Can they even do this? I mean legally, I understand that practically they'll get away with much more than what's allowed by law. I don't get why an enforcement agency should have any say with regards to what's legal and what isn't.
Pick a project that you already use yourself. You'll have a lot more context and will be much less likely to just give up at the first problem you run across.
> By analogy to "power vacuum", it's tempting to call this pattern an "ownership vacuum".
It doesn't work that well. Power vacuum is called that way because there's a tendency for the vacuum to be filled by anyone as soon as possible. On the other hand, lack of ownership in a company can persist for much longer if left alone.
Hopefully in the future we'll have more options rather than offices becoming completely obsolete. Personally I still need a good office environment to do my best work and an all-remote future looks pretty bleak.
> determine what an employee at a given level is worth to the company
Nobody does this. It's not even possible apart from the most contrived cases. Salary is determined by a number of factors none of which have anything to do with the employee's worth to the company.
Don't assume that something is completely useless just because it isn't targeted directly at you or because you have more experience or knowledge than the author.
Can you elaborate on what "bootstrapped technical PhD into data science/ML jobs" means? Because to me it sounds like you got a higher paying job because of your PhD, not because of the Coursera stuff.
I think they will become even less valuable than they are now. If the cost to entry and completion is so low and people are speedrunning the material, the certification becomes worthless over time.
There's more to it than that. If you're applying for a junior position with no experience and a 4-year CS degree, you will very likely get an interview. If you apply for the same position with an online course or two, you're far less likely to get an interview.
Something that I haven't seen discussed - all Twitter employees are currently working remotely. Do we know if that has influenced the feasibility of the hack in any way?
Macs come preinstalled with MacOS, anything else comes preinstalled with Windows. Very few people will even consider their OS as something they can choose, many have no idea what Linux is and the percentage of people who will take the time and effort to switch to Linux is even smaller. So the Linux desktop will remain a thing mostly for people who work in software.
Do you ever feel like all the noise influences the way you think about your own career? I work as a data scientist and sometimes find the hype so off-putting that I think that I should look for a role that's related to solving some optimization problems outside of ML, or a software engineering role in some completely different domain and work as a backend developer or something similar.
Another side of this that I've seen is people with PhDs in applied mathematics on a research team where a PhD is a hard requirement, spending all of their time passing dataframes around and convincing the sales team that the bar charts in the product are in fact correct.
It's different. With the ML stuff there's a bunch of actually useful applications and interesting problems at the core with a lot of fluff and marketing piled on top of it. That's the reason why you're seeing the ML/AI hype last so much longer than blockchain (which was basically a quick cash grab with no substance).
A PhD isn't even a requirement for doing the more advanced stuff. Obviously you need a lot of math and ML specific knowledge but there's no reason why you can't have that knowledge with an undergraduate math degree (for example). Spending 3-6 years doing research in a very narrow and possibly unrelated branch of mathematics will give you a PhD, but the linear algebra and multivariable calculus that you actually need for the ML stuff are covered in a bunch of undergrad/masters courses in mathematics, computer science, engineering, physics etc.
> You can achieve the same weight loss by just eating fewer total calories, without cutting carbs as well.
Achieve weight loss - yes, achieve the same weight loss - no. If you primarily want to lose fat rather than muscle, your insulin metabolism becomes an important variable.
You just need to decide whether you value being an individual contributor more than being in a leadership role.
You state yourself that your goal is a larger leadership role. It doesn't make sense to make a move in the opposite direction, especially if the salary at the other job is similar.
They're basically everywhere, there's a lot to learn, it's a valuable skill for a potential employer and you're interested. Seems pretty obvious that you should go deeper with distributed systems. Also, your lack of formal education won't hold you back as much as it would with ML. The idea that you should go do math for the next couple of years just because the field seems hot, doesn't seem well thought out.
Continuous learning is a fundamental part of the job. Some of the answers here focus on stable tech stacks but in reality even if you spend your entire career using the same tools, you still need to be continuously learning new things within that stack just to keep up.
I second the recommnedation for Whirlwind Tour of Python for people who already know other programming languages and don't need to learn programming concepts from scratch.