Thanks for mentioning PMAlerts! If you'd like to connect and try out a leadgen feature (currently in private preview), I'd love to see if we can turn some of the signals you're catching into qualified leads. Feel free to email me if you're interested: m@pmalerts.com
We have similar backgrounds, and similar struggles. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
FWIW, I'm also about a decade behind-the-curve because of childhood trauma. I'm reminded of it every day - peers within my age group have exceeded me in every imaginable way.
The cool thing though, is that your CS degree is going to empower you with a lethal skillset, whether or not you graduate. Especially if you keep practicing those social skills as you work on your studies.
I know this is a "Tell HN", and I hesitate to offer unsolicited advice. But I'll share with you, what I wish someone would have shared with me:
- Delayed career progression isn't a big deal. Just frame it as an interesting story.
- You can make your story more interesting by learning to love and cultivate your skillset. Maybe reading Atomic Habits inspires you to build a personal habit-tracking application. That sort of thing is a powerful differentiator.
- You probably won't use most of what you're learning in academia. I wish I had supplemented by University studies with a coding bootcamp that taught me how to build real apps for real people.
- Interviewing is a total numbers game. It took me ~20 interviews to get an offer that excited me. My GPA was shit - but my side projects were interesting to the people who handled my interview loop.
- It sounds cliche, but defining a five-year vision (ie - working for a FAANG corp making $>150k/y) can help. You can split those years up into months, and those months up into weeks, and then determine what you should be measuring and working on to meet your targets every week.
I also wanted to thank you for the reminder to take care of my body. I've been getting lazy (easy with gyms closed) and your post was great reminder to resume measuring and improving my nutrition/exercise habits. Much appreciated.
For sure. I have to periodically prune my social media accounts because whenever I hear about the latest atrocity, failure of the system, injustice, etc, I get all fired up and become a wannabe activist who thinks we can change the world with software.
I'll go to bed feeling like I've done my part before waking up to a crippling fear that I've been penalized for criticizing capitalism or the political system or something. It's a constant cycle between "optimistic and morally justified criticism" and "self-censorship" that's frankly exhausting.
> How did Tesla manage to create this when GM has been making cars for decades and that is the singular focus of the company?
(replaced the subjects with auto-industry corollaries)
I think it's the power of vertical integrations. When you aren't cobbling together a bunch of general-purpose bits for general-purpose consumers, you don't have to pay as many taxes. Sort of like SRP in software - a multi-purpose function is going to become super bloated and expensive to maintain, compared to several single-purpose alternatives.
Hi everyone - just wanted to drop a message here in case you sent me an email and I haven't responded yet.
First - thank you for the super supportive and encouraging vibes here, and for the candid feedback. Really, really appreciate how many improvements are going to be attributed directly to you.
Second - sorry for the delayed responses. I'm working through emails / messages / comments and promise to get back to you - I just don't want to rush through bugfixes and conversations, so it might take longer than I'd like.
Third - There have been a few reports of email verification breaking, and also of features not being fully enabled with Early Adopter subscriptions. This is my bad - the email verification flow didn't take into account case-insensitivity. Should be fixed now (for anyone impacted, you should have a new verification link in your inbox). Features should also be enabled by EOD today - the complexity of feature-by-feature upgrades is coming back to bite me now.
Fourth - I've authored a couple more notes to answer questions that have popped up:
Hey Mick, really great tool and super useful, here are my bits of feedback:
1: When you customize what websites you want to listen to, you should also be able to customize what language you want to include/exclude (where I work, there is a univeristy in Italy with the same name, so google alerts floods my email with Italian website mentions, but they aren't actually relevant to us)
2: When I signed up, I got a message that said "something bad happened", the wording is a little alarming right after giving information, and it doesnt give any more info on what I can do/ where to go to fix things. It stopped giving that alert once I unchecked "custom".
Like I said, awesome tool, keep it up!
Ooh this is implemented! If you click on "Filters" at the top of any selected alert, you'll see options for keyword filtering, username filtering, and domain filtering. The UI/UX is a bit immature, so if you use it and have any feedback, I'm happy to address whatever friction you hit.
