281–290 of 315 posts
Sounds like the guy needs a friend more than he needs a job.
He has friends. Read the post again.
"i don't have friends"
Literally, some [new] human contact may help him tremendously.
Cases like this, when the talented person in question is a geek who "doesn't interview well," always frustrate me. Most of my professional success is a result of social skills and a lot of experience with wildly different social environments and cultures. While I do work hard at being actually good at what I do (because that's just more fun!), I could get pretty far as a cruddy developer. And that just feels unfair,…
I get what you're saying, but I also tend to think: if they're so smart, why not learn some social skills? It's not like being socially awkward has to be an innate thing; they're called social skills for a reason, you can learn them. Many people were once socially awkward, and then fixed it. It's not particularly fair, but social awkwardness does tend to send a signal about what people value. And what a socially awkw…
Go fuck yourself. Why not learn to be understanding of struggle?
He needs to find a social services office that can help him get organized and take care of his personal responsibilities. It's completely his fault that he's in this mess, but he probably has some kind of personal/mental health problem that requires assistance. The one thing nobody should do is simply send him money or give him a job, since there's nothing on this page that indicates he won't go back to exactly the s…
The only comment in this thread to point out the $1600 rent. Unless I'm misreading or it's (heavily) back-logged, living on $3/day/food but paying $50/day/rent just seems insane.
Cases like this, when the talented person in question is a geek who "doesn't interview well," always frustrate me. Most of my professional success is a result of social skills and a lot of experience with wildly different social environments and cultures. While I do work hard at being actually good at what I do (because that's just more fun!), I could get pretty far as a cruddy developer. And that just feels unfair,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is having corporate experience really that much better though? I mean, obviously working for someone for several years implies some level of competence, but your work is nearly always locked away and you can't show it off. Ideally you'd want someone who does both; working for someone, which demonstrates the ability to work on a team, while also contributing to open source and making their own content, upon which you…
> Is having corporate experience really that much better though? Yes, a thousand times yes. At a minimum it gives you insight into some product/set of products that are commercially viable and people use. You get experience with at least one build system, and code architecture someone took to market. It also gives you a paycheck that frees up worries about food and housing. In the least demanding of these jobs you ca…
Cases like this, when the talented person in question is a geek who "doesn't interview well," always frustrate me. Most of my professional success is a result of social skills and a lot of experience with wildly different social environments and cultures. While I do work hard at being actually good at what I do (because that's just more fun!), I could get pretty far as a cruddy developer. And that just feels unfair,…
We are not alone.
I'm someone who doesn't naturally get social cues. I don't recognize faces. I was bullied, ostracized, and grew up in an abusive household until I convinced my mother to divorce. While children were being children I was protecting my mother, becoming her key social support by 13. I had to be a man before I hit puberty, never having the luxury to act out, cry, or lament the injustice of my situation. There were starving child soldiers in Africa; I had it pretty good. I was a serious A student and got along with adults.
As a result, I was quietly arrogant and unsympathetic. I shunned social interaction with the children around me whom I perceived to be stupid, emotionally weak, rebellious, attention-craving, and suicidal for no valid reason, instead deciding to wait until they grew up.
They never did.
To my surprise, I did. I finally realized that one of the single most important skills for success in society is the ability to handle people and social situations. A person is not competent or above average without it. At some point, you are going to hit the limit of what one person can do and will have to leverage the competencies of others. They will have some you won't, plus one the most valuable commodity of all: time. It is still possible to be a single person success, like Markus Frind from POF, but it often requires social skills and I don't like the odds.
Had I realized this sooner, I would be much further ahead. Turns out I wasn't so smart. Luckily, I only need a decent foundation; this ability can be bought like any other.
I have invested a ton of effort into addressing this with the help of a couple close friends. Progress can be frustrating. Things can be obvious to others yet when you ask them it turns out they either cannot explain, or don't really understand themselves. Everything Is Obvious examines the difficulty in creating a socially capable AI/robot: "social skills" are in fact a collection of often disparate, complex, illogical, and incongruous data points.
We all have challenges in life. This is one of my greatest. If you share it with me, I understand. It is every person's responsibility to choose to improve themselves and to help those around them who've done the same. We can guide people to this choice, but we cannot make it for them.
If you meet us, give us your patience and compassion as you would to any person who doesn't intuitively grasp something incredibly obvious and fundamental to you. I will do my best to do the same for you, though it might not always come off that way.
Why has he not worked for a decade, and what reassurances are there that he will be able to be productive? There's no chain of trust that would prove that you're not hiring some kind of a ticking timebomb. There's no proof that he's up to speed with any tech since the 90s. There's no proof that he'd not be potentially very quirky and difficult to work with in a team environment. It's a very difficult position to be hired from, and it mostly has to do with the fact that he "let himself go" for a long time.
If you have the option between hiring someone good and "someone potentially good, but also very unpredictable, high-risk and likely to be a long-term project", you'd go with the former every single time, it's a no-brainer.
Its very hard for someone honest and hard working in our world to admit to having problems and asking for help from the general population.
He has done good things, and he is a fellow human, who needs help. Leave it at that.
Who cares if he has upset some people on usenet. You think its some kinda karma? Wut? Troll the net, lose your house?
If there are trolls on the net that should be taken care of it is assholes to humiliate and denigrate a man in his hour of need, when he is down and humiliated. That takes a lot more of an asshole than having spirited discussions regarding technical topics on usenet.
I interviewed/phone screened Xah Lee about 2 years ago. I'd never heard of him, so I skimmed over his resume and checked out his site an hour or two before the call. I remember when I was looking at his site I was seeing various articles around math and programming, and then articles about things like "2 girls 1 cup". The breadth of articles completely threw me off. He seemed to have this unfocused interest in EVERYT…
Some people take a while to warm up to a conversation. Some people are cagey. Some just don't know how to dance the phone interview minuet. The conversation didn't follow the script in the interviewer's head. Maybe that's because he wasn't interested in the topics at the start of the interview, maybe it's because the interviewee wasn't comfortable until the interviewer expressed an interest at a less impersonal level…
The phone screens I performed were just a quick first round check to see if a candidate would be a valuable employee for us. They weren't supposed to be super in-depth or time consuming for either party. The whole thing is basically one big ice breaker. Hoping that I can hit on some topic that will cause a candidate to expose some skill, knowledge or enthusiasm that would move the company forward. There was very little structure. It was all about finding skill overlap, and then trying to decide if they would pass an in-person round of interviewing. If I hit on an ice-breaker at the end of a conversation, it means I had already exhausted all of the others.
Writing is thinking and one person's philosophical pondering can be another's trolling, e.g. this post. Sure trolling is sometimes just being an asshat. But it's also a way of creating diversity. An attempt to deprogram members of a cargo cult. It can be fighting group think and ideological tribalism. I've come to think about trolling as often being an expression of a desire to write - it's very essence is writing so…
Trolling when used for these purposes is often used as a substitute for well-reasoned/articulate point, and has the irresponsible effect of causing grief when it could be pre-empted by simple actions. To not take those actions is often an indication of callousness.
Note: I claim no knowledge on Xah's case, and am not commenting on it.