431–440 of 748 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US is a low trust society?
It’s not. We have functioning institutions that generally perform well over long periods of time. People respect the rule of law and there is an expectation of justice. Spend time in Honduras or Brazil to see what low trust looks like.
So, how long are we waiting...?
Reading some of the comments in this thread I'm surprised. It seems that a substantial number of people think one of the following: a.) cheating on interviews is ok, because interviews don't reflect the actual job b.) this is acceptable because the promotion process is distinct from the interview process or c.) that the cheaters clearly are skilled after all because of all their success, as evidenced by being promote…
It sounds like you find cheating shameful for vague moralistic reasons that you have not disclosed. Software is full of cheating. I am really convinced that maybe 85% (that's actually being generous) of developers have no idea what they are doing. They know enough to complete some tiny agile tasks and push a few lines into a pull request. These people are either suffering from imposter syndrome, deliberately cheating…
> It sounds like you find cheating shameful for vague moralistic reasons that you have not disclosed.
That's absolutely right. I didn't elaborate at all.
> That's why almost nobody can writing software anymore
Honestly though I think that writing software is just hard.
> must be willing to impose minimal standards of acceptable practice
Yeah this is an interesting idea. Like how attorneys have to pass a bar. I don't really know how it would go, but I do believe that the industry already has a hard enough of a time hiring and this would just make things that much harder. Some organizations though seem to have a knack for improving their new hires by a lot, so it's not like all these organizations are evil, just most are probably incompetent. Again, software is hard.
> The goals of hiring/employment often do not align to the skills required to perform product delivery.
Yeah, I would say in general that bad incentives are abound.
I think a lot of the points you brought up are products of strange market dynamics. For so long companies haven't really felt the weight of gravity and have had so much investor money that it feels like a lot of what one could consider fundamentals have been tossed out the window in favor of other things. This is where perverse incentives start to manifest in my view.
I'm probably going to get roasted for saying this, but this is completely unsurprising to me. When I was in college, folks from India and other low trust societies would mercilessly cheat on their projects and exams, blatantly helping one another on individual works, and the college knew about it and didn't care. When I had brought this up at one point, I was told by a professor that it was a cultural difference that…
This is why I enjoy both woodworking and code golfing. There's an inescapable objective success or failure indicator that no amount of posturing can overcome. Either the code is short, or it isn't. Either the chair supports your weight, or it breaks. I think I enjoy these pursuits as an antidote to the kind of software I have to deal with on a daily basis - it's the kind that is so complex there are "no obvious defic…
Well, it's very easy to make a chair that works a couple times. Whether it holds up for a week or a century is another matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Americans cheat at earth-scale by bringing about into existence of intricate systems that benefit them immensely.
Agreed, and it's also hard to consider the US as on some kind of general decline from high trust to low trust. American honesty has always been highly contextual. All it takes is a look into how we treated written agreements with Native Americans to see how small the radius of this value extends. Native societies were "high trust" in the sense that they had no ability, at least initially, to comprehend that settlers…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a very well studied decline in trust in America over time. Despite your snark no one claimed we never cheated etc. It's just getting much worse
I guess “trust” was at an all time high when there were literally laws against Black people being in the same section as White people, sundown towns in the south and laws against black people marrying white people?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I let any of my interviewees know that it is ok to use google, I just want to know what they searched for. I'm not running a trivia contest, so if they forgot the name of something or need a little refresh, that's fine.
The way I combat this is by asking questions about their current jobs, then diving deep into the technical problems they faced. It requires a lot more preparation for each candidate, but it ensures it’s not a trivia test but a discussion. One of my favorite interviews (as an interviewer) was when a SDET candidate provided a link to their website. When I visited it there was an issue loading some page. So I asked him…
My other favorite is very open-ended questions. I mostly do ops-y interviews, and my favorite question is "what happens when you type 'curl https://google.com' in a terminal and hit enter?"
The question is so broad there isn't a "correct" answer to Google, and it crosses enough domains that any article they find is going to be too long to skim. Then I ask them to really zero in on some aspect of it they feel comfortable with and give detail. What syscalls happen to start up curl? How does the OS know how to communicate with the local router? What's the entire flow to translate "google.com" to an IP?
It's also just fascinating to see which parts candidates latch on to. I had one person spend like 30 minutes just talking about TLS and PKI. Another person delved into kernel packet handling for a while.
Reading some of the comments in this thread I'm surprised. It seems that a substantial number of people think one of the following: a.) cheating on interviews is ok, because interviews don't reflect the actual job b.) this is acceptable because the promotion process is distinct from the interview process or c.) that the cheaters clearly are skilled after all because of all their success, as evidenced by being promote…
> Like, there was a time where this kind of personality type would just go get an MBA One nuance that may help explain how the change happened is how the status of CS has changed in the last 20 years. Maybe its just my age bias, but there seems to be a perceptible change of how CS majors are viewed by society and that changes the type of people attracted to that curriculum. It used to be that CS and engineering major…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. I've gravitated towards difficult domains in my career because they serve as a very effective filter on the people actually applying for them, they keep me sharp, and people that have needs in these areas tend to less of the stereotypical "idea people," that are looking to milk those who can execute.
Can you give any examples of those difficult domains? I'm an ok-ish web developer, and would love to fine some niches to specialize in like you mentioned.
* Compilers/DSLs/language runtimes/static analysis
* Distributed systems (on my list of things to learn, know basically nothing)
* More generically: high-performance code, doesn't have to be fintech-fast, but designing and maintaining code that makes excellent use of hardware resources