koof

Yes, I don’t wanna give too many personal details but I gave them a lot of solid work for years after that.

Some in the comments suggested a differentiator about my performance gap was my self awareness that I was doing poorly - I certainly had an anxiety problem in general that was getting in the way beyond work too, but knowing my manager really had my back went very far. I knew of course that I could still get fired, but it meant a lot to me that no one was jumping at the chance.

I think if my meeting with my manager went another way I think I might have spent more time looking for an escape route rather than focusing on the tasks at hand. Someone who thinks they're going to be fired can sometimes cause a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Totally get that. I want more money and growth too, but this taught me I need a good boss.

My first leadership lesson looked like this: as a junior engineer I had an abysmal quarter or two. My manager asked me what was going on. After I gave them an assessment of the situation, they said that they believed me and went to bat for me.

Because of that manager's trust and belief in me even in the face of irrefutable evidence that I was doing poorly, I immediately became fiercely loyal to that manager and the organization, and I wanted to work harder for them.

I'm no 10x engineer, but any time I get frustrated with someone else's poor output, I think about this.

It's worth noting that Diet Coke has about 50% more caffeine than regular.

As opposed to you, who is definitely not virtue signaling.

I resonate with the author preferring to read an e-reader than a book when their mind is more amped up. Why is it easier to read from a mutable screen than paper when I'm frazzled?

Here's an article that echoes this sentiment: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/paris-attacks-bataclan-ho...

The fact that music.razerzone.com exists means there is little hope for democratized electronic music-making being anything but a male money dump, much like video games. Razer will probably start making bike computers next.

Their budget keeps getting slashed. Calling the EPA the disgrace, when you have an actually good target for your anger right in front of you, is nonsense.

Computers can suck sometimes. Maybe stepping away from them for a while might be helpful.

If you are listening to headphones loud enough to block out other conversations, you are almost certainly going to damage your hearing.

Yep, I was saying that too!

Jobs always said stuff like computers were the bicycles of the mind right?

Here's your gold bicycle.

Man, there's something about a gold laptop that just makes me want to never give money to a company again.

It's a crime that he only sleeps for two hours a day.

I think you might find this article relevant. I think that liking your work shouldn't be in exchange for fair compensation and work conditions.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/...

This has a lot of truth to it, but rather than encouraging labor as the opposite thing that makes you interesting, who cares about being interesting?

Ah, I see. Personally I think I could have taken the "give an example of a classifier" question into a deep dive of their competency (talk about how one would build that classifier, etc.) but they might get so many completely unqualified candidates that don't know those things that they need to have those sorts of hurdles before they start really evaluating you for more holistic problem solving traits.

But if you don't think they did that at all then I guess that's bad!

I generally am for the "look things up" argument, but so many people in tech take that to an extreme of "I can fully understand an entire discipline by looking at the Wikipedia page for 5 minutes".

Do you think mathematicians start over from learning how to count everytime they encounter a new problem? That's different from looking up the 10th digit of pi: that's encyclopedic.

Knowing what a classifier is is simply more than encyclopedic knowledge that you should probably know before joining an AI company.

It's only recently that I've found (a few) programmers who talk about the beauty of the work - I think the "get money get out" folks are the vast majority at the zillions of non-buzzworthy companies.

I smirk a little at the slightly oblivious people who put a ton of gravitas on throwaway apps, but to me it feels like down to earth people along with people working on truly exciting things greatly outnumber them.

Maybe it was how you implemented it? That's also a sample size of one.

Would you call someone being removed from a position of power "stomping out"? Eich can and will still live a decent life and nobody in their right mind is denying him his right to that, but remember that he did seek to deny those rights to others.

There is a lot more to the rights gained from marriage than just "legal obligation".

Means of production more has to do with scale. Software is extremely unique as an industry in that people can truly "produce" something by themselves - all other cases of self-employment I can think of are pretty much services, which is a whole other can of worms. A tech oriented example of a means of production that Marx would want run by the state would include any cloud service or datacenter. The average person simply can't afford to start one "on their own" without outside capital.

"Steal" is probably not a word you want associated with a health information product, no?

This was what I really wish I had done. I tallied up all of the electives I didn't need/benefit from on top of the B.S.: it came up to around 12 courses, enough time to fit another major and more. A B.A. would have cut into that even further, but I was worried about the perceived harm it would have on me in the job market, even though now I realize that was such a false fear.

I was in the same boat for a while, I really enjoyed everything and couldn't get enough and was immensely satisfied. I was feeling so great about it initially so when things started to go south, I thought I was in a rough patch and would make it out back to those initial feelings, or that they were just issues with my education/specific situations I was in, and so on.

Even if you are enjoying the hell out of it I would encourage you to still try other things - the opportunity cost of taking a few unexpected things is negligible and you could gain a lot of value out of that rather than grabbing a few more (somewhat redundant after a point) CS electives.

Yes and no. My problem is I thought I loved what I was doing, but there were just little issues with it. Everything has little issues, sure. I never let myself realize until recently that these were problems that were actually harming my quality of life/mental health and that I had lost my love for it. There is a lot of pressure to love the field no matter what, and I think it's unfortunate that reflection isn't encouraged very often around here.

Thanks for your perspective. I don't claim to speak for everyone. I thought I was enjoying programming with just a few reservations that I could live with, but ultimately these problems became to be too much. The echo-chamber of love for the field, or "if you don't like it you just aren't tough enough" kind of talk really made me just feel like a whiner, especially considering I was pretty decent at it and received a good amount of praise/money for what I was doing.

HN frequently encourages people to go deeper into programming/technology when I really needed someone to tell me to explore around. My intention was to do just that for someone else.