That would be my response, but a lot of people can be guilt tripped into coming in to work anyway.

I used to work for a call center that had an automated call out system, so you didn’t have to talk to anyone or give a specific excuse. However, at some point management instituted a policy requiring supervisors to call their employees to “check in on their wellbeing.” I don’t even have to be cynical to know the real purpose because I was in the meetings where they talked about it as a tactic to reduce absenteeism.

I meant moving to another country permanently, not traveling, but good to know that the US system can reach out and punish me if I have the audacity to travel out of network. :(

To some degree you can get use Glassdoor with the help of the element zapper from ublock origin. What you can circumvent is pretty limited, but you can at least get a bit of information without jumping through all their hoops.

What that said, I would not put a ton of trust in the reviews section. As people have mentioned, companies can get bad reviews removed, but also most happy employees aren’t taking the time to go submit a review. I use it more to see salary ranges for job titles, both generally and at specific companies. Even that is subject to how honest users are about their title and salary, but employees have much less access to that kind of info compared to employers, so I have to take what I can get.

It’s helpful to know that if I ever leave the US, I’ll have better healthcare. I don’t even need to spend any time researching that aspect.

I’ve been curious about this too, but haven’t been able to find anything that puts a real price (including future profit margin) on GenAI. For example, having a chat conversation with a customer service agent in India might cost about $2-3. Is a GenAI bot truly cheaper than that once you factor in the energy & water costs, hardware, training, profits, etc.? It might be, but I’m skeptical.

I was only ever interested in these company’s services as a way to save money. They are no longer cheaper than a hotel, so I would rather stay at a hotel.

I’ve been applying similar thinking to my job search. When I see AI listed in a job description, I immediately put the company into one of 3 categories:

1. It is an AI company that may go out of business suddenly within the next few years leaving me unemployed and possibly without any severance.
2. Management has drank the Kool-Aid and is hoping AI will drive their profit growth, which makes me question management competence. This also has a high likelihood of future job loss, but at least they might pay severance.
3. The buzzword was tossed in to make the company look good to investors, but it is not highly relevant to their business. These companies get a partial pass for me.

A company in the first two categories would need to pay a lot to entice me and I would not value their equity offering. The third category is understandable, especially if the success of AI would threaten their business.

The only use case I can see for Access is when you absolutely must have a database and your company will not provide you a real database solution. I have experience with both, but haven’t touched Access in years (and hope to never do so again). To be fair, I also regularly use Excel for things that I should probably be using Word for because it is easier to get formatting right in Excel.