Recognizably depressed at work

The amount of talent in my current seems to be overflowing. This was what I intentionally sought for when I decided to leave my previous job. It wasn’t that I was bored or felt my job was too easy, but I wanted to have intellectually more stimulating conversation.

Also throughout my career I had always played the role of nuts and bolts, rather than felt in control of the product itself. When I first started my career, I vowed to never join a startup. Now that has changed after roughly 10 years. I guess that’s natural.

In my current job, I desparately want to simplify things. I don’t understand how a product with so many moving pieces can possibly be maintained and reach profitability in the long run. I understand people around me are generally smarter than me. Indeed they seem to remember things better, and always know when to complain about things that are not due to their own fault. I also meet people who are highly detail oriented, and work with sql queries like bread and butter.

I am impatient when it comes to running sql queries. I seek to run everything in distributed/multi-processing mode. Almost nobody seems to share the same level of impatience. My entire mindset is around how to make things faster. I guess if you don’t have a product yet, there is nothing to optimize. But the 0 to 1 transition seems to be what I am hired for, and I feel highly under-qualified for such role. My manager doesn’t seem to understand my strengths and weaknesses, but I am sure he will eventually.

In terms of the ranking job I am doing, I want to essentially build a single neural model and declare victory. I know the traditional signals are important for cold-start, but I don’t see them as adding any value past the cold-start phase. My previous job has reinforced my view. There nobody cared about classical techniques like bm25. I am mildly surprised there are much younger folks at my current company who disdain AI and want to go back to old school information retrieval. I guess they are energetic and precocious, and I haven’t really advanced much beyond the basic supervised learning mentality.

I just learned on fb that a remotely acquainted Korean ex-coworker seems to suffer from depression. It appears Korean Americans have a decent depression rate, based on 2 sample points. I was told that I look Korean myself, so maybe there is some risk there.

Overall, perhaps I need to let life control me more, and completely give up struggling. I often blame myself to not anticipate difficulties at certain stages of life, or simply not having enough faith in their reality. For instance, older people could suffer from pancreatitis. And genetically I know I am highly likely to as well, given my maternal grandpa’s history and my own digestive woes. But I seem still not to pay enough attention to this possibility. Hopefully writing things down adds more weight to such thoughts.

Overall I just don’t understand why people write so many complicated pieces of code, and what’s more, that they can stomach that. It seems different people’s brains have evolved differently.

What feels like the low hanging fruit to me seems laughable by others. I am surprised after 10 years of industry experience, I still haven’t reached the level of common sense. I guess one needs to actively seek out opportunity of painful growth, otherwise he/she is just living in a comfort bubble, although it was never comfortable for me except rare occasions.

One who remains calm in the face of comfort may be better suited for big corporate lives, and ultimate wins the race of life. I can’t say I don’t yearn going back to the big corporations, which at least provide some near term illusion of stability. The pain I acquired from the past experience in big companies is gradually fading. I only remember it as an abstract concept nowadays, something I might have told my future self at the time, in anticipation of my forgetful personality.