Oh absolutely… There’s tons of petty tyrants out there too, which is different, but also bad or even worse. They might also be just staffing something just as soul crushing too, so it could just be worse in every regard
But small business means your boss is probably there to stay. Ideally, you meet the owner in your interview, often they’re the same person. But if you find someone loyal to their people, you can actually give them your loyalty and they’ll see you as a person
IDK if this would be viable with an H1 visa and I’ve seen many other options I’ll be looking into, but here’s what I normally tell people in this position: small businesses are built different
They’re harder to find, they usually don’t pay amazingly, but they’re way more human. It’s not all run through spread sheets, you work for humans who get to know you and (can sometimes) actually be like a family…(If they say that phrase it’s a red flag though)
It’s hit or miss, you likely would be working on legacy stuff or have to wear many hats… But it’s work where you know what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for
I think deepseek shook them enough to realize what should have been obvious for a while… Brute force doesn’t beat new techniques, and spending the most might not be the safest bet
There’s a ton of new techniques being developed all the time to do things more efficiently, and if you don’t need a crazy context window, in many use cases you can get away with much smaller models that don’t need massive datacenters
They’re different - when I say “brush” my tongue stays in the middle of my mouth against the bottom and the back spreads slightly on the r, when I say “blush” it touches the top of my teeth before flicking down on the u
They’re slightly different phonemes, if you don’t hear it naturally it’s difficult. But if you focus hard enough on the details you can eventually learn to hear it - you have to listen intently to the comparison over and over until you can hear the difference. From there, you can practice to make the sound yourself
Yep… My first “career” job was for a mid sized company. In my onboarding they gave me my employee number but said “you’ll never need this, here you’re a name, not a number”. One time I emailed security saying I forgot my badge because it was with my lunch, and one of the founders called me up and gave me his prepackaged lunch because he said he usually doesn’t get through them all. When we closed a big deal, they called us all upstairs to have champagne during the workday. Our mission was unambiguously to help people
Then we got acquired… They gave me my new employee ID and told me I’d be using it for everything. They just milked our contracts and refused wages until we all left
And unfortunately, mid sized companies can give an equally good experience with much better pay and job security… But they’re being bought out to secure contracts and gutted at an insane rate.
It’s late stage capitalism… If you want to keep growing but you’ve already destroyed your ability to complete, buy them out to take over their contracts