The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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If you have founded your own company, you probably have some leadership ability. Should you apply as a manager, or even a program manager? Even if that's not what you want to do long-term, it'll get you in the door.
Almost everyone has only intermediate-beginner, non-specialized skills. For a long time, that was enough to make sure you are well-paid in software. The industry runs on the ability of managers to take fungible engineers and turn them into productive engineers who they can apply towards their specific ends.
With the recent landscape changes (both the recession and chat GPT maybe starting to replace people), maybe that level of skill isn't enough anymore. I can't say but I haven't yet seen that trend personally.
Also, I think maybe the issue could be trying to get by on just your engineering skill. Technical ability is great, but if you're not a genius then it may not be enough to make you stand out. But having middle-level technical skill and reasoning ability combined with ability to lead, communicate, and make transparent decisions will make you much more marketable. As I said above, from your startup experiences, you probably have the leadership and communication, so you should leverage it. Apply to roles that will use that, and think about what experiences show off that ability that you can write about on cover letters and talk about in interviews.
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