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!
But with that said, it is always a good time to work on yourself and relationships.
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.
"I wish I had worked more."
"I wish I had a less meaningful relationship with my wife."
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
“I wish I never got married”
“I wish my wife would’ve left sooner”
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.
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.
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.
Long live the culture of individual freedom the west values most.
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.
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).
This is simplifying a complex situation, which OP should definitely seek professional guidance for before he finds himself in the same situation 5 months from now...
> OP should definitely seek professional guidance
You speak with the certainty of a professional (more, in fact, since a professional would know how little they know about the situation). Are you one? Do you have any reason to believe OP _hasn't_ sought professional guidance?
If you have something to share about _why_ talking with a professional would be worthwhile, or how to find the right one, or what kind of professional to look for, or something else that OP would plausibly think to themselves, "wow thanks, this is really useful" – that would be kind to share. Personal/secondhand anecdotes often work (as distasteful as some find it), as do peer-reviewed evidence etc.
Pointing the obvious is seen as rude, negative or plain toxic, as some do here. Even just dropping hints is received with hostility. Honestly I've experienced no upside and only downside from trying to help people in such situations.
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.
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!
Your second sounds like good advice to me too, if a little presumptuous. How well do you know OP?
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?
There's this strange "work-life balance" ethos, where the two have some sort of invisible barrier that holds them at diametric odds with one another. I'm still working out a theory, but I think it's a descendant of the Greatest Generation/Baby Boomer work values starting in the 1940s after practically every able-bodied young man became militarized.
Needless to say (or maybe needfully), it's tripe, as you've indicated. Work creates meaning in its own right, yes, but not if someone despises it, and a sense of duty alone will _not_ empower someone to sleep well at night.
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.
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.
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.
I had a stringent mentality before that I wanted to be an X. Not anymore.
Work needs to have certain things going on, and money beyond an amount is not that of a gamechanger.
I want to do exciting work. Life is too short to work just for money.
(That is not to say you shouldn't assume your pre-IPO equity to be worth anything though.)
I presume OP doesn’t live in SV because no way to buy just about any home here on a startup salary. Homes where I am went from $2m to $3m in last couple years. These pillars of dust full of termites somehow managed to get even more insanely expensive. I literally didn’t think it was possible to see a shitbox going for $3m outside of Palo Alto but I was wrong.
If it were a "I got a job, it's cool." condition, leetcode grinding would've been good advice but he says work is 1000x more exciting so I'm assuming he loves it.
A new goal for myself is to always be interview ready. I ll resume LeetCode pretty soon.
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.
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.
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)
I get where you are coming from when you say "the goal is to see how you think" - I really do and I have definitely believed in that once upon a time. Truth is, it's extremely gut/instinct driven than we realise. So yeah, while you can easily shoot down a candidate who seem to regurgitate what they had already solved, there's just absolutely no way to differentiate it from a candidate having a bad moment (let alone a bad day).
I had a take home exercise recently where I was supposed to identify a performance issue and fix it. I read the code in a hurry after finishing my day job. I knew where the likely issue is coming from but just couldn't locate it. I wrote back as such. The next day the solution came to me. I fixed it and sent it back. I still got hired but that sort of thing can never happen in a leet-code type interview no matter how much we'd like to believe. I have ADHD but even otherwise our brains are finicky.
30 minutes is probably about what it takes me to solve an LC medium on average and I’ve passed every single FAANG full onsite loop I’ve taken which is a total of 6 over my career. I almost always need a hint or two if it’s not a trivial problem.
If I practiced I could get that number down but I don’t think it would make it more likely to get a better offer.
Yes they are this blatant about it nowadays.
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.
Work is work, the stress will happen when things are not perfect. You need to figure out a way to deal with.
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.
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
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.
(remote (Sweden))
... or am I unclear on “remote” or “Sweden”?
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.
I feel this.
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.
> 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.
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot
“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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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."
But this post is Blind worthy not HN.
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.
That’s what I gather from the replies so far.
This is almost every job. You might as well get paid fairly for it.
Some people go on cruises every year or get a timeshare, others throw a dart at a world map.
