"If it bleeds it leads". -famous newsroom adage. This is true for all news and media, always. Humans are drawn toward stories that arouse fear and negativity.
It largely depends on the market you're in and timing. In SF Bay, things are extremely skewed toward renting right now because so many people are sitting on houses benefiting from ZIRP and locked-in prop taxes. It's probably 50-70% cheaper to rent on per month, even considering building equity. We own and are looking to rent a bigger place because it's much, much cheaper. I'm surprised more people aren't talking about how incredibly skewed things have gotten. The problem is there's a lot of "high-end" rental stock in our area, but it tends to be outdated.
NYTimes has an excellent calculator for informing your own rent-vs-buy decision based on factors like rent, purchase price, marginal tax rate, interest rate, etc.
Smart watches for kids are great compared to alternatives. My kids have Apple Watches and aren't asking me for phones/tablets (and the related evils like IG, TT, etc). Love to see this from Google (and Apple).
Scams / Identity theft cost people 1 Trillion dollars a year (https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156212/google-android-a...). This is a huge problem for the elderly. I don't see telecoms preventing this adequately. So huge kudos to Google on this. Not sure what value Google would get from “Google will use your phone calls to train their AI”. They already have a huge corpus of YouTube speech data.
Sorry for the staff who’ve lost their jobs. I did a phone screen with one of their recruiters a couple years back. They told me they couldn’t afford my (slightly above market rate) salary, but went on and on about how the company enjoyed a very “comfortable” work life balance. WLB is great, but I’ve never had a recruiter spend so much time on that and so little on the “exciting” product/role. That was a red flag to me at the time.
Dataloader (https://github.com/graphql/dataloader) eliminates many n+1 issues. Basically, entity requests are queued up during evaluation of the query and then you can batch them up for fulfillment. It’s a great addition to other asynchronous contexts as well.
WRT random requests, there are libraries for query cost estimation you can use as a gate.
A lot of companies will have a career doc that lists expectations for each role. Take a look at the manager version and make sure it is actually something you want to do and then start doing some of those things. For example - lead a small group on a project, mentor someone who needs help, implement a change that will improve team health, reduce chaos on a project, align stakeholders, etc.
Tell your manager you’d like to explore that career path and frequently ask them what they need help with. If you don’t have a good relationship with your current manager, you may consider finding a new one who will help you grow. Look for a manager that is ambitious and looking to develop someone they can delegate to and you can ride their wave.
Everywhere I’ve worked in the last 20 years has needed strong managers, including startups and FAANGS. If you’re slightly patient and show some signal of readiness an opportunity will arise.