At least in the professional world, I believe the key is knowing that "work" is an artificial construct designed to make owners and shareholders richer at the expense of you, the working drone. So "making progress" becomes a lot more palatable than quickly delivering what the capitalists want.
Invest as much money as you can in a diversified low-fee stock market index fund. Set it up as an automatic payment from your bank account. It gives you the best chance you have of retiring early.
Also, start building a bunker and stock it with non-perishable foods and seeds for crops. Because the world is about to go to absolute shit.
On a side note: Are there any scripts that allow you to invest directly from your bank account.For example
Pseudo-Code:
If I have £500 left this month invest 50% in Stock Fund XYZ 25% in BTC 25% in GOOG
Simplified but You can add some complex logic and monetise it as a Bank or script seller.
I don't have a formal background in CS -- most of my schooling and professional background has been centered squarely on mechanical engineering. Attending college in 2004-2009, the school I went to spent just a couple class sessions teaching MATLAB and LabView. Neither language really appealed to me and after some initial struggles I realized that our TAs weren't really checking our scripts... so I faked a bunch of non-functional homework scripts just to move forward in the class. The experience soured me on programming for years.
Years later, the pandemic hit and I found myself with excess free time and nothing to do in the evenings. So I decided to take a series of Coursera classes to learn data science programming in Python and VBA. VBA became rather useful as I was able to program sophisticated macros for automating tasks in SolidWorks CAD. But my programming knowledge has still been rather limited compared to most professional programmers.
When ChatGPT came out and people started tinkering with it for programming, I was delighted to find that it was able to produce what appeared to be SolidWorks VBA scripts. But on further examination the scripts produced were often buggy and in need of rework. So I was rather skeptical for a while about ChatGPT's usefulness.
A few years later, I'm now in a job that requires a LOT of programming and scripting in a multitude of different languages (Python, Bash, and a few others) and the focus has shifted away from CAD. I'll humbly admit that ChatGPT has saved me multiple times in figuring out how to approach different problems. The code often works right on the first try. It's an essential tool for me now.
Entrepreneurs! Hah, this is Boeing, they are anything but entrepreneurs. They are the government-endorsed American aerospace monopoly, stifling innovation. And "communist" is just a bad word used by people in power to silence and stigmatize dissenters.
Get an apprenticeship at a local machine shop. Work insane hours doing manual repetitive labor. Get injured and pressured by your employer not to file workman's comp. Cope with medications, prescribed and otherwise. Join a union (if your employer allows one to exist). Continue working and wondering what life would be like outside of manufacturing.
A few years back, I interviewed with a company that specialized in air filtration products for hospitals and medical facilities. The company had grown rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and was gearing up to expand their facilities.
During my interview, I expressed skepticism in their long-term prospects -- I questioned whether the air filtration market would continue to grow in the post-COVID era... and they were very bullish about their outlook. Their argument was actually very convincing -- they were preparing to kick off development of a new product that was intended to address ongoing air filtration issues that were well known before COVID. Multiple American states were drafting legislation mandating the use of these products, so the market opportunity was immediate and growing.
After rejecting their initial offer, they raised the offer and I hesitantly accepted.
Shortly after joining, I set up a product data management system that worked really well, and the other engineers (even the grey-beard) quickly adopted it. I'm very proud of the work I did on that project, and it only took me 2 months to design and implement.
The next project ate up 2 years of my life. I was tasked with designing a medical smoke evacuator. Medical smoke evacuators had been around for almost 20 years at that point - there were numerous patents that were about to expire, so we didn't have to reinvent the wheel.
Our company founder had started his firm tinkering in a garage. He had no formal background in engineering or business management, and got lucky with the pandemic. As the company grew, he started spending ridiculous sums of money on a distributed sales and marketing team, many of whom he poached from competitors. On the engineering side, he converted multiple outside consultants into full-time employees.
Despite the incredible talent flowing into the company, our founder had no respect for the opinions of his employees. He had to have final say in all decisions, and his judgments always changed at the most inopportune time.
I built multiple functional prototypes of a benchtop smoke evacuator, each about the size of desktop computer. With some finishing touches, it could have been a hit. It worked really well.
Our founder shitcanned it, deciding that we needed to design an upright wheeled smoke evacuator instead. This ballooned the size and cost of the product - it had to be stable while supporting an articulating intake hose. Additionally, it had to have a huge touchscreen display, to show various air quality measurements (that very few customers actually needed). Lastly, it had to use a particular quiet (but somewhat underpowered) fan motor that he had already been ordered in large quantities.
At this point we only had 8 months left to develop a tradeshow-ready prototype. In the medical world, 2 years is not an uncommon development timeframe. So I worked my ass off.
Despite numerous obstacles (especially in wrangling with vendors and our electrical/software team), I managed to get a beautiful prototype ready and delivered to the tradeshow. Nestled among our older products, my product was the star of our show!
Post-tradeshow, I continued working on improving the design for production. I cranked out at least 60 drawings, got quotes from vendors, sent the quotes to our CFO for purchase approval. And waited. And waited. Weeks went by without action.
Behind the scenes, our company was starving for cashflow... the medical market was in a crunch, as hospitals had overspent during the pandemic. My interview market speculations a couple years prior had come true. Several members of our sales and marketing team were let go, along with one of my engineering coworkers. To stem the tide, our executives decided to go through another round of funding with our original investors. It was during this funding round that I found myself waiting for purchase orders to be sent.
Then we got our funding... in the worst way possible. The investing group got a majority share, and they moved immediately to push the founding CEO out (and who could blame them - the guy was a hack)! The consultants came in, hard questions got asked. And then a few days later my engineering VP told me that all NPD projects had been axed by the new CEO, including my smoke evacuator. My VP privately warned my team that we needed to start looking for... "other options".
A week later, I got laid off along with a coworker and our engineering VP. Just a couple weeks before I got married. Luckily, I got multiple interviews lined up in short order and was only unemployed for a short time.
So that was the most useless project I've ever worked on. Doomed from the start, despite my best efforts.
The key to interviewing well and confidently is to understand that you are not the only one being interviewed. You are interviewing them! And you want to ask probing questions that reveal the employer's mindset and working conditions.
Many employers go into these discussions thinking that they are going to put you under the microscope. But if you direct hard questions in their direction, the power dynamic changes. Suddenly they are trying to convince you that you should work for them.
One of the best questions to ask early in interviews is "Outside of what's in the job description, what are the qualities that you are looking for in the ideal candidate?" Then you can frame your responses in a manner that aligns with their description.
Another great question to ask: "What are the circumstances that led to the availability of this position?" I asked this question recently and the employer revealed that 1) a former employee in that position had left, and (after further probing) 2) this employer tended to hire inexperienced engineers, who frequently left after a couple years to pursue better jobs. Needless to say, that info prompted me to end the conversation.
Remember: It's far better to be rejected by a good employer than it is to end up working for a shitty one because you didn't ask the right questions.
