bluesroo
Like the world is learning with nukes, you cannot rely on the powerful for mercy. You can only rely on the powerful to grasp for more power and the only way to stop them is to yourself be as strong as possible.
If a utopia ever exists, it will only be because of a stalemate arms race (see: no nuclear powers have had an open war). Peaceful utopia is otherwise too easily disrupted by a single asshole with a big stick.
Just because I don't remember my experiences at second 45232 on May 22, doesn't mean that my brain was not actively adapting to my experiences at that moment. The brain does a lot more learning than just what is conscious. And then when I went to sleep the brain continued pruning and organizing my unconscious learning for the day.
Seeing if someone can go from token to freeform physical usefulness will be interesting. I'm of the belief that LLMs are too verbose and energy intensive to go from language regurgitation machines to moving in the real world according to free form prompting. It may be accomplishable with the vast amount of hype investment, but I think the energy requirements and latency will make an LLM-based approach economically infeasible.
I think the argument above is that democrats are one of the drivers of building restrictions, leading to the ability to collude. If new entrants to the market were plentiful then the existing cartels would be undercut. Also, rent control puts a tight lock on the rental market by forcing landlords to keep their rents high lest they become locked into the low rents they may otherwise offer.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader whether to be on board with that assessment, but there is a reasonable argument to be made that a free-er market could actually benefit housing costs.
Think of it as childhood trauma triage. It is a good first pass to help people understand their past and maybe help some people understand that their past is more traumatic than they realize.
Children are a deeply personal choice that make basically no sense. They are the ultimate selfless act, and much of the emotional damage children suffer is due to their parents not understanding this. They are exhausting, expensive, and time consuming... until you die. And every time you decide to use them for your own gain, it will cost them something.
To more directly address your point: children will force you to cope with their existence. Whether you have the ability to introspect on yourself during the process can turn that into growth is on you, not them.
This is the internet. Google has been around since the dawn of the popular internet. At this point, no one should be naive to the abuses that internet-facing services regularly encounter.
The correct thing to do here is not offer a fantasy service to customers. Now that they've offered a fantasy service, they should be on the hook for actually assisting the customers that have been locked into their service.
Admittedly, there's naiveté on both sides here. There difference is that the company is the one with the money and power, and they instigated this relationship by offering the service in the first place. They should shoulder the burden of fixing the problems they have created by attempting to undercut the market when it was beneficial to them.
The argument is that amortized over the lifetime of the business, the prices are actually significantly higher because they are able to momentarily drive their prices down, eat the losses long enough to run their competition out of business, and then immediately break the low-priced agreements with their customers.
Sure, they may be a commodity product now. That shouldn't exempt them from holding up their agreements from when they were still competing for market space.
RE Connections: I meant they only matter if they are high up enough to literally hand you a position. Anything lower than that (i.e. an IC referral) was completely useless in 7 different companies.
TL;DR: Connections don't mean shit. Companies require multi-hour takehomes and then ghost you. Every reply is automated unless you are moving forward. Recruiters take a week to reply to even the most basic updates.
For reference, I've job hunted twice in the last 2 years. The startup I joined in Feb of 2022 folded in Feb of 2023. My style is to treat it like a full time job, usually completely filling my schedule with interviews.
2022 stats: In 1 month I interviewed with 31 companies, received 6 offers in under 5 weeks and had a job secured making ~30% more than my previous role. Of the 25 companies that I stopped interviewing with, 13 were me cutting off the process to save time and 12 were rejections. So ~50% success rate depending on how well you count the 13 that I cut off.
2023 stats: First month I interviewed with 14 companies, was ghosted by 6 of them. GHOSTED. 3 of these were from direct referrals from friends and previous coworkers! Not even my connections could get information on my process! I interviewed just as strongly as my previous year and they vanish, not even with a rejection. Of the remaining 8, 4 were not actually software jobs and 4 were rejections that refused to elaborate at all.
Second month I interviewed with 34 companies. 12 ghosted me, 4 of which required a multi-hour take home assignment. With a mortgage and kids, I was doing it all.
Of the 22, 11 didn't work out for non-performance reasons (found candidate before I was through the process, recruiter misunderstood the role, company moved so slow that I couldn't complete the process). Of these 11, 4 were from connections! They could not get their internal recruiters to reply to me in less than 2 weeks.
Of the 11, I was rejected by 6. Again, with no feedback or even a response when I asked for it.
Of the remaining 5, I got an offer and ended the madness before waiting to finish my remaining 4 interviews.
I rented one earlier this month online. When I showed up they handed me a confirmation and told me to pick a car and drive, key was in the cup holder. They had a manned exit barricade to confirm the car you chose, but that was it. I'm not even sure they cared if I picked a car that I didn't reserve, the exit gate person scanned the car and reservation, so it probably would have just updated the reservation on the spot. I don't think it's even possible to predict with certainty what your inventory is going to be 2-3 days out with this sytem.
Just 2 people on the rental side, although I'm sure they have a cleaning/ turnover crew.
I had direct contact with 31 companies. Of those, 16 made it past the recruiter+tech screens. We're about 2 weeks into the job hunt and at that point I needed to start pruning. I had frank conversations with the hiring managers and recruiters about comp, work/life balance, and how tight scheduling would need to be for the following interviews. This narrowed it down to ~8 companies. I also told them all they'd need to wait for ~2 weeks so that I could finish up all of my on-sites before I'd accept or reject their offers.
I scheduled on-sites over the following 2 weeks. Because all of the hiring managers and recruiters knew I was in 8 on-sites, they all tried to give me quick and good first offers hoping that I'd take it and drop my following interviews. A few tried to pressure me into a 2 day decision window (surprise, these offers were the lowest by far).
Of the 8, I received 6 offers. I failed the Google on-site and I turned down another company because of work/life stuff that came up during the interview. As offers came in I could decline ones that were clearly too low. The very last company that I interviewed with had the best offer, so I was pretty happy that I stuck it out... But the only time I was more exhausted was when we had a newborn in the house.
Depending on how you count "interview", these was easily in excess of 40. Each on-site was 3-6 interviews back to back.
I'm not Indian, but I read a lot about this when the Cisco stuff came out. The gist that I picked up from interviews with Indians dealing with this was that there is A LOT of cultural background that you'd be very unlikely to know if you hadn't grown up in a certain caste.
A (likely shitty) analogy: You can learn about WWII all you want, but unless you were deployed it would be hard to fake that you were at a specific battle or did a specific training. There's probably minute details that were not written down, but people who were there would casually know. There may be habits or turns of phrase that would have been picked up. Maybe a certain landmark or destroyed thing that had a funny nickname. Maybe it's knowing a certain soldier or commander by a nickname that hasn't made it into the history books. "Oh you trained at X? Man I loved tuna Tuesdays even though noone would touch the stuff. Do you remember when private Y did..."
Through casual conversation, it's very difficult to keep the ruse up. Now if the interlocutor is actively trying to root you out its basically impossible. In the interviews I was listening to, the best case scenario was that the higher caste member came away not knowing what caste your from, but definitely knew you were not a Brahmin... Because if you were, you'd casually bring up X, Y, and Z and use these phrases and these gestures and and and...
While it would ease things for us financially to move, we'd be giving up A LOT with family to do so.
Thanks for sending that link along! Contract work is definitely something to consider.
Regarding your second point, I'd argue that there's no high school level teaching job with work/life balance in our area due to state regulations.
Thanks for your input, but she does not want to be a SAHM and we've both worked together to put together the financial goals for our family. Our goals assume we both have careers, because we both want careers.
She has been loving the quality time with our children while job hunting which I think is helping to convince her to slow down and find something that really fits the work/life balance she's aiming for.
She's not frustrated with needing to work, it's frustration with the sheer number of hours. A more normal job that would allow us to drop off the kids and pick them up together consistently would be great.
She would like to be able to see our kids off to school and relax with them after school without having to think about work. Weekends without crushing amounts of grading would be nice. That’s the lifestyle my job allows me to have and I’d love for my wife to be able to have the same.