Another advantage of the "it's on your phone" aspect is Consistency. You get into a new car, all you need to figure out is how to open CarPlay, no need to learning a completely different and often complicated infotainment system.
For people who use car share services, this is a godsend. It feels like every other trip we take is in a new vehicle we've never used before, but all we have to do is plug the phone in (which we would do to charge anyway) and when we bring up maps to check the route to my in-laws' place it already has the address saved, my playlists available, etc.
15 years ago a FAANG flew me from England to the US for a grad interview. The HR recruiter met me for a coffee before the tech interviews started and said she'd ask me some gentle questions to ease me into the day.
She opened with "do you believe in god?" Not knowing laws or workers' rights in a foreign country then I had to give a very stunted, mumbled response. I complained after I got back home and was told she should not have asked that question.
A 30 min 1-1 per week per report would be a full working day. Never mind that if you're an IC then you'll also be expected to support other people using your code, as well as analysing and approving decisions for your reports.
It might be better to have 45 minutes every 2 weeks with reports, which is 1.5 days every 2 weeks. Then probably another 2 days every two weeks for sideways and upwards meetings, 2 days for ad hoc planning and design work, and 4 days for coding and reviewing.
And that assumes nothing unplanned happens and there's nothing that expands in any domain. It's just a way to burn out everyone and create a culture of toxic positivity because you are gonna get fired otherwise.
30 minutes of chat is one thing but one might expect work to come out of it such as things you have to do for or about that person.
IMO it's just efficient to use any excuse to say "what's up, how did the house move go?" or whatever and make sure that you do that with everyone and that you behave in such a way that they don't fear or hate to have a 5 minute chat and know you are ready to listen if they want to say more. i.e. to take an actual interest in each person.
I don't know for sure, but from his CV, I'd guess I am similar in age to the author. He described remembering the venue (possibly separately to it being the meeting's venue) but not the meeting itself. I would have similar selective memories of business events from 10-15 years ago, amongst years of many meetings and opportunities. Sometimes I have a strong memory of one aspect, but no recollection at all of another. And I can identify with finding that email phrasing (about someone's "situation") being something that might prompt me to send it to people close to me as a sort of "look what happened to me today" thing.
Depends upon how tight knit is the family, yes, it seems strange for me as well. Members in some families are unusually friendly. My family won't even trust me hosting them an Immich library.
In my experience many of them do feel like they're doing something important, and some seem principally motivated to do the job by the promise of being able to bully travellers.
First I agree TSA is mostly theater... however if you HAD to have it, you want the people to work like this. I might be old-school but I think everyone should have pride and responsibility in their work. Even if from the outside it is meaningless.
100% no reason to be a bully, that is not pride/responsibility. Every job has ass assholes.
>Yeah, but jobs that are police-adjacent have them at a very high rate. Almost like they select for it or something...
Proximity to violence is probably the measuring stick you're looking for.
Police spend the bulk of their day credibly threatening violence. Just about every word that comes out of their mouth, pen or keyboard while they're at work is implicitly back by an "or else". Everyone who isn't an asshole is gonna wash out of that job, start doing something behind a desk, start a PI firm, etc. etc. So you're left with rookie and assholes and the occasional exception.
The TSA, all your non-police state and municipal enforcement agencies, etc, etc, are gonna serve to concentrate "asshole lites" people because anybody who isn't will have issues spending their day dispensing what are basically "do as I say, or pay what I say, or else the police will do violence on you" threats on behalf of the state and so they'll jump ship as they become jaded same as cops do, but the pressures are less because they're not as proximate to the violence.
You can take this a third step out. There are all sorts of industries, jobs, etc, etc. that exist soley to keep the above two groups off your back. Nobody wants to hire these people, but are basically forced to under 3rd hand thread of violence. Same effect, but still watered down.
Even more removed are jobs where some fraction of the business is driven to you under similar circumstances. For example, ask any mechanic. People forced to be there by a state inspection program are consistently the worst customers. And there's the same wash out effect. People get tired of arguing about tread depth or whatever and they go turn wrenches on forklifts or whatever.
Proximity to petty power might be a better measuring stick. The same sorts of people gravitate to those jobs as the people who sit at the DMV window and tell you you need to get back in line, wait another two hours, and go to a different DMV window with the correct form.
Probably the reverse: obnoxious people who seek badge-given authority but fail police entry exams (e.g. the psych part), carry on to other forms of employment that offer badges and uniforms, but have lax standards.
If I have a question for SO these days then I ask Claude instead and tell it to use SO where possible. It's preferable to actually asking it on SO which often results in the question being edited, downvoted and closed by someone with an anime child profile picture.
What was the question like? "How to print a decimal in C"? Valuable questions aren't downvoted. If you ask about something that could be found on the first Google page, then no surprise you are being downvoted.
I asked a novel question, well-written and clear, and a "subject matter expert" decided it was too similar to another question (it wasn't), so they defaced it, downvoted it and closed it.
Stack Overflow is dying, it's extremely difficult to get new questions through. Even if they survive moderation then they're unlikely to get answers.
It's become a lot more difficult to win online since online poker was banned in the USA. The USA sat at a huge net loss online and every other country profited.
At every age, there's a high attrition of students participating in competitive sports, until only a tiny elite remains. Is that what we want for reading and math?
yes, because the alternative is to have kids who can't actually read being dragged along and dragging down kids who can read. What's wrong with a tiny elite remaining if it's based on actually being able to do the work?
The biggest red flag here for me is not that the tiny elite remain, it's that life circumstances will dictate that the majority of the tiny elite will continue to come from privileged families who have the time and resources to give their kids a leg up. BUT pushing kids into places where they objectively cannot compete intellectually or physically under the auspices of fairness is the devil's work. We need constant work at creating equality and to lower barriers to social services, not "fairness" and pretending everyone is already equal.
When I was 8, in the first grade, I hummed in class. I read comic books, I napped, I generally fucked about, around, and several other prepositions. I did this to such an extent that the teacher wanted to shunt me into the shame places you want to shunt these kids into. Fortunately my mother caught wind of this and, knowing what level my intellect was at when it was allowed a little freedom and presented with a challenge, raised actual holy hell at that little Catholic school outside Pittsburgh. Thank God she did, because I ended up being tested and started along the gifted track. My brother in law, otoh, is just as smart as me and just as defiantly internal as me. He didn't have an advocate. For him, school was 12 years of no resources, no opportunities, no goals, and memorizing a copy of The Lion King on VHS. Now I make a tidy living as a software engineer and I'm pretty decent at it. He lives at home with his mom because he never graduated high school, so he stays in all day and hand-hacks NES roms literally bit by bit. He's a shitload better than me at a very valuable thing and no one can take advantage of that, not him, not some employer, not society in general, because he was disposed of by a school system that wanted to get him out of the way of all the future contributors.
This idea that school is a place where kids compete with one another, the weak are weeded out and the strong are rewarded with additional resources is a disgusting perversion of an institution we used to recognize as providing a baseline for everyone. And it simply doesn't work.
> yes, because the alternative is to have kids who can't actually read being dragged along and dragging down kids who can read.
Failing to teach kids how to read is a failure of the school system, not the kid.
Dropping kids because the school system failed them is just yet another failure of a school system, and one which is at best a self-serving failure: a way to mask the extent of which the system is broken by blaming the victims of said system.
As an exercise, invest a few minutes thinking on why most communities do not experience this failure rate.
this, absolutely. when the person you're replying to asked "What's wrong with their being a tiny elite" they seem to be purposely ignoring the fact that what we're measuring is competence in basic skills. A school isn't supposed to take in 100 kids and turn out 99 droupouts and one nuclear physicist. A school is supposed to take in 100 kids and turn out 100 kids who can read, write, do math and understand how their society works well enough to participate in it meaningfully.
And if the kid can't do that at a 3rd grade level at the end of 3rd grade, isn't it much better to have them repeat 3rd grade than to push then into 4th grade and hope something changes?
> And if the kid can't do that at a 3rd grade level at the end of 3rd grade, isn't it much better to have them repeat 3rd grade than to push then into 4th grade and hope something changes?
That's besides the point, and orthogonal to the discussion. If after 3 years a school system failed to teach kids how to read, that represents a failure of the school system. If a school system feels the need to hold kids back so early in hopes that subjecting them yet again to the same school system that already failed them will somehow improve outcomes, this means the same school system is not investing in fixing the real problem.
This is like buying bad tires. If a tire blows up, you can argue all you want that changing the tire is much better than keeping a flat tire on. But the root cause is that the tire blows up, isn't it? Changing a bad tire with yet another bad tire won't fix the problem, will it? The tire you just added will easily blow up again, and everyone else buying those tires will go through the same problem.
I repeat, advocating for holding kids back and even rejecting underperforming kids from the school system is a Hallmark of a deeply broken, unsalvageable system. The only purpose of these approaches is to falsify the actual quality of the work performed by the school system, and generating fraudulent statistics of success at the expense of throwing kids under the bus.
That's how it used to work. But people noticed that some groups got held back at higher rates than others, and there were accusations of isms, and so most schools decided it would be better for everyone involved to stop doing that. Also, holding a kid back came to be seen as cruel since the other kids would make fun of him, which was probably true.
For the same reason, they mostly got rid of "tracks," where an age group would be divided into different classrooms according to test scores and previous grades rather than random chance, so the 'A' fourth grade room could go at a different pace from the 'B' fourth grade room. All that's left of that is gifted programs, which people somehow accept even though they're just the mirror image of holding kids back.
There's really not a good answer, because like it or not, learning ability varies, so if you put 25 kids in the same classroom for no reason other than their being the same age and living in the same neighborhood, some are going to struggle and fail and some are going to cruise and be bored.
I don't want to strawman your argument but it sounds like you're saying that if you're in 3rd grade one year you should be in 4th grade the next year no matter what. That there's nothing you actually need to learn in 3rd grade in order to be advanced to 4th grade.
I would say that the point is that you can't just look at one datapoint, especially if there are other things affecting it.
The most obvious case of this is comparing private vs public schools, where the private schools can be selective and kick out anyone who doesn't perform or they don't like, but the public schools have to accept everyone by law.
Obviously failing anyone who cannot read from getting to 4th grade will greatly improve 8th grade reading scores.
Those failing kids eventually make it to the 8th grade, however, and affect statistics. Still, having lived there and attending one of the better middle and high schools near Vicksburg, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were gaming the system in some way (I hope they aren’t and these gains are real, though).
If a kid achieves a great 8th grade test score at age 18, is that a success or a failure of the system?
What we care about is the level of achievement by a given age. To determine that, we need to be comparing states using standardized tests given to age groups, not grade levels. It is fine to hold students back, if we think that will do them more good than advancing them. But they still need to be tested the same way as their age group if we want to do a meaningful comparison between states.
You are strawmanning my argument as I didn't say anything like that. I said that if you are going to evaluate a policy with statistics, you need to compare apples to apples because statistics are easily biased.
See this example of a paradox that applies a lot in educational settings: you can raise the average level of two classes just by shuffling students from one to another:
> So explain to me what "eliminating bad data points" in this context means. Should MS schools not hold back failing 3rd graders
The data point is the number of 3rd graders failing. If you insist in filtering out those 3rd graders, limiting your analysis to the subset of kids who didn't failed does not represent a success story. It represents an attempt to arbitrarily remove inconvenient data points to portray a false idea if success.
I disagree, I think it points to a core educational policy difference between states. Some states will not fail a 3rd grader, and Mississippi will. This has an obvious impact on 4th grade scores, yes, but I'm willing to bet if you followed those "failed" 3rd graders in MS and compared to other states where they were pushed ahead, holding under-achieving students back is a net positive.
> (...) holding under-achieving students back is a net positive.
Even if we assume that's the case, that's not the problem.
The problem is that the school system fails to provide the necessary and sufficient services that would prevent a statistically significant number of 3rd graders from being held back. Feeling the need to hold kids back is a symptom of the problem, not a solution.
This way of thinking is how we end up with a ton of spending and not a ton of results.
I strongly suspect that Mississippi should be allocating more resources to education. But this is a political problem and the schools have nearly no say in whether the legislature does or does not increase funding.
So. Do we close down the schools and wait until it is resolved?
Or do the schools do the best they can with the resources they have? Do you have evidence that placing kids in the most skill-appropriate classroom is a worse use of available resources than placing them in the “correct” classroom based on age or previous cohort?
> This way of thinking is how we end up with a ton of spending and not a ton of results.
"Ton of spending" are weasel words. "Not a ton of results" is already the problem.
If your school system fails to teach kids how to read after 3 years, this is a school system that fails at it's primary and most basic responsibility. These third-graders are not the problem, they are the canary in the coal mine.
Advocating for holding back third graders and expelling underperformers is a kin to advocate for getting rid of canaries because they are a nuisance when assessing health and safety.
An obvious comparison seems like it would be to compare age cohort rather than grade cohort. Your question confuses a comment on objective methodology with one a more subjective one on the response to that.
> I don't want to strawman your argument but it sounds like you're saying that if you're in 3rd grade one year you should be in 4th grade the next year no matter what.
If a school system is designed so that the average kid in 3rd grade is expected to be in 4th grade the following year, the fact that a statistically significant subset of kids is not able to meet that bar is a sign that the system is failing those kids.
What's the goal here? Is it to get pretty metrics by filtering out the failures, or is it to provide an effective education to all kids?
How do you know its statistically significant? Nothing in the article (or anywhere else I looked) suggests a "statistically significant" portion of 3rd graders, whatever that means, are being held back.
> Who would have thought that not pushing kids forward into an academic environment they're not prepared for would be beneficial?
I think the point is that the school system is outputting kids that are not prepared for the academic environment they create themselves for these kids. So instead of fixing the problem, they are eliminating the bad results to inflate the success statistics.
The author posted a link to an article[1] showing that Mississippi's retention policies were not responsible for the increase in scores.
> But I've gotten some plausible pushback from researchers who say that Mississippi has always held back lots of kids. In practice, the 2013 law didn't change anything.
> ...
> In 2017, the average age of a fourth grade class is a minuscule 0.01 higher than the 1998-2013 average. That's no difference at all. This proxy is strong evidence that Mississippi's retention policies never changed in practice, which means it's entirely kosher to just compare their scores normally before and after reform.
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