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The Lesson to Unlearn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#321

Post by walterbell »

graycat wrote: post #266
walterbell wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best Rexx interpreter for Linux?

I use Open Object Rexx on Windows (3.1, 2000, XP, now 7, 10). I'm not sure what is available on Linux but maybe the same thing. Rexx can be used as a macro language for nearly any software, but I use it just for command line scripting. I have 200+ Rexx scripts I regard as serious and write more for one-shot applications a few times a week. E.g., I have several Rexx scripts for running Robocopy, and each script has VE…

Thanks for the enthusiastic pitch :) There was once an internal IBM editor called E3, with many Rexx extensions. It was amazing.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#322

Post by codingdave »

I went to a small liberal arts school, and tests were rare. Papers were common, presentations as well. Projects, and experiments in the science courses. But not tests.

Most of the time, our grades were based on the work we produced, and our participation in discussions. Even in Art History, when the job was to study and memorize slides and identify them, the test was not to just say what they were, but to write a paragraph about how they fit into the cultural context from which they came.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#323

Post by kccqzy »

pavlov wrote: post #240

The tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews. Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to…

I think testing algorithmic questions is certainly evil, but it's a necessary evil because all other methods are either too time-consuming or unrealistic. You wouldn't believe in a big company how many clearly unqualified applicants there are, and there has to be some quick and dirty rule to run a filter through them. Perhaps it's the aura of FANG companies that make unqualified applicants try because they have nothing to lose. My experience is that just about 1% of interviewees can actually confidently write a depth first search and explain its time complexity. If they can't even do that (which is basically among the first things schools teach in a CS curriculum), how do you trust they that they have the skills to design and implement even more complicated systems?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#324

Post by ksdale »

mattchew wrote: post #171
manmal wrote: post #20

My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…

It's worth contemplating. We homeschooled our kids and it was a good choice for our family. I'm sympathetic to unschooling, but I've also seen it go wrong. If you decide to unschool, don't be dogmatic about it. Feel free to be more or less unschooly if that seems to be needed. Don't get sucked into a community where unschooling "purity" is highly valued.

Your comment jumped out at me, my wife and I are homeschooling/unschooling and some of people we've met focus on "purity" and all I can think when I talk with them is, "The point isn't to completely avoid anything that looks like schoolwork, the point is to guide the children to learn more than they would have otherwise."

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#325

Post by halflings »

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #319
burlesona wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a hiring manager at a big company, I can tell you this is just as frustrating for me as it is for candidates. I hate “leet code” and frankly find algorithmic interviews to be very low signal compared to more practical, open-ended, domain-specific problems. I will say though, the problem is one of “standardization” across an organization where it’s too big for everyone to fit in a room. Suppose you give each tea…

it's a really simple problem honestly. Make a standardized test, but don't put an hour time limit on it. If you gave the exact same algorithm test with a 24-hour time limit vs. a 1-hour time limit then had a 1-hour interview explaining the solution to the problem you would be testing for something closer to programming acumen than memorization. I have no idea why tech companies find this so challenging.

Cheating? Even with phone screens, some candidates still cheat at these interviews (have some engineer with them answering questions, or looking up similar questions online).

I agree a full blown project over 24 hours would be better, but it's more costly to create questions and score them (if you want to do it in a way where cheating is hard/impossible). I've seen startups do this, and it works well for them, but might not be scalable for companies that hire thousands of employees each year.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#326

Post by hkmurakami »

pavlov wrote: post #240

The tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews. Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to…

I've been curious for a while about the inflection point between the more informal startup programming interview style and the bigco interviewing style, and while there's obviously variability between orgs, whether it comes with headcount, customer profile, fund raising milestones, etc

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#327

Post by scarejunba »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #275
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution is smaller companies - that way the underperforming ones can be eliminated more easily.

A federation. To be honest, if a large company has multiple departments that essentially govern themselves, perhaps they could just give them proper names, as if they were subsidiary companies? Because it seems to me that the mechanism behind the "best performers leave when they feel the average performance of workers in the company goes down" is really bounded by the company name . I.e. people in department of frobn…

No, it's not that. It's that often, to make a new product you have to have multiple parts of the business work together. Then you will find yourself working with the other department and they'll frustrate you.

Some places attempt to solve this by saying that you can use whatever vendors you need to solve the problem but often the best place to solve it is the other department since the solution is infeasible without them.

The problem is that often the solution is infeasible with them because the guys who made them good have left and now you only have the lameos.

As to why they can't operate as independent business unit? Well, there's the Theory of the Firm to tell you why that doesn't work often.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#329

Post by alien_ »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #261
burlesona wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a hiring manager at a big company, I can tell you this is just as frustrating for me as it is for candidates. I hate “leet code” and frankly find algorithmic interviews to be very low signal compared to more practical, open-ended, domain-specific problems. I will say though, the problem is one of “standardization” across an organization where it’s too big for everyone to fit in a room. Suppose you give each tea…

My solution is smaller companies - that way the underperforming ones can be eliminated more easily.

At Amazon, perhaps one of the largest and most successful employers, the solution to this is that when interviewing, everyone's main goal is to hire people better than the current average of the team.

To ensure this, someone experienced with interviewing from outside the team/organization, so called bar raiser, is always added to the interviewing team. This person is there to ensure high quality hires and has hiring veto power.

The rest of the interviewers are from within the team, likely under pressure to compromise on quality when they're desperate enough to hire someone, but they can't do it unless the bar raiser agreed.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#330

Post by watwut »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #209
watwut wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theranos issue was not lack of product. Their problem was massive fraud going effectively demanded from top levels. Framing it as lack of product is unfair to all startups who lacked good product, hacked buzz, got investment, got notable people and then did not committed fraud. Plus it suggests that Theranos fraud is result of not having product. The same people would be engaging in unethical conduct with product too…

Disagree. "Not having product", when you say you DO have product, and are very specific about the capabilities of said non-existent product, is the actual definition of fraud.

It is possible to not have product and be vague and get investment and keep going before crashing.

Plus, Theranos fraud was waaay more bigger then that.

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