> It's much easier for an unscrupulous person to find a friend who's willing to inflate their achievements on the phone than to provide on-the-spot solutions to programming problems they lack the skill to solve themselves.
A good hiring manager will be able to sniff that out rather quickly. Following up on references doesn't mean calling it a day after one random phone call either.
Ha! But in all fairness, multiple references, with references coming from verified previous employers. A quick phone call to the candidates prior employers to verify employment/listed reference will flush things out quickly. Also, most people are terrible liars when pressed ... even on the phone. It does require effort by the hiring manager though.
> Surely that’s a better signal than a 60 minute coding test.
It is! Where I work we have a min of three references required for non-entry level jobs and it reveals quite a bit at higher levels. It does require more effort on the part of the hiring manager though and I suspect most would rather punt it off to a test than do the due diligence when it comes down to it.
First off, take a step back and do about 2 - 5 minutes of deep breathing ("Box Breathing" [0] is a popular technique.) Second, know that you are not alone here. You've got a team working on solving the problem and you aren't tackling it all by yourself. You can relax your shoulders a bit. Third, it's OK if the project doesn't get done on time ... no matter what the PHBs are complaining about, it doesn't matter. I've also got 20 years in (plus two major burnouts) and I have never seen a missed deadline be more then a minor setback. It happens all the time.
Now, going forward. Yes, it sounds like you need a break/vacation. Take one! Vacation time is meant to be used. It also sounds like you are juggling too many projects at work. Talk with your bosses and see if you can offload some of these projects or get more people hired. Communicate with them that you and your team are overloaded and it's not good for the organization.
Lastly, dealing with anxiety takes time and there is no shame in getting help from a professional. In the mean time, the NHS has a number of good audio/resources regarding mental well-being [1]. I came across them a long time ago and found them quite helpful. Also, talk with immediate family members or even close friends if you can. We are social, family-oriented creatures after all and need support. Taking care of your physical and mental health is a life-long journey and there are LOTS of techniques and things to do. Some will work for you, some won't ... everyone is different. You might also stumble again and that's completely normal. You will absolutely get through this (and anyone else reading who is in the same boat).
Compounding interest...if you start early enough and take advantage of employer contribution matching, etc. But most people in the US won't retire as millionaires, let alone even retire. Unforeseen life events often cause people to dip into retirement savings and in some cases wipe out any gains. Also, once in retirement, life in the US can still be quite expensive. For example, Medicare and all the additional supplemental insurance(s) you need is absurdly expensive for retirees. Everything in the US is "out of pocket".
> a hybrid private/public pension model like the US
I'm not sure pensions exist in the US beyond a few public sector ones. The US model is entirely private at this point for all intents and purposes.
Also keep in mind that only about 55% of the US population owns any stock (including retirement accounts) [0], so (IMO, not an economist) the US is most likely looking at a retirement crisis in the coming decades.
The US has a public pension scheme called "social security," which guarantees at least a minimum level of income in retirement to all citizens (although, not enough to live on IMO).
This is intended to be supplemented with private investments via 401k & IRAs, which are actually relatively new programs (created in the late-1970s, but nobody even talked much about them until the 90s).
So while most millennials understand they need to be saving privately in these vehicles (r/personalfinance has 15 million members), there's a huge forgotten generation in the middle who slipped through the cracks between the transition from industrial-era corporate pensions to personal saving.
These are the folks who will unfortunately bear the brunt of the retirement crisis, having to get by only on Social security.
If you hit a bug with a popular, open-source framework, the odds are great that others have as well and it will get escalated and solved quickly. The same can't be said for closed-source, proprietary frameworks. Also, writing it entirely yourself always leads to re-inventing the wheel over and over again. Furthermore, I have yet to see any proprietary framework that wasn't in some shape or form a poor knockoff of something already existing in the open-source world.
I have to disagree. The JVM is one of the biggest pluses and might be one of the most battle-tested pieces of software out there.
> The web frameworks are in my opinion not as full featured.
Again, have to disagree here. Django is by far one of the most full-featured, well-documented web frameworks out there (IMO).
> The tooling around PHP is really good and stable. The language itself, the downsides are very limited and the main one that remains valid is inconsistency of function parameters. The issues with bad code are generally the same ones that can be done in another langauge.
I agree here and I think with PHP 8 incorporating JIT compilation, I think the future looks bright for PHP. I think the biggest foot guns these days are to be found in the JS ecosystem...but again, IMO.
> I have to disagree. The JVM is one of the biggest pluses and might be one of the most battle-tested pieces of software out there.
Your points don't seem to conflict with the fact you need more resources to run a mimimal Spring Boot application than you would a Go application, a Python applicaton, a PHP application, etc. Because the JVM by default by the nature of how it operates needs more resources. I'm not saying anything other than that.
Is the push-back to replace the entire department with contractors or bring on contractors in ancillary roles? If the former, then the simplest one-liner that I can give you is that "you can't outsource your way to prosperity." Never going to happen. I would suggest asking why they wish to relinquish control of their business to a third-party(s) that have no intrinsic motivation in the success of the business? Given that you are in R&D, knowledge/experience is the company's bread and butter and handing that over to contractors is an unnecessary risk.
> There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years.
Starting? Did these publishers not learn anything from the whole Facebook Video debacle? [1] Also, who at these companies thinks tying their core business to a single, third party is a good idea?
Video on Facebook is still very big, though. A lot of publishers have taken to recycling TikTok videos and turning them into compilations for Facebook and Instagram. It's all low quality stuff, but it works. It's hugely ironic that some of the most popular content on Facebook's platforms is coming from TikTok.
A good hiring manager will be able to sniff that out rather quickly. Following up on references doesn't mean calling it a day after one random phone call either.