Thank HN: Five months ago, I was feeling like a loser, now I am opposite

564 points by ac2022 4 years ago | 213 comments

I posted this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709273

I thought I hated programming and was ready to quit or even divorce my wife. I was not able to have a normal conversation with anyone. I was burned out but I thought I was having midlife crisis.

My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress.

My job was easy and I had a lot of control over my time, work location, etc. I didn't think it could be the job that was causing me feel depressed.

What I didn't realize while my work gave me freedom on work schedule, it didn't give me any real freedom to make important decisions. We were checkmark driven company. I was forced to do a lot of compliance and security related tasks which added zero benefit to our service.

After my post, I decided that I either move into management at my last company or get a new job. I worked longer hours and spent all my free time doing LeetCode.

LeetCode was hard and pointless. But I was motivated and was able to solve most easy and medium question in 30 mins. However, that was not good enough for FAANGs.

I applied to some smaller companies and got a few offers. I picked one really great Series D startup. I believe in their mission and I have freedom to make real decisions here. I got a decent bump in my salary but not really FAANG TC.

However, more importantly, work is 1000 times more exciting. I feel alive again. Wife and I are not fighting anymore. I work longer hours but have more energy at the end of day.

I just want to thank everyone that responded to my post and tell everyone that if you find your work or life unfulfilling, change your job now!

sacrosancty 4 years ago |

Just a suggestion, but if your relationship with your wife depends on your personal circumstances and mood, then it sounds not very strong. Might be worth taking advantage of this good period to do some relationship strengthening exercises while you can so that when the next downturn happens, you can both understand each other's and your own feelings better. I'm not talking about random activities like going to the beach but finding a good self-help book or therapist and sitting down together working through it regularly. It's easy for problems to grow silently until they're too big to fix. Relationships are far more important than jobs, money or houses.

s1artibartfast 4 years ago | |

It is pretty normal for poor mental health to take a toll on relationships. Sometimes the problem really is that simple.

But with that said, it is always a good time to work on yourself and relationships.

lumost 4 years ago | | |

Shameless plus one, I’ve been with my wife for 10 years - when we’re both happy as individuals were happy as a couple. Sometimes people just need to do the hard work of finding happiness on their own. Someone else can’t make you feel happy with your career.

em-bee 4 years ago | | |

it shouldn't have to be normal. ideally your partner is supporting you especially in times like this. you should be able to share with your wife what OP shared with HN. if he had, the result might have been to not only get a new job but get a job in a different location, with a new, bigger house. it's more work to pull that off, and not something they could have done while the relationship is sour, but possible if they work together.

big life decisions should never be made alone. OP came here to help make his decision, which is better than deciding all by himself but consulting with his wife would have been better still.

robochat42 4 years ago | |

I think that you're missing his point which is that when you are unhappy, it is not always easy to pinpoint the cause of that unhappiness and it is very easy to start casting around for an explanation and end up blaming the wrong part of your life for your misery. You might think that this isn't believable but the unhappiness colours everything in your life and so it isn't as obvious as it seems.

azinman2 4 years ago | | |

All the more reason to listen to GP. Your partner should be someone to lean on, not blame. They likely don’t see them in the right light.

_carbyau_ 4 years ago | |

Lines you won't see on a gravestone:

"I wish I had worked more."

"I wish I had a less meaningful relationship with my wife."

theGeatZhopa 4 years ago | | |

… I wish I was little bit taller

I wish I was a baller

I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her

I wish I had a rabbit in a hat with a bat, And a six four Impala

ungamedplayer 4 years ago | | |

Along with "npm install ..."

bdowling 4 years ago | | |

It would be unusual to see an epitaph containing any personal thoughts, because most such messages are written by surviving family members, not the deceased.

300bps 4 years ago | | |

Things you will read on a gravestone:

“I wish I never got married”

“I wish my wife would’ve left sooner”

burrows 4 years ago | | |

Because I’ve seen “I wish I had worked less.” on a gravestone?

quickthrower2 4 years ago | | |

You might have the first one, but they won't describe it as work. They might say "taken risks" "followed my dream" etc.

ac2022 4 years ago | |

Thanks, we are.

But I highly doubt there are many people who can prevent their internal mental state from affecting their relationships.

I was not able to see her point of view when I felt like a loser. Once I decided that I will get a new job, we were better able to communicate and figure out our next steps.

exodust 4 years ago | |

> "Relationships are far more important than jobs, money or houses."

In the movies, maybe: "As long as we're together, nothing else matters".

In reality, relationship success often depends on certain fundamental things being in order. Like financial security and comfortable living arrangements.

muzani 4 years ago | |

Relationships are like a muscle. They grow with stress, but not with prolonged stress.

It's not just a direct relationship though. Consider your relationship with your spouse's family, friends, community, spiritual stuff. These are usually easiest to strengthen during good periods.

thow34wqway 4 years ago | |

May be this works for American culture. In India over 95% are arranged marriages. The probability of finding a partner with common interests is pretty low. Not marrying is not an option. Because it affects siblings marriages. Women have even lesser freedom in this area. Given these conditions the best thing to do is not forget the relations ship b/w spouse will never be great and at the same time its not the spouse's fault. Minimal commitment to the happiness of the spouse is a must but never forget it will not be great.

Long live the culture of individual freedom the west values most.

nielsbot 4 years ago | |

I second the recommendation of the help of a therapist if possible. You can certainly "work on yourself" but having the guidance of a professional can really accelerate things. It's also helpful to talk to someone who 1) is always in your corner and is your advocate and non-judgemental 2) is an expert in emotions, coping, relationships, and so on and 3) is not someone you already have a previous, possibly "tainted" relationship with. Good luck.

roeles 4 years ago | |

> Might be worth taking advantage of this good period to do some relationship strengthening exercises while you can so that when the next downturn happens, you can both understand each other's and your own feelings better.

Not too long ago, my wife and I got the suggestion to schedule a weekly "open-faced hour". It has worked wonders for understanding each other, which has positive effects on every aspect of our relationship.

n0th3r-curious 4 years ago | |

Well said! Unless the personal life is happy (stable dependable lovable relationship like spouse/significant other), it's hard to succeed in professional life.

Jagerbizzle 4 years ago | | |

Just to provide a contrarian viewpoint, myself and some of my closest friends are experiencing the exact opposite.

rattray 4 years ago |

Can't believe the negativity I see on some of the top comments right now.

Congrats and thanks for sharing, you rock :)

It's really nice to get updates from folks who posted an Ask HN. Especially with a positive outcome.

It's really not uncommon for humans to find energizing work energizing, and for that to affect their overall quality of life. Plenty of people are comfortable checking boxes and going home early, sure, but that can be a slow death to a lot of folks (even some who might not realize it).

drewcoo 4 years ago |

Seek counseling. You're making life decisions based on web boards. Somehow programming and your relationship with your spouse are tied up together.

You're riding really high now. You were really low before. Emotional roller coasters mean you should talk with someone, regardless of how you're feeling right now.

switchbak 4 years ago | |

I think you're being a little harsh maybe? I agree big mood swings like this are a concern, but jobs do a lot to affect our happiness. I'm likewise a little concerned about a partner who "wants a big house", but that's a highly condensed statement about what is no doubt a more nuanced situation.

I've jumped ship and had it be a really positive experience. Wouldn't be averse to it again, and I think that's mostly what this post is about: recognized that their career was important to them, dug deep and found a better job, now they're sharing excitement their about it.

It's also important to not get too much personal identification from a job (see Mike Rowe's thoughts on happy people working crappy jobs), and to not overwork, but whatever - they're making progress!

rattray 4 years ago | |

Your first paragraph does not come across as considerate.

Your second sounds like good advice to me too, if a little presumptuous. How well do you know OP?

aidenn0 4 years ago | |

> Seek counseling. You're making life decisions based on web boards. Somehow programming and your relationship with your spouse are tied up together. > > You're riding really high now. You were really low before. Emotional roller coasters mean you should talk with someone, regardless of how you're feeling right now.

Is it that hard to believe that changing what one spends over a third of their waking hours per week on can have a significant impact on one's emotional well being?

corrius 4 years ago |

I don't normally comment on HN but reading all the negative vibes made me want to comment.

Glad to hear you are doing great! I had to make the decision between a high paying job and a high rewarding job and choosing the second one has been a huge improvement in my life.

heisenbit 4 years ago | |

Indeed the HN community seems to manage the ‚issue‘ in an overall happy tale. I doubt there are many in a long relationship which did not suffer for a time due to external and not so well understood circumstances. Pull through and better self/us understanding and a stronger relationship can be ahead.

qgin 4 years ago | |

HN doesn’t do happy very well.

AtlasBarfed 4 years ago |

"My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress."

Feminism's greatest enemies aren't necessarily men, but their wives. Your previous post indicated you "needed a bigger house" but clearly there was more to it.

It seems like you have great emotional investment in two things that don't reciprocate your investment: your wife only seems to care about what you can give her, and a job is by definition a business relationship with a company they can sever whenever it is convenient to them.

I would guess you do not have a good sense of self-worth. It's ok, it's really hard to have a good self-worth in a world where you are exposed to thousands of daily messages of inadequacies. It's ok to get some reinforcement from jobs, but just keep in mind it is a business relationship.

I hope your wife does not also consider your marriage a business relationship. Two kids are a "real marriage" not easily unraveled.

Hope the best for you.

reuven 4 years ago |

I didn't see your original post. But I'm delighted to hear that things have improved.

There's no doubt that stress in your career can lead to stress at home. Certainly, when I'm stressed about my work (or when my wife is stressed about hers), it can be difficult on our relationship. And then, as they say, you have two problems. Moreover, it can feel hopeless.

So many people say that you have to work for a big, famous company, with huge compensation packages. But once you're getting paid well, there are other important things: Do you care about the work you're doing? Are you treated decently at work? Do they give you responsibility, and the power to make decisions?

There are oodles of people out there making good wages at companies we've never heard of, working with people they like, on projects they believe add value to the world. Such jobs aren't glamorous, and won't make the front page of the newspaper, but it doesn't matter.

I love my work. I feel fortunate to do what I do. And when I tell people this, they are often taken aback, and say, "Wow, you're really lucky. I don't like my work; I just do it for the paycheck." So if you have this kind of excitement, energy, enjoyment, and fulfillment from your new job -- then you've won, as it were. You should feel good about this, and should consider yourself among the rare, fortunate folks in that situation.

In short, it's great to hear about someone who has found satisfaction in their work. And if that satisfaction has improved your marriage? All the better.

qq66 4 years ago |

"Series D startup" may be a very bad place to be very soon. Keep grinding LeetCode.

zepolen 4 years ago |

Bro, it's not the job, it's you not standing up to your oppressive wife.

The longer hours mean you spend less time with her so you're happier, the pay rise means she can spend it so she's happier and the decision making you get at the job gives you a sense of manhood which you are obviously lacking at home.

Give it time and your wife will again become unhappy with the status quo and demand more and once again you will be unhappy and blame your job.

d23 4 years ago |

Congrats! I'm happy for you. Funny how being more engaged and working more can leave you with more energy at the end of the day. I've felt the same way in the past.

ac2022 4 years ago | |

Yes, it is amazing. They say Heart Rate Variability is pretty good indicator of stress. My HRV graph for last 6 months clearly shows when I made decision to change job and when I gave 2 weeks notice.

sgtnoodle 4 years ago | | |

How do you have 6 months of data? Is that something modern smart watches produce? I would love to have that data for myself, but don't really want to complicate my life with a smart watch. I don't even like keeping my e-reader's battery charged...

My heart nerves got jacked up a couple years ago, and I had to get a pacemaker. It's presumably collecting a ton of cool data that it BLE's to the manufacturer and my cardiologist, but I don't have access to it.

bin_bash 4 years ago |

> I was motivated and was able to solve most easy and medium question in 30 mins. However, that was not good enough for FAANGs.

What makes you think it's not good enough? LC is important and today it might be even be essential to land a role, but I think people tend to think of it like an exam when that's not really what we're testing for.

The goal is to see how you think, not see if you can simply come up with the right answer. If you need a hint it's usually not going to hurt you at all so long as you listen to the hint, are able to understand it, then incorporate it into a solution. I'd go so far as to say that being able to do that can help you more than reciting an answer without a hint.

There are some patterns like tries, left/right pointers, memoization, heaps, and maps that studying helps with for sure, but that doesn't mean you're supposed to be able to immediately solve something without any help.

(Note that there are asshole interviewers out there that will challenge you and won't follow what I've described, but that's rare and personally I've only seen them at startups, not big tech)

DantesKite 4 years ago |

No problemo. Optimism, useful advice, and motivational speaking are what we do best here over at HackerNews.

willismichael 4 years ago | |

Well, that and ripping certain subjects to shreds whenever they come up.

silisili 4 years ago |

First off - congratulations.

Secondly I genuinely hope you apologize to your wife and appreciate her sticking by you through what sound like mental issues. Sadly, a lot of people aren't so patient.

qzw 4 years ago |

Congrats on fixing the job issue. Now that times are better, might want to consider working on improving communications with the wife, so that the next time you go through a rough patch it won't go as far as divorce.

ac2022 4 years ago | |

Thank you and yes we are working on it.

BTW I thought about divorce but never said that word to my wife. Those thoughts luckily were very brief.

rattray 4 years ago | | |

Very happy to hear that :)

shultays 4 years ago |

Good luck at your new job but it sounds like you are in a honeymoon period. It is good that you are happier but a fresh startup with longer hours does not sound good at all, especially if you have 2 kids and want to buy a house (ie you need stability)

Work is work, the stress will happen when things are not perfect. You need to figure out a way to deal with.

victor22 4 years ago |

Wow FAANG waited 5 months to finish this PR masterpiece

giantg2 4 years ago |

"My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress."

I have a similar situation. It's not unreasonable to not want a bigger house, even if that's what culture tells us we should want that. Maybe your wife is fine being house poor, like mine wants to be. One bad issue and you're sunk and there will be stress. I prefer a cushion for the real possibility of life altering issues arising. We shouldn't all be spending balls the wall like culture tells us and then going up in flames at the first bump (not that it's your situation, but mine).

And yes, I'm a loser and feel like it too. That's ok.

zttg 4 years ago |

I will try to properly word the well known thing:

When you are happy, full of energy, love your job, get a lot of things to do, confident, etc - you are more attractive for any woman, especially for your wife, than when you are uncertain, unhappy, frustrated and full of problems.

Work as much as possible on yourself and your own happiness and career. Any reasonable woman is designed to feel what is going on with you.

Also consider some physical activity which you like. Gym, hiking, cycling, kayak, crossfit - whatever makes you happy and stronger and a same time does not lead to injuries

daneel_w 4 years ago |

Glad to hear it worked out for the better. My current employment is no longer fulfilling and I wish to "move on", but I can only do remote and such vacancies are very hard to come by in Sweden.

20after4 4 years ago | |

The wikimedia foundation hires remote workers all over the world. They are also very stable with good job security. Some things are dysfunctional but it was a pretty awesome job in many ways - so much that I stuck with it for 7 years and only recently moved on to seek more exciting and challenging work. Wikimedia is almost always hiring and although it’s not the easiest job interview it’s worth a shot.

ac2022 4 years ago | |

Try Toptal. I applied there for practice and as a backup. It seems they have plenty of projects.

Also SaaS like Deel make it easy for employers to hire anyone around the world. The problem is educating the employers. I would perhaps add a blurb about getting paid via Deel in cover letter.

Kaibeezy 4 years ago | |

Doesn’t the Venn diagram look like:

(remote (Sweden))

... or am I unclear on “remote” or “Sweden”?

sokoloff 4 years ago | | |

It costs employers money and complexity to open up remote hiring of employees in a new jurisdiction. If Sweden isn’t a very big market or Sweden is a difficult market from a legal perspective, even remote companies may not be able to hire there.

As an example, I’d have to look, but I think it’s only quite recently that I’ve been able to hire in Sweden, 2 years after being remote. I know I couldn’t last year, but we contracted with some company to make some of the smaller markets feasible for us.

daneel_w 4 years ago | | |

I live in Sweden and I'm employed here, but I work remotely as I live very far from my employer's offices. This is remote work by our conventions and perspectives. If you're not in the office most days of the week you are considered a remote employee, and most Swedish employers (still) have a general aversion to hiring "remotees".

wccrawford 4 years ago |

> it didn't give me any real freedom to make important decisions.

I feel this.

fny 4 years ago |

Congrats! But be very careful about the start up you're working for. Make sure they have enough cash to survive the next 4-5 years and have a steady revenue stream.

rattray 4 years ago | |

Uh, why? They already work there.

If things tank in a year or two, OP will just be the target of a recruiter feeding frenzy, and they'll come out more qualified than they went in.

Quitting immediately would look bad in comparison, and staying but exuding pessimism and paranoia would not be adaptive.

w-j-w 4 years ago | |

> 4-5 years of runway

> startup

If this is your criterion for working at a startup, then you are too conservative to work at one. Every job carries risk, and looking to eradicate it is pointless.

fny 4 years ago | | |

The environment right now is very different than a few years ago. Risk is way higher right now. Reward is even more questionable.

malshe 4 years ago |

I am happy to see that you could leave your “bullshit job”!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

CodeWriter23 4 years ago |

So much awesome here, you having the revelation, taking action to change what needed to be changed, feeling the positive outcome, then sharing it. <3

taesu 4 years ago |

Fanng is not for everybody and everybody doesnt fit in Fanng. Im glad you found your happiness!

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot

thecleaner 4 years ago |

Hey congratulations ! Keep at the Leetcode thing though. You already turned your situation but why not go for another thing in your arsenal ?

pavlov 4 years ago | |

From the OP:

“spent all my free time doing LeetCode. [..] LeetCode was hard and pointless”

For someone recovering from burnout, it doesn’t seem a good idea to recommend that they return to an activity that felt pointless.

ac2022 4 years ago | | |

True, I have taken break from LeetCode but not for too long. I will probably restart it in couple of weeks. Going forward, I always want to be interview ready.

UncleEntity 4 years ago |

So… did your wife get the big house she wanted?

ac2022 4 years ago | |

Sort of, yes. We have signed the contract and should be closing in the fall :)

The house is a bit more expensive than I would like but we can afford it. And we could have afford it before too, but I probably subconsciously thought that I don't deserve it.

method_capital 4 years ago | | |

People who believe they need big houses baffle me. It isn't priced right, and you can improve to flip or live and decide later. But why on earth would someone need a giant fucking house to be "happy".

jimhi 4 years ago |

Thanks for sharing, I think many people out there are going through the same thing you did.

tmaly 4 years ago |

Congrats on the new gig. It sounds like things worked out well.

bioinformatics 4 years ago |

You got help here? I guess you’re a “best” loser now.lol

wiihack 4 years ago |

That sounds really awesome. Congratulations :)

mikesabbagh 4 years ago |

Leetcode is not good training for FAANG?

asdev 4 years ago |

easy to lose sight of what makes you fulfilled while on the Leetcode grind. congrats OP

egorfine 4 years ago |

Man I'm so happy to hear this! Wish you the very best of luck!

holtkam2 4 years ago |

Hell yeah man :)

happyopossum 4 years ago |

Happy to hear you've made some positive changes!

That said, as a cybersecurity practitioner, this:

>a lot of compliance and security related tasks which added zero benefit to our service

scares the bejeezus out of me. Security is never of zero benefit.

justin_oaks 4 years ago | |

The OP could mean that the security-related tasks added zero benefit because they were unnecessary tasks that didn't result in increased security.

There are plenty of security-related tasks that have zero, or even negative, benefit.

- Obtaining EV certificates for your websites.

- Enforcing password rotation every 90 days.

- Adding a webapp firewall in front of your static file hosting (e.g. S3).

barnabask 4 years ago | |

Agree with you in principle. However, it sounds like OP was doing security theater, which is demoralizing to perform.

ac2022 4 years ago | |

I agree in principle but where I worked a lot of it was just for show. We had a lot of security people who only knew how to generate pdfs. They were very hard to work with.

Or some day, they will decide that one part of our service should move from one network to another for security or compliance reasons. But they have no idea how to do it, who to talk to, etc.

But since it is security issue, we will need drop everything and figure out how to move part of our infrastructure to another network. Things like these were pretty common.

hamburglar 4 years ago | |

How has a cybersecurity practitioner never encountered useless compliance-driven security tasks?

Where I work, it’s widely acknowledged that doing security for security’s sake, done right, can cover your compliance, but security for compliance’s sake just checks checkboxes and doesn’t really get you security.

swader999 4 years ago | |

I bet he was referring to the endless documentation around it.

Aaronstotle 4 years ago | |

It might not be zero, but in some cases it could be lots of additional work for some marginal benefit

deathanatos 4 years ago | |

I agree with both. Real security is never of zero benefit, but I've worked on a lot of "security" tickets that are of no pragmatic benefit:

1. Angst to clean up the latest non-vuln. vuln. (e.g., the use of the vuln. library doesn't meet the requirements listed in the vuln. for it to be vuln., or the vuln. is researcher spam and … isn't really a vuln., but good luck trying to get someone to understand that, or where a vuln. gets publicized but your upstream OS is derping around and hasn't actually released the patched version yet)¹

2. ill-advised attempts to add TLS or similar: adding TLS is not trivial (you do have to have the cert available, so that the ends can validate), but I've seen a lot of TLS additions, e.g., on top of a secure network, or where TLS is bolted on but the library is set to "don't verify". (Worse, this is the default in many libraries: as someone implementing TLS, industry would be greatly helped by having defaults that were secure. PG, MySQL, I'm looking at you.) In one case an auditor asked the mobile apps to do cert pinning — which they did, without ever involving the BE engs. (They weren't told they needed to!) The next cert rotation broke both mobile apps, and broke both differently: the Android app pinned only the private key (and had a NPE if it wasn't RSA) and the iOS app pinned the cert, so that one was truly broken. I've also seen a VPN setup where the clients were configured to accept any leaf cert issued by a public web PKI CA … and check nothing else. (I.e., anyone could go to that CA, get a leaf, and it would MitM the VPN.)

3. adding yet-another-security-linter that has problems with every little thing. E.g., we had one that really disliked that we did string concatenation in our SQL queries. But we were concatenating parameterized queries, as the search parameters (including the number of parameters), came from the user. So a program would need to add, e.g., "AND column > ?" to the query, and append the value to the parameter list. Ended up switching some of that to SQLAlchemy, through which it couldn't see, even though it was functionally the same. SQLAlchemy did work with a better internal AST, though, so it caught some errors our query builder caught only after bugging. I also have a linter from my current security team that files a bug for each package in a container that has vulns. against it. But it does not ever update its bugs, … so you don't know if anything is actually fixed. (I'm not patching package by package; I'm usually invalidating a cache & forcing it to do the equivalent of "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade", so I'm going to close a bunch of tickets all at once … but I have no way of knowing which ones.)

4. Audits, where the auditor asks things like "do you use RC4, TLS, or AES?" which … good grief

5. concerns about PII handling for information that's part of a public (government) record.

¹my default disposition is to patch, regardless of theoretical exploitability, if it is trivial to do so. But if it's not trivial — e.g., if the upgrade is a SemVer incompatible upgrade that requires me to rebase the entire monolith on to a new web framework and I lack the resources to do that right now, and the vuln.'s conditions to be exploited say we're not vuln., I am going to take the pragmatic approach of "we're ignoring this, as it doesn't apply to our codebase."

nus07 4 years ago |

Is Hacker News the new Blind ? Wtf did I just read? But good on you dude - just don’t attach that much of your self worth and relationship situation on your job .

But this post is Blind worthy not HN.

philliphaydon 4 years ago |

What is peoples obsession with FAANG companies?

corrral 4 years ago | |

The pay is insanely high. That's what does it.

Plus FAANG is like grad school for startups. Startups love their CTOs and tech leads to be ex-FAANG. Looks great on the "who we are" pages and slides. You're way more likely to be able to land a top-level position at an early, promising startup with that in your work history. I suspect lots of them round-file any applications that don't have either FAANG or something really remarkable and relevant (say, published research in the same area the startup's working on) as their first filtering pass. They need someone with a history they can sell to investors and early clients.

3qz 4 years ago | |

A stable career with a high income. Looks good on a resume so quitting is easy once you have enough money saved

philliphaydon 4 years ago | |

So people just want money even if they are just a number doing boring work and hate their job and have no impact.

That’s what I gather from the replies so far.

3qz 4 years ago | | |

> if they are just a number doing boring work and hate their job and have no impact

This is almost every job. You might as well get paid fairly for it.

thecleaner 4 years ago | |

Stable job. Good pay. And let's face it seems most startups these days is some crypto bullshit.

Nextgrid 4 years ago | | |

FAANG is "growth & engagement", not much better though. At least crypto is easy to ignore, while "engagement" relies on it getting in your way and being hard/impossible to ignore.

leetcrew 4 years ago | |

getting paid?

_8j50 4 years ago | | |

And resume points, bragging rights, exposure.

Kaibeezy 4 years ago | |

My observation is that people “like” what’s familiar. If they try something new they may not like it, and consider the experience a waste when they could have had something they know they like.

Some people go on cruises every year or get a timeshare, others throw a dart at a world map.

totetsu 4 years ago | |

Winner takes all, extreme wealth disparity?

Aaronstotle 4 years ago | |

Lots of money

barrysteve 4 years ago | |

Prestige?