Yup I live in America, and the black eye and tear gas I got from the cops last summer during the protests told me all I needed to know about the state violence that occurs in the US. Not to mention the “cops” showing up in unmarked vans and snatching people off the street, or secret prisons, or the cellular surveillance planes, or the vigilante “patrols” that continue to this day and are encouraged by the police captains.
The police state is here, and if you own guns they’ll just storm your house with a swat team, shoot your dog, and charge you for assaulting an officer.
America is also a fucked up place where people walk around in fear of the police and the paramilitary forces (sorry, “patriots”) that occupy most of the US outside the major cities. You never know when one of them is going to pop into a synagogue or a grocery store with an AR-15.
This country is dystopian af too; the American dream died with 9/11. We’re just another empire that’s rotting from the core.
The one I’ve seen was a client who wanted to store credit card numbers in an Excel sheet (yes I know this is a bad idea, but it was 15 years ago and they were a scummy debt collection call center). Signed integers have a size limit, which a 16 digit credit card number significantly exceeds.
Now, you and I know this problem is solved by prepending ‘ to the number and it will be treated as a string, but your average Excel user has no understanding of types or why they might matter. Many engineers will also look past this when generating Excel reports.
Just wanted to say that the books were not banned; Dr Seuss’ family decided to pull the books because yeah, the dude made some racist books. “Canceling” him would mean banning his entire catalog, which I haven’t heard anyone suggest. But this wasn’t the publisher; this was the copyright holder deciding they no longer wanted this speech in the world.
> Just like IBM, if a strategy fails, nobody gets fired for having hired McK. There is value in that.
This is it right here. A shocking percentage of corporate boardrooms are McKinsey alumni — by hiring McKinsey to develop or even just validate your strategy, you buy credibility from the people who sign the checks because they know and trust senior people at McKinsey.
Consulting is a relationship business. The other purpose of consulting at the boardroom level is to enable companies to sidestep laws around collusion and insider trading — the SEC occasionally charges somebody, but it’s largely symbolic given how pervasive it is. It’s not unheard of for CEOs of companies that are direct competitors to have regular calls to discuss strategy, all while using consultants to create a paper trail that says the strategy was developed through rigorous analysis.
A big part of what consultants bring is repeat experience — when you’ve watched multiple clients make the same mistakes, you can credibly speak up.
And for the kind of transformational work that folks like McKinsey would come in to assess, there’s a huge organizational component that’s actually more complex than the technical components. Building a new technology tool is great, but designing the process the tool implements and rolling it out to non-technical users is the job our buyers hire us to do. We would hire offshore engineers if the engineering work were the majority of the work we do — but the coordination overhead is too high.
Anyone who takes WSB seriously is dumb and deserves to lose their money. The sub is explicitly about using the stock market like a casino to gamble. Loss porn is real and we’re going to see a lot of it soon. To continue the casino analogy, /u/DeepFuckingValue is the dude at the craps table with the hot hand. Everyone is onboard until the winning stops, so the house is doing everything it can to reset the game.
I think the other part to remember is that the author of the article is 22. I didn't need sleep either when I was his age. I don't mean he's naive, just that a 22-year-old can abuse their body without too many negative consequences. As someone in my late 30s, I definitely feel it when I only get 4 hours of sleep.
> She's a celebrity speaker with a large upper-middle-class fan base, so as long as their interest doesn't go somewhere else she’ll probably do okay.
She's also very not-ok (3 suicide attempts, including 1 last week) after what she's been through. Being trans is traumatizing enough in itself, and I can't imagine what it was like for her in a military prison. If I were her, I would want an extended period of time away from the limelight.
It's generally hard for trans people to find employment, period -- and I doubt she has meaningful job skills given her extended imprisonment. That said, trans people rally around our own so she shouldn't have trouble surviving; but whether or not that life is existentially fulfilling is another question...
Also, I don't think it's legal to jail someone over unpaid debt (though many states will certainly try). They can do all sorts of things like garnish your wages, but federal courts don't throw people in jail for being poor.
It sounds like you have a pretty good idea of who you are and what you want, so I doubt you would have a problem finding meaning in your life even if you hated your job. You're probably not destined for a mid-life crisis like this, and it's not universal by any means.
But there are a lot of folks like OP who were focused hard on getting a job at Google and making boatloads of money and never took the time to figure out what they wanted in life besides a high paying job. For people in that position, I would say keep the unfulfilling job, let it be unfulfilling until you know what drives you, and figure out what you want in life. Then you'll be in a position to decide whether to seek meaning at work or not. I personally chose to find it outside of work, which has made the career bumps a lot easier to handle because my identity isn't wrapped up in my job.
Likewise for Lyft and Uber; they just haven't fully collapsed yet -- but give them another 2 years. There will be a smoking pit in the short-range transit market because it costs at least twice what riders pay today just to keep the drivers making the same amount when the VC subsidies go away, and nobody is willing to pay that. You're already starting to see the subsidies dry up with food delivery services where there's an additional $15-20 in fees.
The next recession is going to be a bloodbath for a lot of low-income people when the demand for the gig economy dries up.
I wouldn't say it's a red flag to have Google on your resume, but I will say that I do make a point of understanding what exactly an applicant did during their time at Google. Like any company, there are good teams and bad teams -- but at Google, it's possible to contribute nothing and still not get fired due to the way they're structured internally.
I mean this in the nicest way possible (I envy your optimism!), but I'm curious how long you've been working as the last 12 years have been an exceptionally good period in tech. My career started in the middle of the dot-com era in the late 90s, so I've been through a few cycles where finding engineering work was hard and people who had crappy jobs were grateful for the income. Those experiences dulled my optimism about the meaningfulness work -- I spent a year in the early 2000s eating ramen and freelancing websites in PHP because I couldn't find a "real" job after the startup I worked for that was going to save the world went bust. Maybe I'm just a cynical old lady at this point, but I do feel emotionally well-prepared for whatever happens next.
I think you absolutely can find meaning at work, but it cannot replace the meaning you find outside of work. You can tolerate doing a meaningless job if you have other things in your life to sustain you, but you can't guarantee your work will always be meaningful. Finding meaning outside work is resiliency.
If you want to do this, and you can consistently find interesting work, then go for it! What I mean by "these jobs aren't hard" is that one person is easy to replace, and you are not guaranteed a job in the future just because you have one now. There are always high periods and low periods in a person's career, and you have to mentally / emotionally prepare for those.
Tech has a nasty age bias once you hit 40, and I've seen people fall apart when they get laid off and finding a new job is hard for reasons that aren't exactly fair. Finding meaning in your life outside your job is how you keep sane when economic circumstances aren't working in your favor.
When your company is a monopoly that has a printing press for money, the normal competitive pressures don't apply. There's no need to aggressively cut head count because employee salaries are such a small percentage of their expenses relative to other companies of similar size.
Google is like an ivy league school: the hard part is getting in.
I have; I was a software engineer for over a decade before I moved up through architecture and laterally into product. Those problems are tedious. Not difficult.
The police state is here, and if you own guns they’ll just storm your house with a swat team, shoot your dog, and charge you for assaulting an officer.