I found work in 2025 with almost every disadvantage other than having experience. The front door is broken unless you have:
* BigTech experience
* BigSchool degree
* Direct experience in a niche domain or interest area
* A degree, and good (5+ yrs) experience that looks modern
You will be passed over on most (not all) direct apps otherwise. The degree part is more important the more non-tech the company is.
Referrals mean a lot, especially for the best jobs that pay well have WLB or are remote. If you’re not pulling everyone you know who might vouch for you, you’re not doing it right.
Practice leetcode + hello interview, as almost every place will have some sort of leetcode round and system design round.
BigTech and BigSchool no longer works. I’ve interviewed and passed on two people that were laid off from BigTech because I felt they were incapable of working with high ambiguity and a place where they weren’t coddled by having a lot of processes.
Yes I worked at BigTech and saw that most people there couldn’t work in greenfield environments. I was also 46-49 at the time.
BigTech and BigSchool most certainly get you in the door.
You still have to leverage connections at BigSchool and your previous BigTech though, many ex-FANG fail to do this.
People without these obvious advantages should be looking into other industries outside of direct tech. Oil/gas/energy, Supply chain/logistics, Automotive (Ford etc), Retail tech (Walmart Global Tech), and so many other industries where they still need SWEs.
Many people overlook these options. Pay may not be big tech level but being jobless is worse.
Is it not illegal defamation to have gen-AI post a deepfake in public? Photoshop existed before. Is it not illegal to post CSAM, regardless of where it comes from?
No other company would touch this sort of thing - they’d be unable to make any money, their payment providers would ban them, their banks would run away.
> Is it not illegal to post CSAM, regardless of where it comes from?
This is a great example of why "CSAM" is a terrible term and why CP was/is better. If you generate pornographic images of children using an AI tool it is by definition not CSAM, as no children were sexually assaulted. But it is still CP.
Fine, call it what you want, but CP of or appearing to be of real children is illegal. There’s some grey area for drawn stuff it seems, but at a certain point there IS a line.
Also what changed, over the past 20 years even hosting stuff like this, or even any pornography whatsoever, would get you pulled from every App Store, shut down by any payment providers. Now it’s just totally fine? To me that’s a massive change entirely decided by Elon Musk.
Generating pictures of a real child naked is assault. Imagine finding child photos of yourself online naked being passed around. Its extremely unpleasant and its assault.
If you're arguing that generating a "fake child" is somehow significantly different and that you want to split hairs over the CSAM/CP term in that specific case. Its not a great take to be honest, people understand CSAM, actually verifying if its a "real" child or not, is not really relevant.
>actually verifying if its a "real" child or not, is not really relevant.
It's entirely relevant. Is the law protecting victims or banning depictions?
If you try to do the latter, you'll run head first into the decades long debate that is the obscenity test in the US. The former, meanwhile, is made as a way to make sure people aren't hurt. It's not too dissimilar to freedom of speech vs slander.
> Is the law protecting victims or banning depictions?
Both. When there's plausible deniability, it slows down all investigations.
> If you try to do the latter, you'll run head first into the decades long debate that is the obscenity test in the US. The former, meanwhile, is made as a way to make sure people aren't hurt. It's not too dissimilar to freedom of speech vs slander.
There's a world outside the US, a world of various nations which don't care about US legal rulings, and which are various degrees of willing-to-happy to ban US services.
It, the difference between calling child pornographic content cp vs CSAM, is splitting hairs. Call it CSAM its the modern term. Don't try to create a divide on terminology due to an edge case on some legal code interpretations. It doesn't really help in my opinion and is not a worthwhile argument. I understand where you are coming from on a technicality. But the current definition does "fit" well enough. So why make it an issue. As an example consider the following theoretical case:
a lawyer and judge are discussing a case and using the terminology CSAM in the case and needs to argue between the legality or issue between the child being real or not. What help is it in this situation to use CP vs CSAM in that moment. I dont really think it changes things at all. In both cases the lawyer and judge would need to still clarify for everyone that "presumably" the person is not real. So an acronym change on this point to me is still not a great take. Its regressive, not progressive.
>It, the difference between calling child pornographic content cp vs CSAM, is splitting hairs.
Yes, and it's a lawyer's job to split hairs. Up thread was talking about legal action so being able distinguish the term changes how you'd attack the issue.
> What help is it in this situation to use CP vs CSAM in that moment. I dont really think it changes things at all.
I just explaied it.
You're free to have your own colloquial opinion on the matter. But if you want to discuss law you need to understand the history on the topic. Especially one as controversial as this. These are probably all tired talking points from before we were born, so while it's novel and insignificant to us, it's language that has made or broken cases in the past. Cases that will be used for precedent.
>So an acronym change on this point to me is still not a great take. Its regressive, not progressive.
I don't really care about the acronym. I'm not a lawyer. A duck is a duck to me.
I'm just explaining why in this legal context the wording does matter. Maybe it shouldn't, but that's not my call.
It's also irrelevant to some extent: manipulating someone's likeness without their consent is also antisocial, in many jurisdictions illegal, and doing so in a sexualized way making it even more illegal.
The children aspect just makes a bad thing even worse and seems to thankfully get some (though enough IMO) people to realize it.
I think the arguments for this would possibly be, if AI continues to be useful (generation demand skyrockets): Meta would possibly have a positive ROI for these investments which would lead to others copying the investment strategy and building more nuclear. If that happens a large portion of AI demand would become green(-ish) energy.
If AI demand lowers (generation demand plummets): Meta would have subsidized a bunch of nuclear reactors which would likely continue to produce power for 10 years - 50 years.
A big reason I have heard for lack of nuclear build out is the lack of starting capital but after they are built they are generally stable and maintenance is predictable.
> A big reason I have heard for lack of nuclear build out is the lack of starting capital but after they are built they are generally stable and maintenance is predictable.
I have also heard this, but given Meta's announcement is mostly in funding and extending the useful lifespan, doesn't that indicate without an infusion of capital, the ongoing operations are not cost effective?
If everyone wasn’t held basically at economic gunpoint to a level where they are one or two missed paychecks to living in their car, we could advocate for patients and providers to strike outside of the managers offices or in front of a news station. It’s insane how having no financial security creates a world where they can extract with abandon.
It’s part and parcel to the mental healthcare system for the last decade or so. There is no place that does better because every single provider is dependent on private health insurance which rarely pays without major and intense hassle.
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