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An Unbelievable Demo

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Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#441

Post by steego »

nix23 wrote: post #428
cge wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws around recording typically also cover cases where an outside person, who isn't a party in the conversation, is recording. The idea is that there are three possibilities: all parties in the conversation consent to recording, one of the parties consents (almost certainly the person who wants the recording), and none of the parties consent (ie, someone is spying on the conversation). One-party consent is legal in a…

That's not what he said...if everyone consent that's called a interview.

Tell me what I said.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#442

Post by zikzak »

filoleg wrote: post #401
derefr wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, there does have to be a public mailing list. My point was that there are often public mailing lists, where engineers with real engineering problems could discuss those problems with the engineers responsible for the product/service; and yet the engineer with the problem nevertheless doesn't even think of using the mailing list to reach out, but instead decides to go through regular customer-service suppor…

>Well, yeah, there does have to be a public mailing list. Imo, this is not scalable or sustainable, and mailing lists are not a replacement for adequate customer support. The only reason sending emails directly to mailing lists for specific Google products works is precisely because those mailing lists are not public and not flooded with bajillions of emails from the general public. So those who send the emails are a…

Lately, I've seen a few open source projects go this way: GitHub issues, this gets unwieldy so they create a Discord, this descends into chaos so they nominate a community volunteer, issues are then filtered by thier preferences, etc.

I like Discord, especially in the early days, you can reach out to the principal dev, etc. But it soon seems like they either disappear to get work done (good) or spend all thier time on it (bad). Either way you end up with chaos.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#443

Post by bartread »

bradlys wrote: post #358
TimPC wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your favourite question has some cultural gaps as in many countries in interview settings people downplay weaknesses and flaws. It’s why a lot of weakness questions are often ineffective. Unless you are acutely aware of when a person is doing this BECAUSE it’s an interview you’re going to get some answers that might lead you to reject good candidates.

Honesty is something that never goes down well in an interview when it comes to being critical. (At least in the US)

I've made a lot of foul-ups in the course of my career. When people ask me about mistakes I've made and what I've learned from them during interviews it's generally an easy question to answer because I have this overstuffed mental file folder of examples.

I can't speak for the US but, in the UK, don't misrepresent your work in a job interview. I can't say you'll never miss out on an offer by being honest, though I don't believe I ever have, but would you really want to work for people who'd prefer you to lie or misrepresent mistakes you've made than be open and truthful about them?

To me that's something of a red flag: it's at least indicative of a culture where mistakes are likely to be covered up, leading to a lack of reflection, learning and improvement... and also quite possibly storing up bigger problems for later.

(FWIW, I started as a developer and am now the CTO of a mid-sized multinational market research and insight company. This is nowhere near as grand as it might sound, and isn't meant to be a boast, but hopefully illustrates that being honest doesn't appear to have done my career any long-term harm. Some things that have, if not derailed my career, caused me to take some fairly substantial detours: (i) taking things too personally, (ii) placing too much weight on others' assessments of me, (iii) and I say this as somebody who is wary of people who change jobs too often, but... staying in a job way past the point where there was anything else I could learn/give/progress. I am, of course, but a single data point.)

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#444

Post by avhon1 »

dvlsg wrote: post #312
cromulent wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Australia, for example. https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/is-it-legal-to...

The majority of the states in the US have one-party consent too, I believe.

Yep. Here's a list of one-party recording consent states from [1]:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana*, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

[1] https://recordinglaw.com/united-states-recording-laws/one-pa...

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#445

Post by ghoward »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #347
cperciva wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're giving cperciva too much credit. He was just as arrogant as people thought, and he was definitely defensive.

I wonder how many people will downvote you without looking at your username?

I can't downvote, but I am glad you said something because I didn't look!

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#446

Post by mst »

mercer wrote: post #323
derefr wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, people who say so-and-so company (usually Google) is hard to contact for support, or that they require expensive support contracts before they'll talk to you, have likely never tried sending email to the appropriate mailing list for the product. It's amazing how often doing this completely bypasses any corporate first-line-support structure in the way, and just puts the email right into the inbox of the line en…

I've more than once had one of the core developers of Elixir or Phoenix answer a question almost right after asking it in the Slack or IRC channel. I often felt a bit embarrassed to take up their time considering how 'basic' these questions were. I've had similar experiences in other language/framework communities. It's amazing how helpful some of these very productive people can be to random chat visitors :)!

The trick is to remember that they're almost certainly working on that stuff because they enjoy making users happy, so they're also doing support for the same reason.

I do feel a little bit embarrassed if it turns out they're reading the docs to me, but I feel embarrassed about that whether it's an expert or a fellow n00b ;)

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#447

Post by mst »

beagle3 wrote: post #230
milankragujevic wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can go worse - some cheap and badly designed Android phones which download updates from every month when you first buy it until the current month, so maybe 10+ updates, but they aren't deltas (diffs) but full images. Ridiculous on so many levels.

It’s because they only tested updates from one version to the next, and not every version to every newer version. It is a complete image, but phones today have nontrivial state that may be a problem - e.g. your baseband processor might have its own rom with its own update protocol, which changed between image 2 and image 7, so image 10 after image 1 will be unable to update the baseband.

If it's a cheap phone, I'd rather them do something brute force but reliable than try and be clever when they know they don't have the budget to QA it.

I honestly consider that a pretty reasonable trade-off.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#448

Post by derefr »

filoleg wrote: post #401
derefr wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, there does have to be a public mailing list. My point was that there are often public mailing lists, where engineers with real engineering problems could discuss those problems with the engineers responsible for the product/service; and yet the engineer with the problem nevertheless doesn't even think of using the mailing list to reach out, but instead decides to go through regular customer-service suppor…

>Well, yeah, there does have to be a public mailing list. Imo, this is not scalable or sustainable, and mailing lists are not a replacement for adequate customer support. The only reason sending emails directly to mailing lists for specific Google products works is precisely because those mailing lists are not public and not flooded with bajillions of emails from the general public. So those who send the emails are a…

I'm confused about what you mean about "public." I'm just a regular guy with no connections to Google, other than being a GCP customer. I found the mailing list addresses for each GCP service listed directly in the support documentation. Literally anyone who has GCP problems would end up finding those addresses, if 1. they clicked on the "help" button and went through the workflow presented, and 2. didn't first pay for extended white-glove support and then immediately reach for it for any problem that came up.

By my thinking, that's a "public" mailing list. They're not hiding it from you. The opposite, really — they're trying to get everyone to know and use it, by making it free to any GCP customer, while the actual CSR kind of support requires paying for a subscription to a higher support tier. The mailing list, presented in Google Groups format, is literally what GCP calls their "support forum." It's supposed to take on all comers, including dumb customer asks.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#449

Post by derefr »

zikzak wrote: post #442
filoleg wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well, yeah, there does have to be a public mailing list. Imo, this is not scalable or sustainable, and mailing lists are not a replacement for adequate customer support. The only reason sending emails directly to mailing lists for specific Google products works is precisely because those mailing lists are not public and not flooded with bajillions of emails from the general public. So those who send the emails are a…

Lately, I've seen a few open source projects go this way: GitHub issues, this gets unwieldy so they create a Discord, this descends into chaos so they nominate a community volunteer, issues are then filtered by thier preferences, etc. I like Discord, especially in the early days, you can reach out to the principal dev, etc. But it soon seems like they either disappear to get work done (good) or spend all thier time o…

Our company has a Discord, but we employ a professional Community Manager for it. When community members bring issues up:

1. they're encouraged to do so in public, so that other community members can help if possible, and/or so bots can reply with suggested FAQ answers;

2. the Community Manager will answer with the company line for questions the company has set answers to (e.g. "when are you releasing X?" or "why is [abusive DoS-like pattern of requests to your service] not working?");

3. otherwise, if the Community Manager knows the answer for sure off the top of their head, they'll give the answer;

4. and if not, the Community Manager relays the question to an engineer in our Slack, where we either have an answer off the top of our heads, or we file it as an issue.

Seems to work just fine for us so far.

Some of the engineers are also sometimes in the Discord (and we're all registered to it), but other than the Community Manager, it's not our job to be in there.

Re: An Unbelievable Demo

#450

Post by steelframe »

bradlys wrote: post #358
TimPC wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your favourite question has some cultural gaps as in many countries in interview settings people downplay weaknesses and flaws. It’s why a lot of weakness questions are often ineffective. Unless you are acutely aware of when a person is doing this BECAUSE it’s an interview you’re going to get some answers that might lead you to reject good candidates.

Honesty is something that never goes down well in an interview when it comes to being critical. (At least in the US)

> Honesty is something that never goes down well in an interview when it comes to being critical. (At least in the US)

I wouldn't paint all tech companies in the U.S. with such broad strokes. In the interview loop for the job I have now in the U.S., every single interviewer asked me a question about "how things could have gone better." I talked about mistakes I made, lessons learned, and how I could do better next time.

I am told the feedback from that loop was across-the-board "outstanding."

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