ansq

YMMV. I chose 'materials' instead of courses specifically since I've found books to be more useful.

A course, or any kind of structured learning, is just a foundation. I would still expect to spend hours outside of the course, but with a good background I can now search for more specific things than if I had started w/ a blank slate.

+1. You can easily turn 10 hours of connecting the dots into 2 hours with the right materials.

Though in my experience, the courses on Udemy/Udacity and the like have been disappointing. I always get the feeling that they're trying to fill up time, and they tend to move really slowly.

I've had more luck with books being very useful.

> "for some writing code itself is an act that clarifies the still-murky concepts and helps to produce a good writeup."

This is my philosophy after ~2 years of working on distributed systems. I got sick of vague design discussions where everyone has a 5 minute memory.

I am much happier to sit at my desk and figure it out by writing code, then produce a design doc once I have a solid prototype working. It feels more honest and real.

At the same time, I wonder if I'm missing out on a different way of doing things.

Owning 10% doesn't mean you're a peon. At 10% of a 1B company you probably have a good amount of autonomy.

Some people take pride in creating products that are widely used + lots of jobs.

A few possible reasons:

1. You can't foresee competition, why give up early.

2. It's a big market, worth a shot even if it fails.

3. Someone thought the project would be good for their promotion. This happens more frequently than you might think :)

It sounds like you're trying a lot of out there ideas (volunteering at cafe, open source donations, helping out at hackerspaces, etc).

My advice is to try to halt all of that and dedicate 100% energy towards traditional ways of finding a job over the next month.

Out of curiosity, what about family?

My incompetent manager got promoted because higher level people on the team left.

It's a viable career strategy. It's hard to hire, so if you stick around you'll have more responsibility fall into your lap.

The other thing I notice is that he's great at kissing butt.

As an aside, my advice to people stuck under a crappy manager is to get out ASAP. You can even switch teams and be under the same skip manager.