gyardley

Positive, but every situation is unique.

You're welcome to send me an email if you've got specific questions.

You're feeling what you're feeling because you're trying to treat your mental health issues yourself, and your mental health issues are interfering with your attempt at treatment.

Instead of trying to self-treat, you really should go see a mental health professional; that's what they're there for. Your work very likely will cover it; if not, well, this is why you have savings. Once a professional has helped you deal with your unhealthy attitudes towards work and what could very possibly be depression, then you can determine the best way to move forward with your life.

I've used https://www.usglobalmail.com/ for years.

You could always forward your mail to a friend or relative, which I've also done, but whatever you do, get an address in a state without personal income tax. You don't want to get inadvertently flagged as a resident and sent a state income tax bill which you'll have to dispute.

The problem that I have with scooters is that I can't push my baby's stroller down the street five blocks without running into one left flopped in the middle of the sidewalk. I can't imagine what people in wheelchairs are going through.

New and different is fine, inconsiderate and inconvenient is not.

I would spend all day every day hanging out with and taking care of my baby boy - pretty much what I do now, but with a lot more poignancy.

While good advice in general, I'm not sure this applies in the Portland restaurant market. Renard was pretty boring - good French food, but the same food you've eaten at a dozen other French restaurants - and that, for me, was its problem. So many more interesting places to go!

The cautious thing to do in the Portland restaurant market, as far as I can tell, is to do periodic pop-ups or a food cart and try to build up your repeat clientele to the point where you can justify a brick and mortar location of your own.

I'm guessing you just don't follow local restaurant news (Renard's opening got quite of coverage because it was in St. Jack's old space) or live in that neighborhood.

Portland's a pretty local place. I walk by where Renard used to be almost every day, and can tell you about every restaurant along all of Clinton Street (on that stretch, Burrasca is clearly the standout). But apart from a few very well-known places I've got no idea what's up on, say, Alberta.

Human behavior being what it is, I don't know why we'd be surprised when people who know the pain of rejection are happy to inflict that pain on others.

Reach out, either through a respected intermediary or directly, to CEOs of companies that are about to need executives but haven’t made a bunch of external executive hires yet. Get on their radar before they start their recruitment process.

Sure, this is networking of a sort, but taking a half hour to talk with the CEO of a company you might join is hardly a ‘forced conversation’.

It’s usually because not doing the task has very real negative consequences and due to the sexist nature of modern society the consequences fall most heavily on Alice, not on Bob. Don’t buy the nephews birthday cards? The relatives think badly of Alice, not Bob. Take your son out in mismatched or slightly too small clothes? People pass judgement on Alice, not Bob.

When Bob doesn’t think something is necessary and Alice does, Bob needs to step back and think about why she does, because there’s generally a good reason. Going immediately to game theory isn’t helpful when you’ve got imperfect information due to your own lack of introspection.

Judging by the remarks on this thread, not many of you are interested - but those of you who are may find this compiled PDF of a Metafilter thread valuable:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0UUYL6kaNeBTDBRbkJkeUtabEk...

I can say without hesitation that learning more about emotional labor (and reading that PDF in particular) has helped me be a better husband and father.

In my experience communication happens again and again and again over a period of years until the woman gives up in exasperation and just seethes silently. It's hard to get someone to engage in emotional labor (or as I like to call it, 'giving a fuck') when they simply don't give a fuck, no matter how much you communicate.

Since not caring enough to do the basic gruntwork associated with a decent relationship is almost always a male problem in our society, I'm also gobsmacked that you'd call it sexist. It's about as sexist as calling gun violence or any other widely gendered thing a male problem - there's exceptions out there, but it's not worth being pedantic about.

Differentiating hyperbole from actual Nazis is pretty trivial.

Slippery slope arguments like the one in the article are so tiresome. It's perfectly possible to deny service to Nazis without it snowballing into a problem for the rest of society. After all, plenty of nations have had anti-Nazi laws on the books for generations, and they continue to function just fine for the 99.9999% of society that doesn't want to murder me for my religion.

Yes, it would be nice to see the raw data, but note that they've bucketed Level 1 through Level 6 employees, and have still found gender discrepancies.

Are you suggesting that different jobs might occupy the same level but have widely differing compensation? That might be true - I don't know Google well enough - but that's not how salary bands usually work.

This entire thread is a great example of how many if not most Canadians will passionately defend any old goofy policy, as long as it's different from how the Americans do it.

I've lived in a variety of American states as well as Ontario and I really can't believe what I'm reading - anyone defending the selection, knowledge of the staff, price, hours, pretty much anything relating to the LCBO vs. a privatized but regulated market is a few Timbits short of a Snack Pack. I suspect the very same will be true with The Weed Store once it rolls out - way better than prohibition, but much worse than Colorado or Oregon or Washington.

You know how sometimes when you're looking at an old codebase, where all the developers who've written it have moved on to other jobs, you see a little bit of code that doesn't seem to make sense? And then you remove that code, and then and only then do you find out exactly why it was there in the first place - usually in a rather painful way?

Well, things like marriage are the societal equivalent of that bit of old code. We're 'stuck' with it because (for the vast majority of people, anyway) it serves a useful purpose, one that only becomes apparent when you go without it. That's not to say we can't and shouldn't change the institution - it not like it hasn't been evolving over the centuries - but it'd be wiser to make changes cautiously, experimentally, and locally rather than just 'moving on' as a society.

As a Canadian citizen married to an American - would voluntarily abandoning your permanent residency (say, to live in your home or a third country for a few years) make it more difficult to re-obtain permanent residency in the future?

You also are smart enough to understand that socioeconomic disadvantages are orthogonal to racism and sexism and that your 'poor white dudes' would have an even harder time of things if they were, say, black women.

Seriously, cut the crap. This is not a particularly difficult concept to grok.

Dude, come on. Pointing out that racism and sexism has made things harder for people that aren't white and male is not the same thing as being racist and sexist yourself.

I know you are smart enough to be able to appreciate this difference, so stop being disingenuous.

Hell, no. I know I've been lucky.

I also know that while I was lucky, I wouldn't have been in a position to be lucky if I hadn't made some good decisions. I didn't just sit back and wait to be lucky.

The way to maximize the role of luck in your life is to behave like luck has no role in your life.

Of course I'm not saying 'they should not be allowed to'. I'm not quite sure how you'd get that.

I'm saying that their deep obsessiveness, and issues relating to being deeply obsessed, makes their organization as a whole write worse software. They sometimes write good code on their own, especially if they don't have to work with others, but usually they're a net negative.

Honestly, I don't know how this isn't obvious to anyone who's ever worked on a team.

'Coding in your spare time' isn't quite as extreme as having no life outside of tech. Hey, I code a bit in my spare time too, so let me clarify.

It's the people who don't do anything else but code that I've, in my experience, had real issues with - they might make great computer scientists, but as a group they're not very good in a team of software developers. Arrogance, problems cooperating with others, excessive nitpicking, 'engineer's disease', poor social skills...

I'm not saying you're guaranteed to have any or all of those problems if all you do 24/7 is code, but I've seen it one hell of a lot, and I'm perplexed why this type of person tends to be preferred over more well-rounded individuals. It's not like they're actually better at their jobs.

I'm not arguing for going through an organization and sacking everyone who codes on the weekend. But I strongly suspect that if interviewers didn't glorify the obsessive 24/7 coder, either deliberately or subconsciously as 'what a real developer looks like', we'd have both a much more diverse tech industry and a much more functional one.

No, it doesn't. It makes you one-dimensional and particularly poor at building products for others unlike yourself.

The sooner the tech industry realizes that this sort of person is not an asset and that having too many of them around just drives others away, the better off it'll be.

The idea that you've got to be some sort of obsessive wretch with no life outside of tech in order to successfully fill a role at a tech company is nothing but a pernicious myth. So is the idea that you've got to be some ridiculous super-genius. All you have to do is be reasonably smart and capable of learning on the job.

When interviewers at tech companies mistakenly believe that every successful candidate has to be building atom smashers in their spare time, and especially when interviewers at tech companies unconsciously favor candidates that match what their 'stereotypical' candidate looks like, well, then you get a situation like the one described in the article. But this isn't natural or normal or a product of biology - it's just bias perpetuating itself.

You're not the intended audience for the article.

There's plenty of people for whom it's not at all obvious - in particular, people who're being sold educational materials and courses so they can get those big tech salaries.

I felt exactly like you until my baby boy was born. Now Instacart and I are pals.

In a while, when schlepping him around isn't such a production and I'm back to an appropriate amount of sleep, I'll probably start going to the grocery store again - but honestly, right now I can't imagine my life without delivery services.

Just the one will suffice for Thiel.

This is the guy, after all, who spent his time making "you can't take him literally" arguments about the same policies Trump is pushing forward in his very first week.

I'm having trouble seeing how your parents' net worth is relevant here. If you're interested in AI, you get a job with an AI company or you study AI in school, same as anybody else.

I'm guessing that none of that sounds appealing, though, or you'd already be doing it / wouldn't be asking this question. My guess is you're kind of like me - because you're in a good place economically, you don't have a lot of tolerance for the hard and boring grunt work that goes into intensive study or challenging jobs, and because of that you're not going to be able to achieve something awesome.

The solution is to find the thing you love to do so much, it makes the hard and boring grunt work pleasurable. That thing probably isn't AI, since you've got a MSc in Computer Science - if your thing really was AI, you'd just be off doing it. So if I were you, I'd free up as much time as possible and then use that time to experiment widely. Get an easy job or some unstructured academic thing to keep your parents happy and then explore whatever catches your eye. When you find the right thing, I suspect you'll know it.

Perhaps Google doesn't want to encourage this sort of behavior.

The interview's supposed to, in theory, hint at future performance as an employee - too many intensive study guides used by too many candidates, and it'll just end up reflecting how much cramming the candidate did for the interview.