All (not some) of the most successful devs I've known in the sense of building something that found market fit and making money off it were terrible engineers. They were fairly productive at building features. That's it. And they were productive - until they weren't. Their work ultimately led to outages, lost data, and sensitive data being leaked (to what extent, I don't even know).
The ones who got acquired - never really had to stand up to any due diligence scrutiny on the technical side. Other sides of the businesses did for sure, but not that side.
Many of you here work for "real" tech companies with the budget and proper skin in the game to actually have real engineers and sane practices. But many of you do not, and I am sure many have seen what I have seen and can attest to this. If someone like the person I mentioned above asks you to join them to help fix their problems, make sure the compensation is tremendous. Slop clean-up is a real profession, but beware.
There used to be a saying along the lines of “while you’re designing your application to scale to 1m requests/min, someone out there is making $1m ARR with php and duct tape”
It feels like this takes on a whole new meaning now we have agents - which I think is the same point you were making
I'm cool with blogging about your mess-ups, sort of. Is "I'm incompetent" a good content strategy though? Yeah, you're going to get a lot of traffic to that post, but what are you signaling? Your product is a thousand bucks a year. I would not go near it.
I'm cool with blogging about your fuck-ups, but honestly, not really. Is "I'm incompetent" a good content strategy? Your product is a thousand bucks a year. I'm not going near it. But that's just me?
While I agree, how much training does anyone get as an interviewer? I spent 10+ years doing interviews at all sorts of orgs (including Fortune 500s, government, etc.) without a single hour of interviewer training.
Now that I think about it, none of those organizations ever trained me at anything at all. Huh.
> none of those organizations ever trained me at anything at all
They trained us repeatedly not to bribe foreign government officials, even though I had zero access to anybody like that. There was also some mandatory training against harassing coworkers. I.e. "protect the company from lawsuits" training, not "here are some ideas for how to do your job more effectively" training. They were megacorps, too.
Yeah that's proven by the fact they get degree educated level engineers and force feed them videos designed for people working entry level positions. Its a crying shame because there's actually a lot of interesting discussions around nuance that are just sidelined by these videos creating basic bitch absurdities:
> During the lunch break, Jim has dipped his penis into Samantha's yoghurt
> is this:
> a) entirely acceptable, its just his culture
> b) a borderline issue
> c) something that someone should report to HR
Instead of:
Jane is developing feelings for someone that reports to her, they meet up outside of work and have a one-night stand. What should Jane do next?
> While I agree, how much training does anyone get as an interviewer?
TL;DR: not enough training.
As a hiring manager, whenever we start a hiring period I have a conversation with my interviewer team about what qualities we're looking for and review the questions they plan to ask in order to normalize the process. Stuff like "what does a good answer look like, and why? what does a bad answer look like? is this something easy for a candidate to engage with or will you spend half the interview just explaining the background? is this coding question unreasonably hard?" and so on.
I also look at the evaluations that interviewers give relative to other interviewers. Almost every hiring cycle I've done I've had to deal with some interviewer (all over the seniority spectrum) asking unreasonably hard questions.
Yeah, I had no training on being an interviewer before I started doing interviews. My manager gave me some tips, and I came up with two security bug-hunt exercises (was hiring AppSec engineers), but that was it.
Now, I wonder if I had rejected earlier candidates that I would have passed if I was a better interviewer.
The best advice I've had on interviewing is: Find an actual problem that your team is actually working through and ask the candidate how they would approach it.
Then to jazz it up: simplify the proble. To get to the root stuff that needs to be covered (e.g. ignore creating Jira tickets and focus on connecting to a database with cross-refion replication).
You also want it to be simple enough that it can be solved in <30 minutes
Sounds common to have training in big tech but I never received any training either. Sometimes we’d discuss changes we wanted to make to the interview process, which suppose could be considered adjacent to training.
That's unusual. Maybe that's a US thing? In Europe anywhere I've had to interview people I've received at least a couple of hours of training and then usually sat in as the shadow on at least one interview.
Quality varies, but I think it's only the super small outfits where I've been expected to just wing it.
Seriously? I worked at startups and research institutions. We trained people on interviews. I know Google used to invest quite a bit on interview training.
RE: My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
---
"Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself." - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
People aren't "healthy" (happy, secure, etc.) in America...
Most people live in a fake world, especially when they are playing the part of tourists.
The original post laments having to interact with these people (in Cambridge, MA - oh no, Harvard and MIT sweatshirts, maybe as a "local" you should walk off the beaten path a bit).
Looking up webcams and Wiki pages as a substitute for going places is a bad conclusion - it's even more of a fake world. The author thinks we can somehow "really beautiful how rich of a cultural understanding can be cultivated without ever setting foot in the country". Really beautiful? Come on, that's ridiculous. I get that this is Hacker News but that's a terminally online viewpoint that's warped as can be.
The Lancet had numbers around 600k, but that included the wider context of deaths due to the temporary collapse of society, medical services, electricity supplies, ongoing violence and insurgency, and so on.
The long consequence of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions was providing Russia with a pretext for its own interventions, from the various caucasus states to Syria to Ukraine.
Still, "over 100,000" is technically correct if it's more than 100,000. Since this subject isn't the main point of the article and the Iraq war is generally acknowledged to have been disastrous, I suppose he chose a safe figure so as not to derail the article with disputed estimates at the outset.
Yes, it is a very low-ball estimate. The more accurate estimate is that Iraq lost 5% of its population, and in many areas, Iraq continues to lose babies born with birth defects due to the use of depleted uranium.
Not really, it’s the lower end of what we can be confident about from direct evidence per things like the Iraq body count project. There are statistical estimates that are higher but they have very large error bars. Over 100k is completely defendable and plenty high that any reasonable person should be horrified by it!
The ones who got acquired - never really had to stand up to any due diligence scrutiny on the technical side. Other sides of the businesses did for sure, but not that side.
Many of you here work for "real" tech companies with the budget and proper skin in the game to actually have real engineers and sane practices. But many of you do not, and I am sure many have seen what I have seen and can attest to this. If someone like the person I mentioned above asks you to join them to help fix their problems, make sure the compensation is tremendous. Slop clean-up is a real profession, but beware.
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