No because I used to work at McDonald's and loading trailers from warehouses before working in tech.
That gave me perspective that lasts even to this day.
I'm not saying this is true of OP but I've met a few people who constantly complained about working in tech and one thing I noticed is a lot of them never worked a really shitty/physical job.
It blew my mind in university meeting people who's first ever job was a software internship. I remember thinking wow they must have a totally different idea of what a good/bad job is.
I can't think of a better value job that working in tech in terms of amount of effort and schooling required.
I miss my fast food job (and especially my retail job), to a certain extent. I also worked in a warehouse and a factory for a bit, and there are certain things I miss about those as well. I don't miss the low pay though. And my health is no longer good enough (in part because I've been too sedentary in office jobs the past 20 years) that I can no longer stand for hours at a time (not even that, I can no longer stand in place for more than a few minutes at a time).
I could completely forget about my job when I got home, didn't have to somewhat keep a framework of some giant corporate spaghetti code soup in my head to a certain extent for months or years on end, and interacted with people way, way more than I do now, and made deeper friendships with my coworkers.
Also there was no risk of me working on something for six months and it get cancelled or shelved before it gets used by anyone. At least in fast food and retail jobs you're helping multiple people (sometimes hundreds of people) every day. In my corporate career I've often ended up working on software that only has a handful of high paying clients, or only used internally and not client facing.
If I could justify the insane pay cut and could manage it physically I'd probably do something like be a barista nowadays. Or be a teacher, maybe.
I worked in a bakery / dessert place for 4+ years making barely above minimum wage. 8-12 hours a day on my feet, making dough, talking to customers, etc.
I didn’t absolutely love the job at the time, but I miss the realness of it constantly. Making a real piece of food, talking to real people. The tech industry increasingly seems obsessed with making everything as fake as possible, and I can relate to OP on multiple levels.
Well, different people, with different backgrounds, have very different perspectives, feelings, and standards when it comes to the world of work.
I’ve also had a physical shit job before, and I don’t want to go back to it at all, and between that and being a developer, I'd obviously rather be a developer. But that doesn't rule out the possibility of wanting a different kind of profession. the current state of things just isn't good. the fact that it's one of the few types of work that still pays well makes it seem like this 'privilege' is often used as an excuse for all kinds of wrongdoing.
I think the reality is as a human your brain adjusts to whatever situation you’re in and that just becomes a baseline from which annoyance and complaints will rise up just the same.
But no one wants to admit that because it’s nice to fantasize about the greener grass, that there is some perfect ideal job out there.
Yep, the whole industry is not in good place right now but tech is still a sure-fire way of netting $1Mil+ after a 5-10 year career, with the most freedom and in the most flexible way.
Several people I know who went to a good university and landed big tech/quant jobs early became millionaires (liquid 1,000,000) after 5 to 7 years. Some got lucky and reached this milestone way earlier.
Medicine takes 12+ years of education before bearing any fruit and finance has very little freedom.
Blockchain was useless and in 5.5 years of working in cloud consulting - first at AWS and now at a 3rd party firm, I never once heard a serious business ask - “how can we make or save money using the blockchain”.
I don't get how this solves the problem of edge cases with self driving
Even if you can generate simulated training data, don't you still have the problem where you don't even know what the edge cases you need to simulate are in the first place?
Well it certainly helps,doesn't it? This system is going to encounter more edge cases than a single human ever would. Hopefully the lessons from known unknowns generqlise to unknowns. And once they've been seen once they took can become part of the corpus.
It might be "never-ending", but you're going to encounter edge cases in approximate proportion to the rate at which they actually occur. Anyway, the hope would be to learn behaviors which generalize, not to respond to each edge case ad-hoc; the edge cases provide out-of-sample tests of generalizability.
Neither does the car — it won't drive into what LIDAR sees as a wall. But stopping is not good enough, it needs to be able to navigate the obstacle as well.
Also, even if the car behaved perfectly anyway, these scenarios are useful for testing — validating that the expected behavior happens.
That is something I've found over the years with traveling.
You watch a bunch of travel videos and think the place you're visiting is going to be so different but its just the same overcast sky and ocean and washed out color palette as home.
Once you remove all the filters, color correction, and drone shots from influencer travel videos a lot of places look the same IRL.
I cannot relate to this at all. Even just Valparaiso and Venice (two towns) are so different from each other. Even if you make weather dreary it’s a different feeling.
Then you consider Patagonia or Norway and compare it with the California Coast. The world is full of beauty.
Agreed. Also the trick is, if you end up in an ugly place while traveling ... you just move on, until you find beauty again (so don't book in advance too much).
Really? I drove from Kansas to the Florida Keys in November, stayed at an ocean front hotel where it was a blissful 83°F, and it felt like our own slice of heaven. We stayed a few extra days over Thanksgiving just to laze in the pool while our kids splashed in the water. Being able to drive away from the snow and the cold into paradise was amazing, and being able to go with my family made me feel richer than a king.
I traveled a little and was also happy to mostly see the nice side of most places. Some of us are lucky, some just always try to see the best in things. Beauty is in the eye of beholder. Also, some people here commented that they like this antirender look. Maybe by contrast. I talked with someone from Ecuador and they said they like when it rains. It was this lat autumn, when we didn't see sun for several weeks and everything was gloomy, looking even worse than in those photos, additionally colored by bad mood of everyone.
Hard agree. Lviv feels like a real city (for better or worse) because no one demolished entire city blocks to make it more appealing in 1985. I was there about a year ago and loved it.
I'd say that despite similarities for places built at the same time as each other, there's a huge range of variation in the places I've been.
First trip to the US was California, and the geography of the hills around Central Valley were substantially different in different places just within that region. Southwest, I saw hills that looked like Bryce's default textures which I'd previously assumed were mediocre approximations rather than based in reality; the Redwoods and Yosemite are very different from each other and the aforementioned, and the hills west of Winters and east of Sacremento are different again, and of course all are different to the Valley itself. On another trip I saw the Bonneville Salt Flats, I've yet to see anything else like them. All these are very different from the views around Zürich, or the UK South Downs (which unsurprisingly given the name is similar to New England and Brittany), and all those are different to the west coast of Wales; when I later saw the Spanish Mediterranean coast and the area around Athens, they reminded me of some of the wine areas around Paso Robles (which shouldn't be surprising given wine).
Within cities, Berlin has incredibly wide streets unlike anything I've found elsewhere; Athens is the exact opposite, with at least a few of roads in the tourist core (near the Parthenon) almost too narrow even for the smaller size of car common in Europe and pedestrian paths only a few cm wider than my elbows are apart, and so many ancient ruins you could practically trip and fall over them. The UK and Germany where I've lived, one can quickly learn to spot which era any given house was made in, with a handful of still-standing medieval buildings in the UK (mostly churches), then typical stylings visible for late 18th century (e.g. Bath), then a gap to the late 19th century to early 20th (in both countries but with more Gothic in the UK and more Neo-Classical and Art Nouveau in Berlin), then another gap where little survives to today, then post-war (British housing estates and DDR soviet style Plattenbau); these are very different to Swiss rural styles, to the narrow buildings you can find in Amsterdam. The UK and France also still retain a lot of medieval castles in various states of repair and museum-ification.
Bologna still has a lot of medieval structures around, including two leaning towers. Venice may be famous for the canals, but the famous ones are not the entire set, the ones I remember seeing went right up to the hotel I was in and functioned like roads, with a similar vibe to the roads of Athens (only without the footpaths at all because footpaths were a completely independent system), while the canals in Amsterdam were broad and felt more like the spaces dedicated to the Straßenbahn and U-Bahn in Berlin.
Budapest felt like a decaying museum to itself, or a ruin in which people nevertheless still lived and worked.
NYC deserves the name "urban jungle", it was like walking through canyons where the "mountains" (skyscrapers) were so distant and large as to defy not just the instant parallax between my eyes, but also the time-delayed parallax one normally gets from walking towards or away from a thing.
Nairobi mixed a British 50s-60s Brutalist core (presumably because of who was in charge in the 50s-early 60s) with main streets that were variously poorly repaired and unpaved, and minor streets that varied from "this could be any middle class residential area in Europe" to "this has been accidentally cobbled by people treading plastic bottles into the soil as they pass"; there is another easily recognisable style here, best shown rather than described, this kind of wall lack-of-surface-finishing: https://www.google.com/maps/@-1.2844081,36.9005201,3a,30y,35...
That gave me perspective that lasts even to this day.
I'm not saying this is true of OP but I've met a few people who constantly complained about working in tech and one thing I noticed is a lot of them never worked a really shitty/physical job.
It blew my mind in university meeting people who's first ever job was a software internship. I remember thinking wow they must have a totally different idea of what a good/bad job is.
I can't think of a better value job that working in tech in terms of amount of effort and schooling required.
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