jelan

I’m fairly sure I’ve had some kind of ADHD my entire life, but never been treated professionally for it. I’ve gotten pretty good at dealing with how my brain works, but I just feel like it’s running at 98% constantly (mostly with completely useless thoughts and information) and am wondering if I could potentially get more useful cycles out of it with some kind of treatment.

I have some of the classic symptoms such as finding it hard to bring myself to do tasks I’m not interested in, but also having the ability to focus so intensely on more interesting things, always having some kind of music playing in parallel with all other thoughts I’m having, etc…

I feel like it’s starting to affect my work because I think I try to avoid mentally taxing things in some capacity because of this, and it’s also hard to transition in and out of super focus mode once I get there. It’s very hard for me to be present and not thinking about other things or worrying about the future, to the point where if there is any pause in a conversation I’m having I instantly start thinking about something else unrelated.

I’m wondering if anyone else has felt similarly and if treatment helped them? I’ve had friends give me advice that if I’ve made it this far without being on medication for ADHD there is no reason to start now, and I’ve also heard of peoples lives being completely changed for the better because of it.

I have about 5 years of web dev experience and recently got an offer from a small company based in Seattle.

I overall enjoyed the experience of interviewing with them and it seemed like the people there were talented and down to earth, but after reading some Glassdoor reviews it made me stop and think again.

There are a good number of reviews about the company complaining about executive leadership, how the company has had a lot of attrition and hiring engineers has been slow, etc…

The offer I received from them was definitely above market rate for my level of experience, and after reading some of these reviews I’m starting to think that the company might be in a pretty bad situation that I didn’t pick up on while interviewing, and that’s why they are paying me about 40k over market rate for the base salary and being very generous with equity

I’m not sure if it would still be worth trying to work here or not, I was impressed with the people I met with and the product the company makes is related to satellites and would be interesting to work on, it’s just not very encouraging to read a lot of negative reviews before starting something. Not sure if it’s worth the risk or not for the extra money

I’m working as a full stack SWE in SV and am interviewing around looking for something different with… interesting results, I’m wondering how others are finding it?

I’ve applied to probably 40 companies, gotten invited to do around 6 phone screens (some including two rounds to pass), and have yet to make it to an on-site.

Some of the phone screens I’ve done I just never heard back from, I’ve had two separate instances at different companies where in between passing the first and going on to the second round the company went through layoffs and the recruiters that were handling me were part of those affected, I’ve been told I will get an invite to an on-site after the company recovers from lay offs which never materialized, and I’ve just flat out not passed the rest.

The bar seems definitely much higher than I can ever remember it being at this stage, and companies seem pretty disinterested in following through with hiring. I have heard things are starting to stabilize in tech but it still seems like everyone is bracing for the worst.

I recently applied for a SWE position at a company and completed the first round of interviews. The company had a technical issue the day of my second interview that prevented me from joining the session.

I reached out and told the company about this problem, only to discover that the recruiters I had been talking to had been laid off very recently, but the recruiting coordinator acknowledged the mistake and asked for another time that I would be available for the second round.

I updated my availability, then received a new email from another recruiter saying that I had been rejected and thanks for applying, so I forwarded the last email from the recruiting coordinator and asked what was going on. Later that day they wrote be back and apologized for the mix up and asked if I would still be available on the new dates for the second round.

I’m not sure how I feel about this, part of me wants to acknowledge that people make mistakes and especially after going through a company wide layoff but part of me just wants to stop the process here. I’m not sure if I actually did poorly on the first round and due to a miscommunication they are giving me a second round to save face or if this is truly a mistake. Should I keep interviewing with this company?

I am overall skeptical on ML projects and mostly find myself excited about the potential outcomes but disappointed in the execution (if there is any, most of the time it just sounds good as a marketing tactic to throw ML buzzwords into whatever you are doing)

But then every once in a while we get something really useful like ChatGPT that makes me challenge my overall negative assumptions on the space enough to want to understand more about what’s happening

I’m wondering how much the creators of ChatGPT really understand what the model is doing and to what extent they are able to make changes to the model. My naive understanding is that most of the time the model is a black box that we understand the inputs to well, but are really only capable of observing what comes out of the box instead of being able to change how said box works itself

How much programming is involved in creating something like this?

I am mainly interested in these questions after reading about the Bitter lesson [1] and basically how trying to inject our human understanding of how a problem should be solved only limits how well a computer is able to solve the problem when it understands the objective.

Are we getting to the point where we are just going to accept that we don’t understand how the solution works but in cases like ChatGPT the outcome is good enough to make us not worry too much about it?

[1]: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

I have a few years of experience working mostly on the frontend with React and am getting more and more frustrated with all the added layers of complexity needed to work with most common frontend frameworks.

I’ve hit a point where it just doesn’t seem like the end justifies the means in the vast majority of cases anymore which really doesn’t make me excited to work on much in this space now.

The one redeeming quality of doing this kind of work is that it is in very high demand, and I worry that the price of becoming more specialized or doing something more enjoyable with less bloat is that it becomes much harder to find jobs.

Has anyone either switched from doing web development type work to something else they enjoy more for similar reasons? If anyone considers themselves very specialized in an area, do you worry about job opportunities?

Around 5 years ago I decided I would put some money in my bank / brokerages managed fund program where your money is actively traded on your behalf for a small monthly fee (this fee ends up being about $150 - $200 a month)

The performance of this managed account over the past 5 years while doing well has never beat the returns of index funds that do not cost a monthly fee to invest in, so would now be a good time to sell in order to reinvest the funds outside of the managed fund?

Does anyone have opinions on what the best course of action would be here? I don’t really see a great way of getting out of this fund, either I sell when the market is doing well only to pay capital gains taxes and put the money right back into the market, or I sell now at a reduced gain, pay less tax to put it right back into the market, but get rid of the monthly fee.

The fee itself is not a major concern to me, but it just seems stupid to continue paying it when I’m not getting any large benefit even when the market is doing well and I’ve given it plenty of time to see if paying the fee somehow gets you better returns which is not the case