> How much of the work I’m doing is driven by planning as opposed to circumstance

What question(s) do you ask the companies to get information for this?

I usually ask this question multiple ways with different wording as I go through an interview panel. They're generally along the lines of:

1. What does your roadmap look like? Do you have a roadmap?

2. How reliable is the team about hitting deadlines? Why or why not?

3. Who handles incident response? How frequently does this responsibility rotate?

4. For a given week, how much work is planned vs interrupt driven (e.g. someone needs something by the end of this week and we only learned about it days prior).

5. How much firefighting does this team do? Is this driven by the team's own work or issues in other parts of the organization?

Your mileage may vary, there are a lot of ways to get a sense of how a team/org works and what may be important to me may or may not be as important for you. Cheers!

Hey, I have read the discussion between you and insert_coin and I think you have slightly misunderstood what they are saying. From what I see, both of you are for improved lives of the historically-oppressed minorities in America. insert_coin said "I’m not saying do nothing" and I think that points to them disagreeing with the means taken to achieve the desired outcome (i.e. better lives for the minorities).

Interesting that I have been watching a long video (over an hour long) and the buffer is still loading while YouTube in general is down for me

> an almost emptiness or that of negative space, encapsulates and closes in upon the definition of "present moment".

It definitely feels like that more and more for me recently. Sometimes it feels like "I've watched these videos before" on YouTube or I find the memes on Reddit repetitive or unfunny. It gets to the point where I don't mind rewatching videos..

I've taken these feelings as cues to get off the internet and focus my energy toward the "real world", as cheesy as it may sound.

I feel more joy and direct benefit through improving interacting with the physical environment like cleaning the house, learning the science of baking and cooking and giving the results to friends and family.

It feels more like I'm living real life than having my life disappear into the ether of the web.

Any books to recommend for the topics you mentioned? Especially sql or mongo.

I really liked 'The Art of SQL', Stephane Faroult

Mongo has a series of online courses

Even if the consequences of the dumb people's actions indirectly (or directly) affect your life?

Yes. If I put myself in the position where I am heavily dependent on what they do then I have only myself to blame. And if it is a minor dependency then I probably won't even care. And if you are talking about them doing violence then bullets are cheap.