Don’t use people’s names as a slur.

The problem was always funding. All those bright minds went into ads because it paid well. Cancer research, space, propulsion, clean, energy, etc.. none of those paid particularly well. Nor would they have afforded a comfortable life with a house and family. The evisceration of SWE does not guarantee a flourishing in other fields. On the contrary, increased labor supply with further pressure, wages, downwards.

Agreed, though I think we all knew that the software industry payscales were out of whack to begin with. Fresh college grads that can barely do a fizzbuzz making twice as much as experienced doctors.

What I don't know is, say the industry normalizes to roughly what people make in other engineering fields. Then does everything else normalize around that? i.e. does cost of living go down proportionally in SF and Seattle? Or does all the tech money get further sucked up and consolidated into VC pockets and parked in vacant houses, while we and our trite "cancer research" and such get shepherded off to Doobersville?

Expensive private schools, luxurious ski vacations, and exclusive neighborhoods existed long before the ascendance of software engineers. These had been the purview of investment bankers, high-powered, lawyers, realtors, etc..

For a brief time with big tech, it seemed like intellectual prowess could allow you to jump the social strata. But that arrangement need not exist. It’s perfectly possible, indeed likely that we will revert to the old aristocratic ways. The old boys’s network ways.

That’s because FAANGs are successful due to monopolization and network effects. Not by the quality of their work.

This is especially true for Meta.

How did they get there?

By being in the right place and right time once, making it impossible for users to leave, and buying up all their competition before they become a serious threat.

Also, they typically started with much more of a high quality culture when they were small and people's contributions were legible.

Once it turns into a giant bureaucracy with people you've never met judging a promo packet by rubrics, while they're unfamiliar with your whole org.. the incentives get diffierent.

Come on that’s not true. How would you write and LRU cache in rust? It’s not possible in idiomatic rust. You either need to use unsafe or use integer indices as a poor man’s pointer.

Indices are fine. Fixating on the “right” shape of the solution is your hang-up here. Different languages want different things. Fighting them never ends well.

What's wrong with integer indices? They have bounds checking. You definitely do not need unsafe to do LRU.

At the macro level shifting workers to RN makes complete sense. It is the coup de grâce of the boomer generations: tax the young’s earnings, cancel SS, force them to work as nurses.

yeah and Im not young ... started my first web design job at 33 in 2009. I thought of going for pharmacy but that's too many years. Accelerated RN programs are 18 to 24 months.

Thanks for sharing.

What’s the expected compensation difference between previous career and RN?

Its top pay is $20 to $30 less an hour per the top pay i was making as a Sr UX Researcher/Designer/UI Dev. But as noted the latter career is slowly vanishining and the former is in no way a vanishing career (until the robots proliferate).

Europe should end its dangerous reliance on Russian gas and oil.

I think all this nonsense can be traced back to USA abdicating its industry to China and over 20 years being completely hollowed out.

Has anyone used gas town or any other agentic system to build something useful that people want and need?

This seems to miss the mark in defining “peak performance”.

Magnus Carlsen, Lang Lang, Terence Tao all were precocious and achieved elite performance in their youth.

In theory it can. However in practice ageism in hiring is 100% observable.

It’s basically the revealed preference of hiring managers. The seldom spoken reality is this: managers like them young and hungry with no external obligations; thus they’re maximally extractible.

> > can trick us into over-estimating

> [it's] observable

Nobody said it wasn't, I was quite deliberate in my wording.

I’m not sure what point you were trying to make then.

At face value your post implies ageism is not a problem. Change the target demographic to a different “minority” - racial, ethnic, diverse - and observe the heavy connotation carried by downplaying severity.

"Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

I think you lost track of the thread. You're acting as if the subject was already ageism, and I'm somehow arriving to downplay it.

No, the subject was historical industry growth, and you can't just slam those two ideas together, you need some other idea in the chain to bridge them--like how growth skews our perceptions. Heck, if you care so much about ageism awareness, you should be thanking me for introducing it.

___________

Here's how the conversation would have gone if I'd done what you wanted:

1. robotresearcher: "Job openings have increased dramatically over time."

2. Nega-Terr_: "Guys, ageism exists! I won't say anything else, that'd just detract from its importance."

3. Someone: "Uhhhh, WTF? Where'd that come from? If anything, a constantly growing industry would make it easier for seniors to continue finding new jobs, a shrinking one is really where they'd be in trouble. What's wrong with you? Stop talking nonsense."

age strongly influences a lot of variables that are important to an employer.

race doesn't.

they are not in the same category.

That’s very funny. Of course it does, so of course there is ageism.

That is ceteris paribus, you would prefer to hire a young gun over an old person. The same logic could be applied to other protected categories.

parse error.

“Malevolent spirits waiting at the bottom of a pit”

Didn’t return what I expected: the scene from spirited away when chihiro and haku fall through the trap door.

Relevance can be improved with multiple ranking steps.

Curious why specifically add multiple ranking steps to improve relevance? How would each ranking step differ ? Would you use different ranking models?