Behold, we are one step closer to a world where "AI will do the mundane tasks, and the we all are going to engage in creative hobbies such as music creation"... Oh... wait...
I have almost two decades of experience. I'm approaching 40 years old, I have a family. Sure, I might sound stubborn, but I don't have the time to study 3 months for the nuances of DFS algorithms, or grinding leetcode.
The interviewing process should evaluate my knowledge as required by the job description, and not to play a role in satisfying the ego of the interviewer(s).
So yes, while I did refresh my memory on Big-O notation, and ran through some common brain teasers, I'm not going to read books and invest 3 months of sleepless nights in order to get the opportunity to be a cog in FAANG.
Life is about choices. You want to make BigTech money you have to play the game. You’re not going to change the way the industry works.
It’s fine not to want to play that game and accept that you probably will make less as a “senior developer” working in “the enterprise” as someone just graduating from college and getting a return offer from any of the well known companies.
I am 50, married and an empty nester. Spent all of my career working in “the enterprise” and even my one stint at BigTech between the time I was 46-49 was working in the cloud consulting division (full time direct hire) working with enterprise customers and I am now doing the same thing at a smaller company
You can put your ego to the side and enjoy making a quarter million a year as a cog or you can keep your ego and not - choices.
I made my choice and I continue to turn down opportunities to make more money for better work life balance. But I am making that choice with my eyes wide open.
There is also a world of semi-faangs. Something like working for salesforce or workday or even vercel or fly.io. These pay good money and will interview hard but maybe more accessible than the hard core Faangs. (And Facebook and Amazon are known ad hard places to stay at anyway).
Assuming he could get a job as a senior developer and the definition and responsibilities and qualifications of a senior at these companies are a lot different than those of a “senior” in Enterprise dev, you are still looking at around $225k.
While that’s not bad, it’s not the eye popping FAANG level salaries. More than likely he is going to be down leveled since he has no experience with architecture and system design or demonstrated “scope” and “impact” of senior developer.
If he gets down leveled to a mid level developer at either of these companies, he’s not doing too much better.
And in another reply he stated an unwillingness to do the interview prep.
Fair enough. I got downleveled into such a company but got paid same as a higher level elsewhere so now there is somewhere to go up! Plus even they have raises at same level. I have no ego and grinded leet and design interviews. Happy with my choice
Warning: unsolicited advice incoming. DFS, at least in the context of big-tech interviews, basically just means searching a 2D matrix, or a graph. It's not some esoteric 160 IQ PhD CS concept. You probably've implemented DFS in your day job without even realizing. I used to think algorithmic interviews were beneath me, too, but then I realized that attitude and insecurity was just getting in my own way.
I begrudgingly started treating LeetCode and CodeForces like a game, and it turned out to be more engaging than I expected. I'm also 30 with a family, so I get the time constraints, but just 30 minutes a day for a few months made a huge difference.
Put it this way: If someone told you, 'I'll give you $500k, top-tier career opportunities, and a resume that opens doors, but you have to spend 30 minutes a day for six months solving toy programming problems,' would your sincere reply be "no thanks"?
> I'll give you $500k, top-tier career opportunities, and a resume that opens doors
And he is not going to spend three months grinding leetCode, after working for an unknown company and walk in the door making $500K. He will make significantly more than he is making now admittedly.
And being in BigTech doesn’t guarantee a job or really help on your resume in and of itself after you leave these days. As many people who have been laid off, it won’t even separate you from the noise. Especially if (hypothetical) you, don’t have anything to show for it but you pushed some code maintaining a service.
Again no shade toward the original poster. I was about where he is when I was 40. If you take away my AWS account , I turn into a pumpkin - an enterprise dev with above average soft skills.
I know what I want, but I'm afraid that it's not possible to achieve this. I want full autonomy (as much as possible) over my time and the kind of work I do, while still making at least the same amount of money I make now.
So it would be something like a line of people who are willing to hire my services, while I decide what to work on and how to do it.
> That's the mind virus that the CEOs want you to have.
The current zeitgeist is extremely anti-employee: mass layoffs in a lot of BigTech, and DOGE sadistically slashing federal employee jobs. All of this is meant to send a message that you, an employee, should be more compliant. For some, however (like yourself), the natural reaction is to step back and realize that you don't want that at all. It's an extremely healthy reaction, actually.
Concretely, as I said, I'd look at chiseling time off of your main job to work on other things. This will require a lot of patience (and maybe a job switch to somewhere where that is acceptable). You will probably lose money in the short term.
I'm not the best person to give advice on this, so take that into consideration.
But I think you need to have a fairly decent skill in networking.
I've been slowly building up my skill in networking (randomly approaching people on LinkedIn). It's currently slowly paying off in that I think I will have one friend that is working in FAANG.
I've had 10 conversations so far with people from FAANG (or related). I found most of them okay conversations. However, with this guy, the conversation was genuinely fun and I realized I could consider hanging out with him no matter what his title is.
So why not synergize and look for people that work in prestigious places that I also genuinely enjoy?
Once enough people know you, work will slowly roll in.
> Have you gotten any feedback in your current role about why you're stuck? The reasons can vary from the difference in expected behaviors from level to level, no room at level +1, your current company/manager not really caring about your advancement, etc.
I'm in a family-like company, so there is not much feedback giving. I'm trying to change a job, but there are few struggles: (1) I can't really improve salary that much due to OP, (2) the market is currently shit, (3) even if I find a job, it sets me back to square zero.
> Is this because you don't (or haven't had opportunities to) step up to lead/own chunks of work?
I did lead/own chunks of work. But it just seems not enough to justify leadership roles. I get the "it's impressive, but we need someone a BIT MORE qualified".
> Do you plan to do anything about this? It's hard to advance without some amount of self-improvement?
When I was younger, I dabbled in many areas: game dev, web dev, os dev, embedded, assembly, C, Java, JS, PHP, etc. Eventually I found my career and my niche, but due to certain luck (or lack thereof), combined with my young naivety, I didn't progress fast enough to the style of companies that deal with high load, and other mambo-jumbo tech. And now, I just have a lot of years of experience in mediocre companies/products.
> Are you saying that you're motivated enough to try to bootstrap multiple projects, and have started a SaaS that actually has paying customers?
I do. I have a lot of motivation when it comes to actually solve problems. I talk with customers, do development, and try to find new ways to market my SaaS. I just hate doing to for someone else when corporate politics is involved.
I don't know how to express it correctly. But yes, sort of. I didn't work in high-load-kafka-like companies, so I'm kind of stuck in my mid level company types that do relatively simple things.
I'm kind of tired of the entire narrative that "US good, everyone else bad", as if only US deserves to hold powerful technology because it will be used for "the greater good", rather than employ it in military applications, as if Anthropic didn't partner with Palantir.
And it amazes me how many people can't seem to see past the "US is good, everyone else are bad" smoke mirror.
I'm sure most of us agree with you, but independently of that, please don't take HN threads on generic tangents, and certainly not generic nationalistic flamewar tangents. The problem is that it's tediously repetitive and inevitably turns nasty.
First- the author of this blog post is the CEO of Anthropic, an American AI company. Of course they are going to argue for export controls if it can hurt their competition. They get to benefit from anticompetitive practices with none of the legal risk! So it's not even about keeping the "bad guys" from having things, it's really about making more profit. Also, you can typically assume that anything a CEO publishes is in a pursuit to raise stock prices, it has nothing to do with morality. If CEOs were moral people most of them wouldn't have become CEOs (there are probably a few CEOs that are truly good people, but I'll bet there are more "wolf in sheep's clothing" CEOs that use an image of morality to improve their company's reputation).
Second- aside from the specifics of this post, you don't have to believe that the US is good to see the logic of export controls. There are a number of countries that are openly hostile to the US (Iran and North Korea), and also some that are semi-privately working against the US (like China). These countries will take any advantage that they can- they will steal IP and use the US's development resources to catch up to the current state of the art at a reduced cost. So you don't have to put this in terms of good vs. bad, just think of it in terms of things that benefit the US and things that don't benefit the US. Whether you think people are evil is irrelevant, it is very logical for the US to put export controls on things that it doesn't want to give away for free. The US wants to preserve its advantage and make it as costly and difficult for these other countries to catch up.
Absolutely. Chinese companies shouldn't have chips because their government has "committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage". And the US government hasn't?
To say the two are remotely comparable is either insincere or naive. Like I'm not saying the US always acts utterly virtuously, but they aren't running concentration camps and chemically castrating entire ethic groups.
They also aren't imprisoning people for speech, which is important when we're discussing who we want controlling AI in the future.
Don't forget Central America and Iran; supporting military dictators in Southeast Asia (Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia); invading Haiti and raiding it of the entirety of its gold reserves, condemning its people to poverty -- one could go on and on.
DeepSeek model not providing answer on the Tiananmen Square and ChatGPT providing answer on ethnic cleansing of Palestine are two sides of the same coin.
I made no such comparison, but if you really want to start comparing government crimes and human rights abuses, I think you'll find we can make a stronger moral case arguing for chip bans for US companies than Chinese companies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BOBKTmaQ9M
if you're chinese you'll know some chinese were sterilized because they _didn't_ believe in a religion
muslims were pardoned of child policy because of their ethnics, it's a privilege of them
people can not imagine something they never saw, try dig your own history, you'll find why it's always about religonal genocide, religonal sterilization, and religonal concentration camps
> To say the two are remotely comparable is either insincere or naive. Like I'm not saying the US always acts utterly virtuously, but they aren't running concentration camps and chemically castrating entire ethic groups.
They absolutely did directly and indirectly several times in their history. A few of those times were recently:
> In September 2020, it was revealed that ICE had performed mass hysterectomies on immigrant women in several detention centers, reminiscent of the long-standing US policy of sterilization of black and brown women. 2
> The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3
> In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 200 prison camps, housing over 31,000 undocumented people deemed "aliens", 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren't considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion. 1, 2
> During the 2020 coravirus pandemic, it was found that a law that empowered police to arrest those for not social distancing, lead to 80% of those arrested being black and latino.
I find this line of reasoning a whole lot less convincing now than I would have 2 weeks ago, and it wasn't all that convincing two weeks ago.
When the controlling party of the US is discussing concentration camps for immigrants while also happily calling to revoke birthright citizenship and deport citizens of the US that criticize Trump or the Republican party (eh - who am I kidding - it's the maga/heritage party now)...
It feels like we have no legs left to stand on here, and the support was DAMN shaky to begin with, seeing as we were routinely knocking over governments that we see as inconvenient in our geopolitical sphere of control for the last 100+ years.
Essentially, I think your argument is about 3 elections stale.
True, providing complete military support, with special deliveries of bombs and ordinance to Israel, knowing full well that it will go towards obliterating a city and killing tens of thousands of civilians is more humane. It's not genocide if an ally is doing it!
Note how interesting it is that you can read about these on the internet in the US on US hosted servers by US companies. At least we own up to it and don't just throw you in a mental asylum like they do to anyone who dares to stand up to the CCP.
Oh, people are thinking it now for sure, but it takes a while to retool your relationships and build out a new trade network so you can safely tell a major trading partner to fuck themselves to threats of 100% tariffs.
If Europe and Latin America want to buddy up with the concentration camp gang, I really don't care. We do not need fascists and communists as our partners.
Funny you mention fascists. As for China being a concentration camp gang, that's not going to matter when their former big brother/ally is just relentlessly bullying them and trying to extract all sorts of concessions under duress, and the alternative has demonstrated to be a reliable ally and partner.
Once again, I don't really care if Europe decides that is who they want to be friends with. If your country thinks that trade is more important than the country currently directly committing a modern holocaust, I don't want us to be allied with you at all.
Yeah. I personally think we should just sink the middle east into the ocean because not a single problem there will ever be resolved in a meaningful way.
Ironically, if Trump keeps running this playbook, it's going to end with a USA/Russia/Israel bloc and a Europe/LatAm/Africa/China bloc. Which one of those sounds like the evil empire to you?
Article 1 Section 8 does not enumerate Congress with the power to provide healthcare, so Medicaid should onoy be a state level program.
I know removing it harms those at the low end of the income spectrum, and that is a bummer, but I really would prefer Congress ammend the Constitution instead of just passing laws of which they have no authority to pass.
Well according to the unitary executive theory the US president has complete authority over all government actions and congress is only able to give legitimacy to the president's actions. Under this regime the president would be allowed to stop the execution of any law passed by congress.
I think this is insane and a complete destruction of the balance of power written in the constitution that congress can't enact enforceable laws but only "suggestions" for the president
> UET is a constitutional law theory that gives the President sole authority over the executive branch.
I think UET applies only to the Executive branch, which to me makes sense as he is the head of the Executive branch.
It would seem a violation of checks and balances for Congress to be able to install unfirable persons in the Executive. The checks and balances come from Congress's subpoena and investigatory powers, which can ultimately result in impeachment and removal of office of the President if he is derelict in his duties of executing the laws set forth by Congress.
Though I would agree that UET would violate the balance of the Constitution if it applied outside the Executive branch.
That is... bonkers. At the risk of feeding a troll, I find it difficult to take the argument that voluntary contributions to public health through charity is more "moral", which in the case of health care I would argue is equivalent to "effective", than a system implemented by an organization with enormous power (the government) which at least theoretically has a direct duty to its stake holders (voters), who in turn have the power to enact change in that system if it's not serving them? (by voting)
They just kind of have to give up their power and hope?
Buddy, one cursory glance at history will show that hoping gets you nowhere.
I assure you I'm no troll. I think difference in our perspectives is that I form the basis of my "moral" at the individual vs. the collective.
"Moral" for me means that individuals are empowered to own their private property and should only need to sacrifice it to society for public goods, where I take the economic definition of a private good: nonrivalous and nonexcludable.
Forcing all persons to pay taxes to cover healthcare for only a subset of the population is, to me, akin to forcing all your friends to give to the charity you like because you like that charity and want it to be able to do more, where that more is a level of spending above what you can or are willing to provide.
Economically, this creates deadweight loss: people's individual preferences are violated because they are forced to spend money for something of which they receive no benefit, or at least the direct/indirect utility occupies a lower utility than the opportunity cost of those specific taxes.
I'm not saying that such a policy won't result in undue death. But since I use the individual as the basis for morality, I consider it more moral to have some death than it is to steal from others to prevent it.
Do you really think the US is going to come out on top as the "lesser evil" if we start listing all the "bad things" each side has done related to human rights abuses and behaving aggressively on the world stage? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BOBKTmaQ9M
He's unlikely to be writing from a genuinely ideological point of view. He's playing a zero-sum game, in that every chip that goes to China is one that Anthropic and/or its cloud provider doesn't get its hands on.
So it makes sense to him to argue for export controls using whatever rhetorical flexes and flourishes he can come up with.
As long as the semiconductor fabs are running at capacity, yes, it's one big zero sum game. If you win one chip, I lose one chip, and vice versa.
This situation is temporary, of course. China previously had a large incentive to get their own leading-edge nodes into production, and now they have a Manhattan Project-size incentive.
They aren't running at full capacity on AI chips though - TSMC's main customer is iPhones as far as I know. So you could take away production time for them, though it's still zero-summy.
But TSMC is building new leading edge fabs right now.
I'm not sure how that relates to original comment. Do you mean you want everything that is or could be better than American technology banned/destroyed so we stay the best...?
Like, any global hegemony will be increasingly corrupt given the power that gives, IMO.
It might already be more dangerous in the sense that it is unpredictable. China is autocratic and powerful but their goals are known and do not change at a whim.
You can't build diplomatic and trade ties in quicksand.
U.S. and Chinese hegemony are just different kinds of bad. We could put the pros and cons up and debate it endlessly, but in the end ranking them is pointless, humanity should just be trying to make a better alternative
Economically, perhaps. Brexit certainly didn't help Europe as a whole, and German, French and Italian politics have been off-kilter for years, but it's still, by and large, an ethical and civilized place to live in.
I will freely grant that Euro money goes to completely obsolete heavy industries and luxury items rather than technology innovation (and blame all politicians for missing out on technology), but there are outliers like ASML that almost make up for the whole thing...
I don't know. Living in a country where being able to shoot people is an absolute, immutable, inalienable right granted by God himself (more so than anything else in the Bill of Rights) but where access to food, shelter, healthcare and education are all expensive privileges subject to the whims of the free market, and where half of the population doesn't even believe viruses are real, and where you don't even need the popular vote to elect a President (it's just nice to have) because the electoral system is a series of 18th century compromises to keep slavers happy... doesn't seem like the best of all possible worlds to me.
> Living in a country where being able to shoot people is an absolute, immutable, inalienable right granted by God himself (more so than anything else in the Bill of Rights)...
2A provides access to weapons. It doesn't allow people to murder one another.
> but where access to food, shelter, healthcare and education are all expensive privileges subject to the whims of the free market,...
Article 1 Section 8 doesn't enumerate Congress the power to provide any of those things.
What's more, I beieve the Federal government shouldn't. Rights should only ever be negative unless being a counterparty to positive action taken by the government (e.g., it makes sense to provide public defenders since it is reactionary to the government trying to take away your rights).
Healthcare, education, etc. are better served by the private sector with charity as the supplement for the less fortunate.
> and where you don't even need the popular vote to elect a President (it's just nice to have) because the electoral system is a series of 18th century compromises to keep slavers happy...
The electorial system is designed to prevent tyranny of the majority and is biased towards inaction. This seems better than a pure democracy to me because most government action is bad: inefficient, introduces moral hazard, etc.
In a system of pure democracy, the bottom 51% can vote to tax the top 49%'s income away. Then the next iteration the new bottom 51% can vote the same. Eventually this could lead to purely even distributions. That seems wildly worse for society: all incentive to produce would be void.
Most people - even most Americans - aren't libertarian minarchists who believe everything the government does is harmful by default and that free market capitalism is an unalloyed moral good. History has shown that the kind of governance you want rarely works out well for anyone but oligarchs.
I don't believe everything the government does is harmful. Personally I'm quite fond of the FAA despite the many that complain about TSA.
But most of what the government does introduces dead weight to economic transactions or moral hazard. This is especially true when the government tries to provide social benefits beyond taking over a product or service that could perfectly well be provided by the private sector.
I would have little argument against the government regulating that private healthcare providers cannot discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions. It would increase costs uniformly across the industry. I do have arguments for providing healthcare on the basis of income, as I believe the program would be better served by private charity. Those who argue the contrary do so only because they want to force all citizens to contribute to the private charity (run publically) of healthcare-for-the-poor, because they want to solve someone else's problem but don't want to have to bear the burden themselves.
It does if you're quickly converging into the Handmaid's Tale universe. May the odds be ever in their favor - I'm quite happy we don't carry guns to make it through the day...
You do not have a right to other people's work. I should not be forced to give you food because you are too lazy to do it yourself. If you do not work, you do not eat, just like Jamestown.
You do not deserve to eat just by existing (unless you are disabled or medically cannot work). Saying this is true implies that you have a right to other people's labor, which you do not.
Land, water, air and light used to produce food are not owned by any particular human either. The monopolization of that land (at the point of a gun most often) is the beginning of the issue. The overuse of that land, often subsidized heavily by taxpayers, in order to generate exorbitant profit for the few is a rot in human society. Those owners are the actual ones who don't work and expect a reward for it
I did that, about a year ago. It was amazing, easily one of the best times of my life. But it's not a solution, rather a temporary bandaid to stop the bleeding.
Is freelancing really that different? I keep hearing opinion for both sides ranging from "freelancing is truly different" to "freelancing is corporate/office job in disguise".
It varies, same as so many things :) You can concentrate on finding work within a narrow range where you feel expert in, or spread the net wider and take on work that lets you learn new things as well. You might have a lot of domain experience (eg. financial, construction, real estate, etc.) that you can leverage into finding work, or intentionally find things outside your comfort zone.
We make our own prisons, so to speak, and freelancing can be as restrictive or as freeing as you make it (market conditions may dictate some of this, though).
I usually freelance within a single tech stack and closely related tech, but cast a wide net as far as the type of business goes (music, financial, AI, real estate, legal - all are industries I have some experience with now, and many more).
The problem is that I like writing code. I truly enjoy it. I just hate doing it for someone else, on someone else's terms, performing someone else's rituals (corporate/code/architecture).
I'm a web dev that takes REST data and puts it in the database, or the other way around. It's not rocket science, and I do consider myself a good developer.
Of course I learned long time ago that there is zero correlation between my knowledge and getting a job, and in anyway the amount of companies I want to work at, can be counted on one hand (and most of them rejected me anyways, but I guess it would turn out to be the same feeling eventually).
I've been in SEA and well as Central America. It does open your eyes a lot on how broken the western system is, and makes you appreciate what you have, more.
The problem is that, rather quickly, it goes away. You come back to your western part of the world, and you write posts like mine, where there are clearly people who have it worse. So thanks for reminding me about this.
