mkl95

I've been enrolled in an online CS program provided by a respectable university for a while. I get a lot of joy from continuous learning and being in a university program helps me stay focused, plus I'll get credentials to prove it eventually.

Having said that, higher education as we know it is facing extinction in less than a decade. The materials I'm provided are a rambling stream of consciousness that are difficult to make sense of. Only truly elite universities that educate students efficiently deserve to survive.

You read a text. Then, you are asked a series of questions to assess your reading comprehension. Rinse and repeat for a school year to get a solid idea of each student's proficiency.

This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s. Eventually the productivity boom should take a hit when newer generations struggle to understand basic tasks and the older generations retire. AI is probably orthogonal to the solution space.

It seems there is no working around learning to write and read properly. We've drifted away from this idea, which might lead to a "soft" dark age.

Mark Zuckerberg is the PT Barnum of tech and Meta is his predatory circus. Meta doesn't make much sense without him.

EU states do an excellent job at tolerating each other, with the odd hiccup. They are also gerontocracies fronted by middle aged leaders focused on pleasing older wealthy people, who last cared about entrepreneurship in the 70s. When you combine it with extremely low birth rates, you get a rotting economy.

I had a hard time with probability and stats, although it was way more mind expanding than calculus.

> you're not gonna gain any understanding from a self-reported survey of ~2500 people

A sample size of ~2500 is statistically huge - the margin of error is very small. You should sign up to a stats course.

From an EU perspective it can look complicated. But when you look at the data, the American electorate is relatively simple-minded. For example: https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...

> probability, calculus, linear algebra

All of these are mandatory in EU universities' CS programmes and are taught with relative rigor, particularly linear algebra. Calculus is called "Analysis" and usually covers all of Calc I plus a bit of Calc II.

> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.

It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.

I've worked with SOC2-certified companies where employees would email each other plaintext credentials, publish them in Notion pages, etc. You cannot cure stupidity by "complying".

That was only Q1! So much winning left!

It's very unique to LinkedIn. OP's prose is difficult to process even if you've abused your brain for years with LinkedIn content, though. In a more merciful timeline, only people like James Ellroy or Cormac McCarthy would ever attempt to write like that.

The CEO role at Mozilla is unstable. Even if Mozilla didn't require a LinkedIn page, chances are their CEOs would have an up to date account. Also, Mozilla's ARR is mostly their Google partnership.

In the zero-interest rate economy, it was easy for early to mid-career engineers with average skill to switch to a company that paid them 20%+ more money. I did it myself multiple times.

The current economy and AI have turned the tables. Even today, waiting for three years is pushing it for most folks, but understandable. Career growth is being decimated across the industry, and opportunities simply aren't there anymore like they used to be. You can be dedicated and above average, but you are still stuck in the same industry as everyone else.

Django must be more popular than Rails in the EU these days. Most Django devs have never used Go or Node and have never heard about Bun. Django is in the category of battle-tested frameworks that are very boring and easy to get things done with.

This is an uncomfortable truth on this site, because many of us work for a FAANG company or FAANG partner. If the cloud hadn't grown that much in the last decade or so, the software industry would be relatively unpretentious.

OP defines herself as a mediocre engineer. She's trying to sell you Slop Town, not engineering principles.

The US won't stop bullying the rest of the world until it has drastic consequences for its economy. Make of that what you will.

The US educational system has failed millions of former kids who are now adults and cannot grasp basic concepts like tariffs. The next administration should redesign education from scratch.