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Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
It's almost a law "all technical discussions devolve into interview mind games", this industry has a serious interview/hiring problem.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yeah, but you get points and badges for feeding it free knowledge, they get the cash, go figure. It's the perfect pre-NFT grift.
Comment · 2 years ago
It's funny, since Stack Overflow has done EXACTLY this since day one (i.e. generate cash, with user knowledge provided for free).

The only difference is SO uses community, gamification & reputation facades, to convince users to participate for free.

With OpenAI its simply a blackbox, no credit is given.

So I guess the lesson is people are willing to participate and share things for free, as long as they're given credit, community standing or something along those lines.

Comment · 2 years ago
Wow, it had been years since I read a Barry Schwartz post, a SEO authority since back in the day, I didn't realize his forum had turned so nasty.

Funny you mention 'No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”'. Schwartz and many other SERP/SEO experts talked about writing for medium, circa ~2013, to raise their Google rankings, back when everyone jumped on the medium bandwagon.

Google is bleeding ends users and content creators alike. If search results are getting worse for end users, many AI price points (free or $20/month) or ad-free paid search (Kagi) are eating away at Google's market share. At the other end, content producers which had a symbiotic revenue sharing relationship are also jumping ship.

As you point out, Google will likely never recover, they dropped the ball at both ends: worse end user experience and worse ad revenue sharing, both of which were their lifeblood. I think Google in a few years will be like Yahoo search or AOL email before it, they will still have users, but most likely not by free will, but rather users landed through OEM/marketing deals.

Comment · 2 years ago
They're pretty good at it, just from yesterday.

A $5 billion AWS investment in Mexico:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-region-in-mexico-is...

Regional and national media are swallowing it up, yeah the country needs the investment, but at what price ? Gov still mum on what it took to 'land' the deal (tax/land break).

I remembered the Amazon HQ2 hoopla from years back, that U.S state/local govs were turning over backwards to land it, offering a lot of incentives. And I just looked the yesterday, that deal (HQ2) is still on hold and it was for just as much ($5 billion).

Comment · 2 years ago
OP's line of thought is pretty clear with the other line:

"bidding for candidates against their other options"

Then he goes on about projects having negative value and also paying employees until value is delivered.

His model is to exploit every possible loophole to make it all work and shift the most risk from management to employee.

Yes, assuming it's all legal (which it often isn't, pushing the limits like this)

Where should the line be drawn ? Pay based on what car I drive because it's less|more expensive ? What school my kids go to ?

I'm almost waiting for salary adjustments base on diet! Hell why not, veggies 'are less|more expensive'?

Comment · 2 years ago
Conflating the three is easy, because instead of paying for delivered value, the company is doing arbitrage on location ( like it could do with gender, race or anything else)

All companies will take advantage of maximizing their profit or reducing cost, but it's a slippery slope once a subjective metric to determine value is used.

I for one live in a "low" CoL, but my AWS bill is just the same as a person in NY, SF or Geneva, should I also expect a discount because "my income is lower"? Or is it only fair to be billed equally, because the value all of us get is the.same ?

Turn the tables, if a dev in India, Romania or Mexico is delivering the same value as one in the US or UK should (s)he be paid any less ? Why ?

Comment · 2 years ago
What an ending...

I have never loved learning the details of an obscure communication protocol or the convoluted methods of a library written by someone who wants to show how good they are. It seems like "junk knowledge" to me. LLMs save me from all this more and more every day.

This is depressing or tongue-in-cheek considering who he is -- Redis creator -- and has an older post titled 'In defense of linked lists', so talking about linked lists in Rust is not "junk knowledge" or something an LLM can analyze circles around any human.

It's the best coding nihilism as a profession post I have read though.

Comment · 2 years ago
The information super-trash-way, the data is feeding on itself.

We're heading back to the information dark ages. I don't know if I'm glad or sad, the pendulum is swinging the other way, where printed books or face-to-face learning, will come back in vogue to get vetted information.

Comment · 2 years ago
Only now its more scalable to do content farm garbage with AI, it's cheaper SEO on steroids.

I'm optimistic it will one day be possible to sift through AI generated garbage, but it will take time just like it did with email/spam. And the most likely outcome will be through paid services, either paid content or paid filtering, just like email works best to this day.

I remember the early email days, early 2000's, pretty much anyone could setup their own email server (qmail/sendmail), there wasn't much spam to worry about and it required a lot of effort to make spam cost effective. Fast-forward today, even though you can still setup one, it requires a crazy amount of effort to ensure delivery in-and-out due to spam abuse, that, or pretty much paying a transactional fee, which is the easiest, so large providers don't flag email as spam.

Comment · 2 years ago
So an account named 'amzn-throw' is trying to lecture you after leaving, this is very Amazonian of them, it's like a PIP beyond the grave.
Comment · 2 years ago
If he's single, $70k for CDMX (Mty or Gdl, the other two metro cities) it can work, if he wants to raise a middle-class family not so much.

Rents are $1.5-2K/month in nice neighborhoods (buy range $250K up); taxes are high with a 16% VAT across the board, income taxes are high as well for this bracket; and don't get me started with schools, cars, insurance and the like.

Yeah probably half the population would 'kill' for a $70k job, but they want English fluent, highly-educated, middle-class people, cherry on top, with top notch tech skills. Those candidates either want, U.S. SDE level packages or can make more with run of the mill no-name companies remotely.

I still don't know anyone who has worked for U.S. level pay as a FTE or contractor, take a position with a subsidiary office in Mexico, the salary discrepancy is too great.

Comment · 2 years ago
Same hiring dynamic in Mexico.

They started hiring heavily for various roles in the country's 3 major metro cities. Senior engineering roles going for $60K/yr USD.

Amazon, the retail side, has been operating in the country for years, but the hiring spree that started this summer 2023' has been for positions in Music, AWS, Devices and Real Estate.

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