So... just like Upwork is providing an opportunity to 'developer entrepreneurs' who want to code but not handle the other aspects of contract work?
Usually platforms like this are rigged so nobody comes out on top except the company providing the platform. Maybe there are awesome chefs working in Doordash food factories but it's probably because they just don't have any better options.
I tried freelance and realized I hate it more than any other type of programming work.
I can tolerate being an employee where I do what I'm told. After a month I get a feel for the environment so it becomes low stress and then I can keep my head down programming. Or I can tolerate selling software or having a SaaS. If I'm CEO I decide the direction of the product and then just have to handle customer support.
But the BS and stress of dealing with clients, contracts, undefined specs and getting paid... I have no f-ing idea how people tolerate it. So good luck with that. It took me way too long to figure out that I absolutely hate working as a contractor.
You should only have to do that in the beginning and strive to earn more so that you can hire an accountant or a firm to keep the booking and calculate your taxes for you. Invoicing is a matter of minutes and some apps even do it for free. Once you've set up your templates for each type of contract and document, you should be good to go. The only true problem in freelancing is generating new (good) leads. That's it. Admin stuff is a piece of cake with today's technology.
> Admin stuff is a piece of cake with today's technology
Do you mean something like deploying every client with the same stack which is easy to admin?
I noticed I started this freelancing thing not giving a second thought about how I would mantain systems running for my clients. I should at least include some kind of monthly fee... (otherwise documentation so they can admin it..)
I never had problems finding a job, but I was really bad at finding good clients.
I especially hate, when I've been brought in for my expertise and I tell them what they should do with the least risk and best outcome and they refuse, because no. I realize there might be some important technical constraint I might not know about, but most of the time they just want to respect something their boss said once, some constraint that wasn't that important at all but makes my work 10x more complicated.
May be true in the US but in Europe you can't just increase your rates. Too many policies are involved with especially larger customers: they have a specific maximum rate they are willing to pay. In addition some agencies usually required to get into larger corps have a limit, too.
Usually contractors are hired to fix rotten stuff that in some way is a commodity. You can find 10 other contractors with the same skillset, maybe cheaper.
For me the nice part of freelancing was the end date. I knew I would be gone in a month or two so could detach myself from the politics and bullshit and just observe. I used to try and think of it in terms of a trip to the zoo.
I hate watching dying orgs or poor performing teams/management. I can't mentally disconnect. It often feels like visiting a poor 3rd world country with an ongoing civil war. You know that you can and will save some souls but also that it won't change/stop the dying.
I think there is a difference between contractor/freelance and consultant. With the latter the client bring you for a general expertise on a type of problem. They don’t care which tech you use (they usually have requirements on the hosting though) as long as you solve the problem for the agreed cost.
The gains from GM crops are a lie[1] - most GM crops are made so agri-chemical companies can sell more pesticide for pesticide-resistant crops. Overuse of pesticides is killing all the insects and ruining soil quality.[2]
If you want to get more efficiency out of the food system you can easily do that by going vegan. Raising livestock provides just 18% of calories but takes up 83% of farmland. If you cut out meat you get 83% of the farmland back. You don't even need to cut out meat completely - just have a couple more meals each week without meat and you're saving many times more than any GM crops could achieve.
I had these thoughts as well, especially about advanced AI,which can go far beyond of what nowadays machine learning is capable of. Yet, if mass dissatisfaction is big enough, a lot of things cease functioning, introspectively of how strong they are. However I agree with the sentiment,that it will most likely be much harder than it used to be even 100 years ago.
The US healthcare system is the only system in the world that bankrupts people for receiving medical care. We constantly hear how we’re getting charged many times more than other countries for the same health services.
Is it really surprising that large segments of the population distrust the medical community? I’m actually one of those people.
Luckily I realize the difference between valid research that has over 100 years of proven effectiveness like the research behind vaccines, versus the type that’s done so there can be a new ad to “ask your doctor” about on TV.
A lot of people generalize and can’t tell the difference. If we want to fix that maybe we should fix the system first.
You can be ambitious and still hate everything to do with career tracks and personal development as seen by large corporations.
I make sure I work somewhere that isn't too stressful, and pace myself as much as possible at the dayjob so I can work 20+ hours per week on my own business.
I wish I could have a 3-day workweek so the other 4 days I could be coding my own projects. After $100k why do people even want more money? I just want more time to work on my projects for a chance to have my own business. I'll never understand why so many people choose to be put into golden handcuffs.
I’m nowhere near Silicon Valley or the west coast - I’m on the opposite side of the country in Atlanta. Yes I know people here live a good life, have a house, go on trips etc with a household income of less than six figures, but making more gives you a lot more “Ands” and less “ors”.
You can have the nice house in the burbs, max out your 401K, enjoy decent date nights with your SO every pay period, save for vacations, pay other people to do stuff you don’t want to do (occasional meal prep, yard service, etc), and have enough left for the things that go bump in the night. Realistically, for all the “ands” it takes about $150K to $200K of household income. That’s without getting the biggest house, the nicest cars and the most expensive vacations.
Also, I see “having my own business” and “having a less stressful life” as being the opposite of each other.
I don’t have to worry about finding customers, budgets, marketing, and I have st least six weeks a year paid time off between vacation time and holidays.
If the company disappears tomorrow I get another job.
My job takes me to many Amazon FCs. The job families that we currently offer through career development classes are usually things like CDL, operations management, dentistry, EMT, process engineering, mechanical tech, etc. It is really a grab bag of what is most highly requested by the diverse working cohort at each FC.
Code as HN would think of it is not as common, but associates becoming IT or facilities technicians or engineers(remember, these things are teeming with robotics and conveyor systems) is highly common.
can you add some detail here? Are the career development classes intended to prepare people for life outside Amazon? Or does Amazon have company dentists?
Perhaps too many small dental practices though (or there is a massively underserved need? There seems to be a new dental practice every week in Seattle...).
I've complained numerous times at my FC that none of the career programs are actually careers, and that none of the degree programs offer anything higher than an associates degree. FC employees with any technical expertise and a desire to retrain somewhere in the Amazon network beyond the FC system seem to be SOL. Of course, the situation might differ between facilities.
And I work at a FC near the second biggest tech hub in the US... it would be easy pickings for Amazon (pun intended) but it seems like no dice. But if I want a second associates' degree and to restart my career as a truck driver or paralegal at 40, I can do that.
17% strikes me as not bad. Not great, but not awful. People who take jobs that are at eminent risk of automation probably weren't exceptionally diligent in school the first time around. Add in the burdens of adulthood (parenting, bills, etc) and the odds of staying in a retraining program seem bleak.
17% sounds good to me. I did co-op at Elections Ontario and the place is just chock full of barely employable people who resist change to the status quo.
You poor bastard. I worked for the federal government too.
I remember being told that working for the government for more than a few years would make me unemployable in the private sector. The idea was one's work ethic would be irremediably damaged. I thought that was foolish at the start of my time there, but a year later I had a new respect for the heuristic.
There are a bunch of different programs targeting different cohorts. Associate2Tech and AmazonCareer choice are targeting the fulfillment center workers.
ATA is incredibly successful at small scale. Biggest challenge is scaling it up + making it work for everyone. If you are familiar with amazon's think big and pr faqs, educated guesses can be made as to the end vision for that program.
Actually, he says it's 0-15 percent, which I've always assumed is just the granularity of the study to which he refers.
Alternatively, since those retraining programs were focused on specific industries or occupations in manufacturing in specific regions, maybe it's the range of results in those occupations/regions.
Never heard him say specifically 17 percent (and I have pretty much watched everything Andrew Yang related ;)
Amazon doesn't care about the success rate. They just need positive spin they can point to for any layoffs. "See, we had these retraining programs in place for our recently redundant workers."
> I wonder what the success rate is for their retraining program to turn factory workers into coders.
Probably about 0% for their warehouse workers: they're so exhausted by the end of their shifts that they won't have the energy to learn, and their most at risk of losing their jobs to automation.
This is a feel-good announcement that will likely do little good without other management changes that Amazon is probably loathe to make.
1. Is it really too much to believe that someone with a physically demanding job might be in good enough condition to do something else after work? I'm pretty sure folks in all sorts of physical jobs have physical hobbies as well. You never hear this sort of excuse about carpenters.
2. It's hard to work full time and go to school after. It's by definition going above and beyond.
"Excuse"? You think people are being too lenient about the warehouse workers? Those jobs are awful, and it's not about simply being a physical job. I would much rather do carpentry.
There are a lot of awful jobs. Roofer in Phoenix in the summer, for example.
No, I don't think people are being too lenient -- it's a bit more subtle than that. There are many physically demanding jobs, some as much or more so than warehouse worker. I was questioning why we never see people say people in those job families couldn't possibly study after a day at work.
What you want to do is also irrelevant, as you might have an enjoyment of carpentry. Me, I hate it, and would rather be a warehouse worker.
Amazon warehouse jobs aren't just physically demanding. I agree that one can study hard after half a day spent on some physical effort. Instead the problem is that Amazon pickers are under constant stress all those hours to meet targets far more demanding than most other jobs. I would expect that constant mental stress to leave people so frazzled at day's end that they would be unable to hit the books and concentrate.
And you've just made my point for me. "Most" other jobs. It's not the most difficult, most physical, most dangerous. Where are the people saying people in job "X" can't possibly study after a day at work? Somehow, that reasoning is confined to warehouse workers.
>Probably about 0% for their warehouse workers: they're so exhausted by the end of their shifts that they won't have the energy to learn, and their most at risk of losing their jobs to automation.
I work at one of those warehouses and people do try to put in the effort to learn - unfortunately, Amazon only offers Associates' Degree level education and (judging from public complaints) all but forces people to work night shifts and extra hours to keep their numbers up, and doesn't actually teach the classes well, because of course their first, primary and overriding interest is in having their warehouse employees meet their quotas and fulfill business needs.
Which is why I recently just suggested that people just take Udemy courses and stay away from Amazon's offers altogether.
I have a brother in law going through this process. Having young kids seems to be enough motivation to work more after brutal overnight shifts. He recently immigrated to the US.
I worked harvest and was a janitor in college and still had energy to study. I had no time to do anything else but it was strangely “easy” at the time because I had no distractions.
Youth helped me for sure but I did it later in life than most people.
I was motivated because I believed my effort would pay off. That may be easier without the experience of age but I don’t think anyone is excluded from that possibility.
It's completely dependent on the traffic of the site if a spammer takes the time to break a custom captcha.
I work on a site with 10 million monthly pageviews and spammers register on a form that has recaptcha and email verification... and we tried hidden input fields and other tricks, but each day we have consistently had 5 new spam accounts. With SVG they can just take a screenshot of what a user sees and send that to OCR. Complex math will turn away as many legitimate users as spammers.
The only real way to stop spam is to use a 3rd party API to detect it, or use something like a karma system that builds up over time. I think we're at the point where simple solutions won't work well unless you have a small site.
That's true when we talk about 10M monthly pageviews, but I doubt that this little extension will reach such popularity levels. If this somehow happens, by that time there will be a way to enable 3rd party captchas for any page.
Usually platforms like this are rigged so nobody comes out on top except the company providing the platform. Maybe there are awesome chefs working in Doordash food factories but it's probably because they just don't have any better options.