This maps perfectly with what I'm seeing in the consulting space. Clients are asking exclusively for very senior developers. The expectation is that a senior developer will use AI and replace the junior devs.
The game has become how quickly can we train someone up so that the client will accept them as a "senior"
One of the last bastions of good games journalism, and the only good mobile gaming site. Another casualty of the garbage listicles and AI generated garbage that fills up search results. I would do anything to have the old, fun, internet back. This monstrosity we have now just isn't doing it for me.
Can you explain to me what you mean by this? What about the internet today isn’t fun? There are plenty of websites that don’t have garbage listicles and AI slop, they just aren’t as popular.
But they don’t get attention-public-funding enough to be profitable because of the garbage. The garbage is burying them in search results but also literally.
i don't know if they were ever profitable. But certainly i think there's been a paradigm shift to commercializing everything (mostly through advertising) the last decade or two and if you fall behind, whatever growth you were aiming for goes away and revenues shrink.
And also almost all advertising revenues have probably become centralized with google search, social media by facebook, and youtube, etc. That combined with rising costs, and higher opportunity cost to instead do something else means these sites are biting the dust.
You’re just complaining that the average person doesn’t like what you like, which seems silly. I’m sure the average person thinks what you like is garbage. Who gets to be the judge?
Yeah but once again-who gets to be the judge? I’ve used ddg and other search tools. I think the results are poor. That’s my opinion. I’d rather use Google. You think the results are low quality-I don’t.
Who is right? You for not wanting to scroll past 27 sponsored links? Or me for not wanting to have to go through 27 useless links to find what I’m looking for?
1. social media coalescing to maybe 5-7 different sites in the country, which all have a similar "minimalist" feel, based on non-controversial UX designs and trend chasing (TikTok being the current trend).
2. search engines (so, Google and Bing) steering people towards SEO optimized slop over the proper quality blogs/websites. You're incenivized to clickbait to get attention. you need to dig real deep to find the gold these days, and the pile is only getting deeper.
3. Monetization forcing more and more ads for companies to survive, if at all. Some sites went the paywall route instead, but news these days is very hard to monetize for the mainstream (again, social media will deliver it)
4. few/no personalization. The Myspace era shifting towards the Facebook era really killed this idea of having a real, unique brand and identity (due to #1).
5. Social media became both lonlier and more hostile, somehow. You don't really make "friends" on the internet the same way you may have been able to in the 2000's where you just find some MMO or chatroom and bond with others. But at the same time, everything is so loud. People aren't talking to each other on insagram/tiktok/twitter, they are at best talking about themselves as a brand (so, advertising themselves. Or maybe literally advertising on behalf of a company), or talking at other people about whatever little drama of the day/week is going on. When's the last time you had a proper conversation with a rando on Twitter?
The internet is vast though, so you can indeed still find the fun. But you are becoming an excavator day by day to do so. And if you're into any more niche hobbies, I wish you the best of luck in finding others these days (the coalescing of groups to reddit and FB is a whole other rant).
It is still fun, but some services are severely degraded. A lot of sites require accounts, Google search quality is extremely bad, chatting and communities are behind shitty corporate platforms and I include GitHub and Discord here. Open social networks are often full of crazies, so that more people remain in private groups...
Can you name some? I know they exist, but in my experience 99% of them are small personal blogs maintained as a hobby. In 2024, it is practically impossible to focus on solid journalism and turn a profit, and every site I've seen try has either gone under or been forced to sell out to bottom-feeders and adopt listicles, etc.
My juniors thrive in a WFH environment. This is a problem with the culture and the seniors not WFH. The promotion issue is real. But let's be honest, promotion in tech mostly happens by changing jobs. The in the office people are the ones who are really slowing down their career growth.
I feel like there is a large selfish component with seniors thriving in WFH; the hidden costs are, for one, less impromptu unaccounted for time helping juniors either with tech questions or mentoring. This maybe works for now, but makes me wonder how this will play out when the current generations of workers who trained pre-COVID retire out and the current juniors get into those roles.
Alternatively, what good measures are there to help the current junior roles? I see people saying it's a culture problem but it seems a very new problem with not many publicized solutions.
> what good measures are there to help the current junior roles?
i always make it very clear that anyone can reach me asynchronously whenever they want, and i will always strive to give a clear answer when i'm able to
i think some juniors have been burned by asking the wrong person the wrong thing at the wrong time and believe it was their fault for asking
> i always make it very clear that anyone can reach me asynchronously whenever they want, and i will always strive to give a clear answer when i'm able to
This is good, but in my experience being proactive in reaching out to juniors is critical in a remote environment, especially if your company or team doesn't have an obviously healthy culture
> In my experience, the number of seniors who complain sbout RTO and don't hoard knowledge is tiny.
"Hoarding knowledge" makes it sound like they're intentionally trying to keep knowledge to themselves. I don't think the problem with remote leveling is due to seniors intentionally holding onto knowledge. I do see some senior employees try to hold ownership of a specific area of their work for apparently selfish reasons, but they're a minority.
I've spent a lot of time talking with other seniors (and juniors!) about ways to make sure we're spending time working with mixes of skill levels, but it's a hard problem. Just advertising that you're available to help if anyone needs anything does basically nothing to encourage most juniors to ask. It takes a lot of juniors a long time to lose inhibitions for asking for help, and I think people can often make it to senior levels without learning how to be proactive about offering help.
It does seem easier for most people to ask for help in person. I think one of the causes of this is because even in this field, most people don't grow up doing so much communication and socialization purely using crude text and video calling which have remained mostly unchanged since the 80s or 90s. Most people handle in-person socialization much better, and can read and express cues more naturally there, especially in a work environment. Also, those communication methods have a degree of formality attached to them which feels like a barrier.
Personally, I think it might help a bit if telework software would take more cues from video games (proximity-based chat and virtual environments with rooms and doors). There are some programs for this, but the few I've tried haven't been polished enough to use. The few I've used though did seem to make impromptu collaboration easier, but of course there could have been many reasons for that (e.g. novelty).
I used to be a libertarian on drug use. Fentanyl changed my mind. It isn't a letting people have autonomy over their bodies problem anymore. The issue now is that the drugs are so deadly, getting involved in any illegal drug is like playing Russian roulette. I don't have any answers but a hard line on dealers involved with fentanyl seems like the minimum we as a society need to do.
There are people who function normally in life while using opioids. Both prescription pills, and street drugs. Obviously, long term impact from opioid use is bad, but we allow people to do all sorts of things to themselves that kill them over the long run. One of the biggest we market to kids from a young age - sugar.
The biggest acute risks from drug use are largely overdose related. Having ready access to narcan solves some of it. But issues with actual potency being incredibly unreliable are another huge risk factor that kills a lot of people, and regulated and tested drugs solves that.
Legalization makes huge headway on the acute overdose related risks. It doesn't solve all of the issues, but neither has criminalization and prosecution. I am skeptical of societal taboos doing it either, because I have seen people in my life fall into opioid addiction, and all of them were ashamed about it. I have spoken to people on the street about it, and they're ashamed to be living in tents with any money they come into going straight into more drugs. It's anecdotal, obviously, but it has been so universal that I find it incredibly unlikely that piling more shame on top of people who are already deeply ashamed of their current state in life is going to force any significant number to suddenly clean up their act.
Portugal's use of hard drugs increased at a lower rate compared to the rest of Europe post decriminalization. Obviously decriminilization is not the same as legalization, and there are other demographic factors in play, but I don't know that we have any evidence that suggests the usage of fentanyl, etc. is going to rise based on being decriminalized or legalized. This very article says that the destigmatization has no resulted in higher drug usage than in places where it is still stigmatized and laws are highly enforced.
Opioids aren't like pot or hallucinogenics or even cocaine - there's no glamour associated with them, at least not since the opulent opium dens have long since been shuttered. People can and do use them while functioning, but people mostly fall into addiction through not being able to get off of opioid based painkillers after having been prescribed them, or by their life falling apart to the point where they are medicated to an extreme extent. Will there been individuals who use if it is legalized that wouldn't otherwise? Of course. Will it be in significant quantities? I don't believe so, and don't believe there is any evidence to suggest that this would happen. The question is if the benefits can outweigh the downsides and result in overall harm reduction.
My current perspective is "I'm not interested in fighting anymore about what people should or shouldn't do. I just want to find somewhere nice, far away where I can live a clean decent peaceful life alongside anybody else who is capable of doing the same."
I think fentanyl proves the opposite. The issue is that they are illegal. If they were legal and properly manufactured like other pharmaceuticals fentanyl would not be a problem. If you could get your heroin while getting milk from the shop there would be zero issues.
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. If you like LitRPG this series is just so good.
Paul's "Works of the Law" in the Perspective of Second-Century Reception by Matthew J. Thomas. If you are a theology nerd this is just exceedingly interesting.
Most of early-mid Plato is very worth reading, and surprisingly accessible assuming you find a modern translation and don't cheap out by going for some inscrutable 150 year old public domain translation.
They generally leave you feeling like you understand fewer things after you've read them than before (in a good way).
The game has become how quickly can we train someone up so that the client will accept them as a "senior"