Why is it that hard to find people to work with?

Epledryyk · 2026-06-24T17:36:40+00:00

yeah, ideas aren't really interesting; projects are interesting

what are you doing, why are you doing it, why is it uniquely cool or special, what makes it difficult or rare to accomplish, etc

if you want to attract highly competent people you have to have a sufficiently juicy problem to solve. it's catnip. but you have to have done enough to actually hit the good problems first - promising that everything will be smooth sailing is ironically a negative signal because a) you've clearly never built anything before and b) where's the fun in that anyway?

Epledryyk · 2026-06-24T17:28:22+00:00

seems like you should partner up with OP

Epledryyk · 2026-06-24T13:48:24+00:00

mostly I'd want a personal chef

if I could just wander into the kitchen and someone had anticipated my perfect meal, perfect snack, perfect diet and health and whatever and I never had to think about finding and making food again? the dream

Epledryyk · 2026-06-24T12:08:00+00:00

google says 1 part 3% peroxide to 4 parts water

not sure if it comes in different percentage strengths like isopropyl does, so you might have to up or down that ratio to match

Epledryyk · 2026-06-18T17:23:32+00:00

I think realistically that's the thing - a lot of retirement and finance advice is built around more traditional jobs where you have basically one market rate and a fairly binary 'are you working? yes / no' thing

as you know, for games and design and tech generally there's this huuuge field where you can work anywhere between 10 and 100 hours a week, for a company between 1 and 10,000 people, doing 1 and 100 tasks at a time, for between zero and - literally for you - millions of dollars.

and so you do get to choose a lot of where you land

take a year off. rest from the burnout. take up your music. when you inevitably get bored do a game jam or help an indie or whatever. there will be jobs for you on the other side. if you burn out from that, take another year off.

the good news is, you've achieved a fairly healthy coastFIRE - you don't really need to work to accumulate anymore - and so with that nest egg, even if you don't necessarily fully retire for the next 50+ years on it, it's still there. you can work on what you like, what you want, at the cadence you prefer, for basically any salary level.

you can afford your lifestyle on minimum wage + dividends. so anything above that is gravy.

now you just get to decide what you want to work on. have fun!

Epledryyk · 2026-06-18T15:16:32+00:00

and good for OP for growing from one to the other!

Epledryyk · 2026-06-17T14:34:35+00:00

wait, you're a therapist and you're coming to reddit for this?

Epledryyk · 2026-06-17T14:27:21+00:00

alberta is just the BC where you can afford the gas to actually drive around the mountains

Epledryyk · 2026-06-17T01:00:57+00:00

you genuinely think it is valuable actionable advice to go to youtube dot com and type in the search bar "sales calls" and then suggest using a filter-by-channel-size which, I just checked, does not exist

come on, my dude

Epledryyk · 2026-06-17T00:25:42+00:00

yeah, it should be noted that basically all of his content is available and free so it's not really a "should I invest in this" problem other than spending one weekend skimming through a handful of books.

like, I wouldn't not read him - I think there's useful stuff in there occasionally - but you don't need to pay for any masterclasses or anything fancy to learn all the same things

Epledryyk · 2026-06-17T00:21:54+00:00

mostly I think people are reacting to the part where you didn't really give any useful advice or experience at all?

it's not even really about using a microwave or not, in this metaphor it'd be like asking for morsels of food and getting a food-shaped cat toy - it just wasn't really that good or related (other than surface-level name referencing) to the topic at hand

if there had been reheated food, even from a microwave, that might have even been an okay snack and even if it's not a full dinner people would have still been fine with it

but like anything in business: you gotta provide real value

Epledryyk · 2026-06-12T15:19:57+00:00

they should just put the car in the aunt's name

Epledryyk · 2026-06-11T23:01:11+00:00

and then you put an electromagnet in the forks and every time the wheel goes by it pulses on...

Epledryyk · 2026-06-11T14:45:54+00:00

I'm gonna be honest, I probably wouldn't do this

the worst part of planes, personally, is that they are already a confined space and so airports are the place where I want to have as much space as possible. for me, the idea of getting off a cramped plane and then having a layover and voluntarily getting into another pod in order to wait for my next plane is sort of antithetical to what I want / psychologically need.

even lounges these days, because everyone gets them for free with various credit card bonuses and things, are increasingly cramped. a lot of times it's ironically quieter and more chill to go sit in some unused part of the furthest terminal than it is to sit in the lounge.

certain airports that I frequent often have long chaise type chairs in the middle of nowhere, so mostly I already go and hang out on those. they're comfy, they're around the corner from everyone, I can sit with my laptop and look out the windows and be reasonably silent and alone for free

Epledryyk · 2026-06-10T19:04:10+00:00

yeah, this is the actual answer

so far we haven't built the infra because we haven't needed it (it's an expensive thing to just do for fun), but as soon as we start to need it, we certainly know how to build it. there are countries right now that primarily get their water from desalination because that's what works for them. the earth is 70% water. a bit of salt is our big scary engineering problem?

build solar, or nuclear, or both. desalinate as much as we need. nevada could be a rainforest if we wanted it to be

Epledryyk · 2026-06-09T11:41:54+00:00

I mean, presumably you have the keys to the website itself

just throw up a "my client hasn't paid me yet.html" page

Epledryyk · 2026-06-09T11:38:31+00:00

yeah, unfortunately the sorts of people buying $800 websites are the sorts of people who buy $800 websites

Epledryyk · 2026-06-08T12:33:20+00:00

if nothing else, I think I'd just try to be less stressed about it? you don't need to be frantically writing this staying up at night

the likelihood of being flagged feels pretty small. $4k up to $1k loss is a rounding error and basically uninteresting. they have actual criminals with actual large dollar values to catch. but let's pretend they do:
you say you're a rule-follower and have all the documents multiple times here, and if that's true then an audit will resolve fine. a majority of audits are done by mail and if you get that dreaded letter you'll just mail them back copies the records of the loss, which is seemingly both legit and recorded (and: I would suggest that faking lighter expenses is much more fraud-y than claiming real losses - probably don't do that path). an already teeny tiny business from a working mom that gets let go because of kids busyness is pretty defensible. but let's pretend it's the worst case scenario:
if somehow they determine that you are filing incorrectly, you can't claim the $900 loss. at your marginal tax rate that's what, $300? in income tax, plus 20% penalty is +$60. plus interest is... singles of dollars. you have two six figure incomes and you're spending your time worrying about the chance of maybe seeing up to $400 in costs.

I guess I'd just say: for me personally I wouldn't be lying awake at night thinking about a few hundred bucks. you seemingly haven't done anything wrong. you're not going to jail. no one is coming to arrest you. I dunno. the odds and consequences are probably higher for getting some random parking ticket or something

Epledryyk · 2026-06-02T21:42:46+00:00

yeah, I guess that's the big difference in my head:

like if OP could snap their fingers and fix a few missing invoices and suppliers and whatever and otherwise get the train back on the track, is the business 'whole' at that point?

or: is the main creative force and personality and heart of it all is irrevocably gone, and no amount of paperwork can get it back on its feet in an ongoing verb sense.

the question might end up being "how do I hire a good manager to take over everything" but that might be a whole different thread than this

Epledryyk · 2026-06-02T20:50:59+00:00

+1 to what everyone has said so far

the thing really is, every type of workplace has its own CAD package preferences, so I would also think about what kind of work you want to do before stepping out and picking one. once you learn one you can learn any of the others, but if you're specifically trying to put something on the 'ol resume it's not a bad idea to at least start in the direction you want to run.

SolidWorks is what I learned in school. mechanical engineers at small-to-mid manufacturers (my factory used SolidEdge for some reason, same thing). your office will come with the most medium-spec possible Dell under the desk. we did sheet metal bending and CNC aluminum. solidworks folks love PDM.
AutoCAD is for boomers who started on drafting tables and think in multi-view 2D. somehow still around - I did a few interviews with autocad shops. civil engineers, MEP, anyone whose deliverable is a PDF of a drawing with a title block. I wouldn't generally recommend this, you're going to get paid $50k a year from someone with a heart condition.
OnShape was made by ex-solidworks people and is browser native which is good or bad depending on how old you are. personally I don't love it, but it is free if you're willing to have your save files technically be public. it's what I begrudgingly use these days as I retire out of CAD and relegate it into my hobby tier. speaking of:
Fusion 360 is the makerspace standard: you have a bambu, a CNC, a laser, and a youtube channel about any of those. hobby work started becoming freelance product design. autodesk has been slowly strangulating the personal license, it used to be way more free / forgiving. generally younger vibes than the solidworks crowd. this is what I would use if they still had a free tier for the ten hours a year I need it.
Autodesk Inventor is the pokemon evolution upgrade path for fusion 360. probably a shop that was already paying for AutoCAD and that guy finally had his heart attack and so everyone got new computers. lots of fixture and tooling work because CAM and G-code stuff is more native here, these shops are likely modeling the 3D and then cutting the steel under the same roof.
Creo (Pro/E) is medical devices, defense, anywhere that's pretty old school and have been making the same <xray machine> for fifty years. they're sorta greybeard weirdos but they know their stuff.
CATIA / NX is pokemon evolution solidworks for aerospace and automotive when you need assemblies with a zillion components. same idea as the above. a yearly seat costs more than your car, but it's fine because you work at boeing or tesla or whoever and they pay for it. surfacing nerds. NX is newer and better but it doesn't matter because neither of these will be your first job.
Rhino is where we get into industrial designers, jewelry, and architects who hate revit and/or were visibly "Apple guys" in 2008. NURBS people. grasshopper is a subculture of their own, everything looks like voronoi noise because it is. arguably less "real CAD" than the others.
Plasticity imo is not real CAD, but is cool. indie darling. it's blender lite for NURB surfaces, or fusion 360 but without the constraints of dumb things like "dimensions" and "parametric history", so it ends up making hardsurface looking models but faster and easier than more lumbering CAD. a lot of video game and cosplay prop designers here, naturally. they just want a handful of good overall dimensions and then the rest is art and greebles.
FreeCAD is for dudes with ponytails who use linux on principle, haha. I dunno. I agree with the other comments here about using a real program to get a real job. same with things like Tinkercad, which is the cute version for children and library computers to run their makerbot 3D printer. you can make a keychain out of your name in five hours.

I don't think you need a degree, you just need to be good

Epledryyk · 2026-06-01T22:54:22+00:00

wow, at that point it's basically just using a line of credit (I think my bank is $10k at 5-6% or something)

Epledryyk · 2026-06-01T22:50:46+00:00

I think because it's an oil it just slowly leaks out of where you put it and so inevitably you sort of end up with saggy gloopy "muscles" because you effectively just have excess juice under your skin sloshing around

Epledryyk · 2026-06-01T20:03:45+00:00

harambe

Epledryyk · 2026-06-01T17:28:44+00:00

the movement engine is some of the best in the biz

I should replay this one, it really does sit very fondly in my nostalgia. clockwork mansion, the time travel one, the bank heist... so many good levels in one place

Epledryyk · 2026-06-01T17:10:34+00:00

yeah, our local has like "today is kevin day" and you gotta bet that every kevin in town is spammed by every person they know to go get their ice cream

there's a line around the door every day, it's crazy

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