This might help https://youtu.be/6KGYCU_INVI?si=1Ds8Rez8vNbZAyV5, it has more to do with your perception, expectations, and the story you tell yourself rather than an actual state of “loneliness”.

You are going through a normal phase of growth, and need to be able to sit with discomfort and question it. You will likely find yourself cherishing these moments when you are older.

The real answer is the unsatisfying but true “my shit doesn’t stink but yours sure does”

Ok fellow kid

It’s pretty easy to change jobs on an H-1B if you are high skill. I love hearing folks, who aren’t on an H-1B, tell me things like this. Or that I’m paid less when I’m paid more.

I know these abuses happen, no system is perfect. But I feel the bias in the US against H-1Bs from random citizens not from employers. And the government today has quite strong bias against immigrants.

you are the edge case. for you, it is easy to change employers. For a lot of folks, it is not, despite being equally skilled. it is pretty crass to hand-wave away the real risk of being forced to uproot your life because of the risk that your visa may not be renewed.

About 20% of H1B visas go to indian outsourcing firms. You know the culprits here. Are you really going to argue that these firms are not abusing the system and underpaying employees?

This is my problem with design documents. If your stakeholders already have enough trust that they ask you to go build it without writing a doc, then what value does writing a design doc have.

Many will answer that it helps them think. But why do we need a formal process to think? Thinking is a valuable skill that should be practiced all the time.

Writing for yourself is a good way to think.

Writing is also s good way to document to others that you have thought about the topic/problem/solution.

Mortality is not meant to be cured. Quality of life on the other hand..

I'm not sure any disease is "meant" to be cured. The fact that we can cure any diseases at all is a lucky accident.

Is this a religious conviction, or something else? I've heard that viewpoint a lot, but I've never heard anyone really explain where it comes from.

Smallpox was not meant to be cured anyway, but we did, and we're better for it. One of the defining qualities of humanity is the ability to better ourselves and overcome challenges.

Upvotes for you. I have also worked a ton of odd jobs out of necessity. Many doing things that would frankly disgust most people, or people would say is a worker’s right violation, or is a safety violation. I enjoyed these jobs more despite the conditions.

Financially it is great, no doubt about that. Take away the money and it’s a terrible job - despite loving programming, design, and engineering. And I mean, I love design, programming, ambiguity, and the constant learning required.

My largest source of sanity in this career is to spend extra time at work doing the things that I love in my position. Ironically, I get high performance ratings because of this - but have to fight to spend my time on it.

Modern tech companies and culture suck, even the best ones that I praise. I can’t even blame anyone at this point because it is hard and I have not started a company that tries to be better. I'm not even sure I would do better, to be honest.

Thanks I appreciate it, re safety violations, yeah some of it was those laws were just badly applied across the board, and it was hard to find a place without some degree of violating the letter of the law, so I think they just got flippant.

Re “source of sanity” I’ve caught myself doing the same with extra work, but sometimes it backfires when the little fun tool you wrote solves the purpose so well that it becomes the company standard and then the politics comes in, I don’t mean the “oh we need this feature super badly that breaks a bunch of other things can you do it for us” that’s just having a successful project. I mean when it starts figuring into political finger pointing and you’re forced to be involved in it all since you are the creator of a tool tangentially involved in some inter office politics. I’ve not figured out how to avoid that yet.

It seems insane sometimes that politics makes everything take so long that a decent engineer could’ve written all 3 solutions and validated them in 3 days, but no we want to discuss in this ticket over 3 weeks whose responsibility it is depending on which approach it is or what hypothetical scenarios this will bring (no one really knows anyways so we should’ve just tested it).

Unfortunately that has also pushed lots of good engineers to either disengage or work extra hard to push things through despite organizational problems (I seem to alternate between both but I feel too responsible to really disengage).

Often I wonder why can’t it be easier?

>My largest source of sanity in this career is to spend extra time at work doing the things that I love in my position. Ironically, I get high performance ratings because of this - but have to fight to spend my time on it.

Why do you have to fight if it's extra time? And couldn't you avoid the fighting by just doing it on regular time?

I worked at Facebook and the amount of ex-FBers, especially OGs, speaking out against them on LinkedIn is staggering. I’ve debated doing a livestream of reading this book from start to finish, perhaps even in one sitting, because of what is happening here.

If you do, please post a link here! The book is still backordered on bookshop.org.

The effect on society and the human psyche when political discussions are stripped away from forums is chilling. Internet forums and IRC channels, in their peak, welcomed discussions like these. If you didn’t like it then you don’t click on the clearly political topics. This is hurt even more by forums being turned into feeds that pander into a single category and into businesses where profit, and agreeableness, must come at all cost.

the problem is when "discussions like these" have 2k comments while great technical posts receives 2, 3 comments. If it monopolizes the forum attention, it is not good.

I was hoping for stronger rationale than this. This is not a React-specific problem.

Of course it's not a "react problem". It's a skill issue created by the reality that React is incredibly difficult to scale in large projects.

If Meta cannot even handle React, what hope is there for the rest of us?