Worlds you don't know exist
One of the best thing that happened to me (beside marrying my wife – she reads my posts for time to time 😅) is to have had the opportunities to live abroad (in Europe, China and the US). When you live in a different country, you have the chance to discover different cultures and different worlds.
A few interesting illustrations are:
- Living in Europe, you can exercise every day. While you can also do so in the US, it’s significantly easier in Europe – I’m not an athlete or crazy gym person, but my Strava profile shows daily exercise.
- Living in the US and working in FAANG, you get to work in a company where impact is all that matters – time seniority matter significantly less (or not at all) compared to traditional industry/companies.
Similarly, there are worlds you discover only when working in specific industry, e.g.:
- Working in B2B companies forces you to be significantly more rigorous on your SLO while having less traffic to detect incidents (as compared to a B2C company)
- Working in international companies shows you how complex building a simple app could be – e.g. building apps for multiple languages is quite challenging, you have to support left to right languages and this means more than just translating text
- Working in large and successful means you have to deal with more scrutiny in regards to regulators – e.g. if you think being compliant to GDPR is easy, you likely haven’t been part of a large companies where data (in logs, in RPCs and in other places) used to historically grow unbounded
- Working in music companies will show you how complex the world of rights is – my 2 cents is that if people building blockchains for ownership had experience in intellectual property rights, they likely wouldn’t have built their company. Rights are significantly complex than the mental picture you can have of them
- Etc.
The main point of this post is that there are interesting things in the world – you may just not know they even exist. Keep an open mind, be ready to take a leap of faith and you will find something that you are interested in.