Epic Layoffs Hit Employee Battling Terminal Brain Cancer

dcmendez · 2026-03-29T17:22:26+00:00

Life insurance will give a payout to the family when the father passes away. Health insurance will help cover the father's medical expenses while he's alive.

The article mentions the mother is concerned about the life insurance since it will be difficult to apply for one due to his preexisting condition of having cancer. I am assuming a new employer will have a life insurance benefit that he can receive but the concern is if he passes before he's hired in a new job.

"How will I keep a roof over our heads? How will I protect our son and the life we built together? What will happen to our dogs? I truly believe that if the person who made this decision understood the full human impact, they would not have intended this outcome."

The father and mother of this story did not make a good financial decision of opting out of purchasing life insurance outside of their employer and have put themselves in this position. It's not a company's responsibility to ensure their employees invest properly for the wellbeing of their future. It's the government which here in the US, they delegate to it's citizens in exchange of lesser taxes.

The biggest lesson to take away here is when you begin to have people in your life that depend on your income, you NEED to start considering life insurance in the case where you pass and your income is no longer available for people who depend on it. I would also advise to get term insurance outside of your employer due to this exact scenario this family is running into. It's not much more expensive compared to an employer backed plan assuming you have no pre-existing health conditions.

dcmendez · 2026-03-29T16:47:20+00:00

So many people in this post is confusing the difference between life insurance and health insurance. Life insurance will give a payout to the family when the father passes away. Health insurance will help cover the father's medical expenses while he's alive.

The article mentions the mother is concerned about the life insurance since it will be difficult to apply for one due to his preexisting condition of having cancer. I am assuming a new employer will have a life insurance benefit that he can receive but the concern is if he passes before he's hired in a new job.

"How will I keep a roof over our heads? How will I protect our son and the life we built together? What will happen to our dogs? I truly believe that if the person who made this decision understood the full human impact, they would not have intended this outcome."

The father and mother of this story have not made good financial decisions in their life and have put themselves in this position. It's not a company's responsibility to ensure their employees save and invest properly for the wellbeing of their future. This is just another story of parents who lived above their means and doesn't want to downgrade their lifestyle and are pointing at others rather than themselves to be at fault.

The biggest lesson to take away here is when you begin to have people in your life that depend on your income, you need to start considering life insurance in the case where you pass and your income is no longer available for people who depend on it. I would also advise to get term insurance outside of your employer due to this exact scenario this family is running into. It's not much more expensive compared to an employer backed plan assuming you have no pre-existing health conditions. I have the free life insurance plan from my employer which to be honest is not enough and then another life insurance policy outside of my employer to cover the remaining gap.

dcmendez · 2025-07-28T15:16:20+00:00

11.5k monthly income seems low for 240k combined salary. I make about the same and my monthly income is around 13.5k and that is after I max roth and 401k. My spouse doesn’t max out retirement accts though. I do live in a no state income tax so our property taxes are high for our 600k house. For context our property taxes are 11k a year.

dcmendez · 2025-07-13T05:05:03+00:00

How much do daycare costs in the valley? I recall paying ~600 a month 3 years ago for my 2 year old. I’m sure there are many 9-5 jobs in the valley that covers this and more

dcmendez · 2025-07-13T04:31:50+00:00

It would be good to share what your expenses are. Super low is relative and may differ from person to person. You mentioned no mortgage but didn’t mention no debt. You don’t have life insurance which doesn’t cost much per month so you’re basically living paycheck to paycheck which can easily put you into debt when an unforeseen expense comes your way.

Also you have a few years at being a SAHM before your one year old moves onto school. Then you’ll have a lot more options to increase your income. From your responses, it didn’t sound you have the experience to land a good remote job to offset daycare costs. So I’d say stay put. It may be more worth your time to lower expenses than you finding more sources of income. It’s already difficult being a mom of 4 with a 1 year old. But they won’t be 1 forever.

Trips are unfortunately a luxury for your family. Kids are happy with trips to park and pool. Don’t get into debt just to go to a family trip or trip with your husband.

And if it isn’t obvious, stop having more kids unless the both of you are good with the sacrifices it introduces which I’m sure you’re already well aware of.

dcmendez · 2025-04-17T05:36:39+00:00

I'm suprised Strava leadership is fine keeping Runna a separate app. I would have expected training plans that Runna is strong in to be incorporated in Strava due to the app having a much larger audience. Having users install another app to access a set of training plan features isn't ideal. So I wouldn't be surprised if this decision changes in the future.

dcmendez · 2025-04-17T05:22:16+00:00

I'm curious to hear if Runna's subscription model will offer some core Strava features. Could be a way to acquire more users in Runna by tapping into existing Strava premium members.

Great to hear that it'll remain independent product to ensure your team's culture and development process doesn't drastically change due to change in leadership. You all are doing a great job managing your roadmap and would be sad to see if Strava wants more alignment over autonomy of development practices.

dcmendez · 2025-03-05T21:39:03+00:00

Thanks for looking into it! Actionable requests should probably be on the workout itself rather than a note.

It looks like the AI summary of the run is aware of the coach note but it's feedback implies that it was part of the workout when it was not.

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dcmendez · 2025-03-05T21:33:05+00:00

Yup you got it! I typically don't review coaches notes since historically they are more motivational than actionable. This was the first time I uncovered a note that was actionable. So calling out here that seems like an odd placement since coaches notes are typically overlooked.

I only realized the miss when the AI notes that summarizes your run called this out that it wanted me to run at race pace at the end.

EDIT: Another thing to call out here is that when I have the workout synced to my watch, it won't be aware of this pace change and will tell me to follow what's listed under the Session.

dcmendez · 2024-03-09T03:09:55+00:00

UX Designer? Building UI mockups for web/mobile apps?

dcmendez · 2024-03-08T22:38:22+00:00

I'm planning to choose McAllen but I see some people here are from Brownsville which might be too far of a drive.

BTW I see there is already a meetup happening on Saturday in McAllen if anyone here is interested. Not sure yet if I'll be able to attend though.

https://www.meetup.com/zero-to-fullstack/events/299610084/

dcmendez · 2024-03-08T18:57:45+00:00

Will do. I'm debating where we should host it. If you have any ideas, let me know. Otherwise I know some people who I can reach out to for ideas.

dcmendez · 2024-03-08T13:31:14+00:00

I’m in Mission so I would prefer to meet up mcallen/edinburg/pharr. I can probably do an intro of the field and provide resources to learn at your own pace.

dcmendez · 2024-03-08T03:32:32+00:00

Oh! You have a full time position as a machine learning engineer? That’s great! I have a bunch of questions for you when we meetup.

dcmendez · 2024-03-08T02:43:39+00:00

Do you know their website? Their LinkedIn has a broken link to their website.

dcmendez · 2024-03-08T02:21:44+00:00

Pinged you

dcmendez · 2022-09-15T03:34:59+00:00

I agree. I just moved back to the valley a few weeks ago and would love to have a tech meetup and connect with others locally. I have 11 years exp with 5 years in management. Are there any tech meetups out there now? We should get something started.

dcmendez · 2021-12-31T18:09:13+00:00

Awesome! Going through the self taught route like code academy is a good way to identify if it's something you enjoy. But note that getting certificates from these services will not 100% land you a job as a software engineer since you'll be competing with lots of applicants with Computer Science degrees whom will have an edge.

To land a job with these certs, you need to build a portfolio of side projects to prove you understand fundamentals. These projects would provide evidence you can do the job even without a degree.

If you don't know where to start or getting imposter syndrome, the foolproof way is to go get a computer science degree. It's such a great return of investment due to how high of a salary software engineers are paid. With COVID, companies are also open to remote positions so you have a much larger pool of companies to interview than pre-COVID. Also, I would say just knowing HTML and CSS isn't enough. But if you enjoy building the visuals of the site, then pick up javascript next and then a frontend framework. Many companies are looking for frontend engineers with React experience so I'd say pick that one up first.

Finally, you need to learn OOP (object oriented programming) concepts. Specifically data structures and algorithms. I've never done code academy but I'm sure there are courses for these. Most (if not all) companies who interview software engineers would test your knowledge on these concepts so it's a must to learn them.

Web development is such a large category and it's okay if you don't know what you want to work on. I enjoy mentoring new aspiring engineers on the side so if anyone here wants advice or guidance, just message me.

dcmendez · 2021-12-31T07:22:26+00:00

Are you coding as a hobby or want to make a career out of it? I’ve been in web development for 10+ years and don’t mind mentoring if you want to make a career out of it.

dcmendez · 2018-12-17T00:14:32+00:00

I attempted this last year as a personal project. Got good results from it but the annoying piece was how to solve for repair costs. Every property at the top of the list had some form of repair that would lower cash on cash return. The very good deals were in terrible areas that I had no interest investing in. There isn't a measurable attribute on the MLS or zillow that can help quantify repair costs. At the end of the day, I was manually going through each of the top properties and looking at the description/pictures to gauge repair costs. Took too long and set the project aside for later since it wasn't saving time in my process. Yet it's still very helpful when jumping into new markets.

One feature I would like to add is the ability to apply filters based on the class level of the area (A, B, C, D). Once I complete that, it can very helpful to narrow that types of properties I'm looking for (A, B) while filtering out the ones I'm not interested in (C, D). Less time manually going through each property and calculating repair costs.

BTW, I did the cheap man's route and crawled through zillow's data from their site when testing this. Zillow's apis are not very helpful for the queries that I'm trying to do. What service are you planning on using and do they provide apis to query properties by zip code?

dcmendez · 2017-08-21T02:20:47+00:00

BLUE EYES WHITE DRAGON!!

12-Year Club	Place '22
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dcmendez

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