firstplacelast

I can't speak to Theranos, but having worked in scientific R&D the researchers are used to business folk telling them work is good enough/sellable even when they think it needs more study, are worried about edge cases, etc. And it can be true and not fraudulent. A lot of scientists are always looking for 'better', a more complete model, an answer closer to 'truth'; business is looking for what can I sell, what is slightly better (or differentiated enough) than current market offerings.

I think that can create enough plausibility in researchers' minds (along with keeping work divided and some psychological manipulation). They're thinking this looks kind of terrible and doesn't work for A, B, or C situations, but the business folks tell me this is exactly what they need and works on the market. Add in good pay (Theranos paid well above market for biotech for quite a while) and people won't think too hard about it.

Even before this current AI wave and awful economy/hiring environment, corporations have been turning their noses up at workers. When there were "jobs a plenty", you only need to speak to anyone in the industry to see how much talent is overlooked because they can. Corporations and the economy at large should work for the people, we should not be burning down the lives of citizens to grow the economy at all costs.

Here is the evidence that even 10 years ago there was way more talent ready-to-go and easily cultivated talent that could be honed with a few weeks or months of training: ATS keyword gaming (make sure you have the right SQL/Java version mentioned), need to lie about your exact stack to get an interview, hiring gauntlets where it's "a numbers game" and you go around and around till you get just the right leet-code questions that you happened to already know, age-ism where anyone over the age of 40 is worried about a lay-off and never getting back into the industry because corps/hiring managers only want younger for technical work. All of those anecdotes, which anyone whose been in this industry is deeply familiar with, points to an absolute glut of talent even in employee-friendly times.

I'm all for H1B's and bringing in foreign talent, I'm also all for holding corporations accountable and ensuring they don't get a pass to treat humans and labor as disposable. If a large corporation can bin resumes because they don't match a plethora of exact keywords and if they don't want to train for even a few weeks and need someone to "hit the ground running", they are drowning in too much talent.

I don't think other cultures are driving much of the trend for educational check marks. I remember my dad and uncle talking about the awkwardness of being asked where they did their MBA's by colleagues/clients in the late 90s/early 00's and them trying to figure out how to navigate that as they didn't even have bachelors degrees. And I doubt whoever replaced them when they retired had less than an MBA.

Between increased regulation and greater competition for jobs, the degree requirements keep going up in a lot of/most industries. I also think there is a tendency for those that have reached a level of educational attainment to push back on others without equal numbers of checkmarks. Once a role is populated by MBA, PhD, MS or even BS, individuals don't like to see others doing the same work with less credentials. Maybe it's a 'I had to do this, so you do too' mentality or a sense that it devalues their own credentials.

I was talking to my aunt, who has never been much for technology, during covid. Never really had a tv in her home, etc. She's late 70's maybe early 80's now. Anyway, I was asking her how she was doing with all the chaos and she was just like "umm well I just live my life. I go out and volunteer and go camping, not much has changed...". She was just very unbothered by all of it (and she was a nurse for decades, so not in a "masks are criminal, social distancing doesn't work" way).

I more and more identify with that ethos. I want to be informed, but I don't want to be miserable from the bombastic 24/7 news cycle being shoved in my face when I can't do much about any of it.

Until we are able to reliably simulate cells, organs, and entire human bodies in silico, we will not be able to move the needle too much on drug design from an AI stand-point (IMO). Like others pointed out, the massive bottle neck in time and cost in getting a drug to market are far removed from developing drug candidates.

While acts of war separate couples and would confound the analysis a bit, I think there is typically a big spike in births following wars. Baby boomers most notably being born after WWII. Optimism is dynamic and not a set threshold, wrapping up wars leads to new found optimism about the future. How terrible the recent past was is not all that relevant as it is about the trajectory.

If anything having a terrible past may make the bar lower for experiencing optimism, as it's easier to expect a better future when the overall bar is lower. Hopefully explaining that well enough and it's certainly not the only issue, but I believe we see the same thing on the stock market when large class action settlements are reached with a corp and the stock then rises as it is forward looking and optimistic now that the 'awful past' is settled. First-gen immigrants tend to have larger families as the impetus to move countries is an optimistic endeavor itself.

And while a reach, I think through this lens you can make an argument as to why lower classes tend to have more children than middle classes (currently in the US). It's easier to expect better for your children when you are at the bottom of the barrel (no where to go but up), whereas the middle class is in an increasingly precarious position.

Stock prices are very forward looking, so if half the hype being sold about AI is true I would expect most software-centric companies to be devalued by wall-street (as the test, deploy, support should be automated in the coming years...according to the AI CEO's).

However, if I was a wall street analyst and believed the AI dreams I would further be concerned that software companies aren't taking advantage of the last remnants of value before software (and maybe labor) values go to zero.

If you've got a gold mine and have recently built the most efficient shovels in the world, why are they not bringing in mass amounts of workers to utilize these shovels before all the neighboring mines. Once all that gold is on the market, the price crashes so it's better to be one of the first mines to get in and dig out all possible value first.

I think you either don't believe in the AI hype, which means a lot of silicon valley companies are tremendously overvalued. Or you do, in which case another huge part of silicon valley is overvalued especially when they are not looking to out-innovate their peers (as evidenced by downsizing), but just riding the wave of AI until what they are selling has no marginal value over some guy coding alone in his bedroom. SV is putting itself into a weird position, but still has some time for financial buffoonery before the party stops.

From a US perspective at least, you are right but also wrong. Like yes, it's cheaper to buy raw potatoes and dried beans and cook healthy food vs. ultra-processed "junk food." However, when most people attempt to eat healthy they do not opt for dried beans and potatoes every day. There is a huge time cost to preparing those ingredients.

And anecdotally, when I am eating healthier I am opting for a larger range of ingredients. Probably to keep my mouth interested as I am not getting the food that's been engineered to be perfect to my palate. While potatoes and beans are in my diet, I am also opting for a lot of vegetables that are more expensive, paying more for fresh herbs and interesting spices. I am almost always buying canned beans, sauces, and other foods with some processing to speed up prep time.

I think your analysis suffers from comparing processed food engineered to taste great to the blandest, driest raw ingredients. Factoring in the time and secondary ingredients to make those raw ingredients taste great adds a lot of cost. Add in the cost of more varied ingredients bc very few people want to eat beans, potatoes, rice, and bland chicken every day. And further, you're missing the savings processed foods add by being shelf stable. They can sit on a shelf or in a freezer for months or years vs. fresh produce with a much shorter lifespan.

So yes you can eat very cheap and very healthy, the vast majority of people will loathe that life over time. You can eat kind of cheap, very healthy, with a limited number of ingredients and have things taste great if you have a LOT of time to devote to cooking, this will still not satisfy many.

I agree here. I more often see bakeries selling sandwiches that they make in house (although no clue as to the volume/financials of it), but rarely (never?) see sandwich shops doing in-house baking. The independent ones out-source to a bakery and if it's a well known bakery, they will advertise where they get their bread.

It never made sense to blame AI in the first place for tech layoffs. You have a new tool that you think can supercharge your employees, make them ~10x productive, be leveraged to disrupt all sorts of industries, and have the workforce best suited to learn and use these tools to their full potential. You think the value of labor may soon collapse, but there are piles of money to be made before that happens.

If you truly believed that, you would be spinning up new projects and offshoots as this is a serious arms race with a ton of potential upside (not just in developing AI, but in leveraging it to build things cheaper). Allegedly every dollar you spent on an engineer is potentially worth 10x(?) what it was a couple years ago. Meaning your profit per engineer could soar, but tech companies decided they don't want more profit? AI is mostly solved and the value of labor has already collapsed? Or AI is a nice band-aid to prop up a smaller group of engineers while we weather the current economic/political environment and most CXO's don't believe there are piles of money to be had by leveraging AI now or the near future.

Earlier this year was playing around with the idea of creating an app to track job applications and the subsequent interview process for candidates. Then using the data to give users insights into companies and roles and how responsive they are. So (with enough adoption) one could see how long they take to respond or even see other candidates they had responded to for a specific position (maybe even allow competing candidates to chat? or see where others are in the interview pipeline).

I could not figure out a way to painlessly gather this info without monitoring users' emails (privacy nightmare) or having users forward emails to the app (too painful/not conducive to user adoption). But if anyone has any ideas how to get around that?

Might be wrong about this, but being so far removed and seemingly immunologically resistant is exactly what makes it a dangerous combination. Viruses mutate and recombine at an astonishing rate, so 99.9999% (?) of viral entities won't be able to make the jump between these species, but the one that can might have devastating consequences as it will be wildly different from anything that has infected rats before (and from there it's more likely to infect other mammal populations).

The more exposure between these populations the higher the likelihood that a crossover event occurs.

That's like saying smoke detectors should cost thousands of dollars bc they can save a 500K+ building. That's a poor way to look at value in these situations. It's cheap and easy to make, so it should be cheap to the consumer if there weren't all sorts of red-tape and opaque pricing schemes used as an excuse to prop of extortion.

It also prevents wages from rising, can't find anymore local talent at 80K/year so you hire H1B at that wage. If that didn't happen, wages would rise until they found someone local. I think something like equal pay and then a 10-20% fee that is funneled into american education/up-skilling efforts.

Well that's sort of the fun things about psychiatric "disorders", in many of them you can genuinely ask is this difference with the brain actually harmful unto itself or is it harmful because of the way society is set up?

I have struggled with this myself with ADHD where I think my brain is great and it is society that is wrong as many of the ways I do things/see things/operate are subtly shunned by society and the way it works. Everything from the typical 9-5 (my brain works best 11-7), to most white collar careers revolving around stationary work at a desk (I love difficult mental work, but think better when I'm moving around), etc.

I don't think my brain is wrong or performing poorly, I excelled at school but did not learn much from lecture style formats (figured out how to study on my own). But I have gone back and forth with medication because it is very, very difficult to construct my life in a way that plays to my strengths when they are so different than the norm. Medication helps my brain fit into society better, but I don't think it improves my brain function.

I date men and don't think going against TOS or laws is okay even in the name of 'safety'. This app doesn't bother me and frankly I think more apps like this should be allowed, but it is hypocritical to think this should be allowed to exist and many others not.

Hiring managers and HR area increasingly only open to unicorn candidates that have the exact amount of experience in the exact tech stack. While a few of those people exist, it's definitely more likely they end up interviewing people that are open to lying. So now your pipeline is filled with 90% liars, some just small white lies and others who have made a resume that has exclusively tailored lies just for your org.

The jobs aren't that hard and many people that fudged their experience are capable, so the liars that are hired perform adequately and hiring team sees no reason to adjust their strategy.

Eventually this gets out-of-hand as people learn to further exploit these practices.

While I agree with you, in high-school a buddy of mine was going on a weekend trip a couple states away and made a whole power point presentation to another friend's parents to convince them to allow their daughter to go.

He also gave a very memorable and completely inane speech to our entire school that involved him stomping on a loaf of bread while running for student council (and won). The coolness isn't so much in the tools as the way they are used.

Maybe the reality is most jobs aren't that hard once you have some baseline skills? While I don't love this interview process, I'm certain there are plenty of great people filtered out of the standard interview process in big tech.

If everyone is using the same criteria, they are all competing for the same group of candidates. Using other processes, no matter how whack-a-doodle, will give you a completely different pool to select from.

I was at a get-together last weekend with mostly non-tech friends and the subject was brought up briefly. Seemed to be a fair amount of excitement and use by everyone in the conversation, minus one guy who thought it was the "devil"...only slightly joking.

Tie minimum wage to the cost of housing on a per city or per zip code basis. When the middle class and wealthy are negatively impacted by their restaurants, grocery stores, etc becoming expensive (or shutting down) due to labor costs then they will relent. "I hate more housing, but I love to eat affordably." Connect labor prices to the cost of assets in some meaningful way.

I personally think people should not work for a wage less than they need to buy the crappiest home in their town which would negate this need, but the lower-classes haven't developed enough self-esteem or entitlement for that.

I unfortunately agree with this take, but her (probably) being a crappy person and looking to monetize her experience is exactly why she worked there and there is likely a lot of truth there under her bias.

Years ago, an acquaintence was an exec at a tech company that imploded in a semi-public way. He decided he wanted to get a documentary made on the whole thing and sent me his pitch. A little too self-aggrandizing, which I pointed out among other things. Couple years go by and a doc did come out on it (not his), uncovers some shady things and lawsuits against the CEO…and a little bit of embezzlement on his part.

So I think you’re right on the money, there’s a reason she worked there. Sucky/shady company and she fit in well.

What? I went to an American public high school, there were/are plenty of kids who are very smart. 8% of my graduating class were in the uber-advanced honors math track. This is in a flyover state outside a small city.

I also used to work in science, the reason there's so few chances to make it as a top researcher is that there is little opportunity. Look at jobs for a lot of life science majors after a BS, you will find a ton that is washing glassware in a lab, a complete waste of anyone with half a brain.

There's reasons why there is little opportunity that's not worth exploring here, but suffice to say there are a ton of very smart kids in America that choose other paths. Outside tech and specialized physicians, nerd careers are not lucrative on average. With little opportunity, smart people end up doing banal work. Why do banal work and have a mediocre salary predicated on jumping through higher than average academic hoops? Doesn't add up for most people.

That's exactly what I mean though, agree on something that actually means something. Not certs that are just a checkbox and you still get grilled bc many people don't believe they much value or others believe are a negative signal.

Develop something that actually has weight to it.

I've been working on learning PySpark this week, going through exercises to learn syntax and what-not. Avoiding ChatGPT bc I didn't want to be spoon fed anything. I couldn't figure out how to sort something in descending order. I searched SO for 5 minutes, getting out-dated answers or overly complicated solutions not needed for my very simple one-liner. Click over to ChatGPT, give it the line of code I have and say 'make it sort in descending', and spits out exactly what I need.

I haven't used SO in weeks prior and I think ChatGPT has pretty much killed its use case for me. Even two years ago, I would spend 1-6 hours/week searching SO posts depending on what I was working on.

Big companies and small need to agree on some standards and create qualifying exams that they will actually accept as proof of competence. Degrees somehow don't prove anything, experience doesn't, blah blah blah. It's exhausting to have to prove to interviewers that I'm not mentally disabled at every turn and it's a waste of time for everyone.

Create certifications that actually count for something and aren't just a blip on a resume that may tick a box, but will actually move you past technical trivia questions. I know some people have a deep repulsion to this and I think it would be fine to have a technical interview gauntlet for those that choose not to engage with any type of certification and a simplified interview format for those that have passed the prerequisite tests.

I don't care how long, rigorous, or ridiculous the tests are. Just agree on some effing standard.

They're probably just confident in their ability to mentor. A lot of jobs just aren't that hard. Many people struggle to accept this about their own line of work because they think it undermines their intelligence. Find smart people (or middling with a great work ethic) that are easy to work with. Iterate.

Anecdotally, if there is any extra step after submitting a resume I notice my response rate is much much higher. Whether an email to verify information in their ATS or a small test, just any secondary step.

I attribute it to so many people shotgunning resumes and this weeds them out, so I’m more likely to be noticed.

I worked in biotech / pharma for a little over a decade, a big chunk of PhD’s are doing work that doesn’t require a PhD…as in open to someone with a MS or PhD.

And then mamy jobs “require” a PhD, but I’ve seen what they do and it’s semi-mindless and very repetitive.

Why is the problem always rich people? They're going to do what they're going to do.

The poors need to hold themselves accountable and stop working for unsustainable wages that can't get them even a small, run-down home. They continue to drive their own wages further and further down and make it that much harder for those that come after them.

It's ridiculous that they expect other people to sacrifice when they won't sacrifice (unionize, strike, or just opt out) to make the world a better, more equal place.

The wealthy will always try to squeeze everything out of the lower classes. If you accept unsustainable wages for your labor, you are part of the problem in devaluing labor (ie you are traffic). The working classes need to hold themselves accountable for the exploitation of their labor.