It is an issue, there is not enough choice. I don't want apple so I buy an android but android is also flawed in major ways. There is just no winning as a consumer.
Your thoughts regarding open source are borderline irrational when places like Amazon will copy and paste your repository and start making billions off of it.
What's the problem with that? If I didn't want others to use my code or make money with it, I wouldn't have gone open source in the first place.
I'd rather use an AWS service with an open source core than a closed-source service. Migrating away from AWS in the former case is arguably easier than in the latter.
> If I didn't want others to use my code or make money with it, I wouldn't have gone open source in the first place
> I'd rather use an AWS service with an open source core than a closed-source service.
I guess it’s just a problem with the people who work in software engineering. You won’t use anything closed source, but also don’t care if other engineer’s valuable open-source tools are hijacked by companies with billions in resources.
Basically, you want to have your cake and eat it too.
> I genuinely think Apple wanted this to be relatively unpalatable to the typical consumer.
You’re starting to hit on Apple’s strategy. Build something expensive and impressive, get all the media hype out of it with influencers making content and consumers watching it cause it’s the expensive thing.
Then it comes down in price over 10 years and soon everybody has one, because everyone wants to try to Apple thing they saw so much about years ago.
iPad went exactly the same way, as everyone wrote it off when first introduced as just “a large iPod touch”, and now it’s the defacto leader in the category without anything coming close.
The iPad was far from expensive at launch, considering it was a brand new category, and it was rumored to launch at ~1k. It was a huge surprise when the price was revealed at $500. Apple even acknowledges it in the keynote!
> Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.
I graduated in 2016 and never once had an employer concerned about my grades. It would be a red flag if I had.
Half my time in college was spent working in the dining center cleaning dishes to help pay for my education. I didn’t have the luxury of studying as much as others did.
Funny, most of my class considered it a red flag if a employer didn't check for grades. Mostly because it meant everyone who had < 3.0 GPA or so would mob them.
I know someone who couldn't get an interview at Google, within the last couple of years, because his grades (at Caltech - the last holdout against grade inflation!) were too low.
IIRC he was above average at Caltech, but GPA was abysmally low compared to applicants from Stanford, Harvard, Pomona, and other egregiously inflating schools.
Just curious, why would you include Pomona ( if we're talking about the Claremont colleges generally) but exclude Harvey Mudd, which is definitely in the Caltech position of fiercelyresisting grade inflation, if not even more rigorous than Caltech (and probably anywhere else STEM-oriented) in that regard.
The schools I mentioned are well-known to be grade inflators, and at one point I checked out Pomona's website (which discusses their grading), so it was on my mind.
From a distance, I think highly of Harvey Mudd, but I don't know their grading policies. I doubt they grade harder than Caltech, since HMC's branding is all about "we want to help you succeed" and Caltech is more of "we're going to beat you up [intellectually]."
The outlier status of caltech's international renown makes it difficult to compare apples to apples with comparatively provincial HMC. It's a bit like trying to compare Bard or Reed or Cooper Union with NYU. So this makes it difficult to compare based on acceptance rates because Caltech will draw a great many more applicants, and consequently turn down a higher percentage. So the acceptance rate of Caltech at around 3%, and HMC at around 13% gives us an idea of how selective they are, but this is confounded with how famous they are - a term thats hard to quantify and control for.
However the graduation rate tells perhaps a (slightly) more nuanced story about rigor. HMC, despite beimg more expensive to attend than Caltech, had a lower 2023 graduation rate of 91.5% vs Caltech at 93.7%
it's not that different, and probably you can construct error bars that enclose both of these bounds within plausible parameters, but it suggests that there is a somewhat higher premium for failure of those actually accepted at HMC than even the mighty Caltech, and a greater willingness to uphold standards at the expense of angering (relatively) wealthy parents.
I went to Caltech and from talking to people who went to HMC within a similar timeframe my understanding is grading was similar. And I did get a Google interview with not an honors GPA.
Any employer of new grads that didn't ask for grades were all pretty obviously lower tie. It was also much harder to get an interview because of sheer numbers of students standing on line.
The high tier companies told everyone before they stood on line that unless you have a minimum of 3.0, you were better off going somewhere else.
They don't care about the difference between a 3.5 and a 4.0 but they absolutely have a minimum grade standard for new college grads.
Five years into your career, yeah, they just want to know whether you have a degree and your work experience. Grades certainly matter when first starting out however.
> Five years into your career, yeah, they just want to know whether you have a degree and your work experience. Grades certainly matter when first starting out however.
Not really, even half a year of internship in a average software shop/your own software project/working experience in any software position is enough to win over a great student with 0 experience to score you a chance of interview. And the interview experience is the same for everyone.
The school experience frankly doesn't account for anything except whether the candidate has the fortitute. You learn on the job anyway. It's like how they use leetcode where they just want to see how hard you want the job.
this should be an existential fear for everyone producing things.
your tech blog you use to get a little clout and bargaining power? it's now only read by AI agents and only a fraction of those agents will attribute you.
so then, whose gonna publish any info, well, now it's propagandists. people who specifically want to seed ideas for some sociological skew
