E.g. if I add some new feature to a tool and deploy it, I'll say "we've just pushed X...". If I do 99% of some particular feature, I'll still say "we've added Y...". In an annual review I can still speak to what I specifically did. I have probably been lucky in the teams and team sizes I've been in, but I've not had a problem with this.

For context I've mainly stuck to small (<50) and medium (<500) companies. My one experience (due to acquisition) of directly working within a 5000+ company was certainly starting to feel like what you described, I got out.

I've found people that fit this mould to be insufferable to work with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

This is the norm in many places of the world. I live in London and am lucky to only need to take one tube train into the office. It's still 1 hour each way - 10 mins to station, 5 mins wait - if i'm lucky, but it could be as much as 15, 45 min train, another 10 mins walk, 1hr each way is just a good smooth day for me. Many of my colleagues have even longer journeys. I only belabour this because I actually feel lucky in the length of my commute compared to many people in the UK.

As for 1hr overtime daily - if you're a salaried employee you aren't doing overtime to begin with, you're just doing your job - sure you can just not, but it probably won't go in your favour - at most agencies I've worked (this is in the UK) I was asked (i.e. required) as part of the onboarding to opt out of the working hours directive (https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours/weekly-maxim...). There was no overtime, there was just work.

Oh wow, that was great - particularly if I then look at my own body parts (like my palm) that I know are not moving, it's particularly disturbing. That's a really well done effect, I've seen something similar but nothing quite like that.

When you first study mathematics at undergraduate and early post-grad level there is a sense of being overwhelmed with how on earth anyone figured this out. When you read the messy history of maths, and understand it is an organic, growing field, you feel a little less like an imposter struggling to understand how anyone could've come up with this.

Reading these books (primarily as a software engineer), made me feel better about not immediately getting certain concepts, because it's likely the people these theorems are named after didn't get it either, to begin with. They refined it, they collaborated (like a pull request almost) and eventually everything got very neatly packaged up into a set of theorems. Mathematics is rarely taught in that way, I wish more of the "human" aspect was part of the pedagogical process. I think it might temper some of the fear people have.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...

> Microsoft and OpenAI have a very specific, internal definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI) based on the startup’s profits, according to a new report from The Information. And by this definition, OpenAI is many years away from reaching it.