Start sleeping more, eating healthier, exercising more, and working less. Cut down on weed and alcohol if you partake. This should hopefully help you feel well enough to get a different job which will be less stressful and pay better. Good luck!
+1 to all of the above. Both parent commenter and I know, these are easier said than done (acknowledging it is hard to incorporate these, just in case)
Start sleeping early also. Gradually build up to sleeping before 10pm. A friend once told me people sometimes stay up late because they did not feel enough in-control over their day -- this idea stuck with me for a while (Quick googling now seems like the name for it is revenge procrastination).
I'll absolutely advocate for spending some time on the frontend to see if you like it. In addition to other roles in the past, I built a SaaS company as the founding engineer where I covered all parts of the stack, including primarily backend for a while. Nowadays I work almost exclusively on the frontend, because I enjoy it!
I think there are pros and cons of being in a specialized role at any part of the stack, but some of the things I like about the frontend nowadays is:
1) The feedback is rapid. You can immediately see and interact with the result of your work. Mocking backend data is a possibility, but when you're working on an API or other backend stuff it can be hard to imagine how it will work for the person at the end of the line. Rapid visual feedback on building stuff is satisfying!
2) It is now way easier to build maintainable applications that are easy to understand and hard to break. By using react and typescript (...and mostly writing pure functions with clean interfaces and unit testing them...) you can create tons of functionality with very clean code that's easy for others to understand and modify.
3) CSS is funky sometimes, but with things like flexbox and css-in-js (or even just less/sass) you've got powerful tools for working with it.
4) It used to be that making everything work across all browsers took a ton of effort and was the most frustrating part of FE programming. Nowadays it's pretty easy.
5) With Electron (and perhaps React Native, although I can't speak to that), frontend skills are more useful in more contexts than they ever were before.
6) Although there may be something "oncall-ish" at your company for FE engineers, being on call for backend stuff means you get paged much more and will have much more work to do, and it will likely be due to stuff outside your control. You will get paged much less for FE problems, and you will be able to do something about it.
I think also that the role the frontend has played has gotten more complex (more state, more data, bigger codebases, more stuff users can do), so I've felt that a background in backend work is advantageous when it comes to working on the frontend and can lead to great work, since backend people are often strong in core concepts like writing and testing functions with good interfaces, doing a good job managing state, interacting with networks and dealing with errors, etc.
Thanks for the detailed response! This makes so much sense. In addition to your points, for me personally (similar to your founding engg experience) I feel frontend knowhow unlocks the ability to create side projects. So far, I have struggled with the frontend portions of these while having no trouble with the backend. I am yet to get css down and design is totally out of my wheelhouse, but I hope that I will get more fluent on the former and at least mediocre at the latter eventually.
I plan to do a 2 month project on the frontend at work and will play by ear thereafter.
Well they make 5 billion revenue a year, are close to profitable, and their online revenue is up 34% in 2020 to more than a billion. And now they can print money with share dilution, and they’ve become a household name and are touted as a weapon in a class war. So IDK if dying is the right word for it.
Thanks for your input. A couple follow-up questions though.
Why would the price on the low valued puts go way up though? Is it now, after the squeeze, MORE likely that GME goes bankrupt? And even Hertz, which is _literally bankrupt_ is still selling for more than a dollar a share, so the stock price could remain untethered from realities for a long time.
And why can't they just do some share dilution to raise capital?
Volatility is driving all options up, puts or calls. I have a deep in the money put (not as deep as those, it's at $25) that is up over 100% since last week. Too bad I didn't buy a call, too. I figured it was going to come back down quickly. Maybe in March.
Issuing new shares would let them raise capital, but then they have to do something with that capital. I don’t think they have much of a future so unless they have a CEO can both run GameStop and build something new on the side, he wouldn’t be helping anyone. Assuming the market feels the same way, the share price would fall a lot before the issue. Or he’d be taking money from WSB and wasting it on some doomed revitalisation.
Innovating while running a mature business is one of the most difficult things for companies and few succeed. Even Google mostly buy innovation rather than trying to do internally.
Models all use the volatility to guesstimate outcomes. More volatility means more value in an option. Look at it this way: if a stock is at 10$ and the vol is +/-1$ A day, you only need 5 down days for a 5$ option to be in the money. If the same stock shoots to 50$ over 2days, the vol is now +/-20$ a day (because it shot up at that rate). So you only need 2.5 down days and that 5$ put is in the money.
That’s effectively how the model “sees” GME.
I’d tend to agree that it doesn’t make much sense for the price to have changed given these circumstances. I think that’s an artefact of the model. To be fair, the model relies on volatility being relatively constant AND it being bidirectional (prices go up or down randomly). You can’t really use a model like this to price options on an underlying like GME.
This is where the skill comes in: you don’t just need to obey the model, you need to look at the market, decide it won’t stay this volatile, adjust you vol figure down and trade based on the new model price it gives you and hope the market comes to you before you go bankrupt!
But that takes insight and you have to actively manage the risk that creates if you’re working at volume.
If you’re willing to take that risk and you think GME will quite down, you can short some puts. That would limit your downside to volume*strike price. But you have to accept your eating some risk.
Personally I’d say GME options are not meaningfully modelable right now and you can make good money in disfunctional markets. I keep some cash for this sort of speculation myself. But I only gamble what I can afford to lose and I don’t kid myself I’m Investing.
I’m cash poor right now (covid and no job) otherwise I’d be tempted to try this tbh.
To be clear, I’m not an expert and this isn’t financial advice. I just did software support for a convertible bond desk for a year so I learned enough to hurt myself!
Not to take away from your main point, but the capitalized total cost of ownership for a pony is _much_ larger than $1000 (which, by the way, is the price for a not-very-good-natured pony; breeds with nice temperaments cost a lot more according to https://pets.costhelper.com/pony.html ).
Doing some quick checking, food for a pony is ~$1-2k per year. Lodging is $2-3k per year. Basic preventative veterinary care is $1k per year; if the pony gets old this could get a lot more.
That's $4-6k a year for upkeep, and ponies live for 20+ years. So the actual cost of a pony, even with discounting and whatnot for future dollars, is probably at least $50k, not $1k.
If you really think through the implications of every individual in America owning a pony, it gets a lot more interesting than that! It means that everyone in every city would own a pony -- would that mean that perhaps a proxy ownership situation would occur, where you had a certificate of pony ownership, but the pony would be housed and maintained anywhere in the country that could do so cheapest? It would cost a lot more than 2-3k/year to house a pony in NYC! Let alone the sudden demand for housing about 5 million of them...
My guess is that these ponies would be kept in horrible conditions similar to the way domesticated cattle are raised for milk and meat. I would hazard that all of our assumptions about the actual price of ponies and maintenance would come down if we all needed to have a pony, and would come down by a LOT.
Of the books I've read this year, there are a small handful that I think are beyond good.
Antifragile: This book has informed many decisions I have made recently. It is insightful, entertaining, and in its concern for human choices manages to send a beautiful message about nature and reality.
The Power Broker: I listened to this via audiobook and I highly recommend the experience. It's a large dose of history and a fascinating exploration of city politics and, as its name implies, power. And I learned a lot about New York!
Lonesome Dove: I hadn't read any fictional "westerns" and this came well recommended. I loved it. Listening to it while backpacking and on a road trip was extremely rewarding.
Man's Search For Meaning: Extremely powerful and potentially life changing. It was both cathartic and therapeutic for me, and has affected how I live my life.
The Lathe of Heaven: Incredibly enjoyable dystopian future fiction. It came recommended via the "HN reading list" released some number of months ago, and I liked it a lot.
The Fellowship of the Ring: I had started this book in high school but hadn't finished it for some reason. I picked it up again, and I'm glad I did. It is a gem, and there's good reason that it has become a part of our cultural bedrock. Its exploration of purpose, challenge, and choice is quite moving.
"You've got to keep making decisions, even if they're wrong decisions. If you don't make decisions you're stuffed"
- Joe Simpson, (Touching the Void)
Making a good decision quickly is often better than any other option -- waiting too long may make all options worse.
Make decisions based on clear goals, and attempt to record the reason for making a decision at the time of decisionmaking
Always consider opportunity cost.
Always take individual incentives into account.
Be open-minded, give ample room to disprove your preconceptions.
Take into account your cognitive biases when you can, and reduce them as much as possible
- loss aversion
- sunk cost
- inclination to maintain status quo
- avoiding ambiguous options
- tendency to do things based on many others doing the same
Consider others' feelings, and how their feelings will affect you and others.
Do not assume optimal future behavior of participants, especially yourself.
- do not overcommit your future time.
Do not assume poor future behavior of participants, especially yourself
- especially when depressed, it is easy to be pessimistic about your future behavior
Do not seek information when it will not affect action
Avoid over-relying on familiar tools and methods
- consider and value alternate approaches
- "If all you have is a hammer..."
Avoid overconfidence
Just because someone is in conflict with you doesn't mean their idea isn't good
Do not give disproportionate weight to trivial issues:
- "bikeshedding"
Orient towards reality
- establish a baseline understand of reality before moving toward solutions
Learn, THEN decide.
- am I done learning?
- have I learned enough to make a decision?
Consider postponing decisions until the last possible moment
- at which point you will have the most information with which to make the decision
Consider doing the simplest thing that could possibly work
When encountering hard problems, dissolve them into smaller pieces and identify the success criteria, immediately, before trying to generate solutions.
