I hear you. Since I build my own solar power system last year I am actively considering to work as an electrician. Nowadays that seems more like honest work to me and something that is actually useful. Software and computers were fun that last 30 years but now it more and more feels like a tool that not only does damage to society but controls and watches every move we make so a few people can become crazy rich. Fun times are over.

"Teleperformance, along with hundreds of other companies, has hired thousands of data annotators in India — many of them women in small towns and rural areas — to label training images and videos for AI systems. Prompt engineers, data scientists, AI trainers and speech scientists are all newly in demand" -> All these jobs have one thing in common: Either to make AI better or help install it. Both will not be in demand anymore, once done. This world will become a crazy shit show in the coming years.

Well I am not saying it is completely useless and maybe we really do not have anything better but I can see that we frequently hire people who are great at implementing all these algorithms but are unable to produce an even remotely nice results when it comes to object oriented programming, which in the end is what we actually do. You end up having the classes that are required by the framework plus a bunch of Helper, Util and Constants classes where the actual magic happens. No need to mention that this is hard to unit test and most of the time the tests need to be changed if you change the code, basically driving the whole reason why to have unit tests obsolete. I am in this business for almost 20 years and when I think about changing jobs it feels crazy to me to spend my evenings studying all sorts of tree structures again just to prove myself in an interview and then bury that knowledge up until the next interview. But I agree, finding good people is hard and if that is the only proven option to recognize them, I guess we have to live with it.

"This dismissal of AI tools during the interview process meant we weren't truly evaluating how candidates would perform in their actual role," This is hilarious. So, then why focus so much on basic data structures and algorithms in the interview? Yes, you should know basic algorithms and yes, if you work on certain types of applications you need that knowledge but the vast majority of companies writes code to support their business or to build a product they sell. Most of the time you will use the algorithms provided by your SDK because usually they have been optimized over the years to work really well. Yet, a lot of companies focus in their interviews to just check how well somebody can implement merge sort, linked lists and other kind of data structures and algorithms just to say afterwards "here is our gigantic code base consisting of web controllers, database access code and business logic. Have fun." None of the interviews I ever had tested how I would perform in the actual role because I do not need to implement a linked list myself in order to calculate a VAT to display the end price of a product to a customer.

with all the environmental consequences: unprecedented.

When I look at todays world I cannot help but think that people were more connected when we did not have smartphones and all this social media non-sense. Yes, we might have lost contact with some people but we regularly had phone calls or met with friends. Nowadays we are in contact with everybody via text messages but we do barely really speak to people. How often do you see people sitting on tables in cafes or other places just staring at their phones? The options to communicate have vastly increased while the quality time we spent with people has vastly decreased. If you want to stop being lonely, throw your phone away and meet with people in real life. One other reason I see is that people are more and more eaten up by their work which is required to make ends meet. If you work full time plus you have just any kind of hobby you take serious, the time to spent with friends and family becomes even less. All just so a few people get more rich.

You are absolutely right. Besides the fact, that I don't like their music, I would not buy an online album because I think they are only doing this for profit. They always have been pro-RIAA and now they see that bands can actually make money by selling their songs online they are interested. I guess someone told them, that they could make more money by selling online music because they do not depend on the whole music industry and therefore don't have to pay this giant industry anymore. If someone would show me these figures I would also announce to sell my songs online.