Reyali
@Reyali@lemm.ee
- Comment on If you work hard enough, your work will [pay off].’ And that’s not true. 1 week ago:
Talent, dedication, and luck. Spot on.
I am very successful in my career and earn more than my school-age self ever expected (tbf, I expected to be a teacher). I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for all three, though.
Lucky points include:
- Being the kid of small business owners who gave me/made me get a job with them at 16.
- Knowing someone at a company who recommended me for an internship.
- Working adjacent to a badass development team that made the best proof of concept to build a new app, so they brought me to their team to support it.
- My Lead retiring so I was able to move to her level after only a couple years.
I wouldn’t have gotten those opportunities if I didn’t also have the dedication and talent, but luck was a huge factor.
I have tried the metaphor that luck opened doors for me, but I had to get to and walk through them. I will never take where I am today for granted.
- Comment on Definitely didn't waste half an hour making this 1 week ago:
My fidgeting while I was in middle school led me to break every kind of mechanical pencil I used, except for 5. I forced myself to only use those in high school and college so I would always have a reliable pencil.
- Comment on People never understand the sacrifices I make for them. 5 weeks ago:
Scrum.org doesn’t have anything about strategy in the Scrum Master role so no, not by-the-book. By-the-book Scrum, I am a Product Owner of the whole application. But because my app is huge, areas within it are owned by members of my team. I’m working on the long-term business plan and organizational-level barriers, not the day-to-day execution that a Scrum Master would own.
- Comment on People never understand the sacrifices I make for them. 5 weeks ago:
Ah, I read the italics as sarcasm and was trying to make sense of it in that way. I know what a Scrum Master is; my company doesn’t have them, so their responsibilities are spread across multiple roles. But yeah, my role is higher. I’m not helping the team with processes, I’m working with Directors and VPs on the business side to determine where the product is going. So planning side, not delivery side.
- Comment on People never understand the sacrifices I make for them. 5 weeks ago:
lol, seems like it. I would hate being an actual Scum Master though! I’m a Lead Product Manager over four dev teams with a team of 3 PMs. I am trying to focus on longer-term strategy and removing barriers for my team, while the PMs who report to me should be the ones making decisions and doing the individual contributor work.
- Comment on People never understand the sacrifices I make for them. 5 weeks ago:
It’s not uncommon for me to only have one or two 30-minute breaks between 8:30am and 5pm. I’ve gotten to the point that if I have over 2 hours without meetings I often feel like I get nothing done, because I’ve gotten pretty good at getting a few things (emails or messages, not deep work) knocked out in the 5-10 min in between calls. I can only really focus on deeper work at night after everyone else has signed off.
Not really a sustainable way of doing work, I’m also not doing as much hands-on work these days. A lot of my meeting time is 1-on-1s with my team and making sure they have what they need to move forward, make decisions, and get work done or with other people to try to remove barriers to help the team be able to move forward. So in that sense, the meetings ARE the work.
- Comment on We're in the endgame now 1 month ago:
So yeah, exactly like how they use the Bible!
- Comment on Patch this Bish! 1 month ago:
Not great for long-term use in cases of chronic pain though.
- Comment on is feeling disrespected reason good enough to change jobs? 2 months ago:
Yeah I’m sure I could have gotten more a bit faster and I’m pretty sure I’d make more with my title at many other companies, but environment and quality of life are worth more to me.
The company’s culture is fantastic for many reasons. It’s a well-known brand with ~2k corporate employees and while others are mandating RTO, my CEO has gone on public record multiple times to reinforce that we are a work-from-anywhere company. Also there have been massive layoffs over the past year and our last layoff was in 2021 (and relatively small). Layoffs under our CEO aren’t a fact of life while our prior CEO relished the twice annual layoff and is still doing that at the company he runs now.
Plus I genuinely like the work I do and love the people I work with. Now that I make money well beyond my means, I care way more about culture than chasing another buck.
- Comment on is feeling disrespected reason good enough to change jobs? 2 months ago:
Comments like yours remind me why I’m so damn lucky and grateful for my job…
In February I’ll have been there 10 years, and my salary is almost 150% more than when I started (which was above $50k for context).
I’ve gotten annual ~3% “raises” each year, as well as one role change (+11%), two promotions (+25% and +13%), and a raise I pushed for (+12%). The first promotion, my boss literally called me on a Tuesday and said I had a new title and my raise was effective as of the Saturday before.
I share this to remind people these kinds of companies do exist, even if they’re the exception.
- Comment on flouride 4 months ago:
Small note: the country name is spelled “Colombia,” and spelling it correctly means you don’t need to specify which one!
- Comment on Reporters Without Borders sues X 4 months ago:
But that’s just a ‘bone apple tea’ of “chest of drawers”? It’s not a correct term.
(I figured surely there’s an actual word for misheard terms being butchered in writing, but a quick search failed me so I went with the colloquial name.)
- Comment on Elon's Death Machine (aka Tesla) Mows Down Deer at Full Speed , Keeps Going on "Autopilot" 5 months ago:
A DMV is accountable for driving laws and practices in their own state, not educating people about every possible driving condition anywhere.
- Comment on Elon's Death Machine (aka Tesla) Mows Down Deer at Full Speed , Keeps Going on "Autopilot" 5 months ago:
Wait, are you saying that Virginia not mentioning what to do if a moose is in the road is “bad”?
Considering that the northern-most part of Virginia is still about 350 mi south of the closest range of moose, it would be pointless if not absurd for them to include it.
- Comment on The 1900s 5 months ago:
With one parent who turned 80 this year and the second in their late 70s, I’ve realized there’s a difference between “elderly” and “old.” A lot of people equate the two. I think “old” always started in one’s 70s to me, even as a kid. “Elderly,” however, is not based on a number but on a physical state of being.
My dad is elderly. He’s frail and struggling to move around much. It’s hard to watch and it’s been going on and worsening for a few years now. My mom, despite being only 3 years younger, is not at all elderly. She has more energy and vivacity than many people over 20 years her junior (hell I’m in my 30s and she can do loops around me, but I got the chronic illness genes that she didn’t have). Technically, she’s old. But no one who knows her would think of her as “elderly.”
- Comment on "Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely 5 months ago:
Leadership definitely drives a lot, but even with bad leadership a PM can and should do a lot to help here. I spent 5 of my years of PMing with an operations org that drove every big decision and I still did everything I could to protect my devs. I ended up in major burn out from it multiple times, but I don’t regret it.
Alerts that are waking devs up in the middle of the night have a user impact too, and a PM can and should communicate that impact and risk to the business side as part of why it needs to be prioritized. Alternatively, there might be a reason that the UI change is ultimately more valuable, and it’s the PM’s job to communicate why that is the priority to their devs. If developers with a Product team ever truly believe the reason they’re building something is just “because [insert team here] is excited about it,” then the PM failed at a critical responsibility.
- Comment on "Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely 5 months ago:
“that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”
If this is happening, sounds like you have a shit-ass Product Manager (or no PM).
Signed, not a shit-ass Product Manager
- Comment on How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality. 5 months ago:
Ha, I’ve heard of that one so I caught it. I missed 3 of the passes, though!
- Comment on How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality. 5 months ago:
If you want a fun experiment of all the things we see but don’t actually process, I recommend the game series I’m On Observation Duty. You flip through a series of security cameras and identify when something changed. It’s incredible when you realize the entire floor of a room changed or a giant thing went missing, and you just tuned it out because your brain never felt a need to take in that detail.
It’s sorta horror genre and I hate pretty much every other horror thing, but I love those games because they make me think about how I think.
- Comment on How do I know if a medical issue should be addressed by a Clinic Visit, Urgent Care, or the Emergency Room? 5 months ago:
Do you have a primary care physician? I think this going on for 2 weeks warrants talking to them about it. If it’s not changing, then the urgent/emergency need isn’t there. Getting to a specialist could be months or over a year though (took me 10 months for first-available appointment with a cardiologist who specializes in dysautonomia issues like I have; someone I met in the waiting room waited closer to a year and a half).
Alternatively, if you have insurance many of them have a nurses line you can call and get input. Like you mentioned you would do as an EMR, they’re likely going to recommend you go to the most extreme care (ER) because they don’t want to risk being wrong. But they might be able to talk you through your doubts. And hey, if it’s insurance they have motivation to get you to the cheapest care possible, so maybe they wouldn’t recommend ER after all, lol.
Lastly, since you’re stuck in decision paralysis, it might be worth taking some actions on your own to see if you can improve the situation. Obviously this isn’t the smartest option, but I know I’m stubborn, cheap, and have white coat anxieties after being dismissed for my health issues my entire childhood, so I tend to go this route often. (Heck, I waited until my mid-30s to seek care that ended me with a cardiologist despite having the symptoms literally as long as I can remember.) You mentioned potassium deficiency and my immediate thought when reading “palpitations” was electrolytes as well. If you have a history of high blood pressure ignore this, but if not, eating salt and getting magnesium/potassium can help a ton. My cardiologist insists I eat 7-10 grams of salt a day. It’s a fuckton, but hell if it doesn’t make me feel worlds better.
