dm03514

Nothing is at all lost, 43 is young, you are highly trained, you had skills you were happy with, it's infinitely easier to brush up on skills than learn them the first time.

You have to execute to turn this around. I would set completely realistic trivial goals for yourself to begin with, so that you can practice executing and winning.

Some examples:

"Apply for a single job per day".

"Walk 5 minutes per day".

Things that you know 100% you can achieve. After achieving these for a couple days or weeks, sit back and celebrate, you're executing! you're taking the steps necessary to begin turning your life around. It is one small step at a time. Mark your calendar with green on the days you achieve, watch the greens add up, you are executing you are making strides to improve your life. Celebrate, keep expanding your goals.

The 10 days were split between 3 team members (myself and 2 others).

The situation is a failure, feels arbitrary and makes me livid.

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Would love to do that :p get their numbers tell them to make sure they have internet at all times and be within 5 minutes of their laptop at all times.

My anxious thoughts lead directly to physiological changes, increased heart rate, shallow breathing, sweating etc. Based on the people in my life without anxiety, they can have similar thoughts as me, even "anxious" in nature, but they don't seem to have the physiological response that I do, as an anxious person. What do you all think?

I have no idea if it was anxiety or Covid, but the dizziness was disorienting, at the worst I couldn’t walk , it felt like I was on a boat. During this time I had anxiety attacks almost non stop-triggered by the vertigo. As soon as I started to notice the vertigo I would begin to spiral because it was so unprecedented and disorienting. It just cleared up on its own after 8 weeks.

Part of the vertigo was dizzy spells every time I stood up.

I had ~ptsd from it for a full year, every time I stood up I would brace for the vertigo ,

Hope you find some relief soon

Apply what you're learning to impact your reality :)

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Maybe this is a bit abstract but I feel like one of the highest impact things you can do is incorporate the learnings into your day job, experiment, write about the impacts w.r.t your dayjob. I believe that this happens naturally and subconsciously as we learn but I try to make it explicit.

Build your psychology learnings into your interpersonal/team dynamics. Write about the results of what happens when you incorporate them.

Take your history passion and apply it to analyze the historical evolution of your dayjob, or incorporate the learnings of the past to influence your teams success in the future.

I feel like History, anthropology, psychology are ripe with examples, case studies, prior experiences that are directly applicable to day to day human interactions!

2. What helped me was realizing no one can notice the subtle changes in my mood shifts and my anxiety, literally no one, even if they could, so what?

3. One of the biggest things to help me was realizing that no one actually cares what I’m saying or how I come across, it may sound quite negative but it’s actually quite liberating when it comes to social anxiety, no one notices and no one is reflecting to themselves “was __ awkward in that brief conversation back there?”. “ Did __ seem nervous?”.

My actual suggestestions are basically the same as everyone else’s:

- practice, if one particular situation causes you a disproportionate amount of anxiety, put yourself in it as often as you can. For me it was public speaking, but after a decade of speaking in front of groups of people regularly it’s literally a no op now,

- gym, I have no idea what it is but walking around with a sore body boosts my confidence, not a big body, not lots of muscles; just a sore relatively fit body, if you do HIIT you’ll literally practice high physical stress scenario regularly (fast heart rate) and your body will be better equipped to handle operating under those circumstances, ie you’ll be more regulated and it will be easier to maintain a clear head under a “flight” response .

- realizing that ultimately everyone is pretty preoccupied with their lives, most of the times when I speak most people aren’t even listening :p or they forget about it a minute after I talk, when I finally realized this it really helped me.

- listen more than you speak, ask open ended questions, take a general interest in the people you’re speaking with, if you show interest because you’re authentically interested in speaking to people and listening to people, they will open up, even in just regular normal everyday conversation, if you’re too nervous speaking right now, how about listening???

I'll update the description with how I see this book in relation to the Google SRE books.

This book aims to provide hands on examples of implementing a number of concepts described in Google's SRE books. It also describes how i've seen SRE concepts impact some of the organizations I've worked in.

A couple chapters are hands on debugging exercises going through the process of debugging applications based on data. I'm excited because every chapter describes something that I've done in paying jobs, so it documents real life SRE in action at various size organizations, and not theoretical SRE concepts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29487787

I had pretty much the exact same symptoms you are describing. I am also in my mid-thirties. It was extremely uncomfortable. It was disorienting enough that whenever I experienced it (which was daily) I would start to spiral out and have a near panic attack, i.e. it was extremely anxiety inducing. It was so uncomfortable, sometimes when I stand up (1 year later) I still brace myself for it.

I wish you a quick recovery.

About 7 years ago I got a massage and went to a store in a location that usually caused me a ton of stress due to the driving and the parking and how overcrowded the store gets. After the massage I did not experience any stress; 0, none, zip, zilch. My muscles were completely relaxed and had 0 stress in them.

At that moment I realized that stress doesn't cause tightness, but tightness causes stress, for me. Relaxed muscles relaxes my mind.

I was searching for this issue and found this lawsuit and cannot wait to be part of it.

Dealing with Paypal during the time was borderline abusive and I felt helpless every step of the way. In 2010 when they froze my account they mailed me a physical letter with an activation code which took weeks, and when I called to confirm my account I was told that the code was incorrect...

I had very very little money in my account < $100 and I can't imagine how frustrating it would be for someone who needed paypal for their income.

I'm happy to be in a position where I can choose to never use paypal again and I hope they are punished for the way they treat their customers.

I started a company a couple of years ago and sunk weeks/months into the boilerplate, eventually to abandon the project, package the core product as an CLI and open source it. Hoping to avoid that again in the future :p

I also performed reviews on pullrequest.com (~2+ years ago?). I firmly believe code reviews are an interactive and knowledge sharing process but was explicitly told NOT to ask questions during pull requests, but instead to make statements focusing on bugs and style.

Based on the comments here, this def looks valuable to some of pullrequests.com customers. I believe this is more of a human acting as a safety net, or risk mitigation strategy, and loses the majority of the value that pull requests can provide to an organization.

I just bought an old house with known lead paint. I had as much remediated as I could but there is still (covered) lead paint on the radiators, door casings, stairs, soil and porches.

What sort of exposure does this provide my children? How likely are these to be airborne? How much ingested lead dust is necessary to affect my children's blood levels?

We had a baseline blood test before we moved in, but now it's just waiting 4 months until their updated test, and me being an anxious mess and wiping everything down and touching up paint constantly.

Is this actually true?? I’m concerned because I read that you’re making decisions based on this assumption and I’m not necessarily true this assumption is inline with reality.

I’m 36, and have been moving away from coding for the last couple years too, I’m deeply concerned because engineering seems to earn more across the board than project management.

My strat is doubling back down on coding, by starting to read engineering and algorithm blogs and books in my free time, and finding little toy projects and scripts to do.

This is from Ray Dalio's book "Principles". The whole book really blew my mind but this quote especially. Our perception and interpretation of reality isn't actual reality. This is a humbling reminder that the motivations that I think are driving people aren't reality. It's a good reminder to stay open minded, and seek the truth, instead of assuming.

https://on-systems.tech/109-toward-predictable-engineering-v...

PR's become more of a gate to see if you understand the problem and test for the solution opposed to HOW you went about it. Maybe I've had bad experiences but focusing on HOW is really prone to toxicity. I try to avoid that in PRs at all cost and foster a culture of collaboration, shared understanding of the PROBLEM and Respect for the Constraints. I've left places because of extremely toxic PR culture, so I'm probably pretty jaded :p (The culture was so bad I dreaded asking for reviews.)

How did you prove that your solution works and respects the constraints?? How do you protect yourself and others from future changes? Everything else is an implementation detail.

At a prior job we had a lot of code that wasn't structured in a way that made it easy to exercise using the race detector. This was combined with misunderstanding about what the race detector did and didn't do. For example there was one team that ran `-race` on non-concurrent code, and expected it to verify race conditions.

- The tiny standard library and low learning curve make it quite easy to get started.

- Concurrency is a first class citizen, through goroutines and channels

- The performance, combined with the low barrier to entry, combined with its popularity make it very desirable for companies

In my experiences this means a lot of companies without deep concurrent programming experience begin to adopt it. In my experiences this means concurrent programming errors....literally EVERYWHERE. I've seen (and created these of course) in every company I've been at and in huge open source go projects.

I wish go would address this through first class tooling or type supported in the language like rust.

I have a hueristic based approach that I've had success with when writing and reviewing code, but writing a static analysis tool for it is a bit out of my experience:

https://medium.com/dm03514-tech-blog/golang-candidates-and-c...

Would you consume edibles or smoke?? I just take edibles

It initially helped me to stop drinking. I pretty much swapped out alcohol for marijuana. Alcohol felt really bad for me physical, emotionally, and mentally. And marijuana doesn’t.

I found a lot of other benefits:

- unwind and integrate my brain. As an engineer my brain is constantly is “solve” mode, always thinking about problems at work or side projects. Marijuana stops that, my thoughts and brain feels much more integrated.

- easier to focus and be present with my kids. I wish that I could just sit and enjoy long periods of time with my kids, but my head is always uneasy, checking work, phone, thinking about problems. Marijuana dials that back and lets me be present and focused

- emotional introspection. I had some pretty shitty things happen to me in childhood. I’ve never really reflected on them. I’ve started to repeat some of the abusive behaviors that I experienced growing up. Marijuana has helped me to really introspect my emotions and be open to integrating that trauma

- helps relieve low level anxiety and depression, it’s uplifting. I eat low dosage edibles most nights and positive mood effects linger through the next day

- it’s just fun :$ it feels good and is recreational. Music sounds different, food tastes more intense

I never would have guessed It would be so positive for me. I smoked for a couple months In my late teens until it started making me paranoid. I never would have guessed It would provide me so much benefit. I certainly would never ever have guessed I would become a daily user in my later 30s AND it would significantly improve my quality of life

I just took edibles daily for ~5 weeks. I haven't taken them for ~1.5 weeks and my perception has completely changed. They pulled me out of my head and thoughts, I am now much more aware of my body sensations and visually aware of the things around me, colors, angles, layouts. It feels like a completely different world.

In my early 20's I had similar experience that I would have absolutely described has hppd. I smoked heavily for ~6 months and when I stopped it was so unsettling and caused me extreme anxiety and mental anguish; my visual perception of the world was completely different. There was a 'before' and 'after' perception and my mind couldn't accept it. I had crippling anxiety, would avoid people, couldn't hold a job, would have panic attacks and believed I was going crazy. It was literally hell.

https://medium.com/dm03514-tech-blog/technical-debt-poor-sys...

I believe a lot of tech debt is choosing locally optimal solutions, and that leads to organizations never reorganizing the code to reflect their understanding.