blakewatters

Learn how the plus, minus, equals framework can be applied to hacking your way into law school

Legit tactic

The most concerning part of this post is that you could get drunk enough to watch shitty lifetime movies and describe "those shits are fun"

Agreed. This is aligned with what I was throwing on another thread. Your behaviors were not aligned with your identity so one of them had to go. Sounds like you picked the one you really cared about. Kudos

I beg to disagree. Self-hatred is always negative and certainly does not correlate with any particular behavior. Does being hooked on doughnuts and ice-cream go hand-in-hand with self-hatred? What is so special about alcohol versus porn or sugar or Pokemon or Amazon Prime or Netflix?

I applaud your self-awareness and realization that you personally cannot drink moderately but must reject the assertion that there are such things as "regular life" and "alcoholism". Define these states of being...

... except you can't.

There is this lesson that keeps coming up in my life again and again that I believe is true, applies effortlessly to matters of substance consumption, and generalizes out to life in general: think in reverse.

What you want to do is have a clear vision of what the life you want looks like and then work backward to where you are right now, then walk that path.

When you think forward incrementally with thoughts like "I should drink less" or "Do not drink beer" you are prescribing a behavior that is detached from an identity. Who is the person you will be that behaves this way because these behaviors are aligned with who you are?

Consider the difference between eating less meat versus becoming a vegan. One is a forward looking behavior, the other is a backward looking identity. If you are a vegan, you cannot consume animal products because that is who you are and to be a vegan means that you cannot consume animal products. The behaviors and identity are intertwined in a self-reinforcing system. This is strategy versus tactics.

Veganism and other extremely well defined identities are useful for making my point but it need not be so extreme. You can create a custom identity built around a set of ideals, policies, and rules that you define. I am: "a vegan" is equally valid to "a guy who has 3 beers on Wednesday nights watching the game with his boys". Define your values, describe who you want to be, then figure out the delta from where you are at right now to where you want to be. Then do it or admit that it's not what you really want and who you intend to become.

Setbacks and fuck-ups are inherent to the human condition. They do not matter. If we are still on the path we can take two steps forward, one step back and still finish the race. Black and white thinking leads to shame and guilt, which undermines and destroys everything. Life is messy and happens in the grey. Yesterday might have gotten fucked up, tomorrow might be dope, more than likely it will be aight.

I hate to tell you this but you can swear off booze or smokes or bread or sugar or bowties or whatever now and forever but it is gonna come up again. You might get involved. That is not failure. That is life. Hating yourself is counter-productive. Notice when you get yourself off the path and course correct, keep rolling.

You cannot and should not ever expect that you can execute flawlessly and white knuckle your way through this mess we call life. Do not give up your power and agency by believing that some bullshit molecule has hegemony over you.

Be who you are. Do as you wish. Become what you want. Live the dream.

Your problem is very simple: you are working on bullshit.

Across your entire description of your situation you never once mentioned what it is you are actually working on but called out the income you hit and frameworks you are playing with. I humbly submit that your problem is that you have lost the plot.

Hate to break it to you chief but the libraries and frameworks and techniques you use to work are not the point. Creating stuff that people want to use is all that matters. Doing it with finesse and craftsmanship is how you go from good to great but if nobody gives a shit you will always feel empty.

Switching projects and doing something "harder" isn't going to fill that void.

Build something people want. I promise your drive and all the rest will follow behind once you are making them happy and get hooked on solving their problems and improving their lives.

That is what this game is all about.

There is no intrinsic value to being in a management, leadership, or even a founder role. It's really a shame that we have embraced this nonsense of uplifting and celebrating roles and titles over contributions and outcomes.

Nobody gives a shit if you are a director of engineering but they may well care very much if you solve their problem.

It's all vanity and ego run wild. The reality of business is that the only two things that actually matter are building shit and selling shit. This is how to easily differentiate between cost and profit centers and who is essential vs expendable in an organization.

You should only be driven to be a manager or director if your fundamental skillset is dealing with bullshit to enable other people to do value creating work by getting it out of their face.

If you think you are moving a bunch of JIRA tickets around you should take a hard look at what a legit engineering manager deals with. And then add in trying to resolve bullshit conflicts between grown ass men acting like children, talking people into getting involved with your high risk/low reward squad, forcing people to make a decision and start moving instead of arguing endlessly, having really uncomfortable conversations on the regular, firing people who have a mortgage and kids but have undeniably become a risk to the business even if you like hanging out with them, identifying, defining, and enforcing the processes and changes to keep everything from falling apart...

Your 25 years of experience don't necessarily have any impact on dealing with all that bullshit. You have to be fundamentally organized and passionate about driving others to succeed and absorbing damage so they don't have to in order to be a really legit manager. Unfortunately titles and position in the hierarchy has become irrationally coveted and rewarded in many organizations and people who are "senior" slide into these roles and fundamentally suck at it and create misery for their direct reports and commit unforced errors that put the entire business at risk because they don't know or really care what they are doing.

Do not envy and covet joining that squad.

The only thing that really matters is creating dope shit that people want to use and making money while you are doing it. What role you are playing in the organization isn't meaningful compared to whether or not it is winning or losing.

There are plenty of lone-wolf IC's out there pulling down ungodly amounts of money because they are just destroying it and the best way for them to create value is for everybody just to get the fuck out of the way.

Only become a manager if you can be an excellent one and crush it and don't think for a second that just because your former colleague slid into a lane when you didn't that he is succeeding and you are failing. He has a whole new problem now to make a bunch of other people successful and absord all their bullshit for himself to be successful. That's the job. You can only admire and envy him if and when he has crushed it and you are certain that you could have crushed it even harder and should have taken that shot.

And if that is where you are at start interviewing for management roles, grab one, and put the ball through the basket to prove it.

You haven't made a career mistake you are just ruminating on an insecure head trip. And fuck that, you don't need, want, or deserve to live that way.

OCSP exists because CRLs don’t scale as you build an ever growing list of revoked certificates

Okay, I will bite.

What you need my friend is a strategy. Are there features that if delivered create outsized economic returns?

You need to invert your thinking. Nobody gives a shit about you, your product, your company, your mission, open source. Money is directly derived by delivering value to another party in a way that they could not or would not be able to create themselves.

Open Source software utilizes a confluence of patent law and hippy bullshit to create a safe space for collaboration and advancement and yada yada yada.

I didn’t invent fire, but I can start a hell of a bbq.

Do shit that matters and everything will be fine.

The best thing that you can ever do is make a ton of money, hire a ton of people, pay your taxes, and be there when your are called upon.

The analysis I have read here is far over-indexed on the technology and privacy aspects. Pushing a new messaging platform involves a fundamental change in consumer behavior and this in turn requires engineering, product, design, and marketing to execute in concert. This is why corporations continue to out-deliver Open Source in anything that touches the consumer.

“If we build it, they will come.” Is just a lazy fantasy that lets you stay in your comfort zone, fixing bugs, refactoring modules, and pushing features for the next release.

If Matrix is to succeed as a technology it needs a real, highly competent go to market team and strategy. And I think you have to build some very compelling user experiences to drive switching and combine that with import/invitation features and outreach (pushes, email, etc) to even have a look at the basket. Alignment across platforms is just table stakes.

There is a fundamental disconnect here in the analysis and attribution of malice and disregard for social duty. Building a product and company is a messy affair. You have to earn your way into having a perspective and responsibility to society. Engagement and virality and advertising revenue built off digital addiction may have a dark side but you have to build the business before the self reflection. This is the reality of capitalism: make enough money that you can afford the luxury of guilt.