I've read some of the cryptocurrency subreddits recently and it has been absolutely fascinating. The degree of group cognitive dissonance is something else.
The difference is that lots of people who had no interest in playing that game were unwittingly dragged into it by the CLO/CDO scam. That’s why the risk became systemic—bankers tricked everyone into spinning the wheel.
This thinking only holds if you feel positively about who you currently are and your place in life right now. If you don't, then these "what if" questions can be a lot more appealing.
I'm in the UK too. But also remote means you can get a job "based" anywhere. Check out some US firms for instance, many are hiring and are happy with euro time zones.
The US companies are hiring, just like everybody else.
Multi-nationals now seem to post most jobs as “remote” which means global. A smaller number is “US-remote”. Usually this is not for tax reasons but for business or security reasons if dealing with the US government.
Hiring remotely is easy for these companies as they usually have a subsidiary already in country.
But even if not, there are now agencies that take care if things like taxation etc. I believe remote.com might be the one most known but it is certainly not the only one.
Very much reflects my experience. I am with a US tech now and they are very conducive to hiring Brits. They know on the whole we hold a lot of quality engineers, there are no language barriers , very little cultural differences at all.
It's a bit of coup out to jump on the British where somehow everything negative that happens is due to Brexit.
As counter anecdata, I am in the Netherlands and I am (now, as much as before) receiving calls for job opportunities from UK based recruiters. They are for the majority concentrated around London, Oxbridge, Bristol, Manchester. Depending on where GP is based in the UK, the landscape and opportunities can be quite different.
Irrespective of the politics and bitter emotions, London's VC funding scene is arguably the closest we have in Europe to SV/Seattle/NY and it will continue to play a role in making the UK relevant in the tech scene.
The person you replied to wrote that all their clients "relocated any technical work they had in the UK to Poland or the Baltics". That's not politics and bitter emotions, that's sharing their own anecdotal data.
Of course, one could criticize generalizing based on that one data point, but that's a different thing altogether.
Saying that Brexit is the cause of something based on one's experience with clients, expressed in a way that suggests that it did not positively or negatively affect themselves in any way, does not strike me as particularly bitter, but suit yourself.
First, nothing about "y'all have to thank" suggests that they consider the person they are responding to responsible for Brexit, which is a requirement for it to imply that they are putting some sort of blame on the person (or the collective group they represent).
But let's for the sake of it accept that "it's your own fault" is what was meant by it anyway. That still doesn't imply bitterness.
If parents explains to their child not to run with scissors because they might hurt themselves, the child does so anyway and ends up hurting themselves, and one of the parents says in-between consoling their child "but do you see how you only have yourself to blame for it, if you decided to do this anyway after we warned you this would happen?", then that might not be the most considerate timing for sharing a harsh truth, but there's nothing bitter about the statement.
Why remove large groups of skilled engineers in your businesses domain and have to retrain again, because of a political change. I can understand a company with a manufacturing base doing this (due to import / export regulations changing), but this makes no sense in software.
> In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking.
I don't know how we're defining deep thought and critical thinking but it's important to recognise that people have limitations to their intellect and for some people that ceiling is very low. If we assume that you have some kind of software job since you're on HN - there are many people out there whose brains don't have the computational power to do your job. And for a subset of those people keeping any job would be a challenge. That's not something that they control or that anyone can change. If human intelligence is continuous and somewhat symmetrical, for every outlier that you meet on the high end of intelligence there is someone out there who can barely function in modern society (or maybe they can't).
I don't think it's really about computational power -- it's about practice and experience. It's about how hard those people choose to work and what things they choose to put effort into over their lifetime. All those choices accumulate over a lifetime, to the point where I agree, yeah, it'd be really hard for someone who has worked as a nurse their entire life to suddenly start over and start writing software. Just like it would be an insurmountable task for me to start over and go into medicine, or work on a construction site.
I disagree with the idea that somehow, innate intelligence sets the bar so low. There's definitely a bar somewhere, but I'd argue that most of our jobs (even in tech) don't come anywhere close to reaching that limit.
I'd argue that most of us here are of pretty average intelligence, it's just that our life circumstances have pushed us into a role where we get to exercise our brain muscles.
One thing is that having good teachers helps immensely. For a a lot of people I meet, when they reflect on their high school math and programming classes, the story is always the same: They had a lousy teacher that had them do everything by rote memorization, without explaining the underlying principles. They got the impression that that's what the whole field is like, and that they weren't smart enough, so why even bother. Occasionally, they'll be interested in hearing me explain what I do, and their response is always the same: "Wow. I wish someone had it explained it that way to me before."
I don't think that my point is getting across because you're focusing on the people that you have most commonly observed in the environment around you. Sure - people can work harder, most of us are average and we don't need to get close to our limits in our jobs. That's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking the extreme outliers on the lower end of the intelligence distribution. Those are the people for whom the innate intelligence limit is low, by definition.
People with IQ below 75 can be classified as having a mental disability. That's just under 5% of the population. Do you think those people can take your advice and just put in more effort? What about the people who score just above that threshold? Do you think they could do your job only if they had better teachers? I don't think they could.
We all have natural limitations - it's much better to recognise that some people's limitations are holding them back so much that they can't function normally in modern society. That seems healthier to me than pretending that people just need to apply themselves more.
Strictly speaking, yes, you're right that some people are mentally deficient. But no one is disagreeing with the fact that people with mental disabilities exist.
So I'm focusing instead on otherwise productive members of society who just don't happen to be scientists or engineers. Those people are definitely in a position to benefit from better educational opportunities.
My intent was to argue against what I read between the lines of the original comment I responded to -- the insidious implication that certain races or certain classes of people have innate mental deficiencies, and that we should use that observation to allocate resources in society.
Further, some technical people unfortunately have the mindset that somehow what we do is special, on a completely different level from what "normal" people do, and that "anyone who works in a non-technical position is mentally deficient". This thinking is absurd -- I've known people who sure, couldn't sit down and compose a 30-page essay, but they can strip a car down to its bare parts and reassemble it, no problem. I'd disagree with anyone who tries to say that's not real intelligence.
Maybe none of this is what you had in mind when you replied to my comment, so forgive me if I misinterpreted you. I responded in the context of the OP.
"My intent was to argue against what I read between the lines of the original comment I responded to -- the insidious implication that certain races or certain classes of people have innate mental deficiencies, and that we should use that observation to allocate resources in society."
Of course people should be judged as individuals, not members of their race or class, when applying to college etc. But differentials in IQ tests are mirrored on the SAT and ACT, on AP exams, on NAEP, and on state achievement tests. It has been shown that the SAT does not underpredict the college grades of black and Hispanic students or of lower-income students. If you evaluate all college applicants based on SAT and AP exam scores, you will end up "allocating resources" such as seats at selective colleges unevenly by demographic group, even though the process is race-blind. I think this is just, but advocates of equity do not.
No, it's not the same at all. Tether is not a bank. Banks are audited and bank deposits are insured. Banks can't print money unilaterally. Tether doesn't have the same regulations apply to it.
When I clicked on this post I was thinking of timelines like 1-2 years but 10 years is a long time to have something on the back burner. Do you really need to keep up? Do you want to have engineering as a hobby in some way?
