The article didn’t even mention that, at 29 years old, he abandoned his 5 year-old son to go on his middle-aged crisis journey. Some person to celebrate.
1,658 karma · joined August 27, 2019
Here’s why what you wrote seems needlessly contrarian: Amazon just posted an $18B quarter, so there is no pressing financial pressure. Okay, so you suggest this may be a last resort in lieu of retraining, but we’re talking about 14k jobs across many teams (I know of at least 40 affected), levels, and job families. The idea of needing to cross train is obviously not the culprit at that scale; An SDE laid off from one team can easily perform the same tasks on many others internally. This also completely ignores how Amazon works internally, with managers required to rank employees for pip, and, for events just like this one, URA, regardless of whether or not they deem them to be competent or not.
Of course, Amazon has also been documented to use automated processes for pip/layoffs, and the idea that layoffs involved any ounce of consideration as a last resort is so unbelievable it feels almost inflammatory.
The notion that criticizing one of history’s most profitable companies laying off thousands (at the height of their profits) is the same thing as stating, “every company beyond profit X should never do layoffs” is a blatant misrepresentation and ignores any context.
The “screen” effect doesn’t exist. But the percentage of students enrolled in cs programs grew a lot of the last few years, and I’ve seen the passion difference have an effect. Two friends of mine graduated last year. Both had zero offers out of undergrad (this is the norm right now, again, completely irrelevant to screen time). One of them was passionate about coding and kept working on side projects/leetcoding, eventually landing a role at a tech company after a year of working at a boba shop. The other, who struggled with coding and was verbally not passionate about it (complained about it a lot, didn’t interview prep much) ended up throwing in the towel a few months on the job hunt.
An anecdote, but probably generalizable across those in today’s job market. But the market is the core problem, second to the individual’s willingness to grind. Neither are related to screen time.
That is not as simple to dismiss as, “prices rise everywhere: inflation.”
https://www.collegecounts529.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/...
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/used-car-prices-have-su...
I wonder how much of this language is just anti-Chinese. “Slumping” costs for price decreases. Whatever the outcome, it’s clear I’d much rather prefer to be purchasing a car in China than America at the moment. Probably nicer roads to drive on, too, if I’m being honest.
Another thing worth mentioning that newcomers seem to take for granted - the margin boilerplate required for correct positioning (see https://observablehq.com/@d3/margin-convention).
In addition, for the technical aspect to make sense, a more effective article would place the points should be shown alongside evals. For example, if you're trying to make a point about where to put important context in the prompt, show a classic needle-in-the-haystack eval, or a jacobian matrix, alongside the results. Otherwise it's largely more prompt fluff.
My take is both OP’s tool and the blatant plagiarism of it are examples.
Very beautiful paintings.
Another great solution is to give an interview-like oral whiteboard interview for midterms/final. Quite time consuming (you can’t just assign the TA’s a grading prompt) but quite effective.