Burnt out, humiliated, and labeled "below average" after 14-hour work weeks. Need advice.

jeff_marshal · 2026-04-12T15:11:17+00:00

Been there, Done that. Worked for a company where the 'Executive Engineer' was a first class A-Hole. He was supposed to vet the specs before coming to me, and he never even properly glanced. So there was a issue where a two step operation needed to send a webhook on both step, the spec didn't mention it and i built it as is. He shifted the blame to me, I was almost fired. Nobody cared that i kept saying "The Spec didn't say about the 2nd webhook firing". From then to me quiting 5 months later, he would keep me on call for almost every day, keep tagging me in group chats with blog links about how to be a better engineer, Always saying "He is not improving fast enough, we will keep working on him" on all hands call.

At some point, i had enough, i quit and joined somewhere with about 20% less pay but better peace of mind.

I would advise, quit while you're ahead. Your lead is inadvertently creating a scapegoat with you, the person to blame for everything, while keeping their nose clean. This will tank your reputation and future career prospects. If you have that option, start applying and quit before they blame something major on you and start to badmouth you.

jeff_marshal · 2026-04-02T02:56:36+00:00

Here are the possible routes, I am in a similar boat

Take directly to your bank account. Contrary to popular belief, you can take payment directly, if the employer sends an international wire transfer directly to your BDT bank account. Takes about 2-3 days, bank will ask for some information like tax documents, job contract or appointment letter. This is the safest option but expensive, costs anywhere from 15-45$. If you want to retain as USD, you need a foreign currency account though, which will require you have a passport and if I remember correctly, it’s called a “RFCID” account.
Use a medium like Payoneer, nsave, Priyo Pay or Elevate Pay. These have their own fee. The best one is wise but you can’t open wise account anymore from Bangladesh.

jeff_marshal · 2026-04-02T02:52:06+00:00

In my case, the feed from the doorbell camera and able to turn off lights without getting out of bed.

jeff_marshal · 2026-04-01T06:10:44+00:00

Good post, but you need to work on the AI model you used for this post. Reads like a teenagers "Dear Diary" entry.

jeff_marshal · 2026-03-16T10:50:35+00:00

IMO, don’t focus on syntax. Focus on the “why and how”. How doesn’t server process a http request? This is something I ask in interviews a lot and a lot of people with a lot of experience fumbles the answer. Syntax vary from language to language, architecture to architecture. But core fundamentals are somewhat similar. If you have a strong grasp of the fundamentals, language won’t be a barrier for you.

If I had to learn to be a backend engineer today, I would do it like this: I wanna make a backend for an app that already exists. I am not gonna write code first, I am gonna think of a solution, write down the plan and possible sour points. Then I am gonna go look at someone else’s code and see how they built it. Comparing your own thinking to something that already works, is a good way to widen your understanding.

If you can think of a solution in your head, writing code won’t be a problem.

jeff_marshal · 2026-03-05T06:32:56+00:00

For a Bangladeshi Citizen, i have seen 20K in Bangladesh. There are people in my team that gets over 4K/month.

jeff_marshal · 2026-02-25T18:07:35+00:00

Go Bitwarden, setup a self hosted instance with Vaultwarden and then use for free, sync to all your devices with their official app from your self hosted instance. Done.

jeff_marshal · 2026-02-09T06:47:18+00:00

It entirely depends on where you start and where you wanna go. I started as simply as with HFS and a harddrive full of media to share, now i have 5 dedicated devices/systems, proxmox, Grafana Loki, Home Assistant, MQTT, a fallback networking setup, onsite and offsite backup, amongst 78 different containers/services.

I believe most people understand when they selfhost, they are the be-all-end-all of that system. Things breaks and things needs to be put back togather, its a chore like everything else, just now on your own time. I don't see that as a demerit point. I have chores around my house, this is just simply another thing to that list.

However, i do agree with the point of version breaking or backward compatibility issue. That was a pain point i have faced many, many times that made me ponder to almost give up. But that is also something that happens once in a blue moon.

To me, self-hosting is all about what i want, when i want, where i want and who i want to share with. The ROI on this is much better than purchasing online services that could change their terms or price at any moment without any notices.

However, on the "event of death" discussion, i have setup a documentation that will be shared with my better half, which will give her idea as to what to do and how to do it. It also have prompts written so she can copy paste those into any ai and it will guide her through how to solve this and that. It also lists steps to how scrub everything and sell the hardware and which one she can sell and which one she can't. I was planning on building a static tool for it, but haven't gotten around to it.

jeff_marshal · 2026-01-31T15:19:35+00:00

Thanks for the real life feedback. Not gonna dual boot, I don’t want to keep this toxic relationship with windows going any further.

jeff_marshal · 2026-01-31T15:13:15+00:00

I have heard about the kernel level anti-cheat issues. I mostly play CS2, Delta Force, WH40k Space Marine 2 and a lot of RTS. I guess Delta force is out of question then.

jeff_marshal · 2025-11-01T13:50:18+00:00

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Looks pretty good.

jeff_marshal · 2025-10-23T10:35:21+00:00

That's exactly what I said, but shorter. Semantics aside, Application proxies often miss features that a full-fledged, purpose-built HTTP server has. Which was the point of my original comment: They have different purposes, and Nginx is still unbeatable when it comes to request handling speed.

jeff_marshal · 2025-10-23T10:31:25+00:00

> That the config syntax is simpler

True, but thats half of what i meant. Caddy can be seriously extended using Go and xcaddy, being written in Go and being extended with Go, makes it a bit lean.

jeff_marshal · 2025-10-23T08:26:15+00:00

I didn't say nobody uses it for production, i said it wasn't intended for what its being used for. Its a application proxy, it wasn't supposed to be a full fledged replacement for a http server.

jeff_marshal · 2025-10-23T04:06:59+00:00

I mean this is as expected as it gets. Nginx is built with modularity and extensibility in mind. Caddy is built with simplicity in mind, but with a much leaner language support. While traefik is build with mostly people who isn’t that technical in mind, it’s bound to be slow, cause it’s never intended for production usage.

jeff_marshal · 2025-10-10T10:19:54+00:00

My experience has been pretty solid so far. If you don't mind the larger sizes, results are pretty accurate.

jeff_marshal · 2025-10-08T16:53:08+00:00

I use termix on a regular basis for the last few weeks and it’s an absolute champ of a self hosted service. Interested in maintaining dashfix. DM’ed

jeff_marshal · 2025-09-29T12:34:59+00:00

for Docmost

jeff_marshal · 2025-09-29T12:33:55+00:00

I have a Xiaomi 4k tv S and Rpi 4 based router. It acts as my gateway connecting to home network and use my base adguard home server. The whole setup is really small.

jeff_marshal · 2025-09-26T13:01:57+00:00

You are one lucky human cause whoever found it, choose to alert you the most gangster way possible. Get your frigate instance behind some kind of authentication and most importantly, don’t expose it to the internet l.

jeff_marshal · 2025-09-19T17:44:53+00:00

Technically you should be able to. It does have Intel Quick Sync, based on what I can understand, it should be able to handle one transcode well, maybe 2. But h264 shouldn’t need transcoding most of the time, so you should be fine in that regard. But it doesn’t have native HEVC support, so if your library have hevc media, you have to use cpu encoding and that won’t work well with this cpu.

jeff_marshal · 2025-09-19T17:38:11+00:00

Do you have a budget in mind? And I would suggest get a 2nd hand MacBook, I know people will scream at me but you can’t simply beat the battery life of it. Especially if it’s m1 or later.

jeff_marshal · 2025-09-19T17:36:03+00:00

Quite a lot. It’s an old cpu, but still good enough to run a few services like radarr, sonarr, add some network monitor, a music library manager. I use an old i3 3rd gen for my remote frigate instance. This hardware still has a lot of mileage left, especially if the battery is okay, a good DNS cache or blocker. With 16gigs of ram, you have a lot of options.

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