ac2022

Originally from Pakistan, grew up in Middle East.

Of course, my parents wanted me to be a doctor. As a software engineer, I have disappointed them for a life. It doesn’t bother me anymore, they are from different generation where security especially financial security was hard.

There were other pressures too like as kids we were constantly reminded about our duties to take care of them when they are in their old age. And how we will never be able to take care of them because of our average grades, which means we won’t get decent jobs, which means we won’t have enough money to take care of them. I used to worry so much about that I never spent my pocket money. Still bitter about it.

They pressured us but never provided any support. Other kids who did good in the school had tutors, parents were very involved in their lives. My parents just yelled and said work harder.

Same with sports, never played cricket with us. Never even taught us how to play it. But expected 5-7 years olds to know how to play cricket when we met up with our cousins in Pakistan.

Try Toptal. I applied there for practice and as a backup. It seems they have plenty of projects.

Also SaaS like Deel make it easy for employers to hire anyone around the world. The problem is educating the employers. I would perhaps add a blurb about getting paid via Deel in cover letter.

Yes, it is amazing. They say Heart Rate Variability is pretty good indicator of stress. My HRV graph for last 6 months clearly shows when I made decision to change job and when I gave 2 weeks notice.

Yeah, with recent economic developments, I am a little worried but stock of my previous company is also down. I am hearing rumors of layoffs there. So I could still be laid off even if I had stayed with the big company.

A new goal for myself is to always be interview ready. I ll resume LeetCode pretty soon.

I agree in principle but where I worked a lot of it was just for show. We had a lot of security people who only knew how to generate pdfs. They were very hard to work with.

Or some day, they will decide that one part of our service should move from one network to another for security or compliance reasons. But they have no idea how to do it, who to talk to, etc.

But since it is security issue, we will need drop everything and figure out how to move part of our infrastructure to another network. Things like these were pretty common.

True, I have taken break from LeetCode but not for too long. I will probably restart it in couple of weeks. Going forward, I always want to be interview ready.

Sort of, yes. We have signed the contract and should be closing in the fall :)

The house is a bit more expensive than I would like but we can afford it. And we could have afford it before too, but I probably subconsciously thought that I don't deserve it.

Thank you and yes we are working on it.

BTW I thought about divorce but never said that word to my wife. Those thoughts luckily were very brief.

Thanks, we are.

But I highly doubt there are many people who can prevent their internal mental state from affecting their relationships.

I was not able to see her point of view when I felt like a loser. Once I decided that I will get a new job, we were better able to communicate and figure out our next steps.

> When you yell at your significant other after the work day is done.

This is really important. We were fighting over nothing. Switching jobs is cheaper than couples counseling or divorce.

For me it was lack of control that was causing burn out. Exercise definitely improved my mood but it was only for couple of hours. Once I decided that I will switch job, I was 1000x better although I was working longer and harder.

Pretty funny, I was going to order a balance board that I had been eyeing for a bit. Went to Amazon but it was not loading the page correctly, so I went to company's website to look up specs and found out they had 10% off coupon & no taxes. So I purchased it from them.

Wondering how much Amazon outages can actually increase revenues for smaller companies.