I had a great job. Great pay, stock grants that are still going up, good work/life balance, and co-workers who were friends, co-workers who wanted me on their teams. I'd spearheaded an initiative which ultimately failed but had earned me a good reputation.
I went on a medication with a side effect of anger. I was told that at the beginning, I was told that there were other drugs I could use instead. I dismissed the concern, I'd be fine.
I got cocky. I got complacent. I convinced myself that the company needed me and would never dare replace me. I started to get a really bad attitude - openly sneered at projects that I didn't think could succeeded. I was probably right but I didn't help anyone by my griping.
I lost the job. Technically I was 'laid off' but it was that or simply get fired. I lost friends with my unpleasant attitude. I made statements that made me cringe with embarrassment now.
I'm doing fine currently, and am on a new medication. I'm making less though that I would have at my old job, and if I'd stayed there I'd be a lot less worried about my future. They held on to experienced engineers and for some people it was their last job before retiring.
I could blame the medicine entirely, but the truth is I'm still an arrogant asshole and I still fall into the trap of believing I'm irreplaceable and can get away with whatever I want.
I wish I'd changed medications. I wish that I'd listen to people who tried to help, who told me that there were teams that didn't want to work with me. I'd be in a lot better place.
My SO has a related issue. They were taking depression medication specifically for the side effects. As in, they had a disease and the side effects of the drug were the point of taking it.
Thing was, the actual effect made my SO go nutters for about a year. Because, again, my SO wasn't supposed to take the drug for the effects, but for the side effects.
When my SO, drug free and many years later, finally told this to a therapist, the therapist was aghast that my SO wasn't given therapy to help manage the actual effects too.
It seems so blindingly obvious that if you take drugs that effect your mind that you should also get therapy to monitor that effect. But it wasn't to us for some insane reason.
So, dear HN reader, take these stories to heart:
If you take mind altering drugs, get a therapist for the entire time that you are on that drug.
This could be me - maybe except the successful stock grants :)
Some of things I said and did when I was writing PHP shitcode at 24 make me want to crawl inside my couch. I'd like to think I've mellowed out a lot, but I think everyone is susceptible to falling into this trap, especially when they're highly compensated and well respected.
It's not just you. Most, if not all, of what humanity knows is wrong. It's easy to trick ourselves into thinking our constructs reflect reality: we sit at the pinnacle of human understandanding looking forward and our constructs are correct enough that things mostly work.
I've recently taken to adopting an "antiquity mindset." Instead of imagining a piece of information as the pinnacle of knowledge in our current context, I remind myself that in 10 (or 100, or 1000) years, folks are going to look back at these ideas with a red pen marking everything we were mistaken about.
Stay humble in what you "know" - most of what humanity will discover is in the future.
My first boss was your classic unix-beard, I hear his echo in some of the things I say. Nobody liked him either, but it's easier to get away with it at a 5 engineer company where you're the only one who dares touch the 10 year old C codebase.
I went on a medication with a side effect of anger. I was told that at the beginning, I was told that there were other drugs I could use instead. I dismissed the concern, I'd be fine.
I got cocky. I got complacent. I convinced myself that the company needed me and would never dare replace me. I started to get a really bad attitude - openly sneered at projects that I didn't think could succeeded. I was probably right but I didn't help anyone by my griping.
I lost the job. Technically I was 'laid off' but it was that or simply get fired. I lost friends with my unpleasant attitude. I made statements that made me cringe with embarrassment now.
I'm doing fine currently, and am on a new medication. I'm making less though that I would have at my old job, and if I'd stayed there I'd be a lot less worried about my future. They held on to experienced engineers and for some people it was their last job before retiring.
I could blame the medicine entirely, but the truth is I'm still an arrogant asshole and I still fall into the trap of believing I'm irreplaceable and can get away with whatever I want.
I wish I'd changed medications. I wish that I'd listen to people who tried to help, who told me that there were teams that didn't want to work with me. I'd be in a lot better place.