I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#311

Post by rbanffy » Sat, May 17, 2014, 2:21 PM UTC

klibertp wrote: post #295

rbanffy wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A degree is a proxy. A recruiter without specific knowledge cannot assess a developer's technical abilities in any meaningful way (even an extremely experienced developer can't reliably do so). The degree implies a school continuously assessed the individual abilities over the course of several years and found them acceptable enough to issue the degree. A degree offsets responsibility from the recruiter to the school…

> offsets responsibility from the recruiter Also from the potential hire himself. It's not that he sucks, his college didn't prepare him for this new role. It's not his lack of passion and really any deep interest in the craft, it's just that he had wrong lecturers, also most of them even weren't there to lecture most of the time, so what can you expect? So now we can hire him and train him for a year or more, becaus…

> but that's ok, because he's just like we expect him to be.

For large companies, predictability beats quality. Keep in mind strict business processes exist to defend organizations from incompetent workers, even at the cost of limiting competent ones. Incompetent workers are cheaper. Since the processes prevent competent ones from achieving outstanding results, there is an obvious incentive to hire only incompetent ones.

> I can't help but feel it's somehow unfair.

Not sure about fairness. I certainly don't like it.

> Yeah. Some abilities.

Those are the abilities large banks and insurance companies want. For the average non-technical manager, being able to consider developers as interchangeable cogs beats developers that are impossible for managers to characterize or predict.

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#312

Post by omilu » Sun, May 18, 2014, 2:51 AM UTC

mercer wrote: post #111

nabla9 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is known as annoying Usenet troll by many. I don't classify him as pure troll, however. He don't troll for the sake of trolling and he can be helpful. He is very opinionated and argumentative and don't adjust his thinking very well. He might have mood disorder. http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html

Indeed. I know a few people who have a (strong) mood disorder, and one characteristic they all share is that they tend to be more abrasive and 'rigid' in general, even when they're in a good mood.

I'd rather work with a cranky trolling yet competent and accomplished programmer, then a sweet talking dip tard. In my experience incompetence is directly proportional to the amount of pleasantries one uses in discourse.

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#313

Post by _19qg » Sun, May 18, 2014, 6:56 AM UTC

at-fates-hands wrote: post #219

e40 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 90's, he was the biggest troll on comp.lang.lisp. I actually found some of his stuff funny. It wasn't like it was hard to tell he was trolling. It was performance art, IMO. I often wonder, though, what strange person was behind it. Now I know, sadly.

I guess this is a cautionary tale then about not burning bridges? Seems like the guy is pretty bright, but for all the years he was trolling people, those are the people he needs now more than ever to help him out. Sad, really sad.

I guess there are a lot of people willing to help him out.

He might be 'bright', but he is not a programmer - though he lectures programmers in his trollings.

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#314

Post by Schwolop » Mon, May 19, 2014, 3:08 AM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #84

nkozyra wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he a particularly noted person? Maybe just in the emacs community? I don't know who he is and that resume is pretty skimpy. It seems that his biggest need right now is self-presentation and that's a pretty tough thing to acquire on short notice. I'd also say there would likely be way more opportunities for someone of his skillset outside of the valley, where the skimpy resume probably looks even skimpier by compar…

He is known as annoying Usenet troll by many. I don't classify him as pure troll, however. He don't troll for the sake of trolling and he can be helpful. He is very opinionated and argumentative and don't adjust his thinking very well. He might have mood disorder. http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html

He used to piss off a lot of people on rec.juggling by commenting rabidly on any videos that featured female jugglers. I liked him though - for some reason his webpage directly a lot of traffic my way, even though I wasn't female...

Re: I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

#315

Post by chazu » Mon, May 19, 2014, 3:34 PM UTC

IanKelling wrote: post #206

ChuckMcM wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I suspect this is the core of his incompatibility with nominal employment in the tech space. I agree with others that perhaps a documentation role on an open source project would be something that would be in demand, but having the tech writer telling the developers they are doing it wrong is not a good recipe for success (and that seems to be a real possibility here).

He was unemployed by choice, not incompatibility. I know he has written quite a bit of good emacs documentation and elisp code, and just that is worth donating for to me.

I second this. His emacs/elisp docs have been exceedingly helpful for me in the past, certainly helpful enough to warrant a donation, regardless of any reputation for being difficult to work with.