I really have to wonder if Yahoo should have accepted Microsoft's $45 billion bid, which Yang was roundly criticized for rejecting.
It should had, and Yang was a bone-head. Anyways, good riddance, and it should be soon reckoning time for Yahoo, which hasn't been a tech company in ages. It is now a limited set of marketing services, that's all, the AOL of tech has-beens. Paul Grahams provides some insights as of why of such fateful transformation: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
Generalizations are fair play, if they are true often enough.
These may have not been truths for you, but they were truths for my friends (nerds) as we were growing up, and they were truths for my friends (nerds) in college, and you better believe they made a very lasting and powerful mark on my and their adulthood lives.
I know. I've been there (not in the conditions and situations described by the AC, but in other forms of rejection.) Rejection is the price we pay for being born with a pair of balls. Rejection will have a mark in our lives with a power and longevity proportional to how much we allow it to do. Unfortunately, we typically do not have role models that tell us how to act with women, and unless we are natural-born prince-charming-meet-jock, we will unavoidably do the very things that turn women off. We learn it the hard way, typically by having someone telling us to grow a pair and accept rejection and to really study and pay attention to the nature of man-woman dynamics. And that starts by getting rid of those generalizations. Up and until a man abandons these generalizations and accepts that rejection is natural and not to be taken personal, that man will always be shackled in rejection-land, building resentment wrongly placed on the female gender.
The AC who posted probably feels (and is) neglected by women, in a very, very intimate and emotional way. I don't see what is gained by overlooking this.
It is not overlooking it, it is destroying it for the AC's benefit. Nothing is gained by a) cultivating it, or b) ignoring it. It is true that this is probably a very deep and intimate emotional response, but it is still a wrong response as it takes responsibility of the situation away from the person expressing it (and wrongly putting all responsibility on the target of his resentment.) There is a marked difference between talking about computer work on a date, and presenting oneself as a person who makes a living with computers while focusing on the date and demonstrating that there is more to us than computers. Now replace "computers" with "law", "medicine", "accounting", "engineering". Most women will also be turned off by that as naturally as us getting an erection when seeing a pair of boobs.
Those kind of responses, they are natural, they are part of our genes. It is all about presentation, all about showing that we are more than a small set of topics of interest. It is also all about not taking rejection personally. Any one of us can ask 12 women for a date, and perhaps only one will accept. And for each 5 that accept, probably only one will accept a second date. Life is a rejection game number, one dictated by nature and evolution. Taking it personally and letting it define our lives is the worst thing a man can do.
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Because, when it comes to gender, intelligence is uniform. Also, it is not so much about uniform involvement but respect. I mean, groping of women participants at conference? Conferences allowing sexual innuendo that would get you fired anywhere (Golden Gate Ruby Conference 2009)?
The reality is that when it comes to science/engineering fields, lack of professionalism is rampant among software practitioners. I've personally known of very embarrassing cases in Academia (in particular STEM fields) where female students and lecturers have been exposed to harassing behavior that, again, would get you fired on the spot at any company (tenure == lifelong impunity). But in software, it is worse, specially in conferences and FOSS projects, both of which are free from federal and state regulations against hostile work environments.
We are a vulgar, condescending bunch when it comes to the women (talented or otherwise) that work among us. There is no debate about that, and we should not need a reasonable explanation of why this is wrong.
Well, I'm not going to say "turnabout is fair play", but before you heap too much criticism on socially inept nerds, consider that one reason they are that way is that women universally reject them. Tell a woman you're a computer programmer, and her eyes glaze over. Tell her you like playing computer games, and she leaves. Tell her you like her, and she'll say "ugh". And now other women want to come to communities dominated by these kinds of men, who have been despised by women since the day they were old enough to be, and then wonder why they are not made as welcome as they'd like to be? Who is really the problem here, the nerds, or the culture that inculcates contempt for them?
I've never had that problem (and I know many quote-n-quote geeks would say the same.) Seriously, the generalizations presented herein are such an overused cliche. It's all about communication skills with members of the opposite sex, presentation, etc. If you have experienced these problems, that's on you, not them.
Also, the act of learning a trade and the act of learning how to think and process information are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately in this country a lot of people cannot grasp that simple fact. That on itself is a sad indictment of our education system and the notions and values that our society attaches to formal and vocational education.
This sounds like a trade school. High School should be about learning how to think and process information. Once you've learned how to learn you can go on to learning a trade. Its bad enough so many schools are now about being able to pass tests.
Not according to the German and Japanese models of education (or of many other countries for that matter.)
And no one's gone to the trouble of modeling what happens when you chill down part of a lava dome. Does it harden, then blow sky high? Does it pressure masses underneath the caldera to cause nice earthquakes? Do you get a nice fissure opening up somewhere else to flow the lava into new and vulnerable areas? How long before the solidification means you have drill new spots? How are you going to stabilize the old spots? I don't think there are any lava-eating bacteria to help save the day here. There is nothing we have that's going to repair a newly active caldera. Look at what St Helens did, just a few miles up the road. Talk about playing with matches....
Are you making the question in the rhetorical sense because you know for a fact that no one is doing just that, or are you asking the question because that is what you are assuming?
The danger in your method is when (code below) gets changed, but the comment does not. As a result, the comment says something different than the code. That's where the advantage of "self-documenting" code comes in. When you change the code (to also self-documenting code), you don't run the risk of saying two different things.
The comment changes when the code does. That's what's required to do a good job. So, no. You are not describing a danger to his method. You are describing the result of people not doing their jobs.
Outlook has had this for ages. You simply schedule a meeting for an arbitrary period of time and set the availability to 'out of office'. How is this any different?
People (from within and outside of your network) do not get an "out of office" auto reply if they send an e-mail to you at the time interval selected by scheduled meeting. Do they?
I don't want to be hermit. Go back and redo your reading comprehension classes from grade / primary school. I said I don't want a private company, from which I require no service and gain no remuneration, to profit from my personal data. That is not an alien concept, one quite sufficiently backed up by the widespread concern of identity theft, for one example.
To me, the costs out-weigh the benefits. This is basic logic.
Yes, and as you tell me I lack reading comprehension, I remind you of the questions I posted that still remained unanswered.
I wonder what you will do if a friend posts a picture of you on a non-FB page, like a blog or a non-commercial web page. What are you going to do? Or if a newspaper takes a picture on the street and you are in it. What are you going to do?
Yes, I get you. Still, what are you going to do about it? Hate facebook users as you said in the post of yours that I first replied? That's just an asinine response, and that is my point of contention. What's the point of being so aware of privacy concerns if the response you produce not conductive for what you desire? If you are going to be (or claim to be) logical, be all the way.
What, exactly, is wrong with expecting your so called "friends" to not betray your trust?
Again, wow, just wow. Ignorance of what you desire is not an indication of betrayal. As I said before, Hanlon's razor, which what separates reasonable expectations and stupidity. It is stupid to take actions carried out of ignorance/innocence and attribute malice or betrayal connotations to it. Yes, it is stupid, regardless of how you want to rationalize it.
All of the things you mentioned annoy me too. That's one of the reasons why I have a Facebook account. Since I have an account, I can control the settings. If someone tries to tag me in a picture (and they do!), I get an email with a chance to approve it. I don't approve them, I go delete the tag from the picture. Facebook doesn't know where I live (fake address in a different state). They don't know my phone number. My security settings are pretty locked down and don't allow strangers to message me, etc. If you do this, you are better able to manage what people may post about you on Facebook than you can if you don't even have an account.
You might want to re-think who you want as your friends. If your "friends" are giving your personal information away to an entity who then sells it downstream to anyone who wants it, including most likely the big brother TLA agencies, I'd suggest those people are not actually friends.
Or maybe they are friends, but are not educated in the implications. May I suggest you familiarize yourself with Hanlon's razor before judging you don't know and their worthiness for friendship? I don't know, something to do with social skills, rational thought, humanism, or something.
My friends, somehow, do not do this to me. You need a better class of friends.
I have every reason to hate users of Facebook who enter information about me. I may not be on Facebook, but I can still be tagged in a photo, have my name used in a "Check in" style post, have my details entered as an invitation to join Facebook (thereby linking my email address to me, the person who submitted the invitation, any picture I am tagged in without my knowledge etc).
I'm not paranoid, I just dislike the idea of my life being profiled by a private entity without my consent. I'm well aware that store / loyalty cards, CC companies etc do this; I accept that as part of the terms of service. What do I gain from Facebook?
I wonder what you will do if a friend posts a picture of you on a non-FB page, like a blog or a non-commercial web page. What are you going to do? Or if a newspaper takes a picture on the street and you are in it. What are you going to do?
At the very least, if a friend or acquaintance of yours post/tag a pic of you, you can ask them to undo just that. You cannot do that with other venues, at least not easily and without involving legal action.
I can understand the desire of being a hermit, but to go bananas because a friend (not a random person, but someone you call a friend) tags you on his FB, what's wrong with you? Yes, you have a right to get all pissy, but still, what's wrong with you? You are just building strawmen to be upset at, building up a cause to be upset about and for all the interweebz to see, that's all.
No sour grapes here, Tech Track pays well, and more reliably than Sales or any number of other things, just don't delude yourself that you're going to move into the upper 1% while on a tech track.
I hear ya. But climbing up the tech ladder (or stool) is not the same as attempting to get into the upper %1 on a tech track. You climbed the ladder until it became the stool, just as a non-technical manager climbs up the later until he becomes CIO/CFO/VP, and at that point, it is a stool. And since you have made it to the top of the tech ladder (now an stool), then my comment is not applicable to your case. I was intending my comment to people between the coding food soldier and sr. soft. engineer that want to climb up while remaining tech.
Having said that, if that was the meaning you were trying to convey, then yes, I would have to agree with you. A purely tech track is not going to get you there. The ladder is shallower than others, but like all ladders, once on top, it is a stool;)
This expression is so cliche, it has lost any meaning.
Sometimes smart people ask that question, but let's be honest here, most of the times it is asked just because it is on the "script",
And what's wrong with the opening interviews to be on script? How do you pretend interviewers (HR and otherwise) to filter 200+ applicants. You filter by script first. Then you leave the meat for a 2nd round of interviews with the actual people involved. I've never been hired directly by HR. It's either HR followed by tech leads and management, or directly by the later.
The script process is not perfect, and there are a lot of things to complain about HR interview processes. Script interviews aren't among them.
and the interviewer can't think for himself.
Here you are simply building a subjective, generalizing strawman with which to prop your argument.
I'm trying to work out whether you are being deliberately patronising/accusatory/insulting, or whether it's a function of culture or perhaps not speaking English as a first language.
Well, yes, English is not my first language, but I've been speaking it for 22 years (the equal time I've been away from my culture). Whether that has any effect in how I communicate effectively (or not) that would be an interesting conundrum. Independently of cultural mannerisms and language quirks, I am deliberately and unequivocally stating what I said before: a question such as "where do you see yourself in 5 years" is direct and is clear for any college-educated adult.
Barring an ulterior motive by the interviewer (wanting to torpedo you in favor of another applicant), what other rational and reasonable interpretation in the rational and reasonable general case can there be? You want to remain the same or climb up? And if so, want to climb up technically or managerially? They are interviewing you for a job, and all jobs, specially those involving a college education, they have a very specific, self-evident context. And I've never seen an indication that such a context is beyond the reasonable comprehension of a college-educated person.
Whether you find that patronizing, accusatory or insulting, that's a interpretative choice you have to do you on your own, and which you are entitled to.
In any case, I have never encountered a productive answer to the generic question or a particularly interesting follow-up conversation, either when someone has asked me or when someone on an interview panel I've been on has asked an applicant.
But that's you. If that works for you, that's great. But you have to understand then, that this is entirely subjective from your part. Not finding a productive answer is hardly an objective measure; your are measuring productivity on a personal level (which is inherently subjective.) I also think it is potentially counter productive. And I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise as we are all adults here capable of making our own choices.
For me, quite the opposite: such a question opens up a lot of interesting (and very important) follow-up questions that help you gauge your potential employer: "It is hard to answer that at this stage. What type of opportunities does your company provides?". or "I would like to remain technical" or "Depends. Are there opportunities for move into management" or, simply be honest and see where that gets you: "I'm solely interesting in coding at this moment and for the foreseeable future". Use your communications skills to elaborate an answer according to the situation and according to what you want out of it. Anything else is being passive or unreasonably demanding in an interview.
Be honest or be conniving, depending own your own goals. That on itself is interesting. But you cannot get there without first exploiting out the interesting bits out of anything (there are always interesting bits).That on itself is useful. To find something interesting or informative in such a social, subjective setting, that is completely a function of one's predisposition. Furthermore, it is a matter of rhetorical and communicative skills that should be cultivated (and exercised) with one's education. If you find this statement insulting or patronizing, hey, that's your interpretation.
I guess I (and every other interviewer and applicant involved) must be unthinking, lacking in drive, and unable to interpolate things out.
Not every other. Only those that engage in such behavioral patterns. And not only those behavioral traits that you describe. It could also be that the person in question is simply unaware of the importance of finding value, and the choice of being proactive in extracting value out of things, to steer even the most inane questions according to your own designs, that that choice is subjecti
The 5 years question is really just asking if you intend to move up the management or technical ladder.
Then why not just ask that directly? It might lead to a mutually interesting conversation, and at the very least you're either both going to be more confident in your fit or both going to know immediately that it's not going to work out.
The question is direct and clear enough for any college-educated adult. Also, it is general enough to branch into mutually interesting conversations. An interesting conversation is not so much a function of the opening question, but a function of the participating individuals, their mental capacities and personalities/social tendencies.
The employer is not interested in leading you into a particular opportunity (or pigeonhole depending on how you look at it.) He's interesting in seeing how you think (can you?), if you have drive (do you?) and whether you can interpolate things out.
There's a technical ladder? Anywhere I've ever worked, it's more like a stool - start a decent distance off the floor, then go nowhere.
That's a function of the size of the company and industry you are in. In general, the technical ladder (or stool) becomes steep very quickly. And as you climb it up, you start to see that you do more management than actual hands-on thingie-building. But do not delude yourself into thinking that this type of management is of a non-technical nature.
Software Architect. Enterprise Architect. Technical Lead. Principal Engineer. Technical Director. Chief Scientist. Let's call these upper-stool technical positions.
These types of positions require you to do less hands-on stuff, but the management you will have to do must be technical-oriented. How you assign technical tasks to people and teams will depend on whether tasks are technical feasible, on identifying the technical capabilities of your team, on understanding the resources required to complete technical tasks.
Granted that a lot of people who get into these positions let go of themselves, gradually detaching themselves from the technical realities on the ground, where the pedal hits the metal. And as a result, their decisions are no longer technical, with technical consequences that is beyond their grasp. But those are examples of doing a bad job in their positions. And that exists at all levels, from the uber-chief of technical reality down to the lowest code monkey.
These are the fabled paper tigers.
That is, being detached of technical realities is not an inevitability of working so high up the ladder/stool. Good technical people remain strategically and tactically technical always, regardless of their pecking order. A good above-the-clouds architect can drop back to code with only a few days to clear the mental cobwebs. A good technical foot soldier can extrapolate the reasons behind good high-level technical decisions, even if he/she does not have the management experience (which naturally they don't at their entry level of their careers.)
My suggestion to people who find themselves staring at the technical stool: put another stool over it, secure it with nails, crazy glue or some other good shit, and then climb it. That is, like a good engineer, you need to engineer and build your technical ladder.
This can only be done without realizing first that to climb it, you will have to gradually move away from hands-on work without losing your technical wits. You cannot allow yourself to become a paper-tiger.
This will also means that when you find yourself at a company where there is nowhere else to go but down (because the stool cannot go any higher for whatever reasons), then it is time to go somewhere else where there is a chance to nail/glue another stool over the one you have built so far.
I agree. But I would prefer a puzzle to questions like "where do you see yourself in 5 years" and "what are your goals". I want to answer "My goal is to get hired. Why else would I answer such stupid questions?"
1. To see if you are more than just a code-monkey. I need to know how I can use your skills and disposition beyond the immediate task I'm about to hire you for.
2. To gauge if the salary I'm going to give you is commensurate not only to the job you are going to do now, but also what you can do for me 5 years from now ("Are you going to be around? If so, are you still going to be a code-churning body or are you going to help me down the road in managing the new hires I will have 5 years from now? If that's not what you want, is it because you genuinely prefer to stay "technical" or simply you don't give a flying fuck?") I need to know what my money (your salary) is going to get me. I need to know or at least guesstimate the ROI behind the investment I'm going to make on you.
4. To get a measure of who you are. I'm going to add you to an existing environment with people already in it. Are you going to be a pro or a con? Are your unique annoying quirks (we all have them) tolerable enough wrt your skills, or are you too much of a social turd not worth the risk, regardless of how brilliant you might be?
Considerations like this shouldn't apply to job openings for hourly paid consultants on short contracts ("I need you to fix this now" or "This is just for a 3-month job"). Under other circumstances, however, employers need to ask such questions. It would be stupid for them not to. And it is equally stupid for us not to be aware of the reasons behind such questions.
If someone is giving you one, they're probably not very intelligent.
Depends. For a company completely dedicated to services, like 37 signals, or a company who's center of being is in web/enterprise development, then I agree with you. In such a context, giving brain teasers would be a sign of stupidity IMO.
On the other hand, an "algorithms" company (and Google and several departments within MS are R&D algorithms companies first and foremost), then it makes sense to give brain teasers, in particular if said brain teasers involve word descriptions of problems involving combinatorics, graph theory or discrete math. I'd also go out of a limb and say that, even in "the enterprise" if I see a potentially qualified applicant with a CS degree, then it would be fair game to test some of that CS knowledge (and it would be unfair and impractical to do the same with a potentially qualified applicant that has a different background, MIS for instance.)
So, it is not that simple of a B&W thing. It all depends on the intent (legitimate and otherwise) and thought (reasonable, unreasonable) behind the test, the nature of the hiring entity, the nature of the job and the background of the applicant.
Slashdot Mirror
I really have to wonder if Yahoo should have accepted Microsoft's $45 billion bid, which Yang was roundly criticized for rejecting.
It should had, and Yang was a bone-head. Anyways, good riddance, and it should be soon reckoning time for Yahoo, which hasn't been a tech company in ages. It is now a limited set of marketing services, that's all, the AOL of tech has-beens. Paul Grahams provides some insights as of why of such fateful transformation: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
Generalizations are fair play, if they are true often enough.
These may have not been truths for you, but they were truths for my friends (nerds) as we were growing up, and they were truths for my friends (nerds) in college, and you better believe they made a very lasting and powerful mark on my and their adulthood lives.
I know. I've been there (not in the conditions and situations described by the AC, but in other forms of rejection.) Rejection is the price we pay for being born with a pair of balls. Rejection will have a mark in our lives with a power and longevity proportional to how much we allow it to do. Unfortunately, we typically do not have role models that tell us how to act with women, and unless we are natural-born prince-charming-meet-jock, we will unavoidably do the very things that turn women off. We learn it the hard way, typically by having someone telling us to grow a pair and accept rejection and to really study and pay attention to the nature of man-woman dynamics. And that starts by getting rid of those generalizations. Up and until a man abandons these generalizations and accepts that rejection is natural and not to be taken personal, that man will always be shackled in rejection-land, building resentment wrongly placed on the female gender.
The AC who posted probably feels (and is) neglected by women, in a very, very intimate and emotional way. I don't see what is gained by overlooking this.
It is not overlooking it, it is destroying it for the AC's benefit. Nothing is gained by a) cultivating it, or b) ignoring it. It is true that this is probably a very deep and intimate emotional response, but it is still a wrong response as it takes responsibility of the situation away from the person expressing it (and wrongly putting all responsibility on the target of his resentment.) There is a marked difference between talking about computer work on a date, and presenting oneself as a person who makes a living with computers while focusing on the date and demonstrating that there is more to us than computers. Now replace "computers" with "law", "medicine", "accounting", "engineering". Most women will also be turned off by that as naturally as us getting an erection when seeing a pair of boobs.
Those kind of responses, they are natural, they are part of our genes. It is all about presentation, all about showing that we are more than a small set of topics of interest. It is also all about not taking rejection personally. Any one of us can ask 12 women for a date, and perhaps only one will accept. And for each 5 that accept, probably only one will accept a second date. Life is a rejection game number, one dictated by nature and evolution. Taking it personally and letting it define our lives is the worst thing a man can do.
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Because, when it comes to gender, intelligence is uniform. Also, it is not so much about uniform involvement but respect. I mean, groping of women participants at conference? Conferences allowing sexual innuendo that would get you fired anywhere (Golden Gate Ruby Conference 2009)?
The reality is that when it comes to science/engineering fields, lack of professionalism is rampant among software practitioners. I've personally known of very embarrassing cases in Academia (in particular STEM fields) where female students and lecturers have been exposed to harassing behavior that, again, would get you fired on the spot at any company (tenure == lifelong impunity). But in software, it is worse, specially in conferences and FOSS projects, both of which are free from federal and state regulations against hostile work environments.
We are a vulgar, condescending bunch when it comes to the women (talented or otherwise) that work among us. There is no debate about that, and we should not need a reasonable explanation of why this is wrong.
Well, I'm not going to say "turnabout is fair play", but before you heap too much criticism on socially inept nerds, consider that one reason they are that way is that women universally reject them. Tell a woman you're a computer programmer, and her eyes glaze over. Tell her you like playing computer games, and she leaves. Tell her you like her, and she'll say "ugh". And now other women want to come to communities dominated by these kinds of men, who have been despised by women since the day they were old enough to be, and then wonder why they are not made as welcome as they'd like to be? Who is really the problem here, the nerds, or the culture that inculcates contempt for them?
I've never had that problem (and I know many quote-n-quote geeks would say the same.) Seriously, the generalizations presented herein are such an overused cliche. It's all about communication skills with members of the opposite sex, presentation, etc. If you have experienced these problems, that's on you, not them.
It's not that you called two of them gold diggers that's sexist. It's that you said that there's no such thing as a woman who *isn't* a gold digger.
Can you spot the difference?
Chances are he is the type of person who never will get the difference.
Also, the act of learning a trade and the act of learning how to think and process information are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately in this country a lot of people cannot grasp that simple fact. That on itself is a sad indictment of our education system and the notions and values that our society attaches to formal and vocational education.
This sounds like a trade school. High School should be about learning how to think and process information. Once you've learned how to learn you can go on to learning a trade. Its bad enough so many schools are now about being able to pass tests.
Not according to the German and Japanese models of education (or of many other countries for that matter.)
Sure you will. Download a crack. These game companies are a joke. They'll never outsmart the cracking groups.
Vicariously feeling cool bro?
And no one's gone to the trouble of modeling what happens when you chill down part of a lava dome. Does it harden, then blow sky high? Does it pressure masses underneath the caldera to cause nice earthquakes? Do you get a nice fissure opening up somewhere else to flow the lava into new and vulnerable areas? How long before the solidification means you have drill new spots? How are you going to stabilize the old spots? I don't think there are any lava-eating bacteria to help save the day here. There is nothing we have that's going to repair a newly active caldera. Look at what St Helens did, just a few miles up the road. Talk about playing with matches....
Are you making the question in the rhetorical sense because you know for a fact that no one is doing just that, or are you asking the question because that is what you are assuming?
What could possibly go wrong . . .
Hey, this could be an excellent premise for a disaster movie. I will have you know sir, that your skepticism is killing cinematographic innovation!
The danger in your method is when (code below) gets changed, but the comment does not. As a result, the comment says something different than the code. That's where the advantage of "self-documenting" code comes in. When you change the code (to also self-documenting code), you don't run the risk of saying two different things.
The comment changes when the code does. That's what's required to do a good job. So, no. You are not describing a danger to his method. You are describing the result of people not doing their jobs.
Outlook has had this for ages. You simply schedule a meeting for an arbitrary period of time and set the availability to 'out of office'. How is this any different?
People (from within and outside of your network) do not get an "out of office" auto reply if they send an e-mail to you at the time interval selected by scheduled meeting. Do they?
We don't have the technology to peek deeper.
I don't want to be hermit. Go back and redo your reading comprehension classes from grade / primary school. I said I don't want a private company, from which I require no service and gain no remuneration, to profit from my personal data. That is not an alien concept, one quite sufficiently backed up by the widespread concern of identity theft, for one example. To me, the costs out-weigh the benefits. This is basic logic.
Yes, and as you tell me I lack reading comprehension, I remind you of the questions I posted that still remained unanswered.
I wonder what you will do if a friend posts a picture of you on a non-FB page, like a blog or a non-commercial web page. What are you going to do? Or if a newspaper takes a picture on the street and you are in it. What are you going to do?
Yes, I get you. Still, what are you going to do about it? Hate facebook users as you said in the post of yours that I first replied? That's just an asinine response, and that is my point of contention. What's the point of being so aware of privacy concerns if the response you produce not conductive for what you desire? If you are going to be (or claim to be) logical, be all the way.
Wow, just wow.
What, exactly, is wrong with expecting your so called "friends" to not betray your trust?
Again, wow, just wow. Ignorance of what you desire is not an indication of betrayal. As I said before, Hanlon's razor, which what separates reasonable expectations and stupidity. It is stupid to take actions carried out of ignorance/innocence and attribute malice or betrayal connotations to it. Yes, it is stupid, regardless of how you want to rationalize it.
All of the things you mentioned annoy me too. That's one of the reasons why I have a Facebook account. Since I have an account, I can control the settings. If someone tries to tag me in a picture (and they do!), I get an email with a chance to approve it. I don't approve them, I go delete the tag from the picture. Facebook doesn't know where I live (fake address in a different state). They don't know my phone number. My security settings are pretty locked down and don't allow strangers to message me, etc. If you do this, you are better able to manage what people may post about you on Facebook than you can if you don't even have an account.
^^^ THIS.
You might want to re-think who you want as your friends. If your "friends" are giving your personal information away to an entity who then sells it downstream to anyone who wants it, including most likely the big brother TLA agencies, I'd suggest those people are not actually friends.
Or maybe they are friends, but are not educated in the implications. May I suggest you familiarize yourself with Hanlon's razor before judging you don't know and their worthiness for friendship? I don't know, something to do with social skills, rational thought, humanism, or something.
My friends, somehow, do not do this to me. You need a better class of friends.
Wow, just wow.
I have every reason to hate users of Facebook who enter information about me. I may not be on Facebook, but I can still be tagged in a photo, have my name used in a "Check in" style post, have my details entered as an invitation to join Facebook (thereby linking my email address to me, the person who submitted the invitation, any picture I am tagged in without my knowledge etc). I'm not paranoid, I just dislike the idea of my life being profiled by a private entity without my consent. I'm well aware that store / loyalty cards, CC companies etc do this; I accept that as part of the terms of service. What do I gain from Facebook?
I wonder what you will do if a friend posts a picture of you on a non-FB page, like a blog or a non-commercial web page. What are you going to do? Or if a newspaper takes a picture on the street and you are in it. What are you going to do?
At the very least, if a friend or acquaintance of yours post/tag a pic of you, you can ask them to undo just that. You cannot do that with other venues, at least not easily and without involving legal action.
I can understand the desire of being a hermit, but to go bananas because a friend (not a random person, but someone you call a friend) tags you on his FB, what's wrong with you? Yes, you have a right to get all pissy, but still, what's wrong with you? You are just building strawmen to be upset at, building up a cause to be upset about and for all the interweebz to see, that's all.
No sour grapes here, Tech Track pays well, and more reliably than Sales or any number of other things, just don't delude yourself that you're going to move into the upper 1% while on a tech track.
I hear ya. But climbing up the tech ladder (or stool) is not the same as attempting to get into the upper %1 on a tech track. You climbed the ladder until it became the stool, just as a non-technical manager climbs up the later until he becomes CIO/CFO/VP, and at that point, it is a stool. And since you have made it to the top of the tech ladder (now an stool), then my comment is not applicable to your case. I was intending my comment to people between the coding food soldier and sr. soft. engineer that want to climb up while remaining tech.
Having said that, if that was the meaning you were trying to convey, then yes, I would have to agree with you. A purely tech track is not going to get you there. The ladder is shallower than others, but like all ladders, once on top, it is a stool ;)
Plans != drive
But HR drones won't ever think about that.
This expression is so cliche, it has lost any meaning.
Sometimes smart people ask that question, but let's be honest here, most of the times it is asked just because it is on the "script",
And what's wrong with the opening interviews to be on script? How do you pretend interviewers (HR and otherwise) to filter 200+ applicants. You filter by script first. Then you leave the meat for a 2nd round of interviews with the actual people involved. I've never been hired directly by HR. It's either HR followed by tech leads and management, or directly by the later.
The script process is not perfect, and there are a lot of things to complain about HR interview processes. Script interviews aren't among them.
and the interviewer can't think for himself.
Here you are simply building a subjective, generalizing strawman with which to prop your argument.
I'm trying to work out whether you are being deliberately patronising/accusatory/insulting, or whether it's a function of culture or perhaps not speaking English as a first language.
Well, yes, English is not my first language, but I've been speaking it for 22 years (the equal time I've been away from my culture). Whether that has any effect in how I communicate effectively (or not) that would be an interesting conundrum. Independently of cultural mannerisms and language quirks, I am deliberately and unequivocally stating what I said before: a question such as "where do you see yourself in 5 years" is direct and is clear for any college-educated adult.
Barring an ulterior motive by the interviewer (wanting to torpedo you in favor of another applicant), what other rational and reasonable interpretation in the rational and reasonable general case can there be? You want to remain the same or climb up? And if so, want to climb up technically or managerially? They are interviewing you for a job, and all jobs, specially those involving a college education, they have a very specific, self-evident context. And I've never seen an indication that such a context is beyond the reasonable comprehension of a college-educated person.
Whether you find that patronizing, accusatory or insulting, that's a interpretative choice you have to do you on your own, and which you are entitled to.
In any case, I have never encountered a productive answer to the generic question or a particularly interesting follow-up conversation, either when someone has asked me or when someone on an interview panel I've been on has asked an applicant.
But that's you. If that works for you, that's great. But you have to understand then, that this is entirely subjective from your part. Not finding a productive answer is hardly an objective measure; your are measuring productivity on a personal level (which is inherently subjective.) I also think it is potentially counter productive. And I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise as we are all adults here capable of making our own choices.
For me, quite the opposite: such a question opens up a lot of interesting (and very important) follow-up questions that help you gauge your potential employer: "It is hard to answer that at this stage. What type of opportunities does your company provides?". or "I would like to remain technical" or "Depends. Are there opportunities for move into management" or, simply be honest and see where that gets you: "I'm solely interesting in coding at this moment and for the foreseeable future". Use your communications skills to elaborate an answer according to the situation and according to what you want out of it. Anything else is being passive or unreasonably demanding in an interview.
Be honest or be conniving, depending own your own goals. That on itself is interesting. But you cannot get there without first exploiting out the interesting bits out of anything (there are always interesting bits).That on itself is useful. To find something interesting or informative in such a social, subjective setting, that is completely a function of one's predisposition. Furthermore, it is a matter of rhetorical and communicative skills that should be cultivated (and exercised) with one's education. If you find this statement insulting or patronizing, hey, that's your interpretation.
I guess I (and every other interviewer and applicant involved) must be unthinking, lacking in drive, and unable to interpolate things out.
Not every other. Only those that engage in such behavioral patterns. And not only those behavioral traits that you describe. It could also be that the person in question is simply unaware of the importance of finding value, and the choice of being proactive in extracting value out of things, to steer even the most inane questions according to your own designs, that that choice is subjecti
The 5 years question is really just asking if you intend to move up the management or technical ladder.
Then why not just ask that directly? It might lead to a mutually interesting conversation, and at the very least you're either both going to be more confident in your fit or both going to know immediately that it's not going to work out.
The question is direct and clear enough for any college-educated adult. Also, it is general enough to branch into mutually interesting conversations. An interesting conversation is not so much a function of the opening question, but a function of the participating individuals, their mental capacities and personalities/social tendencies.
The employer is not interested in leading you into a particular opportunity (or pigeonhole depending on how you look at it.) He's interesting in seeing how you think (can you?), if you have drive (do you?) and whether you can interpolate things out.
There's a technical ladder? Anywhere I've ever worked, it's more like a stool - start a decent distance off the floor, then go nowhere.
That's a function of the size of the company and industry you are in. In general, the technical ladder (or stool) becomes steep very quickly. And as you climb it up, you start to see that you do more management than actual hands-on thingie-building. But do not delude yourself into thinking that this type of management is of a non-technical nature.
Software Architect. Enterprise Architect. Technical Lead. Principal Engineer. Technical Director. Chief Scientist. Let's call these upper-stool technical positions.
These types of positions require you to do less hands-on stuff, but the management you will have to do must be technical-oriented. How you assign technical tasks to people and teams will depend on whether tasks are technical feasible, on identifying the technical capabilities of your team, on understanding the resources required to complete technical tasks.
Granted that a lot of people who get into these positions let go of themselves, gradually detaching themselves from the technical realities on the ground, where the pedal hits the metal. And as a result, their decisions are no longer technical, with technical consequences that is beyond their grasp. But those are examples of doing a bad job in their positions. And that exists at all levels, from the uber-chief of technical reality down to the lowest code monkey.
These are the fabled paper tigers.
That is, being detached of technical realities is not an inevitability of working so high up the ladder/stool. Good technical people remain strategically and tactically technical always, regardless of their pecking order. A good above-the-clouds architect can drop back to code with only a few days to clear the mental cobwebs. A good technical foot soldier can extrapolate the reasons behind good high-level technical decisions, even if he/she does not have the management experience (which naturally they don't at their entry level of their careers.)
My suggestion to people who find themselves staring at the technical stool: put another stool over it, secure it with nails, crazy glue or some other good shit, and then climb it. That is, like a good engineer, you need to engineer and build your technical ladder.
This can only be done without realizing first that to climb it, you will have to gradually move away from hands-on work without losing your technical wits. You cannot allow yourself to become a paper-tiger.
This will also means that when you find yourself at a company where there is nowhere else to go but down (because the stool cannot go any higher for whatever reasons), then it is time to go somewhere else where there is a chance to nail/glue another stool over the one you have built so far.
I agree. But I would prefer a puzzle to questions like "where do you see yourself in 5 years" and "what are your goals". I want to answer "My goal is to get hired. Why else would I answer such stupid questions?"
1. To see if you are more than just a code-monkey. I need to know how I can use your skills and disposition beyond the immediate task I'm about to hire you for.
2. To gauge if the salary I'm going to give you is commensurate not only to the job you are going to do now, but also what you can do for me 5 years from now ("Are you going to be around? If so, are you still going to be a code-churning body or are you going to help me down the road in managing the new hires I will have 5 years from now? If that's not what you want, is it because you genuinely prefer to stay "technical" or simply you don't give a flying fuck?") I need to know what my money (your salary) is going to get me. I need to know or at least guesstimate the ROI behind the investment I'm going to make on you.
4. To get a measure of who you are. I'm going to add you to an existing environment with people already in it. Are you going to be a pro or a con? Are your unique annoying quirks (we all have them) tolerable enough wrt your skills, or are you too much of a social turd not worth the risk, regardless of how brilliant you might be?
Considerations like this shouldn't apply to job openings for hourly paid consultants on short contracts ("I need you to fix this now" or "This is just for a 3-month job"). Under other circumstances, however, employers need to ask such questions. It would be stupid for them not to. And it is equally stupid for us not to be aware of the reasons behind such questions.
If someone is giving you one, they're probably not very intelligent.
Depends. For a company completely dedicated to services, like 37 signals, or a company who's center of being is in web/enterprise development, then I agree with you. In such a context, giving brain teasers would be a sign of stupidity IMO.
On the other hand, an "algorithms" company (and Google and several departments within MS are R&D algorithms companies first and foremost), then it makes sense to give brain teasers, in particular if said brain teasers involve word descriptions of problems involving combinatorics, graph theory or discrete math. I'd also go out of a limb and say that, even in "the enterprise" if I see a potentially qualified applicant with a CS degree, then it would be fair game to test some of that CS knowledge (and it would be unfair and impractical to do the same with a potentially qualified applicant that has a different background, MIS for instance.)
So, it is not that simple of a B&W thing. It all depends on the intent (legitimate and otherwise) and thought (reasonable, unreasonable) behind the test, the nature of the hiring entity, the nature of the job and the background of the applicant.