I currently work on a ~10+ year old project that has maybe half of this list, and if you _don't_ start this way, the toothpaste is near impossible to put back in the tube, and you're in for a world of hurt. If the early engineers don't work this way and the system makes its' way into production, then functional software + income is very difficult to override in the name of cleaning up messes.
As a fellow divorcee (minus 3 cats I miss dearly as well), it took me a while to realize that what I was feeling _was_ grief, and still is. I am now happily remarried to a woman who is certainly better for me, but even though it was ~5 years ago, I still feel pain and sadness from my divorce. It will never fully go away, it just becomes a scar that you're reminded of from time to time.
Chrome at home, Edge at work. I should probably think more about it, but I really don't. I use 1Password for everything and the only feature I lean on in any browser is bookmarks.
Writing code is by far the easiest part of the job; working out what to write is probably 95% of what you end up doing. Tying libraries together isn't interesting from a code-level perspective anyway, so try to enjoy the process of getting there.
The easy interview process has always bothered me. It hasn't entirely burned me yet, but I always feel uneasy if I don't feel challenged during an interview. Maybe it's some weird form of Stockholm Syndrome or something compared to the usual complete disrespect of resumes in our field.
The main culprits are explicitly blocked on our VPN. When I WFH I use it on my personal machine for bash/regex/whatever stuff I don't keep in my brain for very long, never anything interesting.
Working on finishing his CS degree and going into a PhD program after picking himself up out of addiction. He's astoundingly brilliant but has always struggled with...just about everything else that doesn't involve a computer. But definitely the most talented mind I've ever been around.
I _really_ don't want to and have been dragging my feet, but I think I'll finally research AI-based development tools. If they truly are sticking around, I'd rather not be a luddite, but I'm still not so sure.
This is where I've landed. If my job as a senior engineer is truly automatable, then there isn't much I can do about it other than pull up a lawnchair.
Anything but blind applications. I know that's not useful information for a lot of people, but if you have experience, you _really_ need to lean on ex-coworkers that you had a good relationship with. Any way to not be a random resume is going to exponentially help your chances.
Additionally, depending on how desperate your search is, you need to be honest with yourself about remote work being a requirement. Ideally you shouldn't budge on it, but the reality is that capital owners have the leverage now vs a few years ago, and you have to play the game. But I would only budge on this if you absolutely need a job asap.
I've wavered on whether being a generalist/"full stack" person is good or not 10+ years into my career, but I think at this point I'm convinced 90%+ of work is just tying libraries together across presentation boundaries, and you should be able to solve problems end-to-end. It's not that hard, I (and the vast majority of people I imagine) aren't working on anything particularly complicated; drawing domain boundaries seems silly.
Graduated with a CS degree in 2012, worked at various small companies until I got referred to Google. Worked there for ~5 years, got promoted, and turned that into a pay raise in a field I actually care about. I also live in a HCOL in the US, which is sneakily the reason why I probably make what I do. If you are new to the industry, I have no idea; it looks like a warzone out there for junior recs. Work life balance is fine; I refuse to break 45 hours. I'd rather get fired.
I used to (mid-2000s to 2020, basically) live on message boards and listen to sports radio every day; I basically lived and breathed college football. Nowadays it's pretty much just a curated list of sports writers I like on a sports-only twitter account followed by watching most of my teams' games + a handful of interesting games going on that day using YouTube TV. There's something about the pervasive, constant nature of content these days that seems to have taken a lot of the fun out of it for me.
Same, I left in 2014. I left after a couple of years to almost double my pay and not work on a Linux RT USB driver directly out of college for which I had no desire to be a SME, but in hindsight I think the coworkers I had there were smarter than anywhere else I've worked since (including Google). They paid absolutely nothing but seemed to have good culture, at least where I was at the time.
“talk a lot and saying little” is a horrible place to start. Acting like you're superior to people who don't speak like a computer is not a good way to endear yourself to neurotypical people.
I recently left Google and knew it was going to be a step down from Google's build ecosystem, but I wasn't prepared for how far a step down it would be. It's the only thing I miss about the place, it' so awesome.
I spent almost the entire first decade of my career being uncomfortable at how...unenthused? I was to solve business problems. I now have landed on this; technical aspects of a problem aren't enough for me to give a shit about what I do at work. It's a means to an end. My current role has interesting technical problems but the product means nothing to me, I think I'm going to take a hefty paycut for my next role if only to just have some sort of emotional investment in my work.
I've grown to appreciate legacy code more than greenfield. It's real code that makes money (hopefully) and solves problems. Code is bad? Well, it's probably for good reason as real-world problems are messy. Also a lot less analysis by paralysis.
I just started a month-long leave from work for...exactly this reason, to the same year. Grinding it out for over a decade without stopping for even a full week of vacation catches up to you eventually.
100% this. It has all the symptoms of an old boy's club, combined with smugness of socially inept nerds. It would have cost the maintainer basically nothing to handle this better, but the natural inclination of these types of people in their fiefdoms would never allow it.
My laptop died recently, and I went with an M2 MBP. I went in expecting to pay it in full, but with no interest/fees, why wouldn't I choose this? It beats inflation, even if only minimally.
Seems predatory towards people who are buying stuff they can't afford, otherwise I don't see how they make money (minus the overpriced laptop I just bought, I guess).
As a Googler: Not just the past 2 weeks, pretty much every Google-related article on HN is a dogpile. And that's fine, I even agree with like 95% of this article (minus the negative characterization of the No Heroes mantra, that exists for good reasons). Just important to note the general (understandable) anti-FAANG bias on HN.
They were weird the first couple of weeks, but now it's back to how it was. I had spent the last ~4 months or so going through the acceptance phase of being laid off, and now that I haven't, I sort of wish I was? I could have used the time off.
I grew up in a small town just north of Austin, and lived in town after college for a few years. If you aren't a big foodie or into live music, there's really not much reason to live there. Horrible traffic, surface-of-the-sun hot, wildly overpriced, geographically uninteresting, etc.
People are generally very friendly and it's a blue city in a deeply red state, which I personally appreciate, but I'd live in inner-loop Houston before moving back to Austin, and in turn I'd live in just about any other coastal state before moving back to Texas.