I created an Omnivore account recently and I started to love it. I thought to self-host it but I didn't have enough time and thought I'd host it later.

I (along with everyone else presumably) got this email today:

We’re excited to share that Omnivore is joining forces with ElevenLabs, the leading AI audio research and technology company. Our team is joining ElevenLabs to help drive the future of accessible reading and listening with their new ElevenReader app.

Next, all Omnivore users will be able to export their information from the service through November 15 2024, after which all information will be deleted.

Though it is quite frustrating, I will not go further in my opinion of this move.

I would just like to let the community know that I'm in the market for an alternative for this... or maybe some help how to self-host it. I don't even know if it will be easy to self-host or if it will be worth it, presumably without updates...

I've been looking at job postings at tech companies. Many of them have pretty bad Glassdoor reviews
(and I tried pretty hard to play Devil's Advocate while reading!). I think there's no perfect company out there. Still, I notice a lot of mentions of overvaluation, layoffs / diminishing culture, stressed employees / long hours, insurmountable tech debt, junior / inexperienced leadership, "toxic" culture, Hire-to-Fire 15% PIP cultures, etc. I feel differently about a lot of companies I used to aspire to join.

In the midst of all that, I also then see small startups. 10, 20 people. It sounded like way too much work at first, but I know some people who seem pretty fulfilled by such a setup and not (visibly) half as stressed as I was at a ~70 person mismanaged startup (although engineering headcount was pretty small). Some part of me wonders if a small company, even of strangers, would actually be less stress because we wouldn't yet have made the mistakes on culture mismatch, growing headcount, adding features to get growth that may never come, etc.

edit: adding clarification

Oh yes, to be totally clear-- a lot of the Glassdoors / Blinds were actually for large tech companies, including but not limited to "startups" originating from 10 years ago. Some were also smedium sized (~6 years old, ~50 people, typically Series A or earlier) so had been doing the startup thing long enough where you can see the team is starting to fray.

In my post, it's basically a slightly unhealthy comparison between older companies that have had lots of time to screw up, and companies that have not yet publicly or irrevocably screwed up (the small, new startups). Of course, I'm then kind of assuming I won't be the reason something fails when I totally could be lol.

I've been a hiring manager before across a few jobs. But, then, I was receiving maybe 50 resumes to screen a week with my recruiter. Y'all are, what, at a few factors to an order of magnitude more than that?

Are your recruiters now pre-filtering resumes before you see them? What is being used to determine whether a candidate gets an interview now?

What I'm seeing:

• Referrals almost never matter: I've gotten two interviews through my network after dozens of applications—and I'm fairly well networked.
• Experience at other well-known Tech companies doesn't get an interview
• Having the right skill set, based on the job description doesn't get an interview.

From the outside, it seems like a coin flip.

Meanwhile, I have LinkedIn's AI advisor routinely giving me flavors of "yes, you're definitely their kind of candidate" yet no responses after weeks followed by the occasional casual rejection email.

So what's happening behind the scenes? How do resumes get on your radar? How do you work from the deluge to hiring a human?

Sincerely,
A very experienced engineer and manager who is rather fed up with what seems like a collection of pseudo-random number generator contemporary hiring processes.

EDIT: I should have also included recruiters in the title of my ask.

For a while now I am personally completely dissatisfied with the direction the (mainstream)technology is taking.

Almost universally the theme is simplification on end user facing side. That by itself would not be so bad but products that go this route currently universally include loss of control of the user including things I would not have believed would be accepted just a decade or so ago. Forced telemetry(aka spying on user habits), forced updates(aka forcefully changing functionality without consent of the user), loss of information - simplification of error messages to absolute uselessness, loss of customization options or their removal to parts that are impossible to find unless you know about them already, nagware and bloatware and ads forcefully included in base os install. And that is simply the desktop/laptop environment.The mobile one is truly insane and anything other "smart" is simply closed sw and hw not regarding user agency at all.

Personally I consider the current iteration of "just works" approach flawed, problems will inevitably arise. Withholding basic information and tools simply means that the end user does not know what happened and is dependent on support for trivialities. I also consider various hmmm, oops and such error messages degrading and helping to cultivate a culture of technological helplessness.

To be honest I believe the option most people(generally) end up taking of disinterest in even the superficial basics of technology is an objectively bad one. Computing is one of the most complex and advanced technologies we have but the user facing side even in systems such as Linux or Windows 7 and older is simple to understand and use effectively with minimal effort. I do not believe most people are incapable of acquiring enough proficiency to for example install an os or take a reasonable guess at what a sane error message means or even understand the basics of using a terminal, they simply choose to not bother. But we live and will continue to live in a technological world and some universal technological literacy is needed to prevent loss of options and loss of agency of the end user. The changes introduced in mainstream sw are on a very clear trajectory that will not change by itself.

I have this vision of a future where the end user interacts solely with curated LLM systems without the least understanding of what is happening, why it is happening or who makes it happen. The blackbox nature of such systems then introducing subtle biases that were not caught in brute force patches over the systems or simply not caught, perpetuating who knows what. Unfortunately I do not think it is sufficiently unlikely by the current trends.

Up to a point I get not wanting to deal with problems with technology but instead roadblocks are introduced that are as annoying to get through with the difference that they will not stay fixed. Technology is directing massive portion of our lives, choosing to not make an effort to understand the absolute surface of it is I think not a sound decision and creates a culture where it is possible to introduce disempowering changes en masse.

So far this has been a rant honestly and perhaps I just needed to vent but I am actually interested in the thoughts of the community on this broad topic.