Yep, decent 3d CAD is expensive. Competition in this space would be fantastic

+1 to this. If I go look at social media the job market is ending. But if I look at the signals around me there's plenty of opportunities.

Also consider taking something below (or even much below) expectations. It's much easier to work your way up with connections than it is to get in the door with no references.

What signals are you seeing?

The ones I've seen aren't good. I see some jobs in companies with shitty pay or shitty culture (my bar is not high). It dies look like the past 6 months have been better than the previous year or so. But overall, it looks pretty dim. I'm getting PIP'd soon. I am expecting that I will likely lose my job. If that happens, I'm expecting that I will end up as a Walmart greeter. As someone with a disability, I expect my application will go right in the trash if I answer yes or blank on the disability question. Or get fired if I mark no and then do need accommodations.

Exactly this.

I'm desperately looking for a new job. I hate my current job, the constant stress is taking a real toll, and I'm more tired than I've been ever before.

I'm quite literally applying to all sorts of developer jobs that I'm well overqualified for, in any honest assessment, for a lot less than I make now. These roles are far from "premium" gigs. I've no diva expectations or hope at this point.

The only places I even get rejection emails from are places I've had a referral.

Things are bleak.

I'm in a similar place wrt job "security."

Current gig will end soon, one way or another, and the future doesn't look great.

> As someone with a disability, I expect my application will go right in the trash if I answer yes or blank on the disability question

That's an interesting hypothesis.

I've seen many people suggest just the opposite- pretending to have a mild disability when filling in the form so that they get the boost from companies which use recruiting software that prioritizes diversity and inclusiveness in candidate pool.

Federal contractors are explicitly required to "take affirmative action to recruit, hire, promote and retain" people with disabilities, with a target of at least 7% of their employees be from that group. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/program-areas/employers/fe...

MIT students expect (not unfairly) to work at Jane Street/HRT/Jump/Citadel Securities/OpenAI/Anthropic and then "settle" for Google or Facebook. They're not going to work for Fidelity or Raytheon.

That's a bit of a charcacture of Course 6 at MIT. Course 10 is chemical engineering and plenty of them go into industry at all the major oil companies. Lots of MIT students go into aerospace and defense (Lincoln Labs is directly federally funded) and MIT holds a yearly Soldier Design Competition that also helps students go for SBIRs. Raytheon is a big hirer of course 2 (MechE) MIT grads.

That's only true of the ones on ROTC or similar military related programs, everyone else goes straight to Wall Street, big tech, or MBB or med school.

At the annual Fall job fair, 80% of students queue up to less than 10% of employers. Most companies never show up because it's simply not worth the cost and time to try to recruit spoiled brats of MIT

Most MIT Mech E grads work at Boeing. Most Chem Es work at Exxon, Merck and Intel. Most Aero Astros are at Boeing. Etc. Etc. You just aren't accurate.

I find this specious - why would they do that when this is basically the composition of the MechE, AeroE, and ChemE (except no Intel for ChemE, we send our EEs to intel) at my public school undergrad?

Why would they work with people that they perceive to be beneath them and have worked far less hard than them?

>Why would they work with people that they perceive to be beneath them and have worked far less hard than them?

Because you aren't actually modeling their thinking correctly?

Perhaps I don't. I don't know why someone would expend 100x the effort and be labeled at minimum 10x the person by MIT admissions to end up at the same place that people with 1350 SATs from Auburn or 1450's from NC State or 1420 from Binghamton would go to after graduating MechE.

So I was accepted to MIT long, long ago and couldn’t afford to go and ended up at an (excellent) state school. If I’d gone to MIT I would be the same person right? Stereotypes don’t work, and never have — see people, not labels.

As someone who's worked at Lincoln Labs, I do wonder if the poster here has considered this. Although, it is worth noting that LL requires citizenship for many/most of its divisions.

MIT kids get part time jobs waiting tables or working retail while in school, just like other college kids. My first job out of college was non-elite aircraft manufacturer... guy on my left was MIT, on my right was CalTech.

> MIT kids get part time jobs waiting tables or working retail while in school

I seriously doubt that. This doesn't fit the class they come from. Maybe it would have in 1985 but not today.

I absolutely second that - MIT students of 70's, 80's and even early 90's were from different social class, demographics and personality types, than todays students.

Today, MIT is nothing but a shadow of its better known academic cartel up the Mass ave. Those who hire MIT students know that and plan accordingly. The only reason to hire MIT students is for branding propaganda, you get nothing more from them.

I get why they might have a certain expectation. It kinda depends on the job market. The guy in the cube next to me at Fidelity had a degree from MIT.

As an MIT reject (technically waitlisted), my very first post-graduation job was at Raytheon and much later in life, I ended up at Facebook, where I managed a team that had several engineers that joined directly from MIT. While I can't speak to the entire MIT grad cohort, fFacebook was the first-choice for everyone in this particular group.

Facebook is still much higher status than Amazon or IBM or any other company the people from my undergrad join after college

> But if I look at the signals around me there's plenty of opportunities.

The signals around me in LA are pretty damn bad. several friends laid off, many others worried about layoffs, and a very weak pulse on the market in terms of roles. I still have part time work but who knows for how much longer at this rate?

At this point I'm fine taking up anything that pays and doesn't potentially sent my 8 YO car into retirement even faster.

People need a “why” to what they do. Generally “I do what I’m told because that is what the process says” doesn’t scale as well as “we are here to get airplanes where they need to go”. The narrative doesn’t have to be outlandish, in fact unrealistic stories give narratives a bad reputation.

What you do need is a simple why you are coming to work that is beyond “to get a paycheck”.

It can also serve as a helpful reference point for "what am I (still) doing here?" so that you can judge when you perhaps should not be.

True enough. If I am sitting in the backseat or front and the driver is meandering, I might think of bailing, yeah.

No.. it’s not dead. But it is at a point where the bar to get traction is raising significantly. You can’t make something mediocre and get traction just because the alternative is pen and paper. Need to design something that sells well and provides value.

that means the lean startup method is dead because if you need to come out of the gate with a polished product, you need to build for a while before launching

Yup. We are starting to fall down the slippery slope of not even knowing how to produce goods, not even considering cost.

Because right now airplanes are flown by humans. A large part of atcs jobs is dealing with humans. Not every pilot will be able to fly the optimum flight path.

My brother, who graduated 2024 in MechE is aware of the term “feeds & speeds”.

Mechanical engineering is a pretty broad discipline covering everything from micro fluidics to structural requirements of sky scrapers. It’s a good skill to have but I’m not sure that awareness of operating a milling machine is critical for success after graduation.

Land is expensive in the areas people want to live. But yeah, tools are much cheaper, esp if you slowly grow over time.

There are good reasons for depreciating the nrf5 sdk. However, I’m not sure how long the Nordic Semi lead is going to last.

Previously if there was a project that came up that didn’t strictly need BLE, I’d recommend the nrf5 sdk because it was reliable and stable. Now with the new sdk they are encouraging people to write firmware that’s much easier to port to other mcus (with zephyr) and the development experience has much higher cognitive load.

Everything on this can be programmatically simulated by a bot with bad intentions. It will be a cat and mouse game of finding behaviors that differentiate between bot and not and patching them.

To truly say “I trust real browsers” requires a signal of integrity of the user and browser such as cryptographic device attestation of the browser. .. which has to be centrally verified. Which is also not great.

> Everything on this can be programmatically simulated by a bot with bad intentions. It will be a cat and mouse game of finding behaviors that differentiate between bot and not and patching them.

Forcing Facebook & Co to play the adversary role still seems like an improvement over the current situation. They're clearly operating illegitimately if they start spoofing real user agents to get around bot blocking capabilities.

I'm imagining a quixotic terms of service, where "by continuing" any bot access grants the site-owner a perpetual and irrevocable license to use and relicense all data, works, or other products resulting from any use of the crawled content, including but not limited to cases where that content was used in a statistical text generative model.