orzig

I suspect that the more palatable path would be “normalize resume gaps”, with the first step being public data on just how damaging they currently are. It’s plausibly zero if you are technical and spent a (even small) fraction self-learning, though I truly don’t know what the data would show.

Anecdotal: A friend took about 3mo off, then spent 3mo practicing and doing FAANG-adjacent interviews for a mid career technical role. Ended up OK, taking a little longer than expected but two offers above previous salary.

I suspect it depends strongly on what you will do with the extra time. I started consulting, which would have been impossible at just one day per week, but it is totally legitimate to use it for non-revenue pursuits and going “one step at a time“ (going 80 -> 60 would likely be much easier) could make sense in that case.

Another consideration is whether you would lose benefits under a certain threshold. I almost guarantee that HR will not know off the top of their heads, so before spinning your wheels, on fuzzy lifestyle questions you should start the process of getting official documentation on how things like healthcare and vacation days will be handled, it might make the decision a no-brainer.

Anecdata: I worked at a large non-FAANG tech company, and went down to 60%. There were many fewer issues like that than I expected.

There were downsides (A project failed because I didn’t have time to fill in the shortcomings of a teammate, which I’d been quietly doing), but on the balance it was very positive.

I want to highlight that this opens with

> based on […] some quick reading I’ve done on the topic

and is dominated by a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide.

There are much better considered critiques of effective altruism than this article.

Make a sandbox repository and just break it repeatedly. Within the realm of basic commands, I bet you already know how to do most things (including recovering from small mistakes), but it feels too scary so you revert to non-– GIT methods. In a sandbox, you can get the reps in without any fear.

You could then graduate to forking a real repo. Again experiment fearlessly, with slightly more realistic scenarios.

This isn't a great article, but for Box Breathing and many other zero-risk wellness activities: Just try it. There's huge variation between people, so obsessing over the impact on the average person will take more energy than getting concrete data on how well it works for you over the course of a week.

FWIW it's been a small but positive addition to my stress reducing toolbag. Best of luck.

This is incredibly important if you want to understand healthcare. Every little thing is expensive in a way that is hard to imagine before you get into the field.

I do freelancing. Any one person‘s advice is going to be from a pretty low sample size, but here is mine: the specific industry and the geography you have contacts in matters a ton more than “the economy“ that you read about in the headlines. Maybe that’s a good thing, or maybe a bad thing, but I would recommend talking to the exact people you would be trying to sell your services to.

If you cannot get meetings with those people, it is not a good time to start regardless of the overall economy

I’ve got you: https://youtube.com/c/megabotsinc

They only did one real fight, but still 190k followers

I think the ball is in your court when launching an ad hominem attack (before we even get to the question of whether it is relevant) It seems like that should be easy enough to provide some evidence for, if it’s true.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=meditating%20collison%... Gives nothing at a glance. Do you have anything?

I read as much of the site as I could, but could somebody explain: how is SAFe different than the original agile manifesto?

That is a totally fair question, and I have to admit I did not - nuanced stories don’t fit in an online comment!

The Great Recession hit and Obama’s climate push failed[0], so I went into healthcare (as another thing that needed fixing, and which there was political will to do something about).

The lessons of all of those twists are more complex, but I still firmly believe that I got the right advice given what everybody knew at the time.

[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2012/11/obama-says-climate-ch...

The value of advice comes from arriving at the right moment to the right person, not some platonic, universal “goodness“.

For example, I wanted to drop out of college to work on climate change, and an adult in that community who I respected immensely told me “calm down, it won’t be too late by the time you graduate“.

Not too many people needed the advice to worry less about climate change (especially 15 years ago), but it was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment so that I could focus on actually learning the fundamentals of engineering before throwing myself in

Maybe the root cause is different for different people?

AI is a big field, you will have to choose a specialty. Don’t stress about it too much, you can change later, but think whether you would rather do images, text, etc. I would focus on whatever you might be able to work into your day job, as diligent as you will try to be, it will be much easier to keep momentum if it ties to what you are paid to think about every weekday.

It might not be possible to overlap the sexiest new techniques with the things that you can practice during your job, but there is a lot of fundamentals you will be learning regardless, and when you are ready to jump more squarely into cutting edge applications you will find them essential.

Tons of internal stuff; think of anything that is minimum wage knowledge worker does, some fraction of it is probably obvious enough to be automated. For example, categorizing PDFs (which go through OCR) into broad buckets so that the right specialist can look at them – the system might not be able to figure out 100% of them, but even taking a chunk out of the human workflow at 99% accuracy is pretty valuable It’s important understand what a massive flood of PDFs some organizations get on a daily basis

There is so much complexity here but I do not know where to start but I just want to throw in that the first few months of parenthood are supposed to be difficult and zombie like so don’t get down on yourself if you make some progress in the next few months, then regress. Things get better after the first year and maybe sooner

An assumption I bring it to most questions like this:

The world, including the tech world, is much bigger than you think.

Though I have only seen a tiny fraction of it myself, here’s where I’ve had reliably contained workdays: 1) Machine learning systems for internal Ops processes, we technically had on call rotation but I never heard of anyone being paged at a terrible hour 2) Data engineering for strategic dashboards, where “I will fix it when I get in tomorrow“ is totally fine 3) A cross geography team who is clients are in my time zone, which set the norm that the other people had to shift their working hours instead (I’m not saying that this is globally optimal, but they knew what they were signing up for, and I can be confident this pattern will persist)

Each has their own trade-offs, but my point is that you can find options anywhere along some dimension if you keep looking

Acknowledging that it is a big city, and “high trust“ is a vague concept:

I strongly disagree with the characterization that New York City is “the furthest thing from high trust I can think of“

I have interacted with thousands of strangers there with near perfect shared understanding of basic city etiquette. That etiquette does not include warmth, and in fact the way that we have all learned it is someone being quite rude to us when we break the etiquette, but that the city functions at all suggests they are doing something right.

Good thing all grandparents are the same, or else our models of how the world should work would have to be a lot more complex

I, for one, appreciated the reminder that this mathematical subject exists. and I’ve loved some of the ideas discussed in this thread.

A strong +1 to this thoughtful comment. I will also add an non-monetary perverse incentive, which is best described in this changed-my-worldview-forever post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...

Seriously, you will start seeing this everywhere

Remember that “officially asking for help” is a very valid step to take. If it all blows up, you can at least point to the several unanswered requests that you sent off to various people. If they reply, and you are able to help it not blow up, you can all share some credit!

If you somehow end up getting blamed for it anyway, I guarantee this is not a company you want to work for even as an intern. Find the one or two good people who might serve as references for jobs later, explain the situation you were put in, and I am confident you will be able to look back at this as a small road bump at the beginning of a successful career in the general industry

I held this attitude for the first few years of my career, having read hacker news in school. I have found that, for me, a more balanced approach works better. I have been through layoffs, but I have also gone to the weddings of coworkers and even managers.

Trying to keep that adversarial boundary was actually draining for me, so for any other young person out there reading this: moderation in all things

I live in that area and would love to start getting involved. I’ll reach out!

Anyone else who’s on the fence about getting involved: If you value building community (even aside from food in specific), your public involvement now will only snowball in impact; strike while the iron is hot!

Getting a new job might be the right answer, but don’t leave without trying to drive a hard bargain with your current employer. You might be surprised at how flexible they can be, I was able to go down to less than 5 days a week almost instantly after asking for it, for example (though at a more interchangeable role at a larger employer).

Give yourself two hours to study sales and negotiation techniques, it is a worthwhile investment for such an important conversation (and would probably be useful if you went and found something else anyway). The most important thing is to understand what feels important, and what feels impossible, on their side. I remember being shocked that a former employer was willing to discuss a $10,000 raise, but not a single additional vacation day – that’s just how the HR software worked.

All this is good advice, but I haven't seen any prospective on personal budgets:

- Remember that money exists to be spent on useful things, it's not a video game score

- Understand your monthly spending and monthly take-home. If you're in a role that grants equity, I bet you've got a healthy surplus. If not, I bet you could make some lifestyle changes to achieve that.

- Take a moment to really accept that you are fine. You are not in danger, and shouldn't carry a fight or flight anxiety.

- Then think about your future. Can't sugarcoat it, you might have had more vacations or whatever if your options didn't decline, but I bet that you can chart a course to a decent retirement. Use an online calculator. Again, your future is fine. Not great, but fine.

- Think about what your future looked like when you graduated high school (or equivalent, wherever you did it). Did it definitely include being rich? If not, then you have lost nothing relative to that. And it's possible that on this company, the next one, or the one after that, you'll end up there anyway.

- Finally, spend a little money on something you like, and cut a little money on something you hadn't gotten around to canceling (streaming service, routine meals out, etc) You have so much control over your life.

For someone whose user name is “zero gravitas”, you sure seem wise :-)

Books:

- Deep Work, and anything by Cal Newport (You can get a taste of most of his ideas for free on his blog and podcast)

- The Art of Learning. Note that he “jumped around“ at the peak of his original career, but ended up finding a common thread. To your dilemma, a major take away is that single domain can have nearly infinite novelty if you keep looking deeper

- moonwalking with Einstein: this will seem unrelated, but really listen for how The author ends up falling in love with this weird hobby. Can you find that love for anything in your life?

- Misbehaving (Richard Thaler): A young economist bumbles around for years until it starts to come together into a coherent research direction.

- The age of Wonder (Holmes): biographies of romantic scientists, know how different they all are, and also how many different phases of life they each have. I guarantee you you will see yourself in one of them, I just don’t know which

Though I do not have a book for it, my final piece of advice is to except that even the “right“ path will have some boring or even painful stretches. I don’t have a clear cut decision rule for when to stick with it, but it’s definitely not “quit immediately”. I think there’s a book called The Dip about that. Also like Adam Savage YouTube channel where you can see essentially endless hours of the sky who is definitely doing what he is passionate about, but also gets frustrated all the time when things break and such. He’s making physical things, even successful projects take many tedious hours. But there’s no question in his mind that he is going to power through.

Experienced 'survivor' here: You're going to feel (and sometimes be explicitly told) that your stress is not valid, because others have it worse. Both these things can be true. Others have it worse, and the stress you're feeling is real. If you don't acknowledge the effects and act on them (in whatever way works for you), you will undergo entirely avoidable suffering.

Again, others might be suffering more, but nobody wins when you self-flagellate.

If, in addition to taking care of your health, you want to take action on suffering, there are many options. I recommend considering an expansive moral circle and checking out: https://www.givewell.org/