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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2327 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 18, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Provided advice to a guy in almost exactly your situation. He's doing a lot better now after investing ~3 years in his crappy job.

  • $50k is low. If you're competent and patient, you can improve this.
  • You can determine your relative skill by:
    • Exercising via leetcode or codewars to see where you stack up
    • Interviewing elsewhere
  • If you are too lazy to determine your skill or exercise your skills outside of work, do not under any circumstances go get a masters.
  • If you move out of your parents and towards your job, make sure the place you're moving to provides other benefits (economic, social, health [getting outside])
  • Believing "a career" is antiethical to human life does concern me. Expecting growth from yourself in exchange for huge swaths of your time is not asking too much. Nor does a career have to be an endless treadmill of progress. Moving out of your parent's house and having a reasonable 401(k) is an OK place to stop striving. I'm sympathetic to there being limits to how much you should try, especially given progressive tax rates

You're correct that the industry will shrink for people who can't beat AI. I am still hiring, but have lost patience with people who cannot operate independently. The clock is ticking far more slowly than the world would have you believe, but you'll definitely want to muster up some energy to evolve.

You mentioned not having a plan, not thinking about money. You'd be surprised how easy it is. If you're starting at ground zero, can I suggest I will teach you to be rich? It's 80% correct and a short read.

Exercising via leetcode or codewars to see where you stack up

Listen, I know this is popular. I know leetcode bullshit comes up all the time in interviews. But IMHO, a better proxy for skill is open source contributions. Can you dive into a foreign code base and understand it? Can you code in the style/language already extant? Can you check out a project and have it compile?! I'd suggest using more open source software, and if something bothers you, fix/change it! Be the meme about the engineer who joins a company, fixes one bug that's been bothering him for 10 years, and then quits. Leetcode is a complementary skill, relevant 10-15% of the time at best, in actual day to day coding. Frankly if leetcode is all you can do, or all you enjoy, I wouldn't suggest sticking with it.

I agree with you, man. But you're talking to a depressed guy who doesn't really understand a retirement account and hasn't mustered the energy to move out of his parent's house.

What these platforms give you is simple setup and a quantifiable number of where you stand. When you contribute to an OS project you're trying to determine the starting quality of the project, how much "cache" it has, the value of your contribution.... much more complex.

What these platforms give you is simple setup and a quantifiable number of where you stand. When you contribute to an OS project you're trying to determine the starting quality of the project, how much "cache" it has, the value of your contribution.... much more complex.

I don't do any of that shit. I use OS software, and occasionally, when I have an excess of free time, I fix bugs and add features that I personally care about. Sometimes I even get them merged back in. I'm not resume building explicitly (but maybe, I donno), but it's great for my confidence. Getting anybody to accept code you wrote is great for confidence.

I think that'd be the difference. Your approach is great for actually getting better and building confidence. For benchmarking, I'd argue it's not providing as much value.

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