u/sudherzdiniq

Ten years ago, being chronically online was mostly seen as a bad thing. Now it's how people find jobs, discover investment opportunities, learn new skills, catch trends early, build businesses, and stay informed before everyone else. Obviously, doomscrolling for 8 hours isn't productive. But if you're intentional about what you consume, being very online can genuinely give you an edge over people who aren't. The internet has become the real world in many ways.

Got laid off in february. accepted an offer last week. wanted to share the full breakdown for anyone in the early stages of their search because i made a lot of expensive mistakes in the first 6 weeks. what was a waste of time: spending more than 30 minutes on any single application that wasn't at a company i deeply cared about. writing custom cover letters for ats-first applications at large companies. manually filling out workday forms. applying to listings that had been up for more than 3 days. what actually worked: applying fast to fresh postings, specifically within 24 hours. networking messages that led to internal referrals at two companies. treating interview prep as a full time block every day. automating the application volume side so i wasn't spending 4 hours a day on form filling. the manual grind took the most time and returned the least. i automated that part starting in week 3 and it gave me back hours i put into prep and actual human conversations.

Running cs at a fintech startup and our whatsapp volume has gone insane in the last 6 months. we moved to a shared inbox setup thinking that would fix things but honestly its just made it worse in some ways. 5 agents jumping between 200+ open threads a day, half the replies loose context because whoever picks up the ticket has to scroll through weeks of history first before they can even reply.

manager wants us to keep response times under 5 mins but reality is my agents are spending like 40% of the day just reading past convos to figure out whats going on. tried adding internal notes but nobody updates them properly and now theres a graveyard of half written notes making things worse.

is there a tool that actually does conversation summaries and suggests replies inside the inbox itself?? like i dont need another dashboard, i need ai sitting inside the tool my team already uses so it can remove the busywork. also translation would be huge for us because we get chats in 4 languages and google translate copy paste is a joke at this point.

Got laid off in January and went into full grind mode, and somewhere around application eighty I started keeping a list of what was actually pulling its weight. For tracking I bounced between a spreadsheet and Huntr; the board made watching the "ghosted" column fill up oddly satisfying. Teal does similar with a nice clip-the-posting button, though the good resume features sit behind a paywall. Jobscan was the one I paid for, scoring my resume against the posting so the ATS stopped binning me, but it's pricey and you can over-optimize until you sound like a robot.

The part I dreaded was filling the applications; Simplify handles the big ATS systems, and for the custom company portals it ignores I saved my answers in QuickForm and let it refill, Chrome only and it tailors nothing, it just hands me back my own answers. Glassdoor and Levels.fyi for not getting lowballed.

That's my set. I'd still love a better answer for the custom portals, since that part keeps eating my afternoons.

Trying to figure out where my hours actually go.

interview prep is time but at least it feels useful. the part that feels like pure waste is filling out the applications themselves, specially the companies with their own portals where you re-enter everything thats already on the resume you just uploaded.

curious what the biggest time sink is for the rest of you, the applications, the tailoring, the tracking? and have you found anything that cut it down or do we all just grind through it. anyone?

I think we've reached the point where "good enough" technology is underrated.

My phone from a few years ago still does almost everything I need. My laptop isn't the newest, but it gets the job done. It feels like we're constantly being told to upgrade, even when our current stuff works perfectly fine.

Not everything has to be the latest version to be enjoyable.

Genuine question because ive been going back and forth on this. some poeple in my life would understand and some would give me a lecture about authenticity or whatever. i dont really want to have the conversation tbh. but also i noticed i feel a bit weird about it when someone asks how my search is going and i say its going well without mentioning that a significant part of the volume is automated. is this even a thing worth thinking about or am i massively overthinking it

I was sitting in a waiting room today and realized everyone was staring at their phones, including me. It got me wondering what people actually did before smartphones became common. Did people just daydream, read magazines, people-watch, or what?

Ok so i kept hearing poeple say apply early in the morning bc thats when postings go live and recuiters check first thing. i decided to actually test it properly instead of just taking someones word for it. for 2 weeks i set an alarm at 6am, checked tsenta and my alerts, applied to anything fresh within the first hour. then compared to my previous 2 weeks where i was applying at like 10pm after work. morning response rate: 11.2 percent from 62 applications. evening rate: 3.1 percent from 58 applications. same resume, same types of roles, completely different outcomes. i know its not a controlled experiment but the difference is too big to ignore. anyone else tested this or have a theory on why morning works so much better?

I install and uninstall a lot of these so heres the survivors. ublock origin non negotiable, bitwarden for passwords, dark reader for my eyes at night, unhook to make youtube less of a time sink. the one most people havent heard of is quickform, it records a web form once and refills it, i use it for a few forms i fill constantly for work, chrome only and you set each form up once so its not for random pages but for repeat forms its great, magical does a snippet version if you prefer that.

session buddy for when i end up with 60 tabs. thats my bar, whats the one youd be sad to lose idk im always hunting for stuff i dont know about

People act like more choices always means more freedom.

I think having too many options just makes people overthink everything and be less satisfied with what they pick.

I seriously hate chasing invoices. The awkward "just checking in" emails make me cringe, especially when a normally awesome client ghosts for weeks over money.

We're a two-person branding studio. Stripe does our invoicing and auto-reminders, but every few months, someone still misses three emails in a row. Not out of malice, they litrally just don't see them.

Last year, a good client hit 45 days overdue. I sent four emails before finally calling them. I felt like a sleazy debt collector. They answered right away, apoligized, and paid that same day. They said the emails just got buried. Everything was fine, but that call still ruined my whole afternoon.

Desperate, I hooked up Stripe's webhooks to WhatsApp using Wati Ai. I avoided Meta's API directly, and Wati's support was suprisingly fast. I was nervous asking clients for their WhatsApp, but no one cared.

Meta's template approval was a pain though. My first draft got rejected for being too "commercial" so I had to make it super boring. Also had a Zap fail silently for a few days, so watch out for that.

But honestly, things are way better now. I havent had a 45-day overdue situation since. The awful email follow-up chain is basically dead.

Has anyone else in a small setup found a hack that actualy works? Becuase standard email reminders definitly aren't it.

I seriously hate chasing invoices. The awkward "just checking in" emails make me cringe, especially when a normally awesome client ghosts for weeks over money.

We're a two-person branding studio. Stripe does our invoicing and auto-reminders, but every few months, someone still misses three emails in a row. Not out of malice, they litrally just don't see them.

Last year, a good client hit 45 days overdue. I sent four emails before finally calling them. I felt like a sleazy debt collector. They answered right away, apoligized, and paid that same day. They said the emails just got buried. Everything was fine, but that call still ruined my whole afternoon.

Desperate, I hooked up Stripe's webhooks to WhatsApp using Wati Ai. I avoided Meta's API directly, and Wati's support was suprisingly fast. I was nervous asking clients for their WhatsApp, but no one cared.

Meta's template approval was a pain though. My first draft got rejected for being too "commercial" so I had to make it super boring. Also had a Zap fail silently for a few days, so watch out for that.

But honestly, things are way better now. I havent had a 45-day overdue situation since. The awful email follow-up chain is basically dead.

Has anyone else in a small setup found a hack that actualy works? Because standard email reminders definitly aren't it

This is maybe a weird thing to post but I've been thinking about it a lot lately

for years I had this belief about myself that I just wasn't someone who finishes projects, like I had energy for the exciting beginning phase and then I'd lose steam and abandon things and I just accepted that as a personality trait

started using CodeWisp a couple months back mostly out of boredom and I have now finished more game projects in 8 weeks than I had in the previous 4 years combined and I'm genuinely a little annoyed about it because it means the story I was telling myself wasn't true

the thing that changed is that the gap between idea and result is so small that I never really hit the wall where the energy dies, I describe something, it exists, I react to it, I describe the next thing, the loop just keeps going and before I realise it the game is done

turns out I'm not bad at finishing things at all, I'm just bad at tolerating slow feedback loops and that's a very different problem with a very different solution

I do QA on a mid-size product and our signup-to-verification flow gates every release. Six screens of the usual fields, and every regression pass I re-enter the same test users by hand. By the third run I've usually mistyped something and sent myself chasing a bug that was never real.

Automating it in Playwright is the textbook answer, but for exploratory passes and quick smoke checks, maintaining a script for a form that reshapes every sprint isn't a great use of my time. Fake Filler is fine for "does it submit," but the random data is useless when I need an account that matches our seeded backend. Bitwarden only does logins. I've been using QuickForm to replay exact values, which fits best.

Mostly I'm curious how others keep test data consistent without a full suite. There's probably a cleaner answer I'm not seeing.

Okay, so I teach four senior English classes and I've genuinely lost a whole weekend to grading. Every tool's website claims it will "save 80% of your grading time" and just shows a stock photo of a teacher drinking coffee. Nothing useful.

Anyway, here's where I've landed so far. Please tell me if I'm wrong:

• CoGrader: This is the only one that grades against proper rubrics (including state ones), and you approve everything before it posts. The narrow focus is kind of reassuring, but I'm hesitant about the long-term pricing.

• Edexia: This one actually learns your specific grading style once you correct it a couple of times, instead of just spitting out a generic AI score. It even highlights exactly how it's applying your rubric, which is literally my main headache. I really want to lean into it, but it's a newer platform, so I'm still a bit hesitant to commit.

• Brisk: This is the free Chrome extension everyone recommends. It lives in Google Docs and is fine for quick stuff, but it tries to do 40 different things, and the ability to grade a whole class is locked behind a paid tier, which is annoying.

• EssayGrader: Looked solid on paper ("by teachers, for teachers"), but then I saw people saying the same essay scores differently on different runs. That's the one thing I genuinely can't have.

Anyway, if you've used ANY of these, please just tell me what you actually pay. Real numbers. It feels like everyone hides their full features behind a demo call, and I do not have the energy for another one of those this term.