This is absolutely fantastic. Great method for teaching new concepts to those new to the subject matter. I have an engineering background and have to say that this approach is refreshing to read. It's like a bag of chocolate chip cookies for the brain :)
It's great that you are staying in the groove. Resetting by taking time off is definitely easier with a supportive spouse/partner. I had to voluntarily take time off when I got sick about 2 years ago. My spouse is a CPA so she was able to offset my loss of income for 6 months before I was able to get back to work.
I learned to back off and enjoy my life outside of work. Life is just too darn short. I still stay relevant by learning at least one new thing each day. Will I ever use all of the tech I learn on personal side projects? Probably not, but I get a kick out of designing things on my own schedule without any corporate constraints by some manipulative middle manager.
So today I broke out my old electronics kit and taught my young one a bit about adjustable voltage regulators. Could have caved to the guilt of work and VPN'd in to code some stuff, but that just isn't worth spoiling my time with my family.
That last point is interesting. Even with an RF detector, an accelerometer may act as a cheap room bug. Heck, if automobiles use them to detect when an airbag should be deployed, why not just use them as bugs in cars? Now I'm scaring myself.
Heck, if automobiles use them to detect when an airbag should be deployed, why not just use them as bugs in cars?
AFAIK the airbag accelerometers are designed to detect much larger accelerations than e.g. the ones in a smartphone, and are thus essentially completely insensitive to anything lesser than a huge impact -- spurious airbag inflation is one of the things the manufacturers really, really don't want to happen.
Many of them are just mechanical switches actuated by a weight, with no active electronics (makes sense for such a safety device to be as simple as possible): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWSlwhYyOhI
And even when not impacting anything, a car is not exactly a quiet and vibration-free environment either...
At my current employer, I had no idea that current employees/senior staff would be pulling in former collegues from a direct competitor. It's hard to see what mindset they are dragging in with them, such as failed processes, that are clunky, but familiar to them or the same singleminded views they are used to. I have to fight that battle being more of an outsider in a senior position and knowing that some of them are filling in more senior roles for the first time in a new company where only their former collegues know their past habits/skeletons.
The aggravation can make you want to lose your cool, but like you said, not backing down is key. Nothing is worse than someone telling you that you are not doing your job and then never challenging them with an intelligent response. You then have to spread your gospel like you own it. Otherwise, you become guilty due to your perceived indifference.
I think even slang terms have a place here. Not sure if the goal is to really improve language skills. If not, any new widely accepted terms could be defined and optionally rated by a community for wider acceptance. If the word is fairly new it could be highlighted in some way to indicate its popularity.
I took a management path at first, thinking it was a natural progression upon obtaining over a decade and a half of experience and being enouraged by my peers over the years. I was never unhappier. I gave it everything I could. My team loved me and I shielded them from mountains of pain and frustration. I got sick from stress and mildly depressed from lack of a technically creative outlet. It took me over a year to recover physically and now I am fully back in the game developing as a technical lead. I still manage, obviously, but within a different context.
From my standpoint, I do not regret anything. I learned from these experiences because I love to explore and am not afraid to fail along the way.
I see so many that seek advice when they have the power to take action themselves. So much time wasted really.
I think it's a function of time and effort. Every day you're not in a dedicated developer role, you will lose a tiny bit of "free" updating about what developers do, use, love, hate, etc. You can offset this somewhat by your own efforts, but they will be limited because the process of working with other developers bringing something to production is its own thing, separate from just keeping tech skills sharp.
I've always been quite active with side projects and moved back into development after about 5 years being in management. It went OK. Everyone was younger than me, stuff had obviously changed and I was out of my comfort zone for sure, but it was a successful transition. If I'd not been so into development on the side (i.e. constantly writing tools and apps with new technologies), I feel it would have been pretty difficult to switch back.
I agree. In my mind, I felt a lot of self-doubt at first, but after digging in, that fear helped propelled me. I suppose if it wasn't for that fear of not being good enough and side projects, I would not have transitioned easily. I also underestimated my ability to adapt quickly.
Today I am very much hands on and I make it known that writing code and designing is my passion.
I secretly stayed active during that role. It takes dedication. Some of this comes from work ethic. I had that drilled into me with the family biz growing up. My tolerance for abuse and failure is high. I focus on looking at myself as a business entity even if I work full time somewhere. Sometimes it isn't enough, but I think going through a tough upbringing had pulled me through. I always find myself asking the question, "Do I want to just want for the rest of my life or do?"... I also still dream and dreaming is key to driving forward. My wife fills the entrpreneurial role right now with escessive travel trying to build something in a new market. I help where I can...so this is me trying something new again ;) We never know where life will lead us so best to take it by the horns and find out :)
I think it would depend in large part with how active you keep your programming skills and how up to date you stay on industry changes. Sure, your initial reaction to reading this is that you would stay sharp as ever, but management is a different kind of grind, and it tends to wear on your soul. Perks are good, trade offs not so good.
Personally, I'm glad I got our of management and back into the nuts and bolts side of the house.
I was the same. Its great you shielded all the crap from the team, but it didn't turn out very well. Next time I'm going to try and shield but also delegate lots of crap guilt free!
geez. i hadn't seen that tweet. crazy. i would love to consider gitlab as an alternative. need to plan on migrating my repos and gists over first. i can't support that type of culture. not today. not ever.
I completely agree. There is no guarantee that they will invest wisely. Adversity is a great teacher and wisdom is the fruit of that labor if not somewhat liberating. I think through that wisdom, the phrase "never enough" has much more meaning. 10k needs to be 100k after time passes and we keep finding excuses to inflate that number.
We were a development team years ago (90s) working late on the production Oracle database writing some SQL (cringe). One junior dev deleted all records from one of the core tables and sat expressionless in total fright for a good 5 minutes. I let her sweat for a bit before I typed 'rollback;' Good thing she didnt commit and there was enough rollback space :)
One of many close calls.
For those I know, including myself and my partner, the habit to strive for is spending less, and I agree that credit can be a useful tool if used wisely, but never really know when life can throw a curve ball. For now, we use credit cards, but manage to eliminate our debt by paying everything soon after incurring debt. Call it using debt for leverage I suppose. For any big purchase (which is rare), we aim to use credit when no interest penalties are present and pay off before any are incurred. A small house, inexpensive vehicles, and thrifty habits even with the use of credit cards allowed us to save quite a bit in contrast to those heavily in debt with terrible credit, but it is still a gamble. I don't blame others for having debt. There are many reasons for this. Without any major life events this system works for us...until perhaps it doesn't.
The #1 rule is, stay cash-positive: don't spend more than you've got in the bank to cover the bills, but be willing to defer the payment and continue income in the interim, because .. after all .. nothing feels better than having all bills paid and still having a net positive every month, to save away ..
