This is the most immature and narcissistic comment I've read in a long time. I think you absolutely don't get what a relationship is about. Having a best friend as partner who is always around. Having kids that give a whole new meaning to live. Just mating with the next best babe will give you no long term satisfaction. What you describe here sounds more like an addiction.
Fewer people are marrying, at later and later ages, and divorce rates are still very high. Every rich country, it seems, is below replacement rate when it comes to having kids.
Yea it is truly awful.. e.g. job search has become even worse than it was a few years ago. The only good platform (Stackoverflow) has closed its job search. Most jobs seem to be on Linkedin these days.
However for a while now Linkedin job search seemingly shows me random stuff.. I can search for C++ and find all kinds of Java, Javascript, PHP jobs. It is driving me mad.
Any recommendations for job search sites (maybe even with negative filters)? I know about Who is Hiring? of course but there are not too many jobs for my region usually.
Search engines use some metric to find relevance to your query. In ye olde days it was "how many words in description matched your query". Now it's typically "how much money did this company give us".
One of the things that triggered this post was I did a search on LinkedIn jobs for "python" and the task of sorting through the seemingly random results to find "python" jobs was too hard so I gave up.
"Java" + "Staff Engineer" produces so many completely unrelated roles that it just isn't funny. I was also extremely irritated to find that you can't specify your own role on your profile as you wish; they'll force "Senior Software Developer" to be "Senior Software Engineer" for example.
LinkedIn is mostly catering to the recruiters. If they make the job search too efficient then they'll stop being able to sell access to the candidates.
Drives me nuts too.
I mostly use LinkedIn as a place to curate my CV (resumé) and I reckon they'd be weak to a challenger who used that as their route into that market. Doubly so if they can figure out how to get the candidates to pay instead of the recruiters (there are more of us).
What a nonsense.. there are millions of people drinking alcohol sporadically and are doing fine. I don't think there are that many people sporadically consuming crack and are doing fine. Now I guess you can define harmful in many ways and I didn't read the study and probably won't.
The correct phrasing is, "Alcohol is the worst drug to be addicted to". Slightly different from OP, it just removes morality from the issue.
I definitely understand your apprehension to this idea, however, someone I know very intimately is an alcoholic. They've said this phrase to me before and it wasn't clear until they explained their position from their perspective:
There is no other drug that is as socially accepted and harmfully addictive as alcohol. Keep in mind that you can die from alcohol withdrawals and even without dying you might wish you had. The same drug that can do that is stocked on shelves, easily accessible, advertised on TV, and passed out for free at times. Additionally, addiction to alcohol is cyclical. Many people drink out of anxiety, that anxiety is cured while drunk until the person begins to sober up. Then the alcohol fuels more anxiety which continues the cycle.
This phrase isn't meant to discount the experience of other addicts but moreso to express the unique difficulty that alcoholics may experience in the world.
> And the National Drug Intelligence Center reports, “an estimated 6,222,000 U.S. residents aged 12 and older used crack at least once in their lifetime.” A lot of people have used crack, and a lot of those people do not fit the stereotypes about who uses or why.
There are all kinds of people in this world, and we all live very different lives.
What’s your point? A lot of people have tried crack and there are a lot of crack addicts. I calculated the numbers of Australia a few years ago. Something like 10% of people who try heroin become dependent. That number is like 0.1% or 0.01% for alcohol.
You are comparing people that used crack at least once in their lifetime with people who drink reasonable amounts of alcohol for decades. Then this comparison became basis for comparing effect of crack on people with the effect of alcohol in people. This is disingenuous.
I'm not sure that's the comparison that's being made. At least the phrasing suggests they think it's more ongoing than "at least once".
> If you're looking for people who use crack recreationally
That seems to suggest something more similar to consuming "reasonable amounts" for an extended period. I personally don't know how common that would be (since I don't tend to hang around kitchens in restaurants) but it does sound rather different from "people that used crack at least once in their lifetime".
Was about to say, I can see how one can try making a claim that alcohol is more harmful than cannabis l or even cocaine.
But crack and especially heroin (fentanyl would go here as well)? That instantly made me lose any belief in credibility of that reply, sadly. Anyone who has seen what those drugs end up doing to literally everyone who starts using them, it's not even close. And that's despite the fact that heavy alcoholism absolutely can churn out some extremely awful scenarios where people turn into monsters.
It's like hearing someone tell you with full-on seriousness that bicycles going at their typical speeds (15-20mph) colliding with pedestrians will cause more physical damage to pedestrians than a pickup truck going at its typical speed (45mph+).
That's more to do with the legal and cultural status of cocaine than its chemical properties. Illicit drug users tend to have difficulties to begin with, and the legal and financial consequences of using illegal drugs tend to worsen them. Also, crack tends to be cheaper than freebase, so a specific comparison is also being confounded by socioeconomic disparity.
> What a nonsense.. there are millions of people drinking alcohol sporadically and are doing fine. I don't think there are that many people sporadically consuming crack and are doing fine.
I don't know any numbers, but I do know there are people who consume crack recreationally and are doing fine. It's hard to compare to alcohol though, since alcohol is much more readily available and easier to get for a large amount of the population.
Alcohol is doing damage at scale vs crack which is doing damage to a much smaller set of individuals. See drunk driving deaths vs crack driving deaths.
It does if you look at it overall vs per capita. If crack was consumed at the scale of alcohol, yeah that’d be a big problem, but I think that’s obvious.
Right now I'm an employee of a tech corporation, mostly delivering internal cloud courses and k8s training. It's more relaxed than working as freelancer, but I also spent some good years on my own :)
Not defending the prices but it seems to be the same as with paintings. It's just some water color on a piece of paper isn't it? The materials certainly won't make the price of famous artworks.
Similar for me. I also work in a non FAANG but big, well-known company. This year's average salary increase was set to 2.7%, despite having a "record year" and despite last year only getting 1.2% "because of Corona".
I decided to leave and I am already in contact with some headhunters that were already nagging me on Linkedin etc. Good thing it's so easy to find a new job these days. Companies should try harder to hold their trained employees.
In the long run (maybe after my next job) I might turn to freelancing.
Always when these arguments come up I wonder: is there actually a tangible way to measure how much of this was because of Cook (or whatever other CEO)? Maybe he is just riding a wave of success?! Maybe someone else would have the exact same results?
To me it always seems that the success of a company is projected onto its upper management in an unhealthy way. Maybe I am just clueless however.
There is no accurate way to measure how much was because of Cook. Clearly he made some decisions as CEO that put the company on a very profitable path.
But the same could be said of any job. Pay a programmer $400k. Was the work completed really worth that much?
Thanks. That's valuable input for sure. I don't have the option to freelance for my current employer but that's OK. I know a few people that might know potential customers They have worked as freelancers themselves.
I will now go on reading your blog post and potentially others you have written. Thanks!
A business value niche, not a technical niche. Your clients will most often have no idea what React or PHP or Postgres mean. They will understand cost, risk, opportunity. Domain expertise has a lot more value to a freelancer than technical expertise.
I usually start with clients by asking them to list their top five or ten pain points or unfulfilled needs. Those are usually business problems: Our invoices get sent out late, we’re not calculating shipping charges accurately. Sometimes they are technical problems: server crashes every other day, we don’t have good backups, we failed a security audit. I’ve never heard low-level programming problems as top pain points. The potential client wants to hear that you can address their actual problems. How many years of React experience you have, or how cool you think Rust is, are not relevant.
Hi, thanks for the info. Indeed I know of both these sites but I didn't know the rates possible there. My first rough calculation gave me an estimate of 80€/hour as a lower bound. My target would be 100€ but it wouldn't be a problem to start out with 80€.
How much of the offers you are receiving are low-ball crap offers you would say? Also for how long are these contracts going on average? Thanks for your input.
Good to know. My stack is mostly in the space of Go, Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, backends, microservices, networking etc. I think it is kinda one of the hotter topics these days.. so that could help.
