watermelon59

> As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was

Would you mind elaborating on why that was the case? I’m super curious because I’ve considered switching careers to become a teacher.

As a father of a still very young boy who might be getting into sports later in school (who knows), reading that terrifies me. I’ve heard the same, in person, from friends who have kids on their school’s soccer team and whatnot.

Why don’t school provide transportation to games on the weekends? Seems like a massive waste of collective resources to have every family drive for hours to get to wherever games are played.

Is it an American phenomenon due to the car-centric culture?

Were you able to get into that role without the expectation that you’d still be functioning as an IC i.e. holding two jobs at the same time?

I had an awful experience as a lead because the massive mental context switches between leading and doing IC work were unsustainable.

Goodness, I totally misread the post lol. I somehow read it as “Mazda has a process to help their engineers deal with that.”

Can you elaborate on that? Sounds interesting.

I’m exactly 35 and in the same situation as the OP.

They essentially eliminated the SDET role across the company. There may be a few left here and there, but it used to be a whole thing of its own.

The book How We Test Software At Microsoft describes in detail what the SDET role was about and how Microsoft used to approach quality.

I think it’s a tragedy that they eliminated the discipline entirely.

Am Brazilian, can personally confirm. I used to do that too. I actually left the country with the explicit goal of shedding my Brazilian identity and becoming someone else entirely.

I think Brazil suffers from being a country where some segments of the population can’t find a relatable national identity. I feel very strongly about my state identity (I’m a gaucho from Rio Grande do Sul) to the point I’d probably support secession if that was a serious possibility, but I’ve never felt anything positive about being Brazilian.

Funny enough, 10 years later and now a US citizen, I don’t speak so negatively about Brazil anymore. Turns that that over time I found out I’m a bit more Brazilian than I thought, despite former efforts to not be one. Also, there are things I miss about living there, at least compared to living in the US. If it wasn’t for the still insane crime rates, I’d consider moving back for a season.

The ecosystem is nowhere near as mature though. I don’t work with either anymore but back in 2017 I made the switch from C# to Java and it felt like a breath of fresh air when it came to the maturity and capability of JVM tooling compared to what’s available for .NET.

> Working on something with unrealistic confidence, even if that project itself is completely doomed to failure, is probably better for you than watching Netflix.

As someone who’s heavily biased towards just sitting on the couch (but reading a book, not watching Netflix :)), but married to an unrealistically confident wife, I have to agree.

I tend to panic whenever my wife comes up with her way-too-frequent ideas and goes ahead with them with minimal risk analysis, but at the end of the day she’s a much more accomplished and satisfied person than I am. I tend to look at every project from the most pessimistic angle possible and the end result is that I almost never actually do anything. I have a lot of book knowledge about a number of things but little to no experience, whereas she’s the exact opposite, and that tends to be more beneficial in real life.

I don’t have an answer to your specific question, but I just want you to know you’re not alone. I’m also quite excitable and love talking not just about technical stuff, but all sorts of things. I’m quick to smile and laugh, and I probably overshare at times (that last one I had to learn to control).

I’ve had the same worry as you at times, but so far I’ve been 15 years into my career as a software engineer and it hasn’t been a problem as far as I know.

I’ve been learning it for over a year because I want to be able to speak to my wife in her native language. So far I’m loving to learn it for the exact reason you said, the way sentences are pieces together is outright fun to me. I’m also amazed by how much information can be packed in a small combination of characters.

Seattle has so many intersections that are completely bonkers. They’re not only poorly walkable, they also make driving extremely stressful.

> My experience in this world of embedded chips, is that many of the tutorials you read do not deal with power consumption really. They assume that you're playing with a dev board. Or that your application has copious amounts of power. But if you live in a battery powered world, your entire game lies around navigating between sleep and wake states on the chip.

This has been my experience so far trying to build my own devices at home. They all assume I’ll connect things to a USB port or have a power adapter. Material on how to deal with battery voltage dropping over time, determining battery level, etc. is really scattered. Makes me wish I was an EE major instead of CS.

> I do not care about being competitve.

> I work so I can draw a salary to fund my life. That's it. I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder. I don't care about advancing my career for the sake of advancing my career. I just want to enjoy my life, and working for a living is just my means to that end. If I'm making enough to be comfortable, I don't care about chasing a promotion or getting ahead of people. I can't think of a single thing I care about less than having a competitive advantage over other people in the Game of Offices.

I’ve made the mistake of saying that out loud during pre-pandemic lunch conversations and happy hours and every time people looked at me like I had two heads.

That’s hasn’t been my experience at all.

Worked at Microsoft and now I’m at one of the big AAA game companies (working on their online services side, not games directly) and both were/are very stressful. High expectations of commitment and personal investment in what I do.

How old were you when you went back to university? I’ve been wanting to do something like that but I feel like at 33 that’s too late.

Not OP but Dropbox for example was unique and game-changing when it showed up.

I agree with OP that nothing interesting like that has shown up in years. It's all "we're gonna make your kubernetes better" now and hardly anything that makes an actual impact on your daily life as an individual.

> Has anyone seen what it takes to run something on AWS?

I've given up every time I've tried it on personal projects. It's just a complete poorly document mess indeed.

At work we host our stuff on AWS but we have an ops team that deals with all the garbage. All I care about are APIs, endpoints and that one thing can talk to another.

Brazil.

My own anecdote as an immigrant is that I've always felt welcome here and have always been well treated, respected, and valued.

Totally different route of course, but same deal in terms of falling in love with the country. This is really home for me. America has given me much more than my birth country ever did, and my birth country was on multiple occasions a lot of more hostile to me, a citizen, than America has ever been to me as a non-citizen.

I'm currently seeking citizenship and have no qualms about swearing to uphold the Constitution and to defend the country if called to it.

I’m from Southern Brazil (very close to our hermanos in Argentina) and yes this is very true. I really look forward to eating steak when I go visit family and friends down there.

The best! It actually helped me take a more moderate view on the HN crowd. I'll admit I used to put people's opinions here on a pedestal.

Brazil has a similar system called Registrato, run by the central bank.

Honestly though, I’m not a fan of such all-encompassing federal systems. I live in the US but I’m in Brazil right now (yes, at the worst possible time for one to be here, but my mom passed away) and I’m appalled at how often I have to give heaps of personal information for the smallest inquiries or purchases. It feels extremely invasive and freedom-averse. I was also shocked at how easily some places could pull all sorts of information on me in just seconds.

That sounds far from trivial. Now in addition to your application you also have to maintain your minimal JVM to keep up with the latest developments in the mainstream ones.

For me, programming has become largely unappealing since the advent of cloud computing (which happened shortly after I entered the market). I really miss the first years of my career.

Speaking of details: your usernames. Lol. Awesome coincidence.

Sorry for going off a tangent here, but when you say you got a CS degree after being a mechanical and energy engineer, do you mean you went back to university for a full undergrad in CS? Or was that a Master’s?

I’ve been thinking of going back to school to go the opposite route (CS -> engineering, probably aerospace), but I have no idea how to go about it or how to estimate how much cash I need.

Crap, that didn’t occur to me at all! And now I realize that that’s what they probably meant facepalms

I get what the person means immediately, but it is quite jarring.

I'm gonna be a pedantic Portuguese speaker and point out that they should've named it Parceira.

Amigo parceiro.

Amiga parceira.

To be clear, I mean to this lightheartedly. Great work!