I don't get this. I have no education, no resume, no Linkedin and I've never applied for a job in my life. Employers/recruiters reach out to me, and I usually turn them down. I'm not humblebragging, I'm not better at my job than most people. What seemed to have worked for me was doing tons of FOSS work (unpaid, in my spare time). People started noticing me and it naturally picked up from there. I'd wager that actual, observable software engineering (FOSS) is simply a closer proxy for job performance than accreditation and past experience.

I'm currently in the job market and I get loads of unsolicited offers too. The issue with these is at least for me they've all been no benefits contract positions paying well below the industry average. These aren't jobs anyone but the most desperate would accept.

but how do you get you money support your life before your FOSS work got some attention?

In this day and age, text is abundantly accessible at all levels of complexity, and you can generate infinitely more with LLMs. Affordability is not an obstacle to developing reading comprehension, and hasn't been for a long time.

GitHub is a completely different scale. If Google hadn't wasted its opportunities to become the prime source code platform they'd also have issues.

That’s what I disagree with, I think Google codebase scale is massive. It has android + chrome + Google + Waymo + tensorflow etc, this is a lot of code. And also consider that every third party library is put inside Google3 codebase too, there are no truly external dependencies, all the code is there in one repo, with their version one version principle. I think Google is roughly similar scale to GitHub and is managing things far better

High school dropout, never attended college. I never had any problems getting work. Having done extensive open source work has helped a lot. YMMV.

It seems that at least in software engineering, Claude is popular and people are shoveling tons of money into it, whereas non-tech people are not inclined to pay for ChatGPT. Market share might not be so important if your competitor is raking in all the cash.

She :)

Am I crazy, or does the article seem to go out of its way to avoid using any pronouns for Tang?

IIUC at the time this article was written Tang was mid-gender-transition and consequently kind of cagey about what pronouns should be used for her. She now goes by she/her.

It's a gender superposition, don't collapse the wave.

We shouldn't be using gendered pronouns anyway.

In very few circumstances is gender relevant. And even when it is relevant, we don't need to bake it into every other sentence, like people should be treated differently based on their gender.

If we baked social caste or race into how we referred to people, on the pronoun level, in every other sentence, it would obviously be ridiculous and terrible. So let's stop doing it for gender.

You're connecting something you dislike to a linguistic phenomenon based on a shared link to a concept. You could just as well argue that we shouldn't use names, because all people need to be treated the same.

Removing gender from language doesn't lead to paradise. Chinese and Turkish don't have gendered third person pronouns, but China and Turkey are not shining examples of gender equality.

I agree with you but changing the basic grammatical rules of a language is a difficult coordination problem and you can't just do it by posting that it would be good.

There's an interesting series of fantasy novels by the author Graydon Saunders, occasionally recommended on this website, that almost entirely avoids the use of pronouns: https://www.goodreads.com/series/242525-commonweal . The avoidance of pronouns is a stylistic choice, but not a didactic one—you might not even realize it until you're a third of the way through the book and you start questioning whether a character you'd imagined as male or female might actually be a different gender, or not gendered at all. It's interesting to see how the author achieves this in dense but readable prose, without drawing attention to it.

Ancillary Justice is told from the point of view of a character of a culture that doesn't draw the distinction in language. It is occasionally remarked on, but generally from the point of view of the main character being always a bit paranoid that they'll cause offense by not referring to characters of other cultures and languages correctly.

Which grammatical rule is that? Singular they has been used in English for over four centuries. Using they instead of he or she does not break any rules.

The proposal was to get rid of "he" and "she", which is a very different proposition.

If men and women are the same, then why transition from one to the other? Men and women are different and there are many examples of when they should be treated differently.

Relative social status is built-in to some languages, such as Japanese. I suspect it fuels a lot of their social constructs, like the whole senpai/kohai thing.

maybe they don't know the gender and playing it like at parties when you don't remember someone's boyfriend name.

No because several times they directly quote people talking about Tang and editorialize the quote to use [Tang] where a pronoun would have been.

I used to know a chap called Colin who's dog was called John, or was it the other way around? I could never remember so never used their name.

Would have been easier if the dog was called Fido.