It's not strictly soul-crushing for me, but I definitely don't like to waste time in non-productive meetings where everyone bullshits everyone else. Do you like that? Do you find it a good use of your time and brain attention capacity?
Some hope or dreams for what to do with your future, life after work, retirement.
You get to work with other people, overseas.
Talk to those contractors sometimes. They are under tremendous pressure. They are mistreated. One wrong move, they're gone. They undergo tremendous prejudices, and soft racism everyday especially by us FTEs.
You find out that they struggle with the drudgery as well, looking for solutions, better understanding, etc.
We all feel disposable by our corporate masters, but they feel it even more so.
Gladly! I think what I would choose is building on-shore teams exclusively. That's the change I'd like to see more of, while overseas teams build their own economies instead of ripping away jobs from domestic citizens in an already difficult job market.
If it was really America First they might not be so screwed for a free and fair election on November.
If it was really America first, their priorities wouldn't be to try and attack free and fair elections instead of reflecting and actually practicing what they preach.
It's going to come across very naive and dumb, but I believe we can and people just aren't aware of or they simply aren't implementing the basics.
Harvard Business Review and probably hundreds of other online content providers provide some simple rules for meetings yet people don't even do these.
1. Have a purpose / objective for the meeting. I consider meetings to fall into one of three broad categories information distribution, problem solving, decision making. Knowing this will allow the meeting to go a lot smoother or even be moved to something like an email and be done with it.
2. Have an agenda for the meeting. Put the agenda in the meeting invite.
3. If there are any pieces of pre-reading or related material to be reviewed, attach it and call it out in the invite. (But it's very difficult to get people to spend the time preparing for a meeting.)
4. Take notes during the meeting and identify any action items and who will do them (preferably with an initial estimate). Review these action items and people responsible in the last couple of minutes of the meeting.
5. Send out the notes and action items.
Why aren't we doing these things? I don't know, but I think if everyone followed these for meetings of 3+ people, we'd probably see better meetings.
Probably like most businesses issues, it's a people problem. They have to care in the first place and idk if you can make people who don't care starting caring.
I agree the info is out there about how to run effective meetings.
You can make people care easily. But people these days aren't incentivized to care. They announce layoffs and get a stock boost many times. You leave a company as a career suite and get paid millions. You speak corporate BS in meetings and get promoted.you bribe a government and you get tax breaks. I can go on for paragraphs about influencers, grifters, government, etc. It's entrenched everywhere.
We in tech like talking about meritocracy, but that's all collapsed, and even the illusion of it has collapsed now.
What we need much, much less of in this world is government force, especially during these trying times of government force and outreach (something I expected my more left side of the isle colleagues to have finally realized by now).
COIVD really was a test of how much governmental draconianism we would take, and we failed spectacularly, and not only that, but are demanding more government.
So no, we don't need more regulation, especially given this country's history of regulatory capture. We need new solutions.
We don't need "more" government, we need the government to do its job. We need the regulators who have been legally appointed to oversee these areas to actually respond to these behaviors. Regulatory capture is the issue, but the solution isn't less government. It's getting corporate money and lobbying out of the government (Citizens United is to blame for most of our woes), increase the enforcement of anti-corruption laws, and get antitrust back on the table.
I want big corporations to be scared. I want them to fear for their own survival, and to tread lightly lest the sword of damocles fall upon them.
I'm with you, I like your answer, especially the last bit.
But how to get there we may disagree.
The existing avenues have proven unfruitful.
Regulating more has just lead to more control in the hands of the elites and those with resources, who know how to game the system, and more draconianism for us smaller folks. "Rules for thee, but not for me"
Anarchy/Libertarianism isn't the answer either, its too impractical, unrealistic.
I won't pretend I'm smart enough to know what the answer is, but I am experienced enough to know whats laid before us hasn't worked and isn't working. Consumer protection regulatory bodies have been made toothless over the course of decades, I don't think I can trust them again anyways after what has happened in recent years. Financial regulatory bodies only purpose is to make life as difficult for the smaller guys.
We have non-existent data and tech regulation. You know what would happen if we actually got some? It would be written by the same tech oligarchs. We would just have a new revolving door. Like how the Verizon CEO become the FCC chair. We will get Larry and Sundar passing our regulation. Elon and Mark funding the think tanks that write the legislation.
It's not about it being scary, its about it being a gigantic, stupid waste of water, and for what? So that lazy executives and managers can generate their shitty emails they used to have their comms person write for them, so that students can cheat on their homework, or so degens can generate a video of MLK dancing to rap? Because thats the majority of the common usage at this point and creating the demand for all these datacenters. If it was just for us devs and researchers, you wouldn't need this many.
Whether it's a "gigantic" waste of water depends on what those figures mean. It's very important to understand if 25 million liters of water per year is a gigantic number or not.
For comparison it's about 10 olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, doesn't seem very significant to me. Unless you're going to tell people they're not allowed swimming pools any more because swimming doesn't produce enough utility?
And at any rate, water doesn't get used up! It evaporates and returns to the sky to rain down again somewhere else, it's the most renewable resource in the entire world.
Yea but it's not like those people have never seen water. And yet it's not so simple, that you can use water but the water eventually comes back to you. There is a hell lot more nuance to this.
Its not gigantic and its not a waste. Brainrot creates massive economic value that can be used to pay people for products you are more happy to consume.
And also, none of those current use cases are a real benefit to society, outside of maybe research cases.
The only benefit is to the already wealthy owner class that is itching to not have to pay for employees anymore because it impacts their bottom line (payroll is typically the largest expense).
It's not like we are making robots to automate agriculture and manufacturing to move toward a post scarcity, moneyless society, which would have real benefits. No, instead we have AI companies hyping up a product whose purpose (according to them) is so that already wealthy people can hoard more wealth and not have to pay for employees. It's promising to take away a large portion of the only high-paying jobs we have left for the average person without an advanced degree.
Me being able to write software a little faster, without hiring a junior, is a net negative to society rather than a benefit.
You appear to be arguing against using technology to boost human efficiency on a forum full of software engineers who've dedicated their careers to building software that makes humans more efficient.
If we aren't doing that then why are we building software?
Because the stated goal of generative AI is not to make an individual more efficient, it's to replace that individual all together and completely eliminate the bottom rungs of the professional career ladder.
Historically software that made humans more efficient resulted in empowerment for the individual, and also created a need for new skilled roles. Efficiency gains were reinvested into the labor market. More people could enter into higher paying work.
With generative AI, if these companies achieve their stated goals, what happens to the wealth generated by the efficiency?
If we automate agriculture and manufacturing, the gain is distributed as post-scarciaty wealth to everyone.
If we automate the last few remaining white-collar jobs that pay a living wage, the gain is captured entirely by the capital owners & investors via elimination of payroll, while society only loses one of its last high-paying ladders for upward mobility.
Nobody lost their career because we built a faster operating system or a better compiler. With generative AI's stated goals, any efficiency gains are exclusively for those at the very top, while everyone else gets screwed.
Now, I'll concede and say, that's not the AI companies' fault. I'm not saying we shouldn't magically stop developing this technology, but we absolutely need our governments to start thinking about the ramifications it can have and start seriously considering things like UBI to be prepared for when the bottom falls out of the labor market.
I'm not a fan of of the "replace workers with AI" thing myself - I'm much more excited about AI as augmentation for existing workers so they can take on more challenging tasks.
One thing I can say definitively, as someone who is definitely not an AI zealot (more of an AI pragmatist): GPT language models have reduced the barrier of running your own bare metal server. AWS salesfolk have long often used the boogeyman of the costs (opportunity, actual, maintenance) of running your own server as the reason you should pick AWS (not realizing you are trading one set of boogeymen for another), but AI has reduced a lot of that burden.
That's more of a form of survivorship bias. Microsoft continued to maintain its lockdown on government IT and infrastructure through the decades, over the alternatives.
Life in the fallen world is indeed dark, and certainly was darker a mere few generations ago. The difference is we have lost the frameworks generations past used for dealing with major depressive episodes, and have opted for more "enlightened" approaches that are clearly working /s
There is a whole 'nother level of safety validation that goes beyond your everyday OWASP, or heck even what we consider "highly regulated" industry requirements that 95-99% of us devs care about. SQLite is used in some highly specialized, highly sensitive environments, where they are concerned about bit flips, and corrupted memory. I had the luxury of sitting through Richard Hipp's talk about it one time, but I am certainly butchering it.
I have noticed that it coincides with the re-election of a certain political candidate (He who must not be named).
The facade of "critical and rational thinker" has all but completely fallen away and this place has revealed itself for the true ideological echo chamber that it is.
Now that sounds like a good argument to make in court! How do we do it?
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