throwarayes

“Have the power”

They have power, but it’s not actually legal. Congress has mandated funds for this array, the administration wants to cripple it beyond repair before any legal action can catch up.

If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last.

Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income.

Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.

Yes those are stable businesses, but we’re probably at peak social media. They need something new to be interesting in long term investment.

Zuck IMO doesn’t have the halo Musk has where there’s results mixed in with the BS. And Meta doesn’t seem to have a good track record of developing new products.

Is a rage bait machine currently at / near its peak of usage still an interesting investment in 2026?

Facebook is for preying on the elderly. Instagram for the rest of us.

I think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments.

Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram.

Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy.

If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.

Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped

So there’s really not a lot of growth areas for them? Their biggest growth seems to have been acquisitions, not new features.

Maybe data labeling is like RTO - an intentional way to force attrition.

I am happy to pay OpenAI for a cheaper model a few generations behind. But they deprecate models aggressively. They push you to bigger and smarter models, when 95% of my work doesn’t need it.

I’d love it if model providers just let old models run and let us pay less, but the deprecation makes me want to look into local models.

Ok if I’m bored I’ll be talking about fun things to do with colleagues. If only for bragging rights, impressing friends, or hacker news upvotes. My time is limited so, I’d need to be careful about how I allocate that resource to projects.

That’s still an economy as it works to distribute limited resources (human time) at a bare minimum.

I’m in an interesting position because I’m fine, but my wife has struggled to find work. I personally have no problem finding work, she applies and applies and seems to get nowhere.

The main difference comes down to networking. Frustrating for me, because I see what’s she’s doing wrong, but can’t lecture her on a style that doesn’t come natural to her.

Basically I don’t ever apply for jobs, yet I find work. She applies through the normal path and never gets called for an interview.

What’s my magic trick? Nothing really slimy, or even pushy, but 100% focused on informal relationships instead of formal channels of work.

I just spend a lot of time connecting with colleagues, catching up with them, and just trying to be friends. I’m not trying to milk them for work. The lunch I have isn’t transactional. We literally barely talk about work.

But because we enjoy hanging out, we find ways to work together. We brainstorm about each others careers. We just both want to be helpful. Opportunities pop up naturally to collaborate and I’ve never wanted for work.

I don’t know how to teach that. It’s somewhat about my temperament. It’s a skill developed over decades.

Still I strongly recommend you practice it. Or at least just try to hang out and make friends with colleagues. The rest comes naturally.

Almost certainly the roles my wife is applying for are not actually open roles, they’re roles made with someone in mind. Or filled by someone better at the relational side than the technical skills.

It also depends on the laws governing your contract, not just where you live.

Yeah the warning is: you may, like me, find a litigious paranoid former employer who freaks out at everything :-/

I’d rather not carry the cost of learning it’s not enforceable.

So far it seems maybe?, but according to the article some courts and agencies are pushing back. Well the FTC was at least in 2023.

California bans anything that is effectively a non compete.