This is easy to explain. ‘Death of despair’-related suicides, which are the kind that have been rising in most developed countries for the past few decades, are overwhelmingly a matter of people feeling stagnant or hopeless in their socioeconomic circumstances. Note drug-related issues are very often, if not usually, downstream from those socioeconomic issues.
And the answer is: when the rest of society slows down, suddenly those who couldn’t keep up don’t feel so behind.
The only reason this comes as a surprise to so many people is that capitalism suggests that all progress is inherently good with no contingencies, or it draws a binary between progress and regression. Associated with that is American hyper-individualism. Ask a Marxist, for example, and they will offer an understanding of society which centers those who reproduce it, and along with that a sophisticated interest in theories of alienation and the role alienation plays in a person’s relations to their society. For a Marxist, these statistics would have been expected.
> And the answer is: when the rest of society slows down, suddenly those who couldn’t keep up don’t feel so behind.
Well said. This goes beyond even the socioeconomic causes of suicide that you mentioned and surely includes people with depression, (social) anxiety disorders, etc.
As an anecdotal data point, I have social anxiety, and depression diagnosed and I have been feeling relieved by the whole thing.
Going to office etc, left me with constant worries and thought cycles, energy spent on analysing and overthinking social situations. Now there's just video calls/chat messages I have to worry about and there's fewer attack vectors for worries there.
Same with random/events parties happening, even with friends I never felt very comfortable attending. Now I always had the perfect excuse to just stay at home.
I wouldn't say "capitalism" so much as "run-away capitalism", and the marxist stuff was probably where your downvotes came from. But that aside I agree, and this was more or less what I was going to post. Perhaps unlike you, I do generally like "progress" and believe that it "lifts all ships." But in the past several decades, this has become less and less true, for a variety of reasons. And fundamentally, you have to be sure most of your society has the basics before getting wrapped up in ever-increasing wild dreams of the future. For a little bit, those who were getting left behind didn't feel their disenfranchisement quite so painfully. I wonder if we'll have a nasty surprise when things crank back to full power again.
> when the rest of society slows down, suddenly those who couldn’t keep up don’t feel so behind.
Exactly, and I'd expect them to rise once things go back to "normal" because those who were already in a bad situation before Covid will rightfully feel left behind once more.
There are also a lot of engineers out there with 1 year of experience x 10 (or even 20 times), or even 20 years of experience with some narrow niche technology that no longer applies - but want to be paid like they have been keeping on top of things and learning broadly for 20 years.
A solid experienced engineer is worth their weight in gold. A lot of folks consider themselves solid experienced engineers who couldn't program a hello world in any modern computing environment. This is quite unfortunate, and more chaff to sort through.
Not defending leetcode. At least it shows someone is trying?
I’m not one to do the boss’s work for them, but you’re observations aren’t wrong. Your expectations are. Personally, I am thankful to be young, single, and have a lot of free time to keep up with things myself. But I have no interest in the society you seem to desire. This business of expecting constant self-education from workers alienated from the product of their labor or any reason to appreciate the daily grind they’re tasked with is asking for a spiraling mess of societal consequences that I am starkly against. I don’t know any simple solutions. I’m afraid socialists might be right.
It doesn’t have much to do with me frankly. And I’ve seen this in every society I’ve been exposed to, from India, Japan, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Germany, France, UK, you name it.
If you aren’t able to do the job (defined by your peers and the market), you either don’t get paid, or you have to force the market to pay you or change the job, despite not doing the original job (often through legal threats/strikes). It’s a market protectionism vs market need thing.
We seem to be advocating here that the best solution (software, market) should win, and that’s what I’ve seen in the global marketplace where legal threats like strikes generally have low impact.
What I’ve seen in other areas where the legal situation allows more leverage from labor is happier but fewer and lower paid labor, in often a much smaller market. Essentially a ‘I got mine’ type setup where incumbents get good slots and it’s super hard to get into once established because the pie overall is smaller and guarded. It screws over the newcomers and unestablished in favor of the incumbents.
China has started to export some really amazing home grown tech (including software) in some verticals, and if you think they give a rats ass about EU, US, etc. programmers - well, they don’t. Just like French don’t really care about Japanese labor conditions.
So we either wall off that software (often to everyone else’s detriment - those would be good products for less cost otherwise for people to use) to protect the local labor/market conditions and cause distortions elsewhere, or.... keep up? Japan is notorious for the protections it has, and is terrible software wise almost everywhere. Pretty solidly stuck in the late 80’s when they were the newcomers and were actually innovating.
And if we aren’t even trying to keep up, well - that just means the people who are will win/define the end state won’t it?
It’s the harsh reality of the real world. EU has been going the way of protectionism for a long time, which is great from a ‘retirement community’ type sense, but there is a reason there aren’t many cutting edge tech firms originating there. It’s pretty clear from the constant handwringing from the EU on anything regarding tech or competitiveness that they know it too, but can’t make the trade offs to fix it. Great if you’re already established and looking to keep things cushy, pretty terrible if you’re trying to get established though.
Like the thread with the folks who broke into tech by problem solving a case as a kid - imagine if they wouldn’t have been allowed to shell script until they’d gotten certified or joined the appropriate union?
It’s also why salaries are generally so much lower there for engineers. The real world doesn’t much care about what we (as producers or market participants) want in an abstract ‘it’s not fair’ sense, it’s about the economics of the markets and the needs and who can meet them best. If someone can get me firewood for $5 at the same or better quality as the person selling it for $10, it would require a lot to not take the $5 person up on their offer for the vast majority of people. It’s what has led to a massive expansion in wealth for all humans, as we constantly look to optimize and create more value for less cost.
If someone has 20 years of experience in tech x, but I use tech y - and they have shown zero interest in, and can’t demonstrate how to apply that experience in tech x to tech y - why should I or anyone be paying them for something that is not applicable or helpful to me at all? So they can feel like it wasn’t wasted? Good for them, bad for me.
What you say is an empty statement because it doesn't rank which skills are the most important to a software engineer.
Coding is the core skill of software engineering.
For other skills, say, communication, you will need to have an adequate amount of it, but you don't need to be godlike (e.g. think Bill Clinton's level).
If you have the Bill Clinton's level of communication, you will likely be in other positions.
Now if you have the Bill Clinton's level of coding, you will be software engineer.
I agree that coding is the core skill of software engineering, no question about that. What I don't agree with is when we make it as a deciding factor in interviews for mid and senior levels. At such stage, I'd assume someone who worked for few employers already know how to code and there are different standards of skills we need to hold them for, such as designing relatively complex systems and understanding tradeoffs, communicating these trade offs, how they deal with priorities to ship a functioning software etc etc.
I think we should limit the algorithm problems in an interview to either college graduates/engineers entering the field, or that's an essential part of the job (unlike most Web development)
I just want to add that Resolve is an amazing product no matter how you pay for it. For beginners and professionals alike. You will constantly need help using Premiere and you’ll never think you’re using it right because it’s a sum of mismatch concepts and dead ends. Resolve has a comprehensive design so you can learn how to use it and keep using it that way because the entire software supports those concepts.
The top 5 appear to be teachers, steelworkers, public service workers, autoworkers, and electrical workers. How many of these would you describe as "unskilled"?
You’re a business. You want to turn a profit.