corrral

OK, but... some places think a "senior software developer" should make $70,000, and other think they should make $250,000 or more. And everything in between.

I don't care how nice the a place it is to work, I'm not applying to the $70k place. If I can't quickly figure out where you fall on that spectrum, I'm not going to bother to contact you because job listings are not rare. If you somehow manage to present as exactly the perfect place to work, I might contact you—to ask what the salary range is, and if you won't say up-front, I'm out.

It takes exactly one time sitting through interviews, having everyone be super excited about hiring you, then naming a totally normal rate when they ask what salary you're looking for, and watching everyone's faces turn green, to never, ever waste time doing that again. I've had mine already.

Yeah, I know a couple agencies like that and they have the good sense to politely point tiny-budget projects to other—usually fledgeling—agencies. Mid-five-figures minimum or you'll be gently redirected to another company or a freelancer or something.

"Managed $XX,XXX site redesign that resulted in [cherry-picked numbers to make it look like it improved things when it didn't at all]" looks good on a résumé.

Your managers may not understand much, but they can understand (by which I mean get a thrill out of looking at) before-and-after screenshots on a powerpoint, which may matter when promotions are available.

That's at least as true in bigco as in startups and small companies.

> Every single time I've hired a general-- I've had to fight scope creep; fight to get them to actually complete work; fight to get the actual quoted materials; fight to fix problematic subcontractor work; fight to avoid price increases.

Our experience with looking into GCs for a kitchen remodel was that their premium was so outrageous and their ideas/plans so mediocre that we were much better off just doing it ourselves.

All the specialist contractors and laborers who actually did the work were basically fine, easy-enough to work with, charged reasonable rates, and did good work.

I think we paid about 1/2 what the cheapest GC wanted (some were way higher) and used much better materials than any of them were calling for in their initial plans they used for their bids. I can only assume their entire market is people with so much money that they don't give a shit what it costs as long as they don't have to do any work themselves. "$15,000 to save me some googling and phone calls? Sure, seems reasonable"

It has not been my experience that for at least 95% of developers their needing to exhibit "spontaneous creativity and improvisation" to a degree greater than what a contractor might do while planning how to run a water line, is a good sign. As in construction or home repair or whatever, it's more likely that it means the person doesn't know the right way to do it.

The fact that we often have to do semi-creative things is more a sign that our industry is immature and shitty, than that the work is inherently much more creative than construction work. We keep trying to make spherical houses even though it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper, faster, and in many ways better, to just make ordinary ones. Then we pat ourselves on the back when we "creatively" figure out how to fit parts and furniture designed for normal-ass buildings into the curved-walled rooms of our spherical ones. Meanwhile the customer just wanted a fucking house and didn't care what shape it was.

Don't overlook all of wal-mart's vendors and service providers then, I guess? Those aren't one organization, but thousands.

Tons and tons of organizations. It's extremely common.

It makes more sense when you consider that companies mostly don't experience market effects internally, but operate much more like the Soviet Union, and that, especially for very large companies, the effects of external competition are rather less than ideally efficient, to put it mildly. Throw in a heaping spoonful of principal-agent problems up and down every organization, the fact that information is very far from perfectly available and distributed to managers, and more than a little good ol' incompetence, and it'd be weird if it wasn't common.

Companies are, internally, command economies. Of course they're full of inefficiency and crazy shit like people hired to do nothing. Competition curbs it somewhat, but economies of scale and various moats and probably some under-the-table collusion and such are very effective at protecting them from what we might consider desirable market effects.

1) This effective backlash/education-campaign has not already happened despite there already being significant problems with this kind of thing, and most of it not being that hard to spot, even, and 2) I think the more likely effect is the destruction of shared trust in any set of news sources—we're already pretty damn close to this being the case, in fact. "It's all lies anyway" is a sentiment that favors dictators more than it does democracy.

It hinges entirely on who the military and police decide to listen to. Hanging Pence wasn't the only, or first, option that day—getting him to maybe, kinda, technically, if you tilt your head and squint legally overturn the election was one attempted strategy. That's far more dangerous, and there sure seem to be chess pieces lining up to take similar sorta-maybe-technically-legal shots at the principles of democracy in the next election or two.

How the military and cops will react to orders coming from someone who plainly stole an election according to every norm we have about how our government is supposed to work, and who sure looks like they're sending us toward single-party dictatorship on fast-forward, but maybe is kinda, sorta, technically doing all this legally, or at least has sown enough confusion that you're not sure whether they're legitimate or not, is anyone's guess.

That's a very expensive solution, most likely, in terms of harm to the economy & international competitiveness. And we already have a huge problem with race-to-the-bottom dynamics when states or cities race to see who can bend over fastest in hopes of to receiving a few scraps from megacorporations. Start putting things the federal government controls in the hands of states and cities, and corporations will definitely gain more power to dictate things like environmental laws, corporate taxation, consumer protection, et c.

I don't think this idea is compatible with a decent-to-live-in, modern economy and state, as nice as it may seem in the abstract.

Our kinda-bad system of government relying heavily on social norms & personal restraint that are no longer present and without which it's extremely vulnerable to malicious game-thinking methods and crass populist manipulation to bring it down from within, is where I'd point the finger.

I expect future historians will point to Nixon's pardon as the beginning of the end.

Right-leaning majority of the land, not the people, is closer to true.

Rural areas also tend to be at least as dependent on domestic shipping as cities, and not a lot of rural dwellers are growing enough of their own food to avoid starvation if that's disrupted. Not like back when a really high percentage were farmers who grew both cash crops and varied crops & small animals for their own consumption. If all the crops for a 50 mile radius are soy beans and feed-corn, and there are no processing plants for either nearby, and you're not close to a large port... you're gonna have a bad time if the trains stop running and gas gets scarce. It's not like any but a small percentage of rural folks would be sitting back well-fed while the cities starved. The best-off of all might well be the coastal cities, in fact. The notion that mostly-empty red counties can just deliberately starve out the cities and win seems extremely far-fetched to me, in this our modern economy.

> Violence just makes people go against you and is wrong, full stop.

That's... quite a bold assertion.

> 7.1% of respondents said they'd be willing to kill someone over politics.

I can only assume it's that low because people tend not to think very hard about poll questions, so are considering only some narrower-than-the-actual-question version of it that they've replaced it with in their heads. Or else a whole lot of people are very honest and don't think they'd be able to actually do it—should, yes, but would? Doubtful enough that they'd answer "no" to the question.

I suspect it's the former because I doubt that many people would be open and introspective enough to admit they don't think they'd have the stomach to do things they think they should do. Try another angle with some extreme but plausible hypothetical scenarios rather than such a general question, and I bet that number shoots way up.

This is an instance in which the call for references is ridiculous enough that I think this is a sufficient response:

gestures broadly at the entire history section of the library

I don't think most civil wars involve a high percentage of the population as combatants. Victims, maybe, but not combatants. So I don't think it's necessary that anywhere near half the population engage in fighting, for us to have one.

Oh, absolutely. I've even come around to thinking that's likely. But one can hope.

[EDIT] One thing I no longer think has any realistic future is the open, semi-anonymous Internet. We're either losing it because despots take over and definitely won't permit that threat to remain unfettered, or we're losing it (in perhaps a gentler-touch way) because we have to to prevent authoritarian take-over and vast civil strife. I don't think we're getting to keep that no matter what happens.

> You can put letters in any order you want and make them say any damn lie.

You can run a web server by responding to every request by hand-typing the response, too. But you couldn't realistically run one-one-millionth the modern Web that way. You can't have global-scale e-commerce that way, et c. Some things that technically could work that way, can't actually—it's too slow, too expensive. This is very much one of those "quantity has a quality all its own" things. Increase the productivity of every astroturf-poster or propaganda-front-news-site manager a few hundred times and that's a big difference.

> I am as concerned as the next guy but throwing the towel already seems a bit premature?

Where'd you get throwing in the towel? I do think we're (especially the US) really unlikely to do what we need to in time, in part because measures that are probably necessary to defend against this are themselves risky and rather unappealing. But we might.

This is already barely holding together with mostly human actors doing the astroturfing and creating bullshit "news organizations" expressly to spread propaganda. Automation is going to overwhelm a system that's already teetering.

> Photoshop has existed for years and humans have been manipulating photos for longer, what's the difference, really?

Scale, cost, and reach.

There seems to me a huge difference between a few organizations being able to produce & distribute a total of X amount of self-serving bullshit with some limited reach, and anyone with a bit of money being able to produce 100,000 • X amount of self-serving bullshit and deliver it to exactly the people most likely to respond to it the way they want, anywhere in the world (save, notably, China and North Korea and such) while making it very hard to tell who it's coming from.

An environment in which 90% of the information is adversarial is really bad. It's a severe problem and very challenging to navigate. An environment where 99.9999% of it's adversarial and it's even harder than before to sort truth from fiction, functionally no longer has any flow of real information whatsoever.

Sure, but being able to do the same thing at 100,000x the scale for the same price seems like a pretty big difference. Throw in the ability to target narrow constituencies with custom messages via modern ad networks, automation-assisted astroturfing, et c., and the whole thing looks like a powderkeg to me.

Thinking bigger: I'm pretty sure the combo of a relatively free global Internet, liberal democracy on large (much bigger than city-state) scales, and cheap, customized, on-demand generation of totally fake text + photo + video propaganda based on simple prompts, cannot all co-exist. At least one of these isn't going to survive alongside the others. If we just let things keep going the way they are, I expect "liberal democracy on large scales" is the one we'll lose—and whatever follows probably won't let the fairly-free, global Internet keep existing, either, so we'll lose that too.

> or the pay being that unfair.

What's "fair" got to do with it? If they can get more, they should. Companies don't stop at "fair". CEOs don't stop at "fair".

On the one hand, yeah, sure, on the other, that concern does nothing but hurt me. It's entirely pointless. You don't need to maintain a constant state of concern/anxiety to remember to work toward solutions to those sorts of things when possible.

And anyway, I only wrote that those kinds of things don't trigger that pleasant crisis-flow-state for me, not that I'm not worried about them.

Almost everything in the news is either gonna trigger anxiety or nothing. Outrage, maybe. That's about it. Farther away from local news, the more true that is.

Luckily, keeping up with that stuff day-to-day or even week-to-week is pretty pointless, so easy to avoid.

The knowledge of all those problems just goes on the pile of shit that I can't possibly deal with, so just have to try not to think about, along with things like existential dread, the fact that my living the way I do (so, like a normal developed-world person) is probably indirectly causing misery for someone somewhere (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is, like much good speculative fiction, not about a fictional place but rather our current world), my hunch that cosmic horror probably comes about as close to capturing the nature of our existence and place in the universe as anything does (if only metaphorically), all that and the rest of the unhelpful crap that's probably true and real but also not especially actionable short of "kill yourself, or else devote yourself body and soul monk-/batman-like to some cause all the time every day, probably to no real effect except personal satisfaction".

I frankly feel kinda great in a crisis. The more serious, the better. All the dumbest parts of my brain shut down and I do what has to be done. Squeamishness, fear, anxiety, second-guessing, rumination—all shoved in a closet and the door slammed.

Gotta be an acute crisis I can do something about, though. "Climate change" or whatever doesn't trigger that state.

If not for being pretty happy with being alive and having a body that's not broken and logically knowing how fast those things can change, I'd probably be really into extreme sports.

I... have not found that to be the case at all (my van's certainly not made by Apple, nor is its stock entertainment system—my BT headphones aren't Apple, my BT keyboards and mice aren't Apple, my monitor and electric piano aren't apple, et c.) but it could be I've just been lucky.