> As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was

Would you mind elaborating on why that was the case? I’m super curious because I’ve considered switching careers to become a teacher.

To quote H.L. Mencken (paraphrasing), a teacher's job is miserable because they must ceaselessly try to get masses or people to think who have no real capacity to.

You might be lucky to reach a small minority of your students, assuming environmental forces of poverty, dysfunctional family, and peer influence don't muzzle their gifts. But the day in day out bulk of your work isn't those "Mr. Holland's Opus" moments: it's handling a bunch of kids who don't want to be there in a bureaucratic set of rules imposed on you from above. And private schools are not immune to these problems either.

As a private school parent, I can say it (can be) a significantly better experience. I’m sure there’s different forms of poop you’ll be stepping in, but in general with my experience there poverty factor is removed (affluence has its own problems, but luckily they don’t tend to show up in the classroom) and the biggest key is the parents are engaged. Instead of blaming teachers for our kids failures, we partner with them to ensure success.

I am a firm believer that (lack of) parenting is the problem that most affects the other learning environments negatively. Parents are the key to any meaningful change. Parents should be responsible for all of it. Teachers are convenient scapegoats of bad parents.

As a father of a still very young boy who might be getting into sports later in school (who knows), reading that terrifies me. I’ve heard the same, in person, from friends who have kids on their school’s soccer team and whatnot.

Why don’t school provide transportation to games on the weekends? Seems like a massive waste of collective resources to have every family drive for hours to get to wherever games are played.

Is it an American phenomenon due to the car-centric culture?

I live in Japan, so it's not just an American phenomenon.

I think most schools provide transportation to away games. But in my city official school sports clubs don't start until high school - before that it's all private club teams.

In my kids' club, the team will provide transportation to far away games in other prefectures, or sometimes for games on school holidays when parents may be working. But it's very common for parents to have to drive their kids an hour or more to other cities within our prefecture. Carpooling is very common.

But most parents want to watch their kids' games as much as possible. Even when the team provides transportation to a game, there are a handful of parents who will make the drive separately to support the team. My son asked me to drive 3 hours to watch an upcoming big game and support the team, and of course I'm not going to say no. To be able to see how far he has progressed, and to know that he wants me there to support him, is special. But also still exhausting at times.

Were you able to get into that role without the expectation that you’d still be functioning as an IC i.e. holding two jobs at the same time?

I had an awful experience as a lead because the massive mental context switches between leading and doing IC work were unsustainable.

Can you elaborate on that? Sounds interesting.

I’m exactly 35 and in the same situation as the OP.

He was making a joke.

> I read this as "person, 35-ish, stuck in a rut" which is a situation so common that automakers engineer cars like the Mazda Miata specifically for people in it.

This refers to people going through a "mid life crisis" who end up buying a Mazda Miata convertible to drive around town in an effort to look young, cool, stylish, etc.

Goodness, I totally misread the post lol. I somehow read it as “Mazda has a process to help their engineers deal with that.”

Presumably, some of the engineers going through midlife crisis can buy the cars they work on. :D

The stereotype is small, under-powered sportscars are sold to to men having a "mid-life crisis."

Miata in my 30’s checking in. About to head off on a 3 month road trip + camping to get over this

They essentially eliminated the SDET role across the company. There may be a few left here and there, but it used to be a whole thing of its own.

The book How We Test Software At Microsoft describes in detail what the SDET role was about and how Microsoft used to approach quality.

I think it’s a tragedy that they eliminated the discipline entirely.

Am Brazilian, can personally confirm. I used to do that too. I actually left the country with the explicit goal of shedding my Brazilian identity and becoming someone else entirely.

I think Brazil suffers from being a country where some segments of the population can’t find a relatable national identity. I feel very strongly about my state identity (I’m a gaucho from Rio Grande do Sul) to the point I’d probably support secession if that was a serious possibility, but I’ve never felt anything positive about being Brazilian.

Funny enough, 10 years later and now a US citizen, I don’t speak so negatively about Brazil anymore. Turns that that over time I found out I’m a bit more Brazilian than I thought, despite former efforts to not be one. Also, there are things I miss about living there, at least compared to living in the US. If it wasn’t for the still insane crime rates, I’d consider moving back for a season.

The ecosystem is nowhere near as mature though. I don’t work with either anymore but back in 2017 I made the switch from C# to Java and it felt like a breath of fresh air when it came to the maturity and capability of JVM tooling compared to what’s available for .NET.

Try JetBrains Rider, and be sure you are using a recent flavor of dotnet. When I migrated past 4.x to 6 of the .Net ecosystem, it dramatically improved my ability to work and deploy in C# with their rather delightful build system.

For example, in the Monogame game library, you can build a self contained binary for Windows, Linux or MacOSX nearly effortlessly with just a single command line.

But these executables are quite huge, are they not?

Could it be any worse than an Electron application?

The dotnet ecosystem is incredibly mature. Its as old as java in most tooling cases, IDE, Language, Build System etc. The runtime is the newish part.

The ecosystem is certainly more mature than many smaller languages, but it is still in a different league than Java’s. Most of it is not too great copies of the corresponding Java library, often being made by Microsoft only, with plenty of paid options while in the java world all of it is open-source and free, while offering a much wider selection.

Also, you will find a java library for that random new tech you want to use, while it is likely missing for .NET.

I'm curious, what kind of tooling are we talking about?

Interesting. Did you try Jetbrains Rider as an IDE?

> Working on something with unrealistic confidence, even if that project itself is completely doomed to failure, is probably better for you than watching Netflix.

As someone who’s heavily biased towards just sitting on the couch (but reading a book, not watching Netflix :)), but married to an unrealistically confident wife, I have to agree.

I tend to panic whenever my wife comes up with her way-too-frequent ideas and goes ahead with them with minimal risk analysis, but at the end of the day she’s a much more accomplished and satisfied person than I am. I tend to look at every project from the most pessimistic angle possible and the end result is that I almost never actually do anything. I have a lot of book knowledge about a number of things but little to no experience, whereas she’s the exact opposite, and that tends to be more beneficial in real life.

Can you speak more on how you balance your persoanlities? How do you balance speaking from a pessimistic perfpective while also being encouraging and supportive?

I don’t have an answer to your specific question, but I just want you to know you’re not alone. I’m also quite excitable and love talking not just about technical stuff, but all sorts of things. I’m quick to smile and laugh, and I probably overshare at times (that last one I had to learn to control).

I’ve had the same worry as you at times, but so far I’ve been 15 years into my career as a software engineer and it hasn’t been a problem as far as I know.

Thanks for the thoughts, this is nice to hear.

I’ve been learning it for over a year because I want to be able to speak to my wife in her native language. So far I’m loving to learn it for the exact reason you said, the way sentences are pieces together is outright fun to me. I’m also amazed by how much information can be packed in a small combination of characters.