Well that's sort of the fun things about psychiatric "disorders", in many of them you can genuinely ask is this difference with the brain actually harmful unto itself or is it harmful because of the way society is set up?

I have struggled with this myself with ADHD where I think my brain is great and it is society that is wrong as many of the ways I do things/see things/operate are subtly shunned by society and the way it works. Everything from the typical 9-5 (my brain works best 11-7), to most white collar careers revolving around stationary work at a desk (I love difficult mental work, but think better when I'm moving around), etc.

I don't think my brain is wrong or performing poorly, I excelled at school but did not learn much from lecture style formats (figured out how to study on my own). But I have gone back and forth with medication because it is very, very difficult to construct my life in a way that plays to my strengths when they are so different than the norm. Medication helps my brain fit into society better, but I don't think it improves my brain function.

I date men and don't think going against TOS or laws is okay even in the name of 'safety'. This app doesn't bother me and frankly I think more apps like this should be allowed, but it is hypocritical to think this should be allowed to exist and many others not.

Hiring managers and HR area increasingly only open to unicorn candidates that have the exact amount of experience in the exact tech stack. While a few of those people exist, it's definitely more likely they end up interviewing people that are open to lying. So now your pipeline is filled with 90% liars, some just small white lies and others who have made a resume that has exclusively tailored lies just for your org.

The jobs aren't that hard and many people that fudged their experience are capable, so the liars that are hired perform adequately and hiring team sees no reason to adjust their strategy.

Eventually this gets out-of-hand as people learn to further exploit these practices.

While I agree with you, in high-school a buddy of mine was going on a weekend trip a couple states away and made a whole power point presentation to another friend's parents to convince them to allow their daughter to go.

He also gave a very memorable and completely inane speech to our entire school that involved him stomping on a loaf of bread while running for student council (and won). The coolness isn't so much in the tools as the way they are used.

Maybe the reality is most jobs aren't that hard once you have some baseline skills? While I don't love this interview process, I'm certain there are plenty of great people filtered out of the standard interview process in big tech.

If everyone is using the same criteria, they are all competing for the same group of candidates. Using other processes, no matter how whack-a-doodle, will give you a completely different pool to select from.

the FAANG-esque process is extremely stupid, but it is entirely dependent on 1) getting a referral / passing a phone screen and then 2) passing the dumb interview process on the day, and perhaps some story about why you don't have a degree from a university the American elite thinks is elite enough.

that feels very different from Mark requiring your high school maths grades.

I was at a get-together last weekend with mostly non-tech friends and the subject was brought up briefly. Seemed to be a fair amount of excitement and use by everyone in the conversation, minus one guy who thought it was the "devil"...only slightly joking.

If I were to write a "hard" sci-fi story of how the devil might take over the world in the near future, AI would be my top choice, and it would definitely fit with The Usual Suspects' "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist".

Tie minimum wage to the cost of housing on a per city or per zip code basis. When the middle class and wealthy are negatively impacted by their restaurants, grocery stores, etc becoming expensive (or shutting down) due to labor costs then they will relent. "I hate more housing, but I love to eat affordably." Connect labor prices to the cost of assets in some meaningful way.

I personally think people should not work for a wage less than they need to buy the crappiest home in their town which would negate this need, but the lower-classes haven't developed enough self-esteem or entitlement for that.

> people should not work for a wage less than they need to buy the crappiest home in their town which would negate this need, but the lower-classes haven't developed enough self-esteem or entitlement for that.

and do what to prevent themselves from going homeless in the meantime?

I unfortunately agree with this take, but her (probably) being a crappy person and looking to monetize her experience is exactly why she worked there and there is likely a lot of truth there under her bias.

Years ago, an acquaintence was an exec at a tech company that imploded in a semi-public way. He decided he wanted to get a documentary made on the whole thing and sent me his pitch. A little too self-aggrandizing, which I pointed out among other things. Couple years go by and a doc did come out on it (not his), uncovers some shady things and lawsuits against the CEO…and a little bit of embezzlement on his part.

So I think you’re right on the money, there’s a reason she worked there. Sucky/shady company and she fit in well.

What? I went to an American public high school, there were/are plenty of kids who are very smart. 8% of my graduating class were in the uber-advanced honors math track. This is in a flyover state outside a small city.

I also used to work in science, the reason there's so few chances to make it as a top researcher is that there is little opportunity. Look at jobs for a lot of life science majors after a BS, you will find a ton that is washing glassware in a lab, a complete waste of anyone with half a brain.

There's reasons why there is little opportunity that's not worth exploring here, but suffice to say there are a ton of very smart kids in America that choose other paths. Outside tech and specialized physicians, nerd careers are not lucrative on average. With little opportunity, smart people end up doing banal work. Why do banal work and have a mediocre salary predicated on jumping through higher than average academic hoops? Doesn't add up for most people.

What’s uber advanced here? I was in the calculus BC class and double majored in math and physics in college.

My performance in the Putnam (I got a 2…) and in grad school are all the proof I need that I couldn’t compete.

BTW I was the best student in my flyover state public school.

I'd say the reason there is so little opportunity in science is that science as an instiution is terrible at capturing the value it creates. Thus it instead relies on charity of which there isn't enough.

I've been working on learning PySpark this week, going through exercises to learn syntax and what-not. Avoiding ChatGPT bc I didn't want to be spoon fed anything. I couldn't figure out how to sort something in descending order. I searched SO for 5 minutes, getting out-dated answers or overly complicated solutions not needed for my very simple one-liner. Click over to ChatGPT, give it the line of code I have and say 'make it sort in descending', and spits out exactly what I need.

I haven't used SO in weeks prior and I think ChatGPT has pretty much killed its use case for me. Even two years ago, I would spend 1-6 hours/week searching SO posts depending on what I was working on.

That seems to be a problem specific to PySpark, it’s amazing how poor search results are for it despite it being reasonably popular.