I wonder how much of this change is the result of the whole world saying “Well, he’s 18 and getting into politics - the gloves are off now.” Wouldn’t surprise me if it was his mom’s doing. I don’t like her, but good on her if she pulled the plug on this.

It was disputed by Trump

Off hand, the only Stephenson novels I can think of that I’ve read are Snow crash, Seveneves, and Fall. All of them are excellent, but they’re very different from each other, so it’s hard to think of another author that’s similar.

All that being said, you might try Project Hail Mary, by Weir, and maybe Saturn’s Children by Stross.

My guess is that her plan is to either become the Republican nominee of Trump goes to jail, or (more likely) set herself up for a 2028 campaign. Endorsing Biden would end her prospects for the latter, so it’s not going to happen.

One who is a control freak that lacks empathy?

It’s been a lot longer than that. Here, take a look at this graph comparing productivity to average worker salary. They were completely in sync up through the 70s, then in the 80s worker salary flattened while productivity kept on the same increasing rate. 1981 was when Reagan took office and we started with “trickle down economics.” Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that was supposed to “trickle down” to the worker. Conservatives still tout it today, but it’s never done anything other than make rich people richer and screw the economy.

The problem is that those two lines are continuing on their respective paths, and businesses are expected to grow their productivity at that rate while keeping costs (including salaries) down. So we get squeezed to do more and more with less and less.

There seem to be more and more people who are just bad at their jobs these days. Part of that, from my vantage point, is companies expecting ever-increasing productivity with ever-decreasing resources.

In my early management days, when I wanted to hire someone, an HR person would come and meet with me to go ever exactly what I was looking for, what was critical, what was nice to have, etc. They’d post the position, but they’d also attend career fairs, connect with other agencies, etc. Then they would read through all the resumes and give me what they thought were the top candidates. And they didn’t do a bad job of it. For the ones that I didn’t like, they’d ask me to explain why so that they could get better.

Now it’s more and more self-service. Same with IT, and other areas too.

I think it’s most important for the candidate to hate the same things they hate.

Understood, but I didn’t want anyone to think it’s a good idea.

I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve been in where the interviewer was clearly not technical but asked questions around your technical background.

That’s just crazy town, I can’t imagine doing that. I manage software engineers, and I did real time control software for a couple decades before I became a manager. Here’s roughly my process:

• I get the matching resumes from HR - I try not to ask them to assess anything besides degree and very rough background.
• I read through all the resumes I get looking for qualifications and red flags.
• For the top three to six, I’ll set up a phone interview with me and our top technical person. But the questions there aren’t especially technical, they’re mostly to get the person talking, look for motivations and interests, make sure we understand the things on the resume, see how they communicate, and get a sense of how they’d mesh with the team. It’s also to answer every question they have as honestly and candidly as we can; I’d much rather find out that we’re not a good fit in a phone interview than later.
• For any that do well on the phone screen and are still interested, I’ll set up in person interviews with one or two groups of my team. I make sure it includes people who have been here for decades, people who are mid career, and people who have only been here a couple years. I do that in part because I think they look for different things in the candidate, and partly so the candidate can get different perspectives on our work environment. I try not to have more than three of our people in an interview so it doesn’t feel like an inquisition. I’ll talk with the candidate for 30 minutes when they come in to let them know what to expect and to make sure they take the opportunity to ask questions, and then afterwards me and the top technical person will meet to see how it went, if there are any other questions, and to get our in-person sense of the candidate.

Then that’s, no other interviews in the vast majority of cases; I get feedback from the team and then make my best call. If none are good fits, I’ll repeat the whole process.

The struggle i have is that a giant percentage of applicants want fully remote work, which I respect, but a lot of our work requires being hands on with hardware, so at best we’re hybrid. Oh, and it’s of course harder when I’m looking for something very specific. If I need someone with ten years of real time control software experience who has a software degree and hands on hardware experience, that’s for sure harder. The reason so many companies are having a harder time is that unemployment is low but salaries haven’t caught up. It’s not that no one wants to fill out the application form.

I don’t struggle to find good applicants. I have a really high success rate in a very challenging field.

Not sure why you think I have trouble getting good talent.

This doesn’t make my life easier. I still get a mess of resumes that I have to read through and rank, then go through the interview process. It’s a lot of work. But I do get good results generally.

I just don’t get how evangelicals can support people like this. Once upon a time, it was career suicide if a republican politician wasn’t seen going to church on Sundays. Now they get kicked out of theaters for groping their date, cheat on their spouse with a porn star, get caught in lies almost daily, and the Christian right says god chose them to run the country.

I’m not sure what your problem with it is. The process seems to work reasonably well on my end. I’m not sure why you think the form is such a burden.

I work for a company that makes rocket engines. It makes no sense to teach the folks in HR about all the disciplines that go into the business - mechanical design, combustion devices, materials and properties, electronics, software, etc. It makes way more sense to make sure they know how to do their own job, and for a hiring manager to be able to tell them something like, “Send me all the applicants who have a computer science degree and at least five years of experience.” Then I can evaluate which of those applicants is the best fit based on the resume. The form facilitate that.

I don’t know what to tell you - I just know that I’ve never known an HR organization that used something like that. All the corporate websites I’ve ever seen have you fill out a form an attach your resume. Maybe that’s changing, but not where I am.

I don’t think HR does it by hand, they do a query for specific degree and years of experience based on what’s entered into the form. Then they take the results and send those resumes to the manager. They aren’t going to read through hundreds or thousands of resumes trying to find the key items.

Knowing me, probably something like “I wonder what this does…”

I’m a hiring manager, and every single person hired at my company has to fill out a form like this.