I make low six figures as a single, childless person, and am just barely doing ok. I rent a cheap 1 bedroom apartment, drive a 20 year old Toyota, and end up with just enough for a small amount of savings each month with very little discretionary spending. Buying a home is an impossible fantasy. Being out of work for a couple months would leave me homeless. I literally cannot imagine what it's like trying to support a family on the average salary in this country.
With respect either you left out some major details or you have a skewed perspective of what it means to be "doing ok." My position matches what you stated almost exactly (low 6 figures, single, childless, 17 year old Toyota) and I'm doing _very_ well. I bought a house last year, max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions with additional savings on top, have a decent emergency fund, paid off my student loans five years early...
I'm not trying to brag, but a single person making six figures should be doing quite well anywhere in the US. I really suggest sitting down and carefully tracking how you spend money for a month or two to find out where it's going.
There are many factors aside from spending habits that might lead to discrepancies between purchasing power of a 6 figure salary.
One example: discrepancies in the local cost of living. For example, someone could live like royalty on a 6 figures is Arkansas, but might barely scrape by with the same salary in San Francisco. According to nerd wallet, a salary of $106k in San Francisco is roughly equivalent to a salary of $50k in Little Rock, AR.
It's pretty presumptuous to suggest that they need to sitting down and carefully tracking spend without knowing more information. Especially considering the original poster wasn't asking for advice (or judgement) from a random internet stranger.
If you can muster up 10k-15k you can buy a $300k house with 3% down. There are down payment assistance programs as well. After a few years you can refinance to remove PMI etc…. It’s not impossible but it is certainly difficult.
Unfortunately if the OP is located in California, there are very few places left in the state where one can purchase a home for just $300k; these are generally places in the southern half of the Central Valley (e.g., Fresno, Bakersfield) or places in the far north of the state (e.g., Chico, Redding). Sacramento, my hometown, is no longer cheap; last I checked the average price for a home there was around $440k, and homes in Sacramento's nicer suburbs tend to average in the $500k range (and homes in Sacramento's walkable core are even more expensive).
There are out-of-state alternatives where $300k is doable such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Houston, but if the OP is a lifelong Californian like myself, then moving to another state may be quite a change.
I'm in a similar situation as the OP. I currently rent an apartment in a coastal area near Silicon Valley that I love. I can afford to purchase a place up to about $425K based on my income, savings, and DTI, but $425K isn't enough to purchase anything near commute distance from Silicon Valley, and while I could have afforded Sacramento two years ago, the pandemic-era rise of prices in the Sacramento area have priced me out of the neighborhoods I want to live in. Thus I still rent.
I'm very interested in a low down payment, not to buy a house beyond my budget, but instead to avoid locking in more cash than I have to. Could you recommend any guidelines or important factors for me to determine whether I should prefer minimal down payment vs standard (>=20% iirc)?
Are you planning on living there for a short period of time (<~5yrs)? It may end up being cheaper overall to pay minimum down and go with the private mortgage insurance and a 30-year mortgage so you pay as little as possible while you're living there. But if you're planning on staying there long-term, a 15-year mortgage may be a better option.
How good is your credit? If it's good and you have a high income to debt ratio, your PMI will likely be pretty minimal. If so, you may end up netting better if you invest what you'd put down and let that money grow instead. Or you can put some of that into points for lower interest rates.
These things are pretty easy to figure out if you know what your home budget. There are a few places you can get rough estimates based on your credit score.
What would a "pretty minimal" PMI look like? My partner and I both make pretty good income and have zero debt. I've heard about places like Ally where you can get a mortgage estimate without a hard credit pull; is that the kind of thing you mean?
I wasn't talking about an actual estimate just a rough listing of your options like this [1]. A pretty minimal PMI could be like $50/month depending on the cost of the property, and there are some calculators for that too [2].
By my calculation, if this person made ~$120k year and lived in a typical $3000/month 1-bed apartment in San Francisco, they should have about $40k/yr left after taxes and housing costs are paid. Out of this $40k they'd need to pay food, transportation, discretionary, and savings. Definitely puts efficiently saving a large downpayment on a home in California out of reach, but I'm surprised OP feels at risk of becoming homeless with that much budget slack. A generous $2000/month budget for non-housing spending (food, transportation, discretionary) would still leave $16k/yr they could save. Not a lot, but a lot better than many. Large debt payments or lifestyle inflation could pretty easily skew this person more toward an experience of paycheck-to-paycheck living.
When I lived in San Francisco, it seemed like the hedonic treadmill was in full force. People came to the Bay Area stunned that they could start out making more money than their parents ever dreamed of, then a few years later they feel grumpy because they're ONLY making $300k/yr when their buddy is making $450k/yr at FAANG and driving a new Tesla. It's easy for lifestyle inflation to happen in an environment where people all around you seem to have Scrooge McDuck levels of money and all the lifestyle bloat to go along with it.
My advice is to take your tech skills and leave for greener pastures. I see absolutely no reason to pay all those extra California taxes and housing costs.
Yeah this sounds about right. If they were in a fancier place and were hitting $4000 per month in housing costs (parking spots aren't cheap I guess), that'd put them down to $4k savings per year with the rest of the spending held constant.
Highly recommend creating a ledger of all spending. It's amazing how quickly the little things add up, by simply taking the time to write things down it becomes much easier to see where it all goes.
Many credit cards claim to do this for you, but to me that defeats the point. If you aren't taking the time do your own accounting, it simply becomes another email/HTML table/push notification/whatever to ignore.
I do this. I have a daily planner with plenty of blank pages and write down, by hand, every transaction I make. I start with my monthly budget, subtract rent, groceries, a video game, a movie, etc. Anything beyond my budget, whether it's salary or a stimmy, goes to saving/investing.
It's been incredibly helpful for being aware of my spending. In fact it's so helpful I actually forgot how much I'm saving and was pleasantly surprised when I remembered how much it is. It's also very effective for staying on top of lifestyle creep.
I make low 6 figures and support a family of 4. We have to budget, but we definitely aren't struggling, we are able to afford plenty of luxuries. Buying a house was not too big of a task. You should move to the Midwest.
Others have done ballpark figures based on what you've said. And as someone who has lived in San Francisco making even less at times, I agree that you should be able to build up at least several months savings.
Unless: you have some crippling college debt ($20k/semester*8 semesters paid over ? years), or have a persistent medical issue ($10k/yr out of pocket), or another terrible corner case that I haven't had the displeasure of encountering.
I had the worst cough of my entire life in January 2020. A solid month of being unable to sleep without massive amounts of Nyquil. Never had any of the other weird symptoms I can remember though, so I've always written it off since I live in North Carolina and we didn't have our first recorded cases until February. But in retrospect it seems almost impossible that it wasn't COVID.
Studies like this suggest that there were Covid-19 infections in the US before they were first detected; they don’t suggest that they were terribly widespread. Unless flu is vastly less likely to cause these symptoms than Covid, or it turns out that the difference in prevalence was much smaller than, at least on current evidence of the trajectory of the pandemic, is plausible, ‘almost impossible’ looks to me like it’s rather understating the odds that it was flu/something else instead of Covid.
I know a healthy adult who was hospitalized with a bafflingly terrible flu in December 2019. They lost consciousness and it was not obvious that they were going to make it. They had just returned from a business trip to China. Still, it could have just been their body being unable to cope with a foreign strain of flu, I suppose.
If they were hospitalised for flu, they would CERTAINLY have been tested for flu. Unless they were told otherwise by the hospital, that was probably flu.
What’s so baffling about the terribleness of this flu? The flu kills about half a million people globally a year.
Ah, I see. I know little about medicine. If they were certain to perform a test that distinguishes, and were certain to not only treat for pneumonia, then yes, it definitely was not COVID.
As for your question, why are you implying that global flu morbidity being a big number negates the concept of an individual case of flu being unusually severe within its own context? It sounds like you're being confrontational, but I don't understand the conflict.
I didn’t mean to be confrontational; I just meant that flu cases that put people in hospital, and worse, are quite common. There should be nothing particularly surprising about someone being hospitalised with flu.
I think people do tend to misunderstand what the flu _is_. An average case of flu is debilitating; a bad but not surprising or rare case will put you in hospital. People tend to conflate the flu with the common cold, leading to them underestimating how dangerous it is.
I was rather ill at the end of February 2020 (UK). Bad cough, full body aches, fatigue, high fever yet feeling chilled at the same time, and I twice woke up and was shaking enough to throw my phone across the room when I tried to check the time. It left me with a lingering question of whether I'd had Covid-19, particularly as it was just after a trip to London, though it seemed very unlikely given the low number of confirmed cases.
I _actually_ got Covid-19 (confirmed PCR) in October 2020, and was significantly more ill (ICU), so it seems to confirm the first illness was something else.
Same here. I had pneumonia twice, once in October 2019 which was probably not covid, then again in February 2020 which I am almost certain was covid. Someone of my age and general health should not get pneumonia twice so close together without some serious underlying condition. The rest of my family got very ill as well.
I was more tired than I've ever felt, and my mind and legs were restless throughout the night and I couldn't sleep despite being exhausted. Called the on-call doc on the worst night because I thought I was having a reaction to the strong antibiotics they prescribed, and they had me take benadryl to help with the restless legs and insomnia, but it made it worse because I'm one of those people that gets the opposite of the intended effect of benadryl. I also lost 2 weeks of work with each case.
All the while, the Dr. shrugged it off, and there was no way to get tested for covid without being hospitalized on your death bed.
Florida here, first week of February 2020, weirdest damn flu for me. While it didnt get bad enough for me to go to the hospital, going to bed and waking up, my heart always felt "weird". Like it would beat hard enough to feel and sometimes have a weird rhythm. Which is super abnormal whenever I had a cold or flu in the past. Mild congestion,
which I normally should be leaking like a faucet and i was always cold. Like, crazy chills, no fevers and no amount of hot shower could solve the cold feeling. But hey, it was early Feb, no reason to have thought it was covid. Went away like one and half weeks later. No one else around me caught it.
My immediate family (but not me) got something nasty between Christmas and New Years. Based on timing, we thought maybe COVID before it was supposed to have arrived, but symptoms point more towards whooping cough.
Thankfully, our local medical professionals who saw my child and my spouse refused to take any sort of sample, so we'll never know. Also, they said we were fine to go out after the fever ended, which doesn't seem consistent with actual spreading of viruses; yay medical profession.
We had family visit from the PNW Dec 2019. Me and one of them caught "something". Whatever it was it kicked my butt from the last week of Dec to then end of Jan. Theirs lasted just about as long. I had trouble breathing and had a nasty cough. I only had a low-grade fever (and that was only for a few days at first), so I never felt like I should go see my Dr. but probably should have anyway.
Son at UCSD with 4 i18n roommates (3 China, 1 Korea) in Jan 2020 after all roommates came back to school from winter break. Diagnosed as bronchitis and was sick for a few weeks. Had heart palpitations, too, which was the scary part, but in retrospect that pretty much nails it as covid for me.
Same, but mid December in SF. It hit our office pretty hard.
I am not sure it was COVID, it could have just been a nasty cold that happened to sweep through right before COVID hit. But the timing was definitely odd.
Yep. There are readily available tests to see if you have antibodies so I took one (before vaccination) and sure enough I did not have any antibodies so likely had not had covid in the past few months prior.
Seems like everyone and their aunt had a story about how they "definitely" had it back at the start. Cough, itchy eye, nose bleed, aching knee etc - you name it...seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so much now.
> seemed like at the time lots of people seemed to want to ascribe anything to definitely having covid. I am not sure why this was - doesn't seem like people do this so much now.
I think the reason back then was that getting Covid was the only way to build immunity. Thus, if you had had Covid and recovered, you were better off than if you had not had Covid.
The big difference now is that we have a vaccine. You can be protected from Covid by getting the vaccine, without having to actually get Covid (Yay for vaccines).
In this particular case it was the worst cough I had ever had by a fairly wide margin. This was definitely not a case of us having the sniffles and thinking we might have caught covid.
And for the record, I don't necessarily think it was COVID. Just confirming the OP's anecdote that there was definitely something that was going around at that time.
I had one of the flu variants (tested positive for flu) from 2019-20 in December, followed by a really bad cold (no tests) in Feb, followed by COVID (confirmed by tested contacts, an antibody test and a fully checked "weird COVID symptoms" bingo card) in March.
2019-20 was definitely a season for nasty colds/flus, not just COVID.
Another variable is that you are also older with a less robust immune system than when you've had colds in your youth. This is why anecdotes are always worthless. You need statistical power to overcome these latent variables that could be biasing your conclusions.
>Im quitting and not looking for another job. Gonna use the savings to take a gap year, or a couple, work on some stuff I want maybe. Maybe more involvement in OSS is coming too?
Unless you have some serious FU money saved up, I'd strongly reconsider. A "gap year" as an adult can make you radioactive to potential employers. And that cash goes quick when there's none coming in. Trust me I know. It's alluring to just walk away. But trying to get a job when you're unemployed is literally 10x harder than while employed, regardless of the actual circumstances of your departure.
Just try taking a few weeks off first. And if that's not enough, ask for a sabbatical. At the very least have something lined up for a few months after you leave. Don't fall for the "I can have another job in two weeks" meme. It's rarely true in reality for all but the very top of the market.
Beyond the distasteful idea that we should always act in a way demonstrating obedience to potential employers, the solution to this is extremely easy. Gap year? No! I am merely doing independent consulting. Do I actually have any contracts? So many questions!
Plus if you actually use the time to work on OSS instead of traveling or whatever I have no idea how an employer (that you'd want to work at) could fault you for that. Seems like a huge asset.
> Beyond the distasteful idea that we should always act in a way demonstrating obedience to potential employers
Maybe even more than distasteful, perhaps soul nullifying?
(Pardon the awkward phrase, it's what I get when looking for an antonym for affirming.)
For myself, when I leave the engineering field it will not be to return to engineering again unless it's strictly on my own terms. More than likely teaching or similar would follow a "gap year".
Yeah. There's no doubt age discrimination and people in PR who filter on meaningless stuff. But the idea that you can never do anything non-standard seems pretty ridiculous to me. And I'm pretty sure that no one who has hired me would think twice about it. I never have taken a real sabbatical--never seemed like a great time--but I have taken a number of month-long vacations and it's never been an issue.
>Gap year? No! I am merely doing independent consulting. Do I actually have any contracts? So many questions!
People aren't stupid. They'll have questions. And lies are extremely hard to keep straight in the long term. The sad fact of the matter is that you are not a person to them in the initial hiring process. You are a piece of paper. And unless you are some rock star 10x top level candidate with impressive credentials, they'll have a dozen other pieces of paper that look just as appealing and don't have those questions attached.
Seconded one of my regrets was not really going for a place on a round the world boat race a few years ago and taking a sabbatical to do the whole thing.
Id just been diagnosed which a chronic illness and though it would have been fair on the rest of the crew.
i interview and i've never looked at the dates of employment on someone's resume. i don't care one whit when you did what in the past, just what you're capable of right now.
> A "gap year" as an adult can make you radioactive to potential employers.
I'm not sure where you got this idea in your head but it is demonstrably false in tech right now.
I took a gap year after getting fired from an extremely toxic company. I didn't want to rush into a new role right away after such an awful experience.
Once I was ready to go back it took ~1 month to go from starting my search to signing an offer letter. I interviewed at a large range of companies and was pretty picky after my previous experience.
My apply -> interview rate was consistent with what it had been in the past, and nobody cared about either my being fired or taking time off.
> trying to get a job when you're unemployed is literally 10x harder than while employed
The only thing that changed for me interview wise was that I was much pickier after not having to work for an organization for such a long time.
The rest of the interview is much easier since you have much more time to do things like practice for coding interviews, doing take home work etc.
On top of all that, because I was so grossed out from looking at linkedin during that time, I've never bothered update my profile, and I still get the same constant stream of recruiters reaching out even though it looks like I'm still unemployed.
In retrospect I wish I had had the sense to just quit earlier. Very often interviewing when you're employed at a place you are not happy with makes you too eager to find someplace else, making you more likely to ignore warning signs during the interview.
In the world? Very, very few. I know it's it a tremendous fortune and privileged to be able to search for a job you think is a good match. Most people work in near slavery conditions with little choice.
At the same time, squandering that privilege out of some misplaced guilt only helps employers exert control of employees.
In tech? Virtually everyone has that level of privilege so long as they have some experience. I'm fairly certain I couldn't get hired by a FAANG company (I don't have too much interest in it, but I won't deny the possibility of sour grapes), so I'm not in some super-elite category of tech worker.
In addition, not everything lasts forever. I used to work for minimum wage in customer support jobs and I wouldn't be surprised if in 10-20 years (or sooner) I'm back in a much less desirable role.
It took me a long time to recognize that my market value had increase over time, and one of my biggest career mistakes was underestimating that and not acting on it sooner. As the saying goes, from a time when most people had to work on farms, "make hay while the sun shines".
I think this is horrible advice. I’ve hired all sorts of people with voluntary time off on their resume. Your experience doesn’t ‘expire’ in a single year. Life is about more than just working, if you have the money to take time off to enjoy your life you shouldn’t not do it out of fear.
He's right about it being harder to get a job while unemployed. You finish your gap year and then spend another 6 months trying to get hired. Maybe if you lived in SF it'd be easier.
Key thing, when you quit, don't burn bridges. I took a year off, did some traveling after working at my job for 8 years. At the end of the year, I applied to a few jobs, but my old boss contacted me to rehire me. I went back as if I never left. I am in a different field, so you experience may vary, but if you are in a good team, your old boss is likely to rehire you instead of investing in someone they don't know and have to train.
My experience with tech hiring is getting three decent resumes for 5 open positions, everyone qualified gets an interview and serious consideration. It's not that way for junior people in entry level positions and non-IT staff (there the "200 resumes, no reason to interview most of them" scenario often applies), but if we're talking about e.g. mid-level developers, then every decent manager I know is in a "always be hiring" mode.
I don't care about this at all, I'd assume you still remember how to do things after a year (or even two.) Of course before it gets to the team it might be filtered elsewhere.
>Your experience doesn’t ‘expire’ in a single year
You're right, it doesn't. But it brings up all sorts of questions in the mind of your interviewer as to the true nature of your departure, and it immediately puts you at a huge disadvantage.
Assuming I would even notice a six month gap, if someone told me they had taken a year off to work on an open source project, hike the Appalachian Trail, or whatever, I'd find it far more of a conversation starter than a negative. Maybe you're either imagining things or talking to the wrong employers.
As an interviewer I recognize people might take time off work for a variety of reasons and never give a lot of thought to unemployment gaps. I’ve found very short stays at previous positions (say less than a year) to be more of a warning; I want people who are likely to stick around.
Being open-minded, seeing something different, meeting other people, working hard to be able to follow your objectives and take calculated risks. That can be a valuable experience and an advantage over ten similar candidates.
I've done about a 10 mo break after my first job and after my second and it has never been an issue with employment. You're overestimating how much hr and hiring managers care.
I think the advice is a reasonable thing to consider; a lot of responses (and presumably downvotes) are either "It doesn't matter to potential employers", which is categorically untrue - it'll matter to some, raise a question to others, and be irrelevant to others yet. How you answer that question is important, and it's fascinating that other half of comments is, basically, "Lie!".
When I'm interviewing candidates, a gap year is a data point - no more, no less. It may lead to more substantial data points, or it may be a non-issue. If you do as many here suggest and lie through your teeth about it ("I was a CTO! I was working on startup! Independent consulting"), you may get away with it, but likely not (even if you think you did); and if caught in prevaricating or lying about your experience and work activities, that is a far far bigger and more immediate red flag than the gap year itself.
Also - sure, knowledge doesn't expire, but oh boy skills do get rusty! A year into my new management-y role, I felt how rusty my sysadmin skills were getting. Two years in and you shouldn't give me root access again without some catchup :-).
You mind seems to be trapped in the employment binary where you're either a full-time W-2 employee or you're unemployed. With contracting and startups it isn't so simple. Contractors (especially ones working in boutique niches on scoped projects) might work for a month with much time between contracts. During that down time maybe they write blog posts or contribute to OSS or hang out with someone else prototyping some neat ideas that don't pan out (which might reasonably be called a startup after the fact) or just do literally nothing so as to recover from burnout, which is lethal to the contractor in a way it isn't to an employee. All of which feed into more people dropping into their inbox inquiring about their contracting availability. It isn't "lying" to say time spent not working on a paid contract is time spent in service of contracting.
1. All of it is true in general and explicitly not the case for the OP/GP I was responding to, which indicated a traveling/no-work year, so it feels you're fighting a straw man.
As well, all of it is easily discussable during interview, and my team and myself will not see any of these in a negative light.
2. >> "It isn't "lying" to say time spent not working on a paid contract is time spent in service of contracting."
Of course not. At the time of my post however, a lot of advice in comments was explicitly to lie and "Say you were in a startup / independent consulting / working on OSS / CTO even if you weren't, rather than admitting to gap / traveling year", and my reaction to them is: That lie will harm you much more than any honest discussion of the gap year.
So again, I feel we are talking past each other here a bit. I've been a contractor, I've been a consultant, and I'm a full-time employee now; I've taken a time to write a book/techmanual, I've run a photography business for a bit,and I've taken extended paternity leave; so I don't think my mind is trapped into thinking of employment as binary. But I do think honesty during interview is paramount - on my team, I don't care how good your technical or functional skillset is, if we cannot trust your integrity. I understand that this is a tricky position for the candidate as market at times rewards dishonesty; but I try to be convincingly upfront in what we're looking for.
Someone who has been doing "independent consulting" for six months or a year is pretty transparently obfuscating that they were unemployed. I'd probably view it in a better light--not that there's anything wrong with doing or trying to do some consulting on the side--if they were just open about taking some time off.
> Someone who has been doing "independent consulting" for six months or a year is pretty transparently obfuscating that they were unemployed.
Lol, what? I did exactly that after getting pissed off with $LARGE_CRAPPY_EMPLOYER. Worked for 3-4 companies for 6-8 week periods over that time on a short term basis, and made more than $LARGE_CRAPPY_EMPLOYER by a factor n > 2, and did some work on a startup. But then $LARGE_EMPLOYER came along with an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Don’t project what “independent consulting” might mean for you onto everyone. It would be interview-ending if I caught a hiring manager suggested this was a euphemism, and I’d subsequently recommend every person that asked me about said company steered clear.
I didn't express things very well, Sure, I know lots of independent consultants who are legitimately work full-time or at least on a regular basis. I was more referring to someone who just sticks "consulting" on their resume so they don't have a gap but didn't actually do anything.
> Unless you have some serious FU money saved up, I'd strongly reconsider.
You're talking to the HN crowd. I get the impression that a lot of the people here think of $200k/yr as poverty level. "FU money" to them is probably on the order of $100M.
The only places I have known who would care much about 'CV gaps' have been toxic workplaces who also discriminated against other groups for spurious reasons unrelated to their competence or likelihood of succeeding in the job.
Your attitude reinforces the corresponding attitude by many employers. If 50% of us signed a pledge not to have children, never to take any health risks, never to join a union, not sue our employers, etc, many employers would be delighted and would hire them preferentially, making things harder for the other 50%.
I disagree. Whilst some employers would be dead against it, others may look positively on people taking sabbaticals/gap years. As long as you have a good CV/resume and if you are older, consistent work history and are taking the time off in a manner which is within your means, I would say go for it.
you won't be marked as radioactive, but you will have to reassure people that you're not planning to do it again with little to no notice. apart from that, I would plan to get back a month earlier than planned so you have a money buffer to get a job you want, rather than _need_
Always assume that you will have bad luck and will need a few months to get a job. More importantly, you will have higher standards for your next job if you have the financial security to do so.
That said, I forsee a lot of gap years in 2021-2023. The key is to have something to show for it. Did you spend a year in another country and learn the language? Do you have a series of open source pull requests? Do you have a game? A novel, even if unpublished? We live in a capitalist society and people expect that you are always working on something.
I feel like I'm seeing a larger than normal wave of retirements. Which isn't surprising. People who were thinking that way anyway probably figured they might as well keep collecting a salary during the pandemic given everything was closed anyway. But now that travel is creaking back to life, etc. people are ready to pull the trigger.
No one you work for has a "relationship" with you unless there is nepotism involved. They will lie to you. They will throw you out when you don't make them money. The only "lie" is that there is a "relationship" and if you believe it, it will end up making you very unhappy. Live for yourself and your family.
I've never had reason to embellish my resume, but let's not pretend employers don't exaggerate, are "aspirational" or outright lie what the job is about "You'll be working on cutting-edge technology" vs. "Actually, we plan on migrating to that cutting-edge platform soon, in the meantime, add features to our 'legacy' PHP5 and Java 1.7 platforms" and "We offer unlimited vacation" vs. "Everyone usually only takes the week between Christmas and new years as our clients shut down then. Currently, the team really needs your contribution to make the release deadline, so now is not a good time"
Both interviewer and interviewee have to be diligent during interview process to dig out the truth about important aspects of what they expect, and not just take it at face-value (asking pointed questions usually reveals the truth, for either party)
The storage requirements for the Moderna and Pfizer shots are heavily on the safe side. They went with it for the EUA because there was simply no time to prove that it could be safely stored at normal temps. The overwhelming consensus, however, is that it can be. I suspect the full FDA approval will change the guidelines to allow normal refrigeration up to 30 days.
I saw a press release from the Singapore health authority that they have extended the time allowed for these vaccines to be stored in regular refrigeration. It doesn't sound unlikely that this time would be extended further until the requirement for ultra low temperatures is no longer needed?
>There's a similar number of people crammed into a similar geographical area on the east coast.
The east coast has unlimited supplies of fresh water. California does not. The east coast megalopolis is also situated on a coastal plain, with a deep hinterland unconstrained by any mountainous geography. California crams a similar amount of people into a tiny sliver of coastal land in between the mountains and the sea, surrounded by some of the driest deserts in the world.
Nothing is secure against a determined targeted attack. That's why we have layers of security. SMS 2FA adds a layer of protection against random attacks, and for that it works great. It should never be solely relied upon for high value accounts.
So much of "mental" health is really just physical health. As a young person with mood issues I could never really understand why I felt the way I felt at times, and would always just chalk it up to some vague self diagnosed mental disorder. But the older I get I realize it all comes down to my physical state. Am I tired? Have I slept right? Have I eaten? Too much caffeine? Too much alcohol? Have I exercised? Practically every bad mood can be traced back to these. Yet people will ignore all that and convince themselves they need to take a pill to make themselves feel better.
Agreed. This has been my experience as well. Whenever I get to a dark place, I eventually pick up the weights again and w/in a few weeks I'm feeling much better. Fixing mental health issues with working out is a meme in the fitness world too.
Probably not a popular opinion among the HN crowd, but I think there are way too many anxiety/depression cases caused by lifestyle. It's like, you sit in front of a computer screen for 12 hours a day chugging sugary lattes, no shit you have anxiety. Go do some hill sprints until you're exhausted.
An awful lot of "night owls" or "insomniacs" who just "can't" go to bed early are a result of lifestyle, too. Specifically, hyper-stimulative home environments and very bright nighttime household lighting—not just screens, though that's part of it. Limit lighting to low-double-digit candle power per room, at most, and take away the on-demand 24/7 carnival that is modern multimedia entertainment past ~8PM (or dusk, whichever's later, it's seasonal), and watch most of the "night owls" who just "are" that way shift to normal sleep patterns.
... of course, this means abandoning evening/night-time computer-based work, and cutting back a ton on pop-culture experiences—if you've got kids and a job and you try to spend at least some time active outdoors during the day, when are you going to binge that HBO show everyone's talking about, if not at night? When are you going to play non-kid-friendly video games? Doom-scroll your social media? Work on your "side hustle"? Do anything at all with people that involves screens or bright lighting? Well, you're not. Or at least, not very much. You're practically giving those things up, as significant parts of your life. People are too attached to one or more of those things to take the plunge—me, too, aside from some highly and immediately effective, strictly-followed trials of at most a few weeks at a time.
(yes, of course some people actually have problems sleeping beyond lifestyle issues, nowhere am I denying that—but as many people as apparently do? No, the epidemic of sleeplessness is largely a lifestyle thing.)
definitely. I was a 'night owl'. spent most of university awake at night.
after implementing a strict 10 pm bedtime, I go to sleep in 5 minutes and sleep like a baby. then I wake up before 7 am with no alarm. 'night owl' indeed...
On the other hand, you may get all of these things right, and still experience no improvement.
Personally, I'm starting to feel that most "diet and exercise" advice is just a subtle way of showing a middle finger. Sending someone on a wild goose chase, thus making them go away. In my circles, I've never heard of a single case where a medical problem - whether physical or mental - was solved by changing diet or a more active lifestyle. The closest I've seen was shuffling meals around because of a bad interaction with a drug.
Keeping sleep, diet and exercise truly optimal, against challenges of the modern world and already compromised physical or mental state is a full-time job on its own. Even if it could help - which I doubt - few people have enough time and energy to go this route. Hell, finding the optimal balance in the first place is essentially a full-time N=1 research work.
Pills are good thing. The right ones, administered in correct doses, under supervision of medical professionals - they work wonders. Modern medicine in many ways a miracle. Being able to function again, to feel good, to spend quality time with people you love, can be as simple as popping a lozenge at appropriate time. It's infinitely better than structuring your entire life around managing your condition with "natural" remedies.
To be clear: I'm not saying we should be medicating ourselves for everything. Not all drugs are good, and all drugs have side effects. They're still very crude tools. I'm trying to offer a counterpoint to the (what I feel is) growing trend of rejecting modern medicine just because it smells too much of industry (as if that was a bad thing). In my view, the problem with medication is just that it's not good enough. But it's getting better, year after year.
What you're doing here is exhibiting the shadow side of people who reject medicine and insist that diet and health are the only valid treatment for mental and physical malaise.
Lifting heavy weights is the only thing which keeps me sane. It might not work for you, but unless you've tried it, you don't know that.
None of my business if you do or don't, and a six week commitment to something like Stronglifts 5x5 is pretty serious so I'm not surprised most people don't try it.
But don't conflate it with hopping on a treadmill or exercise bike, or just pushing some dumbbells around once or twice. Heavy, repeated, and compound lifts are uniquely effective for me, and for a remarkable number of other people.
Perhaps interventions in diet, exercise and sleep and 'talking cures' such as therapy are both required for a real improvement in mental health.
So there are lots of people who claim that effort spent on general health did not solve any of their mental health issues, and others who claim that therapy was useless because they still had the same bad sleep and diet patterns and generally felt physically crappy.
We don't know if this is the case yet but I suspect that the grand majority of ailments currently treated with Psychologists and Psychiatrists will turn out to be things in the future that we know the cause of and can treat properly at a biological level.
There was a paper maybe a month ago about Penile dysfunction in a Covid long hauler who died. Post Mortem DNA analysis of the dysfunctional area showed Covid19 was causing the dysfunction, it was persisting in those cells nearly a year after the initial infection. This person did not show positive on covid19 tests and none of the long haulers do, this person did not shed viral load and infect others, but clearly that virus was still present causing a raft of problems in their body.
I would bet big on other viruses doing this in our body and causing all sorts of local problems and if we knew what we were looking for and had ways to kill the infected cells we would cure a whole raft of chronic conditions. What you suffer from is likely a combination of the virus that is doing it and where it is persisting. It is becoming an increasingly accepted position with a variety of papers showing viruses stick around, control cells and maintain presence and cause all sorts of weird effects in the body and I suspect we are going to find them the cause of a lot of problems we call mental currently.
I am all but certain that right now what we call mental health is really just physical that we just don't recognise properly because we haven't done the DNA analysis of sufferers post mortem to understand the real root cause. I also think the current practice of Psychology is hurting the chance of the biological research from occurring at the sort of pace and funding it should while it does research that doesn't look deeply into the biology of common conditions.
Many years ago, when I was much younger, I had anger issues. I started to play sports (football, wrestling, track) and they vanished. I told myself I was always too worn out to be angry. Now, whenever I don't feel right, I can just go for a walk. I'm so out of shape today, a 30 minute walk can wear me out enough to get my head right.
Exactly. The overcomplicated way people think about things like this reminds me of the counterpoint Michael Pollan quote about what you should eat: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." If people made sure they slept properly, didn't drink too much (caffeine or alcohol) and got regular exercise, they'd feel transformed. It took me until my 40s to realise that!
I think at this point everybody's aware of what it takes to be healthy.
People live their lives pumped up by stimulants and numbed down by alcohol and terrible food because their life is already terrible, it's a symptom and an escape from deeper problems caused by the inhuman environment a lot of us are stuck in.
Reminds me of that Irvine Welsh quote: "If 'it' wasn't so shit, people wouldn't be trying to get 'out of it'." Not sure I agree that's anything like the sole cause though. I think there's a lot of people who've drunk the kool-aid of miracle fixes when being kind to yourself is the much simpler (and cheaper) option.
