the quiz is not the interview. the actual interview process is a more involved two-hour live call. source: i do remote interviewing for them as a side thing.
the actual interview does have live coding -- but note that it's coding using whatever tools the candidate is comfortable with, not a whiteboard. also more involved question/answer things, and more. it gets a lot of additional signal beyond what the initial quiz does.
I have a pretty simple test for whether people take a thing seriously. How does it compare to how they handle payments?
Consider:
I ask you to stop spamming me, and you say I need to allow you 30 days to stop.
I ask you to take $5 from my bank account, and in under 10 seconds you have successfully resolved a transaction in a thorough, secure, and traceable away, even if my bank isn't on the same continent as your bank.
Apple's success came from emulating the visionary design choices Jobs made.
They are currently building all their products in emulation of his last visionary design choice: "Get thinner and thinner until you can't do your job anymore."
Real names have never actually worked for improving discourse. What they've done is allow the trolls to attack people directly instead of being limited to doing it online.
You can also do the same thing with, say, rent. One time a person I know online was distressed about owing their roommates back rent on their share of rent, and very worried about how they'd ever make it up. I happened to ask how much it was, and it turned out to be right around the boundary of "large enough that I should mention it to spouse before spending that much", but not enough to actually worry about.
I dunno. I see a lot of people who are a lot wealthier than I am and miserable because they don't understand what it is that makes them happy, so they spend a lot of money on things which exist only to be expensive, and not on things they actually want or care about.
For what it's worth, I quite like Jim Butcher and his writing. On the other hand, I also have every confidence that he can might well one day win a Hugo without ballot-box stuffing to get him in the list.
The Hugos did not "choose not to award anyone rather than submit to fan's votes". They submitted to the votes of the fans, as always. The fans voted for "No Award".
The name thing was a huge deal-breaker for a fair number of people, and the pathologically horrible way they handled it made it a lot worse. I know dozens of people who would have used G+ but walked away from it because at least one person they knew had bad experiences with it. I spent months with my G+ account in various kinds of limbo because the "appeals" process for name decisions was completely dysfunctional. I eventually ran into someone on slashdot who knew a person who knew a person who could unstick my account and get my name approved, but by that time everyone had lost interest.
And one of my friends used to have a Picassa account, and then somehow it got marked as a G+ profile thing (even though she never intentionally activated G+), and then suspended because their algorithm thought the name was unrealistic, and then she lost access to the Picassa stuff. I don't know whether that actually got resolved.
Very badly run at every level. The most frustrating thing is, they had a guy writing about this who was apparently in some kind of leadership role, and he talked about how the appeals process should work and how the name stuff should work... And nothing he said actually had any influence on the behavior of the product. The actual appeals process consisted of a thing that did not include any mechanism at all for stating your case or explaining why you felt a given name was the right name to use for you, which was then ignored by a machine or possibly a person, who knows. That's it. No mechanism for response or interaction.
Google's hatred of actually dealing with things personally interacted very badly with a policy which was inherently personal.
Why does the submitter suggest "zero" as the output for division by zero? How is that a better answer than 23?
I am pretty happy with the "this is a fatal error don't do it" approach, but if it has to be a number, why on earth would you pick zero? That is the least plausible outcome.
Do you remember that one time when someone found a trivially obvious way to abuse Google services to do something harmful, and Google took complaints seriously and addressed the problem?
I don't either.
Last I checked, it was still really easy to make a Google Group to use to send spam to people, but block them from sending complaints through the documented interface, because why would anyone at Google care?
The existence of programmers who are dramatically faster/more-skilled than others is not all that controversial, really. The question is whether they have to be assholes, or you should put up with them if they are.
My experience is, the majority of the really brilliant programmers I know are not assholes. They might be a little light on tact, but they are generally pretty good at cooperating and listening. If they weren't, they wouldn't be nearly as good.
That everything is offensive to at least one person doesn't mean that some things aren't more offensive than others. I am sort of sympathetic to the "but it's history!" view, but... honestly, it's a crappy picture to use for a number of reasons, it does create a hostile environment, and many many other images would be better.
This is a fascinating set of claims that have nothing to do with any autism research I've seen. I've never seen an "anti-autism drug" get any kind of approval or testing or even marketing, and I've never heard serious claims about people "growing out of" autism. I've never actually heard of "temporary" autism. There's lots you can do to mitigate the inconvenient or harmful symptoms, but the underlying neurology seems to be pretty stable.
Exactly. I never met anyone autistic as a kid. Now about half the people I regularly interact with are autistic. Actually, several of them (including me) are people I knew as kids... But what we mean by "autistic" has changed hugely over that time period.
I have no idea. I have never seen him write a thing that was actually of interest or value, but so far as I can tell, anything he writes is automatically approved by Slashdot. He's guaranteed front-page placement. What is going on here? Who is he, and why does Slashdot owe him this?
Similarly, the Internet has done nothing for science or human knowledge, since so much of the work of pushing it and promoting it has been done for profit.
This isn't people dying so rich people can have fun. This is rich people funding the fundamental research that will make space travel practical in time.
So, on the one hand, it's sort of a spammy/advertisey thing to begin with.
On the other hand, I'm also not entirely convinced that the code coverage tool really solves the problem, because a given line of code can have different effects under different circumstances.
If you read in an address from a text stream, and then write to the memory location denoted, that's just one line of code executing that dereferences the pointer, but good luck determining what it does on all future invocations based on watching it execute once. Similarly, consider a straightforward loop like "for (i = 1; i len; ++i) a[i] = 0;" where every line will be hit if len is at least 1, but the effect of executing the code is, to put it mildly, somewhat variable.
While "only 5% of my disk" is now many times larger than it used to be, so are the things I'm moving around, so "95% full" is just as bad now as it used to be.
Basically, once we got past quotas measured in single or double-digit numbers of kilobytes, this stopped changing for me. 95% full on a 100MB disk and 95% full on a 500GB disk work the same for me.
People who didn't learn to code by the time they were 7 have never been able to program as adults. It sure is lucky a supply of people taught to code by ancient alien astronauts was supplied to us so we could bootstrap the procedure, because no one in the history of our species has learned new skills past age 7.
Slashdot Mirror
the quiz is not the interview. the actual interview process is a more involved two-hour live call. source: i do remote interviewing for them as a side thing.
the actual interview does have live coding -- but note that it's coding using whatever tools the candidate is comfortable with, not a whiteboard. also more involved question/answer things, and more. it gets a lot of additional signal beyond what the initial quiz does.
I have a pretty simple test for whether people take a thing seriously. How does it compare to how they handle payments?
Consider:
I ask you to stop spamming me, and you say I need to allow you 30 days to stop.
I ask you to take $5 from my bank account, and in under 10 seconds you have successfully resolved a transaction in a thorough, secure, and traceable away, even if my bank isn't on the same continent as your bank.
Which of these do I think you "take seriously"?
Apple's success came from emulating the visionary design choices Jobs made.
They are currently building all their products in emulation of his last visionary design choice: "Get thinner and thinner until you can't do your job anymore."
In which case, it's backfired horribly, since all the coverage I've seen has said that it's actually been very good for business.
Real names have never actually worked for improving discourse. What they've done is allow the trolls to attack people directly instead of being limited to doing it online.
Asterixed out: Having little cartoon dudes with magic strength potions drawn over them.
Yes, but the money bought it.
You can also do the same thing with, say, rent. One time a person I know online was distressed about owing their roommates back rent on their share of rent, and very worried about how they'd ever make it up. I happened to ask how much it was, and it turned out to be right around the boundary of "large enough that I should mention it to spouse before spending that much", but not enough to actually worry about.
I dunno. I see a lot of people who are a lot wealthier than I am and miserable because they don't understand what it is that makes them happy, so they spend a lot of money on things which exist only to be expensive, and not on things they actually want or care about.
Anyone who thinks money can't buy happiness has never bought a week's groceries for a poor person.
For what it's worth, I quite like Jim Butcher and his writing. On the other hand, I also have every confidence that he can might well one day win a Hugo without ballot-box stuffing to get him in the list.
The Hugos did not "choose not to award anyone rather than submit to fan's votes". They submitted to the votes of the fans, as always. The fans voted for "No Award".
http://genius.it/robrhinehart.com?p=1331 has a discussion of it.
That said, all the comments saying "guy's an idiot" have pretty much nailed it.
The name thing was a huge deal-breaker for a fair number of people, and the pathologically horrible way they handled it made it a lot worse. I know dozens of people who would have used G+ but walked away from it because at least one person they knew had bad experiences with it. I spent months with my G+ account in various kinds of limbo because the "appeals" process for name decisions was completely dysfunctional. I eventually ran into someone on slashdot who knew a person who knew a person who could unstick my account and get my name approved, but by that time everyone had lost interest.
And one of my friends used to have a Picassa account, and then somehow it got marked as a G+ profile thing (even though she never intentionally activated G+), and then suspended because their algorithm thought the name was unrealistic, and then she lost access to the Picassa stuff. I don't know whether that actually got resolved.
Very badly run at every level. The most frustrating thing is, they had a guy writing about this who was apparently in some kind of leadership role, and he talked about how the appeals process should work and how the name stuff should work... And nothing he said actually had any influence on the behavior of the product. The actual appeals process consisted of a thing that did not include any mechanism at all for stating your case or explaining why you felt a given name was the right name to use for you, which was then ignored by a machine or possibly a person, who knows. That's it. No mechanism for response or interaction.
Google's hatred of actually dealing with things personally interacted very badly with a policy which was inherently personal.
Why does the submitter suggest "zero" as the output for division by zero? How is that a better answer than 23?
I am pretty happy with the "this is a fatal error don't do it" approach, but if it has to be a number, why on earth would you pick zero? That is the least plausible outcome.
Do you remember that one time when someone found a trivially obvious way to abuse Google services to do something harmful, and Google took complaints seriously and addressed the problem?
I don't either.
Last I checked, it was still really easy to make a Google Group to use to send spam to people, but block them from sending complaints through the documented interface, because why would anyone at Google care?
The existence of programmers who are dramatically faster/more-skilled than others is not all that controversial, really. The question is whether they have to be assholes, or you should put up with them if they are.
My experience is, the majority of the really brilliant programmers I know are not assholes. They might be a little light on tact, but they are generally pretty good at cooperating and listening. If they weren't, they wouldn't be nearly as good.
That everything is offensive to at least one person doesn't mean that some things aren't more offensive than others. I am sort of sympathetic to the "but it's history!" view, but... honestly, it's a crappy picture to use for a number of reasons, it does create a hostile environment, and many many other images would be better.
TFA says 2014, not 2013. And thus, not 20 months later.
This is a fascinating set of claims that have nothing to do with any autism research I've seen. I've never seen an "anti-autism drug" get any kind of approval or testing or even marketing, and I've never heard serious claims about people "growing out of" autism. I've never actually heard of "temporary" autism. There's lots you can do to mitigate the inconvenient or harmful symptoms, but the underlying neurology seems to be pretty stable.
Exactly. I never met anyone autistic as a kid. Now about half the people I regularly interact with are autistic. Actually, several of them (including me) are people I knew as kids... But what we mean by "autistic" has changed hugely over that time period.
Yeah. Autism Speaks is not exactly a good source for information.
I have no idea. I have never seen him write a thing that was actually of interest or value, but so far as I can tell, anything he writes is automatically approved by Slashdot. He's guaranteed front-page placement. What is going on here? Who is he, and why does Slashdot owe him this?
Similarly, the Internet has done nothing for science or human knowledge, since so much of the work of pushing it and promoting it has been done for profit.
This isn't people dying so rich people can have fun. This is rich people funding the fundamental research that will make space travel practical in time.
So, on the one hand, it's sort of a spammy/advertisey thing to begin with.
On the other hand, I'm also not entirely convinced that the code coverage tool really solves the problem, because a given line of code can have different effects under different circumstances.
If you read in an address from a text stream, and then write to the memory location denoted, that's just one line of code executing that dereferences the pointer, but good luck determining what it does on all future invocations based on watching it execute once. Similarly, consider a straightforward loop like "for (i = 1; i len; ++i) a[i] = 0;" where every line will be hit if len is at least 1, but the effect of executing the code is, to put it mildly, somewhat variable.
While "only 5% of my disk" is now many times larger than it used to be, so are the things I'm moving around, so "95% full" is just as bad now as it used to be.
Basically, once we got past quotas measured in single or double-digit numbers of kilobytes, this stopped changing for me. 95% full on a 100MB disk and 95% full on a 500GB disk work the same for me.
People who didn't learn to code by the time they were 7 have never been able to program as adults. It sure is lucky a supply of people taught to code by ancient alien astronauts was supplied to us so we could bootstrap the procedure, because no one in the history of our species has learned new skills past age 7.