291–300 of 502 posts
Reading the posters cv and experience, I suspect they have a skill gap in theory of mind. ie, understanding how they are perceived. Sure, the economy is hard, and finding a job is difficult. Questions I have - What jobs are they applying for? - Do they understand the benefits they can bring to a team? - Are they showing up in interactions like they show up in this blog post? How can they take radical responsibility f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is more ethics driven, taking it as the likes of EE, CS and such since we'reon HN. That doesn't apply to every individual, but "more" is about the average. Of course it is. Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering. > Things are no different at companies where the founders are engineers. Look at companies…
> Like how people who study philosophy or veterinary medicine are on average gojng to be more ethics driven than those studying petrochemical engineering. Another baseless assumption. > they end up with a small or medium-sized, product-driven company. Which are no more intelligent or ethics driven than large corps.
Another baseless assumption.
From the UK. Named Ahmed. I think this plays a factor.
I really feel horrible for people who bet on CS and are hitting this job market right now. It's interesting, back when I was in elementary school in the 90's, parents of friends knew I had an interest in computers and would tell me becoming a programmer or IT person was a terrible job and I should avoid it. That was maybe true until it wasn't, and it ended up being highly lucrative. I can't tell if this is the same t…
It was the same for me growing up in the shadow of Silicon Valley in the early aughts, post dot com crash. Even when I went to college in 2008 the conventional wisdom was that there weren’t going to be any jobs in software, it was all being outsourced. I studied CS anyways, because I loved it. It was still very hard to get my first job out of college in 2012. But then from like 2015-2022 things got crazy. Anyone with…
It's not just about money. Besides, the gold rush that you describe was only this big in the US, for a certain subset of workers, and only during a limited time (I feel like splitting up the 2015-2022 period into pre- and post-pandemic is more than warranted on its own). I went into CS not with an expectation of endless riches, but because I really like computers. My goal isn't $200k/year, it's employment. I would more than gladly take a lower-end job doing digital pencil-pushing, or IT, or tech support, or really anything that lists a CS degree as an acceptable education for the job. But it's not just that the money had dried up - the jobs aren't lower-paid, they're not less attractive, they just don't exist anymore. I can't imagine what the job search was like for you in 2012, but whatever financial pessimism might've existed at that time seems like a wholly different beast to what we have today.
When you look beyond office jobs, you see many real opportunities. For example, there is a housing crisis. Not enough trades persons, building supplies, capital to solve that problem. The unemployment statistics aren't detailed enough to show IBM, MS, Facebook, Amazon, etc laying off tens of thousands of employees a year, each. Last I read, over 500,000 staff have been laid off in the past couple of years.
If you have real skills you are expected to make something of your own on the side. Nobody teaches you how capitalism really works, they want suckers to do the shit work. The ways to win are to work for yourself, eliminate as many middlemen as possible, hide sacred knowledge, come up with scams, hide bodies for rich people.
To the people at the top, the job market is a statistic. They can't feel empathy on an issue they're so disconnected from, so they just think it's not their problem, or there isn't much they can do about it. Technological innovation is supposed to mean society can produce more with less work, so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time where we could all work less and get more, but in practice, I…
> so in theory everyone's lives could end up better off over time they did. The innovation that happened in the past 100 years meant that almost everyone (in the west at least, and in a lot of developing nations too) has the access to transport, clean water, electricity, information/communications etc. And because everyone has it, people such as yourself see it as a baseline, and forget that it is benefits being rece…
It was already a bit like that when I graduated in 2012. In retrospect, I think there was a huge difference between me and people who graduated just 5 years earlier.
It's like there used to be a social contract that made sense but it stopped working suddenly at some point and we're basically gaslit because everyone from previous generations thinks the social contract is still working... Meanwhile since us millennials didn't know what to expect we kept convincing ourselves that it's just a bit harder than we thought... 5 years later; OK even harder than we thought... 10 years later, OK this is insanely difficult... 15 years later... Ok ok something's really wrong about the system... I'm basically a work zombie and no results. Talking with my parents about career feels like talking to aliens from a different parallel universe with completely different economic laws inhabited by completely different beings.
Going "out of distribution" in abilities also means your job prospects go "out of distribution". When you specialize, so too does the kind of position you'd be the better fit for. This can mean radically fewer possibilities, and strong geographic restrictions.
To give an example, my PhD topic concerned something "that's everywhere" but, when you look at things more closely, there's only This isn't even a very abstract, very academic field, it's something that gets attacked within academia for being too practical/engineering-like on occasion.
I understand the "belly of the curve" gets automated away, but consider that the tail end of the curve - producing knowledge and solutions to novel problems - has been for a long time, since Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, if not oral communication. The solutions scale very well.
A researcher's job is, almost by definition, to work themselves out of a job, and this has been the case since long before AI. Once the unknown has been known, a new unknown must be found and tackled. There's very, very few places in the world that truly innovate (not implementing a one-off novel solution produced in some academic lab) and value those skills.
I don't mean to be overly bleak, but it doesn't necessarily follow from this automation that the freed salary mass will go towards higher-level functions; just as likely (if not more), this goes towards profits first.