throwarayes

“Have the power”

They have power, but it’s not actually legal. Congress has mandated funds for this array, the administration wants to cripple it beyond repair before any legal action can catch up.

This seems to be a case of administration impounding funds authorized by Congress for this purpose. As in they’re just spending what Congress told them to.

And unfortunately SCOTUS made it harder for private groups to sue over impounding. And seems to argue only the GAOs comptroller can sue under the impoundments control act (ICA). GAO is the part of Congress that investigates when executive branch isn’t enforcing the law / spending funds. But have themselves limited ability to enforce anything.

It’s another post watergate reform eroded by Trump II. The ICA was created to stop these sorts of impoundments that happens with Nixon and earlier.

Notably members of Congress are working to pause the dismantling

https://apnews.com/article/ocean-observatories-initiative-tr...

If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last.

Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income.

Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.

Yes those are stable businesses, but we’re probably at peak social media. They need something new to be interesting in long term investment.

Zuck IMO doesn’t have the halo Musk has where there’s results mixed in with the BS. And Meta doesn’t seem to have a good track record of developing new products.

Is a rage bait machine currently at / near its peak of usage still an interesting investment in 2026?

Facebook is for preying on the elderly. Instagram for the rest of us.

I think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments.

Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram.

Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy.

If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.

Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped

So there’s really not a lot of growth areas for them? Their biggest growth seems to have been acquisitions, not new features.

Maybe data labeling is like RTO - an intentional way to force attrition.

I am happy to pay OpenAI for a cheaper model a few generations behind. But they deprecate models aggressively. They push you to bigger and smarter models, when 95% of my work doesn’t need it.

I’d love it if model providers just let old models run and let us pay less, but the deprecation makes me want to look into local models.

Ok if I’m bored I’ll be talking about fun things to do with colleagues. If only for bragging rights, impressing friends, or hacker news upvotes. My time is limited so, I’d need to be careful about how I allocate that resource to projects.

That’s still an economy as it works to distribute limited resources (human time) at a bare minimum.

I’m in an interesting position because I’m fine, but my wife has struggled to find work. I personally have no problem finding work, she applies and applies and seems to get nowhere.

The main difference comes down to networking. Frustrating for me, because I see what’s she’s doing wrong, but can’t lecture her on a style that doesn’t come natural to her.

Basically I don’t ever apply for jobs, yet I find work. She applies through the normal path and never gets called for an interview.

What’s my magic trick? Nothing really slimy, or even pushy, but 100% focused on informal relationships instead of formal channels of work.

I just spend a lot of time connecting with colleagues, catching up with them, and just trying to be friends. I’m not trying to milk them for work. The lunch I have isn’t transactional. We literally barely talk about work.

But because we enjoy hanging out, we find ways to work together. We brainstorm about each others careers. We just both want to be helpful. Opportunities pop up naturally to collaborate and I’ve never wanted for work.

I don’t know how to teach that. It’s somewhat about my temperament. It’s a skill developed over decades.

Still I strongly recommend you practice it. Or at least just try to hang out and make friends with colleagues. The rest comes naturally.

Almost certainly the roles my wife is applying for are not actually open roles, they’re roles made with someone in mind. Or filled by someone better at the relational side than the technical skills.

It also depends on the laws governing your contract, not just where you live.

Yeah the warning is: you may, like me, find a litigious paranoid former employer who freaks out at everything :-/

I’d rather not carry the cost of learning it’s not enforceable.

So far it seems maybe?, but according to the article some courts and agencies are pushing back. Well the FTC was at least in 2023.

California bans anything that is effectively a non compete.

Well it would have to recreate the entire projects, no? Then they get to maintain it. That seems like a high bar.

And if it’s open source under Apache/MIT license I could care less about people getting snippets from my code.

Not caring is key. Like so much is out of your control you have to accept that most of the company’s decisions aren’t about you or factor you into account. Including your own performance reviews - you can get lucky and have a boss you gel with - or have a boss you don’t interact well with. Or your salary is a rounding error someone had to solve for.

I don’t think you can have any impact on US spending without entitlement reform - almost all medicaid/medicare - or decreasing the defense budget

All these other agencies are small potatoes.

I disagree with the Coup framing.

It’s not clear that reorganizing US foreign aid agencies is in violation of statute. As I understand it statute allocate $X to US foreign aid. And instructs the State dept to organize this aid.

The EO to pause all payments was challenged in court and halted

A lot of bad crap has happened, and I disagree with what DOGE is doing, but it’s not a coup.

You wonder if smart hiring managers knew to post their roles ASAP before a freeze on new roles :)

Isn't this just cover for cost cutting draw attention away from potentially bad earnings?

I really hope someone here makes it their goal to get hired by Salesforce in 2025

Ugh yeah I turned down a job offer even from seemingly ethical and nice startup in large part because I’d be exchanging actual publicly traded RSU vesting in the future with equivalent in options.

It’s hard to trade in somewhat certain money for likely fictional Stock Options. Though I’d possibly trade RSUs from company A for company B.

There’s almost like a two tier employment system between those at FAANG or adjacent with actual likelihood of a healthy payout and those with options / lottery tickets.

Think of yourself and your services as a one-person company. You need to always be marketing and doing sales. You never know when that one big client (your employer) might have layoffs (or you have a bad boss, or get stuck on crappy work, or whatever).

I don't put all my professional energy into my employer but hold some back for myself. I keep a constant public presence, write a lot, go to conferences, work on my own projects.

I think constantly about my positioning in the market. What's in demand? What problems need to be solved? Where are people stuck? What should I specialize in?

I take a lot of chats with folks who want general help, or just compare notes on what we're working on, or even straight up interviews.

It's constant work, but you can't trust the wiles of just one employer. It's like putting all your eggs in one basket as an investor. Be more diversified. Lately, they tech companies haven't proved loyal _at all_. They are always considering their options, so you should too.

Sadly workplace assholery is everywhere

One performance review I received was a 45 minute, one-sided rant from my boss directed at me. All completely out of left field. With no ability to get a word in. It left me utterly shell shocked.

Most performance reviews I’ve had are good “gives and takes”, leaving me with feedback to consider, but also offering my boss perspective too. They’re also usually not complete surprises. I’ve had to give hard feedback to subordinates myself, and I know the importance of being open and listening when giving feedback, as almost always I have an incomplete picture of their behavior and a lot to learn about what they’re going though.

Trusting, dumbass me, just sat there and took this. I assumed I was the problem, that I was fundamentally broken as an employee, and wanted to just find any way to please this boss to make it all better.

She used the time to tell me,

- all the ways I was screwing up, without letting me ask questions, clarify, or correct anything.

- that she, and only she, had the true objective perspective on and others wouldn’t tell me their thoughts about me (despite regularly giving / receiving feedback)

- Make me distrust my colleagues as my boss had me thinking they were holding something back / funneling all these complaints to my boss.

This pattern of communication persisted for months sadly, and it took me months to “deprogram” away from thinking she had the a true, objective view of my performance.

I slept poorly this whole time. My engagement suffered and my performance plummeted. I went from a top performer in my space to becoming disengaged and feeling I could do nothing right. I went from having regular open discussions with everyone on how I could improve to having convos with only her, and closed off from my colleagues.

It was as if it was intended to get me to leave, which I did given how unhealthy the environment was. Which is interesting as early on she had been so positive and supportive. I guess it all had little to do with my performance and more to do with not being seen as useful anymore, and thus discarded by her.

How is this feature different from just posting to /u/myusername? Maybe this is just a cleanup of duplicate features?

90 laid off per layoffs.fyi, which was 5%, so about 1800 pre-layoffs. So now more like 1700.

Keep in mind that at the scale of Reddit entire orgs could exist because their features squeeze 1-2% more user visits, driving more ad clicks, etc etc.

You could also create a photo sharing site in a couple of weeks with a dozen devs. But an actual business like Instagram, that can acquire users, thats profitable is a different story.

There are dozens of unprofitable Internet search engines each made by a handful of people, yet Google somehow employs ~200k people to run a profitable search engine.

I can create (probably build from scratch) a wiki in same amount of time but non-profit Wikipedia is 450(?) people.

The core tech isn’t the driver to headcount, the business model is.

For Reddit, that probably means selling ads and acquiring users. Which probably means a whole lot of ad tech and other optimizations/features to increase visitors to your site. Ad sales, ad tech, etc etc. It probably means ad sales to big clients with complex legal, etc.

In the tech, entire feature groups worth having because it serves important business goals around user retention or growth. Some small percentage of extra eyeballs helps Reddit towards these goals that a site like hacker news wouldn’t care about.

I have no idea which is more rational. I only mean to say one side gets a lot more oxygen.

And thus discourse is dominated by the 0.001% that throw a fit, which isn't nesc. the most rational position.

Because almost every internet post is performative histrionics.

Nobody posts the "meh" position. Which I suspect is the silent majority.

The purpose of my post is to collect / measure the "mehs" in upvotes