u/lilinformatiker

I’m a 30M American software engineer thinking about spending a year in Taipei while on sabbatical. I’m not looking for hookups—I’d like a serious relationship and would be open to staying longer if life there works out.

How realistic is long-term dating if I initially plan to stay for a year? How much does Mandarin matter, and where have people had the best luck meeting women who want something serious?

I’d also appreciate any firsthand advice about exclusivity, family involvement, finances, or cultural expectations.

I'm a software engineer with about 5.5 years of full-time experience: four years at big tech companies and the last 1.5 years at an AI application startup.

I'm considering leaving voluntarily and taking a full year off. I'm financially prepared and expect to keep coding through a few personal or solo projects (which I think could be pretty cool with how great agents are now), but I would not be formally employed and no guarantee my projects turn into something serious. Right now I receive a lot of recruiter inbound, though I know that may say little about one year from now.

For people who took a 6–12 month break at a similar career stage, how difficult was it to get interviews and offers when you returned? Did recruiters treat a planned sabbatical differently from unemployment? My plan would be to return to the Bay Area, which I think could help a lot given that there are a lot of job opportunities here.

What is the strategy to speed run finding a wife abroad?

I am an early employee (first 3 hire) as an engineer.

My startup interviewing is all done by my CTO and there is very little (usually zero) input from other engineers on the team. We are about 15 to 20 people at our company, maybe half are engineers. Is it strange to have hiring so unilateral?

Did you have areas with mild recession from ortho and got full coverage from gum graft?

Getting a gum graft but wondering if getting some teeth to 100% coverage reasonable.

Looking to get 10 or so veneers in the coming year. Anyone have good veener provider in Taipei?

I want to share a documented local patient experience involving Mission Bay Dental and its orthodontic referral partner. What's unfortunate is I quite liked the MBD staff members and was a patient for almost 4 years, but raised issues and had a few dissapointing moments with the owners Dr. Ly and Dr. Choi.

It felt like the owner's ended up being evasive when I brought up legitmate valid ethical concerns regarding their referral partner. Some interesting interactions can be observed in the Granola transcripts. I raised concerns that their referral partner's sales practices were “not in line with Mission Bay Dental philosophy” given that MBD claims to strive to be a high integrity practice. Dr. Ly did not initially treat that as irrelevant. She said, “I agree. Thank you for bringing it up,” acknowledged “there’s a component of this that we cannot ignore,” said the sales approach sounded “too aggressive,” and said, “I don’t want our patients to have to go through that either.” She also said referral partners should be “aligned in philosophy” and that patients should be “treated like humans.”

An MBD staff member also supported part of my concern. She described her own consultation with this provider and said she “did feel the pressure of the cost,” was “taken aback,” and the office “kept on bothering” her with repeated follow-up emails even after she decided not to proceed. Most importantly, she called my concerns “very valid” and said she had been “agreeing with everything” I was saying.

I also shared external reports describing similar sales pressure, including comments that the consult felt like “buying a used car,” that patients felt “persuaded or pressured,” and that the office used “high pressure tactics.” Separately, the TIO consultancy (firm that provides guidance/consulting service for the referral partner) material I attached described treatment coordinators using “persuasive responses,” “converting patients,” “systematic follow-up,” and limited-time incentives.

It bothered me when MBD later seemed to backtrack. In the transcript, the conduct was treated as serious, patient-experience related, and relevant to referral decisions. But MBD’s later clinical note characterized the partner’s ethics as “outside the scope of our authority and outside the clinical responsibility of this practice." It came across like they were being evasive at this point.

The refund/release issue made this more concerning. During an urgent orthodontic transfer, the partner presented a Release and Waiver tied to refund/write-off consideration. The document broadly released claims, included language about claims before “any regulatory agency,” required confidentiality, and legally questionable clauses which appear to contradict California law. I needed the refund to continue care elsewhere, and the delay contributed to me wearing one Invisalign tray for roughly three months. Mission Bay Dental continuously evaded this topic even though it was substantial and relevant for my clinical care.

There were also probing reliability concerns. Close-in-time full-mouth probings from MBD and a specialist appeared materially different. It was not ordinary variation but likely MBD under-detected pocketing or bleeding on probing, making active disease risk appear safer than it was. My disussions regarding probing error prompted a clinical calibration with the probing opertor. In addition, MBD cleared me for orthodontics when I had active periodontal disease which goes against the standard of care and basically all DDSs that I bring this up with disagree with MBD's decision. I believe this can explain some of the degradation of my periodontal health while I was a patient at MBD.

Data handling was another issue. MBD used Granola AI for three appointments involving detailed clinical/referral discussions. MBD said it was used only to aid note-taking, but the transcripts contained clinical content, and Granola publicly states it is not currently HIPAA compliant and should not be used to process PHI unless a compliant arrangement exists. I experienced a lot of friction when requested records as well. Documents were repeatedly omitted or produced only after follow-up, and although I requested the complete Granola transcripts in February, I did not receive the full transcript-format records until months later after significant back-and-forth. The full transcripts contained materially more context than the AI summaries/assessments initially provided.

Although MBD comes across as nice and I quite enjoyed the team there, when push comes to shove it feels like they have different priorities than transparency and high integrity dental care based in my experience.

https://preview.redd.it/c0as04r4u40h1.png?width=1122&format=png&auto=webp&s=7750bca60fce8e5952271db850e55cb4ff526598

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