I thought buying bitcoin to pay work off related malware infections was "too expensive" at $300 when in reality I could have purchased several thousand bitcoin, had my client reimburse me, while keeping a chunk for myself because of course I would have.
also, the idea of being not being able to get hired or fired is really a silly concern as I always did my job well and did not want to leave my "safe" job.
Performing formalized risk assessments can provide you with insights about a risk you're thinking about taking. I think it helped me take the right risks and leave the workforce early.
Emotionally? Just* ignore them and pursue the thing that pays you the most. It's boring and it's unhealthy and it's hard and it's not romantic.
If i retired in my mid twenties I think I would still hate myself. Knowledge of algorithms doesn't feel like labor to me it still feels like a curse. I'm pretty braindead and hardly self-sufficient now but I'm glad I never took any of the big payouts I had presented to me in my youth. I still don't know what I would do with myself if I had any significant amount of money that wasn't earned off labor but instead me selling my stake in companies / projects / what-have-you.
When I started preparing for interviewing, I spent most of my times studying general data structures & algorithms and practicing applying them to different problems. I don't think this is so bad and can lead to a lot of learning you wouldn't do otherwise.
The frustrating thing, is how easy it is to hack the test. After one particular interview, I remember talking to a friend about how hard the technical interview was. He told me that he had already seen the problem and knew it would come up because he bought leetcode premium for the interview. Kind of frustrating to spend hours and hours learning data structures and algorithms when the real key to success is getting lucky and memorizing the problem before hand
Leetcode premium doesn't mean you'll see the problem. I suspect the probability of that is low, given these problems are constantly changing (there's a banned problem list at Google) and the interviewer pool is as well.
