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Thank HN: Five months ago, I was feeling like a loser, now I am opposite

564 points by ac2022 4y ago

I posted this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709273 I thought I hated programming and was ready to quit or even divorce my wife. I was not able to have a normal conversation with anyone. I was burned out but I thought I was having midlife crisis. My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress. My job was easy and I had a lot of control over my time, work location, etc. I didn't think it could be the job that was causing me feel depressed. What I didn't realize while my work gave me freedom on work schedule, it didn't give me any real freedom to make important decisions. We were checkmark driven company. I was forced to do a lot of compliance and security related tasks which added zero benefit to our service. After my post, I decided that I either move into management at my last company or get a new job. I worked longer hours and spent all my free time doing LeetCode. LeetCode was hard and pointless. But I was motivated and was able to solve most easy and medium question in 30 mins. However, that was not good enough for FAANGs. I applied to some smaller companies and got a few offers. I picked one really great Series D startup. I believe in their mission and I have freedom to make real decisions here. I got a decent bump in my salary but not really FAANG TC. However, more importantly, work is 1000 times more exciting. I feel alive again. Wife and I are not fighting anymore. I work longer hours but have more energy at the end of day. I just want to thank everyone that responded to my post and tell everyone that if you find your work or life unfulfilling, change your job now!

nus07 4y ago
Is Hacker News the new Blind ? Wtf did I just read? But good on you dude - just don’t attach that much of your self worth and relationship situation on your job . But this post is Blind worthy not HN.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
tmaly 4y ago
Congrats on the new gig. It sounds like things worked out well.
malshe 4y ago
I am happy to see that you could leave your “bullshit job”! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
juanani 4y ago
bioinformatics 4y ago
You got help here? I guess you’re a “best” loser now.lol
zttg 4y ago
I will try to properly word the well known thing: When you are happy, full of energy, love your job, get a lot of things to do, confident, etc - you are more attractive for any woman, especially for your wife, than when you are uncertain, unhappy, frustrated and full of problems. Work as much as possible on yourself and your own happiness and career. Any reasonable woman is designed to feel what is going on with you. Also consider some physical activity which you like. Gym, hiking, cycling, kayak, crossfit - whatever makes you happy and stronger and a same time does not lead to injuries
giantg2 4y ago
"My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress." I have a similar situation. It's not unreasonable to not want a bigger house, even if that's what culture tells us we should want that. Maybe your wife is fine being house poor, like mine wants to be. One bad issue and you're sunk and there will be stress. I prefer a cushion for the real possibility of life altering issues arising. We shouldn't all be spending balls the wall like culture tells us and then going up in flames at the first bump (not that it's your situation, but mine). And yes, I'm a loser and feel like it too. That's ok.
jimhi 4y ago
Thanks for sharing, I think many people out there are going through the same thing you did.
happyopossum 4y ago
Happy to hear you've made some positive changes! That said, as a cybersecurity practitioner, this: >a lot of compliance and security related tasks which added zero benefit to our service scares the bejeezus out of me. Security is never of zero benefit.
- swader999 4y ago
  I bet he was referring to the endless documentation around it.
- barnabask 4y ago
  Agree with you in principle. However, it sounds like OP was doing security theater, which is demoralizing to perform.
- justin_oaks 4y ago
  The OP could mean that the security-related tasks added zero benefit because they were unnecessary tasks that didn't result in increased security. There are plenty of security-related tasks that have zero, or even negative, benefit. - Obtaining EV certificates for your websites. - Enforcing password rotation every 90 days. - Adding a webapp firewall in front of your static file hosting (e.g. S3).
- Aaronstotle 4y ago
  It might not be zero, but in some cases it could be lots of additional work for some marginal benefit
- deathanatos 4y ago
  I agree with both. Real security is never of zero benefit, but I've worked on a lot of "security" tickets that are of no pragmatic benefit: 1. Angst to clean up the latest non-vuln. vuln. (e.g., the use of the vuln. library doesn't meet the requirements listed in the vuln. for it to be vuln., or the vuln. is researcher spam and … isn't really a vuln., but good luck trying to get someone to understand that, or where a vuln. gets publicized but your upstream OS is derping around and hasn't actually released the patched version yet)¹ 2. ill-advised attempts to add TLS or similar: adding TLS is not trivial (you do have to have the cert available, so that the ends can validate), but I've seen a lot of TLS additions, e.g., on top of a secure network, or where TLS is bolted on but the library is set to "don't verify". (Worse, this is the default in many libraries: as someone implementing TLS, industry would be greatly helped by having defaults that were secure. PG, MySQL, I'm looking at you.) In one case an auditor asked the mobile apps to do cert pinning — which they did, without ever involving the BE engs. (They weren't told they needed to!) The next cert rotation broke both mobile apps, and broke both differently: the Android app pinned only the private key (and had a NPE if it wasn't RSA) and the iOS app pinned the cert, so that one was truly broken. I've also seen a VPN setup where the clients were configured to accept any leaf cert issued by a public web PKI CA … and check nothing else. (I.e., anyone could go to that CA, get a leaf, and it would MitM the VPN.) 3. adding yet-another-security-linter that has problems with every little thing. E.g., we had one that really disliked that we did string concatenation in our SQL queries. But we were concatenating parameterized queries, as the search parameters (including the number of parameters), came from the user. So a program would need to add, e.g., "AND column > ?" to the query, and append the value to the parameter list. Ended up switching some of that to SQLAlchemy, through which it couldn't see, even though it was functionally the same. SQLAlchemy did work with a better internal AST, though, so it caught some errors our query builder caught only after bugging. I also have a linter from my current security team that files a bug for each package in a container that has vulns. against it. But it does not ever update its bugs, … so you don't know if anything is actually fixed. (I'm not patching package by package; I'm usually invalidating a cache & forcing it to do the equivalent of "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade", so I'm going to close a bunch of tickets all at once … but I have no way of knowing which ones.) 4. Audits, where the auditor asks things like "do you use RC4, TLS, or AES?" which … good grief 5. concerns about PII handling for information that's part of a public (government) record. ¹my default disposition is to patch, regardless of theoretical exploitability, if it is trivial to do so. But if it's not trivial — e.g., if the upgrade is a SemVer incompatible upgrade that requires me to rebase the entire monolith on to a new web framework and I lack the resources to do that right now, and the vuln.'s conditions to be exploited say we're not vuln., I am going to take the pragmatic approach of "we're ignoring this, as it doesn't apply to our codebase."
DantesKite 4y ago
No problemo. Optimism, useful advice, and motivational speaking are what we do best here over at HackerNews.
- willismichael 4y ago
  Well, that and ripping certain subjects to shreds whenever they come up.
thecleaner 4y ago
Hey congratulations ! Keep at the Leetcode thing though. You already turned your situation but why not go for another thing in your arsenal ?
- pavlov 4y ago
  From the OP: “spent all my free time doing LeetCode. [..] LeetCode was hard and pointless” For someone recovering from burnout, it doesn’t seem a good idea to recommend that they return to an activity that felt pointless.
  - ac2022 4y ago
    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.
philliphaydon 4y ago
What is peoples obsession with FAANG companies?
- thecleaner 4y ago
  Stable job. Good pay. And let's face it seems most startups these days is some crypto bullshit.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    FAANG is "growth & engagement", not much better though. At least crypto is easy to ignore, while "engagement" relies on it getting in your way and being hard/impossible to ignore.
    - saalweachter 4y ago
      Eh, a lot of the work at a FAANG, or a GAMMA, or whatever acronym you want to use for "big stable tech companies", is on products that people use and like and the changes you make matter to people. You may be a cog in a machine, but it's an important machine.
      - switchbak 4y ago
        I'm actively resisting any future incorporation of Google related anything into my life. Doubly so for Facebook and it's evil tendrils. Twitter/LinkedIn and all that other junk don't even deserve consideration. Are you so sure that work is really important? Most of that big tech stuff is some variation of a low quality attention sink, or similarly some kind of ad-tech that mines the personal information that gets used in said attention sink. [There is real stuff being worked on, but it's not the core focus] I've worked a couple jobs that have had tangible real-world impact, and that has counted for a ton: keeping search and rescue helicopters in the air, and improving material science. Besides that, I think back to what I've contributed to, and it doesn't amount to much. At this stage, I'm fairly selfish about work stuff: I need to learn and to get paid. If my work can have meaningful impact that's awesome, but very elusive.
holtkam2 4y ago
Hell yeah man :)
qzw 4y ago
Congrats on fixing the job issue. Now that times are better, might want to consider working on improving communications with the wife, so that the next time you go through a rough patch it won't go as far as divorce.
- ac2022 4y ago
  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.
  - rattray 4y ago
    Very happy to hear that :)
sacrosancty 4y ago
Just a suggestion, but if your relationship with your wife depends on your personal circumstances and mood, then it sounds not very strong. Might be worth taking advantage of this good period to do some relationship strengthening exercises while you can so that when the next downturn happens, you can both understand each other's and your own feelings better. I'm not talking about random activities like going to the beach but finding a good self-help book or therapist and sitting down together working through it regularly. It's easy for problems to grow silently until they're too big to fix. Relationships are far more important than jobs, money or houses.
- roeles 4y ago
  > Might be worth taking advantage of this good period to do some relationship strengthening exercises while you can so that when the next downturn happens, you can both understand each other's and your own feelings better. Not too long ago, my wife and I got the suggestion to schedule a weekly "open-faced hour". It has worked wonders for understanding each other, which has positive effects on every aspect of our relationship.
- thow34wqway 4y ago
  May be this works for American culture. In India over 95% are arranged marriages. The probability of finding a partner with common interests is pretty low. Not marrying is not an option. Because it affects siblings marriages. Women have even lesser freedom in this area. Given these conditions the best thing to do is not forget the relations ship b/w spouse will never be great and at the same time its not the spouse's fault. Minimal commitment to the happiness of the spouse is a must but never forget it will not be great. Long live the culture of individual freedom the west values most.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  It is pretty normal for poor mental health to take a toll on relationships. Sometimes the problem really is that simple. But with that said, it is always a good time to work on yourself and relationships.
  - 4y ago
daneel_w 4y ago
Glad to hear it worked out for the better. My current employment is no longer fulfilling and I wish to "move on", but I can only do remote and such vacancies are very hard to come by in Sweden.
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
  Doesn’t the Venn diagram look like: (remote (Sweden)) ... or am I unclear on “remote” or “Sweden”?
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    It costs employers money and complexity to open up remote hiring of employees in a new jurisdiction. If Sweden isn’t a very big market or Sweden is a difficult market from a legal perspective, even remote companies may not be able to hire there. As an example, I’d have to look, but I think it’s only quite recently that I’ve been able to hire in Sweden, 2 years after being remote. I know I couldn’t last year, but we contracted with some company to make some of the smaller markets feasible for us.
    - creakingstairs 4y ago
      You could always be an independent contractor instead of being an employee. That way it reduces the hurdle for hiring. I'm technically a contractor atm, but get treated like an employee. You of course don't get the same legal protections or some benefits but you can charge more instead :)
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        Even there, we’d have to understand if that arrangement is commonly viewed as legal in the country of residence. (My understanding is that it’s not legal in all countries [including my own] just because you say and I agree that you’re a contractor, if there are additional facts and circumstances tests to decide the “proper” treatment.)
qq66 4y ago
"Series D startup" may be a very bad place to be very soon. Keep grinding LeetCode.
- asdev 4y ago
  you're probably from the "work harder not smarter" school of thought
  - lovich 4y ago
    And presumably you are from the “stonks only go up” crowd?
- kube-system 4y ago
  There are plenty of recession resistant software engineering jobs outside of SV. If you have some skills, you'll be fine. When the economy crashes and bitcoin startups go out of business, payday loan startups will be hiring.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  My parents always said videogames were a waste of time, but at least they ingrained the value of repetitive stat grinding.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mastazi 4y ago
  Not OP but the day startups are no longer viable I will change careers (something I did already in the past, so I know what it entails) rather than grinding leet and trying to find work at some tech mega corp. Salary at the expense of everything else was never the goal.
  - rg111 4y ago
    Same here. I had a stringent mentality before that I wanted to be an X. Not anymore. Work needs to have certain things going on, and money beyond an amount is not that of a gamechanger. I want to do exciting work. Life is too short to work just for money.
wccrawford 4y ago
> it didn't give me any real freedom to make important decisions. I feel this.
asdev 4y ago
easy to lose sight of what makes you fulfilled while on the Leetcode grind. congrats OP
silisili 4y ago
First off - congratulations. Secondly I genuinely hope you apologize to your wife and appreciate her sticking by you through what sound like mental issues. Sadly, a lot of people aren't so patient.
UncleEntity 4y ago
So… did your wife get the big house she wanted?
- ac2022 4y ago
  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.
  - method_capital 4y ago
    People who believe they need big houses baffle me. It isn't priced right, and you can improve to flip or live and decide later. But why on earth would someone need a giant fucking house to be "happy".
    - shultays 4y ago
      OP has kids, it does not have to be a mansion but you need a large house
    - necovek 4y ago
      People usually don't stress so much on the size, but on the neighbourhood and number of rooms. A "big house" might mean a separate office for a work-at-home parent (or two) instead of the bedroom or living room, or separate rooms for your soon-to-be-teenagers. Maybe that was the case for the OP? Unfortunately, if you are not building your own house (or having it built, ofc), you can only get a house the size that's almost always bigger than what you'd like initially. Or has fewer rooms than you'd like. You simply don't get to specify the room sizes or such, and for unbeknownst-to-me reasons, people simply build huge houses with huge rooms instead of smaller houses with more smaller rooms.
      - em-bee 4y ago
        yes, number of rooms is a big thing. especially with kids and working from home. my office room is 6m² now. sufficient for me. but places with rooms that small are rare. a friend has a 100m² apartment with 5 rooms, when every other apartment i found on the market in that city with only 4 rooms had at least 150m².
mikesabbagh 4y ago
Leetcode is not good training for FAANG?
fny 4y ago
Congrats! But be very careful about the start up you're working for. Make sure they have enough cash to survive the next 4-5 years and have a steady revenue stream.
- w-j-w 4y ago
  > 4-5 years of runway > startup If this is your criterion for working at a startup, then you are too conservative to work at one. Every job carries risk, and looking to eradicate it is pointless.
  - fny 4y ago
    The environment right now is very different than a few years ago. Risk is way higher right now. Reward is even more questionable.
- rattray 4y ago
  Uh, why? They already work there. If things tank in a year or two, OP will just be the target of a recruiter feeding frenzy, and they'll come out more qualified than they went in. Quitting immediately would look bad in comparison, and staying but exuding pessimism and paranoia would not be adaptive.
drewcoo 4y ago
Seek counseling. You're making life decisions based on web boards. Somehow programming and your relationship with your spouse are tied up together. You're riding really high now. You were really low before. Emotional roller coasters mean you should talk with someone, regardless of how you're feeling right now.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  > Seek counseling. You're making life decisions based on web boards. Somehow programming and your relationship with your spouse are tied up together. > > You're riding really high now. You were really low before. Emotional roller coasters mean you should talk with someone, regardless of how you're feeling right now. Is it that hard to believe that changing what one spends over a third of their waking hours per week on can have a significant impact on one's emotional well being?
  - Phileosopher 4y ago
    I think it's a specific cultural idiosyncrasy that comes from (I'm guessing) modern USA. There's this strange "work-life balance" ethos, where the two have some sort of invisible barrier that holds them at diametric odds with one another. I'm still working out a theory, but I think it's a descendant of the Greatest Generation/Baby Boomer work values starting in the 1940s after practically every able-bodied young man became militarized. Needless to say (or maybe needfully), it's tripe, as you've indicated. Work creates meaning in its own right, yes, but not if someone despises it, and a sense of duty alone will _not_ empower someone to sleep well at night.
- switchbak 4y ago
  I think you're being a little harsh maybe? I agree big mood swings like this are a concern, but jobs do a lot to affect our happiness. I'm likewise a little concerned about a partner who "wants a big house", but that's a highly condensed statement about what is no doubt a more nuanced situation. I've jumped ship and had it be a really positive experience. Wouldn't be averse to it again, and I think that's mostly what this post is about: recognized that their career was important to them, dug deep and found a better job, now they're sharing excitement their about it. It's also important to not get too much personal identification from a job (see Mike Rowe's thoughts on happy people working crappy jobs), and to not overwork, but whatever - they're making progress!
CodeWriter23 4y ago
So much awesome here, you having the revelation, taking action to change what needed to be changed, feeling the positive outcome, then sharing it. <3
victor22 4y ago
Wow FAANG waited 5 months to finish this PR masterpiece
zepolen 4y ago
Bro, it's not the job, it's you not standing up to your oppressive wife. The longer hours mean you spend less time with her so you're happier, the pay rise means she can spend it so she's happier and the decision making you get at the job gives you a sense of manhood which you are obviously lacking at home. Give it time and your wife will again become unhappy with the status quo and demand more and once again you will be unhappy and blame your job.
bin_bash 4y ago
> I was motivated and was able to solve most easy and medium question in 30 mins. However, that was not good enough for FAANGs. What makes you think it's not good enough? LC is important and today it might be even be essential to land a role, but I think people tend to think of it like an exam when that's not really what we're testing for. The goal is to see how you think, not see if you can simply come up with the right answer. If you need a hint it's usually not going to hurt you at all so long as you listen to the hint, are able to understand it, then incorporate it into a solution. I'd go so far as to say that being able to do that can help you more than reciting an answer without a hint. There are some patterns like tries, left/right pointers, memoization, heaps, and maps that studying helps with for sure, but that doesn't mean you're supposed to be able to immediately solve something without any help. (Note that there are asshole interviewers out there that will challenge you and won't follow what I've described, but that's rare and personally I've only seen them at startups, not big tech)
- 8ytecoder 4y ago
  All we need is one interviewer who absolutely hates interviewing to ruin the experience for the candidate and probably throw them off balance. It happens in Big Tech much more often than people are willing to admit. I get where you are coming from when you say "the goal is to see how you think" - I really do and I have definitely believed in that once upon a time. Truth is, it's extremely gut/instinct driven than we realise. So yeah, while you can easily shoot down a candidate who seem to regurgitate what they had already solved, there's just absolutely no way to differentiate it from a candidate having a bad moment (let alone a bad day). I had a take home exercise recently where I was supposed to identify a performance issue and fix it. I read the code in a hurry after finishing my day job. I knew where the likely issue is coming from but just couldn't locate it. I wrote back as such. The next day the solution came to me. I fixed it and sent it back. I still got hired but that sort of thing can never happen in a leet-code type interview no matter how much we'd like to believe. I have ADHD but even otherwise our brains are finicky.
  - bin_bash 4y ago
    My point is just that being able to solve LC mediums under 30 minutes isn’t that relevant. I’m not saying it’s a great way to vet candidates. 30 minutes is probably about what it takes me to solve an LC medium on average and I’ve passed every single FAANG full onsite loop I’ve taken which is a total of 6 over my career. I almost always need a hint or two if it’s not a trivial problem. If I practiced I could get that number down but I don’t think it would make it more likely to get a better offer.
d23 4y ago
Congrats! I'm happy for you. Funny how being more engaged and working more can leave you with more energy at the end of the day. I've felt the same way in the past.
- ac2022 4y ago
  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.
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    How do you have 6 months of data? Is that something modern smart watches produce? I would love to have that data for myself, but don't really want to complicate my life with a smart watch. I don't even like keeping my e-reader's battery charged... My heart nerves got jacked up a couple years ago, and I had to get a pacemaker. It's presumably collecting a ton of cool data that it BLE's to the manufacturer and my cardiologist, but I don't have access to it.
    - JohnL4 4y ago
      https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/heartrate-variability/get-hrv-summary-by-interval/ https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/heartrate-var... I used the swagger interface a few months ago to download my resting heart rate over a three-year period, and it was interesting.
taesu 4y ago
Fanng is not for everybody and everybody doesnt fit in Fanng. Im glad you found your happiness! Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot
rattray 4y ago
Can't believe the negativity I see on some of the top comments right now. Congrats and thanks for sharing, you rock :) It's really nice to get updates from folks who posted an Ask HN. Especially with a positive outcome. It's really not uncommon for humans to find energizing work energizing, and for that to affect their overall quality of life. Plenty of people are comfortable checking boxes and going home early, sure, but that can be a slow death to a lot of folks (even some who might not realize it).
- flakyfilibuster 4y ago
  The negativity is totally warranted: OPs misguided believe in thinking that simply finding a new job will get rid of all his woes is worrisome. Furthermore the fact that a high percentage of commentators are encouraging his stance is counterproductive. This is simplifying a complex situation, which OP should definitely seek professional guidance for before he finds himself in the same situation 5 months from now...
  - rattray 4y ago
    You seem to know something I don't. What is the evidence of a misguided belief? OP was skeptical this change would make a difference, but shares that it did. I did not see any forward-looking statements implying the new job "will get rid of all his woes", only what they are experiencing now. Elsewhere on the thread, OP shared that they are using this opportunity to work more intentionally on their relationship with their wife, which doesn't sound like the kind of thing someone who thinks all their problems have been magically fixed would do. > OP should definitely seek professional guidance You speak with the certainty of a professional (more, in fact, since a professional would know how little they know about the situation). Are you one? Do you have any reason to believe OP _hasn't_ sought professional guidance? If you have something to share about _why_ talking with a professional would be worthwhile, or how to find the right one, or what kind of professional to look for, or something else that OP would plausibly think to themselves, "wow thanks, this is really useful" – that would be kind to share. Personal/secondhand anecdotes often work (as distasteful as some find it), as do peer-reviewed evidence etc.
  - 4y ago
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
"My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress." Feminism's greatest enemies aren't necessarily men, but their wives. Your previous post indicated you "needed a bigger house" but clearly there was more to it. It seems like you have great emotional investment in two things that don't reciprocate your investment: your wife only seems to care about what you can give her, and a job is by definition a business relationship with a company they can sever whenever it is convenient to them. I would guess you do not have a good sense of self-worth. It's ok, it's really hard to have a good self-worth in a world where you are exposed to thousands of daily messages of inadequacies. It's ok to get some reinforcement from jobs, but just keep in mind it is a business relationship. I hope your wife does not also consider your marriage a business relationship. Two kids are a "real marriage" not easily unraveled. Hope the best for you.
reuven 4y ago
I didn't see your original post. But I'm delighted to hear that things have improved. There's no doubt that stress in your career can lead to stress at home. Certainly, when I'm stressed about my work (or when my wife is stressed about hers), it can be difficult on our relationship. And then, as they say, you have two problems. Moreover, it can feel hopeless. So many people say that you have to work for a big, famous company, with huge compensation packages. But once you're getting paid well, there are other important things: Do you care about the work you're doing? Are you treated decently at work? Do they give you responsibility, and the power to make decisions? There are oodles of people out there making good wages at companies we've never heard of, working with people they like, on projects they believe add value to the world. Such jobs aren't glamorous, and won't make the front page of the newspaper, but it doesn't matter. I love my work. I feel fortunate to do what I do. And when I tell people this, they are often taken aback, and say, "Wow, you're really lucky. I don't like my work; I just do it for the paycheck." So if you have this kind of excitement, energy, enjoyment, and fulfillment from your new job -- then you've won, as it were. You should feel good about this, and should consider yourself among the rare, fortunate folks in that situation. In short, it's great to hear about someone who has found satisfaction in their work. And if that satisfaction has improved your marriage? All the better.
corrius 4y ago
I don't normally comment on HN but reading all the negative vibes made me want to comment. Glad to hear you are doing great! I had to make the decision between a high paying job and a high rewarding job and choosing the second one has been a huge improvement in my life.
- heisenbit 4y ago
  Indeed the HN community seems to manage the ‚issue‘ in an overall happy tale. I doubt there are many in a long relationship which did not suffer for a time due to external and not so well understood circumstances. Pull through and better self/us understanding and a stronger relationship can be ahead.
- qgin 4y ago
  HN doesn’t do happy very well.
awsrocks 4y ago
egorfine 4y ago
Man I'm so happy to hear this! Wish you the very best of luck!
wiihack 4y ago
That sounds really awesome. Congratulations :)
shultays 4y ago
Good luck at your new job but it sounds like you are in a honeymoon period. It is good that you are happier but a fresh startup with longer hours does not sound good at all, especially if you have 2 kids and want to buy a house (ie you need stability) Work is work, the stress will happen when things are not perfect. You need to figure out a way to deal with.

564 points by ac2022 4y ago

nus07 4y ago

Is Hacker News the new Blind ? Wtf did I just read? But good on you dude - just don’t attach that much of your self worth and relationship situation on your job . But this post is Blind worthy not HN.

barry-cotter 4y ago

tmaly 4y ago

Congrats on the new gig. It sounds like things worked out well.

malshe 4y ago

I am happy to see that you could leave your “bullshit job”! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

juanani 4y ago

bioinformatics 4y ago

You got help here? I guess you’re a “best” loser now.lol

zttg 4y ago

I will try to properly word the well known thing: When you are happy, full of energy, love your job, get a lot of things to do, confident, etc - you are more attractive for any woman, especially for your wife, than when you are uncertain, unhappy, frustrated and full of problems. Work as much as possible on yourself and your own happiness and career. Any reasonable woman is designed to feel what is going on with you. Also consider some physical activity which you like. Gym, hiking, cycling, kayak, crossfit - whatever makes you happy and stronger and a same time does not lead to injuries

giantg2 4y ago

"My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress." I have a similar situation. It's not unreasonable to not want a bigger house, even if that's what culture tells us we should want that. Maybe your wife is fine being house poor, like mine wants to be. One bad issue and you're sunk and there will be stress. I prefer a cushion for the real possibility of life altering issues arising. We shouldn't all be spending balls the wall like culture tells us and then going up in flames at the first bump (not that it's your situation, but mine). And yes, I'm a loser and feel like it too. That's ok.

jimhi 4y ago

Thanks for sharing, I think many people out there are going through the same thing you did.

happyopossum 4y ago

Happy to hear you've made some positive changes! That said, as a cybersecurity practitioner, this: >a lot of compliance and security related tasks which added zero benefit to our service scares the bejeezus out of me. Security is never of zero benefit.

swader999 4y ago
I bet he was referring to the endless documentation around it.
barnabask 4y ago
Agree with you in principle. However, it sounds like OP was doing security theater, which is demoralizing to perform.
justin_oaks 4y ago
The OP could mean that the security-related tasks added zero benefit because they were unnecessary tasks that didn't result in increased security. There are plenty of security-related tasks that have zero, or even negative, benefit. - Obtaining EV certificates for your websites. - Enforcing password rotation every 90 days. - Adding a webapp firewall in front of your static file hosting (e.g. S3).
Aaronstotle 4y ago
It might not be zero, but in some cases it could be lots of additional work for some marginal benefit
deathanatos 4y ago
I agree with both. Real security is never of zero benefit, but I've worked on a lot of "security" tickets that are of no pragmatic benefit: 1. Angst to clean up the latest non-vuln. vuln. (e.g., the use of the vuln. library doesn't meet the requirements listed in the vuln. for it to be vuln., or the vuln. is researcher spam and … isn't really a vuln., but good luck trying to get someone to understand that, or where a vuln. gets publicized but your upstream OS is derping around and hasn't actually released the patched version yet)¹ 2. ill-advised attempts to add TLS or similar: adding TLS is not trivial (you do have to have the cert available, so that the ends can validate), but I've seen a lot of TLS additions, e.g., on top of a secure network, or where TLS is bolted on but the library is set to "don't verify". (Worse, this is the default in many libraries: as someone implementing TLS, industry would be greatly helped by having defaults that were secure. PG, MySQL, I'm looking at you.) In one case an auditor asked the mobile apps to do cert pinning — which they did, without ever involving the BE engs. (They weren't told they needed to!) The next cert rotation broke both mobile apps, and broke both differently: the Android app pinned only the private key (and had a NPE if it wasn't RSA) and the iOS app pinned the cert, so that one was truly broken. I've also seen a VPN setup where the clients were configured to accept any leaf cert issued by a public web PKI CA … and check nothing else. (I.e., anyone could go to that CA, get a leaf, and it would MitM the VPN.) 3. adding yet-another-security-linter that has problems with every little thing. E.g., we had one that really disliked that we did string concatenation in our SQL queries. But we were concatenating parameterized queries, as the search parameters (including the number of parameters), came from the user. So a program would need to add, e.g., "AND column > ?" to the query, and append the value to the parameter list. Ended up switching some of that to SQLAlchemy, through which it couldn't see, even though it was functionally the same. SQLAlchemy did work with a better internal AST, though, so it caught some errors our query builder caught only after bugging. I also have a linter from my current security team that files a bug for each package in a container that has vulns. against it. But it does not ever update its bugs, … so you don't know if anything is actually fixed. (I'm not patching package by package; I'm usually invalidating a cache & forcing it to do the equivalent of "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade", so I'm going to close a bunch of tickets all at once … but I have no way of knowing which ones.) 4. Audits, where the auditor asks things like "do you use RC4, TLS, or AES?" which … good grief 5. concerns about PII handling for information that's part of a public (government) record. ¹my default disposition is to patch, regardless of theoretical exploitability, if it is trivial to do so. But if it's not trivial — e.g., if the upgrade is a SemVer incompatible upgrade that requires me to rebase the entire monolith on to a new web framework and I lack the resources to do that right now, and the vuln.'s conditions to be exploited say we're not vuln., I am going to take the pragmatic approach of "we're ignoring this, as it doesn't apply to our codebase."

DantesKite 4y ago

No problemo. Optimism, useful advice, and motivational speaking are what we do best here over at HackerNews.

willismichael 4y ago
Well, that and ripping certain subjects to shreds whenever they come up.

thecleaner 4y ago

Hey congratulations ! Keep at the Leetcode thing though. You already turned your situation but why not go for another thing in your arsenal ?

pavlov 4y ago
From the OP: “spent all my free time doing LeetCode. [..] LeetCode was hard and pointless” For someone recovering from burnout, it doesn’t seem a good idea to recommend that they return to an activity that felt pointless.
- ac2022 4y ago
  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.

philliphaydon 4y ago

What is peoples obsession with FAANG companies?

thecleaner 4y ago
Stable job. Good pay. And let's face it seems most startups these days is some crypto bullshit.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  FAANG is "growth & engagement", not much better though. At least crypto is easy to ignore, while "engagement" relies on it getting in your way and being hard/impossible to ignore.
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    Eh, a lot of the work at a FAANG, or a GAMMA, or whatever acronym you want to use for "big stable tech companies", is on products that people use and like and the changes you make matter to people. You may be a cog in a machine, but it's an important machine.
    - switchbak 4y ago
      I'm actively resisting any future incorporation of Google related anything into my life. Doubly so for Facebook and it's evil tendrils. Twitter/LinkedIn and all that other junk don't even deserve consideration. Are you so sure that work is really important? Most of that big tech stuff is some variation of a low quality attention sink, or similarly some kind of ad-tech that mines the personal information that gets used in said attention sink. [There is real stuff being worked on, but it's not the core focus] I've worked a couple jobs that have had tangible real-world impact, and that has counted for a ton: keeping search and rescue helicopters in the air, and improving material science. Besides that, I think back to what I've contributed to, and it doesn't amount to much. At this stage, I'm fairly selfish about work stuff: I need to learn and to get paid. If my work can have meaningful impact that's awesome, but very elusive.

holtkam2 4y ago

Hell yeah man :)

qzw 4y ago

Congrats on fixing the job issue. Now that times are better, might want to consider working on improving communications with the wife, so that the next time you go through a rough patch it won't go as far as divorce.

ac2022 4y ago
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.
- rattray 4y ago
  Very happy to hear that :)

sacrosancty 4y ago

Just a suggestion, but if your relationship with your wife depends on your personal circumstances and mood, then it sounds not very strong. Might be worth taking advantage of this good period to do some relationship strengthening exercises while you can so that when the next downturn happens, you can both understand each other's and your own feelings better. I'm not talking about random activities like going to the beach but finding a good self-help book or therapist and sitting down together working through it regularly. It's easy for problems to grow silently until they're too big to fix. Relationships are far more important than jobs, money or houses.

roeles 4y ago
> Might be worth taking advantage of this good period to do some relationship strengthening exercises while you can so that when the next downturn happens, you can both understand each other's and your own feelings better. Not too long ago, my wife and I got the suggestion to schedule a weekly "open-faced hour". It has worked wonders for understanding each other, which has positive effects on every aspect of our relationship.
thow34wqway 4y ago
May be this works for American culture. In India over 95% are arranged marriages. The probability of finding a partner with common interests is pretty low. Not marrying is not an option. Because it affects siblings marriages. Women have even lesser freedom in this area. Given these conditions the best thing to do is not forget the relations ship b/w spouse will never be great and at the same time its not the spouse's fault. Minimal commitment to the happiness of the spouse is a must but never forget it will not be great. Long live the culture of individual freedom the west values most.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
It is pretty normal for poor mental health to take a toll on relationships. Sometimes the problem really is that simple. But with that said, it is always a good time to work on yourself and relationships.
- 4y ago

daneel_w 4y ago

Glad to hear it worked out for the better. My current employment is no longer fulfilling and I wish to "move on", but I can only do remote and such vacancies are very hard to come by in Sweden.

Kaibeezy 4y ago
Doesn’t the Venn diagram look like: (remote (Sweden)) ... or am I unclear on “remote” or “Sweden”?
- sokoloff 4y ago
  It costs employers money and complexity to open up remote hiring of employees in a new jurisdiction. If Sweden isn’t a very big market or Sweden is a difficult market from a legal perspective, even remote companies may not be able to hire there. As an example, I’d have to look, but I think it’s only quite recently that I’ve been able to hire in Sweden, 2 years after being remote. I know I couldn’t last year, but we contracted with some company to make some of the smaller markets feasible for us.
  - creakingstairs 4y ago
    You could always be an independent contractor instead of being an employee. That way it reduces the hurdle for hiring. I'm technically a contractor atm, but get treated like an employee. You of course don't get the same legal protections or some benefits but you can charge more instead :)
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Even there, we’d have to understand if that arrangement is commonly viewed as legal in the country of residence. (My understanding is that it’s not legal in all countries [including my own] just because you say and I agree that you’re a contractor, if there are additional facts and circumstances tests to decide the “proper” treatment.)

qq66 4y ago

"Series D startup" may be a very bad place to be very soon. Keep grinding LeetCode.

asdev 4y ago
you're probably from the "work harder not smarter" school of thought
- lovich 4y ago
  And presumably you are from the “stonks only go up” crowd?
kube-system 4y ago
There are plenty of recession resistant software engineering jobs outside of SV. If you have some skills, you'll be fine. When the economy crashes and bitcoin startups go out of business, payday loan startups will be hiring.
bee_rider 4y ago
My parents always said videogames were a waste of time, but at least they ingrained the value of repetitive stat grinding.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mastazi 4y ago
Not OP but the day startups are no longer viable I will change careers (something I did already in the past, so I know what it entails) rather than grinding leet and trying to find work at some tech mega corp. Salary at the expense of everything else was never the goal.
- rg111 4y ago
  Same here. I had a stringent mentality before that I wanted to be an X. Not anymore. Work needs to have certain things going on, and money beyond an amount is not that of a gamechanger. I want to do exciting work. Life is too short to work just for money.

wccrawford 4y ago

> it didn't give me any real freedom to make important decisions. I feel this.

asdev 4y ago

easy to lose sight of what makes you fulfilled while on the Leetcode grind. congrats OP

silisili 4y ago

First off - congratulations. Secondly I genuinely hope you apologize to your wife and appreciate her sticking by you through what sound like mental issues. Sadly, a lot of people aren't so patient.

UncleEntity 4y ago

So… did your wife get the big house she wanted?

ac2022 4y ago
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.
- method_capital 4y ago
  People who believe they need big houses baffle me. It isn't priced right, and you can improve to flip or live and decide later. But why on earth would someone need a giant fucking house to be "happy".
  - shultays 4y ago
    OP has kids, it does not have to be a mansion but you need a large house
  - necovek 4y ago
    People usually don't stress so much on the size, but on the neighbourhood and number of rooms. A "big house" might mean a separate office for a work-at-home parent (or two) instead of the bedroom or living room, or separate rooms for your soon-to-be-teenagers. Maybe that was the case for the OP? Unfortunately, if you are not building your own house (or having it built, ofc), you can only get a house the size that's almost always bigger than what you'd like initially. Or has fewer rooms than you'd like. You simply don't get to specify the room sizes or such, and for unbeknownst-to-me reasons, people simply build huge houses with huge rooms instead of smaller houses with more smaller rooms.
    - em-bee 4y ago
      yes, number of rooms is a big thing. especially with kids and working from home. my office room is 6m² now. sufficient for me. but places with rooms that small are rare. a friend has a 100m² apartment with 5 rooms, when every other apartment i found on the market in that city with only 4 rooms had at least 150m².

mikesabbagh 4y ago

Leetcode is not good training for FAANG?

fny 4y ago

Congrats! But be very careful about the start up you're working for. Make sure they have enough cash to survive the next 4-5 years and have a steady revenue stream.

w-j-w 4y ago
> 4-5 years of runway > startup If this is your criterion for working at a startup, then you are too conservative to work at one. Every job carries risk, and looking to eradicate it is pointless.
- fny 4y ago
  The environment right now is very different than a few years ago. Risk is way higher right now. Reward is even more questionable.
rattray 4y ago
Uh, why? They already work there. If things tank in a year or two, OP will just be the target of a recruiter feeding frenzy, and they'll come out more qualified than they went in. Quitting immediately would look bad in comparison, and staying but exuding pessimism and paranoia would not be adaptive.

drewcoo 4y ago

Seek counseling. You're making life decisions based on web boards. Somehow programming and your relationship with your spouse are tied up together. You're riding really high now. You were really low before. Emotional roller coasters mean you should talk with someone, regardless of how you're feeling right now.

aidenn0 4y ago
> Seek counseling. You're making life decisions based on web boards. Somehow programming and your relationship with your spouse are tied up together. > > You're riding really high now. You were really low before. Emotional roller coasters mean you should talk with someone, regardless of how you're feeling right now. Is it that hard to believe that changing what one spends over a third of their waking hours per week on can have a significant impact on one's emotional well being?
- Phileosopher 4y ago
  I think it's a specific cultural idiosyncrasy that comes from (I'm guessing) modern USA. There's this strange "work-life balance" ethos, where the two have some sort of invisible barrier that holds them at diametric odds with one another. I'm still working out a theory, but I think it's a descendant of the Greatest Generation/Baby Boomer work values starting in the 1940s after practically every able-bodied young man became militarized. Needless to say (or maybe needfully), it's tripe, as you've indicated. Work creates meaning in its own right, yes, but not if someone despises it, and a sense of duty alone will _not_ empower someone to sleep well at night.
switchbak 4y ago
I think you're being a little harsh maybe? I agree big mood swings like this are a concern, but jobs do a lot to affect our happiness. I'm likewise a little concerned about a partner who "wants a big house", but that's a highly condensed statement about what is no doubt a more nuanced situation. I've jumped ship and had it be a really positive experience. Wouldn't be averse to it again, and I think that's mostly what this post is about: recognized that their career was important to them, dug deep and found a better job, now they're sharing excitement their about it. It's also important to not get too much personal identification from a job (see Mike Rowe's thoughts on happy people working crappy jobs), and to not overwork, but whatever - they're making progress!

CodeWriter23 4y ago

So much awesome here, you having the revelation, taking action to change what needed to be changed, feeling the positive outcome, then sharing it. <3

victor22 4y ago

Wow FAANG waited 5 months to finish this PR masterpiece

zepolen 4y ago

Bro, it's not the job, it's you not standing up to your oppressive wife. The longer hours mean you spend less time with her so you're happier, the pay rise means she can spend it so she's happier and the decision making you get at the job gives you a sense of manhood which you are obviously lacking at home. Give it time and your wife will again become unhappy with the status quo and demand more and once again you will be unhappy and blame your job.

bin_bash 4y ago

> I was motivated and was able to solve most easy and medium question in 30 mins. However, that was not good enough for FAANGs. What makes you think it's not good enough? LC is important and today it might be even be essential to land a role, but I think people tend to think of it like an exam when that's not really what we're testing for. The goal is to see how you think, not see if you can simply come up with the right answer. If you need a hint it's usually not going to hurt you at all so long as you listen to the hint, are able to understand it, then incorporate it into a solution. I'd go so far as to say that being able to do that can help you more than reciting an answer without a hint. There are some patterns like tries, left/right pointers, memoization, heaps, and maps that studying helps with for sure, but that doesn't mean you're supposed to be able to immediately solve something without any help. (Note that there are asshole interviewers out there that will challenge you and won't follow what I've described, but that's rare and personally I've only seen them at startups, not big tech)

8ytecoder 4y ago
All we need is one interviewer who absolutely hates interviewing to ruin the experience for the candidate and probably throw them off balance. It happens in Big Tech much more often than people are willing to admit. I get where you are coming from when you say "the goal is to see how you think" - I really do and I have definitely believed in that once upon a time. Truth is, it's extremely gut/instinct driven than we realise. So yeah, while you can easily shoot down a candidate who seem to regurgitate what they had already solved, there's just absolutely no way to differentiate it from a candidate having a bad moment (let alone a bad day). I had a take home exercise recently where I was supposed to identify a performance issue and fix it. I read the code in a hurry after finishing my day job. I knew where the likely issue is coming from but just couldn't locate it. I wrote back as such. The next day the solution came to me. I fixed it and sent it back. I still got hired but that sort of thing can never happen in a leet-code type interview no matter how much we'd like to believe. I have ADHD but even otherwise our brains are finicky.
- bin_bash 4y ago
  My point is just that being able to solve LC mediums under 30 minutes isn’t that relevant. I’m not saying it’s a great way to vet candidates. 30 minutes is probably about what it takes me to solve an LC medium on average and I’ve passed every single FAANG full onsite loop I’ve taken which is a total of 6 over my career. I almost always need a hint or two if it’s not a trivial problem. If I practiced I could get that number down but I don’t think it would make it more likely to get a better offer.

d23 4y ago

Congrats! I'm happy for you. Funny how being more engaged and working more can leave you with more energy at the end of the day. I've felt the same way in the past.

ac2022 4y ago
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.
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  How do you have 6 months of data? Is that something modern smart watches produce? I would love to have that data for myself, but don't really want to complicate my life with a smart watch. I don't even like keeping my e-reader's battery charged... My heart nerves got jacked up a couple years ago, and I had to get a pacemaker. It's presumably collecting a ton of cool data that it BLE's to the manufacturer and my cardiologist, but I don't have access to it.
  - JohnL4 4y ago
    https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/heartrate-variability/get-hrv-summary-by-interval/ https://dev.fitbit.com/build/reference/web-api/heartrate-var... I used the swagger interface a few months ago to download my resting heart rate over a three-year period, and it was interesting.

taesu 4y ago

Fanng is not for everybody and everybody doesnt fit in Fanng. Im glad you found your happiness! Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot

rattray 4y ago

Can't believe the negativity I see on some of the top comments right now. Congrats and thanks for sharing, you rock :) It's really nice to get updates from folks who posted an Ask HN. Especially with a positive outcome. It's really not uncommon for humans to find energizing work energizing, and for that to affect their overall quality of life. Plenty of people are comfortable checking boxes and going home early, sure, but that can be a slow death to a lot of folks (even some who might not realize it).

flakyfilibuster 4y ago
The negativity is totally warranted: OPs misguided believe in thinking that simply finding a new job will get rid of all his woes is worrisome. Furthermore the fact that a high percentage of commentators are encouraging his stance is counterproductive. This is simplifying a complex situation, which OP should definitely seek professional guidance for before he finds himself in the same situation 5 months from now...
- rattray 4y ago
  You seem to know something I don't. What is the evidence of a misguided belief? OP was skeptical this change would make a difference, but shares that it did. I did not see any forward-looking statements implying the new job "will get rid of all his woes", only what they are experiencing now. Elsewhere on the thread, OP shared that they are using this opportunity to work more intentionally on their relationship with their wife, which doesn't sound like the kind of thing someone who thinks all their problems have been magically fixed would do. > OP should definitely seek professional guidance You speak with the certainty of a professional (more, in fact, since a professional would know how little they know about the situation). Are you one? Do you have any reason to believe OP _hasn't_ sought professional guidance? If you have something to share about _why_ talking with a professional would be worthwhile, or how to find the right one, or what kind of professional to look for, or something else that OP would plausibly think to themselves, "wow thanks, this is really useful" – that would be kind to share. Personal/secondhand anecdotes often work (as distasteful as some find it), as do peer-reviewed evidence etc.
- 4y ago

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

"My wife wanted to buy a big house and I kept blaming her for the stress." Feminism's greatest enemies aren't necessarily men, but their wives. Your previous post indicated you "needed a bigger house" but clearly there was more to it. It seems like you have great emotional investment in two things that don't reciprocate your investment: your wife only seems to care about what you can give her, and a job is by definition a business relationship with a company they can sever whenever it is convenient to them. I would guess you do not have a good sense of self-worth. It's ok, it's really hard to have a good self-worth in a world where you are exposed to thousands of daily messages of inadequacies. It's ok to get some reinforcement from jobs, but just keep in mind it is a business relationship. I hope your wife does not also consider your marriage a business relationship. Two kids are a "real marriage" not easily unraveled. Hope the best for you.

reuven 4y ago

I didn't see your original post. But I'm delighted to hear that things have improved. There's no doubt that stress in your career can lead to stress at home. Certainly, when I'm stressed about my work (or when my wife is stressed about hers), it can be difficult on our relationship. And then, as they say, you have two problems. Moreover, it can feel hopeless. So many people say that you have to work for a big, famous company, with huge compensation packages. But once you're getting paid well, there are other important things: Do you care about the work you're doing? Are you treated decently at work? Do they give you responsibility, and the power to make decisions? There are oodles of people out there making good wages at companies we've never heard of, working with people they like, on projects they believe add value to the world. Such jobs aren't glamorous, and won't make the front page of the newspaper, but it doesn't matter. I love my work. I feel fortunate to do what I do. And when I tell people this, they are often taken aback, and say, "Wow, you're really lucky. I don't like my work; I just do it for the paycheck." So if you have this kind of excitement, energy, enjoyment, and fulfillment from your new job -- then you've won, as it were. You should feel good about this, and should consider yourself among the rare, fortunate folks in that situation. In short, it's great to hear about someone who has found satisfaction in their work. And if that satisfaction has improved your marriage? All the better.

corrius 4y ago

I don't normally comment on HN but reading all the negative vibes made me want to comment. Glad to hear you are doing great! I had to make the decision between a high paying job and a high rewarding job and choosing the second one has been a huge improvement in my life.

heisenbit 4y ago
Indeed the HN community seems to manage the ‚issue‘ in an overall happy tale. I doubt there are many in a long relationship which did not suffer for a time due to external and not so well understood circumstances. Pull through and better self/us understanding and a stronger relationship can be ahead.
qgin 4y ago
HN doesn’t do happy very well.

awsrocks 4y ago

egorfine 4y ago

Man I'm so happy to hear this! Wish you the very best of luck!

wiihack 4y ago

That sounds really awesome. Congratulations :)

shultays 4y ago

Good luck at your new job but it sounds like you are in a honeymoon period. It is good that you are happier but a fresh startup with longer hours does not sound good at all, especially if you have 2 kids and want to buy a house (ie you need stability) Work is work, the stress will happen when things are not perfect. You need to figure out a way to deal with.