Being able to read Stanisław Lem in original I'd consider possibly the biggest perk.

> This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people

Yes.

But a first-line manager more often than not is just another human being caught in the system rather than a total drone. They have their own agency distinct from their org's, and you can consider trusting them, up to a point.

An LLM tool that can sit on a CI pipeline to propose what tests should be blocking.

Instead of brute-force method of selecting the appropriate test suites by path or similar, have LLM analyze changes and propose the set of test suites that is relevant to the change.

If there are new complex tests added to the change, estimates how many times to run them to ensure they are not flaky to begin with (hundreds? or thousands?).

Off the top of my head, possible problems here might be:

1. To handle trees easily you have to understand recursion. Somebody with no CS experience (and no parser experience) might never ever used recursion in anger, even if they launched zillion commercial projects.

2. No Big-O notation. Interviewers usually ask questions about time/space complexity.

And the elephant in the room is that leetcodes are getting trickier and trickier, that's LLM era for you.

I haven't looked at leetcode in a long time but if the problems require e.g. rebalancing a tree, I honestly don't remember how to do it and might not be able to reason it out on the spot either. I have no problems with concepts like recursion or computational complexity though.

It sounds like leetcode problems require either memorization of a significant number of algorithm design patterns or seriously sharp algorithmic problem solving skills.

> Off the top of my head, possible problems here might be:

> 1. To handle trees easily you have to understand recursion.

Well that's the point of the exercises I suggest - to learn recursion :-/

> No Big-O notation. Interviewers usually ask questions about time/space complexity

Well, that's the other half of the interview, I only promised that my method will cover half the questions :-)

> Well that's the point of the exercises I suggest - to learn recursion :-/

Then we must have been talking past each other. We are considering this problem here:

>> I never took affinity to computer science/math, but I love building real world products with software. [...] I am struggling with all the interviews that have these leetcode problems.

Then your advice to these interview problem is to learn some CS - the useful parts of it? E.g. recursion is CS.

>>>but I love building real world products with software.

> Then your advice to these interview problem is to learn some CS - the useful parts of it?

Theory was not my advice.

My advice was to do practical things with trees; I felt it would fit his love of building real things.

I mean, I didn't recommend doing problems out of a textbook, did I?

> Comments should not be answered in line, but by pushing updates to the code.

Hear, hear.

me: This unreadable, needs a comment.

them: <explains the thing>

me: True, but I've meant a source code comment.

them: <explains the thing again, but with more words; push never happens>

Did you try that? These "remote" jobs that OP is describing filter you out instantly because of geography, so there's nobody to speak to about B2B contract.

These that did not filter me that way, offered both: either regular employment or B2B. These are truly rare, say 2%-5%?

My guess is that in countries like US, B2B contracts for individual SWEs are considered something very special and snowflake'y. Like they fully expect you to disappear three hours in, never to be seen again.

> Wall wanted a language that allowed for cleverness, suprise, and ingenuity. [...] Having to learn to be a poet to be a good coder was too high a barrier.

To me this just sounds, umm, pathologically eclectic.

Now extrapolate to "let's do a Perl 6 that allows us to do all the things I couldn't work into Perl 5" and a lot more history makes sense.

But I bet you could really list some rubbish with it…

> I don't feel like I'm working when playing leetcode.

This. So, basically it's not "grinding" as OP describes it. Not starting each day with assumption that you'll do K mediums or L hards. More like making a honest attempt when you feel like it, and seeing whether it sticks.

> to charm, manipulate, and game

There is surely nothing wrong with being charming.

The "manipulate, and game", just per dictionary, would mean in this context something close to "control or influence unscrupulously". What social norms exactly do you see broken/bent by the OP? Because I see none.

Are you trying to influence this comment section unscrupulously?

> Physical attractiveness is a signal of reproductive fitness when it’s genetic, and not otherwise.

Nay, artificial physical attractiveness is also a signal of reproductive fitness. It isn't a given. It's the subject's genes that made a brain that was able to design (and to arrange to pay for!) the improved attractiveness.

It's not qualitatively different from brushing hair.

Yes, technically, having spare resources to devote to your own appearance is considered a positive signal, but it is an unreliable one, and often one not as valued by the people making the judgement. If there are many ways to signal wealth, a signal that has some intrinsic downside will lose its value if lots of people are sending the other wealth-signals.