I've worked as a contractor for a safety system that turned out to be for a foreign military. I was given a signal, and told to write software to fit it. The signal could plausibly be collected for a wide variety of civilian purposes.
What I realized later was that none of the civilian markets could possibly justify the cost of the project.
The particular type of signal fitting I was doing was only achievable by a few thousand expensive domain experts in the world, so, I think that addresses your other point.
I've spent much of my last four years systematically turning down every project a specific director has launched.
The turn downs save enormous amounts of our hardware budget, and each time are measured as not happening users.
No one has yet noticed that basically none of that directors projects are still running and put together that the things he builds stop working after two years.
I keep getting paid good senior engineer money, and don't have to think too hard about what my next project should be. But it's really demoralizing to realize that he will continue to be promoted.
Your surprise over a £3 fee strikes me as a perfect illustration of crypto: profoundly naive, inexperienced investors getting a hard lesson in how unregulated markets work.
I hope, some years down the line, you take the broader life lesson that anyone promising you money for nothing does not have your best interests at heart.
Yerba Mate is brewed, like tea. You can buy the herb and brew it yourself, like loose tea. Yerba Mate is not a company, it's a drink with three thousand of years of history. The reason many energy drink companies add so much sugar is that it's extremely bitter. I like mine bitter, and many drink it straight.
Ruthless environments where low performers are stack ranked out of the company creates a psychologically unsafe working environment that encourages toxic competition and makes it hard to retain your best people. I got out a long time ago, but Amazon struggled to retain their best employees because they'd go somewhere else. Amazon had such absurd turn over that they are running out of people to interview. It's a wood chipper, designed to burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting two years of boilerplate from them.
Yes, it's how people used to do it. I spent my first decade without mentorship. A month isn't enough time; I consider what I do a craft that I'm honing over the course of a life time.