Thanks for the detailed response. You certainly have an optimistic way of looking at the situation.
My problem is that I'm 32- the way I see it is I have 3-4 more years of going balls to the wall before my wife starts popping out kids and I'd really hate to waste this time doing low level unchallenging work.
The funny thing is I can see myself 10 years down the line WISHING I had a job just like this.
I've been offered these kinds of jobs at BigCo's and turned them all down. I just do solo coding from the house. I get to define my own projects, use my own tools, and set my own hours. Most importantly, if I don't like a customer, I can just never work for them again after that project. This keeps my life full of working with people I enjoy working with.
I joined Zenefits when everyone had dollar signs in their eyes. It felt like the roaring 20s (or at least the accounts I've heard of them).
How are they doing nowadays?
I always say don't compromise on salary for equity. Compromise for the experience, for an entrance into the field, because the chick at the counter was digging you, but not because of some payout you think you'll get in the future.
>>> In 2014, 2015, and 2016, we generated $77.8 million, $340.8 million, and $795.4 million in net revenue, respectively, representing growth of 338% from 2014 to 2015 and growth of 133% from 2015 to 2016. In the three months ended March 31, 2016 and March 31, 2017, we generated $172.1 million and $244.8 million in net revenue, respectively, representing growth of 42%. In the years ended December 31, 2014, 2015, and 2016, we incurred net losses of $(30.8) million, $(47.0) million, and $(54.9) million, respectively, and in the three months ended March 31, 2016 and March 31, 2017, we generated net income of $3.0 million and incurred net losses of $(52.2) million, respectively.
Edit: there is a page break in between, added the rest of the sentence
You're missing some important net losses, notably, they've lost almost as much 1/4 of this year than all of last year (continuing from where you stopped):
$(47.0) million, and $(54.9) million, respectively, and in the three months ended March 31, 2016 and March 31, 2017, we generated net income of $3.0 million and incurred net losses of $(52.2) million,
Some words of hard earned "wisdom": make sure the pendulum doesn't swing too far out in the other direction.
I went from being an accommodating person to an intense asshole - trying to dial it back now but it's hard, especially when you notice that people definitely respect you more for good or bad reasons when you're like that. Take it too far though, and it will of course go all the way around and bite you in the ass.
His entire lecture series, which is available on his youtube channel, is absolutely fantastic and worth every minute. It is probably one of the most engaging and enlightening bodies of work I have experienced in any format.
I would recommend starting with the 2017 semester of his Maps of Meaning course. The first topic is a discussion of the themes and philosophy of the story of Pinocchio. It's really good.
That was a solid, quick presentation of key ideas that could impact people a lot. Most psych links I see people post aren't like that. Great video! Thanks for sharing it.
"I went from being an accommodating person to an intense asshole "
I have gone through the same process. Maybe it's because I am getting old, meditation or I just don't care anymore, I have slowly learned what's really important to me. I am generally pretty accommodating but for some things I won't negotiate and just say "No" without any further explanation.
This seems to work reasonably well with most people.
I don't really know what I am trying to say but maybe it's to have your priorities figured out and be flexible with unimportant stuff but firm with important stuff. That is, stuff that's important to you, not somebody else.
IMO, the trick is to have control over the level of accommodation you present to different people and different situations. The key quote from the article:
>I gave to them for years, at the expense of those who had a far better claim upon my generosity.
There's a life skill getting pointed at here. Specifically, comparing the demand to the level of obligation you want to fulfill, and reacting appropriately. There's another higher-level skill of figuring out what the results of different obligation levels are and strategically choosing them.
Basically, saying "yes" implies saying "no" to the alternatives, and sometimes those alternatives are far better.
For many people, it's not about detecting someone with bad intentions. It's about not liking conflict so much that they don't know how not to accommodate by default. Over accommodation of a good person you're close with can be just as detrimental as over accommodation of a shitty person.
I'll second this. If you're over accommodating with your partner, it's just as detrimental to your own mental health and the health of your relationship as it is with a shitty person. The danger here is that we tend to be more accommodating with people we like than those we don't and so we don't even realize we're doing it until it's too late.
Yeah. If two people ask for things that are mutually exclusive, there's a huge problem if you can't say no to one of them. If there's no concept of "no", then "yes" becomes much less meaningful.
In social dance contexts, I'm usually happy when people decline to dance with me. It's dead obvious when someone isn't enthusiastic about the dance, and much less fun than getting shot down. Similarly in business contexts - an unreliable "yes" is worse than a "no", because you can get burned relying on the "yes" you did get rather than trying elsewhere after the "no".
Meh - there are just as many people making the same accusation you are as to render it useless.
I read countless anecdotes on HN and hear many more in person of people with just the shittiest managers, of people who rarely see "competent" engineering organizations, of people who have "never" seen a competent project manager, that it really is a wonder we have any profitable companies at all.
In reality, if you don't understand the value someone is providing them, you should make an effort to understand what they might be doing before making claims like the ones you're making.
I hear what you are saying. Before declaring someone is useless you definitely should make sure to understand what they are doing.
On the other hand, I am pretty convinced that there is a sizeable number of people in companies who create a lot of busywork "managing" things. The project I am on has 3 developers (as far as I can tell) and probably more than 10 business analysts, project managers, architects and other managers putting their name on it. I have tried to understand what they are all doing but from what I can tell there are two managers who actually help the project and the other ones write reports to each other, call a lot of meetings but don't really contribute. They just regurgitate what the few active people are doing.
I'm 32 and work as a PM at a Big Hip Tech Co. in the bay area.
Once I was on a team with 2 QA analysts, 1 Eng Manager, myself as PM, 3 BA's (that I did not want), and 3 developers, and one platform architect. All this plus 1 director overseeing our tiny team. Not to mention the 1-2 BA's I worked with whenever I worked on something that impacted another team.
During my 1:1 with said director, I once lashed out - I hadn't slept well in 4 days and I simply sounded off. I literally said everything that's been said in this thread: everything from why the fuck do we have so many people, give me 5 engineers and fire everyone else, to all you care about is the headcount that reports to you.
Luckily, I was a top performer, and while this tarnished my reputation with this director, I was able to smooth things over over the course of a few months.
This director explained to me that I was no longer at a start up. That this team should be resilient - that anyone should be able to take 2-3 weeks off at a time without interrupting the work. That they didn't want us working pedal to the metal 100% of the time. That it was ok that it was slow, and that I shouldn't be so self-conscious or hard on myself if I wasn't always working my fingers to the bone.
Now, I still thought we had way too much fat. Some of those BA's had no business being on a technical team, even as BA's and we should have traded in the architect and dev manager for an extra QA and developer.
But what that conversation did was bring me back down to earth. So much of what we view as right and wrong is personal preference. While I still disagreed with the amount of waste, it removed the chip on my shoulder and now I simply make sure to join teams that I like.
That's more of a ramble, but gives you some context as to where I was coming from.
Yeah, it's definitely true that a lot of people fail to comprehend the more holistic, bigger picture perspective. There's nothing necessarily wrong with a moderate working pace and building in some redundancy, especially since multiple people with overlapping functions can review one another's work, cover for each other, etc.
This, however, doesn't excuse hiring incompetent people based on appearance and likability with blatant disregard for their competence (I recognize that for many non-technical managers, it is difficult or impossible to discern the quality of one's skillset), nor does it excuse stuffing teams with dead weight just because the hiring manager personally likes the people involved. And those practices are indeed rampant.
As a dev I would be OK if these superfluous people would stay out of the way but in addition to not contributing they call meetings, ask for reports, filter information, schedule reviews and whatever. So they make my life more difficult without adding value.
If this were a TV ad there'd have to be the word 'Dramatization' in soft white lettering at the bottom of the screen because this is definitely going overboard.
I've gone through this process and it's pretty damn easy - contact anker, send the the serial number (the rep even tells you it's so they can do proper QA) and get a new one in the mail.
The alternative would be for them to make you send the old one back which would be significantly more annoying. I think asking for the serial is reasonable on their part. Helps them verify you have the cable, prevents people from filing multiple times on the same cable, and allows them to control quality better.
Heh. My problem is that I am so damaged that when I become friends or find girls that care for me unconditionally, I devalue that relationship because it feels un-earned.
Something that comes un-earned to me has no value.
This extends to my relationship with myself. I'm hard on others so it only makes sense that I'm hard on myself.
This is what happens when your parents get divorced and you're raised by a shitty step mom. Not that my own mother was that great to begin with (cheated on my dad etc.)
Personal thoughts:
Perhaps some of the people offering you unconditional kindness are doing so from a position of emotional wellbeing. They offer their kindness in the hope that you use their kindness as a model to find your own wellbeing. There is an unspoken hope, that one day you will be strong enough to be unconditionally kind to others.
It’s a pay-it-forward kind of model. And if you choose to you can absolutely “earn” (or at least repay) every bit of kindness that’s offered to you. By stepping up and also being kind to others in need.
The good thing is that you have self-awareness about it, so you can identify when your mind or emotions are basically playing tricks on you to make you feel that way. Everyone has their quirks, and there are lots of people whose experiences growing up cause all sorts of emotional reactions that don't always map to reality, but as long as you're aware of it and understand it you can manage it and gradually recover from it (speaking as someone who had a ridiculously alienating childhood and absorbed all the baggage that comes from that when becoming an adult).
For sure man, appreciate the words. I've been working on this with a therapist for a long time, it's only now starting to make sense or I am only now starting to internalize it.
But you have a choice in most of these sorts of things.
For example, you can decide that by simply being human, one deserves to be treated well as a standard, taking that away when someone earns the right to be treated lesser.
You can decide that you earn someone's affection simply by being yourself around the person. That's more work than folks let onto.
You can decide that sure, the past was shitty - but you've worked and persevered nonetheless and earned the things you have. You can choose to see that while those folks were shitty, others around you haven't been. You can choose to not be a victim to the past. People do it all the time.
You can choose to be a bit easier on yourself. This isn't easy and takes a bit of detachment and reminding yourself that you tend to be hard on yourself so that you can set more obtainable goals.
You can choose to get therapy to help you with these things. You've already the self-awareness of much of this, which puts you steps ahead of others.
Look, I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to reply, but this advice is a prime example of how some people just don't understand mental health.
This sounds an awful lot like the "happiness is a choice" speech. If self improvement and changing deep seated thought patterns were as easy as just choosing and deciding to act and think a certain way, the world would be a much better place.
The truth is it is a lot more complicated than that - it takes effort, practice, and guidance over a long period of time to actually enact these choices and decisions.
I do choose to fix this, I do decide to be easier on myself, this is why I've been seeing a therapist weekly for almost a year.
That is exactly why I wrote the last line, as there are lots of choices and not everyone can just snap out of it. This is my own fault, as I probably should have written more. It isn't that I've not suffered from depression - I've taken medicine for it for a while after my ex's suicide attempt because it got bad - normally, mine is just a depressive bend on life (dysrhythmia as some call it). But in the end, I had to decide these things for myself. I had to change my life, and it took years. This doesn't make any of this untrue. No other thing has worked. Yes, it takes reminding myself that perhaps, maybe, I'm expecting too much of myself. Yes, it takes practice. But it sure as hell beats expecting folks to act like my ex, who on top of being schizo-affective also turned out to be fairly abusive. I left him about 10 years ago, which kicked off a bunch of choices that vastly improved my life, then started looking at the general outlook.
To be fair, though, I'd have said many of the same things in your response 6-7 years ago. One day, it just clicked.
On a different note, happy to hear that you are getting help. I hope things have eased up over the last year for you and that they continue to do so.
Kindness and caring isn't a finite resource that has to be "earned". If you begin caring for others by default, you might find that mindset disappears.
I hear you man, and that's a good point. It's just a lot easier said than done. I've been working on this stuff for over a year and it's just now starting to sink in, but barely.
>This is what happens when your parents get divorced and you're raised by a shitty step mom
No, this happens when you accept that you are a victim and declare that you have zero control over your emotional shortcomings because of a past event. And it will continue to happen aslong as you reinforce this in yourself.
This is such a tired trope in the realm of mental health that it's become cliche.
CHOOSE to be happy and you will!!! Embrace change!!
What a load of crap, you shouldn't be commenting on things you aren't familiar with.
Go stay up for 6 days in a row and then tell me how well you function, how well you can make sound decisions and control your thoughts.
This is very similar.
My comment judging myself and about my childhood is in retrospect after now having spent a year in therapy. It's really brought these things to light and now that I am aware I can attempt to fix them.
And I can assure you fixing them is a lot more fucking work than making some trivial declaration that I choose to be X or choose not to be Y.
What a fucking a joke to hear people talk about this when they have no clue.
My problem is that I'm 32- the way I see it is I have 3-4 more years of going balls to the wall before my wife starts popping out kids and I'd really hate to waste this time doing low level unchallenging work.
The funny thing is I can see myself 10 years down the line WISHING I had a job just like this.