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Triple down on referrals.

With 20 years of experience, you must know someone who knows someone who’s hiring. I recommend reaching out to everyone you’ve ever worked with with a message like:

“Hi $NAME! I saw you’re doing $THING on $SOCIAL_MEDIA. Whats the latest with you?”

Followed up with “Oh thats cool! I’m looking for a new job doing $THING_YOU_DO, do you know anyone who’d need my help?”

From now on, make a point to wish all your past colleagues happy birthday every year forever. The best time to say hi is when you don’t need anything, 2nd best time is today.


"I choose to be fired" is quitting in my books. There aren't enough hours in a week to work two 40-hour-a-week jobs if you also want to eat and sleep


These are not factory jobs, most of the job is about making consequential high stakes decisions.

It doesn’t take 40 hours of work all the time, especially if you can delegate well.


Don't build this in-house if you can help it.

I worked at an adtech company that had our own feature flag system built. Absolute pain to work with. To be fair, it had been built 6 years prior, and I worked there 4 years ago, so there were less off the shelve solutions at the time.

Switched to a company that used an off the shelve solution and it was 100x easier to work with.


Can you elaborate on 'the pain' of using in-house feature flags?

I am genuinely curious how essentially a boolean lookup can be hard to work with.


You want more than a boolean flag.

You want to be able to enable features for certain customers. For example, you might want to roll out a feature to only the US or only English speaking users because you haven't internationalized it yet. Or you might want to enable it for select customers. Or all sorts of other examples.

You may also want the ability to gradually roll out a new feature over time. This lets you test in small scale and also lets you ramp up load on new backend services.

You can also schedule features to be released in advance. This helps you align releases with things like marketing or customer service training.

I only hit on a few points, but you can see it's a lot more than boolean flags.


Possible to have a feature requiring a dependency update that may be mutually exclusive with the previous dependency graph of the former feature set?


That's not really the domain of feature flags in their typical use case. That sounds like you would need to deploy multiple versions of the app and switch between them at the load balancer level or something like that.


"We want to test modifying two lines of this header bidding library against 5% of traffic ONLY IF we bought that traffic from an Outbrain Ad, not a Facebook Ad. If revenue increases after 24 hours we'll enable it on traffic we bought from Outbrain and Facebook ads, but NOT Taboola. Oh and we only want to run it against international traffic, but only if their language setting IS NOT English."

Stuff starts getting complicated.


Text ten previous co-workers the following:

``` Hi $NAME!

I saw on $SOME_SOCIAL_MEDIA_PLATFORM you're doing $SOMETHING and I wanted to say hi! I'm looking for an Android developer job, do you know anyone hiring? ```

Only send ten messages. Try to personalize it as much as possible. From there message every person they suggest. With a similar template.


I did this as a Canadian in Canada, and now I live in Taiwan and still work for a US company. I pay tax to whatever country I was physically present in while doing the work.

There was one year I spent 3 months in California and 9 in Canada so I filed multiple tax returns. Kinda like what a football player does, but less cool :P


I can chime in here:

For me, it was a combination of things, here's the order I've tried: 1. Lift weights 2-3 times a week. 2. Avoid caffeine after 10:00am. 3. Stop eating like an idiot. 4. Go to the doctor and get blood work done. Turns out my hormones were all screwy. I had to get three different opinions before I found a doctor who gave me more info than "go to sleep sooner" and actually gave me some vitamins and hormone pills that helped a lot. 5. Therapy (CBT). It took me going to 3-4 therapists before I found one that jived with me.

For some people you just need to do step 1 or 2. For me it took all five. My biggest lesson is that doctors are just people to who are trying their best. Don't be afraid to see more than one or push them if you're not getting results. They can only help you as much as the feedback you give them.

It was totally worth doing all this though.


> Avoid caffeine after 10:00am

Also: Avoid caffeine for the first 90 minutes of your day.

The lifting did it with me. And going to bed at 10 every night for two years in my early 30s, because there was someone next to me I wanted go be like.


Out of all the side projects I’ve tried, the one that’s been the most lucrative consistently is buying boring index funds.

I kinda wish I just doubled down on the boring route sooner .


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bogleheads/ if anyone agrees. This has been my strategy for a couple years.


Or go to where all the old farts are that's been in this game for a while: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/


Same.

Even if you try and get creative the stock market is most easily mastered with boring index funds.


Just a bummer that these index funds are unavailable to expats :(


I'm a non-US citizen Canadian living in Taiwan. These are available, you just need to jump through a bit more hoops.


What do you mean? You can open an account with a US brokerage


fully available. your country of residence matters.


Which funds?


VFINX all day every day


VOO and SPY are popular ones that track the S&P 500.


> buying boring index funds

Which ones?


SPY until I had a year's worth of salary invested. From there, I had more "personal" personal finance questions (How do I treat these company stock options? How do I deal with obscure SPAC IPO while I live abroad in Asia?), so I got a real-life financial advisor person.

Honestly, was definitely worth it. Even though his fee is 1%, which all the personal finance YouTubers say is high, he's saved me over 100k with a few very key financial decisions where I almost shot myself in the face by accident.


What's your use case? If it's for live video calls, I'd recommend using a vendor to handle this (and every other WebRTC edge case you can think of) for you. I'm a bit biased because I work for Daily.co, who does this.

Banuba is great if you're not trying to integrate any WebRTC stuff too.


I spent a few minutes on the site and it all looks like it's aimed at someone who's not me.

You've suggested it for enhancing/image processing on the client-side and yet, a cursory look at the landing and docs and there's nothing I could see that would help me do this.

Are there any blog/howto guides that are better than your landing page?


I perform stand-up comedy a few nights a week. I completely relate to this. Whenever I "bomb" a joke now I'll say something like, "Well everyone, you just witnessed the first, and last, time I will ever say THAT joke" or "Well, THAT didn't work!" and I'll always get the laugh.

Classic beginner's mistake is to try to make yourself "look good" on stage. I did the same thing. Nobody wants to laugh at jokes told by someone who thinks they're better than the audience :)


I love that approach!

I go to every live standup show I can, especially small ones where new comedians are learning the craft. Being in the audience when one is bombing is incredibly uncomfortable (probably not as much for the audience as for the comedian, but still...).

I like it a lot when the comedian "acknowledges the suck" in a way that isn't self-pitying or audience-blaming. It really decreases the discomfort level a lot.

The audience is (usually, anyway) on the comedian's side and wants the comedian to be successful, so doing that makes the "we're all on the same team here" aspect more overt.


I'm a software engineer who switched over to working beside Sales as a Sales Engineer. Referrals are the key to getting customers or getting a job.

Reach out to previous co-workers, managers, vendors you've spoken to, anyone. There's bound to be someone who has a broken website that needs to be fixed. It's more effective to spend two hours applying to one job via a warm lead than it is to send 100 applications out to cold leads.

Lowering your salary expectations won't help that much. If someone were optimizing for cost, they'd outsource to Southeast Asia or India.

Good luck!


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