The biggest problem with VC startups is their geographic concentration, but sometimes remote is available.

Maybe working at FAANG should be something to be embarrassed of.

Not working for FAANG.

Some people prefer having a spine over selling their integrity. There’s heaps of opportunity for doing interesting work in a less toxic environment in places other than Silicon Valley, if you accept a little less pay.

I'm not sure I would call an appetite for risk a "talent", or even a natural consequence of talent.

If we look at the average case, there are plenty of millennials now turning 40 who have higher net worth and a better work-life balance precisely because they never worked for a FAANG. Can't argue with the results of sticking around somewhere and climbing the ladder the traditional way versus enduring all the job hopping, glass ceilings, and layoffs.

The task was to write a simple sum of a list, but they had to convert the list to a pandas dataframe and then call some series of arcane functions. I originally thought this was just a preference but when I asked them for the simpler version while standing over their shoulder they were unable to do it.

They had ~8 years of claimed experience at the time and were from a country notorious for faked credentials. Turned out to be an ok hire overall (friendly, hardworking) but definitely lacking 80%+ of their supposed competencies.

(Source: I've helped hire lots of programmers.)

Part of that is also about who management and HR are socially comfortable with and candidates that may have connections with people in the company. It's often not a level playing field because of cronyism, nepotism, and many other -isms.

That's also why a good engineer, confident in their skills and value, needs to read the room or figure out what's going on. If the situation is not to their liking, then jump to another company or start their own business, whenever the chance presents itself.

Of course knowing how many golf balls fit into a plane will help when it comes to fix that nasty bug on a Vulkan driver.

Or having to solve a data structures and algorithms question as if just left university, completely disregarding the 30 years in between.

Naturally we all do cool algorithm problem solving before getting into bed, and can't wait for the next Advent of Code.

Then they complain they can't hire anyone, go figure.

Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well.

> If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much.

That's a lie. First, because unions don't make it impossible to fire employees, but also because the ability to fire you for arbitrary (or even illegal) reasons does not force companies to pay you more. Removing that ability won't force them to pay you less.

> the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions.

Employers spend billions every singe year trying to con workers into thinking that unions are evil and wow, you really fell for their bullshit. Those are some commonly repeated lies, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. They're just supposed to trick people who don't bother questioning what they're told.

At most, all a union does is force a company to actually document the disciplinary problems and give an employee an opportunity to correct their behavior before they fire them. This makes it more difficult for companies to fire employees for reasons that have nothing to do with their performance and for any reasons that the company isn't comfortable documenting (often because those reasons would be embarrassing or illegal).

There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either. How promotions are handled will be determined in part by the contract between the company and the union and it's the workers who decide what the union asks for in their contract. If you want a contract with the employer that allows for merit based promotions you can have one. There are zero rules against that, but you should expect the union will require the terms to be well defined. Employers like to say they want "merit based promotions" when what they actually want is total control over promotions for whatever arbitrary reasons they decide to call "merit based".

A union contract probably should require that an employer is able to justify the reasons for their merit based promotions using objective measures of productivity/performance that apply equally to all employees. That means the people who work the hardest and do the best work will be promoted even when the boss would rather promote their favored nepo baby, or when the boss would rather not promote someone who actually earned it. Even then, that'd all be according to the contract. If your union doesn't care about fair merit based promotion and wants the boss to be able to deny or award them to anyone at any time without justification that's fine too.

Unions are organizations made up of people. There are good ones and bad ones. Workers get from them what they put into them. There are plenty of horror stories that get heavily promoted to scare you. Some of them are even true stories. Ultimately though, employees have the power to change or replace their union to make sure their needs are being met. You may still think that unions aren't for you, and that's okay. It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you. Once you understand what unions actually are, and aren't, you can make up your own mind.

People do get a pass on this -- you can't rigorously examine every decision and counter-factual or you'd never make forward progress. And I don't really have any great ideas on how to bridge this gap. It'd be nice if there were better ways to measure this but there aren't, so it really comes down to who is more convincing, which is often orthogonal to facts and correctness.

In my experience, yeah, but how they do it is... not what you'd expect.

Leadership has no clue about the scope of tech debt in their products and if they do decide to fix it, it will be by coming up with a bunch of ridiculously optimistic estimates and then foisting them off onto engineers who are already overworked trying to keep up with tech debt to launch new stuff. This feels awful and generally doesn't lead to anything being properly fixed because it turns fixing tech debt into a "just get it barely good enough and mark it as done."

After the inevitable surge in attrition, more often than not the tech debt is "solved" by throwing out the old codebase and starting from scratch with a new team. This is expensive, but in a lot of cases produces a better product.

...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.

> It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.

Right, but not everyone has the same reaction to members of the new generation who don't conform to their values. When my brothers and I didn't end up participating in organized religion as adults, even though my parents still are fairly religious, their reaction was basically "oh well" and to never bring it up again, and we all still have great relationships with them. There are people whose react to their kids not wanting to participate in the same organized religion much more aggressively, and if their kids have "lifestyles" that they consider immoral like being gay or trans, you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them.

You're not wrong that at a high level, the patterns are somewhat similar, but not all of them are the same magnitude. The values themselves will impact how volatile the conflict is because they're self-describing; parents who highly value tolerance will by definition not be as upset at having kids who don't agree with them on everything, whereas parents who instead place a higher value on conformity and adherence to tradition are going to be a lot less happy with kids who don't end up agreeing with them about that.

"my parents are/were abusive" is something a plurality of people (and especially those raised in evangelical churches) experience.

Within that dynamic, the 'value' at issue here is 'Do I, your child, have a right to my own body and choices?'; Too often, the reply to that is 'no, we expect obedience and obeisance to God, your father, and your mother, in that exact order, because that is the one true way'.

This is a form of domination, not well-meaning 'protection'. It does, in fact, 'mess people up', in their intimate relationships most of all.

It’s one thing to try and impart your values onto your children—that seems like what most parents would want to do, although I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s what they should do. It’s another to say, for example, “you were born with a penis and so if I see you wearing a dress I’ll beat you and send you to a camp where people demean you and question your innermost feelings until you change them or pretend to do so”, instead of having a conversation about gender vs sex vs sexual orientation, gender roles, society, and culture, and “nature vs nurture”.

Fuck 'em honestly.

It is common for religious people to assume they are linked and that a religious person does good deeds because they are faithful while somebody who does bad deeds has less faith.

Which leads to an assumption by some that atheists are have no morals and priest are exception good.

It’s one thing to purposefully provoke people, and it’s another to tiptoe around any personal expression or hot-button issue for fear of offending someone, and that is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. I have been on all sides of this; I was raised by a computer scientist (used to speaking freely/veracity being valued) and a doctor (used to self-censorship/not offending being valued), and have worked in academia, industry, and now medicine, and have experienced conservative as well as liberal approaches to both promulgation and suppression of free expression.

That's a fair point I agree with. Still, I've met many people who seemingly put all "flavors" of Christian faith in the same negative bucket (implicitly negating the diversity among Christians you call out in your comment). In light of that, my intention was to contribue to the conversation with the very same point you are making, backed by a data point from my own experience: that there are many Christian communities in which faith is practiced in a way that enriches your life, rather than shackling you to a cult.

> It seems like you extrapolated far beyond what he said.

Was it Andrew's intention to talk about Christianity in general? Now you mention it, he might indeed have been focusing only on people "raised by conservative Christian parents".

The "you cant talk about something that negatively affected you, because a conservative person might feel bad" is not compassion. Its effect is biasing what people can say in very much one sided way.

I am unapologetically my authentic self, I find that works best. If you had broadened your horizons as you say; you'd find the same.

> you may just find that the people you think despise you and who you despise have some very good points, and the people who you thought were the only group you had anything in common with are actually quite toxic and full of bad advice.

There's no need to tell other posters what they think. As for women; I love women, and have always been in long term relationships. Maybe I'm just a lucky guy. I think it's odd though to try and appear superior to these groups as he does. You are right there are toxic people, especially those seeking to earn income and status off of male loneliness. I agree with you fully. Having said that, I stand behind what I said earlier.

The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a test, I asked DeepSeek to tell me how one can do an exact substring-boolean-test in Common Lisp, and it gave me code that was, character for character, _identical_ to the code that appears in Seibel's Common Lisp Book. It clearly memorized the code. It stands to reason, that it could have also memorized where it saw it, and been trained to tell the user that the code was from that book (which is NOT in the public domain, despite being free to read on the internet)[0].

To give you an analogy, nobody has a problem with someone downloading and distributing the public domain works of Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or Karl Marx, etc. But to remove their names from those works, and placing your (or someone else's) name on them instead, is plainly malicious behavior. Such behavior needs to shunned.

LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).

I suspect that they are not trained this way, because fully automated plagiarism creates an ambiguous situation, where a copyleft license (like GPL or EUPL etc) can be unknowingly violated, and there is hardly any trace of the violation. Plagiarism is the product.

[0]: Such attribution can only make LLMs _more_ useful and _more_ widely and confidently integrated into workflows. The lack of such attributions, risks diluting the value of open source projects, as (1) a high-signal indicator of skill and achievement, and (2) a way to ensure the provenance and quality of the code (both very important, if you are considering to build a business on top of one or more such projects). Just look at all those repos that claim to have "made" Minecraft-like game or Unix-like OS, when all they did was have an LLM plagiarize the code for them. This is a kind of, at best, spam and, at worst, fraud.

The reason this is so difficult to manifest, is that only about 2% to 4.6% of the college-educated population are software engineers at any given point, which means that 95% of all the people that we interact with, have no clue what we are talking about, and do not understand why they cannot have more, more, more, now, now, now. For comparison at least 20% of people have a degree in business. And most of those, in non-concrete roles seem to be cargo-culting their way through a career.