For anyone like me who has struggled with insomnia, I have found that "sleep restriction", as used by this and other apps, to be the most impactful thing I have ever done. I've tried every sleep aide, pharmaceutical, and cognitive practice imaginable and nothing can even hold a candle to sleep restriction. I paid for a different app for a personalized schedule but the process is simple. These are the basics:
- Go to bed very late at a time when you can barely keep your eyes open, for me it was 2am. Do normal sleep hygiene things until this time so stay away from screens and stressful stuff. Do this for the same time every night.
- Do not use bed for anything except sleep. We are rewiring our brains so that bed = sleep and that's it. No reading, no screens, nothing except sleep happens in the bed.
- Wake up after ~5 hours with an alarm. This sucks and I hated it but I stuck with it for 2-3 weeks and it shifted my entire existence. My sleep window was 2am-7am.
- The first days will be hard and you may not sleep through that entire window. The important part is to wake up at the prescribed wake up time or whenever you wake naturally (very hard) consistently for a period of several weeks
- Over time, you should be able to sleep through that window. For me, the process of being able to consistently sleep for a scheduled window was enough to prove that there was nothing "wrong" with me as I had told myself for 20+ years.
- Over a longer time, you bring the bedtime up so you get more and more sleep, generally 15-minutes each time.
After 20 years of insomnia, the past year has been the best sleep of my life. I only get ~6-7 hours or so per night but it is deep, restful sleep that is generally uninterrupted if I stick to this regiment. The beginning is not fun but over time I have adjusted to the hours and, most importantly, have outgrown the story and habits that drove my insomnia. For me, I knew how to sleep but I had decades of sleep anxiety and surrounding stress to get past. Being so tired you can do nothing except sleep helps you rewire your association with your bed away from "sleep is stressful" towards "sleep is easy".
I paid for the Sleep Reset app to walk me through everything. Because I paid money for it, I probably had a higher degree of success than if I just Googled stuff and half-assedly tried to incorporate it. For ~$200, the app certainly has high margins and made money off of me but it was the best $200 I ever spent.
The alternative to Gutenberg was allowing thousands of proprietary plugin developers to compete with each other to encode your data in a way that made it impossible to migrate to anything else. Gutenberg was mandatory.
Side note: I would also pay for a "Landlord as a Service". I want to treat a company like my landlord, even though I own my house. "Hi Bill, my roof is leaking" and they say "Someone will be there next week" and then send me a bill.
I was intrigued by the "Test Rule Performance on Historical Data" feature on the home page. I thought signing up would let me play with the performance of your sample rules but I can't seem to figure that out. Is that possible?
Also, that home page block could be more informative. It shows me a dollar value but not what asset it was actually applied to.
I very informally do this right now. I think of my role as a sports agent for top engineers. The engineers I work with pay nothing and the companies who want access to them give us no bullshit, all access interviews where we're not working with HR or recruiters. It works so well for both parties that I'm scaling it at the moment.
I would argue that _none_ of the articles about “hiring is broken” and “interviews are broken” actually help with this problem.
There is near-universal consensus that technical hiring is atrocious and yet very few people putting forth possible solutions and/or companies willing to experiment with the status quo.
My ideas are:
* Real-world interview questions
* Standardized testing for "soft" skills. It can be done.
* Dedicated onboarding resources
* Apprenticeships for entry-level engineers with dedicated training programs
* Remove all names from all inbound job applications
* Offer _more_ money for internal referrals. Make them on par with what you'd pay a recruiter.
As someone who is regularly helping companies improve the hiring process, I can say with absolute certainty that companies _do_ get dinged for "only hiring candidates who sail through whiteboard-algorithms questions". Companies know that these are not indicators of success and that they lead to uniform teams with homogenous backgrounds.
I will also say that crafting real world "on the job style" interview problems is growing steam, as it should be!
Internships are generally thought of as something you do during college (summers or otherwise). Most CS grads would scoff at getting an "internship" after graduating. Internships are also very structured and generally involve working on a specific project within a technical team (I know they're all different).
The apprentice role, the way I've been pitching it at least, is different. This is a role where you join an engineering org and learn the product by QAing it, join technical discussions and help out by taking notes for the team, show off your communication skills by documenting new features and, big picture, you find ways to add value to the team in whatever ways they need. Over time, the bugs fixed get bigger and the person can bite off small features, etc.
The problem is that companies _want_ to hire new grads (even bootcamp grads) but don't feel comfortable paying SWE rates for someone who hasn't worked as a SWE (often rightfully so). The comp for this is equivalent to a QA eng but has a clear path towards being an entry-level SWE (3-6 months maximum). If after 3-6 months it's not clear if the person can add value as an engineer then it's clearly not a good fit.
There's a growing rift in software between employers saying "there's a talent shortage" and a rapidly growing population of devs who feel like they're locked out due to the technical interview process.
Many of the engineers not being hired are recent bootcamp grads but there are also tons of CS majors that can't seem to "crack" the interview process.
Part of my job is helping companies "fix" their hiring and one of the ideas that I've been putting forth for years that's slowly gaining steam is developing a "technical apprentice" role. This role would be responsible for tasks that are frequently de-prioritized like documentation, testing, QA, bug fixes, note taking, etc. and would be a foot in the door for entry-level engineers. The role is designed to focus on communication and soft-skills while also giving the person a chance to prove their "grit" on the technical side. Even a few months in an apprenticeship role is generally enough for companies to "take a chance" on someone as an entry-level engineer.
This has been a great way to shift interviews away from algorithms and more towards finding people can add immense value to technical teams even without having on-the-job programming experience.
I'm curious what the HN crowd thinks about that role as a way to bridge the hiring gap.
My advice is different than a lot of what is here. My suggestion (engineer turned exec turned investor after some exits) is to speak with the team lead directly about the issues you're having with their leadership. Try to be clear and be sure to present what your ideal best-solution would have been for 1 or 2 cases where you've had issues.
Either in parallel or after, depending on how the talk goes, also speak with the founders about your issues. If you're solving the big hairy problems for the business, you could suggest a role that's tailor-made to your strong suits (not working with a team lead, not needing to supervise engineers, whatever it is you want). In any case, any founder worth their weight in salt would want to hear that their star engineer is not getting along with a team lead. If it was me as the founder, I'd take your feedback and then solicit more from other people on the team and then make a call as to where the "fit" seems off.
As to burnout, if you've "solved" the big problems and are giving the company a pathway to revenue/profitability/etc. then I would strongly suggest you don't quit. You're well on the way to being indispensable and can use that as leverage in any future salary/role discussions. At the very least, tell the founders where you're at and say you want a vacation.
Google Fi has been amazing as a "digital nomad". Show up in country X and have a working phone with 4g/LTE + ability to tether. Local sim cards are cheaper, but you can't beat the ease of use.
Conversely, I've noticed that my cell service is significantly better (call quality, coverage, etc.) abroad than it is in the SF Bay Area.
I did it for 3 years or so right after college and had similar experiences to the folks on this thread. I surf so a huge motivation behind wanting to "live anywhere" was to chase epic surf. I look back on these times and feel like I really learned a lot about what's important to me in my life. During those times I was earning great money, developing my career, had very little living expenses, and got to surf whenever I pleased. All of those things are awesome and look great on paper but I also know that I have never felt so isolated and disconnected.
Others have mentioned this but building more than superficial relationships with people is hard. Finding a mate who can and is willing to live the lifestyle is challenging. Staying connected with friends and family is very difficult. All of those issues can be remedied and I know many folks who do so successfully but for me it makes more sense to have a home base and travel 3 months or so of the year. Knowing where "home" is helps keep me sane.
I do, however, think that this lifestyle is probably more feasible and easily attainable now. My experience comes in 2008-2011 when working on the internet was a very different task. Nowadays I see new co-living places pop up all over the globe that cater to the people trying to make nomad life work.