So it seems the "secret" to tech-life balance is choosing more life than tech? Don't get me wrong, I'm all about tech-life balance and work-life balance (which this article and the problem in general heavily overlaps with), but the secret is conciously organizing your life to have more life than tech. Part of this is finding a job that allows you to choose life outside of office hours. Having more free mornings to do things not related to tech is probably a symptom of achieving a better tech-life balance.
Do these types of jobs even exist anymore in tech? At least in SV, every job I've come across these days seem to require on-call and an implicit requirement to work into the night hours in order to finish your work. Not to mention super competitive teammates that don't mind working 24/7 and putting pressure on me to work even longer. I would gladly take a minimum 25% pay reduction if it meant I only needed to work 9-5pm with no obligation to answer emails or Slack messages after-hours. I would love to hear examples of companies with this type of WLB if they do exist.
I'm the only dev at a small consulting firm (3-5 people, including owners). I'm payed for 40hrs/week but rarely put in more than 35. This is completely accepted. Even though we're all very enthused about the work that we do and want to deliver the best that we can, it's always understood that work is not everyones highest priority at all times.
> Do these types of jobs even exist anymore in tech?
Yes, they do (although maybe not in SV). They're not even rare! I'm working at one right now -- and, honestly, that's how it's been at nearly every tech job I've had over my career.
My job in a tech startup in NYC is 9-5. We are on call on rotation, which usually means two or so weeks a year. I don't look at Slack or email after 5pm nor do I have any notifications on my phone for any work-related app (just Slack for now).
It really hasn't affected my career - I just got a raise/promotion actually. My experience is that the "I love to work!" type of employees just get more work assigned to them instead of rewards.
It's pay to play, but I think you also have to tack on that you can pay more to win a bit more (to a certain extent) and this is almost necessary to do well at events. Not that low power, casual magic isn't fun though.
This whole comment seems to be based on the premise that eating meat leads to bad gut bacteria. Do you have any sources for that? I am genuinly curious. My mental model (which isn't based on much hard evidence) is that sugar and processed foods are the things to avoid when aiming for good gut bacteria.
Nowhere am I saying that meat leads to bad gut bacteria, what I am saying is that you can starve out the gut bacteria that eat meat and live for a while with just the bacteria that eat plant based foods.
Because you can't live off just meat alone (unless you are a dog or other carnivore with a short intestine) there isn't the option to cut out the plants and just live off burgers and sausages for a year, to clear out and reset the gut bacteria that like a bit of plant material. Going vegetarian is therefore a safe personal experiment.
The problem with processed foods - even if natural and without additives - is that they don't make it past the small intestine with any nutrients in them for the gut flora of the lower intestine.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson demonstrated this in the USA a century ago, but this was based on his experiences watching and living in the arctic where we have much longer natural experiments to refer to.
Of course, whether you should or not, and the nature of the long term effects, are separate considerations.
What benchmark do you use for marking a kanji card as known in Anki? Do you just memorize the meaning of each kanji, or memorize the readings too? I'm looking to get back into studying japanese myself.
I'm not learning the readings yet since a lot of them have multiple readings, some less common than others. My thought process was to learn the kanji, then the readings as I learn daily vocabulary through Genki 1 / TaeKim's grammar guide.
I don't know if this is actually the best way to start learning Japanese but I thought it would be fun just as a personal goal to learn the 2,200 kanji before anything. Studying Korean takes up the lion's share of my time so I haven't started studying Japanese grammar much yet.
---
I just follow the default progression of anki. 1 day -> 2 days -> etc. If it takes me zero effort to remember, I grade it as Easy. If it takes me more than 3-4 seconds to remember it, I grade it as Hard. If it takes more than 10-15 seconds I reset the card and start learning it again.
So far the only resets have been on similar looking characters and some newly-learned ones from the day before if I was a bit distracted.
