I worked at a few Fortune 500 companies and interviewed a lot of candidates for both simple CRUD and harder systems programming work. Side projects, GitHub stuff, or even an independent bootstrapped business almost NEVER helped the candidate and more often seemed to hurt.

The only thing that would definitely help was getting your patches into major, major projects like the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, OpenJDK, etc.

- QA is always the first thing companies outsource, with predictable results

- Companies either go the route or “separate QA org with separate management chain” or “have QA engineers report to dev managers”. I’ve seen serious misaligned incentives and toxic outcomes with both

- Frequent Slack messages at 4:15 PM on Friday - “hey they just merged the PR, we really need it tested before Monday stand up”

- QA becomes a de facto dumping ground for glue work that other teams don’t want to do. Senior QA ends up morphing into a de facto “responsibility without authority” project manager role

- There is zero internet “community” around QA the way there is for developers or designers. There is no Slashdot or Hacker News for QA and there never will be. Just a bazaar of book authors and consultants promoting themselves on LinkedIn

IMO the only thing that makes sense anymore is having good SDETs embedded in engineering teams.

The only other market based solution I can think of is just charging like $10,000/yr minimum per domain name and forcing the plebs to use randomly generated strings like Tor onion sites

People generally try to follow through on a job they promised to do. They'll try to make the best of it so they feel like they made a good decision accepting the job.

If the conversations go badly, they can easily rationalize it away with "I didn't want to talk to them anyway, but I didn't have a choice".

Many shy and socially anxious people do basically fine in public-facing jobs because of this phenomenon.

Then came of the flood of Leetcode in the 2010s. If you memorized the top 100 interview puzzles, you would have had a good chance to get paid 5x more than a kernel or firmware engineer, and you could have ridden the stock market to generational wealth

There’s an underlying attitude of “serves those entitled nerds right” on both the political left and the right.

In 2025 I think the only thing that makes sense is having SDETs embedded in development teams.

Even a US city of 100,000 people, it can be really tough or impossible to get an Uber - good luck getting a ride from the airport at 12:30 in the morning

Most of the problems I have now are things like lane selection or turning into the wrong parking lot, which seem solvable in software given enough time, and the Robotaxi project should ramp up the urgency on that front

Match Group should be considered an adult entertainment business, like the old Craigslist personals.

Actually, I just checked the market cap of MTCH, it’s $7.3 billion - about in line with the $8 billion valuation being floated for OnlyFans.

> It is also revitalizing an unsuccessful experiment the company began in 2016: offering bespoke local activities, or what it calls “experiences.” The next stage, launch date unspecified, involves making your profile on Airbnb so robust that it’s “almost like a passport,” as Chesky puts it

> After that comes a deep immersion into AI: Inspired by his relationship with Altman, Chesky hopes to build the ultimate agent, a super-concierge who starts off handling customer service and eventually knows you well enough to plan your travel and maybe the rest of your life.

That kind of makes sense to me - Airbnb must have learned to deal with trust/safety/reputation issues better than basically any other consumer app based company (except maybe Uber/Lyft)

Looking at incumbents:

Tour booking - TripAdvisor and Viator, not enough network effect

Home services - Angie's List and Thumbtack, not enough network effect

Events and concerts - Ticketmaster, enough said

Classified ads - Facebook Marketplace, enough said

Gym and fitness - Classpass, which I think is pretty good actually, but definitely going to be acquired or copied by Big Tech

Volunteer event hosting - Meetup, anyone under 40 even remember that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0K0sI5XiP4