faanghacker

Thanks for providing the direct citation, which is more specific than just "Annals of St Bertin."

> I don't think these two events, the Danes raid and the rebellion crush are linked outside of one making the author remind itself about the second.

Sound's like the parent comment's description oversimplified things. I knew it sounded off.

Do you have a source for this? This sounds like a fishy story to me based on my understanding of medieval society:

1. Peasants are often called up for military duty as levies (conscripts), to supplement the knights and men-at-arms. Especially when there wasn't a standing army.

2. Authority wasn't so centralized -- these local matters would be the authority of local lords, not the king.

I'm just stashing cash until I reach FIRE. Don't care about the mission.

I obviously didn't flat out ask others if they had tried it. I either mentioned that I had tried it or played dumb and asked if they knew anything about e.g. microdosing, as if I had only heard of it.

Anecdotally...

1) Friend from college working in machine learning space who just moved back to SV from Asia, saying that the tech culture in Asia suffered from a lack of creativity. In the same conversation I brought up having used psilocybin and he freaked out, thinking it was going to damage my brain.

2) Another friend from college who's a hardware engineer. who found it strange that I didn't want to drink whiskey with him but regularly use psilocybin. He also warned me about brain damage.

3) Friend from work whom I knew socially. After he quit working, I chatted with him and suggested that if he wanted to try psychedelics now would be a good time, before he decides whether to go back to working. He seemed to be surprised, and just made a comment about Steve Jobs to cover up the awkwardness.

4) Another coworker I worked closely with and had a good opinion of me because of the work that I had done, who had gone to another company. I asked him if he knew anything about microdosing while having lunch and he said not to try that stuff because it would mess up my head.

5) The Burning Man guy was someone I'd worked with before. He told me about his recent BM psychedelic experience after I told him about having used ayahuasca recently.

Point is, my experience of sampling people I know in SV both socially and professionally hasn't yielded anything close to "yeah I have used psychedelics to help my work" even when I didn't ask them straight up if they had used it, and instead volunteered my own experience first.

I worked in large companies in South Bay, not SF-based startups. That probably had something to do with it. Still, all the press about SV and psychedelics gets tiring when it seems not to take into account the likely uneven distribution between South Bay vs SF and large companies vs startups.

I keep reading/hearing about the relationship between psychedelics and Silicon Valley, but I have yet to meet that many people in real life who work in the SV software industry and use psychedelics.

I'm a SWE who has spent over a decade at various large companies in SV.

I know one fellow SWE who has used it at Burning Man.

Several other SWEs gave me a neutral or negative reaction when I mentioned using psychedelics.

If there is a side of Silicon Valley that involves using psychedelics to enhance your work, it's either a lot smaller than the media makes it out to be, or I'm in the wrong place.

LOL reminds me of the time at work when I was helping a fellow SWE deploy his code to a new platform. It didn't work. He immediately blamed the it on the fact that we were using a new platform. I then noticed that we were also deploying a newer version of his code onto this new platform, instead of the old code that was known to work on the old platform. I asked him how he knew it was because of the platform (#5 or #6) and not the newer version of his code (#1).

Turned out I was right. And this was his code, not mine. The best part? He had been on the team longer than I had, and this was at Google of all places.

And people wonder why I have lost interest in the field...

What's the point of the constant learning if it's going to be obsolete in 5 years?

That's what I can't stand about the cult of "you get to learn so much at FAANG or a startup" -- at some point in life, you need to spend less time learning new things and start applying the things you have learned. I've been drinking from the proverbial water hose for 20 years. It's tiring now. At some point you need to be able to find the permanent things and reject the noise.

I started programming when I was 11. Taught myself C++ from that age. Solved tons of tough problems in personal and school projects before going into industry at age 22.

Now at 35, I definitely think it's time to move on. I won't lie about my lack of interest in the field. The problems are less difficult to solve, but also much more frustrating. A lot more black boxes that you can't reverse engineer when you get stuck. Working with other people in a big company means things move far slower than my ability to get things done.

Plus the proliferation of different tech stacks means that despite the big job market, most of the new jobs require specific knowledge that I don't have, and my existing experience with low level coding and problem solving don't carry much weight.

> I’m just not sure about top-down forced mentoring as a career requirement.

Tell that to all the people in this thread who thought I should accept my company's top-down mandate to do mentoring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21229910

That's because the post file world is designed for consumers, not producers. YouTube creators and software programmers are still using standard computers.

Maybe he was in bay area but not SF itself. A common ambiguity when talking about the area

For example, suppose you work on the Search for Android team, under Search. You might work to train others in Search and others in Android as part of the work on Search for Android. Those don't count as citizenship, because they are directly related to your work.

You'd have to mentor people outside of that area, such as mentoring new hires in general, not as part of your job role.

The mentoring part is specifically for areas outside of your team's work.

I agree that it is time to leave.

It's harder to take pride in that kind of citizenship work when your company keeps making these kinds of top-down decisions.