thorwasdfasdf (u/thorwasdfasdf)

thorwasdfasdf commented on Life Improvements Since the 1990s gwern.net/Improvements... · Posted by u/janhenr

Look at the essentials and you'll see we've actually been going backwards, ever since the 1970s:

Housing: Now less affordable than ever. It takes more hours worked to afford any kind of shelter than ever in the last 50 years. According to an interview I once watched: in the 60s, a painter could afford a single family house and six kids and the wife didn't even need to work. today, two painters working together can barely afford shelter, even with no kids.

Cars: MPG has not improved. Look at a corolla from the 70s vs today, it's about the same. Comfort is roughly comporable, at least since the invention of AC. It now costs more to buy a car today than in the 70s, in terms of average number of hours worked in order to afford a car.

Education has seen the greatest amount of inflation. Whereas a high school diploma could give you a great enough salary to afford a house in the 60s. Now, not even a bachelors or masters is enough to afford basic shelter for many people living in the first world.

Yes, we have a gazillion more computers, iphones, smart watches and toys to play with. We can fill our entire house with plastic now. what goood is that if you don't have a house to stay in? where will you plug in all those electronics and your massive 70" tv, when you're out on the street?

thorwasdfasdf commented on VCs are financing an economy of servants sifted.eu/articles/servan... · Posted by u/sarathyweb

toomuchcredit · 4 years ago

VCs are just cogs in the wheels taking us from an "Ownership Society" to a "Sharecropper's Society," as Buffett once put it. Private Equity buying up housing, is just the latest worrying trend in a troubling trajectory with excessive debt, centralization of power, concentration of wealth, etc.

thorwasdfasdf · 4 years ago

> Private Equity buying up housing

I know there's a lot of media saying this headline but This is actually false. checkout Stephan graham, he's got a post on this on Youtube where he investigates it deeply and finds that an extremely tiny percentage of houses are being bought up by private equity.

thorwasdfasdf commented on ‘Great Resignation’ gains steam as return-to-work plans take effect cnbc.com/2021/06/29/more-... · Posted by u/remt

dcolkitt · 4 years ago

I’m honestly perplexed what the FANGs are even thinking in being so aggressive about pushing an end to WFH.

Sure it could all work out fine for them. Maybe employees will grumble for a bit, then settle back into office life. But maybe it wont’t. There’s a very real possibility that you lose a non-negligible percent of your staff (disproportionately the most talented who have other options), handicap your ability to recruit replacements, and destroy morale for the remaining. For companies who’s entire value is the intangible human capital of their workforce, this seems like a pretty big fucking risk to take.

I get it. Maybe you think WFH is long term unsustainable and it will erode corporate culture and what not. But the point is it’s pretty clear that it’s not short-term unsustainable. Obviously companies have survived for a year without the train swerving off the tracks. Why would any rational company want to be the first back? Why not just wait six months after the other FANGs go back to see what happens? At worse you lose a half year in the office, which clearly isn’t that bad. At best, you potentially save the entire company from collapsing.

Making such a big push to go back in September instead of waiting until January just seems reckless to the point of irrationality.

thorwasdfasdf · 4 years ago

it's just supply and demand of labor. when there's a vast oversupply of talented labor, you don't need to cater to the desires of that talent pool. there's a long list of potential candidates that would love to work at a FAANG even if they have to go back to the office.

thorwasdfasdf commented on Ask HN: Senior engineers, advice for 1 year, 5 year and 10 years of experience · Posted by u/GGfpc

brundolf · 4 years ago

Can I ask what country you're in? I'm in the US and my experience suggests the exact opposite of nearly every point in your first paragraph

Programming jobs here are plentiful, you should never work for free, your very first job might be a little harder to get than later ones but it won't be hard. And listing things like "tabs" and "pagination" on your resume feels really desperate, like you're scraping the bottom of the barrel to pad out the list as much as possible. The closest thing I would suggest is to maybe list some specific frameworks like React or Redux (or the equivalent for your area); though even then it's not really for the technical recruiters, it's for the imprecise algorithms that sift through the pile

thorwasdfasdf · 4 years ago

Well, I started my career in the US durring the dot com bubble bust when absolutely no software engineer could get a job no matter what they did. this no doubt informed my views on the subject.

But, even now, I thought it would be harder to get a job as a junior role than senior. As a hiring lead, 5 years back, i remember, we could have our pick of just about any overqualified intern we wanted. we got one guy who already had 1 to 2 years of work experience, just so he could be hired as an intern and he was awesome.

As for being detailed. mentioning implemtations isn't just about padding out. It's about providing an accurate picture of what your experience is. It's not enough to simply say "i am intermediate JS experience". that doesn't tell the interviewer much. furthermore, most people aren't very accurate at rating themselves. overconfident people think they're experts and experts with no confidence under-rate themselves. by mentioning implementations and specific experiences, it allows the interviewer to more accurately guage your level of expertise.

thorwasdfasdf commented on Ask HN: Senior engineers, advice for 1 year, 5 year and 10 years of experience · Posted by u/GGfpc

thorwasdfasdf · 4 years ago

1 year advice: It's very hard to get a software engineering job but stick with it, get work experience any way you can, even if you have to work pro bono. Get as much programming experience as you can. Don't over reach on your resume qualifications, but do go into great detail. Instead of saying: "Skills: Javascript". Go into details, for example: "Skills: Javascript, Front end dev experience: Tabs, pagination, leaderboards, infinite scrolling, post loading, pre-loading, page load optimization, etc" the more details you can give the better. this gives interviewers an idea of what experience you have.

10 Year: It's much easier to get a job, but it's also much harder to keep your job, especially if you just got hired by a new company. an engineer who spends 4 years at one company will be more qualified to work there than a brand new engineer at that company with 10 years of experience. So, at this level, when you join a new company, you'll have to work extremely hard.

If you want the very highest salaries, you'll need to jump ship. it's hard work but the more often you change jobs, the higher the salary.

personally, i think, once you get past the middle of the bell curve, any additional raises are of diminishing returns. you'll work harder and harder for less and less money.

don't let mean companies with bad cultures take advantage of you. there still exist companies with good work cultures where you don't have to be a full time slave.

Your job performance is determined by the following: 1/3 - your own hard work 1/3 - how well you do politically (play nicely with others) 1/3 - factors beyond your control (just one example: working in a rapidly expanding industry will be greatly in your favor)

thorwasdfasdf commented on Kinda a Big Announcement joelonsoftware.com/2021/0... · Posted by u/nathggns

bfrog · 4 years ago

Is it just me or is the intro relating to COM a bit off the mark?

thorwasdfasdf · 4 years ago

not to us old farts, who get a great feeling of nostalgia when we read about those win32 APIesque topics.

thorwasdfasdf commented on World Now Likely to Hit Watershed 1.5 °C Rise in Next 5 Years news.un.org/en/story/2021... · Posted by u/infodocket

koheripbal · 4 years ago

We don't talk about birth control enough. Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will - either as a result of the migrations they do, or through development.

We need to reduce the number of humans on Earth.

thorwasdfasdf · 4 years ago

i don't why this is being downvoted. He's abosultely right, if you want to reduce CO2, you need to reduce the number things that cause it: Humans.

The alternative: Asking each human to reduce their C02 output won't get you very, especially since most of our individual output is more influence by govt policy rather than our own actions, for instance: commute distances, etc.

thorwasdfasdf commented on Gen Z is going to have a hard time getting rich businessinsider.com/gen-z... · Posted by u/paulpauper

alexfromapex · 4 years ago

It seems like each generation is having more difficulty making ends meet (https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2021/04/01/the-generationa...). Why hasn't this been improving? Is it because of regulatory capture by corporations?

thorwasdfasdf · 4 years ago

There's been a pretty huge drop in living standards over the last 40 to 50 years. One interview with a person who lived through the 60s said, back then a painter could own a home, support a non working wife and six kids. These days, that same painter would have a hard time supporting himself, let alone a wife and six kids and house.

one of the biggest drivers of wealth reduction is all the regulation that prevents more housing from being built, and how it's built. this leads to higher land costs, higher costs of labor, higher regulatory costs. Not to mention, we've kept adding more and more people to this country but haven't added more land or more material inputs. so of course living standards have to come down as everything gets split up per capita. to be sure, there's a ton of empty land out there, but no one's allowed to use it. and companies have moved jobs to areas where people can't live. meanwhile gov regulates the s** out of the housing dev market and yet let's job creators go nuts in an area that can't grow due to local NIMBYism.

thorwasdfasdf commented on The End of Retirement (2014) harpers.org/archive/2014/... · Posted by u/fortran77

jillesvangurp · 4 years ago

The real problem here is poverty and a lack of social security in the US. That's a solvable problem. It just requires the will to solve it and for whatever reason that is actually controversial in the US.

I live in Europe. Retirement is very much on my mind but more in the sense that I need to secure a little more than just the state pension. You can live on that but only barely. A lot of European countries are lot poorer than the US. Yet retirement is a thing in those countries and not really under any threat.

The need to work and the reality that a lot of work is just busy work that isn't really that critical because all the critical work is increasingly automated does not help with this. No offense but I work doing CTO work in startups and technically it's been a long time since I did anything close to producing critical goods or services. It's nice what I do and I live on it but I can't say with a straight face that it is all that critical or important. A lot of our jobs are like that. We keep ourselves busy doing things for each other or ourselves and try to monetize that. I can probably do that beyond retirement if I stay healthy. I might even enjoy that.

Post scarcity society is not that different from where we are today (at least us privileged people working tech jobs). Poverty is increasingly having to do actual work to feed yourself. In most countries that at least gets you to retirement. The US is kind of unique in that it is very wealthy and yet does not take care of its people in the same way that much poorer countries have been doing for the last century.

thorwasdfasdf · 4 years ago

Gov spends 40% of all GDP. That should be plenty to take care of the elderly. Of the entire federal budget almost half goes to the elderly: medicaid/medicaid ~ 20%, social security almost 20%.

the question we should be asking is. Why doesn't all this money go farther than it does? I'd say, we may not be nearly as wealthy as GDP/capita says we are.