I'll add to this: If you want to practice following up but are afraid of "bugging" someone, start by wishing 1-3 people happy birthday every day. I put every person I know birthday on one giant Google calendar and wish people happy every day. It's a super easy way to at least say "hi" to someone once a year.

I tried this, but it didn't work very well for me. Maybe I was just catching people at a bad time? They'd always brush me off with some version of

  "uh, it isn't my birthday"

  "you've said that to me every day for a week, please stop"

  "stay away from me".

What could I be doing wrong? Am I just choosing the wrong people to try to befriend?

I think you might be choosing the wrong people. :grimacing:

> "you've said that to me every day for a week, please stop"

Did you, or didn't you ??

I love this.

Anecdote from me: I jumped from leading an engineering team for an online virtual events company to working as a solutions engineer for a WebRTC vendor.

They asked for a reference from my previous CEO.

I had left on good terms (gave 4 weeks' notice) and was incredibly professional while working with the previous CEO, so I got a glowing reference. If I had been an ass, it'd be unlikely I'd have gotten such a great reference and got this job. ~6 months later, we even scored my previous CEO as a customer.

The tech world is SMALL. Especially if you niche down career-wise, it's possible to find yourself in a situation where only a couple hundred people worldwide have the same expertise as you. At that level, people would instead work with people they know or have strong references from people they know.

Fun story: I quit my previous job due to health reasons (as far as everyone there knew). I later hear from a friend who works there that during the retro the CEO just said "He couldn't handle the small amount of work that was on his plate." I had never had a one on one with this guy since I started working. He didn't exit interview me. Just a piece of shit truly.

He must have been terrified that people would follow. That’s one of the things about the workplace - the second you’re out the door you don’t matter. He even had the temerity to show everyone around you how they’d be treated if they left. Culture of authority and fear. It’ll come to every company eventually (and spreads like wildfire whenever people hire from Amazon)

I'm a foreigner who's live in Taiwan over the past four years. You can move here tomorrow if you want :D. You can survive with English (though your life will be easier with Mandarin), and there are plenty of English teachers who never learned Mandarin who've lived here for 10+ years.

Highly recommend living here. I met my wife here. Life's chill. Nobody steals. If you've made at least $60k in salary at least once in the last three years you can apply for a Taiwan Gold Card (kinda like a Taiwanese O1 Visa) and come live/work here very easily.

The main reason I continue to learn Mandarin is because my mother in law speaks zero English, so it just makes everyone's live's more fun and pleasant if I speak some Mandarin. :D

My wife teaches Chinese, and this is spot on our situation. Schools and language centers are always hiring. She usually has 1-2 private online students she tutors (generally adults who are learning Chinese for fun). As long as she commits to a semester at a time and doesn't leave in the middle of her semester, she can always return to her job. If we have kids, she can go part-time or be a full-time mom for a few years. Every school teaches the same stuff, so it's not like she has to "keep up" like I do as an engineer and learn new things every few years.

Her income is a lot less than mine, but the extra cash is nice. We've set up our life so we don't NEED the money she brings in so if it ever goes away we'll never panic.

Over the last 10 years, I've gotten every job except one through Hacker News or a referral from a co-worker I met at a job. I got way more callbacks fresh out of school as a 21-year-old living in Canada (aka no USA work permits) via Hacker News than any other channel.

Focus on sending 3-4 _excellent_ applications a day rather than 3000-4000 AI-generated garbage ones. Also, go through your text message history and text every person on there the following:

``` Hi $NAME! I just saw you on $SOCIAL_MEDIA doing $THING and I thought about you? What's the latest with you? No rush to respond if you're busy.

wait for response

Great to hear! I'm currently looking for a software engineering job, do you know anyone who's hiring? ```

You do those two things consistently, you'll have three job offers within 3-4 months.

Now the tricky part is getting the confidence to ACTUALLY DO THE ABOVE. What helped me is going outside and getting involved in ANY club. In the past for me it's been salsa dancing, stand up comedy, and taking a cooking class. Replace those with any other activity you're remotely interested.

Good luck. You got this. The first job or two in tech is tricky. After 3-4 years it gets way easier.

Genuine question: What's the motivation for getting a PhD in an engineering field? I’m guessing you just really really love researching and have enough money/low enough lifestyle to take the oppertunity cost financial hit of not working in industry for five years?

Anecdotally I’m using Kapi trained on our docs to help answer customer questions and its amazing at getting answers to level 1 support. We still need to edit the answers but editing something 90% right is much faster then searching the docs ourselves.

Invest in skills that pay money and spend less then you make.

Skills are key because they’re inflation-proof, and no person or government can ever take them away

While this sounds good, and I agree, it’s hard to turn a big pile of skills into money. Employers are generally looking for exact fit puzzle pieces.

Employers don't really care about skills, they care about paper that says you have skills (e.g. education, certifications, job experience).

You could monetize the skill yourself, of course, though that's just called being an entrepreneur.

I always try to learn new things, and new skills that allow me to be able to get income even in a crisis.

but how do you expand that so it doesn't depend on you, In the end, our body has an expiration date.

Sure. I worked in sales for many years and development for the last handful. It feels good to know that if somehow tomorrow development jobs were scarce I'd be able to walk into a sales job.

That's what the majority of the planet's population are doing, and as a result they are getting poorer every year.

citation needed

For context, as a newly married couple, we spend 80% of our time in Taiwan and 20% in Spain. My job pays the vast majority of our income. I’m Canadian/British, and she’s Taiwanese.

The day after we legally married, I added her as a beneficiary to all my investment and retirement accounts.

In Europe, we keep Euros in one WISE account for which we both have a card.

Culturally, in Taiwan, there isn’t a joint checking account. However, she has the banking password and can transfer money. Banks also let her do whatever she wants with my account as long as she bring my bank stamp.

Also culturally, its important for women to have their own stash of money (私房錢 si fang qian) that’s a psychological safety net. She has that in her own account, it basically just sits there. It’s less then 3% of our net worth and makes her feel safe so I don’t mind.

Every week I take a look at what we spend and make sure we’re on track budget wise in YNAB. We pick our big savings goal together and pool the rest of our money together.

I highly recommend pooling everything together. It makes life a lot more convenient and keeps you both accountable to the goals you’ve set together. If one partner really needs some money saved on the side, that can work (works for us) but all paychecks going forward being pooled makes life simple.

I have multiple "mentors" for various aspects of my life. I don't call them "mentors," though; I generally call them "buddies."

There's plenty of successful people 10-20 years older than you, who want nothing more to tell a younger person what to do and then have them ACTUALLY FOLLOW the advice they are given.

I have a close friend who's about 12 years older than me. He told me I'm the only person he talks to who actually takes action on the advice he gives. Because of that, he gives me more advice (pro tip: none of it is complicated).

My recommendation is to ask people for small pieces of advice who you respect, implement the small things, then follow up and thank them for their advice and show them you've implemented it. Sooner then later, they'll start sharing more unsolicited advice that you can continue to follow.

Joining an organization (club, church, or charity) where you can be around people who are older than you is a great way to bump into people like this.

I agree with this. It sounds like OP is looking for friends. Some in their industry and some outside.