Ask HN: What have the past 12 months taught you?

The world happenings hasn&#x27;t affected me at all. Same job, family is fine. Things are nice and getting better.<p>One trick I&#x27;ve learned is to just show up. Instead of planning to write a whole module in a day, I now plan to just write 5 lines of code. This has helped me a lot - I&#x27;ve picked up two programming languages in three months just with the intent of watching one minute a day. I&#x27;ve had a lot of work done on my side project and have recently been getting fan mail on it. I cut down on a lot of bad things simply by planning twelve 2-minute tasks a day, and being engrossed in them.<p>Similarly, it&#x27;s important to avoid creeping into bad behavior. Once we drop good behavior, once we&#x27;re a couple minutes late for a meeting, a class, a deadline, things rapidly deteriorate from there.<p>Career wise, my goal is no longer to make a better salary (I have enough), but to do more meaningful work that I&#x27;m satisfied with. Meaningful work tends to be recession-proof too.

I&#x27;ve learnt that changing stacks gets exponentially more difficult as I get older.<p>I&#x27;ve also learnt that even the good companies that say they care are just as terrible as the rest. My company touts in interviews how they never lay off employees (contractors they will) and they essentially laid off 3000 employees recently. They have continually eroded benefits since I joined. They also don&#x27;t care about your career and will use you on dead technology and then outsource your job so you have to start over.<p>I guess the biggest thing I learnt is the world is a shitty place and I&#x27;m screwed.

I thought some people were acting dumb but that it was only a facade, that once things would get serious they would stop pretending being dumb.<p>I now genuinely believe that if there was an Ebola outbreak people would still go to underground gatherings and say &#x27;I did not know&#x27; once they or someone they know gets sick.

Some people are unable to chat socially via text only.<p>Since going full remote I&#x27;ve pretty much lost track of a bunch of work friends, since we don&#x27;t directly work on the same thing and don&#x27;t have a reason to chat on Slack. We used to hang out at work and lunches regularly.<p>I&#x27;ve been on IRC since 90&#x27;s so having text-only friends I know only as a nickname is a completely normal, but it seems younger people need either voice or image to connect properly.

looking back to the whole 12 months:<p>- a job is mostly a way to earn money. the joy and pride about your work are within yourself and not in your employer. you can do amazing work at any place. it&#x27;s up to you to always try to be better an improve yourself, your work and your job.<p>- the mood&#x2F;vibe and the work load otoh are very important. if an employer overloads you then it&#x27;s wise to look around.<p>- simpler architectures are better<p>- if you need to operate a custom service and need high uptime, developers MUST be in the loop<p>- you don&#x27;t need aws&#x2F;gcp&#x2F;azure to be in the cloud. openstack providers do exists and work very well (and you&#x27;re improving the whole market)<p>- switching job is nice<p>- some coworkers will become friends, most of them will just pass by.<p>- hear various opinions, but then decide with your own head.<p>- taking care of your own body is super important. can&#x27;t do that much coding if you&#x27;re dead or sick in a hospital.<p>- sometimes you just have to do grunt work (&quot;toil&quot;). meh, it&#x27;s life.<p>- starting doing something when you don&#x27;t feel like starting is the best way to get past that feeling.<p>- time in the early morning &gt;&gt;&gt; time at late night<p>- work from home is possible and not that bad. not that i had doubts, but we finally had a general, large scale, realistic test run. remember this to recruiters when they&#x27;ll forget in a year or two.<p>- having money saved up in the bank is more important than owning shiny things or doing fancy vacations. i realized this during the lockdown when a lot of companies were halting production and&#x2F;or laying off people, and i had saved up enough money not to have to go sleep under a bridge in case of job loss.

If you have a problem you can fix, fix it. If you have a problem you cannot fix, accept it. Either way complaining gets you nowhere.<p>Building consistent daily habits takes a while, but after a year you will marvel at your progress.<p>The medium is the message. Social media [probably] cannot be built in a way that promotes &quot;healthy&quot; discourse.<p>Not all things can be understood in a scientific context. That does not make them any less real.

I can work remotely productively, even with kids at home and that I am more productive than being in the office.<p>I&#x27;ve learned that I can be very fast in changing environments and being able to do my job from home after the very next day I&#x27;ve started working from home, without disruption, on a new, unconfigured machine.<p>I&#x27;ve also learned that interviewing for jobs has become something horrible, with most ghosting and coding challenges well done but poorly reviewed, maybe due to the high number of candidates&#x2F;required salary expectation.

Last year, I did have a comment on the question - It was good to express what I was feeling and get considerate feedback on that - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20477882" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20477882</a><p>For me, the situation right now is almost amusing.<p>Had I been writing this comment yesterday, I&#x27;d have stated that things were fine despite the upheaval in the outside world and I was doing OK remotely in a job that paid well and it was fun to work with very smart people.<p>Today, I am out of a job and staring at sudden uncertainty in the near future. Still, compared to a year ago, I am more like myself - calm and composed. I am around family and have things to look forward to. The trauma and near-depression from a year ago seems significantly reduced. I am almost glad to realize that the damaged me from a year ago seems to have healed quite well.<p>The near future is uncertain, but I am optimistic. This shock and uncertainty might just be what I needed to finally get going and find my own path. Time will tell, and perhaps I will too - in the next year&#x27;s thread.

The past 12 months have taught me that a life mostly without peripheral colleagues is amazing and also that I should have gotten a dog years ago.

It&#x27;s important to hold on to good habits and not slip up beyond an acceptable threshold.<p>The world happenings have definitely affected me significantly. I had a great set of habits, pre lock-down with a meditation practice, exercise routine and just generally getting out and about in the city over the weekend.<p>Now, I have a sense of hopelessness that seems to have percolated through my body. I find movement and just generally motivating myself to do anything as a big challenge. I&#x27;ve tried the 1 push up mindset, but somehow I keep tripping up and eventually feel &#x27;gassed&#x27; and &#x27;exhausted&#x27; from just being.<p>Job-wise - am barely making it. Just about touch and go. Life wise - don&#x27;t really have one. We are expecting a kid soon, preparing for that, but otherwise not really much going on.<p>Would love suggestions from the community here around working one&#x27;s way out of a rut. Just nervous af in general knowing that I was at a much better state few months ago.

Professionally : Leave IT asap, I&#x27;m fine with the &quot;latest and greatest&quot; leaving me behind, given all the time and freedom of a remote workday with no children or spouse to distract me, Id rather workout, watch tv, cook and read than implement yet another infrastructure automation tool. I cannot work remotely. I do not know what to do with myself professionally.<p>Personally : I lack life experiences, the Midwest is homogeneous and I need to upend my life the moment the world returns to normal. Planning life more than a few weeks at a time is very hard but not impossible. Two workouts a day puts me in a very happy place mentally. There is immeasurable value in community bonds, I lacked this for the first 25 years of my life and having found it recently I cant believe I never sought it out sooner.

It’s chaos out there, be good.

It&#x27;s taught me that I can work from home pretty productively. I was worried at first given the lack of separation between home and work but the discipline required I&#x27;ve found has benefited other areas like making sure I get outside and drink plenty of water etc.

By this time last year I was starting to enjoy my first summer with a driving license, finishing the first renovation on my recently bought home (no mortgage!), choosing a venue for getting married in September, and earning a decent salary (while working from home) for the first time of my life. Things were looking good!<p>I started to make plans: renovate the rest of the house, taking my extended family on a trip, and maybe eyeing a second house as an investment.<p>I was fired the first day I set foot on the office as soon as I got back from my honeymoon on october. No explanations beyond &quot;you cost too much&quot;, when I had got the raise without asking. No negotiation, no talking about new arrangements. I got depressed, and then angry, and then depressed again... you get the idea.<p>I tried to keep myself current, freshen up my skills with some new languages, but I&#x27;ve been unable to think about coding since then. As soon as I see a screenful of code I get angry again.<p>And then 2020 and you know what happened. Fortunately I still had some savings. The fact that I feel like this and still have it better than many, many people makes me sad, and compounds on the frustration.<p>So TL;DR: what have I learned?.<p>- Don&#x27;t get too invested in your plans.<p>- Control your expectations.<p>- So much of life is outside your control.<p>- F*ck &quot;where do you see yourself in five years?&quot;<p>(edit: reduced typos and profanity)