Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position "Coffee" with the friend of a friend would he better strategy than a cover letter in that case...more work, but better strategy. Because logically, getting hired requires demonstrating you are "the kind of person we want to work with." Being qualified on paper is not necessarily required.
I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
331–340 of 419 posts
Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, as this is so often the case, many times good, relevant applications are missed. I hope that this Hacker News post will get to one of the key people at Anthropic and they change their minds.
> I hope that this Hacker News post will get to one of the key people at Anthropic and they change their minds. Honest question: what leads you to believe they should change their mind?
Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
#333Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve
You should change the license to AGPL and 'custom, contact for payment details', and provide a link to this as why you did so. Simply put, anything not a viral license like GPL allows parasitization by companies effectively living off FLOSS devs, with absolutely nothing to gain. Human rights under GPL were meant to apply to humans, not '3 lawyers in a trench coat' (corporations). They can make their decisions (snubbi…
Since your replies below are focusing on compensation: have you actually made a nontrivial amount of money with that model?
I would expect that should be a prerequisite to reaffirm it was the correct decision, especially if you're giving unsolicited advice to strangers about how they should license their software.
Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And until I'm independently wealthy, I too will license AGPL. If you're making money on my stuff, I want a cut. Simple as that. A. So much for "Not everybody has to be chasing money..." as missing the point B. What hubris to claim that just because you wrote something it is now "yours" in any meaningful way. The copyright lobby has infected everywhere.
So, what is your net-worth, in that you fight for freebies to corporations? What net worth should I strive towards so I can be nonchalant and passe about money? I'm certainly not there. Also more curious, is the AGPL doesn't affect humans doing stuff. It affects companies when they grab, modify, and host and not share contributions. Read about anti-TIVOization. That's why the AGPL. I'm guessing you know this, and why…
It does affect humans doing stuff that isn't malicious, like if you need to solve a problem by modifying the code then now you also have to make that change public which is a hassle, I'd rather not have to track or maintain such things. I'd rather not have to think about that, and I care more about such nuisances than I care about the possibility of companies stealing it.
Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is not something that happened, even according to Max Howell himself: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... > I feel bad about my tweet, I don’t feel it was fair, and it fed the current era of outragism-driven-reading that is the modern Internet, and thus went viral, and for that I am truly sorry.
Building popular software doesn't mean you're a good programmer, especially since at that point Google was looking heavily at CS concepts and he admittedly wasn't good at that. It's also possible he would have been hired if he applied for L-1. A lot of people get an ego check applying to Google where they're a senior staff engineer or a CTO at a small company and get an L5 offer.
Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
it kind of happened, he went through seven interviews. from the same post: > But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.
I mean, he's also the same guy who apparently thought "Unix ideas that have worked for literally decades, nah fuck that. I know better". It took over a decade before the project made some improvement on how the default install path is handled. To my knowledge it still has absolutely atrocious dependency resolution relative to things like DPKG. Not hiring this guy is honestly like a fancy restaurant not hiring the guy…
Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes - people in HR departments are often female and often clueless, but I don't see the parent denying this. The wording of OP connected both though, which is sexist and can be considered "evil".
Funny enough, I see this whole framing as sexist itself. Nobody would have bat an eye if he said "clueless guys" or "clueless gents", and given the prevalence of women in HR, that wording would actually have more chances of having a sexist background to it.
>given the prevalence of women in HR, that wording would actually have more chances of having a sexist background to it.
The reason there are more women than men in HR is clearly because the men they do hire are too clueless and get fired faster. Ever have an HR department with all men? Most dysfunctional department I’ve ever interacted with! “Clueless HR men” is just redundant. The ~25% that exist are DEI hires. So it wouldn’t be sexism, it would be reality.
Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, "we didn't review your CV" is a great way to get sued in the US if the name of the applicant is in any way potentially indicative of the applicant's gender, race, religion, or any other protected status.
And we now see a lot of proof that that is warranted: lots of people in the US are now openly racist and/or have other prejudices. It is fair to assume many people don’t get a fair chance because of this.
He then, without prompt, in the middle of a conversation mentioned that he was the second coming of Christ. The interviewers ignored the comment and continued the interview.
When he didn't get the job, he sued the company for religious discrimination. Fortunately, the interviewers could honestly say they didn't discuss or ask about his religious beliefs, and he lost. It was said he did this elsewhere as a a scam, though I never verified it.
The simple matter of fact is that it doesn't matter how neutral you are; there are enough people out there who will look for any way to perceive and benefit from a grievance that you must assume they will.
Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really like the copyleft idea, however, I think you did nothing wrong, IMHO, because if large corps like an idea, they will rather reimplement it rather than even bothering with ways to conform to AGPL or buy an alternative licence. Particular in the age of AI, all source available code has become pretty much public domain (value is still in maintenance, etc). License have mostly become a compliance/ideology game t…
Copyright is but one pillar of intellectual property law. I’d like to see an attempt by useful freedom respecting software projects to deploy patents to combat non-free reimplementations. A GPL license that grants you rights to the backing patent as long as the software you develop with it is also released under the GPL license. Use the library for closed source software? Copyright violation. Reimplement the software…
I’d provide links to some discourse of this, but honestly I think it’s better to search “can you patent software in the US” and do a brief read of various sources, because the terminology between them can seem somewhat counterfactual to eachother.
Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me
#340I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.
Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the O…