I have 15 YOE and today I make what I did when I was in Year 2. I have the same employer as Year 2, but I relocated from US, PNW to Canada, Ontario. This resulted in a drastic reduction in pay. After taxes, I make 42% less than what I made before. I make a little more than what I earned as a fresh-out-of-college new hire.
While I'm annoyed about the money, I have an improved quality of life in Toronto. My wife and I were raising kids alone in Seattle whereas we have a village here to co-parent with. I also found much more cultural identity and roots here in Toronto compared to Seattle. I also prefer the climate and politics of Toronto more than PNW. I certainly miss the hikes, but we make that up with non-stop beach trips.
If I can achieve the same financial security here in Toronto that I had in Seattle, I would never move. Unfortunately, this has been difficult to achieve, but I'm confident I can get there.
As a parent with small kids, this really piques my interest. Could you share more details about this? Are you referring to a tighter community; neighbors that you actually know and interact with?
We're moving to the Midwest soon and hope to experience more of that compared to the where we are now.
I used to think the trades is where the money is. I've met so many plumbers, AC repairmen, general contractors, firealarm installers - who are really doing well for themselves. Then just the other day there was a Reddit thread about lack of jobs in trades in Toronto. I did a double take. The joke in our friends was our immigrant parents pushed us to study and get corporate jobs and all the trades folks and real-estate agents seem to be doing better than us. A true grass is greener on the other side moment.
I learned that at most trades companies, there are folks with over 20 years of experience and then newbies. No one in between. Every economic cycle, the folks with 5-10 years of experience get laid off. Apprentice are rarely trained by the old dog and put out in the field with minimal experience.
Perhaps this is a Toronto, Ontario problem. Ontario is going through a major economic cycle that has almost everyone feeling quite hard times. Or perhaps this is just the negativity that is Reddit. There is also the BS that income waged workers pay double, if not more, taxes that businesses or self employed workers.
Watching it I was thinking "I should go back to hn and say thanks to OP". Glad to see someone else did the same. Tokieda is so good!What a joy to watch.
I haven't looked into this, just responding intuitively, but aren't we trained to learn better by writing by hand because of our upbringing. If the next generation stops hand writing and starts typing from early childhood education, wouldn't it be the same for them?
"New research has analyzed brainwave patterns in both children and young adults while they wrote by hand and as they typed on a keyboard. The results revealed distinctly different brain patterns between the activities, leading the researchers to suggest learning is more effective when it is accompanied by handwriting."
Nothing irks me more about the productivity space than the first use case on the blog post:
"Imagine you’re a financial analyst and you get an email at 5 PM from your boss asking for a presentation on Q3 performance by 8 AM tomorrow — we’ve all been there"
1. We haven't all been there. This is not a common use case at all.
2. This is toxic AF. We shouldn't normalize this behavior. Someone does this with me, I will politely tell them to F off instead of relying on Duet AI to have it done before dinner.
3. There's no way Duet AI can handle all the heavy lifting for such a major document without human intervention. Whereas the use case of getting a meeting summary does not need as much human intervention. It's interesting they start with this case.
There are a lot of promises here as well that require a lot more infra than just switching on Duet AI:
"And because sometimes it’s hard for remote participants to see everyone in the conference room, or their colleagues appear far away and out of focus, we’re rolling out dynamic tiles and face detection that give attendees in a meeting room their own video tile with their name"
You need people to opt-in to facial reco. You need potentially multiple camera angles, or minimally high quality cameras that allow to to perform the crop and optical zoom into people's faces. You need in-room attendees to sign off on the digital zoom into their faces. People don't switch on their cameras at home because of this, yet in the room they will be ok? Not so sure about that.
All in all. Great feature availability. But it needs a balance of realism and how this will all come together.
> We haven't all been there. This is not a common use case at all.
I'll speak anecdotally for myself here: I have seen - and experienced - this enough times in my almost 30 years, and I have heard from plenty of colleagues who have also seen or experienced this. These stories come from somewhere.
Times are changing, office toxicity is (relatively) on the decline but you don't have to go back too far - less than 10 years - where this kind of subordinate abuse was relatively common, and it still happens to this day.
I 100% agree with you that it shouldn't be normalized or made light of as part of a sales pitch like Duet AI is doing.
But to say this isn't common (we can argue the definition of "common" perhaps) is just inaccurate in my experience.
"Imagine you’re a Google PR writer and you get an email at 5 PM from your boss asking for a blog post about Duet AI for release to the public at 8 AM tomorrow ..."
I think it's worse than ever, just on the extreme of toxic positivity where we all have to pretend we're a family and do constant culture training that doesn't actually help anyone but just enables the toxic people to do culture-fu to practice their toxicity under the guide of "holding people accountable" and "being upfront and honest"
I can understand that certain situations come up that require an all hands on deck emergency, but in such situations I would argue that the last thing you want is an AI generated failsafe presentation, but to get the necessary people on to fix this situation.
If it's part of the business to have people craft this regularly between 5pm and 8am then there is a systemic problem where AI will be a band aid at best.
I see your point. I too have been asked to do something unexpected around end of day that ends up taking the night. Over the years, I have learned to say no. It was difficult to learn, but now people understand how to work with me. You're right, inaccurate to say this is not common, I just don't like how the usecase is promoting the worst stereotypes about managers. There's a lot of positive stuff. Ex. you want down time to spend with your family. There are a few calls you think you can skip on. You can ask Duet AI to attend on your behalf and give you summaries at the end of the day, etc...
AI is here to help us work smarter. Hopefully this creates time to work on more interesting & impactful problems thereby improving productivity. The worst case scenario is if people just end up working more on meaningless tasks.
Remember the "let me google it for you" meme? Not very different if all the manager has to do is ask Duet AI to pull together this report instead of asking you.
I have also experienced it, but when your colleague approaches you at 8AM to ask if you saw their email last night, it is easy enough to say "No, I just got here." Be the workplace you want.
My thoughts exactly. The way this is presented is pretty grim and dark. It's like they're working to bring out the worst future possible. Including, like you said, normalising exploitation as if it's something to be proud of.
You'd think that this is April fools material, but apparently this is how they present their products nowadays. I wonder if this was written by a human.
This is much less common outside IT. My worry is that this kind of enhancement will normalize unacceptable requests because "just have AI do it and you just need to go over it" will become an expectation.
My take on this was user generated content = content generated by people you follow vs network generated content = content generated by people that you don't follow that the network recommends to you.
There's a huge difference between TikTok's FYP and Following Page and Friends page. While content is all user generated, I expect something different from each of these three modes.
Spoke to a few farmer friends. They tell me that large scale operations are very technically complex and have many digital systems deployed for remote management. That being said, a lot of the numbers here seemed to be miss reported. This seems like a combination of genuine issue and fear pandering.
This is an incredibly click bait article by gifted journalists. Most of these folks are fine and still have similar core priorities. Also there are multiple other responsible AI teams in MS. I have extreme empathy for those impacted, but this is trying to generate news where there isn't.
Living the car-free life in Seattle is depressing due to gloomy weather. Life in Seattle is great if you accept the grey and live outdoors as much as possible. For that you need a car.
I'm not sure that tracks? When I've visited Seattle with friends, I walk to almost everything, even in gloomy weather. I don't see how "living outdoors" requires a car - if anything, driving everywhere is the the opposite of living outdoors.
Sure, if you want to go out to the mountains every weekend you need a car, but with a light rain-proof jacket, it's not too bad to walk or bike through much of the city. The grey weather is either depressing or not, but I don't find it to be much more depressing out of a car than in it.
I was afraid that'd be the answer. Do you use your car for everything, or are you able to handle day-to-day stuff on foot and use the car mostly for adventures?
I don’t drive and have been in Seattle for 15 years. I do carpool with friends to go skiing or camping out of the city, but day to day I used bike and transit for everything (until the pandemic, now I work from home and mostly just walk to nearby shops).
This is the real answer. I walk/ride a bike a ton for about 7 months of the year here. Winter months I am driving much more often than anything else. Standing around waiting for a bus, walking a mile+, etc in the pitch black when it's 40 degrees and raining is not fun and given the option of just driving I take it.
While I'm annoyed about the money, I have an improved quality of life in Toronto. My wife and I were raising kids alone in Seattle whereas we have a village here to co-parent with. I also found much more cultural identity and roots here in Toronto compared to Seattle. I also prefer the climate and politics of Toronto more than PNW. I certainly miss the hikes, but we make that up with non-stop beach trips.
If I can achieve the same financial security here in Toronto that I had in Seattle, I would never move. Unfortunately, this has been difficult to achieve, but I'm confident I can get there.