I don’t know. I think you’re right that the root cause is low EQ either way, but at least the low EQ used to be expressed in each’s own personal manner. Your friend/ex/family member might have been an ass but at least they were the ass you had come to know and maybe appreciate to some extent, and that fosters empathy. When they phrase assery in therapy speak, it feels like all of a sudden your familiar relationship has become one-sided and impersonal. And before at least they had to make an effort to justify being a dang dangus — another opportunity to foster empathy.
There’s also a real conflict of interest in therapy where the therapist has a financial interest in pleasing the client but no stake in the wellbeing of the client’s acquaintances (other than the value they provide to the client). Hence empowering them with generic therapy speak around boundaries seems like somewhat of a logical outcome of that (and anecdotally what I’ve observed in my own experiences with therapy and in others who go to therapy)
I’ve been here for ~4.5 years, on 3-4 teams across 2 different orgs. I work as an applied scientist (i.e. data scientist who meets the SDE bar, and works on an engineering team).
My personal experience has been that the reports you’ll find online have been greatly exaggerated. On none of my teams have I been expected to work more than 40 hours/wk, and all of my managers have been nice. I’ve worked 1-3 people who I believe to have been PIP’d, but they were legitimately low performers (highly opinionated, difficult to work with, unproductive).
I don’t doubt people have bad experiences. Amazon leaves a lot of power to managers, and that enables abuse probably more than other companies.
Amazon doesn’t attempt to be as employee-friendly as Google. If that’s important to you, it probably won’t be a good fit.
Amazon mostly focuses on the business, and treats employees mostly as the market requires. For engineers in a tight labor market, that means at least somewhat generously as long as you’re contributing value.
Amazon is known for being a place where nobody will hold your hand. I think the culture of ramping up new employees is weak, and more tenured employees are generally quite focused on their own work. This means a lot of unnecessary stress when you first start here imo, but it also demands some level of entrepreneurialism and self-sufficiency. These are good skills to develop and be held accountable to.
It’s a big company, and whether your experience is positive/negative is mostly a function of the team/manager you end up with.
The promotion process seems intentionally obstructive, although lots of people do get promoted (i.e. most everyone who joins as SDE I and sticks around).
I’ve had (several?) local primary care doctors hint that a fair amount of people working here are either anxious or depressed. Not sure how true that is elsewhere in tech though. I have a suspicion that FAANG companies in general attract a lot of people with existing insecurities, and so I think that might come with the territory to some extent. Though I could totally see Amazon’s culture exacerbating that.
So is it worth it? I’d probably do it again. I don’t love the place as an employer, but it’s not nearly as bad the internet makes it out to be in my personal experience. Many of the employee/culture problems you’ll see at Amazon exist at other FAANG companies (and in corporations in general)… Amazon is somewhat more openly capitalistic and thus the problems probably exist to a somewhat greater degree, but still the variance between mid-large tech companies is much smaller than the variance within them.
Honestly I’m much more bothered by the lack of meaningfulness in having my life’s work being a contribution to a consumerist shopping platform than how Amazon treats me… and in that respect, switching to the addiction/surveillance/advertising FAANGs/other tech companies isn’t much of an upgrade.
I don’t think GP’s claim is entirely accurate. Bing is an input into the results, along with other inputs (Bing is less than majority responsible in most cases iirc). I don’t remember if DDG does any indexing on it’s own.
Hopefully someone more informed can chime in but GP’s claim was strong, provocative, and to my knowledge inaccurate so wanted to correct it.
I feel fairly uneasy about my ownership of my cat. I live alone (besides the cat) and am probably gone 12/16 waking hours per day and obviously asleep the other 8. During the remaining 4, I’m probably cooking, showering, or recreating (not involving the cat). Add all this up and the cat probably gets about 5-10 min of attention from me each day. That’s the entirety of her interaction with any other living thing. Day in, day out.
I’m not an expert but my guess is that that feelings of boredom/loneliness that humans feel are relatively primal and experienced similarly (at some level) in most other mammals. If that’s true at all, it comes to a rough life for domesticated cats.
That’s ignoring the fact that cats usually have large territories that they patrol in the wild while my apartment is 700 sqft as well :\
The pure mathematician is a relatively recent beast though, and most non-graduate students of math (i.e. almost all of them) study mathematics that almost exclusively was developed to solve a problem in the physical world.
Does this resonate with anyone else? Is there any studies on this?
I’ve had a similar experience over the past few years — a ton of work focus (at a FAANGM as an ML scientist/engineer) combined with limited social interaction and I’ve noticed my ability to have normal social interactions has declined greatly (“verbally inept” and “difficulty with empathy” pretty much hit it on the head). There’s potentially confounding factors in my case so I’ve been hesitant to attribute it to overfocusing at work although I’ve considered it may be a cause.
In retrospect I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s not really a worthwhile tradeoff and I’ve been pulling back from work a bit. To add to the larger discussion, I thought I was focusing on work for the right reasons (making a difference in the world, gaining skills, self-actualization) but after getting my “dream job” it turned out that it the job wasn’t very fulfilling at all. No technical challenge or abstract impact metrics really did much for my happiness (or money fwiw)... at the end of the day it’s still rewarding social interactions (which don’t necessarily _have_ to be outside of work) that control the needle for me.
It resonates with me from a different direction. Up until I've become a dad I could crank out vast amounts of code and dive very deep into a given topic relatively quickly, producing extensive results when being able to focus, but since then I have a strict schedule, can't easily say "I'm coming home a few hours later today" or things like that to conserve momentum, I feel my output drastically reduced.
I'm currently looking for ways to reorganize my way of working so I get a better output and require less compromises of my family.
I’ve found it extremely useful to keep a detailed log of my thoughts and ideas as I’m working on a problem that requires focus. It’s like a thread dump or memory dump of my thinking. Then, if I get interrupted for whatever reason, I can easily go back to the notes and “restore” from the thread dump.
I’ve found various side benefits in addition to being able to focus in shorter time windows. For example:
- it’s useful for dealing with interruptions that are part of work too - e.g. if you’re helping teammates with different projects, or have to switch contexts for other reasons.
- it can be useful as an artifact of work. For example, you’ve spent a lot of time debugging a weird issue and you’re still not making progress, so you can use a second set of eyes. You can share your work notes with a coworker so they can immediately know what you’ve tried, what worked or didn’t, etc. In that context, I like to think of it as “offline pair programming”.
I feel the same. My attention span is half of what it was before I had a kid and learning new topics at work has significantly become harder. If you ever figure out a solution, I would love to hear it.
It resonates with me. I hit that once, at my 2nd year at university, as I was in a pretty bad emotional state which almost led me to drop off. Something clicked in my brain then, and I rebounded to extreme levels of drive and productivity (and a weird sense of humor). I nailed that year, went straight from "doesn't even attend classes" to the best student on the year. I earned a pretty good reputation with both my fellow students and faculty members alike. Unfortunately, the effect mostly went away the next year; I regressed to the mean, neither at my worst, nor at my best.
I'd really, really like to know how to enter that state again, and sustain it for longer.
I do that too, and sometimes this gives me bursts of exceptional productivity. But ultimately, it's just a pale shadow of what I had then, a whole year of sustained, exceptional productivity.
I have definitely noticed this in myself and others - after coming out of an intense “in the zone” coding session I’m definitely more cranky and impulsive.
While this is strictly anecdotal, I do believe there is a tight correlation with focus, social and emotional intelligence. In the sense that if I devote all of my “brainpower” to solving a task, I do reduce my ability to understand social queues and other “left brain” stuff.
But as I’ve taken some time to understand my fellow humans better - deliberately putting myself in social situations and reading some great books about it, I’ve noticed the amount of energy required to “process other people” in my brain reducing greatly. This kinda gave me the ability to be pleasant even after doing some coding.
I can think about it like encountering an embedded language inside my templates or something. Like maybe javascript inside html templates.
If I feel comfortable with that language, I don’t even skip a beat, whereas if its something I’m not exactly fluent in, it gets me cranky - who put this in here and ruined its purity kinda feeling.
So it gets better with time, but I had to put deliberate effort into it.
Very much so. As a dev with ADHD, that focus knob is more external than most. But I definitely have noticed the phenomenon where deep focus and verbal/social fluency are rather orthogonal.
I’m interested in how this social breakdown might affect the role of being a scientist. I would think explaining results would be a critical role of your job.
>No technical challenge or abstract impact metrics really did much for my happiness (or money fwiw)
It resonates with me from a different perspective. I can't speak to the technical accomplisments -- I had a mundane tech job -- but I was making nearly 100k in total comp in my mid-20s in a low COL region, and my job was difficult for me. I know this isn't a lot of cash to many here, but it was a lot to me coming from being homeless at 18. However, my life took a bad turn, unfortunately. I had some unbelievable aggressions and weird things happen to me, and I left my job. I remember my history teacher saying of the past "If I was there, I would have done something about it," and yet all everyone told me at this time was something like "You need to stand up for yourself." I think most people today are just like they were back then, even if we are not burning people alive for witch craft, we still sometimes bully people under the name of pretexts and for unacceptable reasons. I then quit, left to try to play one of the most popular online games professionally (I was ranked #40ish at the time). I was really unhappy despite the intense competition and supposed fun and excitement of it. So finally, after that, I started travelling the world. The thing is, I started feeling like I was in heaven. When you travel, it's so easy to make friends and meet so many people in a setting where you are incentivized to share good memories, and not in a rat race or a "keeping up with the Jones's-type" of neighborhood, university or other setting. I mean, maybe it's that I am like a pariah or witch or otherwise bullied person and I dealt with a lot of extreme bullying that destroyed my social life and this contrasted with anything would be good. But I think it's also a lot about what you are saying: it's positive social interactions that really make us happy. I mean, I wouldn't wish my life on anyone, but I somehow found an amazing life out of it this way amidst all of the aggression and chaos.
I think we agree, but there are disadvantages. One is the power thing. "Your rights are theoretical until you have 100M" and a lot of people treat you differently depending on your wealth and status. That said, we know that's not the world we want to find ourselves in, but sometimes it is unavoidable. I know there is some balance, and that I am at some risk not joining into the rat race.
Did you miss the section about Hong Kong and the blanket ban on political/protest content?
The latter is very Brave New World-esque in that it both “keeps the app fun” and acts as a means to suppress dissent. If they have the capability to identify political/protest content, why not label and allow filtering instead of blanket removing all of it from the app?
I think it's very reasonable for a content platform to enforce some kind of norm on speech including against protest content. Back when Tiktok was musical.ly, ie more explicitly devoted to music-based content, I suppose it wouldn't have raised an eyebrow.
Sure, I might be okay with that for a niche community. But social networks tend to be monopolies or oligopolies due to network effects and general audience social network apps (which TikTok is) empirically appear to be the main for platform for large-scale organized protest movement in the internet world we now live in.
I don’t judge it as worthwhile to get rid of such a platform for capitalistic soma reasons. I’m even more suspicious when the company is from a country with close government-business ties where the government has openly demonstrated it uses such apps to suppress political dissent.
It's not clear to me that Tiktok is, or wants to be, a general audience social network. In any case I really haven't seen it used to advertise or organize protests... And let's be honest it is by itself in no monopoly situation...
> I’m even more suspicious when the company is from a country with close government-business ties where the government has openly demonstrated it uses such apps to suppress political dissent.
I agree it's a reason for heightened suspicion but I feel like in this and a lot of stories around Tiktok, the suspicion is close to the only thing there is.
What I don't like about this argument that all platforms, even privately-owned, should be open to political or protest speech, is that the same argument can be used to criticize the moderation of hate speech, conspiracy theories, recruitment for fundamentalist religious terrorism networks, and other toxic social forces. In the US, the law prevents the government from getting involved, so we are dependent on private actors to moderate speech online.
Now if there's something in these policies about Tiktok censoring differently videos of HK protests or criticism of the Chinese communist party vs those of unrelated protests in the US, that would be different. It's not what I've seen though....
The designer of the software should be liable for bugs that cause life and property damages. This makes sense morally, and the costs incurred from damages should be factored into the costs of pricing a driverless car.
This protects the consumer from being responsible for damages they have no control over, provides meaningful competitive incentives for driverless car manufacturers to improve safety, and doesn’t hamstring the industry’s development.
The very same economic globalization that turns out to be rather destructive to the environment?
I wonder if such problems might not end up forcing us to reconsider our trading priorities to account more for geographical distance, instead of just taking that as a given.
There’s also a real conflict of interest in therapy where the therapist has a financial interest in pleasing the client but no stake in the wellbeing of the client’s acquaintances (other than the value they provide to the client). Hence empowering them with generic therapy speak around boundaries seems like somewhat of a logical outcome of that (and anecdotally what I’ve observed in my own experiences with therapy and in others who go to therapy)