871–880 of 1001 posts
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The people who actually learned the math work in STEM careers, not fancied up sales careers.
Yes and if STEM industry is Silicon Valley then that is just advertising ultimately or if not ads, something much more immoral, data collection for social control. Which is advertising's intention as well so I guess all the same work
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> I need a job. I now give easy tests. That seems more of an indictment of your profession than anything to do with the students.
Since the state no longer properly funds higher education there has been a shift in attitude. We are now a business and the client is the student. This has negative long term consequences. One of them is that I pretend to give real tests and real grades. The client must pass. The cost of acquiring new clients is much greater than the cost of keeping existing clients. It's easy to give a passing grade. Students largel…
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Anything big endian. unsigned int x = 0x01020304; unsigned char *c = (unsigned char*)&x; Assume x is stored at 0x100. On a little endian architecture (x86, most modern ARM systems, etc), it will be stored in memory as [04][03][02][01], from bytes 0x100 to 0x103. If you assign char c to the address of x (0x100), it will read one byte, which is 0x4. However, on a big endian system, that same value would be stored in me…
Do you know if compilers are smart enough to return 04 even on big-endian architectures nowadays? For some reason I'm under the impression that (at least clang and gcc) are able to change this from "first byte in x" to "least significant byte in x" but don't actually know why I think that. Maybe embedded compilers typically don't?
Since this compiles to FF 00 00 00 in big-endian and 00 00 00 FF in little-endian, it would work on both platforms.
If you’re reading a file in binary format from disk, though, you always have to know whether the byte you are reading is little-endian or big-endian on disk.
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I think the best test for a Junior is to ask them to submit some of their OSS or personal fun projects they've worked on. From my perspective, especially with Juniors who aren't expected to be extremely knowledgeable, displaying a sense of curiosity and a willingness to learn is much more important. If, hypothetically, there's two candidates, one who is more knowledgeable but has no personal projects versus someone w…
Most engineers, including good ones, that I've interviewed have no interesting GitHub contributions. GitHub is also game-able. Bootcamps, in particular, push their graduates to build an interesting GitHub portfolio. I've found that talking through projects is a weak indicator of competence. It's much easier to memorize talking points than to produce working code.
I’ve been teaching in higher education for 30 years and am soon retiring. I teach math. In every math course there is massive amounts of cheating on everything that is graded that is not proctored in a classroom setting. Locking down browsers and whatnot does not prevent cheating. The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test. B…
My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted…
Perhaps another way to widen the scope of what is not cheatable (at the cost of more teacher work, ugh), is to require showing all work?
And I mean every draft, edit, etc.. All paper scratch-notes. Or on work on computer applications, a replayable video/screenshot series of all typing and edits, like a time-lapse of a construction site. Might even add opportunities to redirect work and thinking habits.
Of course, that too will eventually (probably way too soon) be AI-fakeable, so back to paper writing, typewriters, red pencils, and whiteout.
Just an idea; useful?
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Serious question from someone who is regularly tasked with hiring Juniors. What IS a good assessment for entry-level/right out of college positions? -> GPA can be gamed, as laid out. -> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use. -> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts -> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot. What should be best practice here?…
One classic approach is to over-hire and weed out. I find some form of this de-facto happens anyway, so managing more explicitly has some benefits.
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(older) ARM (aka, big-endian) it will be 01
I just ran it on my M2 mac and got 04. Don't compilers typically take endianness into account for things like this anyway?
You need to use a bit mask in order to make this code endian-independent rather than a pointer alias. Like (uint8_t)(int & 0xFF), or something like that.
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My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted…
Serious question from someone who is regularly tasked with hiring Juniors. What IS a good assessment for entry-level/right out of college positions? -> GPA can be gamed, as laid out. -> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use. -> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts -> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot. What should be best practice here?…
If someone writes "perfect" code from a take-home, you can ask them to explain what they did (and if they used GPT, explain how they checked it). Then ask them to extend or discuss what the issues are and how they'd fix it.
I think asking some probing questions about past projects is normally enough to discern bullshit. You do need to be good at interviewing though. If you really want an excellent candidate then there's the FANG approach of (perhaps unfairly) filtering people who don't perform well in timed interviews, provided your rubric is good and you have enough candidates to compare to. There is a trade off there.
Grad positions optimise for what you can test - people are unlikely to have lots of side projects or work experience so you end up seeing how well they learned Algorithms 101. For someone who's worked for 10 years asking about system design in the context of their work is more useful.
Note that PhD and academic positions very rarely ask for this sort of stuff. Even if you don't have publications. They might run through a sample problem or theory (if it's even relevant), but I've never had to code to get a postdoc.
Otherwise you put people on short probation periods and be prepared to let them go.
My daughter was accused of turning in an essay written by AI because the school software at her online school said so. Her mom watched her write the essay. I thought it was common knowledge that it was impossible to tell whether text was generated by AI. Evidently, the software vendors are either ignorant or are lying, and school administrators are believing them.
I suspect there is a product opportunity here. It could be as simple as a chrome extension that records your sessions in google docs and generates a timelapse of your writing process. That’s the kind of thing that’s hard to fake and could convince an accuser that you really did write the essay. At the very least it could be useful insurance in case you’re accused.
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> My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. I agree with the first part, but I think the second follows from it. Take a class like organic chemistry. When I was in school, the grade was based on 5 exams, each worth 20% of your grade. Worse still, anything less than an A was seen as a failure for most students dreaming of medical/vet school. Of course you are going to have people…
The consequences of cheating could be made much more severe. I am troubled by this argument because it suggests people have no ethical core. If that is true then we are going to have problems with them regardless.