>I think Sam Altman is an asshole and I prefer to spend my money elsewhere.

That's why he chose the OpenAI logo

If anything though, this shows that at least tech driven hype bubbles can stay around way longer than we think if we are looking at it from a product POV.

This just means short sellers might have a hard time sinking a hype-category stock with reasoned research because the irrationality keeps it afloat.

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - John Maynard Keynes

Sometimes I wonder if Keynes would under the current conditions see fit to differentiate "merely irrational" from "absolutely insane".

This is why the 'craft' should be left to open source for most commercial software. The business reality just doesn't care for it.

Only when you have a PR problem does the business switch back to signalling quality, like Microsoft, although it remains to be seen if they still have the quality part. Most of the craftspeople get to say 'told you so' but also it looks like a sinking ship to them. Once the PR problem is gone, it's back to shipping at the expense of quality.

This cycle conflicts with the idea of a craft, which is that you should do it that way all/most of the time. The business will stop caring about quality long enough that your skills will erode, making it a bad mix. Trying to practice a craft where you aren't in control of this cycle is corrosive to the spirit.

All we can really do is point and laugh. Boards don't listen to workers, and I bet most boards will be okay with a little spending oopsie-daisy because it was 'try shit and see if it works out'

I doubt it, but I've seen dumber stuff like laying off people because they think AI will replace them

PE has a bad reputation, maybe for LBOs, maybe for buying up doctors' offices and retirement homes, and hospitals and making them objectively worse in terms of patient care.

My family doctor underwent that along with several of her local peers and got out from under it and started her own practice. I'm obviously not her only patient, so yes, heightening stress on caregivers by demanding more work to drive profits higher is justifiable of a bad reputation.

Leaving things like medical care, food, water, shelter at the mercy of for-profit dynamics leaves the possibility open that those services stop being provided because it is unprofitable at the expense of the population.

America is deciding it likes profit over its population.

That's probably the goal

You get nothing being the go-to person vs. the person that just does the job

That's heinous. Their firm should stay away from sports car brands.

This would be more meaningful if, perhaps, we had to swear an oath to it before being able to practice. And practitioners would be treated more seriously if everyone knew we swore that oath. And the legal utility as accountability and defense would also be useful.

Of course people are going to ignore it if there's no force behind it.

Professional liability and licensure would create assurances with some teeth, but there are some major drawbacks.

Enlighten us to these drawbacks. On the surface I am inclined to say the pros would outweigh the cons. Compared to other professions, software engineering seems to struggle the most with H-1B/Green Card abuse and interview processes. Job interviews are absurdly different (easier) for doctors, lawyers, et al. than for software engineers, and that I believe is because of the licensure. I do think licensure adds overhead to an industry (e.g., malpractice insurance, governing bodies, license management) and that probably discourages anyone with real power (like FAANG) to pursue it and try to set it as an industry-wide standard. Most software engineers in the U.S. are making around $130-140k, but lawyers and medical doctors usually make significantly more (perhaps because of the licensure overhead - I'm not sure if malpractice insurance is included in a medical doctor's salary- I would imagine it's not and is taken out of each paycheck like any other industry's health insurance benefits).

> "Job interviews are absurdly different (easier) for doctors, ..."

The job interview for doctors is a 5-7 year residency under tight supervision of an attending physician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine) . People do flunk or drop out as well, meaning they can never become a physician. There's nothing easier about that.

I think the parent commenter agrees with you: because there is tight quality assurance and - in many countries - a license needed to practice medicine, the interviewer can just trust the system instead of having to evaluate the competence of the applicant through questions and coding assignments.

(I'm not sure whether I agree with the commentator that a SE license would be that helpful in practice.)

It seems to work somewhat with medical doctors and the Hippocratic Oath.

But I would argue it is way easier there. Building software has way more grey areas.

I don't think there are more grey areas in software engineering than in medicine. The difference is the feedback loop of the outcome - if you design a dopamine slot machine you will ruin the generation and that's a long arc.

And that makes it hard. I am open for banning all comercial advertisement - but general society is largely fine with it. So is someone designing new targeting algorithm for ads breaking his potential oath of doing good for society?

What grey areas are there for doctors?

Tangential, but where do you draw the line on commercial advertisement? If a podcast is sponsored by a business & supports behavior the business benefits from, is the podcast advertising? What if it also contains useful educational content related to that activity?

There probably will never be a clear line and none of this is realistic, but I would start with banning all flashy light polluting physical advertisements. Any advertisement people cannot evade.

A podcast I can choose to listen or not. A news site I can also evade. But any (internet) service people must use, should be ad free. Ideally all of society, but any regulation here will have a hard time in the real world.

Canadians do

I just do business apps and websites, and it pays the bills, but none of it is really interesting since a lot of it involves recurring patterns and simply fixing other peoples' past mistakes (and future people will probably fix mine). I give a shit only because doing that means less work and annoyances and not getting fired, but I still only give a shit 8 hours a day, usually less.

All this advice runs into time constraints and luck, which means you can get unlucky trying 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. things and you're not good at any of them while you still have bills to pay.

It's also an accessibility problem as some careers are gated by degrees (physician) or capital (farming). Doing the sample work (shadowing a physician, hired farm worker) to see if you like it has a risk of not giving a real picture of the actual work. If that happens, you have to rely on tenacity to stick it out.

Some people need to be in the deeper parts of the job before their brain kicks on and starts enjoying it (just being a hired laborer at a farm vs. owning and running the farm) because they don't have any 'ownership' when it's just a job.

All this to say that the quick advice like the OP is technically right, but it has about the same nuance and considerations of reality as clubbing baby seals.

I don't think the point was finding a job that isn't work. My job is definitely work; I wouldn't be doing it if I wasn't getting paid. It's more about just being good at it.

There's definitely luck involved. I'm lucky to have found a thing with basically zero barriers to entry (computing). But maybe I'd be even better as a farmer or physician. We will never know.

It's good enough just to find something that you don't struggle in, though. Not swimming upstream, as the OP puts it.