> What I did do: learned basic Mandarin, established a relationship that has lasted 20+ years, read many non CS / non-technical books, focused on getting healthier and fitter.
Would imposing a structure and setting goals for your time off have helped or interfered with these (admittedly admirable) results?
Blaming disease spread on density is kind of a cop out after how we saw the world respond to crisis. Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, and most Chinese cities are super dense places that, for most of 2020, I would have preferred to be living in compared to the US.
You've just described requirements that belong to a service. Congratulations, you made the right (obvious) decision.
I'm talking about writing entire services that are just wrappers around ffmpeg, pdf2html, parquet-tools, Olson tzdata, or a 10-parameter logistic regression. No stateful behavior, storage, or authoritative source of truth involved. The worst case I've seen was a service that just enumerates a bunch of values of constants (that actually never change).
There may have been some future-proofing in mind at the time, but more likely it was a solution in search of a problem.
It doesn't even take oodles of money from a SaaS platform to motivate turning a library into a service.
Even in in-house development, developers are often motivated to build services and have internal customers take dependencies on them so that they can expand influence and demonstrate ownership in a way that gets noticed by senior leadership and put them in line for promo. It also opens up the possibility for stakeholders to build their own little fiefdoms with access controls, intake processes, and a justifiable source of funding.
To the extent that the parents chose to raise their children in an environment that taught them advanced emotional manipulation skills at an early age, sure.
Who wants to work with me on my next startup, which sets up an innocuous-looking Facebook profile for privacy-conscious individuals, including friendships with other perfectly normal people and records of totally commonplace, unobjectionable activities? We can make sure that you'll never be rejected by a landlord, AirBnB host, or insurance company because of your online presence.
> I know a guy, a sales guy, who "worked from home" for a large multinational while earning six figures. He spent most of his time doing home improvement projects. He replaced his roof (himself), he built and installed new kitchen cabinets, he remodeled the entire house and painted it all.
You seem surprisingly judgmental about this given how upset you were about others not recognizing the effort you put into the business in your garage.
What happens if you have a very small false positive rate for fraud, and end up stiffing the customer? You could easily land in deep trouble with consumer protection laws after falsely satisfying their order.
Honestly, it's the growing realization that despite all of my efforts, I haven't done anything worth feeling proud of. To me that feels like I've lived a waste of a life.
As you can tell, this is an ineffective strategy for motivation.
If I want a $1,000,000,000 unicorn, and can't find it, is it because I'm not paying enough?
The fact that many SV companies want mythical beings to solve their engineering problems is an entirely different issue, but this does not invalidate their claims of a "shortage." It just means that they have failed to come up with a business that is capable of being worked on by the existing talent pool.
> When will the Peoples Republic grant self-determination to Tibet? That would be the action of a self-assured and mature state.
Probably around the same time a certain self-assured and mature state grants self-determination to the indigenous people of Alaska, Hawaii, and large parts of the Southwest. The rest of the country is a lost cause; ethnic cleansing and violent displacement has assured that going back is impossible.
Lack of resources or pure laziness doesn't make it the right measure to use though.