praulv

Thinking about the big tech giants, it's quite obvious the world would pretty much fall apart if Google disappeared overnight. On the other hand, I wouldn't lose anything if Facebook/Twitter were to meet the same fate. We then have the likes of Netflix/Amazon/Uber who provide useful "convenience luxuries" but nothing life changing in my opinion. Curious to get the HN perspective on this, specifically, a view on the company valuation in the context of obsolescence.

As the title suggests, I am looking for anecdotal re-training experiences or suggestions on career advice for my 60 year old parent.

He is highly intelligent and reasonably mathematical but due to luck and circumstance only ever took manual labour roles which he can't perform anymore physically due to health conditions.

I've started looking at "menial" IT roles for him to re-train into, mainly software tester / support analyst style roles which are less technically demanding. (note: not SRE/test engineering roles which certainly require a comp sci background). Concretely, does anyone have advice on specific roles he could target?

I get he is heavily up against the odds at 60 with zero experience in coding but I have a very strong belief in his abilities as he does surprise me with his remarkable intelligence at times.

Yes, this is not your typical latest React/Node JS/Kotlin stack fanboy thread, but your advice would be extremely helpful.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to have this glaringly obvious idea, so I put it up for discussion. I was largely motivated by horror stories of Amazon workers having to walk 15 minutes to the break room for their - you guessed it - 15 minute break, along with a very strong desire to support my local neighbourhood/city shops.

The concept is an "Amazon" style shopping experience which supports local businesses. Let's ignore shipping logistics and synchronising stock inventory for now. Why is there no single global site for consumers to search local neighbourhood inventory for a product as a starting point. Yes, large department and retail stores often have nearest branch stock checking and online checkout, but I still feel the experience is frictious and fragmented. I understand many small businesses already operate on Amazon and eBay through fulfillment programmes. It seems like a fairly concrete and scalable problem to solve in principle, but probably quite difficult to operate sustainably.