

Even in a company of 1000s, how many people are you actually interacting with on a daily basis?

In the PG blog he says:

  A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative.

But even in a "true" small tribe, is there individual initiative? You are still beholden to someone or something. If you're the alpha male you may still worry about feeding the family or protecting them from outside threats.

WhatsApp had 55 employees when Facebook bought them out.

> 8-20 people in a flat structure like our hunter gatherer ancestors use to do

Citation needed. Even wolf packs have alphas, as I understand "hunter gatherer" societies were even less flat, if you disobeyed the leader you had your head chopped off.

The irony is that the whole alpha thing in wolves is itself a myth.

I read a great takedown of the whole "alpha" thing a while back, but can't remember where. Its message was that "alphas" are kind of losers, when all is said and done.

One thing I remember from my degree in cultural anthropology is that there's not much you can generalize about hunter gatherer societies. At least some of them were quite egalitarian.

I looked into the whole Alpha thing when I was training my husky and found it’s actually an outdated model/idea

in a cooperative framework instead of competitive framework, i think this would be the ideal structure.

So, i could guess, the general theory is, having a boss will eventually lead to a failure ?

Instead of capping company headcount, cap team headcount.

Paul does not have a, he has bosses; it’s called economic demand. His privilege evaporates if the mind palace built to empower VCs, b2b SaaS vanishes.

He adjusts to government policy. More bosses.

He’s just trying to sound like he lives on his own world, like the entitled child he is.

Having responsibilities and being affected by the state of the world is not the same as having someone you directly report to.

Hmm you seem to be interpreting “boss” as “any concept that impacts your decisions”, rather than the more specific definition I got out of the article, along the lines of “a person who tells you what to do and takes a large cut of the value you create.”

and yours flourishes? thanks for your feedback, now go sweep the entry-way.

Got laid off in 2017 and never got a real job again. (I have a UX background)

1. I immediately went to Spain to do the Camino de Santiago. Was learning building web apps (Meteor) and launchd a full landing page / swing dance registration site while on the Camino.

2. Learned React and a few other tools after that, tried to be a consultant for a year. Then tried to launch a bunch of projects ("startups" if you wanted to be generous with that term)

3. Met my partner (and now cofounder) at a swing dance, who showed me microbiology and "the potential of phage therapy" because doctors weren't getting access to it

4. I created a random side project connecting docs with phage labs with her (now six years ago). We started connecting docs and labs, and have since taken on 40+ cases, and successfully treated two. Last year we moved to Sydney to essentially run a translational microbiology lab / phage therapy clinical trial — she's the microbiologist and I'm the research software engineer. We're just treating our 4th patient now. I'm building data collection tools for our bioinformaticians, doctors/nurses and microbiology lab, and trying to scale this project up using automation tools and robots. We're creating reports for the TGA to make sure our preps are safe. There's lots of work in areas I've never deal with (data science, stats, building full stack web apps, dealing with OpenTrons, REDCap, and a billion other tools).

It doesn't pay nearly as much as tech, but it's the most absurd thing I could ever do as a "UX designer"

Why do you feel most people do the Camino if not for spiritual reasons? I've heard about constantly in the past couple months of my life and maybe it's just frequency bias but it's odd that I went from never knowing it existed to having met several people who did it and see it mentioned online frequently.

What a coincidence! I've been thinking about taking a sabbatical and walking the the Camino de Santiago. During that time I will likely study for some IT certs to demonstrate new skills in cloud servers & security.

How did you feel about balancing studying skills with socializing & enjoying the journey of the Camino?

Depends what you're hoping to get out of it. If you want to socialise on route or look at is as some kind of spiritual pilgrimage I'd focus 100% on the walk while you're doing it. Seems like a good opportunity to forget about computing / work for a while!

People asking why the Camino, I haven't done it but I have done a number of treks / meditation retreats etc. It sounds fantastic but I think there are many physical journeys like this that could represent a lot of "inner travel".

Are you guys doing the TGA stuff yourselves?

I'm going to finally try to start my own company. Will it be a "startup"? I don't know. But it will be technical and it will go from 0-1 (or from 0-0).

After years of lurking here, watching on the sidelines, working for larger companies, having kids, buying a house, I'm finally going to take the dive. I'm excited, nervous, lost, all at the same time. But I have enough savings and an accommodating spouse, so I don't have to work for a while.

I'm a long-time academic, turned ML-practitioner. I have no major online presence. I don't have a brand. But if anyone is interested in talking, DM me, I have lots of time and am still in the divergent phase of entrepreneurship.

Edit: Added email address to profile. Excuse the confusion, I have been a lurker too long.

There is no way to DM on HN, as far as I am aware. I would be interested in talking - I have some Ml/NLP based ideas and some free time... See my profile info for my website/email

Sorry, been a lurker too long. Added my email address to my profile. Also shot you an email to connect.

i've built nlp apps but lack ideas. maybe we could all talk.

you can reach me at my username@gmail. i just retired 2 months ago from a 25 year engineering stint starting in cyber and ending as a level 5 ML engineer/data plumber. we may be too well aligned though. i have no major expectations but would love a cool project and good folks to work with. money is second to that.

Good luck, the earlier you get into action the better.

DM you how? What's your twitter handle?

Meh guys, it took 5 minutes just out of curiosity: https://github.com/thewopr

Actually, that's not my profile. My username doesn't align on github. My github profile is

github.com/lawinslow

I judged by the timeline and mention of AI project among the stars... :)

As I mentioned, long-time lurker. Added my email address in my profile.

Your employer doesn’t care about you the same way your parents would. Good employers care about enabling you to do your job effectively and efficiently. But it’s all transactional. Doesn’t mean that you can’t find an arrangement that’s good for both you and employer. But don’t ever think it’s like a family. Saves you a lot of frustration. See it for what it is.

It feels easy to think that it's the case that your employer and coworkers are a family.

In my case, I stayed six years in my first job out of college - as did most of my coworkers (the company was pretty stable up until the very end, when I left). I made a lateral shift within the company, and also made it to senior, under their wing.

The illusion started to come apart after a layoff (35% company-wide, 45% in my department, 60% of my team). I started looking for another employer at that point, because it was pretty obvious I'd only been retained to keep the lights on. When I gave my resignation, I wasn't met with any attempt at retention like higher pay. I _was_ told that it'd be personally detrimental for me to leave, because the company was my family (they knew I'd had some unrelated domestic issues that year), and without them, I'd be lost.

And of course, I agreed with them - for one week, after which I shook my head, said "what on earth am I thinking?", and resigned again. It took some time to realize that it was mostly a manipulative attempt on their part.

> It took some time to realize that it was mostly a manipulative attempt on their part.

Then again, there’re people that manipulate their family members. So I get why it’s confusing for some.

This can happen, but Paul "Kinko" Orfalea's book "Copy This!" goes into a lot of detail about how it makes sense to care about employees as people and doing so actually contributes greatly to the bottom line. His company "Kinko's Copies" is not the greatest tech leader ever, but it provided basic services to ordinary people using low paid labor and managed to have employee morale and retention far above other companies in this class, fast food companies being perhaps notable for bad employee morale and turnover so extreme that at times it threatens operations.

This example illustrates the first comment's point: it is fundamentally a transactional relationship. "Caring contributes greatly to the bottom line" means the goal of "caring" is increased productivity.

Not to belabor the point, but if I understand the book correctly Paul did things this way because he believed it was the right thing to do and it was the best fit for him and his personality. Relating this way to employees allowed him to live with himself and humanized the business. So the increased productivity was a happy coincidence of his insistence on positive human interaction being a foundational element of business operations. He never really expected to be successful or anything like the great success which unfolded. The entire business was basically winging it in order to make money because he had trouble following more common paths.

Not laid off but I quit my job 7 months ago to start my own company.

Just the admin of setting up and running the day-to-day has taught me a lot.

But the biggest lesson I learned is that I have the capacity to research and implement technologies new to me in relatively short amounts of time to make meaningful impact.

In addition, my confidence has improved and I am more likely to accept challenging work within my domain than ever before.

What I am doing running a small business is not cool in the context of the OP and the discussion, but it's cool to me in the sense that I did something I once feared and stuck with it.

Thanks for sharing, everyone. Really cool projects. Take care.

I think that's worth a lot. Sometimes I worry that I'm just not fast enough at some of this stuff, but then I pull off something well under pressure and feel better.

Temporarily!

I don’t need my employer to care about me. I have a family and friends for that. At work, it’s a business transaction. I provide them with value and I’m compensated with money. I increase the value I provide and I can demand more.

One doesn't need that, but one certainly wants that. Value is not just what you create directly but also indrectly (such as rising moral in the company, attracting people etc.).

Absurd, most definitely.

I got divorced about a year and a half ago. I’m 32 - for what it’s worth. In June, I left my job and SF. Put all my stuff in storage and went to the east coast for a month then went to Europe for 3 months. After all that, I committed to getting a six month lease on an apartment in Manhattan. Been here since November.

I haven’t worked at all. Maybe done a total of 20 leetcode problems but I spend way more time reading about layoffs and hiring freezes than interview prep. Mostly have spent my time at the gym, Broadway shows, meeting new people, and watching a lot of content online. I go out social dancing 5x/week and to the gym about the same amount. I’m trying to get better at yoga and getting a v-taper at the weights. I’d go out more but it’s hard to find the dances on some nights. (Sunday’s and Monday’s are particularly slow in nyc)

The absurd part is that I’ve done all of this in hopes of meeting a fantastic woman and seducing her to come to SFBA where I can start a family, build a house in the Santa Cruz mountains, and enjoy the region.

It is quite absurd - mainly cause it has no chance in hell of working but it wasn’t going to work in SF either. We’ll see where I end up moving next - too ugly and too much melanin for Manhattan.

New York, and Manhattan specifically, is uniquely difficult as a place to find a woman to settle down with! I'm sure you can do it, but don't be shocked if you find a lot of women are picky or career-focused and uninterested in serious relationships, or just averse to commitment!

Honestly: The biggest issue I find is finding any women who are single to begin with. I do find women here and they do show up (especially compared to SF) but it’s still shit odds cause they’re always in relationships!

It doesn’t help that I’m the Dalit of the professional world. (Working in tech) Here, finance reigns king. Doctors and law are fine. Tech though? (Even if rich) May as well be a janitor.

Status obsessed in this region. They don’t even think about the money.

Tbh - the real issue though is that I’m just an ugly fuck with a hard to place racial makeup. I’m going to get some more cosmetic surgery in May/June because I need to do something to improve my odds if this isn’t working.

No way, don't make any changes to yourself cosmetically. Please observe carefully - confidence and communication skills win out. Even highly attractive men don't succeed well if they don't demonstrate these. And many dates are women testing these things (consciously or unconsciously; either way they'll articulate if someone seems insecure). Manhattan is bru-tal in that department.

Tech is tech, it has a reputation as associated with men who are cold or uninteresting. But I'm increasingly meeting women working in tech. And if any woman is turned on by finance bros, consider it a good avoidance filter!

Source: single 40somethjng with reasonable success with women (not long-term relationships) working as a techie in a financial services company. I've been here two decades now.

I don’t get dates. That’s my point. I’m just too ugly, bub. I’ve already done some cosmetic surgery and do some other stuff to improve texture of the face (microneedling with a professional).

It’s important. We underestimate how much looks matter for men to have success. No one has told me any surgeries or work that I’ve done was a bad idea. They all much prefer the after than the before.

I don’t miss the mark when it comes to this stuff. I’m just ugly and not the right race. It sucks but is what it is. Modern dating.

so you were married but now you are too ugly to get dates? Why did your previous wife marry you?

I had dance moves. It helps with some women. It's a hell of a niche though.

Thanks for the transparent and interesting reply. Best of luck

Not laid off but on an extended sabbatical.

I'm working on a Rust library for SAT solving and other things informed by John Harrison's text on Automated Theorem Proving.

https://github.com/aetilley/harrison-rust

This is largely for me to to learn Rust, but I think it may have the potential to turn into something cool. Next on the todo list is optimizations to DPLL as the existing implementation is currently in its most basic form (I skipped optimizations there for the time being in order to move on to predicate calculus).

Unfortunately, Harrison's book, despite its many other merits, doesn't really treat CDCL (= conflict-driven clause learning), which is really what makes SAT solvers fly.

I'll be happy to circle back to more modern methods once the core parts of the field are addressed. The point of the library is not really to deliver a competitive solver (yet).

Interesting.. What do you think about Survey Propagation?

I'm afraid I was not familiar, although I'm looking at a few related papers on the arxiv now.

What brought that approach to mind?

Survey Propagation is one of the best algorithms for solving very hard SAT instances.

Here's a good review paper that captures it.

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~sabhar/publications/surveyPropUAI...

Survey propagation works primarily with random SAT instances, but isn't competitive with SAT instances that arise in industrial verification, where CDCL shines. Some gossip: survey propagation was proposed by Mezard, Parisi, and Zecchina [1], and G. Parisi won the physics Nobel price in 2021 [2].

[1] M. Mezard, G. Parisi, R. Zecchina, Analytic and Algorithmic Solution of Random Satisfiability Problems. https://aiichironakano.github.io/cs653/Mezard-RSAT-Science02...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Parisi

Thanks

The amount of personal investment I have in an organization is directly tied to my personal upside. If it's my own company (I have run two startups) then I live and breathe it. If it's a Fortune 500 company or the government or whatever, then I give full effort, but I won't grind up my health or personal life. That's possibly justified with an 8 or 9 figure potential exit, but it's definitely not justified for 5 figures worth of stock.

I'm ahead of the curve of this wave, but I've been making a first person Lovecraftian text editor rpg where you type into a mechanical typewriter as a tentacle monster. Exports .txt files, has printer "support".

https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1552977798452609024

I started the autumn after covid reached America.

I have not been laid off, but, as a contractor, I am well-aware that, at any point, I could have no income. I like golf and I've noticed there aren't many good sites on the internet, so I'm trying to build a golf portal. So far, I've implemented a very basic golf odds aggregation service -- https://www.golfodds.io/ if anyone wants to check it out. I plan to work on it in my spare time and build it up. Also open to any cool ideas, if you want to share -- feel free to email me from the site.

I love simple bootstrap sites. If you want to monetize it make all of the sportsbook names into affiliate links. Some books are offering really good terms (20-30% revshare + fixed amount per signup). See https://www.bestfightodds.com/ if you want a site that does this for MMA rather nicely - they were acquired by a subsidiary of Catena Media last year, they have an extensive portfolio of sites like this. If you eventually add historical data people will scrape your site and try to clone it so that may be a problem. Another idea: I don't really know anything about golf but scraping sites like https://www.pgatour.com/players/player.46970.jon-rahm.html and making player pages or tooltips that show up when you hover over a player name that might be useful. If you can make a site that bettors regularly go to you can make a lot of money.

> I love simple bootstrap sites.

Thanks! I picked the simplest thing that I know that could work.

That's really great insight, actually. I definitely thought about adding the affiliate links, however I am somewhat unsure about the legality of promoting sportsbooks within the US. I think there are certain licensing requirements. I may look into it in more detail in the future, if the site picks up in traffic and search rankings.

> See https://www.bestfightodds.com/ if you want a site that does this for MMA rather nicely

This is super on-point. BFO was my inspiration for doing this and I know Catena and other affiliates typically have an interest in successful sports sites, so that thought, as a potential eventual exit strategy, crossed my mind.

> If you eventually add historical data people will scrape your site and try to clone it so that may be a problem.

I do have historical data in the backend, but I haven't done anything with it yet. Great point about the scrapers. I don't have a solution for that yet, although I am aware CloudFlare offers certain tools.

Player pages are a great idea, although I need to think what data will be useful and, preferably, won't require a lot of manual upkeep.

I worked for several years as an independent contractor; when my last big project ended several months ago, I decided to take a sabbatical for the climate. So far that has meant spending more time with my kids, learning to compost, building some new raised garden beds, mending some clothes that I previously would've replaced, reading more books, and various other little things. I plan to start volunteering soon with the local tool library, and there are tons of other things we'd like to do to reduce our budget and carbon footprint, when we can get to them.

I know not everyone can afford to "just take time off" but among those laid off from a tech company and browsing HN, surely some fraction of you could afford to do the same. You will still have a career to come back to if you spend a year turning your attention and energy to the climate crisis. BUT if you're under 40 or so (I'm 37), you may find that there is not a recognizable planet to come back to if you continue to focus on your career until the retirement age we were brought up to expect.

Sounds sublime... connecting with nature, your family and your local community.

We don't really need much to have a good life.

Just wonder whether we'll be able to escape our current destructive economic and value system and move towards a more circular economic system[0] on time to keep global warming increase under 2C.

But for that our value system needs to change first... getting away from the 'more more more' value system and focusing more on what you wrote about. Would be great for example if we had a richer reuse and repair economy.

[0] Waste equals food https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/waste-food/

On a more personal note, how much money did you save to feel comfortable doing this?

When my wife and i decided to try this, we figured we had runway to live without dramatic changes to our standard of living for 3-4 years. The initial period we agreed on for the sabbatical was 6 months and we've extended that to 1 year. Of course, we are intentionally changing our budget and standard of living along the way. Most likely I will not go four years without working, but I may spend some time exploring other work options before I hang my shingle out for software projects again.

Gotcha. I’m 27 and have quite a bit of cash/investments and also interested in taking a sabbatical to study my own stuff for a bit without the distraction of work. Good to get ideas of what other people consider comfortable to do.

Constantly battling with issues of self worth and suicidal thoughts since I've got laid off so that's about it. Being a migrant, who is laid off, who is/was a sole bread winner does the trick I guess.

I feel for you. I've battled self worth feelings through out my career as a lot of my identity was tied up in my work and the fear of failure.

I've since found a new perspective that's helped me transform my identity and self-esteem through therapy and journaling about my experience/thoughts. I still have negative thoughts, but I see them as independent things to observe and not part of my core self.

This is your story to write and other people's opinions are just that their opinions which is "none of your business". The layoff is not a reflection of you. You are worth it and things will get better.

Thank you. You are right - it is just a relatively darker time, so to speak. Going to therapy for a while now - to solve for a ton of trauma, as I don't want to pass it on to my potential future kids so to speak, so it helps.

Please don't hesitate to reach out to people and organizations who can help with these thoughts.

Thank you - I am already in touch with a therapist so no need to worry. Just being open about the struggle, is all.

I’m taking some time to study classical guitar with a private teacher at ~conservatory level. Feels like my form of “quitting tech to work on a farm”.

I’ll also work on my own personal projects and see if any of them can gain enough momentum as a lifestyle business to avoid returning to soul-sucking BigTech.

We need to get rid of the bullshit about companies trying to connect with employees. As the company grows, it does not benefit the employee at all, but the bosses still wait for more effort. The biggest problem of modern man is being pushed into such stupid sentiments.

Growing companies have short memories! You can build teams, processes and culture, and as the company multiplies it's staffing levels, new bosses take hold, and all the rest of it, the loudest salesmen come out of the woodwork to push their personal brands. It doesn't help if they come to the table with workaholism as a trait they're branding themselves with.

My last day is scheduled for around March 31 (I have vacation I can use between then and now). I'm currently thinking about what I want to do with my time off. I will have the luxury of being able to do NOTHING, if I so choose, for a while. I live in Japan, so I will first have paperwork to do (switch visa status, get health insurance squared away, etc)

For the cool stuff, I'm thinking of picking a project/skill each week and devoting a full week to that, to see if I enjoy it and can get any mental traction. Becoming more proficient with pure C has been a lot of fun, so I'll definitely push forward on that. I have a couple of Pico-8 projects to work on. There's any number of opaque or classical technologies that I'd like to understand more deeply. I'll enter a game-jam, just to keep myself on a proper schedule with a proper deadline. There are a lot of books I want to read.

At some point though I'll need to collect my thoughts and start looking for the next thing. I have recruiters already knocking on my door, and the company will pay for 6 months of job agency assistance. But to tell the truth, I just can't see myself jumping back into software engineering as a full-time career so I don't yet know how best to utilize these resources. Sorting myself out is a critical goal for the coming months.

"What do I want to be when I grow up?" is almost as difficult to answer at 51 as it was at 18.

I learnt unity and then added a websocket server to the game, build a virtual lab, and then wrote a simple JSON api so I could create geometry, materials and lighting to the scene.

Then I modified my quantum chemistry simulation platform (https://atomictessellator.com) so that it would use this Python/websocket interface to a running 3D engine to visualise the molecular simulations

Why? It’s fun and I wanted to see if it would work.

Has anyone tried consulting as a DevOps or SRE?

The grind and the firefighting is forever and endless, and the new services you have to learn, the dev and product demands that are poorly planned, make one want to quit, and consult on specific projects. CI CD pipelines, and general purpose SRE project consulting.

I'm thinking about quitting in a high cost of living place and living off of savings will I search for gigs and build a network.

Is that absurd?

I've been working on a web framework in Ruby. It's inspired by all the JS frameworks, but uses Haml instead of JSX and all code is executed on the server, and patches are streamed to the browser.

I'm about to run out of money so I'm planning to move to the Amazon rainforest where money will last longer...

Sounds like Rails in 2008. Long live server side rendering.

You can tell I haven’t done a lot of web dev since 2014 or so. :)

Yeah, well, although it's a server side VDOM, so it's more like React/Preact, but 100% server side.

It's quite different from Rails. There are no models, no views, no controllers. There are components and there is a directory called app/pages where all components named page.haml will get their own route (kinda like the path based routing in Next.js).

Ruby+Haml removes a lot of unnecessary syntax so components become much shorter than their JS equivalents. It feels really nice to use actually.

Since the server knows which components are in use on a page, it will only include CSS for those components, which makes loading pretty fast. Then whenever a user clicks on a link they will receive the styles for the components that appear there.

There is no need to write JavaScript, nor is it possible. It would be interesting to support custom elements (web components) but I haven't found a use case yet. I suppose it will come up some day, for things that need to be aware of browser state like scroll position in very long lists.

It's really easy to make interactive components, just like React. I'm running the website on Fly.io and I barely notice the latency (I got about 60-120ms and my nearest edge node is in a different continent).

I feel like I'm up to something good, though I'm gonna need to attract some users and contributors to make it usable. There are a few bugs and lots of improvements to be made... But it works!

Uh, where? Manaos?

Santa María de Ojeal, a small village about 1.5 hours down the river from Iquitos :) I got friends and family there.

I’m getting back into my synesthesia art project: https://testfixture.presteign.com/

(Running on Grav with Turbolinks; visuals made in Affinity Designer; audio made in Reason)

Haven’t been laid off but I see it coming in the next few months. I do DBA/performance tuning on MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server (and recently Cockroach). Being remote in Australia makes it hard to get another job so I’m thinking to learn a trade and exit tech as a career.

Recently I got into using mono.Cecil to rewrite c# assemblies (specifically assemblies created by IKVM). I haven’t had a personal project in years but this has definitely reignited a spark, so I’m going to try for a remote software engineering job first.

Love this question! My husband was laid off recently and it feels like his free time instead has been accosted by our young children and house renovation:/

Related note, I came across this newsletter which goes into more detail about our “work” identity and how your employer doesn’t (to your point!) “care about you”

(https://wokescientist.substack.com/p/work-life-balance-is-a-...)

Why the :/ ? Spending time with young children and renovating a house sounds like a smart choice. The time with children you will never be able to make up for later. Renovating a house is full of interesting challenges and rewards that are all to yourself.

Chores, house projects and childcare are all productive work. As seen here, no outsiders will ever gainsay you for doing them. Pretty much the only person to criticise that approach will be a spouse.

Romantic partners usually wish for more time to spend together, deepening the relationship or just hanging out.

This isn't productive per se, but it's natural that your life partner would like to actually live a life with you and not see you checking off tasks at home.

“Instead” of what?

Is his true calling house renovations and childcare? If not, then it’s probably a choice that is being made for him. Personally, I love my babies and I consider it worth my time for basic care and teaching them things, but only as much as it benefits them. For the house renovations and all other labor that goes into partner-driven life, I would be much happier living in a mud hut with a candle and a math book, but I’ll never whisper a word about it. Its easy to become someone’s unlimited source of free labor, and they’ll always think they’re doing you a favor.

> then it’s probably a choice that is being made for him

It's pretty poor behaviour to make massive assumptions about and be judgmental of someone else's marriage

I would recommend that we rents a desk in a coworking space. Get out of the house every day, cause there's always more to do at home.

Never depend on an employer for balance-sheet or income-sheet security.

It can only be had through ownership. Ownership is harder and riskier.

Worker-owned co-ops are the way to go, not megacorps.

Startups are special kinds of fast growth businesses that are rare and rarely successful. They exist, but there aren't many. There is a lot of money thrown at startups because the upside is potentially very lucrative, e.g., IRR positive.

I haven't been laid off, but due to the economy I've been trying to come up with something I can do to become self-reliant. I've built a forum platform, and I've been buying up ___forum.com domains and pointing them at it. So far it has been costing me lots of money, and no users are showing up, but it's my vision and I'm not going to give up so easily.

The hard lesson with forums is they're not about the software, or a domain, but the people who can be reached there. Communities will endure the worst software, and also collapse as soon as key people leave.

I think that's very true. However many forums die due to the owner not being able to pay the bills or stop spam. Xenforo + anti-spam addons ain't cheap, google ads won't take just anyone and the payout is very low. Or they just get bored with running a final fantasy fansite. This is where reddit becomes more appealing because if someone deletes a subreddit you don't have to find an entirely new site to join, someone will just recreate it. Of course Reddit is busy trying to make it's VC owners back all of their billions, so its vision has become heavily compromised.

Yes. I'm making a YAML to SQL converter here: https://yaml2sql.netlify.app. It's mostly for fun, useless for most of use cases.

Have a look at schema hero for inspiration. https://schemahero.io/

Thanks. I also love to extend the project to support ALL kinds of SQL.

I like. I had to do something similar a while back as part of an ETL pipeline.

I'm proud to say I am taking some time to work on cool stuff! It's definitely in the "I should start coding and stop brainstorming" phase, but I've been enjoying all the theorycrafting.

I'm creating a web-first colony simulation game. I'm inspired by SimAnt, RimWorld, idleRPG, and Tamagotchi. My goal is to establish a strong, daily, mental health hygiene routine which promotes box breathing, gratitude journaling, and improved awareness of my health, fatigue, and motivation.

The game unfolds on an alien world covered in a thick sea of fog and asteroid impact craters. Huge fog waves roam the planet, splash against the crater walls, and continually intrude with frigid moisture. A damaged terraforming satellite orbits the planet and directs its limited energy towards one crater which keeps that crater habitable. There are three entities in the story: an AI powering the terraforming satellite, the consciousness of a biologist uploaded into the satellite's computer, and a fledgling ant colony within the barely habitable crater. The player fills the role of the protagonist, the biologist, and the hostile weather plays the role of the antagonist. The goal is to terraform the planet without throwing it out of balance.

The ant colony simulation runs on ~autopilot similar to idleRPG but with slowly unfolding visuals like 1x speed RimWorld. It's a real-time simulation which "runs" even when the tab is closed, but is only able to be controlled when the satellite orbits overhead and has line-of-sight with the crater. The queen hatches workers, workers expand the nest, navigate the fog, and search for food. The ants lay pheromone trails to food, but every night the fog rolls in and wipes clean the pheromones. Each day the ants begin searching for food once more. The colony grows optimally given available information, but is not omniscient or even opinionated. The colony will never push itself out of the local maximum of a single crater and struggles with attention due to the fog. Surprisingly, during initial nest expansion, the ants discover a rectifying crystal which allows them to sense electromagnetic waves emitted by the satellite. They develop a ritual around attempting to interpret these electrical impulses which provides a very rough form of of one-way communication from the satellite to the ants. The biologist leverages this communicational channel to assist the colony by providing high-level environmental awareness and opinionated responses.

Each day, the player is asked to show up and check-in at a consistent time. The player wants to be able to nurture their colony, but they need to unlock the ability to do so. They begin by engaging with a guided, box-breathing routine while "awakening" the consciousness of the biologist. It's effortful for the biologist to take autonomy from the terraforming AI in the same way waking up is effortful and so the player is guided through that process. Then, the player is greeted with a technophilic UI which provides in-depth stats and charts of their colony and the planet. Based on current and projected resources, the user makes a decision to encourage the colony to push harder or to ease up. This influences whether the colony will push out of a local maximum, but comes at the cost of damaging the health of the ants. The player needs to balance pushing the colony to expand into additional land with tapering their exertion to avoid long-term negative effects. Finally, the player is given an opportunity to self-reflect and journal on the goals and progress of the ants. Gratitude journaling provides a means of keeping attention on high-value food resources such that the ants don't lose track entirely due to the fog. Non-gratitude journaling (i.e. venting, daily reflections) provide a source of entropy for the weather system of the world.

Outside of check-in time, the player is only able to watch their high-level decisions slowly play out over the course of the day. The interface is calming and provides an opportunity for brief respite similar to taking a moment to observe an aquarium.

Overall, I am building software to help me be more consistent and diligent in my personal growth and mental health hygiene. Sometimes when I get depressed I stop caring for myself, but I'm always good about showing up for others. I want to leverage that to promote self-care. Conversely, when I'm firing on all-cylinders, I tend to think my motivation and determination are limitless. I take on significant personal growth goals only to eventually reach a mental breaking point because I never identify a good time to push less hard until forced. So, I would benefit from a visual indication of where I am at on a motivation/determination boom/bust cycle so that I don't find myself surprised by burnout.

I've never really responded well to software that implies I have problems which need fixing. Instead, I do much better when someone tells me a story, I contrast that story to my own, and I succeed in identifying personal growth areas through the reflection. Instead of creating "yet another mental health / journaling app" I am interested in telling a compelling, sci-fi story where the protagonist struggles to succeed in their goals due to a failure to acknowledge their humanity. I believe telling this story, while providing tools to participate and a pet to stay attached, is likely to instill long-term changes in those who engage.

This is awesome and heavily resonates with me. Specifically this line:

> Sometimes when I get depressed I stop caring for myself, but I'm always good about showing up for others.

What stage of the project are you on? How can I track or contribute? I would love to see this come to fruition.

Coming from someone whom loves their career(engineering not tech) - I am learning web dev for fun on the side. Got some cool ideas for websites and low effort income streams.

Without revealing details of your ideas, how did you go about getting the ideas in the first place? Were you bumping into problems and encouraged to solve them in a more structured way? Did you have conversations or read some stuff that inspired you to create something? Did you work on a project purely for fun that led to being a potential business?

Seriously asking as someone who is grateful to have a wealth of resources at their disposal, but suffers from a complete lack of imagination in the idea department—that is any idea that would motivate me to the point of starting up a startup.

I’m working on math videos :) https://youtube.com/@logicaltoroid

I'm thinking of building a plane.

Also a couple of applications.

And finally learning to play an instrument.

Meanwhile I'm looking forward to my $440 a week in unemployment!

Kinda. I started a gap year, thinking I'll finalize my Skyrim mod while traveling round the world. Coworkers bade me farewell and wished good luck on my next adventure. Two weeks in, Elon Musk took over Twitter

So now I'm also settling thoughts on my next lifestyle business kind of project, something I kept in mind, though with those AI improvements these days it might get a new flavor

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