If I may be so bold, the fallacy here is of time. Dare I say, you are already surrounded by friends, and not noticing it.
It seems like you measure "friendship" not by the time spent with them when you go to events or in school, but what happens afterwards. In other words, you are discounting to zero the moments that are actually happening in your life, for an imagined future of what a friendship might turn out to be. But life only ever happens moment to moment. That time that you spend with people at an event, that IS the thing.
There is no "friendship certificate": some people, you'll only spend ten minutes with; some, you might spend an afternoon with; others you might end up seeing once a week for a term. You might date a girl for a fortnight, or a couple of months, and then break up and never see each other again. It's ALL GOOD.
If I understand correctly, none of the above would qualify in your eyes as "real friendship", only the deep, deep kind. You might find it helpful to learn about Dunbar's number, and the size of the model's concentric social circles. Most people end up with 1-2 very close friends (possibly including their spouse). That is the outcome over a lifetime of making connections. Popular culture markets this idea that we should all be carousing with a tightly knit group of friends - no statistical social evidence bears this out.
When sinking into deep analysis about all your self-perceived inadequacies, your attention beam is directed inwards. That's unhealthy. When it's directed OUT, into the world, it takes you out of your head, and lets you see that everyone, every single one (person or otherwise), is struggling in their own way. Everyone's got a thing. Looking out builds empathy and kindness and affection towards things that make you happy, and gazing inwards makes you miserable.
You are surrounded by people in school, and are at a stage in life where you get to be interested in whatever. Any experience you have, even if it doesn't lead to lifelong friendships, is worthy in the space of time it occupies.
Throughout my undergrad I had friends come and go. I'm not in touch with anyone I met at Uni during those years. It doesn't make the actual time spent with these people any less special.
There are two books on the issue by a guy called Steven Pressfield, "The War of Art" and "Do the Work". I've read the latter and it's good. He talks about how resistance strengthens the closer you get to ending a project. I've found it useful in my work.
Don't know about "ideal" but YC have a video where Michael Siebel talks about the dev cycle they had at Twitch. Before they applied it, he says, they wrote lots of redundant code and also get stuck on stuff that didn't matter.
Eventually, what they did was set up two-week dev cycles. Before each, they'd write down suggestions for features/WIP and stick everything on the board. They would also estimate if a feature was large (one week of work or over), medium (2-3 days) or small (up to a day). Then, they'd pick the most urgent things off that list, and work only on them. Two weeks later, same thing. But you don't keep a list of the ideas, the other things don't go into a queue.
I applied this for a product I was building last year, and it definitely helped build faster.
Not sure about measuring things in LOC or commits.
A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again (originally titled 'Shipping out')
David Foster Wallace goes on a luxury cruise.
There's a PDF version online, but the reading experience doesn't compare to reading it in a book. My copy is tatty by now, still keep going back.
I'll say something that sounds really unhelpful until one day it makes sense. You don't really choose the process, the process chooses you. You can't make yourself 'enjoy the process' for something that doesn't resonate, because it will always feel a chore. So the one and only trick is to really pay attention to the thing you keep going back to, and in a way accept that this is a path.
Some people might say "But I only enjoy video games!" and if that's the case, I don't really know what to say to that. All the people I know who have found great alignment with a path of progress are ones where the effort tickles an itch they would have regardless, so might as well scratch that itch.
I used to be a big fan of LinkedIn. I've posted, here and elsewhere, expressing these views. But some of the value LinkedIn used to offer is definitely eroding.
The feeds have become really terrible. This wasn't always the case. Before, a lot more weight was given to posts from people you were connected to, vs. the weight given to their overall engagement. This offered two kinds of value:
One, you were more likely to keep updated on what's happening within a professional niche (assuming lots of your connections were in that niche too.)
Two, your own writing would be shown mostly to people in your business niche, which helped foster trust.
I've formed a lot of useful connections this way. A lot of client relationships, past and present, started out this way. A bunch of people helped me in a bunch of ways (intros, advice) because they felt I was a real person, not a rando profile image.
That's mostly gone now. A useful post is now so rare, and the rest is "engagement" fodder. Eventually, I turned off the feed, and that's how it stays most of the time. (I installed an extension someone once posted about here.)
The chat feature, which was always really powerful, is still there. But it used to be that the flow was written insights -> chat -> in person/Zoom. Without that slower process of getting acquainted, the connecting itself has less potential to become really useful.
For anyone saying "I definitely won't get in" here's a counterpoint that has little to do with whether your application succeeds or not: Do it for yourself, not for the approval.
I found that filling in the application, without even sending it, is a useful exercise. It makes you think hard about what it is you are trying to achieve with whatever it is your building. It's very helpful when you come to talk with clients.
You know how they say launch fast, launch early? That's part of it, because launching means talking about it to other people. Those people will have questions or objections or an incomplete understanding of pre-existing solutions. A lot of the application is about this kind of stuff.
Personally, I wanted to fill the application irrespective of YC. I figured, if I'm serious about building something useful, I shouldn't just build it and que sera, sera. I should know what to focus on. And since they've learned a bunch about building companies, if they care about something enough to ask about it, that's a good pointer that I should care enough about it to be able to answer it.
For example, I filled it in when a solution was just an idea, as if it were already built. So it made me set expectations, and clarify what I want this thing to be. Then, once it was built, the first thing that happened when that solution met with clients was this: I'd give them the short description I've written in the application, and they'd ask - Oh, but does it have to do just that?
Without the application, there wouldn't have been the short description, without which there wouldn't have been the useful client feedback...So, again: do it for yourself, not for the approval.
From everything you've described, it seems the company is structurally built so that you would be on a need-to-know basis. I'm going to use the analogy of horse blinders: processes around teams have been built so that ICs would focus on their tickets, just as you describe. This is not an act of malice - in a company this big, to steer the ship in any one way, you don't want noise coming from half your workforce, nothing would ever get done...
But it does mean that all the gaps you are describing are, in many ways, there by design. So going against them is going against the grain of the organization. I think it generally helps to bring something to the table. A point of view on something external to work that could add value inside it. In many ways, though, it still requires hustle, in the sense of reaching out to people and creating opportunities.
For example, you might take an interest in a certain type of antipatterns, and want to propagate the knowledge internally about it, and how to resolve it. (I'll assume the company doesn't actively seek to cultivate this anti-pattern deliberately. You never know.) You might say, oh, I can put together a colloquium about it. So you find the person in the org who's in charge of the events, and talk to the person who books the rooms, and talk to people around you to get ideas on how to promote it internally...you get the drift, it's not all that different to doing these things outside a company. (Except the part where you risk treading on more toes.)
One book that's really useful for just about anything is "The Goal". It teaches you to think in terms of processes, bottlenecks and constraints. With this perspective, you learn to look at the work you and others do not as a series of discrete tasks, but as part of a flow of production. It broadens the perspective on the types of questions you can ask.
But that's the thing: I wasn't looking for this, and even having found it, I won't bother looking at "the competition". In my mind I don't even see "missing features" because I have zero awareness of what features could be.
I'll be honest, would I pay for it? Probably not, because I already pay Spotify. But I did look you up on LinkedIn earlier today, so as a calling card it works.
And, judging by the parent comment, you clearly have a knack for marketing it, which tends to be the differentiating factor...
The label, like any label, is a tool, it's not who you are. It might be a good tool for you to better understand yourself (your struggles, your preferences), but still not be a great tool for others to understand and communicate with you.
For one, unless people have had direct experience with spectrum diagnosis, I think most still think of autism as the extreme end of the spectrum, of severe disability. For another, the label itself doesn't offer any knowledge of what to do differently.
In my mind, there are two things that you can do that might help:
First, it helps other people understand better when you make it about vulnerability. When you say things like "I dislike crowded spaces, it stresses me out." or "It takes me a little longer to come up with a retort, I've always been this way" it does exactly what you want: allows you to be your authentic self in a social way. Everyone has things that are outside their comfort zone, so being honest about yours is very relatable.
Second, you mention people "viewing hints of antisocial behavior". It's very challenging - to yourself and to other people in the situation - to be both "social" and "antisocial" at the same time. Social behavior requires effort from everyone. That's why advice columns have always existed, that's why there are so many self help books. Recognize that, as a baseline, practically everyone is walking around with some internal sense of inadequacy, and that in social situations most everyone puts on a front. Granted, most will understand the codes to putting on the front better than you. But the effort is there.
Which is to say, if you decide you are going to be in a social situation, there isn't a way to square the circle, be anti-social and have it glide. But you can manage the effort to your capacity: step aside, limit the time, set boundaries - whatever works. It can help to know that really everyone else is doing it too.
I'm sorry you feel so scared. Even if the fears aren't real, they feel real, and our body responds to them as if they were real. So your fears may be irrational, but the pain is very real.
I think the first thing worth saying is that, in my experience, this anxiety is more common than you'd think. The common narrative is that a young man (and it's always a man, right?) has only a few short years to make it big before it becomes clear to the world they're worthless. Never mind that zero data backs this up, this is about narrative, and storytelling always trumps data.
So you come out of college, you've taken two breaths, got some kind of job, you're 24 and time is running out. Naturally, you begin to question everything you've done up to this point, and feel you have one last ditch to fix it...or else.
The thing to understand is that this is not life. This is not how life works. This is a story that is so evidently fictional, that the only thing stopping you from seeing it is sheer panic.
You say you're scared for your future in software engineering. I am assuming you see, right now, a future you want in software engineering? (Because maybe you don't actually want it, just feel it's 'the path' to somewhere?)
Because if you do want to be in software engineering, school is not the fix. Learning and doing is the fix. (I am massively formally educated in CS. And I still stand by everything I just said.)
Life is long - especially from where you're standing now. You've just started. You're not doomed. If you lose your job, then you'll have lost your job. You may be out of a job for a while, and then you find another job. And then you leave that one, because you got a better one. You may get an opportunity to relocate and seize that. You may meet someone and decide it's a good idea to move halfway around the world. All along, you're picking up skills and know how. If you're even just a bit methodic about building up your skills, you'll find that jus five years down the line, you already know some actually useful stuff.
According to the latest Stackoverflow developer survey, 40% of developers use React, well above any other web framework. (42% for "professional developers").
It doesn't answer to your question, but it does answer to mine on these flexes in HN around niche frameworks and the difficulty of putting them into context.
I'm glad people are working on alternative solutions, and maybe ten years from now everyone will be using something else. But right now, 235 MB is an awfully small price to pay for something that just works, especially as a lot of it doesn't actually show up in deployment.
I'm surprised no one has pointed the obvious, which is using chatGPT as a coding buddy. I've done pair programming with developers who were much more capable than I was, so can compare the experience, and I have to say - it works just as well.
The solutions it offers are not infallible; when it comes to pair programming, that's a feature not a bug. Often times the solution will emerge only through the back and forth. But it does a tremendous job of helping locate local bugs, introduce functionalities you may not be familiar with etc. etc.
There was a system like that. Roll up, roll up, I'll treat you to a story:
It all started in 1957, with the Sputnik.
The US was entirely taken by surprise. The belief that the Russians were way ahead instigated an internal crisis, which, in turn, led the US to re-evaluate its national maths curriculum. Thus was born a think tank called the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG). They developed a radical reform in mathematics education known as 'New Math'.
This was rolled out nationally, to great criticism. The teachers were ill prepared and the parents felt clueless. Look it up, there were 'Peanuts' strips from the period mocking it.
Now, New Maths focused initially on the early years, but then, in the mid '60s came a second round, and one specific initiative was the Secondary School Mathematics Curriculum Improvement Study (SSMCIS), and the guy who heads it happened to be a professor at Columbia University Teachers College. This last tiny fact probably means exactly zero to you, but it is central to why I even know all this stuff.
Anyways...The program's signature goal was to create a unified treatment of mathematics, so that instead of studying the normal curriculum you'd basically study maths the way you're taught it at university: set theory, group theory, axioms proofs and logic, all the way up to calculus. The programme was intended for grades 7 through 12, and was rolled out initially in the NY area and then later in select schools in other affluent cities in the states. It only ever targeted the top 15-20 students in the a class body. That was for sure the right call - this ties to your question, so more on that in a minute.
Eventually two things happened: one, the programme ran out of funding. Two, by the mid-seventies there was a massive backlash against New Maths and the US decided maybe it's okay to just leave it, since the Russians didn't end up winning the space race after all.
I would have known diddly squat about this whole affair were it not for a curious corollary. In 1953 one very specific individual happened to be on a mission in New York. He was a former Russian Jew who studied maths in Canada, served in WWII for the US military and eventually made it to Israel. He was an educator and had somehow caught on to what was happening in Teachers College, and upon his return to Israel, he started devising maths curriculums and translating the original SSMCIS textbooks. This was now dubbed 'The Columbia Programme'.
Fast forward almost 40 years later. In a way I've never managed to uncover, that programme survived, and was still being taught in one of Israel's gifted programmes. I entered my first maths lesson at seventh grade never realizing just how much this would end up influencing the person I'd become. Our textbooks were literally photocopies of the typewritten texts. The teachers has added to it bits of the regular curriculum plus more practice exercises, which the original textbooks lacked, but they left most of it as is.
In the first three years, no one in the class was allowed to drop out and take 'regular' maths. For many, even in a cohort that was already pre-screened for academic achievement, this was a struggle. For sure, once highschool rolled along, anyone who hated it could switch back to the regular national curriculum.
Of the people who stayed, nearly everyone went on to study Maths, Physics or Computer Science to graduate level. This tended to happen in the years above and below as well. Over the years, though, the programme got smaller and smaller. I'm not sure it still exists.
To your question:
You absolutely CAN get highschool students to leave secondary school with advanced-undergraduate level of mathematical maturity. (And, BTW, the Russians are still ahead there...) But you can only do it for a small minority. Not because of elitism, but because most people aren't a good fit for this path.
At the time I intended to write up all of this into a nonfiction essay. But other things took greater priority, and I just left it there. In a way, it's been nice telling this story here.
My perspective here is shaped by two things: One, my kids are a little older than yours (so I've seen a little further ahead), and the experience to have changed up my career not through promotions but through upskilling.
Prioritize spending time with your kids. You already know that you will never get that time back, but what you don't realize is how much you'll value in retrospect having spent that time.
Career advancement doesn't happen because you put in 20% more hours. It just doesn't. No one appreciates you more because of doing 'more of the same'. In each of the jobs I've had, I look back, and some of my former colleagues are doing pretty much the same thing for a little bit more money. Some get promoted, not everyone. MUCH WORSE is, in having spent all this time doing 'the job', windows have closed to do anything else.
Real leaps happen when you're able to be X but then suddenly also Y. This means upskilling. Finishing your regular tasks a little early means nothing; automating your tasks means a radically different state.
The great thing is, there is more time than you think. People think their careers are set by the time they hit their late 30s. But for many others, that's when things get exciting.
Grandiose, large-scale automation has to start with a simple system that just works and is miles better than what it is replacing. To shrug off how AI changes the act of coding is, in my mind, to miss everything that matters about this technology.
When I use it, I'm in two halves. One part is engaged in the task itself (whatever I happen to be building). The other part is observing why the process feels comparatively so much better.
I was fortunate enough to become friends with a Japanese person in my community this past year, and I had the joy of experiencing the everyday quality of Japanese aesthetics. It was inspiring. It goes well beyond choice of décor or clothing. It's a profound commitment to aesthetics, one I struggle to express using English vocabulary. It's like, if something isn't thought out - why even bother?
If it's a real problem for real people (and not an imagined one for imagined B2Bs), what are they doing right now? Is it good enough?
Why do you, of all people, want to solve this problem, of all problems? What's the fire emanating from inside?
With good answers to these questions you'll find it a whole lot easier talking with clients. If the problem is real and painful enough for them to have cobbled together a solution, they won't care if you made your software out of matchsticks.
It seems like you measure "friendship" not by the time spent with them when you go to events or in school, but what happens afterwards. In other words, you are discounting to zero the moments that are actually happening in your life, for an imagined future of what a friendship might turn out to be. But life only ever happens moment to moment. That time that you spend with people at an event, that IS the thing.
There is no "friendship certificate": some people, you'll only spend ten minutes with; some, you might spend an afternoon with; others you might end up seeing once a week for a term. You might date a girl for a fortnight, or a couple of months, and then break up and never see each other again. It's ALL GOOD.
If I understand correctly, none of the above would qualify in your eyes as "real friendship", only the deep, deep kind. You might find it helpful to learn about Dunbar's number, and the size of the model's concentric social circles. Most people end up with 1-2 very close friends (possibly including their spouse). That is the outcome over a lifetime of making connections. Popular culture markets this idea that we should all be carousing with a tightly knit group of friends - no statistical social evidence bears this out.
When sinking into deep analysis about all your self-perceived inadequacies, your attention beam is directed inwards. That's unhealthy. When it's directed OUT, into the world, it takes you out of your head, and lets you see that everyone, every single one (person or otherwise), is struggling in their own way. Everyone's got a thing. Looking out builds empathy and kindness and affection towards things that make you happy, and gazing inwards makes you miserable.
You are surrounded by people in school, and are at a stage in life where you get to be interested in whatever. Any experience you have, even if it doesn't lead to lifelong friendships, is worthy in the space of time it occupies.
Throughout my undergrad I had friends come and go. I'm not in touch with anyone I met at Uni during those years. It doesn't make the actual time spent with these people any less special.