I will humbly give my POV on this. I also never understood the VC verbiage until after I “launched”. Now here is what I understand after coming forward with a business idea: the formula for “success” is being able to “uncover” a market request for a product/service and SELL that product/service to them. In this regard idea = market_need = make_something_people_want. Therefore, to me ideas AND execution are EVERYTHING. I think what people mean is that “talking” about an idea is not sufficient. I strongly disagree that ideas are cheap, as I disagree that execution is a given. I believe ideas are oxygen, execution is hydrogen, what you want is water…

Fun! I trolled your bit and it froze. To the first question I replied: “Hell I know??? You are the consultant!”

Worry about what other people think

So from the looks of it you are in a negative mind frame. Use a professional mental coach (therapist, of course, not one of those "gurus") to help you reframe. It is never too late nor you are never not good enough. But you have to get to a point where you really believe it, not just superficially. A well structured mental coaching development path will help you reframe. Use the right tool, get into therapy.

So I am contributing work to a product that is solving this exact problem. Would you mind giving it a look and see if it fits your requirements? www.nuvolaris.io

This. FFS who wants to stay home to live and work!?!? I don’t understand WFH. the right way is to have better public transport and cheaper housing, not secluded lives.

I agree with you that better public transportation and cheaper housing would be a respectable path towards a better society in general.

However, please don't state that "the right way is to have... not secluded lives." Some of us absolutely enjoy the seclusion, especially this WFH Alaskan.

“You do enjoy it…just like alcoholics enjoy alcohol.” I mean, assuming I’m reading this correctly, seriously? Let people enjoy their choices, and without pulling questionable comparisons out of thin air. Especially when we aren’t given complete context, as with parent. Don’t take one sentence and then turn around and say, “doesn’t sound healthy”.

The entire zeitgeist is that people are more and more isolated and lack a support network.

We can put 2 and 2 together and figure out that physical isolation in environment where people live far apart from each other and drive everywhere is... isolating?

And by the way, there are studies that show that even for introverts, socialization (even forced!) is ultimately good.

We're not made to sit alone in a room in the middle of nowhere. We were born in caves filled with our tribesfolk, dozens and dozens of people living together in small spaces.

Also, who said anything about alcoholics? Alcohol is just bad for you. Anything except for very small amounts has a ton of bad side effects. It's just "grandfathered in" (just like tobacco) and seen as socially acceptable.

> We're not made to sit alone in a room in the middle of nowhere.

You seem to be implying that people's social lives revolve around work. A lot of us prefer to spend that effort on family, friends, and community during the other 72 hours of the week we are free instead.

I'm 43. Doing things with coworkers isn't even remotely appealing as it was 20 years ago, because at the end of the day they are coworkers and not friends (usually).

> This. FFS....

Not this FFS.

Who says remote work means you have to stay home all the time? Stay home to work and make sure you leave at least once, ideally two or three times a day!

In the morning for a walk or workout or coffee break.

At lunch just to breath some air.

At 5PM[1] sharp laptops closed to reconnect with some of your favorite humans, not necessarily the same ones you live with.

[1]: or whatever hard stop you craft for yourself.

> secluded lives.

Remember that "pandemic remote work" is not at all normal remote work. I have a social life outside of my coworkers. I can work from places that aren't my home office - a cafe, a coworking space, whatever - even if it's just a couple hours to get out of the house.

It need not be seclusion.

> better public transport and cheaper housing

Yeah, well, no argument from me here.

> I have a social life outside of my coworkers.

This. Even before the pandemic, when I had to waste two hours a day, every day, to go sit my butt in my employer's chair, all my "social life" was strictly with people other than my coworkers.

So being able to get those two hours back, even if not all of them but every other day, is a net gain for me. I can go for a walk, lift some weights, space out on the couch, whatever. It's also much easier to not always eat the same plastic lunch every day, or have to prepare things that are easy to reheat in a microwave.

If you compare the economic costs of public transport and “cheaper” housing to WFH’s requirement of an internet connection, it’s much more cost effective to work from home. Now we could say that face-to-face interaction outweighs these costs economically, but you’d need the data, and at least in terms of commuting you’ll never beat the ecological footprint of not going anywhere.

Me?

Because "home", for me, while I've been working remotely since 1994, has been Indiana, to Puerto Rico, to Budapest. I go when I want, do a little schedule juggling maybe. And now I live in the tropics in the jungle on a mountain coffee farm - the best place to spend a global pandemic - and I still have an income.

I'll take my seclusion, thanks.

People aren't going to get better public transport or cheaper housing in the USA. I want to stay home and live and work. I've done it once before over a decade ago and doing it now as a result of the pandemic and I love it.

> People aren't going to get better public transport or cheaper housing in the USA.

Not with that attitude :-)

Wasn't the US about a "go getter" attitude? I'm not even an American, but that's the general perception.

This only makes sense if you were born and raised in San Francisco, Seattle, Milan, London, Dublin, Munchen, Berlin, Amsterdam or some other big tech city.

Otherwise your statement just doesn’t make sense.

In my current house, my commute would be 1 hour each way if I wasn't working from home. I'd be leaving early and getting home late. I'd have no time with my wife, son, pets. No time for housework/extra projects. I did this commute prior to having a kid and it worked then, but it wouldn't work now.

It'd also be nice if companies were forced to pay for time spent commuting

Obfuscating costs and increasing the complexity makes no sense.

Variable rate tolling on roads to disincentivize unnecessary travel by individual car makes more sense.

Then the companies will just tell you to suck it up and pay the tax yourself, or they'll find someone else.

And that someone else will also have to pay the tolls.

Therefore both employer and employee will be incentivized to locate in places with higher density housing to reduce costs.

So then their next move would be to mandate that you live within a certain commute range. I don't think we want that.

Then to compete we’d have to move more often and pay more for less space to live even closer to the office.

why? you chose to take the job far from your house.

if companies are forced to pay for the time commuting people will choose to live 20 hours away

Yes, I do, but that's probably because I am not the target audience of their product. My gut feeling is that the target customer are devops teams in scaleups

I feel you. As many here I failed to recognize burnout early enough to prevent total exhaustion. My experience (not a doc) is medication won’t help and ADHD seems to be a stereotypical American fixation almost like tomato sauce for us Italians. Call it for what it is and don’t blame yourself. The cure for burnout is change. Distance yourself from the source of discomfort, lay bricks or bag groceries for at least three months and it will go away. I am saying this because you said you cannot afford a vacation (not slouching on the couch, rather travel). Not sure my experience will help, but that’s my 2 cents.

To counter this, medication has helped me a lot, and I am able to get work done thanks to it.

Edo, what was it? For burnout or ADHD?

It was for ADHD. But I have had burnout as well, not a good combination to have.

It'a sunken cost effect at paly, little more than that. Oh, and parents pressure, least we forget the role of family. You can test my claim empirically by asking yourself: "are all college graduates I met more intelligent than me?". Admission test measure how well you can prepare for admission tests, nothing more. There are too many confounding factors and co-factors that play in the career of a relatively fresh semi-adult aged 17-18, that reducing it to a single number is just moronic or bad-faith utilitaristic escape route. Universities only care that you graduate so they can make money, therefore they use the simplest KPI to measure that. Let's not forget Universities are staffed with people and are a business.

It's unlikely to be a sunken cost fallacy.

You're technically right with "Admission test measure how well you can prepare for admission tests, nothing more.".

It's definitely not a silver bullet and doesn't assure success after admission. nonetheless, the ability to prepare for these tests is strongly correlated with success along this path.

If they can't be arsed to prepare for them they're unlikely to bother with studying either, making their admissions pointless too.

And if they attempted to prepare for the test but still failed... Then they're unlikely to be able to learn in the University setting either and should follow up on other avenues.

I’d trade coaching budget for company car any day. But as the old saying goes: “what if they leave after we train them”? Pls post here if you find a channel. I am also interested in that. I have (www.adplist.org)[www.adplist.org] but it’s more technical mentoring than anything else