Haul4ss

99 percent invisible did a whole episode about this! https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/658-the-em-dash/

Didn't he used to say "concretely" all the time as well?

That was such a cool course. It seems ancient now, but I remember enjoying it at the time.

This is a very rich-world view of work. Most people can't just "unilaterally rescind" their employment if they decide they don't like it anymore.

I don't disagree with what you're getting at, just understand that loyalty is a necessity to a lot of folks, and I don't think it is because their values are misplaced.

I've seen this software used on a couple different video lesson platforms (I am currently subscribed to Open Studio). It works really well. Occasional browser funniness, but otherwise a really solid tool for learning music. Great work!

> Getting a different job in a startup or an agency sounds like the last thing I want right now. From what I’ve heard big tech is not all that much different, and a non-tech programming job sounds like it’d be boring/horrible in a different way.

Here's the thing. Every job is a job. Even "doing what you love" comes with days when you really don't feel like doing it. There is no perfect job that will contain all the things you like about work and none of the things you don't like about work.

Furthermore, you will never ever get the first years of your kid(s) life back. You should be present for those years. Being burnt out and hating your job does not leave you the mental bandwidth to be present.

Taking a less glamorous job to make space in your life for other pursuits is not bad. Even if it's just for little while to reset. And have some perspective: you can enjoy some aspects of a job without enjoying all aspects. Pick what is most important for you and optimize for that. And the most important aspect is not fixed; it will change depending on your season in life.

I don't think I've ever been actually burnt out, but I have experienced the gamut of job satisfaction. You break out of it through self-reflection and understanding what you actually like and dislike about a job, and what really matters to you in life and how to build around that.

We used to have unlimited PTO, and even in my interview I chided them that it's obviously not "unlimited".

For a small, organically growing firm like my employer, unlimited PTO is just shorthand for "we don't have the back office staff to track this, so just don't abuse it". Yes, totally subjective, but the point is when you're scrappy you don't have time to make Policy all the livelong day.

As we've grown and evolved we ditched the messaging of unlimited PTO because of the negative connotation it has that everyone here has rightfully pointed out. "Does unlimited mean none?" is a verbatim question I've fielded in an interview.

Anyway, I explain OP's question as what I call the career trifecta:

1. You are working on things that have meaning to you

2. You enjoy working with the people around you

3. The pay and benefits give you space to pursue life's other interests

Most people in the world don't get one of those, much less all three. I have all three and now I'm a spoiled brat and don't want to give up one of them to get more of the other (i.e., more salary doesn't make life better if you lose one of the other pillars).

> a rational person will blame the repairer, not Apple

Assumes facts not in evidence. My experience has been people tend to blame the platform supplier first and foremost.

1990s OEM computer maker loads a bunch of crapware on your PC? You're likely to blame Microsoft Windows.

SimCity doesn't run on Windows 95 because of a bug in SimCity? You're likely to blame Windows 95. Microsoft at least understood that dynamic.

iPhone acting weird? Apple's fault, obviously, no questions asked. It's the default position of consumers.

I agree with your assertion that this is a knock on the Apple brand for a certain subset of their audience. I don't think it matters to the lay user as much as it does to the power user.

Rather than looking at titles, I would focus on what you want to do.

"Software dev" encompasses a wide variety of work. As a simplified example, if you were a senior frontend JS dev who wanted to get into writing kernel modules, you might have to take a job title and/or pay cut since you're less senior in that niche than your current one. But if you really want to be a kernel dev, it might be worthwhile.

So, what do you want to do? What kind of dev do you want to be? Will the new gig get you closer to that, regardless of title? Thinking beyond just tech stack to how you want this arc of your career to progress, will new job be better?

Also look at non-tech stack things. Do you like your team? Do you like your industry? Has your boss treated you well? Do you have equity opportunities at current or new gig? Which stack/niche has a higher ceiling of potential opportunity?

My coworker and I used to run this on our work PCs (which were generally left on 24/7 and rarely rebooted).

It was a delightfully simple "game" and we enjoyed comparing stats.

That coworker has since passed away, and I think of this game every now and then as I reflect on our friendship.

I don't know why it's on Hacker News's front page today, but it brought a smile to my face.

I was afraid my reference was too old, and people would just downvote not understanding what the heck I was on about.

Did you tell them you could build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem?

You can't, so don't bother thinking about it.

You can make changes today that will pay dividends in 10 years, so maybe focus on that instead.

I was widowed pretty young (as widowers go), so I have done my share of playing the what-if game with the past. Ultimately it is not a productive exercise, and I try not to do it. If I catch myself dwelling in unlived lives, I try to refocus on the one still in front of me.

> Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have

You may be surprised to learn how false and limiting this belief is. Turns out most of those people are also just winging it, so if you wing it too, hey, you may actually reach a better outcome.

Lots of great sentiments in that article.

You don't have to love every day of a job to love the job. You can love the organization even as you need to let it go (or it needs to let you go).

He's proud of the arc of his career and understands that sometimes a good thing needs to come to an end for a new good thing to begin.

Endings are bittersweet. You can focus on the bitter, or you can focus on the sweet. He seems to be doing the latter.

My kids will be in 9th and 7th grade. My school district is starting 100% distance learning. I did opt for hybrid when it's available.

I'm setting up study areas in the house for the kids that are away from each other and me. I'm going to get comfortable headphones for their school-issued Chromebooks.

The plan is instructional blocks that include webinars, basically, along with some study time with the teacher available online. They can come up to my office if they have questions as well.

I built out my home office to mirror my work office this past spring, so I'm pretty well setup to be a remote employee and hopefully the quiet spaces I setup for the kids will be good for their remote learning.

This is a good question to ask regardless of your career. It's a combination of factors: specialization narrowing the range of possible jobs, experience tending to command a higher salary, and flat-out age discrimination.

You will likely have peak earning years, and that means earnings will decline post-peak. For most people this is true, not everybody.

If you know this is a likely pattern, you can do something about it. Namely, live below your means, invest, bank raises, keep a lid on lifestyle inflation, and accept that some day you will take a job that pays less than your previous job and that this change should not be ruinous.

Stay private. I don't think publicly traded companies can be values-driven, but if you maintain control over the ownership of the company, you can. Here I'm thinking of something like Wegman's grocery stores.

If Wegman's went public and had to meet the demands of Wall Street investors, I think they would lose what makes them special.

I can't think of an example of a large, closely held firm in tech.

I'm sure someone trying to survive on $10/hr in America today would be heartened to learn it's better than living in the Middle Ages.

I slogged through it. I appreciate the sentiments expressed in the book, but it was not a breezy read. I found it to be dry and long-winded.

The chip is nearly 100% reliable (absent any manufacturing defects). It's the network in the U.S. that is stuck in the 1970s. Even with the supposed requirement to move to chip terminals, I still come across so many merchants who either (1) don't even have a chip reader, or (2) have a little sticky note on the payment terminal that says "chip broken".

What's really surprising is when a new store opens (restaurant, typically), and they don't have a chip reader on day one. They still swipe.

I've had my card skimmed more times than I can count over the decades. That we're still dealing with this problem in 2019 is maddening.

And Garmin is welcome to create an API to host your data and integrate with other services. Uploaded Garmin data isn't originated by Strava, but since they're hosting it they are setting the terms.

I am a former Strava user, emphasis on former. If they enforce terms of service that are unfriendly to their users, those users are free to leave. The lock-in is just not that strong.

> But the problem is those workout files are actually your data.

I'm a long-time fan of DC Rainmaker, but here he is just wrong. Once you put that data into Strava, it's not yours anymore.

This is the fundamental conflict with all of these services: your data doesn't belong to you, it belongs to them.

You can argue all day that it shouldn't be that way, but Strava pays to host the data, to store it in perpetuity, to (theoretically) keep it secure, and to enable API integrations that cost bandwidth. And you don't pay for it. Not with cash money anyway. You pay by surrendering your right to use your data as you see fit.

Edit for my downvoters: I agree that this state of affairs is messed up. I'm just noting the reality of how these services operate.

Amazon is so much more than a "web shop"... its logistics infrastructure alone is worth actual money, to say nothing of AWS, Prime lock-in, etc.

I enjoyed Joey Hess's interview on there.

https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/

An interesting juxtaposition of working on technology in a decidedly austere living arrangement.

I'm convinced that almost nobody is good at the whole cycle of creating/maintaining something.

Some people are great at coming up with new ideas but quickly bore with the implementation. Some people can relentlessly improve on an existing thing but can't come up with the initial idea. Some people are great stewards of an established program but don't thrive in the chaos of rapid iteration.

I think instead of trying to mold yourself into something you're not naturally good at, you should try to figure out what you are naturally good at and build a team around it to support you.

I'm speaking in broad strokes of course, but reading your post, I think you are just not going to be a sole proprietor. You need a team member who can catch your early enthusiasm and then help see the project through to completion.

You need a finisher. Not every starter is a finisher, and not every finisher is a starter, and not every finisher is a good maintainer, either. They're different things.

A big part of this is just how you see the world, and perhaps how well you understand yourself. Not sure which term to use: attitude, personality, outlook, frame of mind, perspective, etc.

I have definitely had times in my career when I dreaded going to work. Like I could feel an actual physical weight on my shoulders as I drove up to the office.

In my current season in life, I can see a lot more what is good and what is bad, what I'm willing to put up with and what I'm not, what I'm good at and what I'm not, what is actually a big deal versus what is just a big deal in my mind, and so on.

That perspective will keep me more happy in any job, even ones that other people may dislike. But it also draws me to work that I know will keep me happy because I understand what contentment is in a way I didn't understand 15-20 years ago.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, would I stay in my current job? Probably not. But that doesn't mean I'm unhappy in the job -- as ways to earn money go, this one is pretty nice. But it was a circuitous path to get here, and I think the biggest lie we can perpetrate on young folks is that there is a single passion they should pursue to find their calling. Almost no one gets it right on their first try.

Depends. On weekdays 6-7, I try to eke out 8 on weekends. To be honest, some days I just nap on the couch for 20 mins before I have to make dinner.

Midlife single parent, so my answers are going to look a lot different than the average HN reader.

I average 40/week. Some weeks I need to surge, rarely I need to work weekends, but my ability to put in long hours is capped by my home situation (and my desire not to be a workaholic).

I wake my kids and get them ready for school each day. Sometimes they need homework help. We eat dinner together every night, and of course I have them all the time so we get to spend time together regardless of whether we want to. :)

I do strength training at the gym 2x/week, before the kids wake up. I run 3x/week, again before they get up.

I am as productive as I am required to be, but often no more productive. Meaning that the demands of life force productivity on me but I don't go crazy with the extracurricular activities.

I do spend time each day thinking about what my most important tasks are, just to make sure I'm making the best use of my time. I don't let other people take over my calendar, but I work for a small company so we're not meeting-heavy anyway.

All things considered, I am doing fine. I am fortunate to have understanding coworkers, good friends, and two really wonderful children.

You're probably still trying to do too much.

Another user recommended The One Thing, and I'll second that. You have to always be prioritizing. Figure out what you really, REALLY want to do, and you will make time for it.

I definitely suffer from the "everything looks cool and fun" syndrome. There are a thousand things I want to learn and only enough time to learn maybe three of them.

You can do anything, but you can't do everything. So how do you decide what to do?

I also use a Full Focus Planner and the corresponding method that goes with it, to distill annual goals into quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily habits. FFP is definitely not for everybody, but when I commit to using it I do find I get a lot more done. Then I invariably fall off the wagon.

We're all a work in progress.

Since I was an intern in college, I have seen older technical folks become harder and harder to employ. I've had good friends lose their job and because they're older/more expensive, they get rejected with all sorts of creative excuses.

Well, guess what? Now I'm older and I'm more expensive. Thankfully I saw it coming, and I have been saving diligently along the way. I'm not rich, but my lifestyle costs are not insane and I can continue to save from now until the gravy train pulls into station.

At that point, god willing and the creek don't rise, I can afford to work part-time, or take a big pay cut, or switch to consulting gigs.