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An Unbelievable Demo
451–460 of 478 posts
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having conducted technical interviews at FAANG companies for over 10 years, I've gotten to the point where I never believe anything anyone claims on their resumes unless I can independently verify them. I also make it a point to ask probing questions about where they got the idea of "inventing" what they did and what alternatives to "making a brand new thing" they considered at the time. However one of my favorite qu…
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.
I'm aware of what you're referring to, and I can assure you that this cultural gap can often extend beyond just the interview and into the workplace.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#453Earlier 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…
I've also got serious problems (as in, the service we're paying real money for is totally broken) solved by contacting a friend who worked at $BIG_COMPANY and the friend escalating internally. The point is that I shouldn't have to bypass the official channels that way. These organisations are operating at the level of ad-hoc individual heroics, which is the lowest tier in terms of organisational maturity. In a start-…
What I've seen so far is that companies in general don't get better at this as they grow. They add process over process and each level makes tackling 90 percent of support requests more efficient (for them) but the more difficult requests just don't make it to the person who could help.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
I for one wouldn't be so forgiving. Stripping the author's name from source code is an absolute no-go.
Yes, but that code wasn't mine either as I wrote at another company as their product. When I added my "hidden" traces I did that with no intention to claim ownership, but rather to leave a signature just in case. Technically the 1st company should have sued him, but I can't know for sure the details; the old project was then dead, and he could have purchased the sources legally, although I doubt that.
> leave a signature just in case
Just in case what happened? I'm not understanding the work environment that would lead to this practice
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#455Almost been there. I was once hired and given some sources to work on by a company, and those were the same exact sources I wrote at another company years before, although my name and all recognizable comments were stripped, save for a few almost invisible traces I left like my initials paired with reserved words to make them appear like directives, pragmas, etc. The guy who had given me the "new" sources was without…
I personally wouldn't work on code that I knew was stolen from a previous employer, especially if its code I worked on directly. Ethics aside, if you ever get caught you are personally going to be subjected to entirely to many questions and its the kind of thing that could follow you around for the rest of your career even if you really did nothing wrong.
I wouldn't touch it, either. It's a crime.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've also got serious problems (as in, the service we're paying real money for is totally broken) solved by contacting a friend who worked at $BIG_COMPANY and the friend escalating internally. The point is that I shouldn't have to bypass the official channels that way. These organisations are operating at the level of ad-hoc individual heroics, which is the lowest tier in terms of organisational maturity. In a start-…
What I've seen so far is that companies in general don't get better at this as they grow. They add process over process and each level makes tackling 90 percent of support requests more efficient (for them) but the more difficult requests just don't make it to the person who could help.
That is certainly one pattern we see repeating, but I don't think it's what is happening with many of the big tech companies. They're opting for the alternative where tackling 90% of support requests is highly efficient because those requests are simply routed to /dev/null.
In one sense, it's hard to blame them. After all, if no-one who matters to their revenue stream is actually going to change behaviour because of that dismissive policy, it saves them all the overheads of providing useful support and costs them practically nothing. It's just good business, right?
What is strange is how they've got away with it for so long and most people still don't seem to be switching to alternatives, even as the tech giants casually squash them without even noticing. At some point around here, the words "competition" and "regulation" enter the room.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#457Heh. I've a few times asked questions, only to be pointed to my own blog for answers. To be fair, yes those articles were on the same topic, but I'm actually trying to take the next step here. :-)
I've found my own blog posts in the search results while searching for something more than once. The best part is when my own blog posts actually have the answer I was looking for - at which point I start feeling old and forgetful.
This has happened to me. And I wrote the post in the first place because I kept having to rediscover how to do the thing
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#458Are we being fools? Do you only get ahead in the world if instead of spending our precious time building things we use it cannabalizing other peoples work?
No.
While I don't believe in karma, I do believe there are consequences to misbehavior, even if one is not caught:
The temerity and lack of ethics to appropriate a project that someone else has written and claim it as one's own leaks into other areas of one's life. That kind of behavior is not isolated to just open-source software. Perhaps the world-weary thief of the OP took his experience as a lesson and changed his ways, but he likely continued bumbling around, behaving dishonestly, losing the respect of his peers along the way. Perhaps even that of family and friends. Perhaps he miscounts the points in a boardgame, or cheats on his spouse, but it won't be limited to this.
Contrast that to the life and career arc of the OP himself.
So, no, the fools are those who steal, caught or not.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePo... > Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public? > The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified vers…
Yes, I'm not arguing otherwise. You're not free to make copies without the license. You are free to make copies with the license, because that's what the license granted you permission to do. You aren't free to do so without preserving the license, because you don't have a license to do that and that's copyright infringement. You aren't required to publicly release derivative works or their source, simply because the…
That was my understanding. If removing the license is a breach of terms, therefore the GPL now fails to apply, then it falls back to default copyright laws. And no one would argue copying MS Windows 'internally' is fine.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#460Reminds me of when Apple started providing "smaller size updates" to OS X. I was curious about the details since my doctorate had touched on the topic, so I worked my contacts (I had a few in Apple engineering from the FreeBSD / OS X relationship) and after a few months I got back as answer: "We're using a tool called bsdiff, are you familiar with it?" I was indeed, since I was the author of said tool. (Just to be cl…
I sent an email to a corporate Steam email address, asking whether I’d be allowed to post a screenshot from half-life in a computer graphics shading thesis. Ended up with a response from Gabe Newell, CEO, shortly after, and another engineer who invented skeletal animation, all excited to talk about it with some random kid