Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Ask HN: What is your biggest problem? (2022)
15 points by dazzlevolta on Jan 4, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 41 comments
Hi HN,

In 2020 I had posted the same question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069693).

Now the world has quite changed in a little over two years and I would be curious to know if the "biggest problem" trends also changed.

This is the very simple (and purposely broad) question:

  What is your biggest problem right now?



I recently became a solution architect after pursuing this goal for quite a number of years. I love what I do, perform well, have good work-life balance, solve cutting edge technical problems, the pay is great. Wife, kids. Healthy and fit. So, enjoy your nice life, right?

The problem: am Ukrainian. It currently looks like I can get mobilized soon and go to war. If that happens, chances are that what awaits is not domain driven design and distributed systems but trench warfare. Even though I am likely to survive, my mental health and capacity for intense intellectual work may be permanently reduced.

Not just me: it's a trend. Ukraine is a major software engineering hub. The war doesn't care. Tons of talented people have to stop what they do and go defend the nation from the russian horde. Such a striking contrast where you can have cloud solutions and Ww1 style fighting within weeks from each other. Puts things into perspective.


I'm really sorry you're in this position. My family left Ukraine when I was 12. Even sitting safely in another country and thinking about family members under bombing and occupation has given me countless sleepless nights over the last year; I can't even begin to comprehend what you and others who are actually there are going through. I recently read about several people in my industry who went to fight and lost their lives; it makes me feel emotionally stunted or something because for the life of me I still can't seem to mentally grasp the fact that someone was working as a game developer one day and getting killed in an invasion the next.

I hope you and your loved ones make it through this alive and healthy.


This is a good reminder, at least for me, to think about life outside my bubble. Wishing you a safe and healthy year.


Is it too late to escape and help the war with money instead of sacrificing your body/life/mind?


Not too late, but not easy: https://www.dw.com/en/how-ukrainian-men-try-to-get-around-th...


Communicating with any large company.

Try to tell Google, Verizon, Microsoft, American Express, et cetera, that there's something wrong with their servers, or some security issue with their site, whatever, and you'll either not be talking with real humans (Google) or you'll be trying to explain email servers to first level phone support who think that if it works for some people, then the problem has to be elsewhere.

The same goes for companies that have no way for humans to contact them yet have, for instance, old people who need to use them. They ignore ADA requirements for TTD contacts. They have no way to skip their automated phone systems or voice activated systems. They have outsourced people who know nothing about the companies' products and no way to escalate anything. These problems are getting worse over time.


I work as online support for the US' largest private company, being one of the main direct point of contact their business partners have with the company -- and I can 100% attest for this.

On a daily basis, my team (which consists of 2 people only, on a good day) deals with hundreds of partners facing dozens of different issues. We are only trained to deal with maybe 3% of the issues we receive -- the rest, we must redirect to other dozens of internal departments, or escalate to other teams.

The problem is: I (and my colleague) have zero idea who is the correct team to re-direct to/escalate most of the time. This is not because we don't want to know, but because most of the time even our leaders and their leaders have no idea who is the right person to deal with those problems.

The company is so big (and not properly organized) that some issues their business partners' face go almost 2 months without a solution, with endless email threads of one team pinging the other...

It is bad for the costumer/supplier, and also for the employees, who have been alienated of their job and are left to "none's devices" to do their job.


We have the same problem internally. Just getting internal support requires calling 3-4 people all redirecting you to someone else


My friend has a startup (nonono.com) that takes customer complaints and makes sure they are heard in companies. It’s mostly for customer products so not exactly suitable for reporting ie. server issues I guess.


Lack of friends, a meaningful social life and general peace of mind.


My life is great, healthy, happily married with kids, great job, etc.

But I'd like to achieve something special in my life. Have some sense of fulfillment. Be it professionally or towards the local community, etc.


Too many choices.

Want to learn too many things. All right now.

It's so bad it’s almost always crippling.


I have the same issue, and I have found a bit of a way to work around it. I am always learning something new and looking forward to the next thing after that. It is who I am as a person and what drives me in life as a whole. What took me 37 years to figure out was that learning is stress and doing is stress relief. What I mean is that learning a new skill is inherently stressful, and if you do it constantly for years without breaks it starts to hurt you mentally and physically. If you don't take a break to use some of those skills and actually build something then you have all of the "I have to surround myself with information about this topic 24/7" stress with none of the "I just built something really cool" stress relief. Take a break for a bit and build something awesome. I promise it helps.


I find this insightful.

I can relate to that.


ADHD, without a doubt. I take medication to manage it well enough to take care of myself and do well at work, but it's still the single largest obstacle I face in all my endeavors personal and professional.


The internal conflict of wanting to leave my country but staying put because of my ageing parents.


No money to buy house, support ppl iny life.


My biggest problem is that I've probably got ~15,000 days of life remaining.

There are only a few ways I might get lucky:

- somebody uploads my mind into a computer

- somebody cures aging

- somebody cures sleep (extra 30% of each day would be nice)

- I decide that ~15,000 days is good enough


Personally, I do not fear death.

I don't fear death because I'm utterly curious. All of your thoughts are functions of a brain, a brain that will stop functioning. So what will you experience? Religious people will say there's an afterlife. A non-religious person might say you experience a void. You see, hear, feel, smell nothing. But if experiences are a function of the brain, and the brain is dead, you can't even experience a void.

It's not possible to imagine a true nothingness. So it brings me back to the original question, what do you experience after death? It's an impossible question to answer without experiencing it. Sure, people have had near-death experiences and talked about them, but I question how many of those experiences are merely hallucinations created by a mind panicking about its demise.

To die is to finally get the answer to the question. I do not fear dying because I will finally have an answer to the unanswerable.

That said, my bigger fear is aging and becoming decrepit. I don't want to survive, I want to live. If I ever get to a point where I'm merely surviving, unable to walk without assistance, unable to wipe my own ass, then I think it'll be time to say I've had a good run and end it.


If your biggest problem is that you will die in 41 years, you must live an incredibly easy life.


I have a friend who has chronic debilitating pain from a spine injury. He's a wonderful and kind person, and I can only imagine what his biggest problems are right now.

Pain and exorbitant medical bills will probably make my death feel small one day. I'll try to enjoy my easy life while I have it :)


While I deeply respect anyone's effort to go down any of the rabbit holes from first to third bullet in the face of something as terminal as death on the one hand, I always chuckle to myself at anyone thinking fixing any of these points (cryogenic storage, curing aging, living infinitely) would be a smart idea - even if possible.

So I rest content and confident that most of it will remain lucid dreams for the foreseeable future thanks to the intricate complexities of biochemistry.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate our general age rising due to improved nutrition and medicine, but I deeply believe we only have the chance to feel truly alive and get ahead because we know we are going to die one day.

Obligatory Steve Jobs quote:

> Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

> Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

> Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.


Realise that you will never experience being dead. The same way that you didn’t experience anything before being born. So there is nothing to fear. Appreciate that you are one in billions of unborn people that get to experience life! So enjoy it and don’t waste time worrying about things you can’t change anyway.


Really, how about the transition from alive to dead?


You experienced the transition from not being born to being born. And from not existing to existing. And yet I am pretty sure you don’t remember any of it.

Same with falling asleep. At some point you are awake and at some other point you wake up from having slept. Death is like falling asleep. That’s why sleep in some cultures is called the “little death”. You practice dying every night.


No, the transition from not being born to being born is not comparable to the suffering of dying.

We don't remember any of it because pain doesn't necessarily transfer to memory. I agree that death is like falling asleep and never waking up but you don't suffer hopelessly before you fall asleep. Many that are dying do.

My aunt was hopeless during the dying process. There were no singing angels, no great grace descended. It's not a magical experience, it's ugly and continuous suffering before you fall asleep and never wake up.

How could it no be, you will never see your children again. The party continues and you are abandoned for forever.


I got a good laugh out of your characterization of sleep as a disease, I very much enjoy it myself.

But it has arguably been “cured” in a sense, look into the Uberman Polyphasic sleep schedule.


Uploading your mind into a computer wouldn't help even if it worked perfectly. Computer-you would be a copy, real-you will still die in your body.


My biggest problem is that I dislike my job but it has potential to pay off big and allow me to retire (Or at least, semi-retire) in ~5 years off the stock options.

Retiring at 45 seems pretty appealing. I could finally catch up on my massive library of games I've been wanting to play, not to mention reducing my alarm clock usage to likely 10 times a year, rather than 5 days a week.


it has potential to pay off big

I hope you’re not talking about a startup lottery


I am.

And I do recognize that it's just that - a lottery. We could fail and I end up unemployed with nothing. Or a funding round could dilute my stock options to worthlessness.


It does not make any sense to suffer through 5+ years of unsatisfying job with (relatively) low pay, just to have a very small (<5%) chance to make enough money to retire. This chance is actually much smaller if you own less than 5% of the company (i.e. not a founder or C-level).

Source: worked for 7 startups in the last 20 years.


My base salary is actually above market by a decent margin.

Total compensation is a little lower than market if you assume the options are worthless. But if we get to a $5B valuation, the value of my options would put me to a significantly over-market compensation, though not enough to retire. If we reached $30B, then that would give me ~$6M assuming no dilution.


What is the current valuation, or how much money have you raised, and how many rounds?


Our current valuation is not public. I can't disclose it.

But we've had 4 rounds of funding totaling $131M.


One of the startups I used to work for in the past had 3 rounds, ~180M total, shut down 2 months ago. Investors lost almost all of their money, founders got nothing. I lost 20k I paid for my vested shares.


I'm not buying my shares until we've gotten enough momentum that an IPO or buyout looks inevitable.


Or just regular old recession


The lack of financial freedom.


Jobless. The dreadful feeling of being unable to positively contribute to something.


If you're not getting anywhere aiming up at programming and directly technical roles, have a go at coming in sideways via data entry, field aquisition, installation, cable pulling roles .. or even "non IT" industries (as everywhere has computers and software these days).

I landed two of my more interesting programming roles via jobs that started as something "other than" (for the change) and found myself migrating into industry specific problem solving internally as I had the knack (programming and higher math) and an inside track.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: