Shinmon

After spending almost two years increasingly on the business side of things, I would say showing how your work impacted the business in a positive way is the best way to negotiate raises/promotions.

Team performance isn't a pure individual KPI but making your team better (mentoring, ...) is still valuable to the business as well.

Depending on the company's culture there might be more emotional KPIs as well...Does you boss like you? Do you play along in office politics, ...

It's much harder to get laid off in Germany due to much better protection and even if you are laid off, you are eligible for unemployment benefits. So I think you are a little reactionary there right now.

Besides that, it's still an interesting question. I am currently in the process of starting a company in Germany and besides the horrible bureaucracy it's just really hard in general.

I think in tech the best way to start a company is to start a consulting (side) business in whatever you are good at. This way you can talk to companies and get paid for it. Over time you will notice that many companies have similar problems which you might be able to address with some kind of product.

The key is not to fall in love with the consulting business because that is selling time for money at the end of the day.

> but I don’t feel experienced enough for that.

This is classic imposter syndrome. I don't think anyone feels experienced enough. My background is tech as well but I have learned a shit ton of things on the business side of things and got to talk to many people.

> I am buying ETFs for a few hundred € a month,

Btw, that's a good way for long term wealth, especially for more money in retirement or a possible early retirement, but it takes time.

Short term wealth is always gambling. Starting a company almost always goes along with a significant pay cut in the beginning.

Modern C++ code now looks very different to even C++11 code which is considered to be the start of modern C++.

"A Tour of C++" which has already been recommended is probably a good start to get back in the game. I think there was a new version coming out, but not sure what the current status about this is.

[https://en.cppreference.com](cppreference.com) is a good resource for me. It has documentation regarding the new standards as well and up to C++20 the examples are mostly complete, at least for the relevant things.

I can also recommend watching the "Back to Basics" talks on the CppCon youtube channel and once you are more familiar also the regular talks. They are great resources about practical topics.

Jason Turner's C++ Weekly videos are also a great resource. They are usually 10-15 minutes long videos that give you a good start to think about. Great way to learn something new every week.

That's a common sentiment one hears everywhere but C++ will stick around. Surely, new projects will more often than not be implemented with Go or Rust since the systems programming space becomes more and more fragmented and specialized.

However, there is so much legacy code around that cannot or will not be replaced just because any of the competitors is better now.

That's like the holy grail when you find something like this...

Currently trying to get deeper into Rust and struggle to come up with reasonable project ideas that are fun, challenging but also not so big that I cannot "finish" them in a reasonable time.

I think Python is pretty dominant in ML.

ML is a big space and depending on what you want to do it either requires an advanced degree and access to super computers or you are good to go on a normal laptop.

There are plenty of tutorial on applied ML with open data sets, code examples and so on. I think this is the best way to start. While you go, review fundamental concepts if you can. Sometimes it's also okay to accept that something just works because it is implemented inside a library. Note, that "learning ML" isn't really a thing in the real world. You can definitely become familiar with many concepts and implementations but "learning ML" imho suggests that there is nothing left to learn.

What is your goal? Why do you want to learn ML?

Mh, since I don't see a much of an application in the business model canvas anyway, I am not sure how an AI generation tool would help there.

Probably, but I wouldn't know what I would choose to be honest. I am currently involved with starting a startup which also entails a lot of interesting aspects on the business side.

I completely feel you. On the one hand I would love to get deep technical expertise, but this is something that is not that relevant in startups. My technical expertise is good enough to build but it's rather general. I am a master of nothing basically.

Something that I struggle with is the internal battle of "oh shit I wanna know more about this cool tech" and "I wanna provide cool products to people and help create value".

I would say computer engineering is probably the broadest. You get a lot of the relevant computer science things and a lot of the electrical engineering things as well. I would consider taking some business related courses (marketing, entrepeneurship, ...). Being an engineer with a perspective on the business side of things is a good spot to be in.

Electrical engineer here.

During my studies, I did do quite some coding, but this was mostly due to my own interests. There are plenty of opportunities to code: embedded, simulations, data processing, more and more ML stuff, ...

However, what you don't learn in electrical engineering is software engineering. If you are lucky you can do data structures & algorithms but even that is not always part of the program.

If you want to work as a software engineer I would go for electrical engineering. I would probably do computer engineering or compsci. Compsci often is very very theory heavy on theoretical comp sci, but that's not necessarily bad, just not something that will help you in software engineering in my mind.

I don't feel like business model canvas is a good way to start out. I rather use the "jobs to be done" thought framework.

Business model canvas is one of these things that make you think of stuff that you don't and can't know about.

A lot of the things on the business model canvas are not known at all. So at the best you can create hypotheses, but more often than not you never test them afterwards.

The number one thing you should do when starting out is talking to as many relevant people as you can.

- Your business idea is in a certain problem space -> talk to people who work in that field: engineers, managers, sales, marketing

- after talking to 15+ people you may have a rough idea what's generally seen as challenging -> narrow down what people need, how frequently the problem is encountered, ...

- create an MVP, test as soon as possible, find partners to work on the product

This is a very draining process and takes a lot of time and energy, depending on how easy you can acquire customer interviews.

In my eyes a landing page is important and should be started early on. Landing pages will change over time anyway.

You can always have some kind of sign-up for a newsletter or a waiting list. It's important to track the landing page (e.g. mixpanel or something like this). You want to know how many people come to your page, what they look at and where they click.

Your call to action must be clearly stated. The idea is that if nobody visits your landing page, nobody will get to your MVP either. If people visit your landing page but never click the call to action, it doesn't matter if whatever is behind the CTA is working or not.

A good landing page can also be a gateway to talk to people, collect contact data, ...

In the end it's somewhere between employee and employer branding.

It gives potential candidates a feeling for what kind of things people work on. The employee gets exposure that might further his career.

As long as everyone is fine with writing a blog post and it's not just some company bullshit, why care?

It's also nice to get back some of the learnings from the industry, especially because many companies use open source libraries without ever contributing much at all.

AI will just lead to more shallow copy writing corporate blogs or blog posts. The best blogs are the ones where people do real deep dives into a topic. They often don't do this for generating leads or anything like that. They just want to share the cool shit they have done.

> my team is generally unfamiliar with coding, and if they are, aren’t up to date on best practices, as it is not their primary job.

Slightly off topic but this such a problem nowadays. Coding is everywhere now but it's treated like "it's only software", especially from people who are in more traditional engineering disciplines.

This is partly a cultural issue but it's also technical. Software engineering / coding workflows are expected to be roughly the same whenever there is coding involved. In classical engineering the processes and the mental models of how to develop a product are completely different to modern software engineering which creates the tooling vacuum that you describe.

Thanks for clarifying. Pretty much what I meant but not a native speaker so probably worded it a little bad.

Talk to your target customers. In the beginning it's mostly about "does it solve the problem" in my experience.

B2B is a large field as well. Small businesses have completely different expectations than enterprise customers.

Spot on. Devs/Engineers come in with a technology they think everyone needs while in reality nobody needs.

I have seen so many people talk about finding product market fit and they don't even really have a product. They only have a technology.

Who are your users? Are they on mobile? Are they using a tablet or a laptop?

Are they private or business consumers?

There is not enough information to answer this question. Build for where your users are and build where you can get it done the fastest.

Have you talked to your target users? If not, do so before you build anything. Don't pitch but talk about the problem space your idea is in. This isn't guarantee for success but you will get a better understanding.

Regarding project complexity: Make it as little complex as possible but as much as needed. An MVP should solve exactly one problem. It doesn't need to be fancy, but it should look okay. But again, lot of this depends on the field you are in, your target customers/audience and so on.

This is a pretty broad question to be honest.

There are different types of call to actions and different places they will appear. What they have all in common: Getting a user to click on that button.

I don't have any resources to recommend but you might want to look into marketing funnels and maybe sales funnels as well.

Do you have any more specific questions?

Yeah, but...do besides a very few people actually have problems with that?

Not sure if this is irony or not.

If it's a professional event and the attendees are only there because the companies they work for use a specific software, that makes a lot of sense.

That's more like facilitating community building and not comparable to a meetup in my eyes. Even though I might have some professional interest in using the software, it's purely based on my company's using it. What would be important in this context for me is that actual users share how they use it, what tricks they use, best practices and so on.

> This probably isn't burn out, as my job has been surprisingly relaxed for the last year.

Maybe it's bore out instead. It kind of feels like you need a hobby to fill "a void" that gives you purpose.

> So what comes next? Maybe try to make a small startup? Maybe switch to carpentry or farming? Tough it out for another decade until I can retire? What do people do after they get bored of tech?

- Startup: Lot of work, minimal pay in the beginning. Might be perfect to get back into the groove, but doesn't sound like you actually want that.

- Carpentry/Farming: Why not. Definitely gives living more meaning in my eyes. Hard work and you will likely ruin your body earlier than you want.

How about reducing working hours if that is an option and then take on volunteering work that has a meaning to you or teach/mentor kids.

> Side note: how and why did we as a society ruin that job?

Pretty much the moment someone decided that your publication count is an important metric to get funded.

It's a good start to acknowledge the fact that you want to learn and improve soft skills.

I like to read books about different things. I would call this the "theoretical foundation".

- Fictitious stories can help you understand different view points.

- Books about society, philosophy, listening strategies, ... can help to put it into a broader context.

- Dedicated books about organizing teams, conflict management, how to be a leader, that kind of thing.

I am pretty sure that there are also videos aboiut these topics.

In the end, you need to apply these things. Next time you get a new junior on your team, try to be a mentor for them, help them understand what they need to know.

That said, soft skills are .. soft. There is no right and wrong. What works for me, might not do it for you. You way of communicating might be perfect when you talk to senior engineers, but completely overwhelming for a junior.

It's easier to find people who had some exposure to C++, but that does not make it easier to find good C++ programmers.

Both are incredibly hard to find, though.

- meetups with rather specific topics (e.g. python, local startup meetup, ...)

- regular schedule (every other monday, first monday in the month, ...)

- selling from the organizer definitely kills the motivations to go there regularly

- group traits: good mixture of junior and senior people => different levels of experience and know-how

- I would not pay for regular meetups, but probably for one-time networking events if I trust the organizer to make it good or if the company pays.

- I like short talks + discussion formats. barcamps are pretty cool, too. not gonna lie.

Markdown or LaTeX is awesome in combination with git. Even better, it's a (bad) frist backup solution.

I mean, that is basically happening already. For almost all "jobs" it isn't necessary to target a very specific individual but rather a group of similar enough people.

Even with alt-right fake news people still talk in real live and that is what really drives it. People coming together and thinking that everyone is of their opinion because of the 25 people in the same pub.

Targeting specific individuals could be simplified by AI but in the end, after even a few questions to chatGPT it becomes kind of repetitive in nature.

What I see happening soon: - A lot of creative work will be aided by AI. This will create a divide and some people/industries will fall behind because they do not adapt.

The difference between kids at a playground and a startup is that kids don't have to worry about anything in that moment.

As a startup founder you usually have to worry about money (personal and in the company) which is technically the only important thing at the end of the day.

Starting a company would be like being on a playground if you could start with at least a couple of million such that you 1) never have to worry about money and 2) can fail multiple times without major consequences.

Startups are hard. I agree, it's not a bad thing and something being hard can also be the challenge that you are looking for.

It's not just installing a chat server though. It's setting up the server in general, securing the chat server, make the chat server work with your companies choice of auth, updating the chat server, updating the underlying server, .... How about file transfer in chat? Pictures? Gifs? ... That's what you gotta do with every solution you want so self-host. It takes time, costs money, and is likely still leading to a worse user experience.

Are there companies who self-host their chat and project management? Pretty sure there are. In the end, that's why slack is has a free option that works well for small teams that do not need to keep old messages.