Life: Drinking more water seems to help with night time sleep but not perfect

I still occasionally wake up in the middle of the night. Drinking more liquids throughout the day seem to help with my restless leg syndrome which in turn helps me sleep better. I definitely had more no-wake nights, and definitely better sleep nights even if I wake up.

Having good sleep habits is still good. Some days when I am too exhausted and I take a nap during the day, I have more difficulty staying asleep. Twice that I did this, I ended up just watching videos at night as lying there did not help at all. With nothing to do actually makes my body feel worse. Watching video distracts me from that feeling and I will eventually drift asleep.

I am not sure if I have insomnia as I usually don't have trouble going back to sleep. Majority of the time, I can just move to the couch and fall asleep. I haven't determined if it is because the couch is more firm or because it is cooler there.

In the past, I tend to sleep much better if I keep the windows open because it cooled my room. Recently, I cannot keep the windows open for reasons out of my control. I am also not sure if sleeping with a blanket helps, as I seem to also lose my blank for reasons out of my control. Although, maybe I can just use a second blanket. I do tend to kick my blanket and even my pillow so this may be a very difficult experiment.

Any case... for a period of time, sleeping was getting harder and my restless leg syndrome was getting pretty bad. Drinking more water does seem to significantly help. I have not been perfect and on/near days that I was more dehydrated (in hindsight), I did notice that I had more trouble sleeping.

How much is enough drinking? I typically can drink 3-4 cups a day on a good day. On bad days, I drink almost no cups of water. I do not drink alcohol often. On the couple days where I did drink a decent amount, I usually fall asleep pretty quickly but the quality of the sleep is not as good. I do get buzzed very easily but I don't get drunk easily. I also never had a hangover... not sure if that is related to me never having a headache. So not sure if my advice on drinking will help anyone else. I don't recall having much issue with restless leg syndrome so maybe having liquids help more with that and that in turns help me sleep uninterrupted, and somehow alcohol lowers the quality of my sleep.

Interview: Good or Bad? Google, Amazon, Microsoft brain-teaser interview questions

This is a good question to understand a candidate's ability to problem solve.

Super vague and opiniated history of question

Just historically, Google and Microsoft have asked these questions since 2000. And see how much they have grown since then. The extremely vague and generic macro outlook to me rather indicative that something was right during that period of time. My guess why this was more effective in the beginning because the people who wrote the questions knew why they were asking the question.

Now there are too many people who do not understand the intentions of the question.

Not For Interviewers

The biggest problem to these questions is the interviewer. Majority if not all interviewers do not even understand the intention of the question. The main reason is that interviewers just ask a list of questions that need to be answered. The company gives them the list, and they ask it. So like many other questions, they think the right answer is the correct answer.

I've interviewed with many companies who have asked these questions, and none knew the intention of the questions. I know this because I knew the answers to all of them. There were a couple new ones but they were far easier than FAANG. When I answer them, the interviewer are easily impressed and moves on. In many cases, I would even give them other questions I knew of and they would be even more impressed.

Even if the interviewer has some clue to the question, they have no way to score a candidate like they can with technical questions. Also interviewers are not hired to have problem solving skills, so how well can they judge another person's problem solving skills? 

So basically, this is not an interviewer question. This is a hiring manager's interview question to ask and only if the hiring manager understands why they are asking this question.

Why the question?

The point of the question is to understand the candidates problem solving skills. In my opinion, this is one of the most important skills I look for. The main reason is that technology is always changing and I can train information, but I cannot train (or at least have no time to train) problem solving skills. I am looking for the candidate's ability to take the problem, break it down, ask questions, etc. 

The question is actually meant to be nearly impossible to solve for most candidates. That is probably why arbitrary questions became a thing too (like "how many tennis balls fits in a jumbo jet"). Because everyone became so obsessed with the actual answer than the reason why they asked it. And knowing the answer is quite useless for software engineer employees. If there's an answer, it is cheaper for the company just to buy the answer. What the company needs is an employee that can solve the problem that doesn't have an answer to it.

Bad Hires from Traditional Interviews

One example in my life on this difference was this one time that we hired a highly certified employee. He had many, many Microsoft/Cisco certificates. He had a lot of work experience. His projects were never completed. Near the end of his employment, the owner had me help him with a project and he couldn't tell the difference between a class and an object. I told the owner that he wasn't worth the time to train. We could hire a college grad that could do more.

Another example was a college "graduate" that was tasked to setup a computer with Windows. He was provided an install CD. He installed, then got stuck with a video driver. A bit odd for him to ask for help with this, but I answered his question. 6 hours later, my colleague calls me over and we find that he never installed the video driver because he didn't which video driver to install. The PC case was already open, and I just google the video card name and it was the first result that comes up. My colleague told me that he just told our boss to let him go. I learned that he had actually asked everyone how to install the video driver and still couldn't figure it out. We also found out later that he didn't actually graduate but dropped out of school.

Another example was a transfer from another department. He came with a lot of recommendations from his previous group. He was also very good at talking and making others feel good. Although he had the credentials, he was not able to do anything on his own. Every task had to be spelled out, even if it was a repeated task. Not only did it have to be explicitly written down, he had terrible attention to details. This was almost clear to me within the first 5 minutes of interacting with him for the first time.

My final example was a person that we actually hired before and basically fired for incompetence. I did my best to give her the benefit of the doubt. Even then, she was only able to accomplish two tasks of thousands of tasks. The two tasks being to copy a file to another server (which she actually copied to the wrong server... twice). I even had her screen share and watch her do it incorrectly, then corrected her (just to make sure she had access). At the end, I had her delete the file and have her do it again on her own. She was never able to do this for an entire week with a daily reminder. She was hired to be a procedure manager and she could not even copy files (she had plenty of tasks that was to set up meetings or talk to people but none of those were ever done).

My point with all this was that they all passed the interview. I did not interview any of them. To this day, I have no clue how they even lasted 5 minutes. I think firing people is harder than rejecting, and I wanted to fire all of them within minutes. I think the brain-teaser or open-ended questions are great to weed these people out.

Many candidates that I have recommended are either the longest tenured, promoted, or very well-liked.

Other Questions

These brain-teaser / open-ended questions should not be the only question to determine a candidate. This is just to understand the candidates ability to problem solve. 

One type of candidates that do well but are toxic to the company are the ones that are very smart but also have very big egos. So it is important to ask other questions that will determine their ability to work with others. In general, you do not want those candidates. If you do, then you need to make sure they and your existing staff have the right environments to handle such situations.

Another type are those that often cannot stop asking questions or only sees problems. The main problem with these candidates is that they analyze too long. A group could afford maybe one of these candidates if they are very good at identifying critical issues, but it is equally important to have someone that counter-balances to make sure things still move forward.

Reference

https://douglastclee.blogspot.com/2013/02/interview-oddball-and-riddle-questions.html

- Almost seems like I contradict myself here but not really. Will have to review that post in more detail.

Scammish: Samsung S20 FE wifi calling is so faulty

I don't know if this is a Samsung phones thing as I had similar experience with Samsung S7 and S8. For whatever reason, I've always had issues with sending out text messages over wifi calling. For another stupid reason, I always live in a unit that has 0 cell reception so I am forced to use wifi calling.

After I send a text message, the progress circle just keeps spinning. I can even receive text messages while it is spinning over several minutes. I can also surf the internet. Eventually, the message will even get sent with maybe 80% success rate. The other 20%, I just resend and it'll attempt again with about the same success rate.

What is even worse is if I send multiple messages to the same person, the order of the messages is maybe in the correct order about 50% of the time. So the more messages I send, the more likely messages will be out of order.

Not only is it sometimes out of order, the history display of messages of both incoming and outgoing is not the same as the receivers. I've had friends send me screenshots and our messages do not match.

I doubt it is the carrier as I've had this issue with Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. I've restarted my phone, restarted wifi (over multiple phones and multiple places), and other online attempts. My friends' phones (iphones and non-samsung) appear to work fine.

Once I connect to normal cell reception data, the messages are nearly instantly completed.

Thought Experiment: Why more good than evil, good over evil, good triumphs evil

The age-old question of whether we are born good, evil, or neutral is one that we ask ourselves some time in our lives as we attempt to figure out who we are and understand others. Depending on what recently occurred, I have swung through each of the options in the past.

For a long while, I have believed that the question is not really a valid question because it was too muddled by what each term meant. Somethings are good to some, evil to others, and lastly the rest do not care at all. But because of all the superhero movies that have been coming out for the last decade, this has gotten me to thinking why does "good" triumph over "evil".

And in my limited reality, I feel that people are good. There is a lot evil events in the world, but when compared to the mass of the people, it really is the smaller percentage. But even then, I think people want to be good so there are even fewer people who are evil to be evil.

I think this is evolutionary because it is easier to survive by being good even though sometimes we believe that good people finish last, but rather good people stay alive whether it is physical, financial, or social. It is easier to be good because we do not have to put as much effort in being helpful to others than being evil.

To be evil takes a lot of energy and time. On the basic level of just pure evil, people seamlessly group together to fight a common enemy. This leaves the evil people who need to fit in with the good people.

These people then need to understand two worlds, one is the lie that they live and the other is hiding their true intent. This also scales down to smaller evil deeds like corruption, self-promotion, or even white-lies.

Even just braving a smile but dislike the person underneath takes more energy than just ignoring the person. If we could tell the difference, we would prefer to be with the person who is more forgiving.

I believe that simply by having good intent is natural because it is fundamental to our ability to survive because we do not waste as much energy as evil people. This would also explain why many of the unsuspecting evil people are highly intelligent. I get tired just remembering who doesn't like to hang out or work with other people. Many times, I believe that I only seem intelligent because I do not waste a lot of time with rumors where I tried to keep up but I became physically drained. I really do feel dumber as I figure things out because it always seem others seem to pick up on social cues and little tidbits so much easier than I do.

So although I have had some evil thoughts, I am probably too stupid to be any good at it. Unfortunately, this does not cover where my good intentions may clash with someone else's good intention. For example, the US presidential election nominee selections.

Well, it kind of does but not as cleanly defined as the prior examples. Although I believe people are well-intentioned, this area points out how lazy we can be. If we believe someone else will do something or if we do not understand which option is correct, we do nothing. On the extreme end, we have the capacity to become silent witnesses where we do not call the police even though a major crime occurred in a somewhat public area believing that someone else would have called it in. On a lesser end, we do not report misbehavior especially in a work-place because we are afraid of our social status of being a tattle-tale.

So the majority of people agree on good-intentions when life and death is the ultimate result, but when it comes to evil activities that are not life and death then our good-intentions become fuzzy even when we know what is right and wrong. If we add in evil activities where people believe they won't be caught or punished, this becomes even more dicey (like speeding when driving).

Then what is good people? Those who have more good-intentions than evil ones? Those who only have good intentions? Ultimately, I think the general population are misguided well-intentioned people. Our conflict is primarily on short-term gains versus long-term gains. Basically, when is good-enough, enough?

My Thoughts: Who Should Give Salary Range in Interview? IMO Companies

Yes, I am very biased as I have only been an employee. And I want to believe that even if I were a manager, providing the salary would be in my best interest too. But until that day happens, my thoughts will always be biased.

First, there is only one reason for a company to request the interviewer's salary range. Purely a power trip to see how much fear someone has in not getting the opportunity. Sure there are plenty of blogs and articles about psychological analysis for one's ego.

Because if the ask is greater than their budget, they can cut all ties even if the candidate could potentially provide greater value than they expected. To me, that means they are not looking for the best candidate.

If the ask is within their range, then they can kind of expect a somewhat amicable interview process.

If the ask is lower than their range, this is the same as within range but now they have the option to offer less. And there are plenty of blogs and articles that suggest that this is not in the interest of the employer. Also there are comments and feedback that candidates were offered more than they expected.

Personally, I have never had an employer give me more than I expected. In most of companies, I have also learned that I was paid much less than my peers even though I did the same work if not better (yes, I know this sounds very biased... perhaps I should write a blog on why I think I was not only better but preferred).

Among all the people I have worked with, I have never heard of anyone within my circle that was offered more than they asked. I don't quite ask, but talking about salary does come up every so often typically around review season. But this is more implicitly implied since I do not ask explicitly.

Back to the point

The main reason I do not believe I should ever share my expectations is that I want to get paid for the work that I will be doing. If they are asking me to work 20 hours per day, I don't mind being paid half the normal salary. If I only have to do half the work of my peers, then I don't mind being paid half their salary.

So until I know how much work I will be doing, why would I give what my expectations are? If I give my real expectations and it greater than the offer, I will never know if they are offering easier work which I may consider.

My other point

What is the big deal with companies not providing the salary range?

Some say they want to save time in case the range is too far apart. If I can see the range, then I can save you the trouble and skip over your job post. I would save you the trouble to even calling me to ask my salary expectations.

They may miss out on some good candidates. Yea, and then you would not be able to afford them and wasted all that time anyways.

Salary expectations do not match all industries and all geographical areas. Why force the candidate to give a static number that means only something in one place and time and industry? Let me decide whether it is worth my time to do that line of work.

If you don't get enough candidates then offer more. If you get too many candidates then lower the offer. 

My conclusion

So I believe a fair negotiation between company and candidate is far greater than the ability to pay less or even the perception of paying less. Even if you were a fair company, I will never know. It will always be over my should that I could have been more aggressive.

The company has the power to replace you. I have no power to change the amount of work I will get after I get hired (except for quitting). 

I think the HR industry has a great potential to be so much better. I think there are still many opportunities for new companies to enter the market purely by hiring the right people. I also believe there are plenty of people who are willing to build a career just to be at a fair and just company for a lower wage. But because we are asked first, the general candidates fear to be paid too low which thus causes us all to fear those who fear. 

Scammish: Job boards and Company Online Jobs Listings (based on my personal experience and thoughts)

To be fully honest, I am not a fan of the current HR (Human Resource) industry/practice today.

I have used glassdoor, indeed, monster, linkedin, and a couple others in the past. And my experience is that I rarely ever get any response from any online applications (including directly on the company websites). All my work opportunities (nine different employments, eleven if you count contract to hire) have come through a physical person whether that is a friend, acquaintance, or even a recruiter.

Yet when I interview through traditional means, my success rates to get offers are extremely high, nearly 100%. And usually with a day or two of my interview (which makes me think my salary request is on the low end, and never has a company offered more than my ask). So this makes me think there are a couple things I am doing incorrectly with online applications.

The easier and within my control is not using the proper keywords or catchphrases that will get me past the automatic filtering system. I have so many variants of my resume. I tailor my resume to the job positions. So I like to think that I should have been accidentally correct at some point.

The other reason is a bit scammish. I have seen a few of these practices myself.

The simplest one is that some companies are require to post positions publicly even though they already have someone in mind. This typically is with larger corporations and most definitely for contract-to-hire positions. As mentioned above, I have had a couple of these. This transition took time, and part of the reason is that HR has to post the job publicly and it needs to be up for a certain period of time. They will field the minimum candidates with the minimum amount of work. I may have been focused on my work, and I am not one to keep an eye out for what my managers do, but I am pretty sure they did not interview anyone. Eventually, I get transitioned to full-time employee status. Therefore, people saw the post, applied, and most likely never heard back.

Technically, this is not the job boards fault but it kind of is if they scrape these positions from the company websites which most of them do.

A more scammish practice is companies that are not real. They just post jobs to just collect data. I have worked for a marketing group, and there is a lot of bartering for personal information (especially behind the scenes). One of the biggest values to data is how much of their data is legit data. Job applicants on job boards are one of the best and easiest sources of data to be collected. I use a separate email and phone for my job search. After applying to certain unknown companies, I get sudden spikes of spam. Sometimes all it takes is just to publish your resume on the board which I typically get smaller spikes and more sporadic.

A similar practice but more borderline scammish is corporations doing similar practice but only to populate their HR system of records. Because they purchase bulk amounts of job postings, companies that have remaining posts will just use them to post non-existent positions. This has all sorts of implications. The simplest is just to have a queue of available candidates. Second, they can see how desperate the candidates are which can be used to set their expectations on how much they pay their current employees. Last, they can also use that on low-balling other or future candidates.

Suspiciously, even the job boards ads and site metrics seem to avoid how effective they really are. Many states number of users but they don't state how successful they are. Maybe it is also due to users abusing the system too. But if they claim number of users then they must take responsibility that number is somewhat accurate, thus they should have the ability to give some estimate on how successful users are. Otherwise, they should not market how many users they have.


References
https://zerista.s3.amazonaws.com/item_files/ab2f/attachments/458970/original/source_of_hire_2018_pdf.pdf

Interview: Job Entails More than One Role

Release management is quite time consuming, similar to project management. So I find it odd when companies feel that they need to create a role that is really two or three roles. I can understand if they were much smaller in size, but they shouldn't be expecting people to have all the experiences they are looking for. Sure, I can fake it to land the job but I am still a loser that the company cares that I be more honest but will choose the guy who was most likely faking it.

I actually had an interview with a company that was hiring a release manager but expected that person to also code, deploy, and handle change management. I made the mistake of saying that is a lot of work for a single person (I also confirmed that this is a single person role, and not a team of people sharing all the responsibilities). Oh, and I also forgot to mention that the role is also a management position that will have future direct reports in a year or two (which really means 2+ years), so they are also looking for someone with direct report experience.

In the corporate world (I worked for two fortune 10 companies), each with the responsibilities they listed are handled by multiple individuals at full-time capacity. There are people who does change management full-time and coding full-time and plenty of managers who do not do any of that level of work. Deploying is something some developers have to do if there are not enough resources, and none of them enjoy doing that. Plus, a lot of release management is also during off-business hours.

So, I was honest and explained that it was a lot of work for a single person, and that it would be difficult to find someone that really wants to do all that much less someone who has the experience of each one. Of all the release managers I have met, I think only one colleague and myself had development backgrounds. I have had no RM managers with development background, nor worked with one. We also had to work with a team of change management people.

I think I wasn't selected because I had no direct report experience even though I gave them some of my leadership roles. The reason is that seemed to be the low-energy part of the interview. The interview was at least able to fake excitement over my other skill sets.

The other day, I saw the role was re-posted again on the job boards so I guess they haven't found a person yet. A year and a half later, the position is still available.

Work Life: (Exempt) My Personal Advice to Avoid These Steps on Your Yearly/Periodic Review or Interview or Status Update or Self-Evaluations

I have been working professionally for 15+ years, and I have coached quite a few colleagues and friends what I have learned the hard-way. Many who struggled with promotions or raises have found success with my suggestions.

For this article, I'm going to use a scale of 1-5. 5: Beyond expectation; 4: Meeting expectation; 3: Sometimes expectation; 2: Well below expectation, possible suspension; 1: Likely to get fired soon. Some companies have more points; some put different names to them; some also in reverse order. In my personal opinion, they all basically boil down to this type of model based on the results of my reviews.

This is also primarily for paying jobs where the work is not very well defined (exempt, no overtime pay) versus most hourly jobs (non-exempt). My experience is also wholly in the white-collared world. This may also work for blue-collared work too.

Give Yourself Full Score if You Do Not Know Your Benchmark

If you do not know your benchmark for scoring, give yourself the full score even if you believe that you deserve a 3 or even a 2. Force your employer to explain to you why you do not deserve a 5. 

The only exception to this is if your employer already gives you feedback on a regular basis. In that case, make sure that you fully understand what is being asked. You should make sure that you do understand when you receive those feedbacks. But if it is too late to fill in your self-eval, then put in a higher score. Don't put it too high as you may appear that you didn't get anything out of your regular reviews.

I have also never experienced nor heard anyone experience any negative effects of giving themselves a 5 even if it is obviously not a 5 work. Still use some judgment on whether your manager is the type to take offense. My work has always been 4-5. I do get some 3s but they are primarily for skills I do not have the opportunity to do. The most common one is improving company core values. Which I believe they default for everyone. But I still give myself a 5 just to hear my manager tell me that it is basically defaulted to 3 for everyone. This is when you learn this is whole exercise is quite pointless. But since it is required, I suggest everyone to make use of this to get as much information as they can from it.

Do not mistake that the score is for you to guess what you think the company thinks of you. This is what you think of yourself. If you believe you meeting expectation, then give yourself that score.

The main reason for this is because most managers also have no clue. Your problem is if you give yourself a 3 and a non-deserving person gives himself a 4, then you lose out. The manager won't even look or reconsider. You are automatically filtered out. HR has even less clue. Most do not even know your name.

Last is that it may even be potential that your work is a 5 but you don't know it! Maybe you thought all that training was normal, but you don't know that you produced the best candidates. Another scenario is that your group outperforms another group. You may be average in your group but still outperform another group top performer. As mentioned earlier, let the company tell you why you don't deserve it because they will happily let you keep your 4 even if they believe you deserve a 5 or even a 5+ because 4 is cheaper for them. 

Keep Track of Your Own Activities

Keep track of as many activities as you can do without impacting your work, because you are bound to forget them by review time. By activities, I do not mean just big projects. I mean meetings you hosted, important meetings you attended, any exceptions to your normal role, people who trained (or partially trained) even if it was only 30 minutes, documentations created. Many people I have coached assume these are small tasks so they do not record these information.

The problem is that some of these small things amount to big things. The difficulty of tracking these is that it is too late by the time it becomes a big thing. For example, I had to do a presentation on our internal processes. Managers loved it and had me present more. My roles have been development or process management, and no one else in my role or level presented. So by the time I had my review, I can only said that I spent significant amount of time training. Which they down-played because what is "significant"? When I started tracking numbers, this became much easier to present and leverage myself to my needs.

Ultimately, you are trying to justify your time. There is approximately 2000 (50 weeks of 40 hours) hours of full-time work in a year.

Also see Give Managers Ammunition.

Give Managers Ammunition

Most managers have absolutely no idea about your quality of work. A decent one will at least vaguely know if you are better than someone else. If you think it is difficult to give yourself a number score, imagine having to give a number score to someone else?

So help your manager fight for you. This is where your self-evaluation and your list comes in handy.

In reality, most managers don't know what to do. So it makes it easier for your manager to stand out if you give him some information that helps him leverage for you.

Start with not lowering your score. If you give yourself a 4 but in reality you are a 5, it is an uphill battle for your manager to explain why you should be a 5 when you gave yourself a 4. The manager also plays a similar game with their managers. Not all managers know where they stand among their peers either so you may be shafted for having a 4 in an outstanding team versus a 5 in an underperforming team. At least with 5's, the discussion can be had.

When that discussion can be had, it is typically pretty easy for managers to impress too with data. For example, 2000 promotions may be normal for me but that sounds impressive to upper management. Especially if a peer group does not provide any numbers at all. 2000 can be a crappy number in reality, but the perception is that my manager appears more prepared. The more data, the harder it is for a competing manager to leverage the benefits. Number of resolved tickets, requests, time-to-completion.

As I have repeated a couple times, this can only be done if that information is provided.

Not Everything Needs to be Monetary Compensation

With large corporations there are limits to a raise, the timing may not be correct. With small companies, they may not have the funds. Or your manager may be weak in fighting for your values.

Negotiate training time, bigger budget (or get a budget) to purchase work related products or software, promotion in name only (even just a jr to sr, or level 1 to level 2; make up a new position if one doesn't exist... this is free to the company), etc.

These are investments that you can use in the future when money becomes more available (whether that money comes from your current employer or future employer). If current employer does not honor your value, then other companies can at least justify the higher salary.

Don't Work Overtime Except for Exceptional Reasons

At least start reducing your overtime hours. You will never be able to reduce your hours until you decide to. Do not wait until you have a new member in your team.

Why? The reason is quite simpler than you think. No one tracks the hours of salaried employees. Most managers barely know the hours. Even if they do, most likely they are also working overtime. Because no one knows, upper management only compares your work to the calendar.

So let us say that you did 100 tickets over 80 hour work week. Because upper management don't know the hours, to them that is 100 tickets per week. If they hire a new person and assume that person is your clone, if you both work 40 hours, you still get 100 tickets completed. To upper management, they do not understand because now you are completing the same amount of work for the double the cost.

Along similar reasoning, if you were given a raise for working 80 hours and you are now working 40 hours, then upper management cannot justify your salary. So it is important that salary is in-line with your base hours otherwise it will be very difficult to ever return to normal hours.

If you are already doing extreme overtime, the path of least resistance is to slowly reduce your hours and let things fail. This requires you to set the proper expectations and "upset" some people.

Business is not perfect so some overtime is acceptable if it is seen as an exception. Once that overtime becomes a household name, then things get more complicated. Even reducing salary is more complicated than you'd think.

Overall, personally, I think it is good for both company and employees that expectations are set properly for the long-term. This is a difficult track because most managers do not know how to overlook short-term gains over long-term gains but it kind of starts with a person. "It's all business" will dictate that if someone is willing to put themselves in position to do more work for same or less pay, they will continue to exploit it.

This was a long round-about way of saying to avoid using overtime as a reason to get a promotion or a raise. Use overtime to get a bonus or other one-time benefits so that it is not tied to your base work. Once it is tied to your base pay then you will have a difficult time separating the two if you ever wish to work normal hours again.

Exception is if you plan to continue to work overtime for the remainder of your tenure of that job. I specifically use job and not employer is because one of the easier methods to get out of the downward spiral is to apply for a new role. The farther the role is from the original, the easier to start over.

Autism Spectrum vs me

I surely do relate to some of the key items of the low-end of the autism spectrum especially when I look back into my past.

I am told that I didn't start speaking till I was four. I do not make eye contact. There are stories that I did not look up at the teacher till second grade. Supposedly, it was such a big moment the first time that I did. The teacher personally stopped by our home to report the "happy" news. I was always very quiet till 15-16.

I probably don't have it, but reading some of the articles help me understand myself in a way where others fail to satisfy my questions. I believe I do a very good job of masking normal behavior.

I believe the biggest factor to my drive to understand to be normal is my insatiable need to understand the world. I ask a lot of questions to that point where people would put their hands up and walk away. Even if I agree with their point of view, I will play devil's advocate to better understand. So this is my drive to go against some of my natural tendencies.

I still struggle with some things like eye contact. When I really get into a conversation, I stop looking... at anything. I couldn't tell the person's facial expression, other conversations, time, place, etc. I get so hyper-focused that I do not sense anything else. Nowadays, I have to conscientiously remember to look at the face. I will naturally look at the mouth at best, but usually will just stare into space. I am really not sure where I am looking at once I am engrossed in a conversation.

The more background noise, the less I am able to understand people. I am terrible when there is noise. Not that it bothers me, but I cannot "hear" what people are saying. Sometimes I wonder if I am deaf but I hear sounds. And I can hear very minute sounds that others cannot hear. But when there any sort of sound, my ability to hear what people are saying drops exponentially while others can hear perfectly fine. I have had little to explain this phenomenon, but the article by Burgess has the best example thus far. On her "spectrum", there is a category for sensory filter. I believe this is where I am rather weak on.

I also struggle with expressing what I feel. I think the problem for me is that I really do not feel anything, especially things to an extreme. I do not really hate, nor do I really love. Things just is. People's fascination with art and music is lost on me. I still go to museums, and I just fail to see what other's see. There is no particular music that I love, none that I hate. I am unable to really mean it when I say that I totally love this song, music, artist, etc. I like the beat, the rhythm, the lyrics, but I approach it more analytically. For me, it is amazing how well they can maintain a beat, how they can change the beat but keep the sound coherent or lyrics that uses limited words that rhyme yet still send a message. Although I do not have extremes, I do have preferences but the reasons seem to still be consistent. If the lyrics is repeated too often (bores me) or distracts me from whatever I am focusing on, then I do dislike the song. But I have not heard anything where I would want to ever consider ripping my ears off. I don't even plug my ears or even change the radio station.

To me bad music is like food that has a bad after-taste. There are food that tastes good and there is food that does not taste good. And that pretty much is the summary of my taste palate. There is very few foods that I dislike. Even fewer where I refuse to eat. But there is nothing I wouldn't try for free, and I would hate to waste money by paying an exorbitant amount of money for something that tastes good. Yes, it tastes better but is it worth paying 2x to 5x the food and labor? I am perfectly fine with eating unsalted boiled chicken. It does not taste great, but not worth $10 for an alternative.

I still consider myself a loner. Ironically, I was told that I was like a social butterfly at the office. This is due to the fact that I go around and talk to people (about work or their social problems). But for me, this activity is extremely exhausting. But I "force" myself because I want to understand. And I learned that people do not share as much information when I do not share some information.

I do get frustrated. This is usually when I am unable to understand more about the situation. But I think the blame really goes to people who do not make very coherent logical steps. Uusually there is still some reason they do things that are more self-centered, for their big ego, etc. I just do not understand why they think that way. I get most frustrated with people who have no interest in self-improvement except to manipulate others for their own life improvements.

From what I have analyzed about people, I find that I have a very different approach to the world. And my biggest worry about this thought is that everyone seem to feel that they are different (like how everyone thinks they are right or good). So how do I actually gauge how different I am?

http://themighty.com/2016/05/rebecca-burgess-comic-redesigns-the-autism-spectrum/

Notes: MariaDb setup

MariaDb Setup

/etc/mysql/maria.conf.d/50-server.cnf

comment out:

bind-address = 127.0.0.1



Check Configurations

On db server, open shell (mysql -u root -p)

Run query, SELECT User, Host FROM mysql.user

Google Cloud Setup

VPC Network
Firewall Rules

Direction: Ingress
Source Filters: IP Address of device accessing db server
Applicable to instances: permission to users

Work Life: Another way to rename a file is to move it

Sometimes I do not learn my own lessons very well and having to re-invent the wheel each time. The latest example is for renaming SSRS reports. There is no option to rename, so I have just been deleting and uploading with the new file name. I knew this couldn't be the answer, so I kept searching because my initial searches didn't come up with the answer. Eventually finding out that I just had to move the file to the same location with a new name which to my embarrassment, I have also used. It just never clicked.

A palm to forehead moment would occur a few seconds later where I have used this solution elsewhere in my past. I cannot recall at the moment but I definitely had to do this before. Then it just evolves to just shaking my head.

Buggish: Microsoft Teams Web Excel slow performance at 7500 records

I use Microsoft Teams Web Excel. There is an obvious performance issue at 7500+ records with about 15 columns that are mostly populated.

This spreadsheet is an audit history of objects that I have promoted since last year. The largest column is the object path which typically would be file paths as they would include server and folder paths. The other columns are simple strings at most 50 characters or date-time fields.

The biggest problem is the copy/paste. I will oftentimes get the error:

Retrieving data. Wait a few seconds and try to cut or copy again.

Before, waiting will sometimes work but now waiting does not seem to work at all. I do not know if waiting will ever work but I've tried pasting a few hours later and I will still get this message.

Copy/pasting rows now take time. Inserting new rows take time. If I keep my browser open overnight, sometimes it takes a minute or two just for the page to allow me to click on something.

Do I know specifically that this is due to the number of records? No. I am only assuming because it seems to be a trend I see with Microsoft products. Also there is weak correlations between the number of records and frequency of issues or length of delay.

Rebooting sometimes helped before. Now, most little tricks to improve performance no longer work.

Update (2021-09-02)

I split some old data to another sheet, and the performance almost seems immediately better. I moved about 2500 records out of the primary sheet. With around 5200 records, performance still has intermittent issues but much less frequent and faster but still noticeable.