The high prices due to Donnie's policies absolutely impact me. I paid $5 for a piece of plastic that before used to cost $2. I paid $55 / fire alarm - this used to be under $30. I paid $55 for 2 dishes at a "cheap" Chinese take-out. At these prices I balked at buying some Chinese food for myself - I only bought these dishes for my son to eat.
This reminds me of this joke: How many MAGAs does it take to screw in a light bulb? None - they all sit in the dark clapping while Donnie tells them the light is on.
A few weeks before the tariff idiocy, I paid $320 including shipping for an ebike battery from the EU. When it arrived, it included a bill for an additional $350 from US Customs. That's insane, I refused.
When returning to sender, the package disappeared, presumably into Customs. I'm out $320 and still no battery.
You NEED to be getting at least 1 interview (with a human, never do one sided AI interviews) per month.
Interviewing is a skill and unfortunately the best way to practice that skill is real interviews.
If a month goes by without a single interview, that is all the feedback you need that you need to try something different.
It's good that you have made it a routine to apply, I would just try to fine tune your application towards specific roles.
Also consider how AI is changing what employer's are looking for. The job posting you're seeing likely exists because underneath is something that AI can't do. i.e Perhaps that simply means knowing how best to leverage AI or there's some communication / ownership element to the role that they want a human to be in charge of, etc.
If you look at things in this way you'll apply for fewer jobs. Some days you may not apply to any because none meet your criteria.
So the TLDR here is to remember it's more about focused quality instead of playing the numbers and aiming for quantity.
That "incentive" already exists in the form of cheaper housing the further away you go.
I agree that commuting should be considered as part of "work", but I always took into account commute time when considering job opportunities. The pay obviously never had an explicit "commute" line, but my math was "this job + this commute for this pay". Figure if it's worth it or not.
Salaried employees are already paid for their labour, I'm not paid hour by hour.
If I work one extra hour, was that unpaid and my employer stealing from me? If I work one hour less, is that me stealing from my employer? No on both counts in my opinion.
When picking a job I consider a commute a cost already and would need to be compensated for it in the form of higher pay.
But I don't think we should artificially stack the deck in favour of people who live close to work, that just adds a totally fake and unneeded item to the long list of advantages e.g. non parents have over parents who need a bigger house or access to schools.
Everyone already does. If a job involves picking up toxic sludge, commuting long distances, or any other badness factors, you're going to get paid more because the labor market will clear at a higher price. This is how all markets function, the labor market is no exception. I believe governments should fix market failures, but this isn't an example of a market failure.
You could maybe make an argument only for minimum wage jobs as a special case, because the price for labor can't freely adjust downwards if you force companies to also pay for commute.
The Efficient Market Hypothesis is an approximation at best, and fails hard at labor issues.
Employee salaries don't fluctuate continuously. In most cases, labor loading - the number of warm bodies paid to be there 9-5 - can't fluctuate much, quickly (with the exception of catastrophic business failure). Salaries and wages almost never go downwards for employees already hired. Etc.
The most ironic part is that AI skills won't really help you with job security.
You touched on some of the reasons; it doesn't take much skill to call an API, the technology is in a period of rapid evolution, etc.
And now with almost every company trying to adopt "AI" there is no shortage of people who can put AI experience on their resume and make a genuine case for it.
Any overlap between interview skills and job performance is a coincidence.
You have to accept this on a visceral level.
Alternatively, remember that the reason the company is making you jump through these hoops is that there are many other candidates who are equally qualified.
Competent people do pass the filter, but what Leetcode interviews do filter out are people with a shred of creativity who just won't submit themselves to the drudgery of studying useless crap for an interview – the kind of people who need purpose to always align with work or part of them dies. Avoiding these people is great for a company that's all about boosting it's ad revenue, and also great for the applicant who dodged a bullet.
I get it but it's sort of a strange thing to ask people to accept no?
like asking people to accept that 1+1=3. or that the day after Monday is Thursday. maybe that's the real function of these hoops -- selecting people who are good at doublethink
It is accomplishing something. When 40 different applicants are equally able to do the job, the only selector you have is "culture fit", which is where bias starts to easily kick in (race, age, whatever), and that is a legal risk.
The leetcode hoops exist to provide a provably objective measure for hiring, even though that measure is unrelated to job performance. It's purely a lawsuit avoidance mechanism.
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