I was firmly against them but an opportunity showed itself early in my career and figured I could stick it out for 2 years to get a big name on my resume… and somehow it’s been ten years now. But it’s a company with a genuinely good culture and my career has grown constantly over those 10 years, so I’ve been happy. TBF, my employer before this was extremely toxic so in comparison it’s been amazing.

I appreciate seeing the Quaker love on Lemmy! (UUs are awesome too, in my experience!)

There’s a lot to take issue with in your post that doesn’t mean people prefer fake things.

Assuming people hate reality because of these arbitrary dichotomies that aren’t actually black and white.

Spending time online can mean making real, personal connections. Why is that less valuable than spending time outside? Are people who have allergies or heat intolerance or live in a big city somehow lesser because they can’t spend as much time in nature?

Many people don’t get plastic surgery or any of the things you listed. Plus a lot of people who claim they hate makeup and prefer “natural beauty” actually just like natural-looking makeup and prefer that to people who truly don’t wear any.

Organic is more expensive and less accessible than not-organic; often it’s not a choice. Plus like another commenter said, it’s not like GMO means fake. We’ve been genetically modifying plants for millennia through selective breeding; we’ve just sped up how it’s done.

Ozempic is an easier way to weight loss and yeah, some people take it as a lazy way out I’m sure. But also a lot of people who are overweight aren’t just that way because they’re lazy, but because there’s an underlying issue. Mental health issues like depression or addiction; physical health issues that cause weight gain like hypothyroidism or issues that make exercise difficult (and yes, weight can add to these problems, but a lot of time it’s a both/and situation); socioeconomic problems that make healthy food inaccessible due to time or cost limitations or living in a food desert. There are many reasons people are overweight beyond simply choosing not to exercise. (And I shouldn’t have to do this but just to head off any judgment you want to throw at me: my BMI is currently 18.1, putting me in the “underweight” category. I have never been overweight, I just have empathy for people who live different lives than me.)

You’re making a lot of false dichotomies and everything you’ve said is rooted in judgments of people. I suspect that’s where the downvotes are coming from, but I also suspect you’ll find issue in what I’m saying and dismiss me for it rather than checking in with your own biases and judgments.

Just curious, do you mean specifically the job as in role, or do you think this about going back to a company as a whole?

I can name easily a dozen, maybe two dozen people at my company I personally know who left then came back, although generally to a different role. And I’ve seen most of them get promoted after coming back, even to high roles like Director or VP. I don’t know if that’s just because of a good company culture or if it’s because it’s a larger business (2-2.5k corporate employees).

That’s how I read it. Sure seems like NYT wouldn’t want to put reporters at risk of criminal charges just for documenting what they see but here we apparently are.

Also hate crime? Against whom, exactly?! Oh right, corporations are people and basically the most protected class (behind, maybe, billionaires).

My partner and I started dating when I was 23 and he was 35 and while I don’t think OP is in the right, I really feel like we stretched the bounds of what was ok. I still had a lot of learning the basics of being an adult, and he had to put up with some incredibly immature shit from me. We’ve been together 13 years now so I don’t regret it, but I do cringe and worry when I see others following in my footsteps.

My company has started using a survival metaphor of air/water/food.

• Air - “keep the lights on” work; things that will fundamentally stop the product or business (legal, compliance, security) if not done in the next year
• Water - foundational work; tech debt is here
• Food - strategic work, new features, experimentation

It works because it recognizes that you need all three to survive and you have different time scales on which you can survive without them.

We will choose not to drink water sometimes to make sure we can eat some food. But we will die if we only consume food.

I’m on the product side and trying to buy my teams as much capacity to pay off some of our wayyyy overdue tech debt, and this metaphor has made it easier to convey where we are to my higher ups.

Usually I’ll answer product management because that’s what I do and I enjoy it (and I had no idea this career existed while I was in school), but reading this I actually think it could be a good fit for you, depending on how you feel about socializing with people.

I have an English degree but I also worked at an IT company every summer from high school through college, doing many different jobs with an increasingly technical focus. I taught myself HTML and CSS when I was like 10, but except for one high school class of Java I never got deeper into coding than that.

My interest in language and words combines with my technical aptitude in product management. I usually describe it as a job of translation, because I have to work with customers, internal users, business leaders, designers, and developers, and I need to be able to talk to and listen to all of them and understand their context well enough to translate to the other groups. I might need to tell the exact same story half a dozen completely different ways depending on my audience.

There are lots of different approaches to product management and every company does it differently, but some of the critical skills are being able to identify and deeply understand problems (of the business, of customers, etc.) and propose solutions to those problems.

It sounds like you have some technical aptitude but also interest in language and story telling (and a big part of product management is writing what are literally called “user stories”), so if you don’t mind the people interactions, it might work for you too.

I’ve been on or involved with Product teams for about 10 years now and had an actual Product Manager title for over 6, managing a team of PMs for the last 3. I feel like I found it by accident but I totally lucked into a career I actually love, so I’m happy to talk to people about it any time!

You and I are on the same page. My only point was that there are unfortunately many people out there now who believe they have a “healthy” level of skepticism, but are actually misled, misinformed, and not educated enough to distinguish reality. And I named specific groups who frequently fit this pattern.

When skepticism is truly healthy, it’s great. But there are many people who are unable to identify what “healthy” means here. No where did I say or mean to imply that some skepticism is a bad thing.

Unfortunately this also gets abused by some people who believe they have a healthy level of skepticism, but actually are way off the deep end. Like anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, and other anti-science people.

So “healthy” in this context shouldn’t be defined by the individual.

This is the advice I was coming to give, with the addition of a specific possible group.

I know there’s a lot of the anti-religion sentiment on Lemmy (for many good reasons) but one community I’m familiar enough with to suggest are Quakers (AKA Friends). Quakerism is rooted in progressive values and even those who practice have a wide array of religious beliefs, many of whom lean agnostic or even atheist.

It’s one of the most LGBTQ+ friendly groups I’ve ever been a part of, and there is a Friends meeting in Columbus.

I hope OP is able to find a community that supports and loves him for who he is.

Lots of advice here but I haven’t seen anyone mention coding boot camps. There are free ones like FreeCodeCamp or lots of paid options. You can do these to learn or validate what you have been taught.

My company hires associate-level software engineers directly out of college programs and boot camps. They don’t expect people from these to know everything; you may not have ever even used the language that you will be expected to code in! But by completing a program you’re showing you understand the logic of programming and that is applicable knowledge.

Look for entry-level jobs and you’ll be fine. Even better, look for companies that intentionally hire from programs like yours. They’re more likely to have internal programs to help teach new-to-career folks.

It looks to me like he has a lot of blood pooling in his hands here, so it’s possible that in the morning, at rest with his arm on a table this did reasonably match his skin.

I say this as someone with a condition that causes blood to pool in my hands, so I know how extreme the color swings can be!

I see the joke you’re making but also if you genuinely want to understand and possibly gain some empathy for these people, I’d suggest reading The Cult of Trump. It’s from 2019 so it doesn’t include a ton of awful stuff that’s happened since then, but it does a great job of contextualizing how people can fall into these belief patterns.

It was written by a man who fell into a cult in his early 20s, found his way out, and has built his career around helping others out of cults and cult-like mindsets.

Well it’s fine to have compassion… for the right people!

The whole thing is framed to make it out that these people are empathetic and caring, and that trait they have is being abused by the wrong people. Refusing to empathize with those people doesn’t mean they are no longer empathetic!!

(Total BS, obviously. But that’s the loophole that they use to make this argument.)

I recently finished reading The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan. It’s from 2019 and so depressing with how much has happened since then that’s not accounted for, but it was interesting insight into how people like that can accumulate a following. It might help answer your question.

My partner and I have discussed our wildly different willingness to try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world plenty of times over the years. He would work to survive and would probably thrive more than the average survivor. Me? I’ve always said I’ll likely head to the cough syrup section of the pharmacy.

This conversation came up earlier today, in fact. Well, I was recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I’m still sorting out the right medication to get it under control and am dealing with a lot of pain, but way less than before starting treatment. I told him with this diagnosis, if society ever collapses in a way that causes me to be unable to get my medication? I’m out.

Thanks for links. As someone recently diagnosed with RA, I’m still trying to absorb as much information on it as possible.

What’s interesting about the study is it focused on RA patients without positive rheumatoid factor (RF) blood work. Now, in my skimming I didn’t see it mention anti-CCP, which is the more definitive test for RA. Despite the name, positive RF alone could be any number of things that aren’t RA. They didn’t mention if they were totally seronegative, though.

I have an unsubstantiated theory that seronegative and seropositive RA may be distinct diseases, but we don’t know enough yet and we treat them the same, so they get the same name. If the pts in this study were totally seronegative, that could correlate to my theory where maybe “seronegative RA” is actually more of a long-term infection triggered by measles. But these are just idle musings.

As a side note, the name rheumatoid arthritis is pretty silly from an etymological standpoint. The words basically break down as:

• rheumatism means inflammation
• -oid means like a thing
• arth- comes from joints
• -itis means inflammation

So put together, it’s “inflammatory-like joint inflammation.”

Right?! I thought about mentioning the bright lighting and glass walls that make all the products visible. Or the window clings advertising ear piercings.

Anyway, thanks for validating my thoughts… I was very confused by the person I responded to and thought maybe the gender divide was greater than I thought, lol.

Good for you! When I got a second piercing I knew better and went somewhere they used a hollow needle instead of a gun.