This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
From college to dating to jobs, no one in history has been rejected more than Gen Z
This is an interesting article about the trend of mass-applications that has become increasingly normalized across many areas of life. If you've applied for a job in the past decade or so, you'll know that the signal:noise ratio is very bad, and as such you're kind of expected to mass-apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs. Each job will get bombarded with something like 1000 applicants in the first few days, and while many of those applicants will be junk, there will probably be at least a few dozen high-quality candidates that you're competing with. This has led to companies becoming extremely picky. In my specific area of tech, its led to an expectation that you need to do dozens of hours of "leetcode", which are little toy problems that are ostensibly used to make sure you actually know how to program, but which actually do a terrible job at this because real programmers will usually be somewhat bad at these, while people who grind leetcode but know little else can do quite well. There's also a further expectation that you might be asked to do other ridiculous feats like have 8+ rounds of interviews for an entry-level position, and you might be ghosted at any point in this process, even after you've interviewed with real people. Heck, you might even be ghosted after you've received and accepted a formal job offer, then if you show up to work the company will just lie and say they have no idea who you are. While there's theoretically some recourse by suing for promissory estoppel, it's almost never worth the effort so it rarely happens. The accepted answer is "that's just part of the game now, swallow your pride and move on".
Dating, and to some extent college applications are also like this. Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face. While I think a little bit of rejection can be good to build resilience, I doubt humans are psychologically well-equipped to handle the barrage of rejection that's become commonplace. Getting rejected hurts even if it's just a small annoyance from not receiving a response. It makes you feel like you're being treated like garbage a little bit, which would almost certainly prompt some amount of nihilism after a while. It might also lead to some amount of risk aversion. I myself simply refuse to deal with online dating at all, which has dramatically limited my romantic options. But if dying alone is the price required to remove this nonsense from at least one aspect of my life, that's a deal I'd gladly take.
Look, commenting about jobs- I freely acknowledge that tech jobs might just be uniquely ridiculous. But for most normal jobs you apply and then call the company and check up on it, and then if the interview doesn’t raise any red flags and you have the basic qualifications they’re looking for, you’re hired. The zoomers seem to have forgotten that second step. As with most things, they should listen to their elders born before jet fuel melted steel beams and they’d do fine.
I’m not sure what type of jobs you’re referring to here, but I can confidently say that this is not how the hiring process works at all at my job, which is an extremely standard-issue white-collar/pink-collar corporate call center position. We have a whole HR/recruiting edifice to receive, sort, and filter out applications, and our company also does background checks. If an applicant called our HR department to “check in” at any point during this process, it would not make any difference in expediting any stage of the process. If the applicant got any response at all from our recruiting team, it would almost certainly be a generic “your application is still under review, please wait to hear back from our team with an update” email. Maybe you and I have very different ideas about what constitutes a “normal job”.
Yeah, I work at a generic-ish large-ish company, and there is literally zero way - including being an internal applicant and stopping by the hiring manager's desk! - to get your resume moved in front of them quicker or to jump the line.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link