solididiot

I mean, seriously? Is that still a thing in 2022?

I bumped into such an online test by a marketing firm and I just couldn't bring myself to go through it. Dunno, felt a bit like monkey and a bit like "do I really want to work in such a place?".

What do you think about this?

Wife is talking with a FAANG that has presence in pretty much all large EU countries plus UK and Switzerland.

Where she relocates to is pretty much open but we most often gravitate towards Germany, UK and Switzerland. We are pretty mixed up though due to mixed signals from all of them (UK: Brexit, Germany: difficult language, Switzerland: cost of living).

One thing we know is that we don't want to go to Ireland or something close to it. Great job market but high cost of living and public services not close to taxation (we were not happy especially with health and education). We have a small pre-school kid. So, if we learned anything from there is that we're willing to exchange a higher taxation rate with good public services.

Anyway. I'm curious. Which country in EU would you consider under similar circumstances.

Thanks

Sorry for the foul language but I had one too many of this.

Having worked with a good few Open Source tooling/libraries/frameworks etc and with a lot of similar internal ones I have come to the conclusion that almost invariably the quality of the later is far below the quality of the former. Being documentation, ergonomics, bugs, you name it.

Open source alternatives are much better than proprietary closed source ones. Mind you that I'm not talking about code quality, I'm talking about mere usability and dev experience.

This is consistent across quite a few medium, large and very large companies (enterprises) I've been. Worst case (and quite common) is when a company "builds" upon OS (e.g. a framework based on Flask). The end result is a painful to work with half-baked mess.

What I don't get though is that OS is built (in many cases) by hobbyists for free. The internal messes are always being built by people on a steady payroll. I just don't get it...

You've probably been there. Interview after interview after take-home test after pair-programming session to only get a vague templated email rejection without any real info on why you got turned down.

How do you deal with it?

I personally find it increasingly difficult to be polite about it - especially as I grow older.

Being a SW Eng I spent hours on a chair. In home-office. COVID lockdowns made this worse. Added extra stress due to bad future outlook and a lack of direction in my career plus dozens of other blockers that navigating gets more difficult as I grow older.

Anyway. The point of the matter is that I crack and meltdown quite often. And that makes my problems multiply because I then have to deal with apologies etc.

How do you deal with meltdowns? How do you calm yourself down? I'm not talking about being a Buddha (I'm as far away from that as I could be unfortunately). I'm talking about doing the bare minimum so that I don't cause myself and the people around me extra problems.

For the most part I have managed to keep this away from my (shitty) job so it has not affected my (dead in the water) career. But it is taking a toll on my family relations and I hate me for that.

No phychotherapy please. I won't go near their arrogance.

Any practical tips that work on you are highly appreciated.

For context I'm 45 yrs old, male, relatively new dad in a backwater EU country.

TIA