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My father had one up until very recently. He now has a Citroen Berlingo (I think it’s this model). Rural Portugal by the way.

Portugal also has a bit of the culture of working long hours. People joke when you leave at 6pm/7pm and ask “are you taking the afternoon off?”. We also have the “manager + 5 minutes” rule to leave work. Most of the time, when I worked in these types of companies, I was killing time and feeling depressed. After moving to the UK the culture changed. Less working ours so I started attending meetups and doing Udemy courses (most are all 60/70% finished but still!). I’m much more productive here.

My son was born with TEF/EA (TOF/OA in the UK) and needed a 4 hour surgery when he was 2 days old. The days before the surgery and the following month while he was incubated were agonising in ways I can’t even describe.

Even though my story isn’t nowhere near your situation, I can vaguely relate. To the pain you feel, but also to the strength you seem to have found, to look for the positives because, deep down, you know that being positive and embracing the situation is the best you can do for your son.

I’m sending all my love to you, your son and your family.

What is wrong with me? I always think the other way around. I *know* that I’ll get into some rabbit holes along the way and stuff like that.

> What would be the worst thing that could happen if you did ask again? Would you get fired? It's about "reputation" and about what your peers think of you. I feel that how others perceive is very important for career progression inside a company. It's common for managers to ask team mates for feedback during performance reviews. This was (and is) my fear.

I think I know of a particular situation that might have led him to give that piece of feedback. To be fair I think we're both to blame.

Thanks for this advice. I think this is very pragmatic and actionable.

Yes :D it is.

My "big picture" was not so big. It's just to get enough context to do my "mundane" work well. I forgot to say that I'm only a mid-level engineer. For instance, to give good opinions/high-level solutions during ticket refinement sessions, realising when a ticket is not clearly written and things like this.

Also, there's always this debate about the level of detail that goes into a ticket. Lots of detail makes refinement sessions take ages (and they aren't the place to "solutionize".

However, tickets with fewer details (just the business outcome), can be challenging as we may not yet know all our service's logic or we may not know enough about the organisational structure of our company (for when we need to interact with other teams with different competences).

Thanks! Good advice here.

I think you're onto something here. Yeah, Feynman is a good source of wisdom. He has other nuggets of wisdom I like (for instance, "You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish."). Thanks for the article. I will read it.

> I'll do this many times throughout my day if I don't already know the answer. If you are feeling afraid to feel "dumb", I don't know exactly how to force it, but you need to have a moment where you accept the fact you will not know things and will have to ask questions to get the answers you need. It becomes easy to ask questions once this moment happens.

I need to staple this (or maybe the whole answer) to my wall and read it many times a day. Thanks :)

You're right here. I don't. And maybe my perception that everybody else seems to know everything that's going on around them is just biased by my own fears. I don't know...

This is very interesting advice. Sometimes just the writing things down helps us clarify my thoughts (like before we post a question here or on SO).

Thanks, that makes sense. However, sometimes it looks like some of the best engineer's I've worked with can get work done even before technology gets popular enough to have courses :)

Also, it can sometimes be hard to create sandboxes. It's easy for Prometheus, but maybe a bit harder to AWS (I tried LocalStack before).

Nevertheless it's all good advice, thanks!

Thank you, this is a very useful answer. I will check your videos out for sure.

Interesting point of view, thanks.

Thanks. I found an article about it and it looks like a interesting read.

This is very interesting. I need to try your ideas. Thanks!

Only Kent Beck’s one, but honestly I might need to revisit it (I only vaguely remember how he approached the two examples on the book). If you have other suggestions of books you found insightful please let me know. Thanks!