We could also rein in private equity? Culture Study had a great episode about PE [0] recently, with some explanation of what started it and, if I remember right, some gestures towards how it might be brought to heel — or at least made less bombastically awful for most people.
I'm a full-stack developer with over 10 years of experience across early- and late-stage startups, a Fortune 500 company, and academia.
Most recently, I've been working on a reading environment for networked commentaries on ancient texts. I built the first iteration with Elixir and Phoenix, and I'm currently working on a minimal computing setup that others can use for their own commentaries/collections of texts.
I've worked extensively with JavaScript throughout my career, and I also have production-grade experience with Ruby on Rails and Python.
I'm looking for a role in the Boston area or remote (hybrid works too) that has a meaningful impact and room to grow.
Thanks for reading, and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have questions or if you think I might be a good fit for your team.
> He can't go work in tech, who is going to pay a historian six figures or even a living wage?
I appreciate the thinking that went into the parent post, but I want to challenge this statement, which is emblematic of the kind of reasoning that paints training in the humanities as frivolous and out of touch with the demands of the market, as if the market is the sole arbiter of reality.
I recently earned a PhD in a humanities field, and I'm currently gainfully employed as a research software engineer at a major university. I'm making less than I did when I was in tech just out of college, but more than many of my humanities colleagues in various positions between the PhD and the tenure track.
My point is not to brag about being able to get into tech with a humanities background, but to say that I don't think I'm anything special. When I was first applying for tech jobs out of college, I drew on my training in literature and human languages to guide my learning and application of CS fundamentals. I admit that I caught a lucky break with companies willing to take a chance on someone with a non-traditional background, and I'm grateful to have these skills to draw on if a traditional academic career doesn't work out for me. But I think my story is repeatable.
But back to the original point: rather than denigrating the value of a history PhD, it's important to question the market forces that have created this kind of precariousness for people who possess not only important knowledge about the past but, more importantly, the training and skills to use that knowledge to interpret the present.
The assumption that jobs are available to people because of what they _know_ is based on faulty logic that comes from the MBA-ification of everything -- the obsession with "deliverables."
Really, what PhD training in any discipline brings is both a deep pool of knowledge and the training to synthesize and use those "facts" in novel ways.
> ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market
Relatedly, this statement only makes sense if one assumes that we have given up on teaching everyday people -- non-specialists -- the importance of the medium for a message's delivery, dissemination, and broader understanding. "ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market" because we have collectively failed to reinforce the value of human perspectives on an issue.
Allowing "The Market" to dictate reality has led to schisms in shared truth like climate change denialism. We need interpreters of history, literature, drama, etc. in order to get back to any hope of getting back to broad agreement about what the world is.
Will we ever get everyone to agree? Of course not, but market forces can't repair these divisions.
As the old Upton Sinclair quote goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
They're also a thing in Boston and a few other areas in the US. It's blatantly exploitative, to say nothing of the obvious corruption pointed out in other comments.
There was supposed to be a crackdown on the practice in NYC in 2020, but the brokers lobby was too powerful.[0]
One can only hope that such legislation eventually passes -- and has teeth.
Tbh, I’m put on more on alert by the spelling errors in the linked post than I am by the ostensible threat of a server timing my requests in order to serve malware.
It’s good practice to check anything that you’ll pipe to `sudo`, but this article’s level of paranoia is kind of self-defeating, no?
At some point, we all trust the things we run on our machines. We rely on communities — and our participation in them — to vet installations.
There is no perfect solution. Someone will always be misled.
[0]: https://culturestudypod.substack.com/p/how-private-equity-de...