twayamznacct

Thank you - I have thought about this on and off but the thought of speaking to someone about this in-person (or even over the phone) terrifies me to the point of almost breaking down just thinking about it.

I know it's irrational, and I know I need to do it, but that doesn't make it any easier :(

> I wasn't quite clear if the problem was the work or the company?

I honestly don't have a complete answer for this. I mean, I know the work is a major problem, but it's not the only factor by far. It's definitely the one front and center, however.

As for other "life" things, I believe I do well there. I get 8 hours of sleep, I exercise 4 days a week, eat healthy, etc. No relationships but I'm antisocial to a tremendous degree so there's not much helping me there.

I appreciate the comments. Thank you!

Everything I've read has led me to believe that whiteboard interviews for internal hires/transfers are still a thing at this particular company, so I've avoided even that...

For me, at least, the problem is something else. I never expected it to be "special" at any of these places...I'd likely be exactly this unhappy doing the same meaningless work I'm doing here, elsewhere. I just took the jobs because they paid well and, at least at the beginning, I was going to be doing things that were of reasonable interest.

I tried the "take time off route" once, and while it was alright, I was consumed with thoughts of whether or not I'd ever be able to get a job again, to the point where I couldn't enjoy it simply because I worried about the future (and it wasn't because I only had a few months of runway - living frugally I could have likely stretched my savings to two years or so, but the panic got to me after half a year).

I, quite frankly and totally honestly, don't see any way out at this point. I live life in an aimless fog, with no drive towards anything any more (which also makes it very difficult to do things like study for whiteboard-hazing).

I was at Amazon in the past but I am not currently there. That's as much as I'll narrow things down :)

-Edit- I used this acct as a throwaway in the past to respond to an Amazon-related topic and then just kept using it!

"Awful" would be the first word that comes to mind.

I've spent three years at my current position at one of the "big 5", and after the first 9 months there were reorgs and I haven't been doing the things I was hired to do since. Instead I work on things that I have zero interest towards, and can feel my soul being sucked out of me daily.

It has gotten to the point where I cannot even imagine heading in to work each morning. My entire body and mind rejects the notion. Somehow I manage to make it in on autopilot, and pretty much autopilot throughout the day. Any acts of sentience on my part while at the office are immediately doused with reminders of how much I hate all of this, and I quickly retreat back.

Unfortunately, this has done nothing but cause an ever-amplifying depression spiral. At this stage I can't even imagine trying to get another job as I don't think I'm capable of passing the whiteboard-hazing at any tech company given my current state of mind.

I'm just going to wither away here until the end I imagine.

To be fair: it's not "awful" by any traditional metric - I'm not being overworked, yelled at, treated like shit, etc. But acknowledging that doesn't help my thoughts, any.

Probably the one that isn't owned by two wealthy elite individuals...

What I don't get about Cardano is that it has almost NO use at all. The number of transactions per MINUTE can be counted using only your hands (every so often you may need to include your toes):

https://cardanoexplorer.com/

I'm having a really hard time reconciling that with the fact that it's got a market cap in the billions at this point...

Hahaha, you mean the vision where one wealthy elite gets even MORE power than everyone else?

I suppose it could be even worse though, it could be the upcoming UB fork.

I'd be curious to see any sort of proof (or, for lack of direct proof, something pointing the finger in this direction) in this.

I say that without sarcasm. A legitimate request.

Wealthy Elites losing and Wealth Elites gaining, while the normal folk just get to look on in disgust at both.

Sounds like the current state of cryptocurrencies for sure.

Just out of curiosity, why only BCash and not the other "big" forks of BTC (like Gold)?

Thoughts like these are what have really reduced my will to live.

If I had made a simple decision back then there's a good chance I'd never have to waste my life working again. I could have been freed by now, to live a life dedicated to whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to do it.

Kinda like how a third-party prints USDT in the cryptocurrency case ;)

I was going to be smarmy and post a lmgtfy link with the contents "Wash trading price increase" but decided against it.

There's a reason why wash trading is regulated against.

For your question in (2)... Wash trading?

Some of the exchanges have zero fees for high enough volume on some trading pairs... and if an exchange themselves are running wash trades it's not like they'd be paying their own fees anyways.

I'd argue you're getting richer, not wealthier. A very key distinction.

I do have money in cryptocurrency, just to be clear. Only because I expect to be able to sell it for a higher value to a greater fool down the line (and have no misconceptions about what it is and the risks involved).

I keep hearing about how cryptocurrencies are a revolution and the "Greatest Transfer of Wealth in History" and all I have in response is that it appears to be nothing more than yet another transfer of wealth in the wealthy elite's favor. The wealthy get wealthier, while those not wealthy may get a few crumbs to placate them (10x returns on 6 - 8 figures investments + funding to build massive scale ASIC/GPU farms versus 10x returns on 3 - 4 figure investments and no ability to generate meaningful returns via personal mining).

Business as usual.

> Bitfinex has been undergoing third party audit from Friedman for months now.

Is there proof of this? All I've seen (and I may be ignorant of the rest, so this is a legitimate request :) ) is that "note" from Friedman LLP that explicitly stated it was not an audit.

You mean the document that specifically noted it was not an audit? That audit?

IF there is a hard fork to resolve this I hope some very hard questions are asked regarding why there was a hard fork for this, and not one for the earlier Parity bug given that the amount of funds lost in both were roughly equivalent.

Unless I am recalling incorrectly, the bug during the summer did not impact anyone on the Ethereum team, while this one did.

Which would make the motivation behind a hard fork in this specific case ... questionable.

I think that would be the time I divest myself of the ETH I hold.

Disclaimer: (If it wasn't obvious from the above :) ) I hold a decent amount of ETH (thankfully not in a parity multi-sig wallet!)

Disclaimer: Ridiculous pager duty was one of the reasons I quit Amazon (combined with massive failures in management, which I'll describe shortly).

The team I was on (retail-related, not AWS), shifted away from the rolling schedule with your counterparts in India taking over for the other 12 hours in order to push the "promote ownership" BS.

The only problem? Management was constantly pushing for new things to get done on extremely tight deadlines (including "emergency features" that needed to be done and in prod in days when they likely required a week of design efforts to get right, never mind actual dev time) so you have two options:

(1) Develop something stable, with good test coverage and the like, and work to fix it if it breaks... and work 20 hours to get it done.

(2) Shit something out as fast as you can and hope it breaks when someone else is on call (who likely will be too busy triaging SEV3-5's during business hours to even think about spending time fixing the root cause of the SEV1/2, rather than mitigating it and moving on...or, even worse (!) (/s) try to get the actual feature owners to fix it) in order to maintain some semblance of work-life balance.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess at which route was generally taken.

I despise the industry that I work in (the tech industry, if you couldn't guess :) ) and doing nothing but consuming after I put in my time at work is the only thing keeping me from a massive depressionary spiral and self-harm.

I've tried, before, to do things, and my mental state has quickly deteriorated to a worrisome point.

Do I wish I could do things? Absolutely. But my hatred of what I do, and the fact that it's the only real thing I'm good at in a productive sense, means that I've never found another outlet that I can work on and not spend the entirety of the time dwelling on how much I hate it.

So all I do is play games and watch internet videos on my off time. Deep down it crushes me that this is my life, but thus far I've managed to keep that mostly bottled up.

(1) Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, etc. Effectively "printing money". Perhaps not entirely arbitrary, as it's limited to the number of bitcoins in existence in the "main" chain at the time of the fork, but good enough.

(2) There are a very small number of third parties that control the vast majority of hashing power

> I am excited about ethereum, which turns the global mining network into a Turing complete engine for arbiterless smart contracts

Until the owners (and there are owners) of Ethereum don't like the outcome of a particular contract and roll everything back for their profit/gain.

I haven't talked with anyone, unfortunately. And I have thought about moving to a different industry but I don't even know where to start with that. Despite my total, and growing dislike, for this industry, it remains the sole thing I identify with (which is also a problem).

I do recognize that the first step is talking with someone but...it's a tough first step.

> what conditions need to occur where a man who most likely can get another job easily enough and who has switched jobs before decides that ending his life his a better course of action then switching jobs.

From my perspective (which isn't as bad as considering suicide over changing a job...but still pretty bad in terms of depression), there's a huge mental block in terms of ability to interview, especially given the terrible interview practices across most of the industry (5+ hour algorithm regurgitation sessions).

This would require "studying" algorithms for hours a day to refresh my memory. In my currently depressed state there's not a chance that I could bring myself to do that once I'm off work for the day...nor could I possibly imagine even participating in the interview process itself right now even if I felt confident in my ability to vomit back algorithms to the interviews.

I wish it was that simple for me...by all rights I work at a place with good work-life balance (not a startup) and good management that doesn't drive stress into devs, but I feel innately against everything in this industry at this point. 99.99% of everything anyone does, including myself, seems utterly pointless.

I've had anxiety attacks so bad because of this that I haven't been able to get out of bed in the morning. I can't remember the last time I've legitimately felt happy.

What about the ~20% of the population with one or two APOE4 alleles?

There's no real route, no, but you can take the EB Green Card path. You just can't leave the country from the period starting when you file for adjustment of status and ending when you get EAD/AP (otherwise you're never coming back in under TN status again and will likely get banned for a few years :P)