The first half of the title is correct, the second half is obviously wrong.
Take someone who is absolutely calm under pressure (an astronaut, say), but who has never so much as seen a line of code, and give them a live coding exercise. They’re going to fail completely.
They measure coding skills and ability to function under stress. If you’re looking for coding skills, it’s a useful albeit imperfect proxy. And you may well be interested in performance under stress too.
It means that you paying taxes on your pay is equivalent to your employer paying taxes on your pay. If you shift taxes to the employer, then they will reduce your pay accordingly.
Never ever once has an employer given me a pay raise when they got a tax cut or a pay cut when they got a tax hike.
Taxes do not feature into salary negotiation. Employers pay as little as they can get away with, while employees want to get as much money as they can.
If you need theoretical worlds with no correspondence to anything ever in actual history to justify your claim, then maybe there is not that much to it.
The point is valid based on the context here, but taxes certainly feature in compensation.
Notably if you’re considering moving from a no/low tax locale to a higher one.
Two spectacular examples are the MLB contracts of Shohei Ohtani and Vladimir Guerrero.
Ohtani is getting paid very little ($2M/year) for his 10 years with the Dodgers, the vast majority is deferred to when after he leaves the team (and, notably, probably) California (likely back to Japan).
Vlad’s large contract is padded with a very large (like $175M I think) “signing bonus” to be paid over 10 years. The key point is that money will be earned “where he lives “, which is Florida, not where he plays (Toronto).
Both of these are structured to avoid local (high) tax jurisdictions.
But not just superstar athletes need to consider this. Anyone moving for work to a higher tax locale needs to consider that during salary negotiations.
Social Security and Medicare (FICA) is not exactly a tax, if that is what you are talking about. There is FUTA (Federal Unemployment Tax) paid by employers, but this is quite low, certainly not a significant portion of tax revenue.
The IRS calls it a tax. In what sense is it not exactly a tax? It’s a mandatory payment to the government. It functions like a tax and it’s called a tax.
I’ve had fantastic service in countries where tipping is not the norm. I’ve had atrocious service in the US. UK service may be worse, but I doubt tipping is the reason for it.
Good service is common in industries where tipping doesn’t happen. What makes restaurants special that their workers can’t provide good service if all of their pay comes from their employer just like everyone else’s?
These businesses are all about scale. Each user makes them a paltry amount of money, but they have an enormous number of users.
A single support incident that reaches a paid worker on their side costs them more than the profit you’ve brought them for the year. It probably costs them more than the profit you’ll bring them for your entire life.
With less scale-y businesses, it’s worth it for them to put some effort into fixing problems, as an investment in your future business. Here, the only reason would be to avoid reputational damage. And who’s going to stop using Google or Microsoft because some guy had trouble getting support?
There’s a story (no doubt apocryphal) about Bill Gates telling people working on Windows that a customer calling their support line cost as much as the profit they made selling that copy of Windows. The point was to make it so Windows users didn’t need to call support by making Windows work better. The modern equivalent of this would be to make sure that users can’t reach expensive support in the first place.
If business are all about scale then you are not fixing one user problem but you are fixing the same problem experienced by thousands or millions of user.
That’s the thing, sometimes a user’s problem requires a fix that’s specific for them. Their account gets into a bad state and needs to be unstuck. There’s no fixing that for millions of users, only fixing it for each user, millions of times.
I feel like once they've gotten everyone on the planet using their services, and then fucked them all over, maybe then there'll be a market un-fucking them over.
I have smartphone photos on my walls. They look damned good.
Is this person going around asking all of their friends what kind of camera they used to take the photos they have on display? Or are they just sure they can tell from looking?
You absolutely can tell from looking, and you don't even need to be trying. Whenever I show people photos from trips or of my kids or whatnot, they immediately notice the quality ask "You took this on your phone!?" (since I'm showing the photo from my phone library and that would be the default assumption). Sure, people are used to phone photos and they're fine, but even laymen who aren't thinking about judging photo quality immediately notice and appreciate the quality of a real camera photo.
There are technologies that become de facto requirements for work in a field. For software, compilers and version control both qualify.
But... what else? These things are rare. It’s not like there’s a new thing that comes along every few years and we all have to jump on or be left behind, and LLMs are the latest. There’s definitely a new thing that comes along every few years and people say we have to jump on or be left behind, but it almost never bears out. Many of those ended up being useful, but not essential.
I see no indication that LLMs or associated tooling are going to be like compilers and version control where you pretty much can’t find anyone making a living in the field without them. I can see them being like IDEs or debuggers or linters where they can be handy but plenty of people do fine without them.
I think it’s even simpler: government is seen as bad. The military and some law enforcement are excepted, but otherwise, dismantling government agencies is a goal in and of itself.
I listened to way too much Rush Limbaugh in the 90s and none of this stuff is a surprise. Distressing, but exactly what this particular segment of Republicans have been working towards.
I could buy that argument if it weren't for the disparity in which organizations are being targeted and the degree to which they're being attacked. Getting rid of all government is just the story they use to appease their base.
There's definitely a Venn Diagram intersection of "small government means 'no Science' because it is a 'waste' of money" and "Science is bad because it keeps talking about Climate Change", but it's not clearly all one set or the other of that chart (it's a full union applying pressure here).
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