Yes. I got laid off from Capital One at 3 years of experience in 2025 and I found myself either competing with laid off Amazon employees with 4+ years of experience or applying to junior roles and competing with new grads.

I ended up sidestepping the whole market and now I make $75k NZD, so I'm not sure who won in the end.

The best managers I’ve ever known were some guys who came over to Amazon from Capital One. They were deeply embedded into the EC2 infrastructure systems, including the team I was on — EC2-Chronos. We were responsible for managing all NTP time sync across all of Amazon and AWS, in every single region, availability zone, and datacenter. That includes the isolated and classified regions.

That was also one of the best teams of technical people I’ve ever known.

Sadly, there was also the Amazon and AWS S-Team leadership, who came up with things like RTO and mandatory co-location with your manager. They lost a lot of good people, and I think that was entirely intentional.

This is all a bit out there, but I moved to New Zealand on a working holiday visa, and within two weeks of settling down in a particular spot (after a two month road trip), I had two job offers, one very relaxed retail, and one tech-adjacent for a small civil engineering firm. I'm making about a quarter the take home I did in the US, but I've cut my expenses a lot (bought my car in cash, carpool to work to save gas money, rent a room in a house instead of a whole apartment, no food delivery), and I'm using this time to reevaluate my values and work on building a lifestyle that does not rely on earning a six figure salary.

My plan when I return is to get my EMT and moonlight as an ER tech while doing prerequisites for PA school or maybe medical physics.

One of my biggest regrets is not availing myself of an NZ Working Holiday visa in 2014.

This is really a grass is greener scenario because I just left there (NZ) along with a large amount of people I know because of the bad economy.

I heard a lot of doom and gloom about the economy before I came here, but finding a job proved to be straightforward. The pay leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm not intending to extend my visa because of that.

Caveat: I'm not living in a typical region of the country, I'm in Wānaka, which is easier to find a job in but also more expensive than most of the country.

I’ve been there but I figured those were all tourist jobs.

I guess I didn't make the distinction between "any job" and "any job in my field." It's very easy to get offers for "any job" in Wanaka on a working holiday visa, but to get a job that's even vaguely tech adjacent here, especially on a WHV, you really have to luck out, and even then it is much lower paid than it would be in the US.

NZ is really greener though. Economy is shite everywhere until further notice.

Just any relaxed job in NZ will not let you extend the stay beyond 3 months, no? The employers who are employment visa approved are milk-cow-bank-insurance companies very difficult to get into, not to mention the overall crisis right now.

Ah... it's working holiday visa, I never qualify for these...

I moved from the US to New Zealand. I spend a lot of time hiking, and it is very unsettling for the sky to be so unfamiliar. Orion is the only constellation I'm good at picking out here, and it is upside down. No Polaris, obviously.

I spent a week in Queenstown during a new moon, and I almost did not come back home. Being able to image the Magellanic clouds was a bucket list item for this Northerner. NZ is definitely top of my list of relocation places.

I can't believe how many mind blowing targets they have access to compared to us, feels like a different world. I wonder if they are as jealous of our side as we are of theirs...I doubt it! Will have to either travel, move, or use remote facilities to image, but that feels like cheating.

I think it's like anything else in that you take for granted what is readily available yet crave what is not. It is definitely a compelling factor in traveling. The sky is really big, and it would take an entire life time to really view everything in one's own hemisphere let alone the other one. I can't wait for the Rubin telescope to complete its first full sky survey. That'll be a really nice VR experience mapped onto a sphere that allows incredible amount of zooming.

Tangentially related, but I'm curious. How does bilingualism in Montreal work out in practice? I know most of the rest of Quebec is very Francophone, but Montreal is more bilingual.

I've seen some interesting jobs pop up in Montreal and I'm starting to take French classes with the intent to possibly move there, but I'm not clear how much there's still the option to work in English in the city.

Sorry if it's a silly question, I'm Canadian by descent but have never lived in Canada, so I'm out of the loop on a lot of stuff.

I'm not the best person to ask, but the last I heard, New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province. The rest are either French or English only. (It was a news story when the premier of Manitoba spoke in French in his legislature a few weeks back).

That said, I live in Alberta now and normal serious parents tend to send their kids to French immersion. It's a leg up if you are going to get a government job, and it is pretty cool. That's not to say that John Q. Public is going to be happy if you are going to talk to him in French, but I think with the explosion of other languages in Alberta, the regressive types now are probably more accepting of it than they were before.

(Again this is just my observation, N=1, etc..)

> That said, I live in Alberta now and normal serious parents tend to send their kids to French immersion.

Not really true, there is usually a very limited number of seats in french immersion. In the school district where I live, its a lottery system of who gets to go into french immersion as there are limited seats. Also you're implying that parents are not doing a good job if they don't send their kids to french immersion which is patently false.

> It's a leg up if you are going to get a government job, and it is pretty cool

In certain positions in the federal government, possibly. I know lots of people who work in provincial governments that don't know any french, and have never been required to know any.

My extended family rents a beach cottage for one week (saturday-saturday or sunday-sunday) every summer at a family oriented beach in North Carolina. We have done this at the same beach since the early 90s. There are local vacation rental agencies that have offered one week rentals with various packages of linens under similar terms and seasonal pricing for decades. Over the last few years, fewer and fewer houses are available directly from these rental companies and more and more are only listed on Airbnb or VRBO, with nightly pricing that is much higher than the weekly pricing from the local rental agencies.

The vacation rental companies offer very consistent cleaning services and local contacts for any issues with the house, and were relatively cheap because they were typically able to fill these houses with weeklong rentals all summer.

With Airbnb and VRBO, sometimes they are just a marketplace for the exact same rental companies that already existed, under the same terms and conditions, but a higher nightly price, and sometimes they are far less professional operations, and it's not easy to tell which is which when you are initially paying.

Last summer we rented a house directly through a vacation rental company that was also listed on VRBO for a third of the nightly price it was listed on VRBO for. We're dreading the day when the only option left is VRBO.

We did the same with a vacation rental in Hawaii this year. The properties in the neighborhood are owned by individual investors as vacation rentals, but they ultimately contract with a handful of full-service vacation rental agencies. Seeking out the agencies’ websites was worth a 25% discount over renting the same property on AirBnB.

Exact same setup here though I realize I didn't quite state it directly, the cottages are owned by individuals but all rented out through the agencies.

We got a much steeper discount, I'm assuming because we were solidly in shoulder season (a couple weeks after kids return to school in North Carolina, and during hurricane season), which the vacation rental company accounts for in their seasonal pricing, but VRBO didn't seem to. At this beach in particular, it is a summer vacation for families and you get a steep drop in prices if you don't have to schedule around school holidays, but VRBO didn't price that in in the same way that the local companies do.

Yes, for those without children to schedule around, vacationing just before or after other people’s children’s school vacations is the primary trick.

It’s absolutely insane how much you have to pay for all the advertising, network effects, and exposure these platforms grant you.

Would be so much better if every region just started their own again and you just looked up property managers in the yellow pages haha

All holiday rental platforms charge somewhere between 17-22%. Responsibility of a platform is zero. As a guest all you can do if something goes wrong is to shorten the stay after hanging 1 hour on the customer service phone line. Everyone would be better off with some local message boards and visitors taking few extra steps to find holiday rental.

That's hasn't been my experience at all with at least some local rental companies. A popular vacation area near me has a local rental company with significant market share and they have a local office and local staff that can come out to help with things like maintenance issues.

I've used them a lot and have found them very responsive with none of the Airbnb type horror stories. For vacations where you want a house instead of a hotel room, companies like this are a VAST improvement over Airbnb because they offer the type of local service that Airbnb will never be able to do at scale.

In the states part of doctor compensation is based on patient satisfaction surveys and rates of complaints. People are very quick to complain about not getting what they want out of an appointment (which is often pain or anxiety relief) and much slower to complain about the long term consequences of these prescriptions, which happen often, but not to most people who are initially prescribed these drugs.

I've been on klonopin for sleep and prescribed xanax or ativan for acute anxiety at a couple points over the years, and never had any trouble getting off them. I usually stayed at the lowest dose and often skipped doses, and I'm searching my brain for any memories of withdrawal symptoms, and I don't remember ever having any.

I would bet that more patients have my experience with these drugs than have the long term addiction and severe withdrawal, and doctors have often passed people on before the consequences start stacking up.

I still think they should be prescribed extremely sparingly, because even in my experience with them, they didn't really do too much that some running and yoga didn't do, and they come with much bigger risks.

There are other drugs since the 90s that are effective for anxiety, but they're either way more subtle and take longer to work than benzos (SSRIs, SNRIs, lavender pills, buspar and derivatives) or don't have the same withdrawal syndrome but come with a much worse package of side effects (quetiapine and other antipsychotics).

I have had clinically significant anxiety since I was a young child, and in the end, treating other mental illnesses effectively (I developed bipolar 1 in my late teens) and exercising very regularly seems to pull my baseline level of neuroticism down to within the normal range. If I get good cardio in, usually an outdoor run, 3 days a week, I feel normal.

SSRIs, SNRIs and I think buster do have withdrawal symptoms that can be as severe as benzos.

I took buspar for like 4 years because it basically didn't scramble my brains the way other anti-depressants worked and I could say I was 'cooperating' with treatment -despite getting no benefit from it.

I had no issues getting off of it; not to say that other people don't either -they very well might.

I'd say a mild benzo withdrawal and a severe SSRI withdrawal can overlap, but SSRI withdrawal doesn't give people seizures or last for years.

I was able to edit this to fix it, but the geography of New Zealand page had a reference to Southland having a "tundra like climate." Invercargill, which is in Southland, actually has a temperate oceanic climate and a record low of -9C or 15F.

I find wikipedia is really vulnerable to Gell-Mann Amnesia where any article about a topic on which you are very familiar has blatantly incorrect information, but then you open a different one and read it as though it were true. Of course this is true of other sources, famously newspapers, but I think wikipedia is more vulnerable, especially on topics that are very emotionally salient to its power editors.

If you had to get in a fight to edit that, it really is the height of wikipedianism.

I can totally see how this kind of question would intersect with climate activism though.

I didn't really have to fight to edit it, but it had been in the article for many years, despite being blatantly false (tundras have mean temperatures below 0 C for 6+ months out of the year, while coastal Southland has a mean temperature of 5 C in July, the coldest month). My best guess is some kid thought that Southland was cold and knew that tundras were cold, and added a sentence to the article comparing Southland to a tundra.

Whenever I catch something like this, I wonder how many things like this are in there that I don't notice. And this one isn't even really touching anything that is controversial.

It is probably a reference to upland areas of Southland. Some of those do qualify as tundra although most of it is forested.

It specifically said coastal southland before I edited it, it would've worked to change it from "tundra like climate in coastal southland" to "tundra like climate in apline regions of the south island" instead, you're right.

I think the Southland reference is to upland areas. Invercargill itself is temperate (but often cold) and has a lot of trees, as does Stewart Island to the south. I've camped in both places.

N of 1, but I had serious low drive/motivation side effects from Wegovy. Everything enjoyable became less enjoyable, from alcohol, to running, and after a couple of months, even getting out of bed. I lost weight slower than I had previously with old school calorie counting (most of which I have kept off to this day). Within a couple weeks of getting off it I was back to normal.

My conspiracy theory is that a lot of people must be getting this global lowered reward sensitivity from GLP-1s but are ignoring the negative sides of that effect because they like being skinny.

I felt something like that affect, though not very pronounced, for the first couple weeks. Since then I've felt completely normal. Life is way more fun now.

Caveat: I've not been on GLP-1s.

Sounds quite a bit like when I started the probiotics I've been on for quite a few many years now: When I started these ones, I actually started feeling worse than before. Ultimately though, after IIRC about two weeks of feeling worse than before, things got better.

I started out being lethargic all the time (in hindsight: way, way too many years, I just didn't put 2+2 together on multiple symptoms!). Migraine headaches from certain foods as well as any amount of alcohol and even non-alcoholic beer for example, essentially anything that produces histamines (which certain foods as well as alcohol consumption does).

After the probiotics "fought and won the battle" against whatever was inhabiting my intestines before that, I felt totally fine. No more lethargy. Could eat all the histamine rich foods in the world (Roquefort, here I come again, you're soooo tasty! Maybe with a glass of red wine too) and be fine. Never looked back. Life is way more fun now.

I might want to get on GLP-1s to not like alcohol and too much Roquefort now, while still not being lethargic, lol!

One thing that colors how I view it is that I am more in the "would like to lose 15 lbs" space than the "needs to lose 50 lbs" space at this point in my life. I have a BMI of 27 and ran a half marathon right when I first tried Wegovy, and I already weigh 30 lbs less than I did at my 2021 peak. My A1c is 4.6. I actually recently reached out to my doctor about trying a different GLP-1 and she told me that given my labs and that I haven't been gaining weight she doesn't feel right prescribing me one.

So I am a lot more picky about side effects than I would be if I seriously needed to lose weight or had diabetes.

>But my BMI was like 39, and now it is ~25. My blood test results the last couple of years have been phenomenal

If you’d lost the weight without GLP-1s, your blood test results would still have been phenomenal. Most of the effect you are seeing is the result of lowered bodyfat% through calorie deficit.

now, in your case calorie deficit comes from GLP1 use but in others case it can come from sustainable dieting which is little more tricky execute properly than just injecting a drug.

> If you’d lost the weight without GLP-1s

I've lost the weight several times over the last 30 years. The test results were never so dramatically improved. Your hypothesis may be wrong.

Honestly I was finding the last 15 lbs to be stubborn, and had a borderline mild sleep apnea test that meant my doctor offered it and my insurance would cover it. I also wanted to see what all the hype was about.

That's fair.

I forgot about sleep apnea. I was struggling with adjusting to CPAP, and never really succeeded. After losing a fair amount using tirzepatide, I did a repeat sleep test and my sleep doc gave me the green light to put the CPAP in storage.

In the end, a year after the borderline sleep apnea test, we optimized my thyroid medication dosage (I had hypothyroidism the whole time but my dose was too low) and I went on a multivitamin, and after a couple of months, the sleep issues that were why I'd gotten that test in the first place went away. And, it's easier to lose weight when my thyroid is properly treated.

I was beating my head against those sleep issues for years, and had multiple doctors sit down and tell me that I probably "just had a high sleep need." In the end, I'm not sure whether it was the thyroid or some vitamin deficiency (before the multivitamin I was on iron, C, and D separately), but it turned out to be very treatable.

You're not the only person to report anhedonia. This shouldn't be downvoted.

> My conspiracy theory is that a lot of people must be getting this global lowered reward sensitivity from GLP-1s but are ignoring the negative sides of that effect because they like being skinny.

Possibly some of them could also be unintentionally countering the impacts through things like self-medicating with caffeine.

I have no personal experience with GLP-1s but suddenly quitting caffeine after decades of daily use was pretty eye-opening in terms of how much it was boosting my baseline mood. And I'm not talking about being cranky for a couple of days after quitting, I'm talking about a very noticeable sustained change from when I was a frequent caffeine user to when I stopped having it altogether.

Seconding this without straying too far from the topic.

My entire life I have been underweight and also ridiculously hooked on caffeine. At work I would easily go through 5-8 cups of coffee in a day.

I quit caffeine to become a parent a few years ago and suddenly I am able to put on fat and muscle so much easier.

I think the fact that 95% of our society consumes one of the best weight loss drugs (caffeine) anyway really skews a substantial portion of the data.

Speaking of which, nicotine is another effective weight loss drug. I have to wonder if some portion of the increase in median BMI (ignoring the morbidly obese) in America over the last 50 years is it becoming less socially acceptable to chain smoke.

Looks like it's typical to gain 5-10lbs when quitting smoking.

Edit: pulled up the data and there's been a 30lb increase in median weight in America, so (loosely guessing) the smoking effect is probably somewhere between 5 and 10% of that change.

> Speaking of which, nicotine is another effective weight loss drug.

Nicotine is a very useful drug that is sadly so very, very bad for you.

It has weight loss impacts, acts as a stimulant and is actually one of the better non-prescribed treatments for ADHD (as well as being super associated with schizophrenia).

After I got my ADHD diagnoses I noted that this was always called out in the literature, and I have been addicted to nicotine for the past 25 years or so (on a vape now, which appears to significantly reduce some of the bad side effects, but is still probably not good for me).