bradlys (u/bradlys) - Readit News

bradlys commented on 'Life being stressful is not an illness' – GPs on mental health over-diagnosis bbc.com/news/articles/cx2... · Posted by u/jnord

chneu · 8 days ago

Hard disagree. I think we're convinced life is way harder than it is.

Life is fucking easy. One push ordering for almost anything. Cushy houses with hvac.

We make life hard by buying into the narrative that it's hard and we're all helpless. This cheats us out of our development and ability to handle real conflict.

bradlys · 8 days ago

I make $400k/yr at faang, I don’t have a cushy house with hvac. My house doesn’t even have insulation. I can’t even park on the street in the city I’m residing in because it’s illegal.

Imagine how much worse it is for people who don’t make as much as I do.

bradlys commented on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled? reason.com/2025/12/04/why... · Posted by u/delichon

astrange · 10 days ago

> > we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few.

> Correct, their slice of the pie is growing, the bottom 90%'s is shrinking

Not sure about "power" there. In my experience you get power by having a lot of free time and dedication to something else other people don't care about… which yes includes billionaires obviously, but most of the people meeting that description are just middle class retirees, so they're outnumbered.

> > This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.

> Also correct, the biggest growth of share being in the top 1% segment.

It does not show it "every year", there are long periods of stagnation and some reversals. I would say it shows that recessions are bad and we should avoid having them.

nb another more innocuous explanation is: there's no reason to have a lot of wealth. To win at this game you need to hoard wealth, but most people are intentionally not even trying that. For instance, you could have a high income but spend it all on experiences or donate it all to charity.

bradlys · 10 days ago

Who is in the white house regularly dictating policy? Is it old retirees with no money or connections?

bradlys commented on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled? reason.com/2025/12/04/why... · Posted by u/delichon

jaredklewis · 10 days ago

Yes, I agree with that, but that still doesn't explain why it would be a good idea to give some students more time on a test. It explains why students would be incentivized to game the system and get more time. But it doesn't explain why we have this strange system to begin with.

bradlys · 10 days ago

Probably started out as an exception for truly difficult situations but like everything else became routinely exploited once widely known about and eventually became a defacto norm and just part of the protocol.

A lot of things start like this. You need someone with an aggressive backbone to enforce things - which these institutions won't have.

bradlys commented on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled? reason.com/2025/12/04/why... · Posted by u/delichon

jaredklewis · 10 days ago

Your comment explains why students would like to receive these accommodations (it gives them a competitive edge), but does nothing to explain why this is logical or beneficial.

If as you say the number of available positions is constrained, this system does nothing to increase the supply of those positions. It also does nothing increase the likelihood that those positions are allocated to those with the greatest material need. This is Stanford; I am sure many of the disabled students at Stanford are in the 1%.

bradlys · 10 days ago

Even in the top 1% there’s a limited amount of positions. Everyone wants every advantage possible over everyone else. That is how the market is. Even for Stanford students there is a hierarchy.

bradlys commented on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled? reason.com/2025/12/04/why... · Posted by u/delichon

jaredklewis · 10 days ago

Can someone explain to me why the accommodations make sense in the first place?

Like what's the point of having the test be time constrained? If there is no point, then just let everyone have more time. If there is a point to having the test be time constrained, then aren't we just holding one group to a lower standard than another group? Why is that good?

Same question about lectures. Is there a reason everyone can't record the lectures? If so, then why do we have different standards?

I think at the college level, grades should in some sense reflect your proficiency at a given topic. An "A" in calculus should mean that you can do calculus and that evaluation should be independent of your own strengths, weaknesses, disabilities, genetic predisposition to it, and so on. Imagine an extreme example: someone is in a car crash, suffers brain damage, and is now unable to do calculus. This is tragic. But I don't also feel that it now makes sense to let them do their tests open book or whatever to accommodate for that. As a society we should do whatever we can to support this individual and help them live their best life. But I don't see how holding them to a lower standard on their college exams accomplishes that.

bradlys · 10 days ago

The reason is because employers are insanely brutal in the job market due to an oversupply of qualified talent. We have more people than we have positions available to work for quality wages. This is why everything is so extreme. Students need to be in the top X percent in order to get a job that leads to a decent quality of life in the US. The problem is that every student knows this and is now competing against one another for these advantages.

It’s like stack ranking within companies that always fire the bottom 20%. Everyone will do whatever they can to be in the top 80% and it continues to get worse every year. Job conditions are not improving every year - they are continually getting worse and that’s due to the issue that we just don’t have enough jobs.

This country doesn’t build anything anymore and we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few. This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.

bradlys commented on The Junior Hiring Crisis people-work.io/blog/junio... · Posted by u/mooreds

lordnacho · 12 days ago

I suspect this junior hiring crisis thing is linked to the ridiculous hoops people are put through to get a job these days.

When I was starting, you were checked for potential as a trainee. In my case, options trading. They checked over that you could do some mental arithmetic, and that you had a superficial idea of what trading was about. Along with a degree from a fancy university, that was all that was needed. I didn't know much about coding, and I didn't know much about stochastic differential equations.

A couple of weeks ago, a young guy contacted me about his interview with an options trading firm. This guy had spent half a year learning every stat/prob trick question ever. All those game theory questions about monks with stickers on their foreheads, all the questions about which card do you need to turn over, the lot. The guy could code, and had learned a bunch of ML to go with it. He prepared for their trading game with some really great questions to me about bet sizing.

I was convinced he was simply overly nervous about his prospects, because I'd never met someone so well prepared.

Didn't get the job.

Now I can assure you, he could have done the job. But apparently, firms want to hire people who are nearly fully developed on their own dime.

When they get their analyst class, I guess there is going to be nobody who can't write async python. Everyone will know how to train an ML on a massive dataset, everyone will already know how to cut latency in the system.

All things that I managed to learn while being paid.

You gotta ask yourself whether we really want a society where people have to already know the job before they get their first job. Where everyone is like a doctor: already decided at age 16 that this was the path they wanted to follow, choosing classes towards that goal, and sticking with it until well into adulthood. And they have to essentially pay to get this job, because it comes at at cost of exploring other things (as well as actual money to live).

bradlys · 11 days ago

Haven’t seen anyone mention this but this is how it works in China. You have to study the same thing since you were 16 and completely ace it. If you decide during or after college that you don’t like the job path you chose (or really your parents chose) as a teenager then too bad. You’re locked into it for life or you’re stuck with never getting a job because the job market in China for young people is so horrendous. (Much higher youth unemployment rate)

They have terrible interviews there as well that go much deeper than here. They’ll analyze your family - not just you.

This is just a symptom of a really bad economy. That’s what the US is in right now. China’s youth are suffering from this as well.

bradlys commented on The Junior Hiring Crisis people-work.io/blog/junio... · Posted by u/mooreds

bradlys · 12 days ago

I upvoted the article for the purpose of discussion. I disagree with it. The core tenant of the article is that AI is the reason why companies aren't hiring juniors. That's just not it. Do people just blindly believe whatever some CEO or company says in their press briefings? This was all happening before the AI boom. Interest rates went up, hiring went way down, and then AI launched. Before interest rates, interviewing was getting harder and harder every year. That's usually an indication that you have more supply than demand. The bar for getting into any American tech company was getting much harder - not just FAANG. Leetcode had gone from having practiced 50-100 questions to there being a bank of over 3000+ with many people having regularly studied hundreds. It went from easy/medium to being typical in interviews to medium/hard being typical with many original hard questions now being reclassified as mediums.

Wages for your typical engineer stopped going up 5+ years ago. The joke of senior FAANG engineers making $400k has been a meme for over 5 years. Yet, inflation has done over 20% in 5 years? Look at new offers for people joining the majority of positions available at public tech companies. You're not seeing $500k offers regularly. Maybe at Jane Street or Anthropic or some other companies that are barely hiring - all of which barely employ anyone compared to FAANG. You're mostly seeing the same $350-400k/yr meme.

The reason we're not employing new grads is the same reason as the standards getting much more aggressive. Oversupply and senior talent has always been valued more.

bradlys commented on Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026 businessinsider.com/insta... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

dexwiz · 13 days ago

It was before matching so I am guessing overall HR policy.

bradlys · 13 days ago

That doesn’t make sense. In 2024, you could choose any location while matching. You just wouldn’t get any matches if there was no one hiring in that location (or if your profile wasn’t suitable to any, etc.). Your recruiter was being stupid or failing to communicate effectively.

bradlys commented on Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026 businessinsider.com/insta... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

paxys · 13 days ago

Pre-covid - an entire working team is clustered in the same office and have desks near each other. People collaborate via in-person meetings, hallway conversations and general proximity.

During covid - hiring is mostly remote since companies figure they don't have to be constrained by geography anymore. Employees work at home and collaborate over Zoom meetings. It's difficult at first but everyone adjusts. Productivity is allegedly lower, partly due to the remote nature, partly because employees are slacking off.

Now - employers start mandating return to office. Teams are still distributed, so rather than collaborating via physical proximity employees have to spend their day trying to find meeting rooms and sitting on Zoom, just in the office instead of their homes.

Is the company actually more productive now? Some McKinsey consultant has a slide deck showing that it has gone up from 6.5 to 7.2, so the bosses all pat themselves on the back.

bradlys · 13 days ago

None of these executives are using data driven decisions. It’s said as much in the memo. It’s vibes based.

I suspect there’s more at play with this. Maybe they’re expecting attrition from this and that’s their actual goal. They never reveal their core intentions.

bradlys commented on Instagram chief orders staff back to the office five days a week in 2026 businessinsider.com/insta... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

akudha · 13 days ago

One of the teams at my workplace has 5 members in 5 different offices. They’re still forced to come to office and attend calls via Microsoft Teams from their respective offices than from their homes.

These are reasons I can think of - they want to prevent people from doing second job, they want to maintain commercial real estate prices (even if it is artificially propped up) or most likely, it is just the good old ego thing (“you work for me, I make you do things just because I can”).

bradlys · 13 days ago

Ego/pet project/appearance of doing something as an executive is probably the main driver.

A lot of these decisions have very little quality data behind them.