Take a break for a few months to recalibrate what you want from life. Tech will still be here when you’re ready again. Go travel, use your physical body to walk and hike and lift, have a couple of flings, go to a bar at noon, work a few temp jobs, apply minimalism in your life, learn about something you like, etc.
This is not advice to just follow for anyone. For some people this may be right, but for others it can be dangerous and a disaster. (At least if there's any chance "months" turns into "years".)
If one is of verge of depression (or similar stuff) then removing routines in your life is in general not going to fix things, but make things worse.
A long vacation or unpaid leave, sure. But quitting work without a concrete plan to return and definite exit point feels dangerous. If one isn't in the right place mentally suddenly you are just stuck at home watching Netflix in a downward spiral, instead of all those exciting things you planned on doing but somehow don't end up doing.
I remember seeing a post from someone on HN that started in this place, then did quit work for a year. It seemed quite obvious reading about that journey that attempting a "reset" just made things worse.
A variant of this advice, that avoids some of the pitfalls, is to take time off to do something structured and specific.
Personally, in between jobs a long time ago, I chose to walk the Henro Trail, an approximately 800-mile Buddhist pilgrimage trail in Shikoku, Japan. To make a long story short, it was the experience of a lifetime.
I haven't, but others have written about the same trip. There's lots of material online these days, I'm not really familiar with it but if you google "Shikoku henro pilgrimage", all the hits will be about the same trip I took.
There is a wonderful book, Japanese Pilgrimage by Oliver Statler. He goes into the history of the pilgrimage and of Kobo Daishi, the monk whose path the trail follows. He also discusses his own personal experience walking the trail.
As somebody who was traveling for 6 month in my young years, I can tell you, after arriving at home it just felt like i was a day away.
I thing, like another guy said, teaching might be a good way.
Also, "tech" is big. Maybe a job in industry automation might be something. You nod just see something on a screen, you can touch the result. I'm in this, it is also sometimes stressful, but also very interesting.
It's more like "don't lose the opportunity to make money in tech" because everything else without any other qualifications or schooling is not very lucrative. OP is looking for happiness though so any re-calibration will not bring any happiness but just make them able to hop back in the rat race.
Angular v1 was absolutely the game-changer for sane UI patterns. Although it could choke on large datasets and models were iffy, it allowed us to worry less about the framework and more about the work at hand.
Have a baby! You’ll definitely live in the moment when the attention is on another rather than yourself. It’s hard to wax philosophical when you’re trying to keep another human alive.
The AI hype seems to be a smokescreen for mass layoffs from the CoVid era. The increased attention on the H-1B visa’s hiring process and labor market impact reveals a far more underreported and significant contributor to job shortages. Also, a lot of these companies have existed way longer than they should have.
Be happy you’re not employed in tech course content creation or something that is directly replaceable TODAY, like language translation or low-level graphic design.
> The AI hype seems to be a smokescreen for mass layoffs from the CoVid era
This. Better to tell markets "we can now downsize our workforce due to incredible efficiencies achieved by our AI initiative" than "we hired too many people, grew slower than expected and now we're making cuts"
A little tinfoil birdie told me that even the Covid era itself (and the resultant mass layoffs during, mass hiring following, and mass layoffs following that) were a smokescreen for (bond?) market instability. I personally tend to think that both were more of a, "Don't let a good crisis go to waste," situation.
Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.
Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy, personnel you totally need in order to build a metaverse or whatever.
Money ran out + overleveraging during the boom + market changes caused by the rapid socioeconomic shifts (e.g., commercial real estate tanking)? You can cover the bottom line for now with a lot of firing and consolidation, say it's AI's fault.
I appreciate your willingness to consider possibilities like this, but I think it really is tinfoil in this case.
> Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.
This gets cause and effect wrong. Wikipedia reminds:
> The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020, and first referred to it as a pandemic on 11 March 2020.[3][4]
Markets were doing well in Jan 2020 until people started noticing the case numbers and speculating about the WHO's judgement. They were on a bull run before that — up almost 29% in the 2019 calendar year — which was largely a recovery from problems at the end of 2018.
So the market was only hiccuping because of existing panic over the pandemic (including people reasonably pricing in risk that pandemic would be officially declared; the "social distancing" policies and business closures were quite telegraphed).
> Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy
This is just naturally what would happen.
> Money ran out
It's more that people started devaluing money because of how much was printed, so interest rates were controlled to avoid a hyperinflationary spiral. It could have gone much worse (see: early 70s until early 80s). Powell did an impressive job to engineer the desired "soft landing", but I personally was surprised and displeased that they waited that long to reach for the brakes. (It came across that there was a reluctance to trust early vague inflation signals, despite what should have been a high prior on their correctness given recent policy.)
Markets hiccuped because they were already running too close to the red line. Good markets can rake disruption, rebalancing rather than crashing the entire thing.
One way I had it explained to me (may be different now).. H-1B's are often a way of getting willing candidates who are overqualified to work tons of extra hours for years compared to other options.
How has humanity organised itself to maximize productivity throughout time? By means of slavery.
What really is h1b at the core? Its a modern form of slavery - it appears to be voluntary in nature (to a degree it is) but the key point is that it creates lock in. That lock in enables a slave-like culture to thrive. And this is what we see.
And btw just install Sundar and Satya as CEOs to voluntarily attract more Indian software engineers and so on...
Lmao its so easy to see whats been going on. These guys arent all that smart, even though they are worshipped.
As far as I can tell, it didn't start causing problems until the piper had to be paid (in the form of interest rate hikes), and even then probably a lot of businesses had a fair amount of runway.
I suspect Israel does whatever they want under the auspices of national security, gives “private” cybersecurity corporations latitude to circumvent international laws, then packages it all up to sell to the highest bidder.
It seems pretty unlikely that selling a zero-day to a state actor is a violation of international law, unless the vendor knows that state actor intends to use it to commit an internationally wrongful act.
Like at the very worst - selling "cyberweapons" would follow the same rules as selling actual weapons.
I don't super follow US politics, but i don't think we are at the point where ICE is comitting crimes against humanity - which i think is what would be required for this transaction to violate international law.
I’ve had a few conversations with people who use ChatGPT as a therapist. There is real danger of using LLMs that are engineered agree with you, at least in terms of therapy.
Even if "AI cannot legally do therapy", nothing would stop people from crying their soul out to a "Gangster Sponge Bob" persona on some "funny novelty chatbot" website.
