I’m just about a week later in my kidney donation than the author.
My husband was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease in late
2022 and it rapidly progressed to end-stage renal failure at the end of 2023. He’s been on dialysis since February.
It took quite a bit of semi-political hurdles to get him on the UNOS transplant list; once that happened, several people had volunteered to go thru the process to be a donor on his behalf.
I was the only one cleared; it turns out I was a match, but a better one could be found, so I went ahead and donated to an anonymous recipient. A few days after my donation, a match was found for him, and he receives his new kidney in a few weeks. That will make all this worth it for me.
My pain was much less than the author’s; it never got 9over a 3. I used one Oxy pill, and the rest of the time, Tylenol controls it. Still sore around the main laparoscopic site (1-2) still uncomfortable and can’t sleep on my left side 2 weeks out.
Definitely feeling the fatigue I was told to expect as my body adjusts to one kidney. I was told to plan for 6 weeks out of work, and I think I’m going to need most of that to rebuild stamina. I’ve been trying to walk as much as I can, weather and fatigue permitting, and I’ve had helpers to deal with the weight restrictions I’m under.
Ever known anyone in end-stage renal failure? Not a lot that could be that really bad; waiting to get on the UNOS transplant list, while doing daily dialysis…
These tools have the advantage of not being multi-taskers and can manage version for all your tools. You wouldn’t need pyenv and npm and rvm and…
We’ve even started committing the .mise.toml files for projects to our repos. That way, since we work on multiple projects that may need multiple versions of the same tool, it’s handled and documented.
Doctor of osteopathy (DO). My first doctor as an adult was a DO and treated things like sinus infections with medication, but when I picked up a ladder and something popped in my back, he adjusted my spine and put it back into place and almost instantly it stopped hurting.
You have to do leetcode if you want any hope of being able to find a different job. You have to be ready for that kind of question.
I’m a software engineer with 20+ years of experience in a bunch of different industries. I know what I’m doing.
I did 3 interviews with 3 different companies in the past couple months and utterly failed at the leetcode style coding interviews. The last one was to “print out the contents of a binary tree, each level on its own line.”
I had 1/2 hour to do it. Oh, and I had to translate their sample seed code from Python to Java, since I’m stronger in Java.
I haven’t seen a raw binary tree in 20+ years. I at least remembered how to depth first traverse it, but haven’t seen in order traversal since my freshman year of college.
So look-I was able to read and translate Python, a language I don’t use to one I do, and pull out of deep storage how to traverse a binary tree one way, but since I couldn’t remember the other ways, I failed.
My daily job is far more about translating complex business requirements into appropriate data stores, improving performance, working with cloud providers - NOT banging out freshman level programming tasks. I’m out of practice for that.
So to be in a position to change jobs, you sadly have to spend time keeping that information freshened.
It’s not helpful to leetcode grind; I’d rather spend the time and energy I have for non-work coding to learn a net-new language. It’s not the “hive mind saying we should”.
It’s the stark reality of the hiring processes everyone has decided is necessary because there’s a myth that no one applying for a software development job can code and if you don’t do these kinds of interviews (and don’t screen any other way) you’ll hire these fakes.
I didn’t do that when I set up my dev machine, and got into quite a mess of differing brew install versions plus different repos having different dependencies.
I noticed they installed version managers for Java, node, and directly installed Go. Never mind the nightmare that is Python on macOS.
I’ve become a big fan of ASDF (https://asdf-vm.com/) for managing language versions. It has plugins for most everything I work with on a daily basis (all those languages above plus Ruby).
I keep myself in the interviewing loop at my company because I actually enjoyed the process when I joined. It was conversations over “executable” solutions. Now, we kick out so many candidates that can’t get a coded, running solution in the 45 minute slot.
I have tried so many times to explain the WILD asymmetry going on. That for us, we just have to interview the next candidate. To them, they have the enormous pressure of “if I can’t do this exercise then I have no income, no health insurance, no security.”
I’ve been working in software for 35 years. Never been laid off but ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED of it happening to me. I saw how being laid off devastated my father and brother.
The closer I get to being able to retire the more this scares me. I need these last 5-7 years to get to a point where I feel like I could retire, and to have that stolen from me when it’s so close…it would be devastating.
“They (workers) don’t get to choose their compensation, they don’t get to choose their promotion, they don’t get to choose to stay home five days a week,” said James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley…”
Absolutely they do.
They get to make that choice by choosing a company that values their talent to the degree they are paid what they feel their time is worth; they make that choice by choosing to work for a a company that values their talent enough to give them the opportunity for promotion; they make that choice by choosing to work for a company that values results over butts-in-chair.
For almost 2 years, many, many workers proved they could be as productive, if not MORE productive than pre-pandemic times. They got creative on how to be collaborative; it worked.
If Gorman doesn’t see and embrace that, may he find himself setting the “open to work” flag on his LinkedIn.