mertleee

I guess I'm too simple to understand why this is useful? Just because it's been implemented in so few lines or?

Assuming we don't give all of the jobs generated to h1b's and O1's I think this could do very good things for the country. Dollars staying within the US and not going to other countries is good.

Looks cool, what sources of data are you guys using to derive this insight?

I was able to raise, it's been interesting. But a part of me feels like I just can't take this shit seriously anymore. I'd like to think I just have a real brain and self-respect for thinking this way - or maybe I just suck. Not sure that I actually care, not really that afraid of my 30s if I'm more okay thinking this way.

Frankly, I'd prefer to build / consult in a LCOL area with real seasons.

Thanks for your thoughts!

I think I'm just going to try to get a "boring" role for a few years and re-charge. Granted, anything making more than $50k a year as a "founder" will be a welcome change. Embarrassing as the recovery from this phase of my life is.

After having a seemingly "random" bout of cdiff after receiving a highly potent antibiotic for a "random" salivary gland infection - colonoscopies and antibiotics really scare me.

I believe the salivary gland infection was a result of some non-covid illness I had that may have been linked to some odd vaccine side effect or my tanked immune system.

Gut stuff is so important.

Curious what you mean by "corporate"? I'd be down to join a google et al, however my background is pretty scattered with 1yr long engagements and I'd need months to actually leetcode up to the bar that I'd even start passing second round interviews at these companies.

Open to the idea that although I like software engineering I should just do something else? Product seemed decent, because it's still solving problems lest the technical side.

Very cool! I've had great results with Mistral OCR as well. However, in terms of embedding models I've had a hard time getting consistent results with really large pdfs (over 40pgs). Ideally would like to be able to build indexes with just my two 4090s.

Would be super interested in that writeup!

Elon is a clown but I'd be more worried about $500B missing from our government accounting records.

Very curious what kind of tooling you used to create this!

Has anyone created an open source solution to check vibe-coded apps for basic auth / db configuration issues?

Page is... broken? lmao

I think it's important to highlight that this kind of advice isn't negative and it's well meaning. As engineers it can be easy to form a distortion field about what we're working on and the perception of those who might actually want (or not want) to actually buy it.

Being honest with yourself is the best way to be kind to yourself. Moving on is not giving up.

As a past founder this is immensely important. Think very carefully about he financial impacts of "taking the idea to term" and more importantly if you're happy with your current life. In many cases if you're asking yourself questions like this you likely don't have traction to make this a real thing and should maybe consider moving on.

Just hire an SRE. If you want to piss off your team and incur more costs than the annual salary of one decent SRE... ask your team to do on-call rotations.

In this day and age if you're a properly capitalized startup you should have the budget for one decent SRE hire. They often times double as a technical writer and are great at preventing knowledge silos in teams / members of a small team since they have to sort of know everything to be an effective SRE.

Best process improvement I ever made for my teams.

the irony is KYC/AML basically only made things worse for consumers while doing nothing to combat banks from doing lots of illegal things.

KYC/AML now means you have to share incredibly personal and high-risk details with... anyone you bank with or who has to transmit funds. So now every single element of the banking system is a target due to that data.

And like clock-work HSBC and Chase have still been caught and meagerly fined for transacting with known terror groups and drug cartels. At times even laundering money for known persons even on OFAC ban lists.

Historically, the "private dark room" has always been a mechanism of goofy elites.

To an extent these will always exist - but what we define as investigative journalism will likely decide whether we hear about these at all haha.

Idk, at 29, 30 and 31 I became significantly smarter - it just had to do with things I was intensely interested in. Things that could hold my focus just no longer matter. Fortunately I'm interested in engaging things that are hard.

More than willing to make tradeoffs. It doesn't have to be fancy or new.

Curious what you mean by "professional services" orgs? seems like you need a referral to get into these?

This is quite common even in austin - heck even at half decent startups.

Also, with inflation $120k is a joke relative to even my adjusted starting salary out of college.

It's not for my ego - it's being honest about what I've been able to yield from my skillset and just being able to live a modest below average life. My point of comparison is about average or below average.

I barely go out, I don't spend any money on fun things and I do personal upkeep on my nearly 14 year old car.

This advice seems to come significantly from boomers.

I'm starting with companies that appear to be relatively good fits, by no means just mass applying to anything that matches a skill / tool.

Ideally at least series-B

all in all, within the month prior to joining my friend probably applied to about 50 roles.

Curious what platforms I should attempt to network with? I have no idea where to even start with this but it sounds really interesting.

Thanks for the advice.

I've always sort of struggled putting myself in the shoes of someone who would read my resume and then pick me over another candidate.

Cover letters used to help with this - but I don't think even HR folks read these anymore...

I appreciate the perspective - but in my opinion continually lowering your standards (at this point below even average) to feel okay with my situation is what I've done in the past and it's only resulted in a bigger hole / closing off more options.

I don't want to make a million dollars a year - I'd just like a normal 9-5 even 9-7 job that provides enough to live a somewhat normal below average life.

It's insane that in 2025 this is seen as an entitlement or something that shouldn't be relatively common.

thanks ;)

Is there any way to become that guy without doing 1-2 years of grunt work under the adult supervision "guy"?

This is frankly exactly what I'm looking to land. I've just had a really hard time differentiating / finding leads. Similar to product stuff it seems like roles in the space are very few and far between and given how flooded the market is it's been very difficult just to get in the door.

Any suggestions where I could start to ween my way into this space?

Interesting, other than linkedin cold messages do you have any suggestions for finding leads in the space?

My only reservation with going this route is technical / programming folks always seem to be second class to anyone else at finance orgs / hedge funds.