474 karma · joined January 14, 2022
The reason here is similar to why science oftentimes appears fundamentally worthless - most of the time you uncover absolutely nothing of importance. I think the same is true for data organizations. When you're looking for large patterns in the data you're going to strike out a lot. And that's not on an individual level, but on an org level - a lot of teams within the broader data organization will never produce anything of value. But at least they'll try.
With respect to data quality - fix it then! That seems like an immediate way to make your work less "fundamentally worthless". I understand that fixing data quality is hard (I spent >12 months working on that problem at my current company), but it is not a worthless endeavor.
I remember reading that while training for an ironman and getting a bit spooked. But then I realized that the folks who suffer from OTS are taking it to such an extreme. This article reminded me a lot of that - it sounds like you can take anything too far. At the 99.99th percentile, probably any healthy activity can become an obsessive act that can ruin your life. But anywhere in between the 50th and 99th percentile it's probably still a good thing.
The times in my life when I've been the most anxious or unwell have been when I'm questioning my mental health. And I think that the society we live in does encourage people to open up more. But if you have ADHD / obsessive compulsive tendencies, and your brain works like mine, that opening up can just look like obsessing over why you aren't feeling 100%. Then it's a self fulfilling prophecy.
A few years back, I was almost killed in a shootout between two rival gangs while in my house. A bystander walking by wasn't as lucky and he was shot to death in front of his wife. Major US city, not in a bad part of the city either, just bad luck, bad timing. It took a while for the PTSD to hit but eventually my therapist and I realized that a lot of my anxiety symptoms were stemming from a constant feeling of danger / feeling that I wasn't safe.
I started meditating every day about 3 months ago and the difference has been night and day. My friend started the journey with me and he's had similar results. I feel so much better every day, and I would estimate that my anxiety symptoms are down about 80%. Therapy is helpful too, and I would encourage anyone who feels like anxiety affects their life at all to do both CBT and meditation.
That being said, I don't think this is a strong enough phenomenon that it explains the rather large trends upwards in self harm/mental health. I think a good control is the graph that shows Schizophrenia - a 67% uptick shows that the diagnosis rates are probably a lot higher than the early 2000s, since I doubt that schizophrenia is really becoming more common due to social media.
For starters, it's unclear why he draws a line at 2012, when in many of the graphs the slope gets steeper at 2010 instead, and in fact that's where the percentage increase calculations start from as well. That vertical line at 2012 is misleading and confusing.
Also, in the US Teens, Suicides (Ages 10-14), the uptick clearly started in 2007. I don't disagree that social media is bad and I've seen firsthand people who become mentally ill because of the standards and expectations supplied by a constant stream of highlight rules that make you question your own worth. But I think that the data provided here is not strong enough to come to that conclusion.
Years and years ago I started training seriously for a triathlon. Then a half ironman. Then a marathon, and after 2-3 years of having a few races a year on the calendar, I just started exercising every day. At the start, a lot of the days took discipline/motivation to get out the door. After a while, it was just a few days of discipline a week. Then a few days a month, then a few days a year. Now it's automatic, and something I actually look forward to rather than dread (obviously in a hard training cycle there are some sessions I dread, but it's almost like my brain turns off and my body subconsciously gets my stuff and gets me out the door).
The longer you do something the easier it is.
Second, as other people have mentioned, sometimes FAANG can scare companies away. They see your resume and think "gosh, he's expensive, there's no way he'll sign at the rates we're offering". This happened to my father - MBA, 30 years of experience, he found that companies didn't want to hire him because he would "be too expensive" or "was more experienced" than they wanted.
Combination of those two factors could be it.
Assuming you pay $200/month in healthcare, ~$1800 a month to max out your 401k, your take home pay is about $5,000 after taxes. In Manhattan and the expensive parts of Brooklyn, your own place is realistically a minimum of $2,500, possibly as much as $3,000. Outside of those places, still $2,000.
Source: I literally just went through this process, as a new grad, making slightly above $120k about 3 months ago.
I remember a period of my life where I was struggling a bit more than normal with anxiety, and my creative / intrusive brain was like "how about you think on the concept of suicide?" to which my brain responded "wow now you're thinking about suicide, you should really seek help".
In reality, it was just an intrusive thought. But the fact that my brain jumped on that thought, and ruminated on it as "if the thought popped into my head, maybe I'm not OK", that was the thing that caused problems.
Entire thing could have been avoided if we had gone into it with the assumption of "When you enter the mountains, assume that any cold/wet weather is possible". Bring hand warmers and/or safety blankets, or even just a big roll of aluminum foil. Someone in the group had brought an amazon package specifically for that reason, and they shoved it in their jersey to block wind and keep their core body temperature up. They were fine, the rest of us were not.
EDIT: another storm I'm just remembering - not mine, but my dads. When he was 18 he was hiking on the side of a ravine in California with two friends. They were supposedly trying to find some caves in the side of the hilltop, and my dad grabbed some loose rock and fell - over 100ft straight down, another 200 tumbling at an angle. He spent 3 months in the hospital, mending a fractured skull and jaw, 2 broken vertebrae, and a whole lot of other injuries.
That being said, fission is already pretty darn safe. But the public perception of it is not good.
As one of my friends said, "Positions of power are still predominantly held by men, but the average man is lagging behind the average woman". Not sure if this is necessarily true, but sometimes it feels true. It's also unfortunately a rather un-PC opinion to share.
Some semesters I was doing like 70-80 hours a week on average, split between managing clubs, homework, attending class, working part time jobs, studying. One week I remember being busy from 7am to 2am for 6 days straight. a few semesters I had a lot of free time, like second semester of senior year, and first semester of freshman year, but mainly it was the gaps - after midterms, during breaks, where I had obscene amounts of free time.
There was a lot of talk about this in the news, and although the software I was working on didn't entirely fix the problem, it allowed the agencies to communicate better. Their data wasn't siloed, and families got separated for only a few days rather than (sometimes) permanently.
I really miss that job. The pay was atrocious and zero WLB, but everyone agreed it was an important problem to solve, and I think the tool we had built really was helping.
1. Sign up for a local 5k race 3 months into the future, thus forcing yourself to train.
2. Set up all your running gear the night before.
3. When you wake up and don't want to run, tell yourself all you need to do is put your shoes on and then you can go back to bed / not do it (at that point, a lot of "well I'm already up" kicks in).
4. Run slow. Really slow. Walk whenever you need to. Hell, walk the whole time if you have to.
5. Follow a couch to 5k program.
6. I personally enjoy running as a form of exploring streets I've never been down, trails I don't know the end of, and cities I'm new to.
I think a big reason people hate running is they run too fast too soon. Run 15 minute miles if you have to. Shuffle! Slowly! The joy is in being outside and moving your body.
Intelligence comes in a lot of ways - clearly Elon Musk is incredibly intelligent, but only in some ways and not in every way.
Trying to play devils advocate here, I don't fully believe that Musk will be incompetent in handling Twitter, but I definitely think given the current evidence it's possible his understanding of how to operate Twitter is less comprehensive than how to operate a hardware driven tech company.
It also sounds like you've been lucky so far. There are many periods over just the last 30 years where the "sure thing" ended up bankrupting people. The hard part is beating the market over the course of your life.
I would caution such reckless confidence. "The more you know, the more you realize you don't know." - if you are looking at a subject like quantitative analysis in stocks and thinking "this isn't so hard", you probably know so little that you think it's easy, but not enough to realize the intricacies of why it's hard.
Are we not allowed to complain about known things? If you get a speeding ticket do you complain about it? Under that same philosophy, complaining about your ticket is irrational and stupid. Someone complaining about a hangover is irrational and stupid. Someone complaining about having back problems because you sit all day and don't exercise is irrational and stupid. I just don't think this line of reasoning makes sense at all. Our priorities change and maybe a teacher wants to do something good for the world but after 10 years they see they're not paid/respected well, and they have a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay and they're tired because they work 60 hour works. IMO that's a very rational place to start complaining.
I'd disagree. Some anecdotal evidence - I'm from a HCOL suburban area with a nationally ranked public school system. Teachers here are generally considered "well-paid" by teacher salary standards. Many of the teachers in my area literally cannot afford to live here, and have to commute 30-40 minutes in.
My mom was a teacher there. She was making about $80k a year at the end of her career, with 2 masters degree and 20 years of experience teaching (so she was pretty much maxed out on her salary). Her pension is something like $20k a year (also maxed out due to her YOE). My dad was in between jobs for some time in there, and my parents, who are frugal people, struggled to make ends meet on just my moms salary, borrowing against their mortgage for the year while my dad was unemployed.
The problem I think is that you're examining 'working more' in the context of 'work output'. As a developer, it is very much about 'work output', however as a teacher it is often not.
In my moms example, she had roughly 6x50 minute classes a day, with a 10 minute break between each one. So, roughly 6 hours of 'meetings', since those 10 minutes in between were really just prepping for the next class, and oftentimes speaking to students in between too. That in and of itself is draining. This is the schedule of a manager, more or less - 6 hours of meetings where you need to be "on" and can't zone out.
The problem is that teachers don't just operate on a manager schedule. They also operate on a maker schedule: designing lesson plans. My mom's other 2x50 minute blocks were designated for a 50 minute lunch break and 50 minutes of planning. But 50 minutes of planning is not nearly enough time to plan two classes that my mom teaches every day. So, no actual lunch break, the lunch break is actually eating while planning. And that's still not really enough time, so my mom would get there an hour early and stay an hour late. She worked 7am-530pm M-F, and since getting behind on lesson plans means you need to put on a movie which puts your kids behind, she often worked 3-4 hours on Sunday to prepare for the week ahead. This is not my mom being an overachiever, or being dedicated to her work, this is her being dedicated to ensuring that she is just doing her job. This is what the job requires. Sure, it does get easier over time as you get to reuse lesson plans.
The point I want to drive home is not that working 7am-530pm is "more [time] than most professionals", but rather the quality of work is so much different, and so much harder. Managing a classroom of 25-30 children, middle schoolers in her case, is draining, so much more draining than coding. It is more draining than being a manager, because your team is often 3x as big and significantly less behaved (they're children after all).
The cherry on top is that my first job out of college as a developer I was already making $30k more than my mom a year. She had a masters and 10yrs of experience at the time. I am not under the illusion that I am smarter or more qualified.
To answer your statement of "I also need to do trainings, mentorings, networking", teachers regularly need to do trainings too. For my mom, these trainings are required - she was required to do something like 20 hours of professional development a year. And they often mentor students as well, as you absolutely experienced during your own education whenever you went to a teacher during their lunch break for help. I don't think tutoring versus mentoring is that hard. Having someone come to you with questions is an easy way of educating someone. The hard part is lesson plans, to think through a year of "how can I distill this knowledge down and transfer it?", which I personally have never needed to do as a tutor.
To answer your question of "why don't they change professions?", I think that's rather naive. Not everyone is on the path of trying to optimize financial independence and minimize time spent working. Why do folks go into journalism? Or art, or music? Are those people stupid, because they aren't in software engineering where work is more lucrative and easier?
> teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals work in a year
I do think this is an overstatement, maybe a little. Maybe not. It depends on the teacher and the subject. I hope these explanations help, growing up I definitely did not realize how hard my "good" teachers worked to provide me a solid education.
I guess you could look at cancer growth rates during winter/summer, however we live in relatively controlled environments. I don't think you could control for AC usage / how much time you spend outside versus outside.