As a senior engineer / tech lead / whatever, I have to work with product people and think heavily in the product's terms. I have to imitate various user personas, their needs, their perspectives.
If I'm trying to think on a a user's behalf, and the question "what the user might want from the service to further their best interest?" for me has answers like "discontinue immediately and uninstall the app", I can't work on making new features and improving user retention. I'm not psychopathic enough.
> space between believing in something and despising that thing.
Correct. It's the spectrum between wasting time because the business will never work, and actively and consciously helping people do things that I would rather help them stop doing. None of this spectrum is interesting to me to work on, except maybe if that were the only way to secure my family's physical survival. I try to strategically stay far from circumstances like those.
It's not the technology, of course. I have interviewed with a company that used a blockchain to track something like carbon credits and trees planted. Most web3 companies try to peddle tokens though.
> nervous about touching water when trying to swim for the first time is healthy and rational
I agree about the first time, and maybe the N-th time, until you're comfortable in it. But your goal has to be to get comfortable in water, and to master the almost-submerged motion that is swimming. If you plan to swim in the long term while avoiding contact with water and staying on the shore, it's likely unrealistic.
Refresh a few times, it seems to present examples randomly, and some are much more close up than pixel-wide.
Regardless, consider the job of the lifeguard: They don't have the benefit of clear close-up sight of all swimmers. If you can't spot the drowner when you know there will be one, imagine how much more difficult it is for a lifeguard who doesn't know when a crisis will occur.
Unless you're willing to go to lifeguard school, learn to train yourself on the hard-to-spot examples without explanatory details: you'll be a lot more likely to gain a potentially life-saving skill.
Could you imagine going out for a simple swim, diving down for fun, and stumbling across a car with a rotting corpse in it? There's the reason why I don't like swimming in deep water.
I lived in a coastal region where, every storm season, people would get swept out to sea and drown because they were watching storm waves from the beach. Sometimes they'd even go in the water, out on jetties or out on piers, without any appreciation for the sheer forces at work that push the water around. With enough force, even ankle to knee deep water can sweep you off your feet and suck you out to sea.
Sadly parents let their kids do this and some have lost their lives.
> I have had this feeling twice. Both times my overwhelming thought was "Wow, I've been an idiot."
Same experience here. I'm a beginner swimmer and got caught in a rip tide in Bali.
The thing was, it was terrifying yet so calm at the same time. Everybody on the beach continued to bathe, unaware, and a few metres away I was frantically but silently fighting for my life.
The helplessness is especially haunting. You exert this primal will to life, and the force of nature just brushes it aside.
Anyway, I made it out, spent that evening binging Youtube videos about rip tides, and have developed a healthy aversion to ocean water.
That's a pretty cynical attitude. It's obvious the intent of this is to test a program that has the potential to keep people from drowning. I doubt you're now gasping for air as you sink below the waves.
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