4 ms·

Idk if it's true but it seems like life was simpler before the Internet took off. Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing

by tayo42 2mo ago

Idk if it's true but it seems like life was simpler before the Internet took off. Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less

whaleofatw2022 2mo ago
Used to flip both ways... I.e. for a time, it became easier for talented people to find a better role. In the last 5-10 years though, between the race to the bottom and AI/Bot spam (even ignoring the overall decrease in job availability) things frankly suck.
spicyusername 2mo ago
Simplicity and convenience are often inversely correlated. Life was for sure simpler in times gone by, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was better. Definitely different. I'm sure future posters will look back on these years with fondness for this or that as well.
- DrewADesign 2mo ago
  I don’t think most people under 40 can wrap their head around what it was like to need to be home or at work for someone to reach you, which required a phone call. And you couldn’t make a phone call unless you were at home or work, or stopped at a pay phone. And what if you called someone that wasn’t home? Or were on the can and couldn’t pick up in a few rings? Sure you could leave a message but they probably had no way to get back in touch with you. You just had to wait and hope they called again. No text. No email. No Caller ID for most people pre-internet. No GPS for most people, and even if they could give you GPS coordinates, wear are you going to with them? Hope you got a really big fucking globe.
  - dyauspitr 2mo ago
    Yeah, but none of that really mattered, did it? The expectation everywhere was you couldn’t really reach people that easily so you didn’t and you didn’t miss it. Also going to places involved mapping out your path on a map ahead of time and then struggling a little bit in complicated places where you would ask local people for directions. There was no GPS. We didn’t know what we were missing. It didn’t feel like a real problem at all.
    - DrewADesign 2mo ago
      As a teenager that hated being at specific places at specific times, it was often an annoying problem for me. The second I realized I could get a cheap pager, I did so without hesitation.
  - ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
    You know, it's very strange; during a normal week I may go "out and about" a lot during the day, even though I'm not employed, and I just go do errands or shopping. And I'm out in public carrying my phone. Now I may be 100% available to answer phone calls, whether I'm sitting on the bus, walking down the sidewalk, sitting in a clinic waiting room or a restaurant. But I am definitely not 100% available to talk to you. Especially if you're a billing department, medical office, or some business that wants me to both authenticate my PII and then talk about some personal, financial/medical matter. That is not a conversation for public space. That is a conversation I must have in the privacy of my home (and with access to my computer for files!) So that is why we used to have phone booths. I don't own a car, which is essentially a large, privately-owned, mobile phone booth. Sadly, because pay-phones went away, privacy booths naturally died with them. Dr. Who understood. But Pacific Bell didn't! So just because you can reach me, and I can reach you, doesn't for a minute mean that it's an opportune time to talk.
    - DrewADesign 2mo ago
      Someone I used to work with left to start a business selling “phone booths“ for private mobile phone conversations in public. I believe they’re called Private Talking Spaces. Not sure if he’s still doing it. I thought it was a good idea but obviously there’s no financial incentive like there was with a phone booth, so they had to be purchased and installed by whoever owned the space.
Aurornis 2mo ago
> Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less This strikes at the core of it. Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy. You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. You would lose career advancement at every step of the way relative to peers who had a social network that fed them this information. If you're one of the people with more talent and hungry for work, life actually got simpler for you in modern times. The advantages of being well-connected and groomed by your parents for success are still there, but they're diminished when everyone can find advice on the internet. I grew up on the cusp of this change. It's hard to communicate just how hard it was to navigate even simple things like interview prep or even dressing correctly for interviews if you weren't surrounded by people who had up to date info. EDIT: To be clear, I was raised with a lot of advantages and had a lot of benefits. It was still striking how much of the early job search I had to fumble my way through in ways that would have been so easy to address with the unlimited online resources available today, which many of my peers had handled by their classmates or their parents' friend who had some industry familiarity. A specific example is that I didn't know that there were specific books for learning how to do programming job interviews. At first I just thought you had to learn how to be really good at programming, so I challenged myself to do a lot of tasks like I saw in the first interview I did. These days, it's unthinkable that someone would get all the way through college and into interview loops without knowing what a tech interview would be like and having the opportunity to practice.
- II2II 2mo ago
  > You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. I'm not sure that is any less true today. If you were looking for a job, people used to go to a job centre or look at the classifieds. Since everyone did it, those were also the jobs with the most competition. Swap job centre and classifieds for online job boards, and you have the situation today. Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs. On the other hand, that is balanced out by people applying for more jobs. It's hard to claim that applying for more jobs involves more work, though there is certainly a negative psychological impact. On the other hand, knowing where to look (then or now) cuts out a lot of the competition. Having a social network feeding you that information cuts out even more competition.
decimalenough 2mo ago
Back in the day, the 4x5 (medium format film) experience requirement would have filtered out a lot of candidates. It was arty, weird and required expensive gear (Hasselblad or equivalent) and even more expensive film (around $1/exposure). These days everybody can shoot unlimited high-res imagery for free with the phone in their pocket.
- asdff 2mo ago
  Your phone in your pocket is not sniffing medium format film resolution. It also lacks the latitude of really any negative film stock. Color wise slide film is still supreme to this day.
  - decimalenough 2mo ago
    The realistic digital equivalent resolution of 4x5 film is around 40-50 megapixels, which iPhones have supported out of the box for a couple of years now. Of course there's a lot more to taking good pictures than the raw sensor, but what I'm saying is that the barrier to entry is way lower than it was in the article's day.
    - asdff 2mo ago
      I'm sorry but 48mp on a sensor the size of the end of a pencil is just not the same as even full frame, let alone 4x5.
      - fluoridation 2mo ago
        What does that have to do with how much detail the sensor cells are able to resolve?
        shagie 2mo ago
        The circle of confusion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_confusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_confusion ) imposes optical limitations on the image. It may be acceptable for phone screens and images on the web. However, if one was to print the image as an 8x10 (or larger and view it from 12 (the length of the diagonal) inches away, the ability to resolve details in the image will not be present in the phone image. Granted, few people are printing things out at 8x10 or 16x20 for framing anymore and comparing them to traditional photographic images... but it is there. (I have some 30x40" prints that I've done (though I typically didn't have the funds or wall space for many - 8x10s and 16x20s where my most common) and purchased a number of 20x60" prints over the years).
keybored 2mo ago
You know, I think I’ve had enough of “have taken up farming”/woodworking Silicon Valley nostalgics at this point (I’m talking about them/in general, not you). Modern computing is toxic. The Internet is shit. And all because it was designed that way. Computing doesn’t have to be shit. I would know. Plenty of let’s say local computing solutions are just fine. They are so okay and fine that I hardly think about them. They just save me time and work. Like the AI Cretins say, the cat’s out of the bag, time cannot be unwound. But computing is not fundamentally alienating, life-draining, or doomed to be infiltrated by spooks from the worst regime in the world. That’s just what SC programmers who are hobby woodworkers and use fliphones think.

by tayo42 2mo ago

Idk if it's true but it seems like life was simpler before the Internet took off. Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less

whaleofatw2022 2mo ago

Used to flip both ways... I.e. for a time, it became easier for talented people to find a better role. In the last 5-10 years though, between the race to the bottom and AI/Bot spam (even ignoring the overall decrease in job availability) things frankly suck.

spicyusername 2mo ago

Simplicity and convenience are often inversely correlated. Life was for sure simpler in times gone by, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was better. Definitely different. I'm sure future posters will look back on these years with fondness for this or that as well.

DrewADesign 2mo ago
I don’t think most people under 40 can wrap their head around what it was like to need to be home or at work for someone to reach you, which required a phone call. And you couldn’t make a phone call unless you were at home or work, or stopped at a pay phone. And what if you called someone that wasn’t home? Or were on the can and couldn’t pick up in a few rings? Sure you could leave a message but they probably had no way to get back in touch with you. You just had to wait and hope they called again. No text. No email. No Caller ID for most people pre-internet. No GPS for most people, and even if they could give you GPS coordinates, wear are you going to with them? Hope you got a really big fucking globe.
- dyauspitr 2mo ago
  Yeah, but none of that really mattered, did it? The expectation everywhere was you couldn’t really reach people that easily so you didn’t and you didn’t miss it. Also going to places involved mapping out your path on a map ahead of time and then struggling a little bit in complicated places where you would ask local people for directions. There was no GPS. We didn’t know what we were missing. It didn’t feel like a real problem at all.
  - DrewADesign 2mo ago
    As a teenager that hated being at specific places at specific times, it was often an annoying problem for me. The second I realized I could get a cheap pager, I did so without hesitation.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
  You know, it's very strange; during a normal week I may go "out and about" a lot during the day, even though I'm not employed, and I just go do errands or shopping. And I'm out in public carrying my phone. Now I may be 100% available to answer phone calls, whether I'm sitting on the bus, walking down the sidewalk, sitting in a clinic waiting room or a restaurant. But I am definitely not 100% available to talk to you. Especially if you're a billing department, medical office, or some business that wants me to both authenticate my PII and then talk about some personal, financial/medical matter. That is not a conversation for public space. That is a conversation I must have in the privacy of my home (and with access to my computer for files!) So that is why we used to have phone booths. I don't own a car, which is essentially a large, privately-owned, mobile phone booth. Sadly, because pay-phones went away, privacy booths naturally died with them. Dr. Who understood. But Pacific Bell didn't! So just because you can reach me, and I can reach you, doesn't for a minute mean that it's an opportune time to talk.
  - DrewADesign 2mo ago
    Someone I used to work with left to start a business selling “phone booths“ for private mobile phone conversations in public. I believe they’re called Private Talking Spaces. Not sure if he’s still doing it. I thought it was a good idea but obviously there’s no financial incentive like there was with a phone booth, so they had to be purchased and installed by whoever owned the space.

Aurornis 2mo ago

> Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less This strikes at the core of it. Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy. You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. You would lose career advancement at every step of the way relative to peers who had a social network that fed them this information. If you're one of the people with more talent and hungry for work, life actually got simpler for you in modern times. The advantages of being well-connected and groomed by your parents for success are still there, but they're diminished when everyone can find advice on the internet. I grew up on the cusp of this change. It's hard to communicate just how hard it was to navigate even simple things like interview prep or even dressing correctly for interviews if you weren't surrounded by people who had up to date info. EDIT: To be clear, I was raised with a lot of advantages and had a lot of benefits. It was still striking how much of the early job search I had to fumble my way through in ways that would have been so easy to address with the unlimited online resources available today, which many of my peers had handled by their classmates or their parents' friend who had some industry familiarity. A specific example is that I didn't know that there were specific books for learning how to do programming job interviews. At first I just thought you had to learn how to be really good at programming, so I challenged myself to do a lot of tasks like I saw in the first interview I did. These days, it's unthinkable that someone would get all the way through college and into interview loops without knowing what a tech interview would be like and having the opportunity to practice.

II2II 2mo ago
> You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. I'm not sure that is any less true today. If you were looking for a job, people used to go to a job centre or look at the classifieds. Since everyone did it, those were also the jobs with the most competition. Swap job centre and classifieds for online job boards, and you have the situation today. Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs. On the other hand, that is balanced out by people applying for more jobs. It's hard to claim that applying for more jobs involves more work, though there is certainly a negative psychological impact. On the other hand, knowing where to look (then or now) cuts out a lot of the competition. Having a social network feeding you that information cuts out even more competition.

decimalenough 2mo ago

Back in the day, the 4x5 (medium format film) experience requirement would have filtered out a lot of candidates. It was arty, weird and required expensive gear (Hasselblad or equivalent) and even more expensive film (around $1/exposure). These days everybody can shoot unlimited high-res imagery for free with the phone in their pocket.

asdff 2mo ago
Your phone in your pocket is not sniffing medium format film resolution. It also lacks the latitude of really any negative film stock. Color wise slide film is still supreme to this day.
- decimalenough 2mo ago
  The realistic digital equivalent resolution of 4x5 film is around 40-50 megapixels, which iPhones have supported out of the box for a couple of years now. Of course there's a lot more to taking good pictures than the raw sensor, but what I'm saying is that the barrier to entry is way lower than it was in the article's day.
  - asdff 2mo ago
    I'm sorry but 48mp on a sensor the size of the end of a pencil is just not the same as even full frame, let alone 4x5.
    - fluoridation 2mo ago
      What does that have to do with how much detail the sensor cells are able to resolve?
      - shagie 2mo ago
        The circle of confusion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_confusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_confusion ) imposes optical limitations on the image. It may be acceptable for phone screens and images on the web. However, if one was to print the image as an 8x10 (or larger and view it from 12 (the length of the diagonal) inches away, the ability to resolve details in the image will not be present in the phone image. Granted, few people are printing things out at 8x10 or 16x20 for framing anymore and comparing them to traditional photographic images... but it is there. (I have some 30x40" prints that I've done (though I typically didn't have the funds or wall space for many - 8x10s and 16x20s where my most common) and purchased a number of 20x60" prints over the years).

keybored 2mo ago

You know, I think I’ve had enough of “have taken up farming”/woodworking Silicon Valley nostalgics at this point (I’m talking about them/in general, not you). Modern computing is toxic. The Internet is shit. And all because it was designed that way. Computing doesn’t have to be shit. I would know. Plenty of let’s say local computing solutions are just fine. They are so okay and fine that I hardly think about them. They just save me time and work. Like the AI Cretins say, the cat’s out of the bag, time cannot be unwound. But computing is not fundamentally alienating, life-draining, or doomed to be infiltrated by spooks from the worst regime in the world. That’s just what SC programmers who are hobby woodworkers and use fliphones think.