arandr0x

If the company performed well, and politics or weird accounting ju-jitsu is the reason for lower raises either across the board or in your department, you can push for the top 2-3 employees to be awarded RSUs or stock options, those usually are very well received and they're good retention mechanisms.

If somebody has ever come to you looking for a promotion or transfer (either works in this case), give them a great annual review (meaning: huge praise, no nitpicking) so they have a better chance at escaping your clearly underappreciated team.

Otherwise, give the news 1:1 (no team meeting for bad news please) and tell the truth, but not bitterly, and don't linger on the topic. Explain the priorities for next year.

As far as your own position, you need to figure out (with top management/your management) how your department is seen, who decides of the final allocation, and why you're getting scraps. Money is feedback and the feedback you're given is no one care about you or your team. No it doesn't matter if they say otherwise, what matters is their actions.

I'm in kinda that position (keeping the condo not having more than 1 kid, though). And honestly the sad thing is the kids don't care. Growing up my parents did the whole, salary treadmill, long hours, 30% travel, Saturday conference call business. The money's gone. The vacations forgotten. It kind of sucks nobody cooked in my home and I had to learn how to boil pasta at 17. I don't have college debt, but it's not like I use my degree anyway. I'm not sure all the stuff my parents doubtless told themselves they were doing for me was worth it.

Although they're light years better because of their experience, not because of any inherent merit that starting a company suddenly revealed. By far the most disgusting implementation of meritocracy is when people believe that some people are simply better than others, and their track record is a way of identifying them, when in truth, most people's track record is dumb luck but that dumb luck shaped them into quite different (and differently useful) humans.

The corollary to this is it's always worth to give a young person who has great desire to help a chance, no matter where they come from, because maybe this dumb luck (or grace on your part) will make them into, well, the kind of person that starts and sells their company.

In my experience, even if you stay frugal, and I did, the main change comes from the job requiring full-time hours (and some weird culture stuff). I worked part-time in college and programming hasn't changed, but then I had daylight hours to walk outside, the freedom to stay home if I felt sick, etc. I started working F/T and almost immediately, the hour+ commute and not seeing daylight in winter rewired my brain. Suddenly, my mornings were spent preparing my lunch so I could go to work, my evenings cooking dinner and recovering from work, and on the weekends, I did everything except talk about work. (In those days my partner was still a student, and it made the contrast greater).

After the first year, my work had become my only source of pride; after the second, I was constantly wondering how to be better at work; three years after that, I engaged in a hobby for the first time in my adult life. It snuck up. I don't like money that much and I never made the conscious decision to prioritize my career; but it ate my life and I doubled down because it was all I had left.

The fact is, for most young adults, jobs pop into their life right on cue to replace the family they're no longer seeing and the dreams that have disappointed them (around 25 where that first crisis hits). If you're 25 and lonely do not go to work happy hours. If you're bored don't take work home. When your boss tells you you're very promising and he can see you grow in this company, tell yourself you're an interesting person who's had a life full of stories that people would love to get to know. The best promises are the ones you make yourself.

I like you and you're alive for a reason.

I mean, I definitely don't think anybody should be fired for something they did 20 years ago no matter how egregious, but it's misrepresentation to say the problem is bad work. The problem is the work is needlessly and unapologetically aggressive/hurtful to certain people. The equivalent would be losing your coding job today because your github has a 20 year old rootkit on it that cost a few people their credit scores. Which, still unacceptable, but a bunch of your coworkers would still hate you for having stolen people's information and benefitted from it.

It's good that you actually give actionable advice. 1) Wake up early, 2) Don't do all your chores on the weekend, 3) Do less housework, and an optional 4) Don't have kids.

I have the same experience you do as far as routinely finding myself having "too much" free time on weekends. Just don't fill it with TV, interruptions, and bad comedowns from your job stress.

I'd like to submit the possibility that in a lot of cases dopamine is doing its exact job (which seems to be ranking your brain's predictions and facilitating learning of patterns) -- if you are correctly able to predict with high confidence the outcome of whatever you are wanting to do, then you'll end up not wanting to do it anymore (because you'd learn nothing from it -- and because the pleasure from imagining doing it is just as real). The solution is to attempt harder stuff, things that you can't right now predict, where outcomes are still uncertain, things that might bring you suffering and not just pleasure.

Where in Quebec are you located? I know a few psychologists here but nobody who actually left tech for it, it sounds like an interesting combination of skills.

Then don't code in your free time. My family likes eating my cookies and hearing me play piano.

I agree with this. I lived abroad (several abroads) for years at a time, but you don't need however many thousand miles to go meet a new society that has unique rules and different values than yours, just go spend a month at your parent's retirement home and don't be obnoxious to the locals. (Or move to the "bad" neighborhood, take a job as a teacher or police officer in the remote countryside, etc). Middle-class people exist in what is largely a pocket of society that they mistakenly think is how their country is because all the media is about them.

Women not working at this point would decrease the birth rate, because the reason people aren't having kids is they feel like they can't afford them, and halving their revenue isn't going to make them afford them more. (In locales where daycare is already very subsidized, which is most of the world.) Of course most of those people can afford kids in the absolute sense, either through paying the subsidized daycare or somebody staying home for what is essentially only a few years, but they don't want to because then they have to live in 1000sqft, own a single car, and cook their own dinner. Which is a lifestyle most people today don't want -- especially not young urban men, if they're making any money at all.

People were raised by their grandparents when I was young. Maybe the problem isn't within the nuclear family but with the idea that it's desirable to move in a different city to your parents, or even that it's an imposition to live with your parents while your children are young.

You can actually acutely treat opioid overdose (with antagonists) and so presumably the actual issue here is people use drugs alone in locations where nobody is going to check on them for something like an hour. There may be an education campaign there so that people prescribed painkillers know to never use them alone.

Also, we probably need to invest in lifestyle education for preventing depression like we do for preventing obesity. Have campaigns asking people if they've had one pleasant conversation today. Force workplaces to give people a midday break where they are allowed to leave the facility in winter. Sensitize parents to symptoms of their child developing persistent anxiety or sadness like they are to the height/weight curves. (Also, develop ways of treating mild depression that aren't SSRIs -- light therapy, animals, caffeine, sleep deprivation, whatever, but a ton of people are refusing to seek help because they don't want meds that they see as having too many problematic side effects.)

I've spent significant stretches of my life sleeping 4.5-6 hours/night on weeknights, and then 8-10 hours on weekends. It works just fine. I do drink a ton of coffee, but I'm quite alert even before my first one at 9AM, and capable of doing exercise/engaging in focused activity with zero difficulty. If I don't sleep enough on weekends though (like I have to set the alarm) I start getting jumpy and anxious though.

I can empathize with your situation and it must be very painful to be there. I hope you had awesome times with him and that you have a great life moving forward.

Nobody's gonna cure cancer. We'll be able to prevent some cancers and treat others, but cancer is a large number of distinct diseases with different causes and outcomes and you can't eradicate it.

That said you don't need to be good at biochemistry to help treat cancer. The bottleneck in pharma research right now is essentially finding big enough patient groups for clinical trials, I'm sure Javascript can help with that. (And the "best ad minds" of the generation as well). What about tracking habits that may increase cancer rates? Hmmm, Javascript can help with that. What about mapping out locations that have abnormal occurences of cancer due to possible environmental factors so nobody buys a house somewhere the local plant is dumping waste into the nearby water supply? Well, there again...

Also, you can just study biochemistry and become good at it. I did just that. It's perfectly attainable and does not require extraordinary skill.

You mention you work at a nonprofit. Do you take volunteers as well?

This was strikingly on point, although I'm saddened it's mostly about the Internet, and only obliquely mentions the status games of office culture, wider adult culture, and pre-technology child's play.

One very, very uncomfortable feeling about the Internet is status-seeking, which is now omnipresent, feels a bit too good. I used to be able to socialize in places where I knew the interaction would lead nowhere -- acquire some status the time of the conversation, make people laugh, make people stay longer than they wanted, maybe buy me candy or silly things -- then leave and kinda calmly come down and sleep and forget about them. Nowadays it's all permeating everywhere and if I want to play the game it has to be "for real" spending a bit of time building up a persona, staying on a platform, knowing whatever happens may live forever on some server or the minds of the mostly random strangers I was trying to impress. The fun part happens a lot less fast, and in addition, you have to deal with it encroaching on your real life and the status games that actually matter much more. (For example, nosy interviewers who want my GitHub.)

There used to be, well, recreational status-seeking, and now, all recreation is status-seeking. You can't even go walk in a park without somebody almost having an accident trying to take a "unique" cellphone pic. I miss having "on" periods that are intense fun but temporary in nature and "off" alone calm periods no one sees. Please somebody turn off the social thingies and give me that world back.

In r/antiMLM they sometimes talk about "financial advising/consulting" pyramid schemes involving either selling information on stocks or weird funds, and those disproportionately target men. (And reading Gang Leader for a Day, apparently for some proportion of inner-city boys selling drugs is a pyramid scheme of sorts.)

Women usually spend more on products, and pyramid schemes are definitely targeting consumers by dangling the carrot of helping them pay for the product they are consuming so much of, so it'd make sense that they'd mostly be made up of women. It's not always "falling for" in the sense that women are not always caught up in the scammy part; sometimes they really like the product that much, and sometimes it's a social thing that they're OK paying for to stay in the community. If anything that there exists consumers of pyramid schemes that are OK partaking in the pyramid part but not taking it seriously makes it worse, because it legitimizes the whole activity in the eyes of a) uninvolved husbands/bystanders and b) potential marks who are really falling for it.

In my experience people provide excuses because they're being addressed by management in a way that is unnecessarily negative and/or management is wanting to find "guilty people" and not work out which is the best person for the job of fixing things.

That the article is clearly refusing to even mention this casts a big shadow over the rest of its conclusions. Some of the other things are the result of personality (like taking credit or sloppiness) but making excuses is 100% context and a defensive coping strategy literally every time I have seen or done it.

How exactly would you "set" a mental injury?

So it is for more money.

At 10h/week I'm assuming you're a consultant. Have you tried accepting more jobs than you feel you can do (not a lot, a little more) and then giving the client a deadline? It's not usually recommended because it's stressful but you're essentially having issues not having a boss and as a freelancer the clients are your boss.

It seems like your efforts to work more are very self-directed (working on ideas you had vs things customers are asking for) -- in my experience some clients will definitely bring you metric tons of coffee and breathe down your neck for hours if you'd let them, so doing client work may be easier (and well, more lucrative). Smaller clients are more agile(/annoying). Clients who are local are more likely to engage in high-pressure behavior to remind you they're important, like, pick up the phone.

People are talking them out of it because the way they word it sounds like there's no reward. They don't need or want more money -- they don't have trouble working harder when needed -- they have no generalized motivation issue or mood issue that would affect their quality of life. So... they're not working harder because they don't want to?

I mean it would be like asking "how can I deep clean my house every day" and then explaining that you never have visitors, you find your house fine as it is, you have had no health or sleep issues, and you really only go a week between cleanings. It's a caliber of problem where I guess there's drugs for that, but it's also not really a problem in the first place.

This was my life in college and I eventually realized I just had an above average prioritization mechanism. If it doesn't really matter, and I don't feel like doing it, it's not getting done.

It's actually pretty productive at baseline since I can do the things that do matter lightning fast, so if you're like that, just try to do more things/more varied things (for example start a class not related to your job or get a second job not in the same field). (Also different/more intense physical activity. I don't know if you're like that but I'm a standard issue adrenaline junkie in addition to having selective motivation.)

Gifted education is, I believe, an area that has rather too much funding compared to gifted mental health services. (Mental health services generally, of course, but often gifted children are functional long enough and just enough that debilitating conditions that have nothing to do with intelligence, but could end their life, are not identified in them.)

A lot of the gifted education policy discourse seems to treat gifted children as resources where the yield must be increased. But they are, like all children, humans and the primary problem of their condition is not "not achieving according to their ability", but indeed it is suffering. Policy should strive to address, first, suffering, and only then be concerned with achievement. (Again, as with all children. For example, this is what is done with education for children that don't have the intellectual abilities for regular schooling.) And I don't really wish to tell actual experiences here, but gifted children have plenty of suffering that is not simply due to being bored in school or not told they're smart often enough.

You'll make decisions. They will have consequences. For good or ill they will change your life forever.

No, but, seriously, I'm scarcely older so I distinctly remember what it's like to be young and watch stuff feel permanent for the first time. Having a job, a house, no immediate plans to leave your city, whatever. You wonder if that's all there is and if it's not why whatever else can't come any faster. You realize you've got mostly what you wanted and everything else you could want seems small or like someone's already done it. And you watch the days stretch and all alike.

So my prescription is:

* Wake up in the middle of the night (or stay up till the middle of the night, but sober). Go outside. Observe that your immediate world isn't, in fact, only what you usually see of it.

* Make older friends, they'll tell you you're full of it.

* Make younger friends, they'll think your boring old man life is the epitome of freedom.

Will you want to move to California at 32? It's kinda old to be starting over in a brand new place with no friends, high cost of living and terrible traffic (as well as about zero dating prospects). I mean usually 32 is the kind of age where you care about more than money.

OTOH there are plenty of places in Canada where you can go to university in-province for not a lot of money, most of the classes are online, and Canadian employers care more about degree than US ones. (But... if you eventually want to move to the US... does that matter?)

There are ways to achieve the move to the US part without the degree part, of which the two easiest ones are probably find a job at a multinational, get transferred, apply for green card and start vacationing in the area you eventually want to live, meet a nice girl, marry her, go join her family. Both would take years but so would getting a degree, so really, the only advantage of the degree is with it you can apply to FAANG internships.

> Can I both get a CS degree and work full-time?

Yes.

> How likely am I to complete the degree, given that things in my life could change (opportunities, disease, motivation, depression, passion, love, children)?

> What's the opportunity cost, in time/money/experience?

>Should the excuses I attribute to my lack of degree be attributed to something else (mental barrier, low confidence, imposter syndrome)?

That's something only you know.

> Is there a shortcut to get an accredited Master's degree without getting a Bachelor's degree?

Not really. There are ways to get a MS degree is a different field than your BS, or to get a MS degree if your BS GPA doesn't meet the degree program requirements, but I don't know anyone who'se done it with no degree.

> Are there different career paths in which I won't have to worry as much about my lack of degree (i.e., freelancing)? Are they sustainable?

I know people who freelance and have no problem making a living doing so, including some people who have always been freelancers. It depends what your professional network looks like.

I've never had a BMI above 19 since puberty, so I can't speak as to being overweight. However I did gain (a welcome...) 10 pounds when I moved to the US. I attribute this to:

* my workplace had free candy bars lying around (think Reese's and that kind of stuff)

* bigger portions in restaurants

* temptations for things like cookies and muffins; there were bakeries everywhere on my way to/from work

So I would suggest the opposite thing. Move somewhere with no bakeries or restaurants (rural is good), pick a health conscious workplace or lobby your boss to remove snacks from the building (dangle the health insurance prices carrot if needed). Also you can do a thing I did which is go to work by train, the station was 2 miles from the office. Easy daily workout. I ran instead of walking because the train was usually late.

In summary, you should re-arrange your life to fit your desired weight goal rather than rearrange yourself struggling every day against a life that is clearly pushing back against you.

I work as a programmer in Canada. In the past 10 years of my career, exactly one employee has taken the full parental leave at my workplace (a woman), and several male employees have taken parental leaves from 5 weeks to 4 months. In addition, two male employees were out on sick leave for sport-related injuries that they essentially caused themselves during the practice of their hobby, each for several months. All sports and accident related injuries are more common in men than women because women are more careful. Some common injuries can permanently damage the brain (unlike pregnancies). I really don't think women are more at risk than men of taking leave as programmers in Canada -- for different occupations it is different, for example in female dominated orgs there's usually a "culture" around motherhood and taking time off etc and it's almost a status symbol so people do it more. Not so in programming.

I know HN loves politics but I made my original post in the spirit of seeing replies like yours where it's less about ascertaining which side is "best" and more speaking about your lived experience and things you liked and didn't. It's great that you've been there so long and are defending the values the US has because (I suppose) they match those that have always been yours.

I think that's exactly the discussion we should have re: this tech/non-tech divide. Whether what we want is to help our neighbors, or live near only people who can (and choose to) help themselves. And there's definitely people in both camps and you know where you are because you live through both, like you and I did, and get an uncomfortable or bleak feeling at some point, not because of watching election talk or economic lectures.

Also I'm actually Canadian so I don't know where the thread's obsession with communism and Sweden or wherever has come from. The poor people on the bus from my OP see the same sky you guys do ;-)