This war (not the ceasefire) is basically a loss for the USA. Many people don't yet grasp the scale of the reputational, economic, and power damage that has occurred and will continue to occur.
I have worked on multiple strategies.
- Strategies using technical indicators do work, but you have to reasonable. If you find these giving higher than expected returns, or too many consecutive wins - take the money. Stop live trading and continue dummy trading - eventually there is a point where you can start live trading again. The thresholds will be determined from backtests.
- Statistical strategies work for swing trading. However, these are very difficult to figure out. Need a lot of data (for backtesting). These work consistently over a longer period and might look loss making over a small period.
- Scalping within 5-10 minutes works pretty consistently, signals based on options data.
- Understand and realise the law of large numbers, and use that to your advantage.
- Give importance to understanding the concept of Time. There is a whole lot of weird and scammy pseudo-science around it. Therefore do not blindly rely on one theory.
Lots and I think anybody who is passionate about programming, has enough motivation to get it done. Most of my stuff is to reduce complexities in my daily life and/or automate/simplify monotonous work to be done at regular intervals.
A video from 6 years ago that pretty much predicted what is happening, and why it's not as straightforward as it is made out to be
https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4
You might be experiencing a mid-life crisis (assuming you are not undergoing depression). Fortunately, I found what I was experiencing by just openly talking about my feelings to my friends (and not spouse/girlfriend).
For me something snapped one day after age 35. I was relatively successful, married and I suddenly lost interest in my work or any kind of work. Even retired for 6-9 months, only to come out extremely bored - pledging that I would never ever take a retirement.
It took me 3 more years to understand what was happening - I felt that at 38 too, and ideally it was still too early to experience a mid life crisis.
Some tips based on my experience:
1. Take very good care of your health. Regularly exercise (including at least some resistance training) and mostly healthy food. Measure health parameters.
2. Rule out any medical illness and/or deficiencies. Get a full body checkup done (including a detailed blood/urine tests). Do not cut corners here, but if not recommended, you could skip tests involving radiation.
3. For a month or two - take less stress (don't overperform or even try to overperform) and find periods of emptiness. After some time fill in those times with some activity that you love to do - doesn't matter how illogical it sounds. Let your intuition guide you. Make notes weekly.
4. On the work side, try to get into a management role. My situation was a little different, I was not an employee.
I do not know whether I am out of the woods(at early 40s), or just got used to the new reality. But I do feel quite better and may have made significant progress - only time will tell.
I have been called a 10xer (aka magician/one-man-army/genius/R2D2/etc..) quite a few times in my programming career. Sometimes I have felt that to be true but most times I just feel like a 1x.
Many years ago, one junior programmer asked me "How do you do it?". And I answered - "Trust your intuition". I realized later it was a "dumb" answer - but few years later I have realized the following (this may not be true for all 10xers):
I cannot remember a lot of things. Probably these memory issues are due to an undiagnosed ADD. But to compensate the memory issue, I have from an early age picked up the skill to see patterns, asking the right questions and attempting to understand things fundamentally (as much as needed to connect the dots). It exponentially increases the learning effort - but may be that extra effort gives me the intuition to solve/narrow down certain problems quickly. On top of that, I have tried to solve difficult problems just for fun - nobody had to ask me to do that. At times it is like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I would become obsessed with solving that problem even if I had pending studies for exams next morning. All that added a plethora of experience/hours. If I find somebody solving a problem quickly when I am stuck (which in itself is a rare, because I tend seek help quite late), I typically ask questions on what they were thinking. May even dig into their mindset (to their discomfort) like a psychologist.
On the other hand, I am miserably just-average when I am not interested in certain work or do not understand its purpose.
If somebody feels like a 10x in their company, I advise them to move out to a team/company where they are back to 1x, and keep doing so until age catches up and slows them down.
For a long time, I believed this myth - might have heard it on TV as a kid. Then one day while reading about the possibilities of intelligent life on other planets - I wondered how far we (humans) would have got technologically without oil or similar fuels, which "I thought" were a result of dead dinosaurs and a extinction level event. That is when I looked up and found the correct answer.
Similar mismatch stuff exists with Google Scholar on two patent applications(now abandoned) where I contributed. It has my name but somebody else's photo and job title. Cannot apply to correct it just because I do not have any University email.
Not really. It is part of the journey towards evolving efficient systems as a whole. If you go by the 80/20 principle about workplace/work (which is true in most cases) - will you fire away 70-80% of the staff as a manager/entrepreneur? or will you give 80% the privilege of not doing as much work or taking on responsibility as the 20%?
Work at an org where you think you could be considered at least a 4x engineer. Even better a 10x. I could be a 4x/10x/100x engineer someplace, and a 0.25x at another.
Learn to automate stuff at your job. It works at programming jobs too.
Prefer the workplace is a product or SaaS/product company. My experience with it shows that it has a lower cognitive load after the initial 6 months to 1 year of hard work. Yes, you have to put in extra effort early on to reap the benefits later on. This does not mean programming more, but understanding the product in depth and in domain.
On top of that prefer an established product which has sizeable management and team size. Things move slowly here.
Stay away from lead/architect/management roles - it would be unethical to take up any of those.
Prefer a development (programming) role. Over the years, I have realised that "time is elastic" with programming roles.
Keep away from consulting companies/consultant roles. Some of those pay well, but then you are not looking to earn more.
In ideal situation I would recommend leaving toxic places - but embrace and learn to manipulate workplaces that give more importance to "visibility" than "actual work".
And the last piece: All of the above should be temporary for few years - it will hurt your psyche the longer you keep doing it. Explore and change your earnings to something that will work for you long term.
Had been waiting for something like this few years back and with Ubuntu. But with M1 chip's success, I think we are much closer and it could be worth waiting for an iPhone (or a bulky iPhone) with something like MacOS that docks into a desktop or lapdock.
Why would a business pay 2x to someone when they can get the same output from a local at 1x pay? Unless they(business) are doing some financial trickery
I am not saying it is OK to circumvent rules. BTW my access was revoked because they assumed I was using some automation - when I know I was not using any such thing. I am just good at computers and not even a fast typist. No response to my appeal - stopped using tatkal since then and fortunately never needed it after that.
There is a difference between "guilty until proven innocent" and "innocent until proven guilty". In India, the former is how the law-enforcement works for most people while the justice system says the latter. Most people entangled in the slow legal system just want to get out of it even if it means injustice towards themselves. And the laws are so convoluted and in this case he has a behemoth monopoly to fight against.
This is a case of 'BUREAUCRATS STIFLING INNOVATION' and this is how it often looks like. He could have gone through legal channels to approve his app and would not be able to find approvals even after being able to afford those financially.
Fair access is not provided by the official website. When one clicks "Book" and then suddenly get an Internal Server Error in network logs (while UI shows in-progress icon) or gets logged out - where is Fair Access? If Railways gave 10 Rs for each such failure, they will go bankrupt within 2 hours. First-come-first-serve does not mean fair access when they can't fix their technical problems.
And this guy charged money only after the cost of the servers was high. To give a context the alleged amount between 2016 and 2020 he earned in 4 years is in the range of 27k-30kUSD. That is as per Railways. It is likely to be inflated. Pretty sure he was running into losses.
However I doubt he is totally innocent. Most developers would know this app would be illegal. Or may be he is just too naive - hard to say that since he is an IITian. The railways will probably find out each ticket booked, heavily penalize each such booking, add huge interest to that till date and make the total amount sound like a huge scam. Adventures with Indian bureaucracy will cost him big unless he manages to heavily PR himself as a victim.
A string of such stories have me concerned. What happens after you are locked out? Can one have access to the data? I have a lot of important personal and business related stuff in GMail and GDrive - do they revoke read access too?
EDIT: I know about email clients setup to backup data, but there are other reasons I do not like to use those - unless of course that is the only way to protect data
Don't get fooled by India's startup hype. India has one of the world's "best" anti-business systems that will create hurdles all along the way to the top. If you do get to the top, the same systems will become your ally (as you would have learned to grease those).
Apart from the regular business troubles and risks, the unease of doing (not just starting) business in India is a huge growth barrier. And it is worsening. The bureaucracy is just horrible and spiced with corruption all over from taxation to approvals. The leaders have little control on that. And it may not visible for first 1-3 years of business growth time, it consistently hits and threatens you as you grow further.
Having said that - Any economy focused strong leader in India could flip that view in a matter of 6 months or a year. It might require reducing the bureaucracy resources by 70-75%. Otherwise the country might be selling the same hopes & dreams for next 50 years or more. India has talented resources and is potentially a talent goldmine, but they are mostly hidden, misused, abused, suppressed, unaware or just moved out.