whatthedangheck

There are two possibilities:

- the entire media is in a conspiracy against the world's richest man.

- he really is a jerk and when he initiated the Twitter deal it got the public focus on him and so when stories started churning out they couldn't help but be about what a jerk he is.

I think which of these cases you find most likely will say a lot about your personality and state of mind.

It seems plausible. During the first section of this talk on transgender medical care Dr. Will Powers touches on exactly what you're talking about except in his example it was a highly potent estrogen prescribed to mothers who had had miscarriages to take during pregnancy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fefu33e8O-0

Also relevant: https://www.psypost.org/2022/06/study-finds-early-exposure-t...

> Low exposure to gonadal hormones during early gestation and infancy predicts higher recalled childhood gender nonconformity in men, according to new research published in Psychological Science. The findings provide evidence androgens such as testosterone play a role in the development of male-typical gender role behaviors in childhood.

That's really fantastic to hear. Another commenter said that Nursing is very brutal and abusive. I've heard the same said about medical school. How do you feel about this based on your first hand experience?

Before you take such a drastic action you should try to visit a shelter or an outreach service of some kind and keep an open mind and an open heart about any services they offer you. Wishing you the best.

Very sober advice and I appreciate it. That's why I haven't done these things.

This is really dark. How did this all start. Were you employed at one point or did you start that startup? How old are you? Where do you live?

That's really terrible. I hope you'll get into a better spot. Good on you for leaving that first job. Recognizing that it was bad and then acting on it took courage.

Yes. The pay cut would be obscene. The only way I could justify it would be to think of it as a soft retirement.

(Because I suppose we're here to trauma dump I'm moving my stream of consciousness about wanting to be a nurse to this comment where it seems more appropriate.)

My daydreaming about being a nurse started again when I was taking care of a friend in the hospital after she had a serious blood clot. I was spending 15-20 hours a week there feeding her and stuff because she could barely move and thinking that it was the happiest I'd felt in ages. I should have been stressed out because I was coordinating with her out of town family, and taking care of errands for her, and coordinating with her job, and talking with her doctors and nurses and such but I would leave the hospital feeling so happy and recharched. Meanwhile I feel so drained after spending a few hours "coding" or reviewing design documents or, worse, writing design documents. I think I just don't like technology even though I learned a lot about it to make money.

At this point in my career everyone wants to hire me at the equivalent of what would be L5/L6 at Google and at that level they all want me full time and want me to "mentor" people and be a leader. It's part of the problem of me doing really well at interviewing. I can solve your leetcode problems, design a distributed system, and tell you everything about how your operating system works down to the level of hardware interrupts so I pass these interviews left and right but I don't have the drive or passion to be a "leader" in this field.... Maybe this is the root of my burnout actually.

edit How can I even find a part time job at this point? I have executive recruiters sometimes even trying to get me to be a CTO. Everything points in the direction of companies wanting more of my time not less.

It's good advice, thanks for it. We are in good financial shape and only plan to have our one child luckily. My partner is not working at the moment but he has a masters degree in engineering so I'm sure he could also find work.

I hope your situation worked out in the end too.

Speaking of standup, yeah.... It's obviously a way to keep people on track and apply some social pressure insofar as that. It's not too bad compared to other stressful jobs but it's annoying haha.

Yes. I'm currently employed by a well known company but interviewing elsewhere. I've been a SWE for 10 years and even though I'm still able to smash tech interviews for the most part thanks to lots of grinding over the years I just feel so empty inside about working on computers. It's no fun. I feel isolated. I'm a very social person in real life so I live for the weekends and otherwise spend my mornings and afternoons stressed out about what to say at our daily standup because the truth is I don't care about any of it enough to get invested in a project. But it's hard to leave this field. I'm really good at interviewing and because of that I've been able to secure very good pay and conditions of employment.

In the past 4 years I've seriously looked into going to Nursing School and Cosmetology School respectively (Cosmetology School might seem silly but it's only a year, it's cheap, and it's something I'm interested in). The idea that I'd give up my cushy SWE job for much lower pay even in the case of Nursing says everything there is to say about how burnt out I am. In the end I probably will leave this field anyway. I don't suspect spending my middle age and above programming will be any more fulfilling.

Above all the weirdest part about burnout as a SWE is the GUILT that I feel about it. I get paid a lot. I have a very flexible job with a lot of autonomy. I am coddled but somehow I daydream about ... going to work from 7-7 at a hospital???? It makes me question my sanity.

I was curious about trans people and the health risks of HRT because I have some trans people in my life as of the past few years. When I looked into it I found that there is an association between testosterone levels and mortality along with vulnerability to illness. That did indeed lead me to a particular point of view on the subject and that point of view runs contrary to the common narrative that cross sex hormones are always bad. It's my counter-narrative I suppose.

Not that you asked but in matters of gender it seems like even the most reasonable people seem to fall back on gut feelings over facts. One of those "gut feelings" seems to be that taking cross sex hormones is always or obviously bad for your health. I think it's fascinating to note the fact that much of the literature on the topic only suggests that too much of any sex steroid is bad and in particular testosterone shortens lifespan possibly because it is a weak immunosuppressant. Maybe taking estrogen offsets some of the gains of having low testosterone concerning lifespan but considering that females tend to outlive intact males but not eunuchs it seems likely that the downsides of estrogen are gentler overall.

Insofar as long term consequences, trans women have now been taking HRT since the 1940s so I suspect we'll be seeing some cohorts showing up in published studies more and more. Anecdotally trans women like April Ashley who transitioned in the 1950s, and died this year in her late 80s, and Wendy Carlos who transitioned in the 1970s and is still alive seem to be doing fine. (April Ashley was a very fascinating person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjA9zdIYruU)

Some people are quite happy to have lower testosterone. If you aren't that's fine too. Higher testosterone is associated with shorter lifespan and greater vulnerability to some illnesses. It just is what it is. What I find interesting is how personally some people might take the idea that testosterone has negative health impacts. It has positives: it helps build and maintain muscle and increases energy levels, but that's not the whole story.

Testosterone is an immunosuppressant and leads to a shorter life. Simply cutting off the supply of T to a man can increase his lifespan enough to make up the general gap in lifespan between sexes. [1] There are even some theories about human mating preferences that suggest masculine faces are attractive as an indicator of good genetic quality because if you're able to be drenched in Testosterone and still survive you must otherwise have some above average qualities to make up the difference. [5] (Also recall how estrogen therapy or anti-androgens improved outcomes for male COVID-19 patients. [6])

The biggest risks that come from estrogen therapy are blood clots (estrogen thickens blood) and breast cancer. Blood clots are much less likely when injecting estrogen since it does not pass through the liver which would produce metabolites that complicate matters for your body. Further even though trans women have a much increased risk of breast cancer they are still 70% less likely to get breast cancer than cis women. [3] The risk of prostate cancer also drops by something like two orders of magnitude versus a cis man who has functioning gonads.

Taken all together it seems that if you account for things like the fact that trans women are one of the most impoverished groups globally and suffer from HIV at a rate of about 40% (as in 2/5 trans women have HIV probably because of doing survival sex work) you'd expect a well-off socially accepted trans woman on HRT to live longer than a genetically identical cis man. She has an improved immune system due to lower testosterone and her chances of prostate cancer have plummeted. [4]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-eunuchs/the-ultim...

[2] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/12/in-men-high-t....

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8403717/#:~:tex....

[4] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342512760_Prostate_...

[5] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491301100508

[6] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/05/estrogen...