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Thank HN: Five months ago, I was feeling like a loser, now I am opposite

• qzw 4y ago
  Congrats on fixing the job issue. Now that times are better, might want to consider working on improving communications with the wife, so that the next time you go through a rough patch it won't go as far as divorce.
  • ac2022 4y ago
    Thank you and yes we are working on it. BTW I thought about divorce but never said that word to my wife. Those thoughts luckily were very brief.
    • rattray 4y ago
      Very happy to hear that :)
• daneel_w 4y ago
  Glad to hear it worked out for the better. My current employment is no longer fulfilling and I wish to "move on", but I can only do remote and such vacancies are very hard to come by in Sweden.
  • Kaibeezy 4y ago
    Doesn’t the Venn diagram look like: (remote (Sweden)) ... or am I unclear on “remote” or “Sweden”?
    • sokoloff 4y ago
      It costs employers money and complexity to open up remote hiring of employees in a new jurisdiction. If Sweden isn’t a very big market or Sweden is a difficult market from a legal perspective, even remote companies may not be able to hire there. As an example, I’d have to look, but I think it’s only quite recently that I’ve been able to hire in Sweden, 2 years after being remote. I know I couldn’t last year, but we contracted with some company to make some of the smaller markets feasible for us.
      • creakingstairs 4y ago
        You could always be an independent contractor instead of being an employee. That way it reduces the hurdle for hiring. I'm technically a contractor atm, but get treated like an employee. You of course don't get the same legal protections or some benefits but you can charge more instead :)
        • sokoloff 4y ago
          Even there, we’d have to understand if that arrangement is commonly viewed as legal in the country of residence. (My understanding is that it’s not legal in all countries [including my own] just because you say and I agree that you’re a contractor, if there are additional facts and circumstances tests to decide the “proper” treatment.)
• UncleEntity 4y ago
  So… did your wife get the big house she wanted?
  • ac2022 4y ago
    Sort of, yes. We have signed the contract and should be closing in the fall :) The house is a bit more expensive than I would like but we can afford it. And we could have afford it before too, but I probably subconsciously thought that I don't deserve it.
    • method_capital 4y ago
      People who believe they need big houses baffle me. It isn't priced right, and you can improve to flip or live and decide later. But why on earth would someone need a giant fucking house to be "happy".
      • shultays 4y ago
        OP has kids, it does not have to be a mansion but you need a large house
      • necovek 4y ago
        People usually don't stress so much on the size, but on the neighbourhood and number of rooms. A "big house" might mean a separate office for a work-at-home parent (or two) instead of the bedroom or living room, or separate rooms for your soon-to-be-teenagers. Maybe that was the case for the OP? Unfortunately, if you are not building your own house (or having it built, ofc), you can only get a house the size that's almost always bigger than what you'd like initially. Or has fewer rooms than you'd like. You simply don't get to specify the room sizes or such, and for unbeknownst-to-me reasons, people simply build huge houses with huge rooms instead of smaller houses with more smaller rooms.
        • em-bee 4y ago
          yes, number of rooms is a big thing. especially with kids and working from home. my office room is 6m² now. sufficient for me. but places with rooms that small are rare. a friend has a 100m² apartment with 5 rooms, when every other apartment i found on the market in that city with only 4 rooms had at least 150m².
• wccrawford 4y ago
  > it didn't give me any real freedom to make important decisions. I feel this.
• corrius 4y ago
  I don't normally comment on HN but reading all the negative vibes made me want to comment. Glad to hear you are doing great! I had to make the decision between a high paying job and a high rewarding job and choosing the second one has been a huge improvement in my life.
  • qgin 4y ago
    HN doesn’t do happy very well.
  • heisenbit 4y ago
    Indeed the HN community seems to manage the ‚issue‘ in an overall happy tale. I doubt there are many in a long relationship which did not suffer for a time due to external and not so well understood circumstances. Pull through and better self/us understanding and a stronger relationship can be ahead.
• jimhi 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing, I think many people out there are going through the same thing you did.
• happyopossum 4y ago
  Happy to hear you've made some positive changes! That said, as a cybersecurity practitioner, this: >a lot of compliance and security related tasks which added zero benefit to our service scares the bejeezus out of me. Security is never of zero benefit.
  • Aaronstotle 4y ago
    It might not be zero, but in some cases it could be lots of additional work for some marginal benefit
  • deathanatos 4y ago
    I agree with both. Real security is never of zero benefit, but I've worked on a lot of "security" tickets that are of no pragmatic benefit: 1. Angst to clean up the latest non-vuln. vuln. (e.g., the use of the vuln. library doesn't meet the requirements listed in the vuln. for it to be vuln., or the vuln. is researcher spam and … isn't really a vuln., but good luck trying to get someone to understand that, or where a vuln. gets publicized but your upstream OS is derping around and hasn't actually released the patched version yet)¹ 2. ill-advised attempts to add TLS or similar: adding TLS is not trivial (you do have to have the cert available, so that the ends can validate), but I've seen a lot of TLS additions, e.g., on top of a secure network, or where TLS is bolted on but the library is set to "don't verify". (Worse, this is the default in many libraries: as someone implementing TLS, industry would be greatly helped by having defaults that were secure. PG, MySQL, I'm looking at you.) In one case an auditor asked the mobile apps to do cert pinning — which they did, without ever involving the BE engs. (They weren't told they needed to!) The next cert rotation broke both mobile apps, and broke both differently: the Android app pinned only the private key (and had a NPE if it wasn't RSA) and the iOS app pinned the cert, so that one was truly broken. I've also seen a VPN setup where the clients were configured to accept any leaf cert issued by a public web PKI CA … and check nothing else. (I.e., anyone could go to that CA, get a leaf, and it would MitM the VPN.) 3. adding yet-another-security-linter that has problems with every little thing. E.g., we had one that really disliked that we did string concatenation in our SQL queries. But we were concatenating parameterized queries, as the search parameters (including the number of parameters), came from the user. So a program would need to add, e.g., "AND column > ?" to the query, and append the value to the parameter list. Ended up switching some of that to SQLAlchemy, through which it couldn't see, even though it was functionally the same. SQLAlchemy did work with a better internal AST, though, so it caught some errors our query builder caught only after bugging. I also have a linter from my current security team that files a bug for each package in a container that has vulns. against it. But it does not ever update its bugs, … so you don't know if anything is actually fixed. (I'm not patching package by package; I'm usually invalidating a cache & forcing it to do the equivalent of "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade", so I'm going to close a bunch of tickets all at once … but I have no way of knowing which ones.) 4. Audits, where the auditor asks things like "do you use RC4, TLS, or AES?" which … good grief 5. concerns about PII handling for information that's part of a public (government) record. ¹my default disposition is to patch, regardless of theoretical exploitability, if it is trivial to do so. But if it's not trivial — e.g., if the upgrade is a SemVer incompatible upgrade that requires me to rebase the entire monolith on to a new web framework and I lack the resources to do that right now, and the vuln.'s conditions to be exploited say we're not vuln., I am going to take the pragmatic approach of "we're ignoring this, as it doesn't apply to our codebase."
• DantesKite 4y ago
  No problemo. Optimism, useful advice, and motivational speaking are what we do best here over at HackerNews.
  • willismichael 4y ago
    Well, that and ripping certain subjects to shreds whenever they come up.
• philliphaydon 4y ago
  What is peoples obsession with FAANG companies?
  • leetcrew 4y ago
    getting paid?
    • _8j50 4y ago
      And resume points, bragging rights, exposure.
      • stemlord 4y ago
        Harder to brag about working in big tech given increasing contempt for these companies but yeah maybe the implication still is that you're loaded and comfy if that's something worth bragging about
        • _8j50 4y ago
          People hate the companies but no one denies their tech acheivements. A manager may not brag but tech person certainly can...if they acheived things there.
  • philliphaydon 4y ago
    So people just want money even if they are just a number doing boring work and hate their job and have no impact. That’s what I gather from the replies so far.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • 3qz 4y ago
      > if they are just a number doing boring work and hate their job and have no impact This is almost every job. You might as well get paid fairly for it.
• thecleaner 4y ago
  Hey congratulations ! Keep at the Leetcode thing though. You already turned your situation but why not go for another thing in your arsenal ?
  • pavlov 4y ago
    From the OP: “spent all my free time doing LeetCode. [..] LeetCode was hard and pointless” For someone recovering from burnout, it doesn’t seem a good idea to recommend that they return to an activity that felt pointless.
    • ac2022 4y ago
      True, I have taken break from LeetCode but not for too long. I will probably restart it in couple of weeks. Going forward, I always want to be interview ready.
• holtkam2 4y ago
  Hell yeah man :)
• sacrosancty 4y ago
  Just a suggestion, but if your relationship with your wife depends on your personal circumstances and mood, then it sounds not very strong. Might be worth taking advantage of this good period to do some relationship strengthening exercises while you can so that when the next downturn happens, you can both understand each other's and your own feelings better. I'm not talking about random activities like going to the beach but finding a good self-help book or therapist and sitting down together working through it regularly. It's easy for problems to grow silently until they're too big to fix. Relationships are far more important than jobs, money or houses.
  • _carbyau_ 4y ago
    Lines you won't see on a gravestone: "I wish I had worked more." "I wish I had a less meaningful relationship with my wife."
    • ungamedplayer 4y ago
      Along with "npm install ..."
      • Aperocky 4y ago
        The grave isn't big enough.
    • theGeatZhopa 4y ago
      … I wish I was little bit taller I wish I was a baller I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her I wish I had a rabbit in a hat with a bat, And a six four Impala
      • deebosong 4y ago
        I wish I was like, six foot nine So I can get with Leoshi She don't know me but yo she's really fine... You know I see her all the time everywhere I go but even in my dreams I can scheme my way to make her mine...
• qq66 4y ago
  "Series D startup" may be a very bad place to be very soon. Keep grinding LeetCode.
  • asdev 4y ago
    you're probably from the "work harder not smarter" school of thought
    • lovich 4y ago
      And presumably you are from the “stonks only go up” crowd?
  • kube-system 4y ago
    There are plenty of recession resistant software engineering jobs outside of SV. If you have some skills, you'll be fine. When the economy crashes and bitcoin startups go out of business, payday loan startups will be hiring.
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    My parents always said videogames were a waste of time, but at least they ingrained the value of repetitive stat grinding.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • mastazi 4y ago
    Not OP but the day startups are no longer viable I will change careers (something I did already in the past, so I know what it entails) rather than grinding leet and trying to find work at some tech mega corp. Salary at the expense of everything else was never the goal.
    • baq 4y ago
      on that day there might not be many career options open on the market, though
• asdev 4y ago
  easy to lose sight of what makes you fulfilled while on the Leetcode grind. congrats OP
• silisili 4y ago
  First off - congratulations. Secondly I genuinely hope you apologize to your wife and appreciate her sticking by you through what sound like mental issues. Sadly, a lot of people aren't so patient.
• mikesabbagh 4y ago
  Leetcode is not good training for FAANG?
• fny 4y ago
  Congrats! But be very careful about the start up you're working for. Make sure they have enough cash to survive the next 4-5 years and have a steady revenue stream.
  • rattray 4y ago
    Uh, why? They already work there. If things tank in a year or two, OP will just be the target of a recruiter feeding frenzy, and they'll come out more qualified than they went in. Quitting immediately would look bad in comparison, and staying but exuding pessimism and paranoia would not be adaptive.
  • w-j-w 4y ago
    > 4-5 years of runway > startup If this is your criterion for working at a startup, then you are too conservative to work at one. Every job carries risk, and looking to eradicate it is pointless.
    • fny 4y ago
      The environment right now is very different than a few years ago. Risk is way higher right now. Reward is even more questionable.
• drewcoo 4y ago
  Seek counseling. You're making life decisions based on web boards. Somehow programming and your relationship with your spouse are tied up together. You're riding really high now. You were really low before. Emotional roller coasters mean you should talk with someone, regardless of how you're feeling right now.
  • neuronic 4y ago
    Please stop psychologically evaluating someone over an Internet comment.
    • tsol 4y ago
      People are making a lot of strange, reaching conclusions based on little information
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • switchbak 4y ago
    I think you're being a little harsh maybe? I agree big mood swings like this are a concern, but jobs do a lot to affect our happiness. I'm likewise a little concerned about a partner who "wants a big house", but that's a highly condensed statement about what is no doubt a more nuanced situation. I've jumped ship and had it be a really positive experience. Wouldn't be averse to it again, and I think that's mostly what this post is about: recognized that their career was important to them, dug deep and found a better job, now they're sharing excitement their about it. It's also important to not get too much personal identification from a job (see Mike Rowe's thoughts on happy people working crappy jobs), and to not overwork, but whatever - they're making progress!
  • rattray 4y ago
    Your first paragraph does not come across as considerate. Your second sounds like good advice to me too, if a little presumptuous. How well do you know OP?
  • barry-cotter 4y ago
• CodeWriter23 4y ago
  So much awesome here, you having the revelation, taking action to change what needed to be changed, feeling the positive outcome, then sharing it. <3
• victor22 4y ago
  Wow FAANG waited 5 months to finish this PR masterpiece
• zepolen 4y ago
  Bro, it's not the job, it's you not standing up to your oppressive wife. The longer hours mean you spend less time with her so you're happier, the pay rise means she can spend it so she's happier and the decision making you get at the job gives you a sense of manhood which you are obviously lacking at home. Give it time and your wife will again become unhappy with the status quo and demand more and once again you will be unhappy and blame your job.
• nus07 4y ago
  Is Hacker News the new Blind ? Wtf did I just read? But good on you dude - just don’t attach that much of your self worth and relationship situation on your job . But this post is Blind worthy not HN.
  • barry-cotter 4y ago
• bin_bash 4y ago
  > I was motivated and was able to solve most easy and medium question in 30 mins. However, that was not good enough for FAANGs. What makes you think it's not good enough? LC is important and today it might be even be essential to land a role, but I think people tend to think of it like an exam when that's not really what we're testing for. The goal is to see how you think, not see if you can simply come up with the right answer. If you need a hint it's usually not going to hurt you at all so long as you listen to the hint, are able to understand it, then incorporate it into a solution. I'd go so far as to say that being able to do that can help you more than reciting an answer without a hint. There are some patterns like tries, left/right pointers, memoization, heaps, and maps that studying helps with for sure, but that doesn't mean you're supposed to be able to immediately solve something without any help. (Note that there are asshole interviewers out there that will challenge you and won't follow what I've described, but that's rare and personally I've only seen them at startups, not big tech)
  • 8ytecoder 4y ago
    All we need is one interviewer who absolutely hates interviewing to ruin the experience for the candidate and probably throw them off balance. It happens in Big Tech much more often than people are willing to admit. I get where you are coming from when you say "the goal is to see how you think" - I really do and I have definitely believed in that once upon a time. Truth is, it's extremely gut/instinct driven than we realise. So yeah, while you can easily shoot down a candidate who seem to regurgitate what they had already solved, there's just absolutely no way to differentiate it from a candidate having a bad moment (let alone a bad day). I had a take home exercise recently where I was supposed to identify a performance issue and fix it. I read the code in a hurry after finishing my day job. I knew where the likely issue is coming from but just couldn't locate it. I wrote back as such. The next day the solution came to me. I fixed it and sent it back. I still got hired but that sort of thing can never happen in a leet-code type interview no matter how much we'd like to believe. I have ADHD but even otherwise our brains are finicky.
    • bin_bash 4y ago
      My point is just that being able to solve LC mediums under 30 minutes isn’t that relevant. I’m not saying it’s a great way to vet candidates. 30 minutes is probably about what it takes me to solve an LC medium on average and I’ve passed every single FAANG full onsite loop I’ve taken which is a total of 6 over my career. I almost always need a hint or two if it’s not a trivial problem. If I practiced I could get that number down but I don’t think it would make it more likely to get a better offer.
• d23 4y ago
  Congrats! I'm happy for you. Funny how being more engaged and working more can leave you with more energy at the end of the day. I've felt the same way in the past.
  • ac2022 4y ago
    Yes, it is amazing. They say Heart Rate Variability is pretty good indicator of stress. My HRV graph for last 6 months clearly shows when I made decision to change job and when I gave 2 weeks notice.
    • sgtnoodle 4y ago
      How do you have 6 months of data? Is that something modern smart watches produce? I would love to have that data for myself, but don't really want to complicate my life with a smart watch. I don't even like keeping my e-reader's battery charged... My heart nerves got jacked up a couple years ago, and I had to get a pacemaker. It's presumably collecting a ton of cool data that it BLE's to the manufacturer and my cardiologist, but I don't have access to it.
      • JohnL4 4y ago
        https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/heartrate-variability/get-hrv-summary-by-interval/ https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/heartrate-var... I used the swagger interface a few months ago to download my resting heart rate over a three-year period, and it was interesting.
• taesu 4y ago
  Fanng is not for everybody and everybody doesnt fit in Fanng. Im glad you found your happiness! Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot
• rattray 4y ago
  Can't believe the negativity I see on some of the top comments right now. Congrats and thanks for sharing, you rock :) It's really nice to get updates from folks who posted an Ask HN. Especially with a positive outcome. It's really not uncommon for humans to find energizing work energizing, and for that to affect their overall quality of life. Plenty of people are comfortable checking boxes and going home early, sure, but that can be a slow death to a lot of folks (even some who might not realize it).
  • flakyfilibuster 4y ago
    The negativity is totally warranted: OPs misguided believe in thinking that simply finding a new job will get rid of all his woes is worrisome. Furthermore the fact that a high percentage of commentators are encouraging his stance is counterproductive. This is simplifying a complex situation, which OP should definitely seek professional guidance for before he finds himself in the same situation 5 months from now...
    • hawkar20 4y ago
      What is he misguided about, and what is the complexity he is simplifying. I ask out of genuine intrigue. Reading the post it comes across as someone who appeared to need to make a change in his life, unsure of what to change. He took a chance on a new role and has found himself happier for it.
      • laserlight 4y ago
        OP is mistaking positive feelings (short term, extrinsic) with wellbeing (long term, intrinsic). Their excitement probably allows them to neglect any underlying problems. When the excitement wears off, issues that haven't been addressed are likely to reappear. All of this is purely speculation of course, based on my reading of the post.
        • rattray 4y ago
          Wouldn't "a rewarding career" qualify as long-term, intrinsic wellbeing? Cynics may believe no such thing exists, but I don't think it's a universal view. Of course, there's always risk that the job changes and becomes worse. In a Series D company, we know that could happen at any time. OP probably knows this too :)
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  "My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress." Feminism's greatest enemies aren't necessarily men, but their wives. Your previous post indicated you "needed a bigger house" but clearly there was more to it. It seems like you have great emotional investment in two things that don't reciprocate your investment: your wife only seems to care about what you can give her, and a job is by definition a business relationship with a company they can sever whenever it is convenient to them. I would guess you do not have a good sense of self-worth. It's ok, it's really hard to have a good self-worth in a world where you are exposed to thousands of daily messages of inadequacies. It's ok to get some reinforcement from jobs, but just keep in mind it is a business relationship. I hope your wife does not also consider your marriage a business relationship. Two kids are a "real marriage" not easily unraveled. Hope the best for you.
• reuven 4y ago
  I didn't see your original post. But I'm delighted to hear that things have improved. There's no doubt that stress in your career can lead to stress at home. Certainly, when I'm stressed about my work (or when my wife is stressed about hers), it can be difficult on our relationship. And then, as they say, you have two problems. Moreover, it can feel hopeless. So many people say that you have to work for a big, famous company, with huge compensation packages. But once you're getting paid well, there are other important things: Do you care about the work you're doing? Are you treated decently at work? Do they give you responsibility, and the power to make decisions? There are oodles of people out there making good wages at companies we've never heard of, working with people they like, on projects they believe add value to the world. Such jobs aren't glamorous, and won't make the front page of the newspaper, but it doesn't matter. I love my work. I feel fortunate to do what I do. And when I tell people this, they are often taken aback, and say, "Wow, you're really lucky. I don't like my work; I just do it for the paycheck." So if you have this kind of excitement, energy, enjoyment, and fulfillment from your new job -- then you've won, as it were. You should feel good about this, and should consider yourself among the rare, fortunate folks in that situation. In short, it's great to hear about someone who has found satisfaction in their work. And if that satisfaction has improved your marriage? All the better.
• awsrocks 4y ago
• egorfine 4y ago
  Man I'm so happy to hear this! Wish you the very best of luck!
• wiihack 4y ago
  That sounds really awesome. Congratulations :)
• shultays 4y ago
  Good luck at your new job but it sounds like you are in a honeymoon period. It is good that you are happier but a fresh startup with longer hours does not sound good at all, especially if you have 2 kids and want to buy a house (ie you need stability) Work is work, the stress will happen when things are not perfect. You need to figure out a way to deal with.
• tmaly 4y ago
  Congrats on the new gig. It sounds like things worked out well.
• malshe 4y ago
  I am happy to see that you could leave your “bullshit job”! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
• juanani 4y ago
• bioinformatics 4y ago
  You got help here? I guess you’re a “best” loser now.lol
• zttg 4y ago
  I will try to properly word the well known thing: When you are happy, full of energy, love your job, get a lot of things to do, confident, etc - you are more attractive for any woman, especially for your wife, than when you are uncertain, unhappy, frustrated and full of problems. Work as much as possible on yourself and your own happiness and career. Any reasonable woman is designed to feel what is going on with you. Also consider some physical activity which you like. Gym, hiking, cycling, kayak, crossfit - whatever makes you happy and stronger and a same time does not lead to injuries
• giantg2 4y ago
  "My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress." I have a similar situation. It's not unreasonable to not want a bigger house, even if that's what culture tells us we should want that. Maybe your wife is fine being house poor, like mine wants to be. One bad issue and you're sunk and there will be stress. I prefer a cushion for the real possibility of life altering issues arising. We shouldn't all be spending balls the wall like culture tells us and then going up in flames at the first bump (not that it's your situation, but mine). And yes, I'm a loser and feel like it too. That's ok.