mtberatwork

What about "Three Days of the Condor"?

There are all kinds of people in tech who are self taught without CS degrees though. I don't think it's that beholden to the universities...at least not like other professions. I think it's simply that people took notice that all the money was being funneled into tech. The MBAs all followed.

In the US, "right on red" should be abolished. It's abused way too much at this point.

What headwinds? The Western world is a consumption driven society (with the US being an extreme version I would say), so I don't think advertising/PR spending will be reduced, just transferred from one focus to another. The businesses that are driven by ad revenues will pivot to wherever the ad dollars go.

This is a gray area too as unnecessary testing can be costly and lead to worse care: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/06/13/1104141...

> and other laws, like those protecting unions, that defeat at-will employment

This is backwards. Union membership is at its all time low and at-will employment has mostly taken over. A union would be the best tool to curb "boss-ware".

You certainly do not need to build out an entire SPA or use React to reload part of a page just to swap in some HTML or load something asynchronously in the background.

> Google News refuses to permit socially conservative viewpoints (Fox News doesn’t make that list for me) to make up a user’s personalized feed.

This isn't true. I just looked up a few conservative publications, from the center-right to the heavy-on-conspiracy and they all show up as available news sources.

"Various pockets" seems to imply the problem is not that wide spread. But it is:

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/americas-tap...

[2] https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...

Software engineers can buy worker rights, overtime limits, etc? That's news to me. Also, goes without saying, not every engineer is making FAANG-level salaries.

> I think we probably at some point will realize that food like we ate in the past are way better than it is today and the type of heavily processed food we eat today is unhealthy.

That point is here, right now. Michael Pollan and much of the food blog-o-sphere has been writing about this for years. The article is tone deaf to say the least.

Not sure why you are being downvoted...you aren't wrong.

> Except the Buddha and his stories explicitly advised against asceticism...

Yup, the Middle Path.

Who ever mentioned anything about repressing thoughts? Quieting the mind does not mean repressing feelings. Observe the thoughts when they arise, but do not judge. This is nothing new.

> At the best of times these routines of habit are just an escape from the stress...

No, not an escape. Amongst the many benefits, exercise, meditation, etc are a means (but not the only means) to quiet the mind and give a pause to thought. They force you to focus on the present moment and not to dwell in the past or future. Humans are incredible prediction machines but generally not all too accurate. Too much time spent thinking about the past and future without balance of the present creates needless suffering. None of this is new and has been known for millennia.

> Society, economics have changed to keep up.

I think that is debatable, at least from the Western standpoint. Much of Western society and its economics produce tremendous amounts of depression and anxiety (rooted mostly in fear).

Be careful for what you wish. As OP alludes, much of your income is taken up by housing, childcare, healthcare, retirement funding, etc. Just about everything is "out of pocket". In terms of safety nets or other societal benefits (e.g. family leave, vacation time, etc) that Europeans take for granted, the US has none to very little. As a result, Americans work non-stop and more than half the country is stressed out on a daily basis [0]. It's really not a sustainable way to live IMO.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/249098/americans-stress-worry-a...

A note on burnout: once you have had one burnout, the next one comes on faster and with less triggers needed.

> My autoimmune disease is likely caused by modern technical advances

I'm absolutely certain that my autoimmune disease manifested itself later in life due to chronic stress at work (a modern advancement so to speak). While not the cause, it was certainly the catalyst. Now that the proverbial Pandora's box of autoimmune diseases has been opened inside of me, there's no closing it back up and I can only manage it to some degree.

> There's very limited research done on on fixing it and lots done on treating the symptoms. Each commercial I see advertising a new medication to treat the symptoms is like a slap in the face.

Yup, exactly this. You have to take things into your own hands and figure out what works for you in terms of management. Not many doctors are going to take the time to sit down with you to figure out the root cause(s).

This is odd because the web version is almost always the first experience for a new user of the platform.

> If managing a server becomes just another bullet point in a developer job, this is exactly what we get.

Yup...the same management are the ones that laid off the DBAs, system admins, network engineers, etc because "the cloud" hand waves all this stuff away now.

I generally agree with you, but for me I'm not necessarily trying to optimize for an ultra long life span but instead am trying to optimize for going out peacefully. I don't want my end years to be in some miserable, decrepit state in which I am unable to do much. In the end, all we can hope for is a peaceful exit.

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.

> 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.

> 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).

[0] https://www.healthline.com/health/box-breathing [1] https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/self-help/guides-tools-and-...

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".

Social Security is not a pension plan in the normal sense. It is structured and taxed differently than a pension that a company would provide.

> 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.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-own...

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.

> Downside JVM is a Resource hog

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.