One thing I've learned repeatedly over the last 20 years is that companies are generally not deserving of your loyalty.

By all means, show up, apply yourself, and do your best work, that's just being a professional. But never get emotionally invested in a company you don't own.

There are really only two reasons for staying: earning or learning, ideally both. Once you have exhausted your current employer's limits in this regard, move on, you don't owe them anything.

I try to explain my problems to my 6yo twins. It is just HILARIOUS to see their small faces going "huh. Did you tried using that spark thing to send your emails for you?".
Srsly, they give better advice than half the devs I work with. Rubber ducking be damned.

I am mentally burned out from web development.

Physically I'm fine, but it's getting more difficult each day to open my laptop and write code, documentation or do code reviews.

Web development just seems so meaningless, where my day to day job has me trudging through one web form after another. I'm sick of implementing business logic on the backend and tired of listening to the product owner bitch about users who are demanding.

My productivity has fallen to the level where I'm feeling guilty for spending my time on nothing!

Don't give me advice, I know I need a change of scenery.

I just need to find the motivation to work on another hiring test which has nothing to do with the actual job.

The joys of using overpriced enterprise software...

Me: Hey, I tried connect to the server, but I'm getting a "connection refused" error. Is it really running.
Other: hmm, I'll check
Other: The host restarted, but I'll get the software up again, no problemo
Other: I started the server again, but there's, but it's throwing errors while initializing. Time to write customer support

And then you get that premium customer support that think we don't know how to use their software at times. And once they realize we do, they don't know much better either. And once they realize we know how to use it there are 3 possibilities:
* They need our help to debug stuff before knowing what is going on
* They need to release a new version and accidentally break backwards compatibility and create enough work for us to burn through the clients contact hours
* They provide helpful advice (secret ending)

These fuck don't even release a proper changelog for their software nor their manuals.

i know we're all sick and tired of the covid talk, but...
I'm so, so sedentary right now, more so than two years ago, and that's a feat.
this past week i had to walk a little and do some stuff, and today i woke up a little earlier and spent my afternoon in the sun. and it feels so good, to just... do nothing, sunbathe, pet my cat, kiss my boyfriend.
i never realize how much this shit wears me down until i catch a break. it's not just the pandemic though, it's this career, this lifestyle. sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours straight, no window in sight... that's death, no matter how much of an introverted nerd i may be.
if someone wants advice, I'll tell you to go out, get some fresh air, do nothing at all. we don't need to do something at every minute of the day, that's not resting. find a park, a beach, some piece of nature and just breathe it in, it's worth it.

*Haxk20 "rant"*
Its been around a year or even more since i switched to Gentoo from Arch.

Dont regret a thing. Made my experience of using my system and working better and faster.

Dont try it just because you want to be part of some gentoo gang or whatever. Its a system. Its a tool. Not some badge you wear. And this tool is a tool you never knew you needed. Takes time to set it up. But once you do. You dont need to reinstall nearly ever. And it will take care of you if you do the same sometimes.

Advice i wish i had when i went into this: Read the news. If you have your config and you get a ton of conflicts. Best chances are that it will be there with explanation how to resolve it all.

There is ofc FAR more i could say. But i doubt anyone wants to hear me talking for entire char limit about the experience.. Tho if people want it i can *shrug*. Its been mostly positive either way.

"get lost"
The fucker was just saying he would not help me, but in the end I should have taken the advice literally and got the fuck out of that fucked up place.

I like like my boss and my coworkers and the place I work but for the love of goat cheese this org has the attention span of a toddler on meth.

Seriously, it's like this is your #1 priority, next week, wait we have a different emergency you have a new super critical urgent thing, then "hey team Y has a vendor coming in next month to integrate these two pieces and they need you to have half of it wired up by then so make sure you get that done." Like SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY

HERE"S SOME LIFE ADVICE IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU PLAN OR SCHEDULE OR PRIORITIZE IF YOU END UP CHANGING ALL OF IT EVERY WEEK!

It's like painting a mural of a field, and then 10 minutes in you decide you'd rather paint a space ship, then you realize you don't like the space ship so instead you decide to change your painting to Elvis with a mullet, and you keep doing this. The end result is not beauty it's the mad deranged scribbles of a man past the point of sanity.

But for the love of Haliburton if they ask me why X or Y wasn't done I'll probably end up going full BOFH on somebody.

If the project goes overbudget it's because you fucking gave away the custom made software for too fucking cheap.

Not because of the amount of hours building this piece of shit site which btw I was never consulted on the estimates and not even mentioned about the 2 different designs for the same fucking site or even how it needed to be architected.

As a contractor you depend on your time, not on a fixed salary. No perks, nor fucking swag.

My advice is if the company thinks that working remotely is a perk, then fucking run away.

Absolutely new to programming world and devrent. And looking for some advice on were to begin for a Web developer

How are you guys taking care of mental health?

I feel down in dumps. Burnt out from previous job and life seems like a drag.

Any advice appreciated as I feel pretty isolated.

// todo: refactor this!

Advice from me to my future self.

Best advice from and to myself though:

"Don't work with idiots"

I'm sure it will change my life when it happens.

I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.

One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .

My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:

1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)

2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))

Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.

When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"

So I messaged the CEO ...

Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?

CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.

Me: and how does one maximize value?

CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!

Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)

CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>

I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...

So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.

Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...

You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

One thing that @scout taught me is to wear the oxygen mask myself before helping others. Oh she is a sweetheart.

This advice has stuck with me since and slowly & steadily, I am regaining my lost confidence and self love.

Remember, how I was struggling for clarity a couple of months ago? But now, I feel more clear in head.

During the start of the pandemic, I joined a community of corporate normies. I used to live happier until that decision.

That place made me ultra competitive and I subconsciously became a rat trying to win the race. I damaged myself more than I benefited.

I joined at the time of inception. Every core member is a good friend.

Now the fun thing is, they moved to Slack. Many of the core members run the community as admins.

While I don't engage much, but talk to some of them occasionally.

One key area is, running a job board to help people get jobs. And another is mentorship to help the members overcome challenges and grow in their career.

In DMs, literally every core member who is doing this for others is struggling themselves for the same. How fucking ironic!

They seek help and advice from me and vent out their failure frustrations.

Imagine, someone who isn't able to solve their problem, let alone solving it first before helping others, is guiding the community of few thousands to excel in their careers.

Fucking brilliant.

One of the biggest life lessons @scout taught me, wear your oxygen mask first before helping others.

Learn php. It's the future!

Actually it was good advice at it's time.

I don't know what's wrong with me..

Within one day I basically lost interest in everything I do. I just don't see the point of all this anymore.

And the bad thing is, that I don't even know where that comes from so suddenly, everything is going fine, but still.. Life just feels like pain at the moment.

Don't want do drag down someone else with me and I sincerely apologise if it's too late to mention it at this point, just hope that maybe someone here can understand what's going on or give me some advice on how to fix my situation.

always put timeouts on your connection code..number of times I see shit blocked forever ..and we know it’s not good to have your shit blocked

Whats the state of mobile development skills demand atm?

Thinking of getting into crossplattform development with flutter or kotlin or enhance my dev skills in native android development (10years exp.) and create me a base project with jetpack compose.

Advice appreciated.

Does anyone here have any good resources for introduction to embedded, low level development, or anything on advanced C concepts? I've been having trouble trying to step into more complicated topics like bit manipulation and stuff I can do with memory management. Also any advice is also appreciated.

actually, the one thing me and an old friend joked about has probably been most helpful 'advice' lately.

i had a boss that said "i made ppl look bad" - as oppose to make me look good? idk...he didnt like me

and my friend said i should just do the shit i can, and save it for a rainy day to look like a hero.

since i am usually out-doing other ppl i work with with 1 hand on my dik, i started doing it. take my time or make it look like things take longer than they do. then when someone is in crisis mode i 'work' on an already done solution and present it in a week and get brownie points.

from 1 angle dishonest, but the alternatives are being overworked, a constant SME, or in my first case with the boss that didnt like me - an asshole ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hey guys! I'm new here, and also in programming... I'm finishing my studies in Python and I would like to ask you a question, if I can... what else should I learn that would help me? I intend to start my "career" as a web developer, at least for now... did I do it right? am i starting wrong?

I have got ton of great colleagues that I have worked it and consider myself very fortunate that they were hunble and patience enough to deal with me.

Having said that, it would be evident that I have gotten some great advice too. In fact those minor comments here and there made me who I am today (a much better version of my past self).

One advice that I got from my South Korean colleague, who was based in Singapore and used to collaborate with team in Pacific time (US west coast) at odd hours uptil of 12 AM almost everyday.

When I was new, she kept telling me to get enough rest and not burn myself out. In early days I was very excited about the new stuff.

She said, 'Floyd make sure you set yourself up for a marathon and not a sprint.'

Damn! That hit me hard. Not just from a professional stand point, but also from a personal perspective, I realised that I need to slow down, enjoy the details, live those moments, and let shit go.

She is one of my favourites.

How often do you go for an interview? A senior once told me to go for job interviews regularly to know where you stand. WDYT of this advice?

If you got job offers from Uber and IBM. Which one you would choose?

This would be my first big name company. Need advice. 🤷🏻‍♂️

To all my Machine Learning engineers, Ive been doing Frontend development for 6 years and I'm done. Wanting to get into machine learning because I've always loved data.

1. What is your day to day like?
2. Any advice for my learning journey?

Thank you🙏

I was terminated last year from BigTech. Will I ever get another job in another BigTech company?

Not a layoff. Terminated for moonlighting. Lack of judgment on my part. Trying to move past this but the events still haunt me till this day.

Not looking for sympathy. Rather, advice on how to approach job search and background checks in the future. I have big ambitions and don’t want to be an IC forever. I’m hoping this doesn’t prevent me from becoming a manager —> Director in the future.

This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.

Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.

With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.

All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.

I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.

I'm fucking Paralyzed and I need some advice.

I want to be an entrepreneur.

Not just an entrepreneur but a DAMN good one.

I self-studied business, economics, physics, self-taught multivariable calculus, teaching myself chemistry too.

But I haven't even started my career and I just graduated from University.

Right now I'm starting simple and just doing a few web development things.

But, I want to go deeper into a subject that hasn't really had its problem solved yet.

A.I. can sell you neat things, but it can't kill misinformation (yet).

Graphics are an integral part to gaming, but GPUs are the second greatest threat to our environment behind commercial jets.

Do I HAVE to choose between A.I. and graphics?!

Hi all, how do you deal with imposter syndrome?
I just joined a new job 3 mths back and am struggling with feeling productive. I feel my manager thinks I might be incompetent as my project deliveries are getting delayed.

I was burnt out as last job and it hasn't been easy picking up domain knowledge in a new workplace esp with wfh.
Any advice on how to deal with such a situation ?

It has been a few years since I havn't touched any code, IDE, git or anything else.

And now, I'm trying to create a new personnal project for Warhammer with Laravel, Node, Tailwind and trying to understand all the webpacking thing ...

Dude, it's hard af to get back in business with all the new things ...

Any advice on how to get back ?

Need some advice. I’m a uni student and I really want to go into machine learning, data science, or computer vision. I have most of the skills and I feel I am fairly competent. However, the only professional experiences I have are web dev based. How can I make myself more appealing for data based roles? I really don’t want to do web dev anymore hahahahah

My first words to one fresh graduate , which just started his backend path:

Untested code is a garbage waiting to be collected. Even if some companies / teams somehow manage to do miracles and to work with untested code... that's just a pre-death fantasy of a dying man.

Returning to tech after 3 years working with agile, training and coaching Scrum, Kaban and XP practices. Applying for team leadership positions. Advice?

I'm planning to switch from ownCloud to Nextcloud in the next weeks. Does anyone have experience with that or maybe some advice? Aside from creating Backups.

Why do I fart so much? It's such a problem, while I was in church, I farted so loud they kicked me out.
If anyone has any advice on how to fart more, please give me advice.
(Will take any advice)

I understand that to get a promotion or a level boost you should try to do duties far above your level to show you can do more.

But what if your manager deems that the expectation? What if they don't believe your work is really above your level, and find your lack of domain knowledge compared to someone who's worked for 4 years a restriction from getting promoted? And also what if you can't get involved on projects to increase the domain knowledge you specifically lack (we have a service we don't develop for but own and get pages and resolve incidents for it, and it's an ancient one without good docs).

I just want advice on what should one do to be able to get a promotion at this stage

i am so angry, i was trying to play multiplayer on minecraft java, and it won't let me join, its literally been like this for weeks and i'm so angry.
i payed 27 usd and it doesn't even work. like what?
i haven't contacted support yet but i'm about to.

thank you for your time, if you have any advice in the comments, lmk. peace.

Has anyone taken a gap for 6 months or more? Where are you from? What age did you take it? Why did you take it? How did it go? How difficult was it to find a job after?

I am 25 from India. Due to stress and neglect, my health has been constantly deteriorating and at this point I am really running out of options. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

For those who have made a FE to BE transition: what is ur best advice on how to try new things and find a place where you can build cool ass shit?

[Career Advice]

Hi folks! I'm in a bit of a career dilemma for which I sincerely need your help.

TL;DR
How do I go from being a React Native Developer to an Android developer, considering I have 2x more experience with React Native than Android, with React Native being the more recent one ?

More details -

I started as an Android developer in 2015, using Java as my primary language. Up until the end of 2017 I kept working as an Android developer, adding different native mobile tech skills to my skillset.
At the end of 2017, my employer asked me if I could also learn React Native as he had many big projects that required a more hybrid stack. I had always been eager to learn new things (perks of being a programmer I guess), so I said yes and started working on React Native in 15-20 days.
From that point onwards, I kept doing more and more projects using React Native (in my day job) and over the years, I became more of a React Native Developer than an Android one. At this point in my career, I have about 4.5 years of React Native experience and 2.5 years of Android.

However, now I am at a point where I want to make a switch (for better pay and more exciting projects) but when I looked at the job postings for React Native this morning, they were all for startups with great pay but kinda average products, whereas the Android job listings were for companies like Uber, Reddit, etc. (basically great companies with good projects and great pay).

I really want to go back from being a React Native Developer to an Android developer full time but I don't know how. I've personally seen so many people switch jobs from one field (say React Native) to another (Backend development) - and when I asked them about how they did it, they said it didn't really matter to their companies what specific tech stack they'd worked with, which is kinda hard to believe because every job listing I've seen companies list every single technology very very specifically.

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks for reading!

What your advice for procrastinator ?

I'm pro in this field 😎
I think the reasom might be that I'm scared from being a failure

So I am pretty fair dev at Java and have been doing freelancing for sometime apart from normal full time job.
Got a client , a well funded one, who raised a decent chunk of money recently.
Got me do a couple of different areas right from refactoring and bumping their performance to all the way setting up AWS Services like RDS,Lambdas,Dynamo,SQS.
It was going good , money was coming in for the initial part.
Thinking that money is not the concern here , I accepted work at runtime and gave quotations about the additional work.

However now that all is done and deployed , the client simply refuses to pay me the money and has ghosted me horribly than my ex ever did.

I have access to their GitHub,AWS(I setup myself).

Need suggestions of whats the best way I can fuck them up if they decide to not pay even after a few more professional polite attempts I do .

sidenote : They had a pretty dumb db design and blindly had resorted to services in AWS and the pricing is still a major point of concern for them.

Yo guys any advice or tips for product dev/product management (internship) and all would be awesome

I am in such a weird state. It's definitely jealousy but i can't accept that, because jealousy in classical context means "I want to take away the thing he got" . but what am feeling is "Its okay that he got that thing, but since am equal to him, therefore i also deserve to get the same thing, but not like, after taking away from him" . this whole sounds very stupid but i am just shattered right now.

My friend. a brilliant hell-good , rock-solid, blood-bound, brother like friend of mine, is in interviews to switch for a CTC of around $700k(in spending power) . and that's shattering my whole world around what i think of myself.

To get you the context, its not like we are at same package now. I am just above an average SE salary and he is at 4x ctc , an amount which if i was getting, i would have just settled down and get a family (I am 23 btw, and starting a family is like , a goal of 10+ years)

But that was never a problem considering how our relation was. When together, money was never a question since we are earning well enough to go out lavishly without getting bothered. The main thing was that we were intellectually very equal and even though being more successful, he would agree that the points i bring to the discussions are equally valuable.

Every discussion would be like a game of chess, both of us at opposite direction, playing to prove ourself either right or reaching a point of truce while appreciating every move (i.e fact/point presented) of the other person .

But today everything feels wrong. This guy sky rocketed. even in the discussions where the truce reached in my opinions's favor, were wrong because i am still in the same ship and might not reach to his place in my whole life.
I always felt him to be better than me since we both started at the same time, but he was always 3-5x bigger and better than me in every step. but now he seems the ultimate set of correctness in my life , and everything else feels wrong. even the advice of my other friends, my seniors, my team mates and everyone else feel wrong because we are all a bunch a failures and he is the ultimate GOAT.

I am now not an intellectual anymore with any unique opinion. every thought i am having is quickly followed by "is that what X would do? what would X do?"

I can't just... mind= fucked

Need advice:

So this recruiter from AWS reached out to me for a SDE job. I said yes I’m interested and scheduled an interview. She didn’t show up. I politely said would you like to schedule another time 30 min after the empty session was over. She said yes. Then the day after she sends me a message saying they can’t hire students. (I’m 20 yo second year electrical engineering student but I have decent dev experience ~3-4 years) I tell her I’m not planning on continuing with my 3rd year next fall. She says no I’m hiring from the “industry only”. And I try to tell her I’ve never had an internship before and all of this work experience is all by myself and not university related….she stopped responding…..what am I supposed to do? It’s not the first time that this has happened. They see “graduating 2024” they immediately bounce. I tried hiding what year my university education starts/ends….didn’t work…

I have to use SQL event to check if in the "plots" has specific building, and update the gold/iron/stone... by the specific amount that building produces. This is how the Gold mine creates slowly gold. I am not sure this is OK like this, please I need advice.

I am about to start a project in RUSTLang , so RUSTLang Dev , is there anything I need to aware or advice before I start ?

Advice to New Devs: Peer review code with co-workers and constantly learn and improve. Ask a lot of questions and during your down time learn something new. :)

Starting as a software engineer in the application development department of a huge multinational. This will be my first job, ever.
What is that one advice, that you would give yourself if you were starting out?

Has anyone ever accepted an offer of employment and then changed their mind and "cancelled it" in the UK?
I have an offer starting 6 months from now and I am worried I might get another better offer in the mean time but I'll be bound to this one since I accepted it...
Any advice would be helpful. Thanks.

any advice/suggestions to intensively brush up on modern C++ and multithreading for an interview that will likely be technical and cover bases like algorithms, data structures, etc?

I haven’t done c++ for awhile since a few courses in college - I did parallel programming and GPGPU on the side, but nothing on a professional level.

I’ve been mostly doing front web dev since I got out of school and C#, so I’ve been more on design/higher level of abstraction in dev and if I am asked things about pointers, memory allocations, etc I would probably draw a blank but I am motivated to no life it hard for the next week to catch up again.

What's your advice for a new developer advocate?

How do you handle a colleague who just throws his/her work at you saying that he/she is able to implememt things at his/her side in meetings. And when you ask on personal he/she says not done yet !? Things getting delayed because of that and I don't know what to do ? can you give some advice.....

I am a stupid monkey that spilled coffee all over his keyboard, and now it seems to be EOL.

Looking for some "inspiration" - what keyboards (and mice, might also just buy a whole new set) are you guys using?

!Rant?

Hey, have been having several job interviews, does anyone have any advice on how to approach being interviewed by people from India, have been doing a lot of job interviews for a lot of companies in the US and seems like I'm interviewing for a position at India, it's very difficult to understand them and often they get offended when asked to repeat themselves... I try to be as positive and optimistic as I can but often poor audio on their part and very thick accent makes it difficult... any tips? this happen to more people? am I the only one?

Thanks...

company i work at was able to go public, and get listed on Nasdaq. i struggle to understand what that means for me. is anything gonna change? any advice?

i also find it baffling how u can be a public company and not give ur employees bonuses or raises for 3 years straight...