Cute dog, but is that an MST3K Torgo's Pizza pillow?!
Not one book, but almost all of Asimov's Foundation series. The first one is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time because I love seeing how each group has to use game theory to solve their own unique issue in order to survive and flourish as a society built on science and reason. While I admit that it's not always written well, I love the mindset that Asimov wanted to emphasize: violence should be the last resort for solving conflict between nations. When the factions outside of Foundation threaten them with war, they respond with soft power like economic pressure, religious sway, and focusing on making better advancements to science and engineering to defend themselves by being too valuable to destroy.
The fatal problem with the series arises in Book 2 though. Book 2 (Foundation & Empire) introduces the interesting concept of "what happens when a massive wrench is thrown into the meticulously calculated 1000-year plan?" Unfortunately, you can tell that at this point is when the concepts of the story become too smart for Asimov to handle, and he instead begins his trend of doubling and tripling down on deus ex machina characters with mind control powers for the rest of the series. All of the interesting methods of sociopolitical problem solving are thrown out the window to become sub-par adventure stories.
Books 4 and 5 (Foundation's Edge and Foundation & Earth) were written particularly poorly, and was probably the point where I should have cut my losses. The books follow not-Han-Solo adventure man, contain a sexist female sidekick that only serves to be a hot piece of ass for Asimov's self-insert character to have sex with, and then has an extremely uncomfortable "happy ending" where a traumatized child is left to be groomed by a robotic parental figure so that the robot can one day mind-wipe the child and insert it's own consciousness into their body. What's more is that they completely ditch the core premise of the 1000-year plan, and the ending undercuts any direction that the story could have gone from there.
The prequel books 6 and 7 (Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation) aren't nearly as bad as 4 or 5, but they completely undermine the importance and intelligence of the character Hari Seldon from the first book. Instead of him being a great man and brilliant mathematician on his own, he's essentially led around by his nose by undercover robots that are the secret architects of everything just because Asimov wanted to tie-in elements from his books about robots.
I wholeheartedly agree. There are so many communities that seem to be created just for one specific post and then remain empty (most commonly for games or shows from what I've seen). Instead of building up a more general-purpose community of interactions, the result is a lot of fragmented ghost towns that are far less than the sum of their parts.
Hi everyone,
I just recently graduated from university this past May with a BS in Computer Science, and I really have to ask the question: is the hiring market for the tech industry in the U.S. really as screwed up as it feels right now? I've been job hunting since before the start of my senior year of college and I've put out WELL over 100 applications by now (probably nearing 200) and I haven't even been able to get a freakin' interview. Not. A. Single. One. I'm at the point where I'm about ready to give up and just go back to applying to retail jobs, even though the reason I went to college was to escape those positions. I know that late last year and early this year there were tens of thousands of layoffs at major tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon, and so all of those people with industry experience flooding into the job market really outshines a new-grad like myself. However, I keep asking myself if that's actually the source of my problem or if it's something wrong with my approach. One thing that I know for certain is a bit of a problem is that I'm applying to positions in the Seattle area as well as remote positions, which are both fairly saturated with comp-sci people. This is because I'm going to be moving-in with a group of my friends there in a couple of months.
To give an idea of the position I'm in, here are some details about my experience level so far:
- I graduated Cum Laude with a GPA of 3.64.
- I had 2 internships during college, both of them writing code for small, local web development companies.
- My second internship turned into a 5 month contract position developing a mobile app in React Native for one of their clients.
- Though my school I did some projects for both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and my state's Parks and Wildlife department to help prototype some projects. Neither of these were paid positions, but they were projects that I wanted to help with to make my resume stand out.
- During my last two years, I worked with my university's biology department by writing small programs to help their undergraduate research projects. Again, this wasn't a paid position, but I thought it would look good on my resume (and my biology teacher was cool).
- I participated in a summer research program to work with machine learning algorithms and see how they can be useful for data analysis. So even though I'm a new-grad, I feel like I have a pretty good amount of experience to offer.
Now here are some details about how I've been job hunting:
- I've had my resume looked-over by 2 of my teachers, someone in my school's career services department, 3 of my friends who are in the tech industry, and also ChatGPT (just for good measure). All of them said it looks really good and professional. Also, I have 3 different versions for applying to different types of jobs, each of which highlights different skills more prominently.
- Using ChatGPT and help from a few of my friends in the tech industry, I created a very professional cover letter template that I've been using when applying for jobs. Each section highlights specific skills and experience, so I can quickly rearrange and tailor it to fit the job that I'm applying for.
- I use my GitHub account very frequently to show details about all of my major projects and to demonstrate that I know how to use code repositories for backing up and documenting my work.
- I created a Wordpress website to act as my portfolio, which I've been keeping up-to-date with all of the notable projects I've worked on since going back to school. This includes lots of pictures and detailed breakdowns of what the projects are for and what the biggest problems were.
- I've reached out to all of my friends, family members, classmates, roommates, teachers, former co-workers, and acquaintances to see if any of them might know of an entry-level position I could fill. Unfortunately, all of the non-tech people in my network came up empty-handed, and all of the people who were in the tech industry said "my company has a hiring freeze and are only laying people off right now." I should also note that I've reached out to these people a couple of times each since the start of this year, and the responses have been exactly the same.
- I've set up profiles on LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, ZipRecruiter, Handshake, Jobot, Microsoft Careers, USA Jobs, and probably a couple other job hunting sites I can't remember. All of them are up-to-date and I use them all very frequently.
- When I apply for jobs, I'm not just throwing out an application at every single position that I find. I specifically target ones that I actually have a chance at, which are 0-3 years of experience and where I have about +40% of the skills listed. I just wanted to clarify that I'm not being an idiot, applying for mid-senior positions, and then complaining that "nobody will hire me!"
With everything I've listed here, I honestly have no idea how I'm failing this horribly at my job hunt. I'd understand it if I had gotten some interviews and people said my coding skills weren't up to their expectations, but I haven't even made it that far. Not only can I not get my foot in the door anywhere, it doesn't look like there are even open doors available for me to try. All I get are automated rejection letters over and over and over. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Because this constant failure is really breaking me down, and I'm at the end of my rope here.