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I didn't get formal diagnosis either. At the time, I really didn't know what was wrong with me. It was later in life when I realized what had happened.

The thing with depression is that one is unable to properly think. Nothing really matters. So suggestions like go for a walk or eat healthy are really hard to put in practice.

I used to run 5K almost daily when depression hit me. It was induced by trauma. Initially, I kept going out to run, though my pace was slower and I didn't run as far. Like how they say about going broke; slowly first and then suddenly, that's how my depression progressed.

Also you reminded me about weekends. I did same thing, spend whole weekends in bed, avoided any social contact. Just drank, ate, prayed, listened to music, and cried out loud. I tried playing video games and watch movies but they could not hold my interest. Stopped running. If friends invited me, I made excuses. Luckily for me, it lasted only a few weeks.

I don't think it was any of healthy suggestions here that helped me. I already had some healthy habits like running and eating right. Maybe if I had gone to doctor, it would have helped me faster.

Just like how it started, that's how it ended. First, I started a to feel a little bit better and then suddenly I was not depressed at all. Then I had really bad case of anxiety, which I still suffer from a bit but CBT methods really helps me here. I am back to running, working out, taking vitamins etc. And feel great now.

When I had depression, I had similar symptoms like you. I had same deep pit in the morning and unable to sleep at night.

I tried exercise, read Feeling Good book, took different vitamins etc. None of this really helped.

What finally worked was giving into my depression. I would come back from work, listen to sad songs, cry like a child, pray, and drink until I passed out. Within a few days, I would wake up without pit in my stomach. Hangover was another story. Within a couple of weeks, I was not depressed. Depression turned into anxiety. And anxiety was a lot easier to deal with than depression.

Once depression was mostly gone, then I was able to use CBT methods to deal with my anxiety.

It is really hard for people who never experienced depression to understand what it feels like. It is worse than hell. I am sorry you are going through it. Just take one day at a time.

If CEO changes their mind, then they will look weak and indecisive. So they are unlikely to change their mind.

But I have recruiters in my circle and know stories where people challenged rejections and succeeded. All of them were lower level applicants. The hiring managers were overridden by HR or higher level managers. And this whole thing is so rare that whenever it happens I hear about it from my friends.

When I was teenager, Xenogears greatly influenced me. It introduced me to various concepts of philosophy and psychology.

Before this game, my world was pretty simple and easy to understand, after it I had a lot of questions and wasn't really sure about anything.

Yeah I agree, one doesn't need to maximize their income at all costs. Let me update my PR then :)

  if (can solve hard leetcode problems) {
  
    return isDesireToMakeMoreThan(500K) || !enjoy(code) ? moveToManagement(moveToFAANG) : moveToFAANG;
  } else {
   // move out of developer roles

    return moveToManagement(bestBrandedCompanyCanGetInto).asynchronous(workOnOwnCompanyInFreeTime);
  }

I love programming but I realized that I enjoy writing pure code and I am good at it. I can solve hard LeetCode problem though takes me hours or days. But I really don't want to deal with senior/staff/architect level dev responsibilities such as infrastructure, DevOps, and politics of proving yourself.

Long time ago, I did a little bit of photography as a side-hustle. It sucked the joy out of photography until I stopped doing it as a side-hustle. It has been a long time since I enjoyed programming at my 9-5.

I would update code as follow:

if (can solve hard leetcode problems) {

  return moveToManagement(moveToFAANG);
 } else {
 // move out of developer roles

  return 
 moveToManagement(bestBrandedCompanyCanGetInto).asynchronous(workOnOwnCompanyInFreeTime);
 }

Even in FAANGs, there is a limit on how many engineers will reach the top level.

Check out Developer Hegemony by Erik Dietrich. I am an engineer at heart but this book convinced me to move into management.

I did take photography classes in college that helped me understand basics.

But I learned a lot more by joining a local photography meetup. They would hire models to practice portrait shoots with and the main people were very helpful. They charged $50-$60 per shoot though.

Fair warning, back then I ran into a lot of photographers who did photography for living and were pretty grumpy about dwindling incomes. Don't let their snarky comments discourage you from going to meetups.

> The problem with DSLRs/mirrorless is that they're proper tools and just like with a brush and a canvas you have to put time and effort to master them. No amount of computational photography will make you a good photographer and if a modern 2k$ camera is the bottleneck it certainly is more of your fault than the camera.

This is a good analogy, I will have to borrow it.

I got friends who ended up buying expensive DSLRs after they saw my photos taken with f/1.8 lens. But they had kit lens and were complaining that their cameras. I told them to get f/1.8 lens. Then they were complaining about zoom. Also they could not use maximum aperture outside. I helped them get ND filters. Now they are complaining about that. And forget to take ND filters indoors, get way too many photos incorrectly focused etc.

Most people expect pro cameras to just act just like cell phone cameras.

Not only that, here in Dallas many homes are being sold sight unseen these days.

I have thought about it, but I think working 4 hours a day probably would cause similar low-level but constant anxiety about deadlines, bugs, etc.

I rather work a few months and then take a month off.

I know you are joking but it works. We have become a society where unhealthy lifestyle is encouraged because we are too afraid to hurt feelings.

My health journey basically started with wanting to marry someone out of my league. I saw my friends with unhealthy lifestyles, marrying and having kids with other unhealthy people. And then their kids developing unhealthy habits. Food worship is big in my culture, and so is diabetes and heart diseases.

I was unhealthy skinny-fat loser. It is probably the worst body type. This is when I first slowly, then suddenly removed all unhealthy people from my life. I even avoided shopping at places where there were too many obese people like Walmart. I stopped eating at restaurants where there were too many overweight people. No buffets for me.

While I lost unhealthy friends, I also developed better friendships with healthier friends. I also adopted new habits and hobbies that brought me in contact with attractive people. Gym, coffeeshops, Whole Foods, yoga.

Initially, I felt outsider. But eventually I started to feel like one of them. Also I lost my gut, developed decent back and legs muscles. And it didn't felt like work. I didn't even try any diet or workout program. Just ate where attractive people ate and just used random machines in the gym.

Since having kids, I have stopped avoiding unhealthy people and have become more accepting of unhealthy lifestyles. And also gained a lot of weight and struggle to lose it now.

I used to be on-call during one of my first jobs. We would get called all the time, and a lot of time these were simple issues like reboot or restart a process. But it cut into our personal time. And we didn't get any compensation for it.

Team wanted to do root cause analysis and fix problems for good but there was always some new very important feature to build. So we never fixed these issues.

The way our on-call escalation worked was something like this: First, on-call gets the call. If the issue is not resolved in 15 minutes, then it is escalated to teamlead. After another 15 or 30 minutes, it is escalated to manager and then entire team. After an hour it is escalated to manager's manager. Other teams/SMEs had to join on-call bridge. Then director, VPs etc. And supposedly if it takes long enough it would escalate all the way to CEO.

I used to feel really guilty if it escalated past my teamlead. And if my manager joined the bridge, she would really scare us about further escalation and make us take all kind of shortcuts like hard reboot servers. She never cared for us to find root cause.

But every once in a while issues will get escalated past her to her boss. And then those issues would become top priority to fix for good.

Soon entire team/department learned this. So we stopped fixing issues as soon as possible. We would pretend like server is stuck, internet connection issues, etc. Wait for call to escalate as high as possible. Some of the teammates would even join online games while supposedly troubleshooting.

Eventually stabilizing our code and environment became top priority instead adding new features. We spent a few months squashing all kind of bugs, added processes like code reviews, unit tests, etc. And after those few months of hard work, our off-hours calls dropped by 90%.

And this is when I learned leadership won't care about our life if they are not impacted by their policies.

Now at my current company I do have on-call but I don't change anything for it. If I am out having dinner with my wife, and I get a work call, I acknowledge it but let my manager know that I will look at the issue in couple of hours. They can get someone else to look at it or wait a few hours. (Also by fighting for quality, we rarely ever get calls after work and management understand why I would spend time with my family during on-call week.)

Any books you can recommend?

Video games are where I forget to eat

Since you asked weird tips, here are mine:

1. Video games are better than movies. When I played video games, I ate less snacks. Lately, I watch movies/shows with my SO, and end up gaining weight. But every once in a while I get a new game and every single time I end up losing weight until I beat that game.

2. Avoid unfit people. I have friends who worship food and alcohol, some of them are naturally skinny, so don't look unhealthy. But whenever I hangout with them for multiple days in a row, I end up gaining a few pounds.

3. And on other side of coin, seek environments with healthy people. When I was single, I spent a lot of time in gyms, coffee shops, chipotle, whole foods, etc mostly looking for a fit companion. As a video gamer, I never considered myself as a healthy person but slowly my identity changed and I became a healthy person.

I agree there are some very good fake programmers. And I haven't interviewed as many programmers, more like tens of them but I had good luck discussing the issues I was having at work.

For example, I might tell them about a bug I am working on or even show code on my laptop. Good programmers actually wanted to solve the issue. Many solved or made useful suggestions.

Fake programmers usually had pretty hard time, even had troubles verbalizing questions to ask.

And sometime I turn tables and ask them what they are stuck at work and I try to help them. With good programmers, we had good discussion and sometimes actually solved their issues. Bad programmers never had any issues.

I find it insulting but that's the way it is.

The problem is it is very hard to fire a bad hire, sort of joining a fraternity or sorority. So they add rituals before you join them. If you can take the abuse for joining them, then you should be able to conform to their way of life/work.

Unfortunately, you have to play the game or start your own company.

It seems everyday web is turning into ask permission before you do anything environment. Companies instead of hiring competent technical person, spend money on lawyers and lawsuits.

It is scary for someone who grew up on 90s' Internet. Not sure what was in the bucket, but in 90s and 2000s, it was common to link to various resources on the web. My friend in college ran a popular forum where people shared direct links to video games, softwares, pdfs, etc. It, of course, facilitate piracy, but not everything linked there was illegal.

I run a blog where I curate and embed YouTube videos. Yes I am using their official embed code. Using standard http protocol to link to a resource on the web is official way to link. If they were bypassing url signature or something similar, then I can see how they were violating terms and conditions of that bucket owner.

While I agree that it is important as a developer to understand operations side of things, but I disagree that developers should be doing operations. Not only developers accessing production environments is against various security principles but also it increases employees' cognitive load and reduces quality of work.

There is a reason why in other fields, people tend to specialize instead of generalize.

I think there is some misguided marketing/MBA ideas that developers can learn and do any and all technical work. I have seen in my current company quality of work and work satisfaction destroyed after higher-up decided that we don't need operations and developers should do DevOps now.

I have just started my job search in Dallas/Fort Worth area. I hate to waste my and other's time, so I ask upfront their pay range or tell them my expectations. I am looking for $200-250K as a senior developer, and only a few of employers said it was above their budget.

Another big issue is Checkmark Driven Development.

I signed up to work on a microservice where we were supposed to be a small startup within a big company. We supposedly can make decisions which are good for our customers and work on interesting challenges.

Except security and compliance is top priority, and it doesn't matter how those security and compliance requirements fit our service. We need to get a checkmark. Everyone from security and compliance team is unable to have a technical discussion but they continue make technical decisions for us.

And in order to stay relevant, they change their checkmark requirements every few months. So we spend all our time, trying to keep our service compliant and don't really get anytime to work on real issues.

I get the feeling my job's main function is to keep these security and compliance people happy. They have no skin in our service, my manager doesn't want to bring up issues with her higher up.

All this leave me feeling extremely unsatisfied and burned out at the end of the day.

I think I would have enjoyed pandemic a lot more if I was not married or had kids. It was nice to get out of so many boring social obligations. I tried to play more video games, caught up on various shows, picked up new hobbies, creatively socialized like hiking, or meeting outdoors.

But a few weeks in my wife got really depressed, she didn't want to do anything but complain about lockdowns. I spent rest of next two years trying to cheer her up. It was exhausting. So finally I gave up on social distancing guidelines and we started to socialize like normal. But for some reason she continues to complain about lockdowns, covid, etc. I am spending all my energy cheering her.

Yeah I came here to say same thing. I find it hard to concentrate when bottom two boards are cutoff.