This resonates with me to a surprising extent. My perceived threshold for expressing an opinion is very high, and I also find that I don't really have any particularly _strong_ opinions to begin with.
The "hedge my answers extensively" bit is spot-on, as is the isolating nature of this "trait", unfortunately.
The justification for using LIFO (vs FIFO) queues for requests is interesting: at no/low load it makes no difference, while at high load the requests least likely to time out get serviced first.
Is that a common architectural decision in reverse proxies or queuing systems in general?
In queuing theory, it's well known that choosing the request with lowest service time first will result in lowest waiting time on average across the requests.
This is usually not done because it can starve the larger jobs.
Interesting. I wonder if that choice would lead to a noticeable impact on perceived latency (from the perspective of a human end-user) under some high-load/pathological scenario.
There's a lot of web and B2B stuff in Utah County. (Google for "Silicon Slopes" - yeah, the term is marketing hype, but there really is a fair amount going on.) I'm an embedded systems guy, and that's... not a roaring market, but fairly steady.
Regarding your last point: this is an idea I first encountered a couple years ago in Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness", and it's been on my mind ever since.
Monetizing successful people's advice on how to become successful seems seems to be a pretty profitable endeavor.
Accepting that success, among many other things, is more random than post-hoc explanations make it seem is scary yet somewhat liberating at the same time.
Over the years, how has your perspective on the stack + the type of work you're doing changed? I feel like due to my age I don't have the context to make a decision based on factors that will actually matter in the long term.
It definitely changed, I started with what's easy to learn, available and well-paying, and that meant Java jobs - I thought that programming is just fun enough to make these jobs cool. Now I seriously doubt that.
It all depends on your circumstances. If you are single then London will work well for you, and if you like travel you have all other countries at hand - Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland.. Very diverse and very colourful. And it feels like London is a startups heart of Europe (at least this is what I feel compared to Geneva, Munich or Berlin). Some people will argue in light of Brexit but I personally think this will work for better to both Europe and Great Britain. A step back towards what EU used to be (in a good way).
To rent a whole flat for yourself will cost you 1k+ PCM (that's flat, you need to remember about council tax and TV tax and utilities, so probably closer to 1150+ PCM), you will be better to go for a room (did I mention it all depends if you are single? and you meet new people too)
Taxes here depend on your formal situation with the company. If you go PAYE then you'll probably see about ~30k of what you earn. Go and look at pay calculators. But once you get your permanent stay your option might look better. Also you mentioned 40k is a starting point, so you'll end up on better wage once your probation/review is done. Maybe your employer would go for paying your flat and travel expenses which would work better than doing this for yourself.
I would try to evaluate which option (Canada or UK) look better from your pocket perspective and then would look into tech and future perspective. Python seems to be quite on top at the moment, though C++ is not too bad neither :-) so not simple choices here!
---
Just spotted you edited your question.
Q- Would it be irresponsible to give up the PR in Canada and move away?
A- I don't know :-) What's the PR in Canada?
Q- Would I later regret not moving to London in my early twenties?
A- older you get more difficult it becomes.
Q- What's more important: work or people?
A- growth. And that might mean either work, or people, or both, or neither - depending what's your end goal.
Q- How important is compensation for the first job out of college?
A- you would not (probably) consider moving if you was not offered a job, would you? Compensation is important but at some point you get to the glass ceiling and you need to think about other options. You need to value yourself, does not matter what point in your life you are at.
Think what you want to be doing in 1/3/5 years from now. That might give you the right perspective.
---
Oh and commute - it is not unusual to see people commuting 60+ minutes (one way). You need to target the area near your office or near the fast tube (some are faster than the other). I live in suburbs and it takes me only 30 minutes to commute :-) it used to take 70 minutes when I was in zone 3 (but I was on slow line).
Also as far as I'm aware it's about 5 years before you get permanent residency in UK. So this would be long term plans and you might decide to go back once you are fed up of being here :-)
Two Truths and a Take by Alex Danco (tech, VC, and broader topics): https://danco.substack.com/
The Uncertainty Mindset by Vaughn Tan: https://uncertaintymindset.substack.com/
The Diff by Byrne Hobart (finance, tech): https://diff.substack.com/
Kneeling Bus by Drew Austin (urbanism, tech): https://kneelingbus.substack.com/