Yes. Kind of. Anything involving home invasion I’ve usually seen them go in like an occupying force. Including the time i called them because a small group was going around the neighborhood trying to break into houses. They show up with bullet proof vests and assault rifles at the ready and pull everyone out of their houses.
There is huge variation in what the US trend looks like from the ground that varies by region, age, income level, industry, and demographic.
EI think if you’re a professional class baby boomer the trajectory has looked fantastic through your life.
If you’re a 35 middle income living on the coasts (where at least 100 million Americans live) you may have watched affordability collapse and QOL decease significantly over the last decade.
“ Most of the attraction of living there historically was its extremely business-friendly environment.”
How old are you? What propaganda told you this? In my generation (young millennial/genz) the attraction of living in Seattle, which pulled me and almost a dozen professional friends at this point has been:
- high quality urban living in a temperate environment. Including access to great parks, waterfront, bikeability in the city
- access to great outdoors and regional amenities like skiing, ocean fishing, hiking, wine country
- liberal policies and general friendly society (it’s friendlier here than the east coast)
- no state income tax (we’re all very high tax bracket)
- a high enough income population that you can find a plethora of high-end products and services that cluster around high income earners (only a few us cities have this stronger than Seattle I feel)
Oregon ticks most of those boxes except the difference is that Oregon has very few jobs. People flock to WA because of jobs created by long-standing business friendly policies.
That doesn't explain everything, obviously, but I think you need to take it into consideration. For decades I've heard this in some form from people: "Oregon is amazing, but I had to leave when I couldn't get a job." Meanwhile the Sea-Tac region has had amazing growth, packed wall-to-wall with a range of companies.
I agree, difference between explosive growth and “consistent draw” is large employers setting up in the region.
Another interesting anecdote is that I know many people who work remote for companies all over the world who moved to the Seattle area once they had a remote job. I am one of these people who moved once I got a remote job. Im not sure what kind of impact this has long run. I think the flywheel drawing high skill people to Seattle is still very strong.
For my demographic (Early genz), there are only 3 reasons to be here:
A. Their job is only available here
B. No state income tax
(C?). They REALLY love skiing/hiking
People have always regularly left for NYC/Bay Area, but I predict it will start to happen in droves over the next few years as A rapidly fades and legislation begins to threaten B.
Ok so if that labor was someone’s job, that implies they couldn’t get something better for them. If you’re straight eliminating those jobs and now they have to take something even worse for them (lower pay, worse hours, worse personal satisfaction, etc)
Did you read anything I said? Who's losing their job when almost all tourism jobs are done by foreign seasonal workers? The locals mostly aren't losing any job because they don't work in tourism due to pay and work conditions.
Are you using the same logic to cry for the western workers making clothes and sneakers who lost their jobs to Asian sweatshops? Do you think they miss that type of jobs and would want them back?
I think the only part of that statement I kind of agree with is the “large home” part.
It’s much easier to afford good schools, safe neighborhood, luxuries and travel in most of Western Europe than it is in the US. Because the first two are basically free, travel is cheap, so you have plenty left over for luxuries (unless you want like race cars or something)
Good schools are certainly not free in most Western European countries, in fact for most middle class families, it's one of their biggest expenses to put their 2-3 kids through secondary schools.
There’s a massive disconnect here between a “good school” in the US and an expensive international school, and no definition of middle class where a majority of families pay for it. “most Western European countries” is not a thing. Nonsense.
What are you working on that they are so knowledgeable?Even the best models absolutely make stuff up, even to this day. I literally spend all day every day working with them (all latest ChatGPT models) and it’s still 10-15% BS.
I had ChatGPT 5.2 thinking straight up make up an api after I pasted the full api spec to it earlier today. And built its whole response around a public api that did not exist. And Claude cli with sonnet 4.5 made up the craziest reason why my curl command wasn’t working (that curl itself was bugged, not the obvious it can’t resolve the dn it tried to use) and almost went down a path of installing a bunch of garbage tools.
Just today I had Claude Opus 4.5 try to write to a fictional Mac user account on my computer during a coding session. It was pretty weird - the name was very specific and unique enough that it was clear it was likely bleed through from training data. It wasn’t like “John Smith” or something.
That’s the kind of thing that on a large scale could be catastrophic.
for coding, if you have not hooked up your workflow to a test -> code feedback loop, then you are doing it incorrectly. i agree it doesn't get things right all the time but this loop is important to correct it.
for other things like normal question answering in the chatgpt window, it hasn't really said anything incorrect.. very very few instances.
There aren’t Nazi-style extermination camps in the U.S., but an extermination camp is just a subset of concentration camps. There are large-scale immigration detention facilities, with 60k+ people on any given day, where tens of thousands of people are held without criminal trials. Enforcement often targets identity proxies like race, accent, neighborhood, sweeps up citizens and legal residents, uses expedited deportations with effectively suspended habeas, and operates with extremely limited judicial oversight and blatantly ignores judicial rulings.
These are concentration camps, or at least so close that I’m rhetorically OK with it. All of the famous concentration camp programs of history started the same way. And there’s always an excuse for why “no no no, our program is different, these people are illegal, we have to operate like this (suspended legal rights and oversight) to stop the bad people, it’s not targeted by race/religion/etc it’s just the bad people all happen to be like that…”
This may come as a shock to someone stuck in a radical far left bubble but people who are not either a citizen of one of the several states or not a citizen of the federal government (nor both) are not parties to the agreement that is the constitution.
"concentration camp" isn't a root command line term to people with critical thinking skills.
Anyone who is neither a state citizen or federal citizen and does not have a valid VISA (or some equivalent) is an unlawful invader.
Again, this may come as a shock to someone stuck in a radical far left bubble, but most Americans' sentiment, the Americans who are busy raising their families, the ones who actually pay all the taxes that pay to house and feed all of these unlawful invaders stuck in limbo is: they are lucky we don't just kill them all.
I know it's shocking to those stuck in a radical far left bubble, but it's the reality. The state governments and federal governments were formed to protect what the founders wrote: "our posterity". Not every third world rando who shows up for the gibs Biden promised rather than fix their own country.
If you want to be effective in your activism, try to avoid "rhetorical correct" terms. Those terms only work on a particular lower class and only piss off the people with critical thinking skills because it comes across as trying to bullshit them in a malicious way (which it is).
There’s always an excuse. “They” are always unlawful invaders. “They” are always a danger to our children and our posterity. “They” are always not deserving of the same rights as “us”. The excuse is always “justified” in the eyes of fascists and people fooled by their rhetoric.
Hemingway was right when he said “There are many Americans who are fascists without knowing it.”
Whenever this comes up I feel like I work on completely different kinds of software than most people here. (Giant, backend, distributed systems projects at FAANG)
I’ve never worked on anything large in software where the time it will take can be reasonably deduced at the accuracy some people here seem to assume possible. The amount of unknown-unknowns is always way way too large and the process of discovery itself extremely time consuming. Usually it requires multiple rounds of prototypes, where prototypes usually require a massive amount of data transferred to adequately mine for work discovery.
The best you can do is set reasonable expectations with stakeholders around:
- what level of confidence you have in estimates at any point in time
- what work could uncover and reduce uncertainty (prototypes, experiments, hacks, hiring the right consultant, etc) and whether it is resourced
- what the contingency plans are if new work is discovered (reducing specific scope, moving more people (who are hopefully somewhat ramped up), moving out timelines)
^ This report from 2020 analyzed about 50,000 IT projects in a wide range of market segments, and they found that 50% exceeded their deadline. This seems to suggest that your conclusion holds more generally than just your specific context.
On a personal level, I hardly ever see a developer's estimate turn out to be right, on whatever scale. I'm wondering what the pro estimate folks in this thread work on that they're able to estimate accurately.
I've worked on codebases all the way tens of millions of lines of code. Obviously not in the sense of knowing all the dusty corners of such codebases, but still, I did enough work on them that I had to navigate my way around millions of loc. It's not easy! The problem is that you can't possibly know even a sizeable fraction of such a codebase well. Instead you can know small corners well and know your way around the internal and external interfaces so you can find gotchas and answer questions as you research. The knowledge you build is hard to communicate to others, too, so bringing others up to speed is not easy either. So for me TFA hits all the right notes.
But I've also seen things like the ZFS team at Sun deliver something unbelievably good that started as a skunkworks project that senior management didn't really know about until there was enough to show to justify a large investment. Sun was like DARPA: not micromanaged from the top. Sun failed, of course, but not because of this.
That I wouldn't know, but I know it took longer than anticipated, and towards thee end Sun pulled a lot of engineers from other projects and put them on ZFS for the final push.
> what the contingency plans are if new work is discovered (reducing specific scope, moving more people (who are hopefully somewhat ramped up), moving out timelines)
I think this is the most important. You can't just HAVE contingency plans, but you need to be clear in who you need to get approval / sign-off on those contingency plans and who you need to notify. As a developer, knowing that you're going to need to drop Feature B to hit your deadline, but being unable to get the right people to approve dropping Feature B is endlessly frustrating and a massive waste of time on any project.
Yup, the whole chain of command needs to be bought in. All of this is not “in my head” but “well established with m1, m2, pm”
In my experience this is a really hard conversation and you have to build a lot of relationship/trust (aka politics) within the company to be direct about it. But it saves you and your team from burnout, because it eliminates the expectation of “if you fall behind you’ll work 80hrs/wk until the timeline is caught up” which is what I’ve seen happen too many times.
The (now somehow) political position that blackrock is not the reason a house in Seattle is $1,000,000 is somehow the most hated position in America. Both my left wing friends and right wing family believe blackrock owns something like 30% of houses in America, and saying otherwise is heresy.
