Panic at the Job Market

> Then, of course, you get rejected under some false pretense of “not having enough experience” when you’re trying to promote developing fixes to their seemingly decaying platform ^4

>> 4 There’s a continual disconnect where people with experience can see problems then construct easy and rapid to implement solutions, but people with less experience think every little bug fix is a “we don’t have time to stop the world for 6 months so we can never fix anything!” problem. We get excited to fix problems because we see fixing problems is tractable and we can implement these fixes in days instead of months as opposed to others don’t understand how everything works. It’s amazing how the simple practice of just doing the work solves many problems sooner than many people think is possible.

I didn't expect a mind reading today. It's kind of cathartic to read about someone experiencing similar problems and know that it's just a people thing after all, the tech really doesn't exist, just the individuals doing it.

> Now I’ve got nothing to show of my life of work, while other people who just picked a better company to work at 20 years ago and never left have been growing their wealth by a couple million dollars per year every year for almost their entire career, all working as just some rando middle manager at multi-trillion-dollar companies.

The authors repeated insistence on incredibly inflated salary numbers makes me question if I'm on the outside of some inside joke

He took 2012-2013, and 2016-2021 off work to travel? That large of a gap doesn't look great on a resume. He basically worked half or less of the 2010s? Ridiculous.

I enjoyed this, but I can offer an anecdotal correction: this person does not know what the Amazon bar raiser interviews are like (or at least, used to be like 10 years ago). They're not behavioral interviews. They're more like "lateral thinking" interviews, like: here's an abstract problem, what ways can you think of to tackle it? And then drilling into the details to see if you're just making up fluff or you can solve actual problems on the fly. Not saying they're necessarily the best format, and rarely is this the day-to-day skill that a software engineer needs, but they do somewhat pick up on an abstract and hard to measure quality of "wisdom" which is very valuable to the job but otherwise had to detect in programming interviews.

(IMO it is not possible to over-index on "wisdom" when hiring someone. It's a vastly more useful quality in a coworker than "intelligence" is, at least once a baseline is hit.)

After working under them for two decades I’ve come to realize GenX is gripped and captivated not by traditional religious story, but recent American history.

I’m early 40s, of the Xennial persuasion and mostly work with under 35 year olds now. The number of under 35s who openly admit they don’t believe any of this bullshit about tech, who see it as just marketing and advertising is wild to me. GenZ are way different people than GenX who mumble something about the greatness of capitalism unironically and just shuffle over to their laptop and ignore how tired they are of pretending their make work job updating some SQL is the future of technology; Hiro Protagonist and Capt Kirk are their spirit animals

GenX just the latest middle management to demand the kids likewise fill the hole in their souls with boring API config and repetitive leetcode to addict people to screen use, a toxic energy hog.

Line must go up! The catechism’s and chants of MBAified American Civic Life: The Religion must be recited! No physics demands this routine of is just socialized ramble, so it’s religious belief in that it’s decoupled from reality outside us. It’s tribal nonsense

It’s super corny obsession with pop culture memes of the last 50 years, outdated belief ST:TNG is right around the corner if we believe hard enough