Slept really badly that night

It's good advice if you have the appropriate financial resources or support network, but plenty of us don't have the option to move back in with our parents for six months and need to adult on hard-mode.

I'd be curious what the algorithm was. Were/are there any approximate algorithms that could have approached the problem?

Sadly, a lot of people are too nice to do this, and instead have a mental breakdown trying to solve an impossible situation. Despite the popular expression, "Never give up," sometimes it's important to know when to say fuck it and quit.

For the last 20 years, employment in the software engineering field has basically been a dream scenario for the job seekers. Great wages and every company was always trying to hire. However, that seems to have taken a pause. Higher interest rates mean the free money buffet is over and the FAANGs have spent the last year flooding the job market with engineers of the highest pedigree. I'm not quite job searching right now, but my understanding is that it's not the cake walk it used to be.

> So I go back to him and he accused me of lying and went and told the CEO. The CEO, a pretty chill guy with a doctorate, I was expecting to have a rational discussion about with but not he screamed at me too. That's terrible, I'm so glad you got out of that situation. Hands down the best part about working in a field like tech and building up a cushion of savings has been that I haven't had to put up with coworkers who yell, accuse each other of lying, or any other immature, boundary-pushing behavior. In the past I worked for the military, academia, theater, etc and there were times when I felt a strong esprit de corps and others when I felt stuck because I was a cog in a large machine and had granted jerks immense power over my life -- working on a contract in a war zone, needing approval from certain professors to further my career, needing a job to pay the rent, etc. Whereas in tech …

The Silicon Valley Machiavellian TechManager way to deal with this situation is to say "Yes, we will do this, but only if I get an up-front bonus and a team of twenty." The CEO instead gives you 6 headcount and a bonus schedule with performance milestones. You put the team together. Drag things out as long as you can, managing upwards with bullshit and a charismatic smile, faking the goals when you can, while the team is on a death march. Finally, when it's obvious that you'll never deliver, blame the team and parachute away to a different company with whatever bonus money you managed to get your hands on, where they offer you a "Director" title and $1M in stock because you were a "leader."

the scalability characteristics approached "all the energy in the universe" levels of compute pretty quickly Something someone was doing in excel scaled up to taking all the energy in the universe? That does not sound right.

Haha that was a great post because I was reading from the beginning thinking "gonna follow up tell this person they don't need to take abuse from sociopaths" then got to the end. Good job. Not every employer is a psycho but many are.