Good point, I hadn't thought of it from that perspective. Almost like a "grass is greener on the other side" type phenomenon. I wonder if there's a name for this?
Don't say "fast paced". I take this as an indication that the work will be a "move fast and break things" type of culture. Many engineers want to build solid infrastructure and/or cutting edge tech which takes time and thought to develop. Many engineers do want a challenge - we can tell if it's a challenging job post from the rest of the ad.
Take this with a grain of salt, some people do actually like "fast paced" of course.
Taking some time off to purely focus on networking could be a good option. Networking is great fun when you have spare cycles. Networking when you have a full-time job - not so.
Maintaining a network when you have a full-time job is much easier than building one.
Yes. Particularly important is gesticulation, if you don't gesticulate at exactly the right silicon valley cadence you may as well not even be talking.
Make sure you're not taking any medication which effects your problem solving skills. Nothing is without suspicion, even things you take for granted. Sometimes medication of all kinds, particularly those that effect your hormone system, has unlisted side effects.
Another silent killer is poor air quality. Make sure you're getting lots of fresh air each day.
Just go for a drive through Los Gatos or Los Altos to know where all the blood and sweat is going. Even just look them up on Zillow with some unusual filters.
We haven't seen anything yet. What we're witnessing is the transition from capitalism to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and things like this termination are an obvious milestone. That may sound like a bold claim but let me explain.
Allow me to back up a little bit. First off some context: a lot of people don't realize it but we are a lot closer to a post-scarcity world than the world would have you think. Check out this chart which shows GDP per capita since the 1950's. The productivity gains since the 1950's have been absolutely incredible, and the quality of life back then was pretty good. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA
Have you ever noticed there's never any dialogue about encouraging men to be stay at home dads, or reducing the overall household number of hours worked per week? Never. The dialogue is always about the "wage gap" and "women have value too" and "rape culture" and "microaggressions". Men who are stay at home dads still get shamed just as much as they did during the 1950's. This is how you know there's something wrong - there is never any serious dialogue about actual equality. Income has in no way, shape, or form, kept up the with the GDP per capita shown in the chart above. There's never any explorations of policies that would actually increase equality, like restricting the number of "investment properties" a man or woman can own, behavior which is clearly parasitic. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_productivity_and_...
It's not in corporate interests to have people have actual equality. Increasing the labor pool without discussions of actual equality makes it so that people can be kept in debt, wages go down and the nexus of power moves away from the family and towards the corporation, which is what is happening.
"Women have value and should be working full time too". The implication here is that if you are not working for money you have no value. Despite common belief, in fact it IS possible to generate value outside of a money context. Many of the world's greatest achievements have occurred outside a money context, eg. the discovery of calculus, wikipedia, linux, countless famous works of art, literature, and philosophy. By saying that you only have value if you earn money is throwing many of the world's most accomplished people under a bus. The reason why "money is the only form of value" is such a horrible mentality is that it leads to people like Mozart dying in poverty and being thrown into a ditch, which actually happened.
Check out charts of combined household numbers of hours worked, you'll see it's going way UP not down, despite the GDP per capita chart shown above. There is clearly something dark in that picture. http://www.bls.gov/opub/working/chart17.pdf
I don't think these are idle complaints - feminism in its current form is an ideology that's on a direct collision course with the whole 'robots are about to take all the jobs' reality, which I think is going to come a lot sooner than we realize, and when these two phenoma collide, what's going to happen is that it's not going to be equality (sorry folks) it's going to be Brave New World, an immensely stratified society.
I work in one of Alphabet's departments where everything you do is constantly monitored. Your teammates conduct detailed psychometric analyses of you, beyond the simple perf of yesteryear. It's beyond cult-like. It's Brave New World.
I would recommend against sound cancelling headphones. The thing is that they only block out constant background hum like a fan. They don't stop talking.
What does stop talking though is a set of headphones call the 'Oppo pm-3'. These ones are like earmuffs, they have foam padding built-in, and the sound quality is pretty decent too.
Unfortunately I only discovered these 3 weeks after I burnt out of my open plan job and quit.
I too am a bit guilty of this. In all seriousness, there are a lot of smart people here so it's a reasonable thing to do IMO.