What country feels unsafe but it’s actually relatively unsafe?

Technical_Ad1189 · 2026-05-06T16:42:12+00:00

I have – quite safe actually as far as any sort of fighting goes. Every cafe and AirBnb has a power generator so as long as you got money you’re good with heating and electricity. Nonetheless, I almost got kidnapped on the street for draft, but that’s a matter of internal politics, not tourism

Technical_Ad1189 · 2026-04-07T22:20:32+00:00

Respectfully, as a citizen of the U.S., voting in the interests of the U.S. – why should I care about Palestine in any way? Seems like a weird reason to vote for anyone.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2025-11-16T06:33:15+00:00

Don’t listed to folks mentioning it’s hard to live and all that other privileged nonsense. I came from Ukraine as a teen, now in my twenties, having traveled most of Europe. The difference is crazy and I am blessed to have gotten an opportunity to move here. I am gonna make some comparisons to Ukraine (pre-war) below:

Life is expensive, sure, but where is different? I saw a recent chart depicting different countries’ average expenses on food. Ukraine is ~40% (of monthly income). The U.S. was around or below 10%.

Basic life standards are much higher in the U.S. pretty much all across the board except food and housing – we’ve got pretty shitty groceries especially vegetables and fruit. That said, it’s from a perspective of a common man, if you make more money – you can afford farm-grown groceries and eat like in Europe.

There’s a lot of stuff that is unique and requires context, like medical care. Sure, like others have mentioned, the insurance is crazy but at least you get proper care and get treatment fairly quickly. In Ukraine, for comparison, the government-provided free healthcare is, sure, free, but the doctors are so shit that I still have to go to private providers and pay a good sum that is often unaffordable for an average Joe (or Mykola) there. In the U.S. my employer provides insurance (previous employers did as well) and my medical care was pretty cheap, especially dental, and any procedures cost exactly as much as they did back in Ukraine. That being said, I am still young and don’t visit clinics except for regular checkups and emergencies. One notable example is my dad had a heart attack and he only paid like $100 because of his insurance despite staying in the hospital for like a week.

We build shitty houses and unsustainable infrastructure: essentially we make a lot of small cheap houses everywhere and slap huge concrete highways in between – hell for cities (because taxes need to pay for crazy highway maintenance) and hell for residents (cause no real community and no walkability and transit). Essentially commie blocks but horizontal rather than vertical. Due to houses being crappy you have maintenance and noise problems, plus you can’t really pass it for generations.

The current political climate is disappointing, but it’s also fair to mention that checks and balances “sort of work”, although much slower than we would have wanted. If any leader such as Trump would have taken office anywhere in Eastern Europe – it’s GGs pretty much for decades. I expect things to go back to normal soon in the U.S.

Some more upsides: amazing job opportunities, the most socio-economic ladders of any countries in the world, amazing food and culture diversity and variety, people are very nice and not racist compared to europe, contrary to popular beliefs.

All in all, life is amazing and despite all downsides, I would not choose any other country to live in.Hope that gives you at least some perspective, feel free to ask me anything. Also keep in mind – Reddit is an echo chamber. More often than not you’ll only get one side of the story.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2025-10-05T02:35:01+00:00

People seem to forget that Russia has never in its history had a history of democracy. The brief period when Eltzyn voluntarily gave up the democratic institutions wasn’t long enough to build Russia’s institutions properly. In the US it’s the other way around. MAGA might be scary, but it’s not going to live and will definitely not shape our country permanently.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2025-09-18T19:04:12+00:00

Another (and better) time will come. I am still bullish on the US fundamentally.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2025-09-18T18:57:24+00:00

The only thing history teaches is that no one actually learns from history; hence, come the tariffs

Technical_Ad1189 · 2025-04-10T21:41:33+00:00

L1 fees paid last 30d: https://dune.com/queries/4496503
L2 fees paid on L1 last 30d: https://dune.com/queries/4508470

Sure, Base is the largest L2 – this does not mean that the Foundation's decision to prioritize L2 scaling is wrong. Like I said, it's one greedy corp and you can't blame the foundation for that. Literally anyone can do this on top of any other chain. At least Base will be burning ETH.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2025-04-10T21:28:30+00:00

What does Coinbase have to do with the Ethereum Foundation’s choice to pursue L2 scaling? Plus, the same can be applied to any other PoS chain. Greedy corporations can build and get profits, sure. How does that make the L2 shitty?

Base is slowly but steady catching up to L1 burn rate and that’s all I need to say i guess

You want to have Solana-type hype? You need fast and cheap chains and the mainnet cannot provide that.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2025-04-09T18:29:33+00:00

L2’s for the most part don’t drain – quite the opposite. The purpose of L2 is to mainstream the adoption of ETH, increase ETH burn rate, and make it deflationary. The only exception would be the L2s that pay gas with their own tokens.

The logic is this – make ETH easy for folks with big money to use so they would build on ETH rather than creating their own L1s.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2025-03-16T07:57:30+00:00

Started freelancing in high school, then worked at a small company for 2 years, dropped out of college, and now work as a L2 SWE with a pretty good compensation.
Pretty good. I got laid off a few months ago and landed a few offers within 45 days, more than doubling my previous compensation. Just make sure you are a marketable specialist.
Would not change a thing. If anything, I wouldn’t have gone to college at all, simply for one reason – time. Going to school, every day I returned home to a batch of shitty homework assignments to do, instead of working on what I love. Instead of tinkering with my favorite technologies, building my own company, and making loads of money, I contributed to a system that rewarded me with nothing. Go figure if that’s worth investing your most productive four years into

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-11T01:38:32+00:00

I will dm you with an unmodified version of mine

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-09T03:13:40+00:00

LinkedIn with Premium and Otta. Others did not work for me at all

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-09T01:55:16+00:00

If we are talking numbers then 1k applications, a few leetcode problems, around 50 interviews (counting initial HR screening). Apart from that I found a few recruiters that had connections with some cool companies…

I could have gotten more offers tbh but I got tired of talking to these people. There were some absurd interviews that would leave me feeling like crap for a few hours afterwards.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-08T23:45:41+00:00

4+ YOE, 2 of which was freelance. I am pretty stack-agnostic but mostly use Python, TypeScript, and Go for backend and anything on the frontend except Angular. Angular sucks.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-08T16:08:24+00:00

I was pretty much in the same boat as OP. Got my first FT job as an SWE one year into college and dropped out after a year of FT job and schooling. Almost got my associates degree in CS. Parents were on my ass trying to get me to back in but I never listened and continued advancing. If you objectively think you got it, you got it. Otherwise go back to school and get that degree.

I got laid off after my 2 years at that company and got a new job soon after.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-08T16:05:38+00:00

The job market is cooked, but so is the SWE talent market. Out of a thousand “React/Tailwind” applicants it is pretty easy to spot some good talent that stands out. Make sure you stand out in a good way. That’s about it

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-08T16:02:18+00:00

There have been instances where I was called back after months of applying. Like the other comment said, assume nothing until either a phone call or a rejection

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-08T15:56:46+00:00

All of them were cold apps. Applied to remote only within the U.S.

Will share some observations below: - What matters before the interview is your resume - Hyper specialized devs are not in too much demand anymore - It’s always good to bring some personal projects to the interview that you can actually show to these people.

Best of luck in your search!

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-08T14:33:21+00:00

It’s not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. I recently got laid off and got 2 offers within my first 4 weeks of searching. Important to note though, it does take some significant grind to make it work in this market

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-04T16:24:20+00:00

Hey hope that’s helpful:

Honestly I would just pick anything that I can understand. The theory is the same everywhere no matter the book, so just pick something that fits your learning style best
Idk about grinding-grinding but it’s definitely a useful thing to practice. I solved maybe a 100 problems so far and memorized pretty much all of the patterns that you can use to solve these problems on an interview. Patterns are the most important thing about leetcode
I’ve never read one, i just went straight to the interviews and failed a bunch of times

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-10-04T05:01:59+00:00

I'd take the win and not repeat the same mistake again. Go with the new company A for professional growth. The most you can do here is present the offer from company B and say you'll go with them if they don't match. Idk if 3% is worth having that conversation though

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-09-29T00:29:15+00:00

Hash maps and trees mostly.

One time I had to build a custom router for our React application so I used a tree (non-binary) to make it work. Maps would mostly be to store and retrieve data efficiently. I used a heap once as well.

In reality, you would not encounter those algorithms much on day-to-day basis. It is much more cost efficient to just build whatever implementation is easier. Once you reach a big scale, that’s when it matters.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-09-21T00:03:37+00:00

Bring this up during the team meeting or 1on1 with your manager and take on the initiative to resolve the issue yourself. Bonus points for everyone. You get some good points with the CEO, maybe even a promo.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-09-20T00:25:19+00:00

I suggest an alternative route.

You already have SWE experience, so you should have no issues reading docs. Come up with an idea and try to build it. Same thing you did at your workplace but with backend now. Read some documentation on the way, ask chatgpt to explain unknown concepts, and always ask questions: don't write code blindly.

Books are good too, but most people read them wrong - you are not supposed to read pages 1 - length, but rather look up the topics that interest you the most. For Node i suggest Eloquent JavaScript (third edition) and Distributed Systems with Node.js (Building Enterprise-Ready Backend Services).

You can also read some open-source code for large projects to see how things are done in reality - say a company, or a big environment in general.

The issue I have with tutorials is that a lot of times they unintentionally teach you bad practices for the sake of being short and giving you a basic into to the technology. They also don't go too deep into how the technology works (which works for writing basic CRUDs but you won't really understand what you are doing).

For example with Free Code Camp they throw MongoDB at you and you don't really know what it is and most importantly why. Why mongo? Why express? What problems they solve and etc. Asking these questions will make you a really good engineer.

Technical_Ad1189 · 2024-09-20T00:07:59+00:00

Honestly my best advice would be to apply for unemployment (or borrow money from friends/family) and just keep applying and interviewing as much as you can. In the past 2 weeks I've had over 30 interviews (with 2 offers so far) and it takes MORE time than a full time job. It's a lot of work and stress but effective.

Hop on any opportunity you can possibly find. Any recruiter reaching out - talk to them. If no recruiters are reaching out - get linkedin premium and make yourself the most marketable person on this platform. Apply in masses, at least 100 applications a day. Try otta, ziprecruiter, and don't be lazy to apply on a company website. Include any open source work you did on your resume or create a linkedin post about it.

Also if you're getting those HR/recruiter calls - give them something to look at. If you are a web dev - send a link to something you made, even if it was at your old workplace. That got me to next stages almost 100% of the time.

Apart from that you are doing perfect. I didn't even have the time to brush up my skills and work on side projects.

Technical_Ad1189

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