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Yes, because hiding information is definitely going to slow down the brain drain.

> That's a bit naive.

They're not being naive. This is a deliberate effort to downplay the events. Always keep in mind that a war is often fought with different types of weapons, including information.

Is it just me or…

This whole recent 'staff engineer' bs is just a made-up concept to get some conference slots, write a book or two and basically talk about talking about working? I mean We've had 'staff' level engineers since forever and now someone comes along and tries to create like this aura around it and formalize what it actually 'means' to be be a staff engineer. You get to read interviews from other 'staff' engineers telling you how to properly 'staff engineer'. I mean get over yourself, you're a senior individual contributor with more responsibility. But you know, if you're not a 'staff' engineer, what are you doing with your life, right? Are you working hard enough? Do you even care about your potential? Buy my book to unlock your true 'staff' potential.

He is smart and indeed an asshole. BUT not all of his arguments are always strong. I'd say most of his arguments are not. He's Seth Godin for cynics or Joe Rogan for finance bros. He's a pseudo-scientist who rode the 2007-2008 GFC hate for finance people (which was well deserved) to become a toth leader. So, in this case (bitcoin), I think Taleb is carefully positioning himself in the proper direction of the tide. He is a HN sweetheart though. Trash talking Taleb is one of the most satisfying ways I spend my karma around here..

> I prefer to hire people who are EXCITED about the challenges they will face in the job.

In this case your pipeline is optimized for hiring great actors.

Spot on. I always ALWAYS ask about time off during interviews. But I don't ask the manager because I found they always try to stretch the truth or reframe shit.

I just ask the individual contributors how much PTO they've taken in the past 12 months. It's more or less an open question, doesn't necessarily means I'm interested in taking too much PTO. You'd be surprised of how honest people are. I had interviewees even start venting about burnout. Someone from an e-commerce company (not Amazon) told me he's gonna take a month off as he took 0 vacation days for the past 1.5 years (!!!). He admitted he's probably going to get in trouble but he doesn't care anymore.

Read some of the comments in this past thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27821392 to understand this better. I've also been working at this for well over 10 years and I do agree that overall this profession is draining. I often need 'hard resets' between jobs, it's hard to compartmentalize work and regular life when you brain is constantly thinking about 'the system'. I have experienced burnout a bunch of times. It's not pretty. Add the new trends of making devs do oncall because frankly everything is online, tech interviews becoming the coding Olympics, the incentive structure in an organization making people cut corners or backstab coworkers to get ahead, it's not hard to understand how someone would consider the profession draining. This is from the perspective of someone who worked both in small and big corps on the west coast.

Comfort doesn't have a lot to do with burnout or job satisfaction unless you're coming from a blue collar mostly manual job.

> many of us got into simply because it was a fun and engaging thing to do

That's one of the problems. For a lot of folks, it was exactly that 'was a fun and engaging thing to do' and then you get do it in the context of office politics, tight deadlines, need to sacrifice professional ethics and ship something half-assed because that's what the business needs, etc.. These things, repeatedly chip away at your happiness. Would you be more unhappy without the ergonomic equipment and all of that? Most likely yes. But ping-pong tables and the unlimited vacation (which is at the discretion of your manager anyway) doesn't always compensate for shit work or the nervous breakdown from having to sit on an incident bridge for 4 hours...

I need to admit, I love my job and I love this profession. But I do understand when people say it's draining.

I grew up in a communist dictatorship, where illegal wiretapping by the government is still an open wound in society's culture. Given that, I cannot understand who willingly buys this crap and puts it in their house.

A couple of days ago, I lost all respect for a coworker when we were in a meeting and somebody said something which woke up the Echo he had on his desk.

That's mostly the work that you want to do. The work you must do when being forced by economic factors, especially the extra job one might take in order to make ends meet, gives a sense of dread to a person's life. We can talk about a sense of purpose when people are more-or-less financially stable (at least nothing threatening their first level in Maslow's pyramid) and they get to pick whatever they get to work on. But when you're one step away from homelessness, the sense of purpose and the value derived from that takes the backseat.

> Ability/commitment to work on something that may not be that intrinsically motivating, in the context of getting/maintaining a certain type of job.

I remember a blog post which was ranting about the current culture at trendy big tech companies (has since been deleted [0], probably the author still wanted a career at such a company) in which a quote resonated with me a lot: 'we're not problem solvers, we're problem endurers'.

Someone solving hundreds of leetcode problems to prepare for an interview just signaled that they are willing do do basically any tedious piece of work you throw at them.

EDIT: [0] Found it: https://web.archive.org/web/20160308032127/https://medium.co...

I have mixed feelings when I see these articles popping up recently along with the general consensus on hackernews about the fact that Amazon shopping should be avoided. On one side I'm glad, considering Amazon has gotten too big and is in need of a readjustment. But on the other side, I feel that this is an echo chamber, considering the continuing growth of the company.

I am privileged enough to actively reject everything that has anything to do with Amazon. I buy most things locally and sometimes I pay a premium for that. No regrets, I consider this the capitalist democracy of voting with your wallet in the free market. I have not bought anything from Amazon for the past 4 years, since the first time I heard about the warehouse working conditions. I correlated that with the toxic environment they are cultivating for white-collar workers and just decided that Amazon is a company I never want to deal with.

Oh.. you're not the only one to find similarities between some corporate cultures and oppression mechanisms from communist regimes.

For example, whenever I had to do my yearly review and write in my opinions about what I did good/bad/could have done differently which afterwards were discussed with my manager and then shared among leadership, I couldn't help but think of a milder version of https://translate.google.ro/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=https://...

Whenever I hear patriarchy in a conversation I can't help but start laughing as it reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch which as growing up in an eastern orthodox family was a central part of my belief. It never helps the conversation.

This is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection. I also grew up in a communist country. I also remember good times. I don't miss it, except for the sense of community in the face of adversity. You can still have that now if you look past the consumer culture.