Youtube comments of (@DiabeticGameGuy).

  1. I moved whenever I could get an advance in my career. My 20 and 30 year old self told me this was a great way to climb the corporate ladder. I would earn more money so I could have a better life. However, in my 50s I realize I lost so much time with my family. My father passed away 1 year after I graduated Harvard so he never got to see the person I would become. My mother lives on the other side of the country, and I only see her once a year for a short visit. I call her regularly, but I know I can't be there for her when/if she needs me as my life is here now. I also have few friends from the time I graduated college until I finally decided to stop job hopping. I didn't realize what I had been missing out on for all those years. I've now lived in Arizona for 11 years. I am married, and I have friends. I'll always wonder how life would have turned out if I had accepted a slower paced life of living in a small town rather than chasing the career.
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  2. Wow, I had no idea you started as a support engineer. Your growth has been incredible. Congratulations! I started a L5 TPM, then moved to L6 SDE Manager in my first review cycle. My first year I was in the "Top Tier" category, and then I just plateuad. After the great year one, I spent the rest of my time as a L6 Product Manager, L6 Ops Managrer. I did a stretch role doing L7 work for one peak, but I didn't do well enough for a perm promotion. I left shortly after feeling lke a failure. Leaving Amazon is my greatest career regret, but I just couldn't get out of my head that people were promoting all around me. For referenece, the older version of me realizes I wasn't ready. However, at the time, it really hurt, and my lack of promotions was all I could think about day and night. Can you talk about how long you spent at each level? Did you ever feel like you were failing because you weren't moving up as quickly as you wanted?
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  3. Man, your hair and beard are amazing. I'd love to see a video where you talk about how you care for your hair and what facial hair products you use.
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  4. I moved from Los Angeles to Seattle, and then moved to Huntington West Virginia, specifically Barboursville. In CA and WA, my rent was $2800 per month for a 1 bedroom apartment. In WV, I rented the nicest apartments I could find and it was only $1k per month. The food was about half the price I had been paying when I lived in downtown Seattle. I loved living in West Virginia. I only moved away because my work led me to Phoenix. If my family were to ever relocate, West Virginia would definitely be on our shortlist of places to move to. One tip that the video creator didn't mention was the traffic. The other 3 cities I've mentioned have some pretty severe traffic during rush hour. I only really spent time around Huntington area, but even during rushour it wasn't that bad. Hahah, the only bad traffic days were the heavy rain days due to water getting in the road. This may not be as bad for people who know the roads well, but for someone who just moved to town, there were days when I had no idea how to get to my house from the office.
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  5. Congratulations! I'm a fan of all your videos so I'm here for the life updates as well as the career advice. I was at Amazon from 2007 to 2011, and it changed my life. I learned more from my time at Amazon than my graduate degree from Harvard. I can't fathom how much you've learned from spending nearly 20 years in such a talent rich environment. I wish you huge amounts of success on your next chapter.
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  6. Nice, loooks like you are shooting from a new space . Thats a very nice kitchen. Congrats on the new home.
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  7. Question - How are you going to survive 11 months as you're trying to get to full-time on YouTube? I assumed you'd be doing Uber Eats while making the vids.
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  8. Wow. Thanks for making this video. I hadn’t heard about the wsj article.
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  9. Keep at it. No shame in doing what's right for you at the time.
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  10. You have a great camera and background. It's so crisp and clean.
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  11. Glad other people are helping. Hope you got credit for all 3 of the Amazon purchases that I made using your link.
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  12. Good luck.
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  13. Congrats! That's huge! Having enough food will be such a help.
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  14. Wow, you've really upped the editing game on this video. The montage was great!
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  15. Question - When the fed loans out that 300m$ in the new program for upto one year, what is the interest rate the banks are paying? I haven't seen that amount anywhere, and it makes a huge difference. Is it more or less than the government is paying? This feels like an incredible subsidy if the banks are paying more in interest on bonds only loan that back out at full face value at a lower rate.
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  16. Wow! Tough year. You've built a community of people who are cheering for you.
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  17. Wow, I wish I had seen this while I still worked at Amazon...
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  18. Just bought an air filter using your link. I used my wife's account (Frugal Moth) to buy two things yesterday which were a selfie stick and CoQ10 so that should get you the 3 referrals you need. :) Congrats on being monetized. That's a huge step, hope you'll publish what your RPMs are for your channel, and maybe even do monthly updates on how much you earn. Would be awesome to be able to follow your journey.
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  19. Good luck on your journey. Just keep at it...
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  20. This video is pure gold. Thank you.
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  21. For perspective, I have a master's degree from Harvard, and I also have an MBA from a smaller university. My opinion is that YOU should not go for a graduate degree. If you've tried multiple times without finishing, why would a new program be different? Going to school has both a financial cost and an opportunity cost of the time you spend studying. You're not leveraging the education you have now so why add more? I think you'd be far better off using your time to teach students rather than become a student yourself to learn more. There are options that have an incredibly low barrier to entry such as being a substitute teacher or a classroom aid. This would earn some money, and it would build experience toward landing other jobs teaching math. If those aren't an option, I'd suggest looking into volunteering at a non-profit or public high school. Ideally this could be in your local area to build contacts, network, and get references. Even volunteering a couple hours per week would give you experience that you could talk about for job interviews.
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  22.  @skyhappy  Definitely not. If I hadn't gone to Harvard, I wouldn't have been equipped to work at Amazon nor would I have been able to keep up with the pace. I had always been a big fish in a small pond before Harvard, and it's easy to standout in small schools or at startups where I can be the smartest person in the room. One of my biggest lessons was to listen and learn from others. At my previous jobs, I could just spend more time and get the win. Both Amazon and Harvard really taught me the importance on knowing my strengths and trusting my peers to deliver.
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  23. Congrats!!!
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  24. Wow, this is brilliant. Thank you for publishing. This video was such a help to me.
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  25. Wait, did I miss Clem moving his desk and getting a bigger monitor? I loved his apartment tour.
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  26. Congrats on 100k subs. Question - When dating, do you find that it's important that your partner also believe in minimalism or living in a similar financial lifestyle?
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  27. How in the world does Meg feel about this? She is so into fashion and clothes. This must annoy her beyond words.
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  28. Great advice. Thank you.
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  29. Haha, opening up the drawer to show the can opener was awesome B-roll. Made me laugh. :)
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  30. God, I remember those. My team caused one sev 1 while I was there and it still hurts. The year was 2008, and my team (Warehouse Deals) had just migrated to a new order and fulfilment pipeline. Everything was working well, BUT none of the reports were prepared for orders to flow through this channel. There was a hard coded value to ignore us in the main Amazon reports, but after the migration all our orders were double counting. This polluted all the data in the Datawarehouse for every category where Warehouse Deals had products. The revenue and COGS were off by millions!!! It was a brutal time as it was a major issue completely impacting the business, finance and DW teams, and our little team was the main root cause. All the retail VPs and Directors saw a decrease in their WBR metrics. The consequences were above my paygrade as I was just a L6 Software Engineer Manager. Our whole team was reorged to retail from ops shortly after this happened. Another incident that was only a sev 2 happened when we misran a pricing script for WarehouseDeals. This was in 2007, and our mistake made the NBC national news. This was about 5 months after I joined the company, and I was sure that I'd be fired. Thankfully, I lived through it though.
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  31. I worked at Amazon from 2007 to 2011 as a L6 manager. During my time there, I was never on a PIP, and I was top tier for two review cycles. If I were open to returning to Amazon, would I be considered for L7 positions?
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  32. Gosh, I hope you don't go back to either graduate degree program. As a reminder, I already have two master degrees with one of them being from Harvard. I also had a 20+ year career where I managed many people and ran more hiring loops than I can remember. I will be direct. I believe going to school for you is a complete waste of time and money at this stage in your life. When you go to school, you are the customer. You are paying money to be there. I believe this is just false progress. Rather than spending more for your education, you need to find ways to get value from the degree and certificate you have now. Rather than spending thousands of dollars and years of your life to get more letters after your name, you could instead spend that time now working as an educator. Even if you have to start out volunteering as a free tutor now to gain experience, that wouldn't cost you tuition, and it would be far less time to find a full-time job compared with the years of getting another degree. I know many people who have started as high school teachers that later moved on to teaching classes at community or regional colleges. There is also a huge need for high school math teachers. There can still be a path for you to be a professor, so you don't need to give up on that dream, but you need to take some steps first with building a stable work history. As I mentioned in my previous comment about this, substitute teacher is a job with an incredibly low barrier to entry. I bet many schools would leap at the chance to have you as an option. That would also allow you to build a name for yourself to determine if you like it before going through any certification to be a full-time teacher.
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  33. The Backpack you get depends on the year you started. They also gave new backpacks every two years. I was there in the mid 2000s and it a status symbol to to wear the older backpacks. When you left Amazon, did you have to pay back the signing bonus or relocation package? I was a SDE manager and an operations manager with direct reports. Some of my reports left before their year was up, but no one was close to the 2 month mark. When I was an SDE manager, I didn't expect anyone on my team to even be value add for a 3-4 months. Yep, I expected them to launch code or contribute to code reviews, but the time the other SDEs took to help them with project was likely a net negative and I was ok with that. Glad things are better for you now. Speaking from firsthand experience, when you're in the wrong role at Amazon, it can feel brutal.
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  34. This reminds me of the late 1978 and 1979.
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  35. Great video. Can you let me know where you get your b-roll? It's so amazing.
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