Because rich countries brings their products from somewhere else, they don't have to produce them, they don't have to deal with the environmental impact of producing them.
Lots of content which I actually enjoy reading.
Advise regarding career path.
Last but not least, ability to see people who shares my point of view without having to engage in an endless feed.
I'd say look for good funding and someone who is willing to provide plenty of freedom on your research program (the ones who people say they are always busy are good candidates for advisors) make sure that this person is well connected and can get you some contact to help whenever you are stuck.
Learning about how a friend of a college has a sibling who work in Korea, and surprisingly noticing that they complained how people there "lives to work".
There is so much inertia in a big organization if you want to do something, it is better not to ask and work on it and keep pushing things forward until someone explicitly ask you to stop. It is not productive and possibly dangerous to be waiting for approval or even guidance, when there is so many things to do and no one offer to help, stop looking for guidance, dive deep into the code, solve the problems and make a defense of your solutions.
That was a life changing lesson. I became more productive I got rejections a couple of times, but the rate of success was way more than I expected.
Build a portfolio that speaks for your work and experience. Take those projects and make them worth to be shown. That way you can show concrete examples of your work with programming. Make them open source, show them on your github account, that way the interviewer will know that you have an idea of the workflow. Even better if you can get some issue on an already existing project you'd like to contribute, fork the repo, fix it and get it merged (repeat).
That will help a lot, if you fail in a couple of programming questions they can relay on your ability to learn and get things set up and running as your previous projects.
I'd like to be more a people person. But when I try I realize I just don't usually like people. So I get stuck, because it feels like faking it. Anyway I'd like to improve the ability to talk to people and be more open not just the one who gets the stuff done
Regarding the "Eat better" thing. It helped me when I heard some lecture advising to be careful with what you eat because what you eat is what you become. Like literally, because everything you eat will be broken into pieces, the pieces that will replace the exhausted cells on your body :)
This is true for me as well. Sometimes when I feel down. I workout until exhaustion and then everything is Ok, not perfect, just fine. It helps to keep going. It helps, quite a lot!
It helps the realization and be mindful of your emotional state. I have felt the same and I just say to myself "It is Ok. Just keep doing it" I remember something from someone saying "Don't compare yourself to others, just make sure the one you are today is a little bit better than the one you were yesterday" and the process is incremental.
I take a break whenever I feel stuck or that my work is useless. It may be useless (for other people and for myself sometimes) but at the end of the day is that I enjoy the process what really matters.
What I don't understand it is how this happens if you get a testing process carried on. In a company like Google you would expect a lot of people trying to test and hacking things out projects to are meant be public interfaces
I'd suggest to go trough the fundamentals. Make sure they understand the workflow on Django and a project that they can actually take into production, don't make it too broad but care about the fundamentals, so they'll be able to solve their own problems in the future. It doesn't pay well in the long run to make a project too broad. I'm not sure if Django is the right thing to start but that depends on your motivation. Think about python notebooks, for instance how to connect to a well known API, to grab some data and play with it using data structures, plotting. Things that they can see without investing too much time in server configuration. Most probably you already know it, but colab.research.google.com is a ready to code python notebook
I tried LabView but didn't like at all the visual programming side. I'd suggest to make sure that it allows to write code and from the writing make it visual ;)