Green tea (maybe others) has l-theanine which takes away the jittery feeling/anxiety of caffeine. Might be why. I really like caffeine + ltheanine pills.
I'm burning through something like 10-20 usbc cords a year. It's outrageous. I'm buying Ankers and "good" brands too. My car has ubsc to usbc and android auto and it used to be a pain (usba to usbc slowed it down) so I'm diligent about fast/good cables.
I have no working usbc-usbc cables right now. It's wild how quickly mine go bad and most of the time they're just plugged into a phone once a day (driving), if that.
I just have a drawer full of dead cables with some sort of usbc end..
I mean this is literally all stuff you could have done prior to 2020 and I guarantee you would have had a more enjoyable time doing all of this in 2019.
Since you're new to CO I hope you'll also contribute to the local issues. Today we're helping unhoused Coloradans have water to drink at Benedict Fountain Park. We do this every Sunday.
As someone who has dealt with depression their entire life it's really something to start to see people who have never, ever dealt with it begin to try to compartmentalize their lives from their depression and look for every other option before declaring it depression. Like it's some horrible disease you'd never want to catch, like any of us have the option.
I really hate that it took this but I've had my feelings/depression talked down so much by people who don't understand depression, don't believe it's a real thing, etc.
I've had so many conversations with friends this year that go like this; "I've lost my entire personality, I can't motivate myself to get out of bed.. whats wrong with me, is this depression?"
Yes, yes it is. Maybe it's temporary, maybe it's acute or chronic, but that is depression. You never know how long it will last, what it will take from you or how quickly you can overcome it.
Be kind to people.
edit: Reading this again I can't shake that some of you are just so far removed from actually understanding your own feelings and emotions that you can't even recognize that you're depressed. It's absolutely fascinating. "What are depressive symptoms?"
I'll say that one positive of this struggle throughout my life is that I've learned which emotions and feelings I can trust or let guide me. I often don't get it right and focus on the negative but I'm very glad I'm cognizant and it's a bright burning fire of "Yeah I'm depressed this week oh boy let's work on this, I need to make some changes."
> some of you are just so far removed from actually understanding your own feelings and emotions that you can't even recognize that you're depressed
For example, I am quite aware that I have some feeling X. I am just not sure whether other people use the word "depression" to refer to X, or something else. Maybe "depression" actually refers to 10 times X, how am I supposed to know?
Sometimes people use the same words to describe different things (or different degrees of the same thing), sometimes people use different words to describe the same thing. I don't have a direct access to your feelings, so how am I supposed to tell whether my feelings are the same?
A similar problem is when one person says "I am unable to do X" and another person says "I find it extremely difficult to do X, but with lot of suffering I somehow manage to do it anyway", you never know whether the second person had more willpower or better strategy or maybe more supportive environment, or simply their symptoms were less strong.
No matter how you decide to see it, it ends up blaming someone. If you decide the problem was the same, then you can blame the first person for not trying hard enough: "see, the second person had the same problem, but they didn't give up, they thought positively, tried harder and overcame the problem, why can't you do the same?" But if you decide that the problem was not the same, then you can blame the second person: "see, you were able to do it after all, which shows that you were only pretending to have the problem, unlike the people who actually suffer from it and cannot do anything about it!"
Of course in real life many problems are on a scale; for different people doing X may be "easy", "difficult but possible", or "impossible". But many people want to round this to "yes" or "no". -- "Either you have depression or you don't. Either it is possible to do X when you are depressed, or it is not. If it is possible, then people who claim they are too depressed to do X are just lying. If it is not possible, then people who manage to do X with great effort were lying about being depressed." -- It works similarly for topics other than depression, too.
This is what an SRE actually is to me, but not to G. Google seems to think they need to create SREs out of SWEs. It took me far, far longer to learn distsys, network engineering, storage and everything else that goes into a platform than it did for me to learn to write grpc endpoints in golang.
I've been in ops for 10+ years building platforms. I'd love to be able to spend 6 hours a day coding but when I'm jugging 10-20 different products that have 1-10+ different languages involved (go, python, nodejs, javascript, ruby, ansible, terraform, puppet, chef) you really have a hard time getting super good at one thing. So most of us have to get good at one language just to pass the code tests, then it languishes because when launching a product I then spend 1-3 months writing something completely different out of biz necessity.
The most important skill to me for an SRE/Ops is curiosity and pattern recognition, and #1 humility/empathy.
Google SREs are split into SWE-SRE and System-SRE. They have different interview processes and job ladders. Usually they have the same job functions day to day, but anecdotally it seemed like SWE-SREs were SWEs who got into SRE and System-SREs had more traditional sysadmin background. Disclosure: was a Google SRE
I mean Google could stop being completely elitist with SREs needing to come from SWE backgrounds and hire the thousands of SRE/Sysadmin/Ops types who do know systems very well but have a lot/bit less SWE background and let their SWEs contribute to mentoring them on SWE stuff.
Pipe dream of mine, for sure.
There's been at least 3 G SREs that have posted in here about what they do day to day and it's literally no different from any other non-FAANG SRE/Ops role any of us do at various scales except for the gatekeeping.
Google does hire SRE SEs and I interviewed many - the focus on coding is a lot less and they get grilled more on systems etc. it’s important to have a healthy mixture of both or you run into eng culture issues like described by many posters here
In my experience, Alice moves on to a cool new project to greenfield while Betsy gets stuck supporting Alices creation until they eventually get on-call burnout and quit. Alice checks in only when there's enough noise made either by angry customers, cto or angry SREs.
That's my 10yrs+ ops experience, at least, and this is hugely exacerbated if Alice is put on such a high pedestal that they don't even have to be on-call with Betty at any point of the lifecycle.
Purely anecdotal but I think it’s from irc/aim users (a lot of millennials/genx including myself) since long form communication wasn’t really a thing on there. I see some people write paragraphs as messages on discord servers and iirc that wasn’t technically even possible on irc and I feel like it’s even strange to see in the middle of lighter chatter.
Also slack threads are awful, imo. I can appreciate them in certain contexts like asking what tool everyone likes or where to grab dinner, but if your slack has become a place where complicated tech answers wind up in threads it makes searching so frustrating just due to the UX. Also they’re limited, or were, on features (code blocks never looked right, etc). I HATED when outages wound up in a slack thread and not a room which was too frequent at my last employer.
That #tagging/#threading feature available on the other slack/discord/teams competitor I can’t think of right now is something I really want.
I have to pay attention to not treating slack like irc quite a bit.
It’s important to the schools to generate income and whatever weird rivalry keeps people going. If you aren’t in a rural town sports players are probably a tiny, tiny percentage of your class and I think it’s better today but they weren’t exactly the most inclusive group of people when I was in school in the late 90s/2000s.
Well there's a decent chance you're going to be working for millennial and gen-X'ers nowadays. We're the ones who were hiding all our online lives (still) from our parents. I'm glad my Myspace was deleted to my teenage angst.
Point being a lot of us I think are really respective of privacy and the fact that people (even teachers and nurses!) have lives that don't revolve around work.
Nice to see Gen X mentioned. In the several years, the media has mentioned only Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z. It’s like Gen X is the lost generation.
This is something that I've been aware of for a while now. Us (Gen-Xrs) have had a rough time of it; The boomers rode the financial booms and mostly did well, and the millennials are pandered to everywhere you look, whereas we had to suffer more than one financial crash, and the media and retail pretend like we don't exist, so nothing is aligned to our values or desires.
Even worse, there's a large chunk of millenials who don't even believe that Gen-X exists, and think that the generation above them are all boomers.
This is very far off from my millennial experience
1; I’m a 34yo millennial, 2; my siblings are ~40ish yo gen-xers, 3; my parents are 65yo boomers.
My genx siblings all bought massive houses around 2008 when I was starting my career which in 2008 meant being lucky to make $40k as a sysadmin. Obama subsidies all over the place if you had 5-10 years to put together a downpayment, though. I don’t think my paycheck became NOT hand-to-face until I was in my mid-late 20s and making well into 6 figures. And I’m not eating avocado toast or buying starbucks.
This is my 2nd recession since I started my career. In the first I was a “JR” and couldn’t get a job. Now I’m a SR and overqualified at most places. I barely know any millenial colleagues of mine that are home owners. And once again, I’m in my mid 30s.
And no, I don’t have children along with half of my mid-30s friends because we can’t afford them along with the 70k+ Of college debt and $600k starter houses.
The truly sad part though, millennials actually remember and know what life was like starting out around ~2008. We’re very open to mentoring and hiring gen-z. Social media wasn’t what it was back in 2008, of course, but I don’t remember any genxers going out of their way to get us millennials hired, go over our resumes, refer us, etc. I luckily landed my first engineering job from another millennial over IRC. This goes into the culture of the company, interviewing, everything. The people bitching about having to describe how to throw a rock or explain why manholes are round? They’re millennials who got those stupid questions when we were JRs because of a horrible job market that Boomers/Genx allowed to continue as the status quo. Not all, of course, but there’s a lot.
Instead of working to make things better for those coming up behind you, you’re acting like the victim. We can all come up with reasons that things suck. Let’s try to improve things.
> The people bitching about having to describe how to throw a rock or explain why manholes are round? They’re millennials who got those stupid questions when we were JRs because of a horrible job market that Boomers/Genx allowed to continue as the status quo.
I’m a GenX and I got those stupid interview questions. I don’t think that is related to generation.
Oh of course you did, my point was more that you got those questions but also a lot of your peers continued asking those stupid questions. I remember when I was hired after getting a manhole question; the genx managers (i was probably 19) used it as an inside joke, "gotcha" just to see how candidates responded. I always thought it was gross.
So I don't ask those questions to people that I interview, because I remember how stupid they made me feel and how unrelated to the job they are.
It's the genx'ers that were asking me that, probably asked by boomers. I don't know why you'd continue to repeat those biased systems.
Genx isn't exactly well known for standing up for itself as opposed to continuing to normalize trash systems, that's the entire problem.
Be better than those before you, that's it. Make things better for those coming up or going out. There's no reason work should suck.
Now you’re the victim... of bad interview questions that have nothing to do with generations. There are assholes of all ages. Just because YOU don’t ask interview questions about manhole covers does not make it a generational trend. I still get these questions and you can delude yourself that all the people asking them are GenX or Boomers if you want.
You still get those questions because you’re a shitty developer interviewing at shitty development shops. That’s it. Nobody gives one fuck that you’re a boomer, you just act like one.
Stick to your namesake, the “doesn’t talk” part. We don’t want or need your input, bud.
