MisterBastahrd

Go look at the resumes of everyone in a leadership position at that company. Find me the person who has ever run a recruiting desk. You can't do it. Every engineer has an inner know-it-all recruiter who just instinctively knows not only how to recruit, but how to run a successful recruiting business.

Which is why almost none of them have ever been successful at building a recruiting company. Because recruiting is a people problem, not a technical problem, and people problems are vastly harder to scale.

If you don't believe me, go talk to third party technical recruiting firms and ask them what the backgrounds of their top contributors are. Unless they're being spoonfed with a sweetheart deal from a former employer, virtually all of these people can barely operate their own PCs, much less know anything about engineering. I used to be a recruiter. The three most successful third party technical recruiters I know (with incomes in the 300k+ range in Texas, not SV) are a high school dropout, a college dropout, and a theater major. These people know how to communicate with other people, are as nice as can be over the phone, and they will fight you over a stray nickle.

Being great at recruiting is about being great at building relationships. Building relationships is built upon trust. Clients need to trust that the recruiter can find candidates and convince them to sign on when the time comes. Candidates need to trust that the recruiter is motivated to find them a position. As long as the effort is there, the better the recruiter balances that trust factor, the more money they make.

Triplebyte sucked at the people game. They sprang public opt-out on people and couldn't figure out why that would be such a big deal to potential job seekers. They assumed that their process was so great that experienced devs who had jobs and lives and lifestyles and families would just jump at the chance for impersonal coding evaluations. They started a company with no idea how to recruit and hired people to build a recruiting product who had no background in recruiting. And no, founding a company does not give one recruiting expertise, even if they're doing the hiring. It is both a talent and a skill.

Oh, and here's a fun one: they failed to recognize that along with being a people game, recruiting is a numbers game. Being highly selective in your pool of candidates is a genius way to run out of money as a recruiting firm, especially when you've already chosen to place numerous self-own barriers in front of you.

The average third party technical recruiter with a year of experience actively maintains and prunes their own database of 3-400 candidates. More than that is too many people to manage. You can either pay a bunch of engineers to attempt to automate a small part of their process, or you can simply hire people to do the work and pay them according to what they produce.

Well, their biggest success is pretty much done to death now. NGE has had a series, multiple OVAs, multiple movies, multiple revamp movies... there's really not much else to get out of it unless you want to tell the story of how they got into that mess to begin with, which might be the most interesting part of all of this to its core fanbase given their age. Maybe tell the story of the project up until Shinji's mom dies or something.

Is there a key to clear a word automatically? Seems the space bar would work well.

Musk has made off with generational wealth just off of government subsidies alone. Government subsidies for businesses are just welfare for the rich.

You don't get to be Musk level without reaching your hands deep into the pockets of other people and taking it for yourself. All you have to do is look at the propaganda surrounding "PPP loans" versus the money given out to stretch people's paychecks during the pandemic. Most businesses weren't affected in any substantial way, but governments still gave away trillions, and the companies got to keep the money. Meanwhile, we're supposed to hate ole Jimbob because he's poor, his hours were cut, and he received a $1200 check.

I don't even for a second believe that most authors care to the degree that they feign for the purpose of keeping up their popularity. Book signings are about keeping up brand loyalty and ego stroking.

I gotta say... I would have quit writing the moment I became successful enough to be required to sit at book signings. I can't imagine sitting there all day long, bored out of my skull, faking like I care about these people. I got out of recruiting because of how utterly disingenuous the career is and how boring the work was, and the non-creative parts of being an author have zero appeal to me.

And it's really because they don't know any poor people.

Because if they did, they'd know that filing taxes for low income people with kids is a HUGE bonanza, and they'd work like hell to implement a system where all tax credits were applied to individual paychecks, not lump sums during tax season. It's the one time of the year when their pockets are flush with cash.

To go back to the start, it's about what the author of the article said. And the author of the article made the claim that you aren't making a living wage as an author unless you (a) are working for a known publishing house, and (b) are making over $250K a year. It's so absolutely absurd on face value that it's not even worth discussing further at length. You don't even have to do any real research to know that this is incorrect.

It's not 500 out of 300M rare. I have a co-worker who could support himself entirely on sales from a children's book he self-published.

Yeah, it also fails to acknowledge that self-publishing is a thing and you can make a nice career writing straight-to-epub books and print on demand books. Amazon allows people to bypass traditional publishers.

Title does not follow through with article.

The author defines "making a living" as making 4x the median salary, and further ONLY considers authors of books. There are MANY ways to make an actual living wage off of writing that have nothing to do with book authorship. Blogs, newsletters, journalism, opinion columns, and screenwriting, for example.

I'm one of those annoying ADHD people who will hear everything you're saying, ask "What?," and then a second later I've finished processing the audio in my head and am ready to continue the conversation. Similarly, I can't readily differentiate voices from melody in songs. Far too many songs don't have strong enough vocal tracks and the songs might as well just be mud to me. I suppose it's why I gravitated towards rap and R&B growing up.

While not exactly the same, I came across an app called Tunity the other day. It allows you to use your phone camera to catch the live audio feed of the television that you are attempting to watch, whether the audio is muted or if it's in a loud, crowded location, like a sports bar or airport. I haven't used it, but it's an interesting concept.

It does when everyone is waiting on "electric pumps" because they've switched to vehicles which are far more inefficient on average at refueling. Try thinking about the situation instead of just coming up with a dumb rebuttal that doesn't make even a tangential amount of sense.

Hurricaneland. Unless you are SUUUUUUUPER on point with booking a room well in advance at the far edges of the state, you are definitely driving out of it and likely a good bit away. I've had friends who needed to drive to Tennessee from New Orleans, and when the last major storm that hit the NOLA area, my parents asked me to check hotels in Dallas but they were all booked.

Did you ever consider that the reason I would prefer a gas engine over electric is because I can quickly refuel a gas tank to be full and be on my way? You aren't doing that when there are lines down the road at each station along the route and you're in an electric car. You're just stranded, because if these are EVs, they will either take forever to charge or you're going to make a dozen supercharger stops that will literally eat up HOURS of your time.

Why do you think we need capitalist economies? It's almost as if you've just decided that the other thing must necessarily exist.

I won't buy a car that I can't adequately evacuate in. This means 700 miles with a 10 minute stop for gas / restroom.

I don't care about personal emergencies. I care about local emergencies. It only sounds unreasonable until you've had to do it multiple times.

Every person should be able to have a right to say "This is me. This is where I live. I belong here." It's all fun and games until you've lived in one place for 15 years and your landlord decides to sell the place out from under your feet because a developer wants to build a high rise.

Yes, but the particulars of the case are that the guy decided to seek out a BLM crowd, drove his car up to a side street where the crowd was, shot into the crowd, and managed to kill a guy with a gun. Even WITH clear motive, his behavior to even get into that situation, eyewitness testimony, and a jury conviction, he was pardoned anyway.

Being unable to see the technical and organizational problems with a baked-in API driven feature that many people don't want is its own form of incompetence.

And here, gentle readers, we have a poster with a long history of astroturfing for Tesla.

That's of little consolation to the people who bought Tesla stock when it was far more overvalued than the still grossly overvalued price that it has today. The quality of their products is bad. The quality of their leadership is even worse. People have taken notice and are voting with their wallets.

Even if I could buy a Tesla for $19K and it did 800 miles per charge, I wouldn't, because the control system alone is beyond terrible.

My last car didn't have cruise control. When I bought it, I didn't even realize it at the time because... what 2013 model doesn't have cruise control? Anyway, if it weren't for a wreck that totaled it (with 3 payments left), I'd certainly be driving it today. It had 55K miles on it, AC worked, and I replaced the radio with an Android Auto device.

I replaced it with a 2019 with about the same amount of miles on it and every single feature I wanted in 2021 and have put 5K miles on it since. The best part is that after an argument with my insurance company over used car prices, the difference between what they gave me for my wreck and what I bought the first car for was $500.

Buying a brand new car to me is not much different than buying a designer bag or a pair of Jordans... you aren't paying for the utility, you're paying to be seen with the item. And then 2 months after the newness has worn off and everyone you know has seen you with the item, you're still stuck with the payments.

For me, who needed structure, I most enjoyed the Saxon method of learning. It was heavy on problem sets and homework, but you retained what you learned because a part of each problem set was always designed to revisit past lessons. By the time it was test time, you could be fairly confident that you understood all of the material without additional studying.

Second favorite was in 6th grade where we were handed a bunch of color coded workbooks and told to go at it. I finished the entire grade's assignments by the end of the first 9 weeks, and I hated math. I was just competitive. In hindsight, it's probably why I was placed in the advanced clas when we were promoted to the next grade level. Because I finished all of that content before the end of 6th grade, too. I understood pre-algebra concepts because I had started writing programs on my dad's Ti 99/4a.

Reminds me of a guy I know who was not particularly the brightest. He wanted to be a lawyer and received a degree in Mass Communications, because he was told it was an easy major, then followed that up with a very low LSAT score. He's spent the better part of the last 3 decades verifying the contents of container vessels in a railyard.

Knowing the space that you're working in when you're a contract recruiter is far less important than being a good salesperson.

I don't care how many technically aligned recruiters you've read articles from over the years, the simple fact of the matter is that the people who are at the top of the leaderboards at these companies couldn't give two shits about the technology. Their job is to land asses in seats, and they are ultimately in a vastly better position if they focus and refine their talents on selling and networking as opposed to learning about the problem domain. I still keep in touch with people from my recruiting days, and the high school dropout with 3 years experience when I joined a company is still a senior manager over the Cornell grad. They both make excellent money, but the dropout is easily the better salesperson.

When you've interviewed enough people, you can sniff out the bullshit artists, and virtually all decent to great candidates have a certain cadence to how they describe their roles and responsibilities regardless of the tech stack. I don't need to know the ins and outs of SAP AR and Treasury, I just need to know that the candidate has a consistent work history, is up to date, and can confidently describe their work. Client managers are more likely to go back to recruiters who can consistently put candidates in front of them, which is yet another reason why the numbers / networking game is more important.

My old high school now has two policies in place:

1. Honors and AP courses get +7 added to grades. 2. Honors classes are on a 4 point scale, AP classes are on a 5 point scale.

The school still considers 95-100 to be an A and 94-88 to be a B, so it's totally possible for an AP student to get the bare minimum B score and receive an A and a 5 for their GPA average.

Reminds me of a business consultant who recently got roasted on TikTok recently because he described his $500k job as deciding whether or not companies should recall products or just weather the class action and liability suits.