xoail

Basically I am stuck at a job since last 8 years. Moved up the ladder from engineer levels to engineering manager (2nd highest layer in my company, only a VP is above me in my dept). Now feeling bored and less motivated at current role, I am looking for a new role and a challenge. I love tech and business although sometimes I feel outdated with tech but I still write code (mostly prototypes whenever I find time).

I feel I need a coach or a mentor who can help me guide through areas I should focus for next couple months/years so that I can break into exec levels at another company. Unfortunately my network is pretty weak. Any pointers?

I am not sure if this question is relevant to HN but I am looking for some rational answers and I do not know where else I could find smart rational people to ask this.

These days I see quite a lot of people begging for some petty cash. Subways, streets, public places and joints. Almost all of them have a touching story to tell. Most of the time I do find it convincing and would like to help with a dollar or two but lately it's getting out of control. I feel this has become more or less a business model to keep begging in areas where there are people. I see people on the street with cardboard signs, people doing tiny skits to impress/entertain, people trying to raise money for other poor people. This morning on the way to work, I encountered 3 different beggars in 20 minutes. While I would like to help with my allocated budget, I am afraid I might be hurting the system. System, where people are volunteering to help these and many other poor who do not beg and are out of sight. I find myself in emotional dilemma where I would like to help but also do not want to harm a system. What do you do in cases like these?

I've had this idea for a SaaS based product and started working on it not too long ago (about 2 months in as solo founder/dev moonlighting). Since it is for enterprise I figured getting a solid product that does one thing really well is more important than building MVPs of product features. I still have at lest 2 or 3 more months into development before I start selling version 1 of the product.

But now I see my potential competitor also rolling out the same product I am making. They have a $1b market cap, have a large customer base and I can imagine they would find it easy to sell it than I do. I was sure that this would happen some day but not so soon. Their offering seems good enough to entice customers. The only thing I can compete with them right now is Price. They charge a lot for their product and I can beat it by being a fraction of what they charge.

I am currently confused wether to continue building or give up and start-over on something else?

I tend to modify the markup a little bit of my favorite sites I visit, sometimes for fun, sometimes some of their features annoy me. I use Chrome inspector to do that. Is there a way to make them stick so that when I load the page again, may changes are re-applied again? I came across this extension, Stylish but im not sure how to create my own styles in there.