Didn’t you just say your landscaper gets fired every year? That would mean they’re not “truly skilled.” So why hire them in the first place if they’re not skilled?
Originally you were assigning zero significance to the act of being fired, now you’re backtracking saying it implies something about value.
The landscaper analogy is to explain how any firm can hire or fire at the same time (which many can't seem to grasp).
A landscaper that doesn't have repeat clients is what you are comparing to, which is the signal for unskilled labor.
(If we are just using the landscape ecosystem).
For the Knowledge Worker ecosystem, the seasonality is not summer/winter but say Recession/Growth or Technology Waves. There is definitely at least 3 years gap between Recession/Growth of Technology Waves. So, someone getting fired every 8 months is a red flag just like the Landscaper not getting re-hired the next season.
All these are valid signals but most HNers are blinded by anti-corporation propaganda and can't see the objective reality
I'm no where near that TC and think this way too. This field of work is generally new in history. The whole woe is me what will we ever do attitude is so weak and frankly annoying.
Most of modern society is new in history; what is that supposed to say? If you are making the point that it's unproven and fragile, that would be a good point and actually one that supports "woe is me" because all of it could disappear overnight considering the fragility.
In my lifetime I have watched SPARC SUN Servers being thrown in the trash, spaghetti coded javascript and php run fortune 500s, the linux kernel adding containers, and everyone now being required to know how to code for CI so they can rerun tests, linters, and rebuild their app on every commit and publish it to an S3 bucket with specific IAM permissions tied to some SSO IAM provider.
At no point in any of that was anyone coddled or told that they will get to keep their job forever. Learn new skills. That's the game.
It's not even unique to tech. Doctors have to do this too.
There's so much work in the industry right now around LLM implementation that folks not looking into that are sleeping on good jobs.
Learning a new language or tech has always been such a minor hurdle. The whole point of the current wave of AI is that there is nowhere to retreat to if your means of income depends solely on intellectual work. Learn a trade or train to be a vet, sure, that'll last a while longer.
Doctors have to undergo minor professional development refreshers — not replace their entire education. There is a reason we educate early in life; it's hard to retrain the old (and expensive or even approaching impossible).
This comment gives me a chuckle. In my lifetime alone I've seen oncology completely transform before my eyes. New tools. New techniques. New drugs. I've also watched doctors in my family study this stuff in their off time in order to get certain positions.
"minor professional development refreshers" lol
Also known as (unpaid) hard work during the weekend.
Obviously fields like oncology and genetics are going to have major disruptions. What sort of event would trigger someone needing to redo their entire 7+ years of medical schooling?
That's obviously false. What's the point of society if that's true? Do you think there should be no government roads, no government health care (if you're in the US, you may think this, but only because you're indoctrinated), no legal system (or enforcement thereof) to protect you from criminals, no legally enforceable human rights whatsoever? Etc., etc.?
Once they actually understand what they're saying, no sane person believes that society doesn't owe them anything.
Correct. But don't you want something from the future? What do you imagine it to look like? How far is it from what you hope it might? What are you willing to do to bring them closer together?
Savvy ex-YC startup Software Engineer, great at taking a project from 0 to 1 and 1 to 10. My background was initially in React and the frontend world, but I've since transitioned to being a more Go/backend-heavy developer working on high-throughput systems. Clocking in at 10 years of experience, I have worked the full gamut, from early stage startups to Fortune 500 companies — and would love to join a team focused on building a great product for the user. You might want to hire me if you have a need for someone who has both business/finance intuition and also software skills.
That would not run counter to the popular (whether true or not) idea that by using functional programming languages you filter for a higher quality labor pool / applicant pool.
That wouldn't apply here, since as the article says they hire "generalists, and most of them have never written a line of Haskell before joining."
In any case, I think the "Haskell tax" concept (where you can pay well-paid programmers less if you have a Haskell shop) is stale by now. Rust attracted away a lot of FP-ers, plus mainstream langs like C++, Java and even Typescript got smarter. Haskell's biggest problem by far is the tiny labor pool, which Mercury seems to wisely avoid.
The version I've always heard is just well designed but less popular languages, but the ones I can think of were all functional (Haskell/F#/OCaml/Clojure/Elm/Erlang)
Drudgery is not as much drudgery when there is variety. I think a lot of people who see their work as "drudgery" actually just are forced to do one thing and never even think about doing a second thing during their day.
The purpose/results of the work matter just as much. Take restaurant work. Making meals people enjoy is less drudgery. Making meals you know are good versus making low quality slop. Working at a basic but locally appreciated breakfast place versus making breakfasts at Denny's even though you are making basically the same thing.
Take making software I felt was making the world better versus software that was not. When I knew my work dramatically improved the lives of tens/hundreds of thousands of people and by extensions their families touched hundreds of thousands more versus just a software job in a kind of bad industry. The positive job it was easy to put in ridiculous hours. For the other straight 9-5 felt like too long.
Location: Seattle, WA / Portland, OR
Remote: No
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Typescript, Golang, Python (Django/Flask), C#, React, C (certification in C)
Résumé/CV: https://philippeterson.com/resume
Email: peterson@sent.com
Savvy ex-YC startup Software Engineer, great at taking a project from 0 to 1 and 1 to 10. My background was initially in React and the frontend world, but I've since transitioned to being a more Go/backend-heavy developer working on high-throughput systems. Clocking in at 9 years of experience, I have worked the full gamut, from early stage startups to Fortune 500 companies — and would love to join a team focused on building a great product for the user. You might want to hire me if you have a need for someone who has both business/finance intuition and also software skills.
And notably, totally interchangeable cogs is exactly what a startup should not want. For the reason that it requires a lot of slack. Startups are supposed to move fast, and if you move fast that means there should be minimal overlap in work between different employees. Layoffs could be fatal at that stage in a company's story.
