The Quest To Find the oldest properly commented code is still on-going. None were found so far.
The best code has no comments, because it doesn't need them and would be less readable if it had them. The function and variable names are so well-chosen and the code so logically-organized that comments would only get in the way.
Nope, that isn't how they do it. You get a phone interview with a technical person, tied to a Google Doc. They give you a coding puzzle and you implement something (language of your choice, or even pseudo-code. Doesn't matter, since its not being compiled).
I got two of those.
You got two phone screens? That's unusual. The normal process is one phone screen to decide whether or not you are brought in for on-site interviews. The on-site interviews are the actual interviews. If you got a second phone screen, that's because the engineer who did the first one couldn't decide whether you should be brought on-site.
So, I think what happened was the first phone screen was so-so, and the interviewer couldn't make the call. Or maybe it was bad, but your resume was good enough that they thought maybe you just had an off day. So they scheduled a second one. It's not common, but it happens.
BTW, I do lots of interviews at Google, both phone screens and on-site, as well as do campus outreach to teach students what to expect and how to do well, so I'm very familiar with the process.
IMHO, I knocked the first one out of the park.
It's actually quite hard for you to know that. Google interviewers are asked to try to make everyone's experience good, regardless of how well they do in the interview. To make that work, we generally start with a simple question then move to harder questions, or, better yet, use an open-ended question that can start simple and become increasingly difficult. So weak candidates get only the simple questions and feel good about having done well. Better candidates get further and feel good about having done well. Sometimes really outstanding candidates walk away feeling like maybe they didn't do well, even though they blew the interviewer away (not ideal, but sometimes it's hard to gauge the difficulty when you're interviewing someone really, really good).
This "leave them feeling good" bit is not easy to pull off in all cases, but really good interviewers are masters at it. Anyway, the upshot is that your feeling about how you did doesn't mean much about how you did, one way or the other. The fact that you were less certain about the second probably means that the second interviewer was less experienced.
As near as I could tell really the main thing they were querying me for was knowledge of things like design impact on O() time behavior and efficiency/maintainability tradeoffs. That's the kind of things the interviewers seem to be asking me about as I went.
Yep, that's what they asked you about, but it's not what they were looking for. Google interviews are focused on seeing how you solve problems. Interviewers look to see how you go about working your way through a problem you haven't seen before. The language of the conversation is algorithms, data structures, big-O time/space efficiency and coding, but the real focus is on how you think and how you solve problems.
That was exactly what I thought when I got called. But no, she identified herself as being from HR in Cali (as opposed to the recruiters who made the initial calls to me, who were I believe reported being based in Texas.)
I still don't think she was HR. HR has no role in the hiring process at Google. Recruiters gather and screen the resumes, engineers do the interviews, more engineers sit on the hiring committees to make hire/no-hire decisions, recruiters generate the offers. HR doesn't come into the picture until you're hired.
You're right that there could be innocent explanations for it. That's the thing about prejudice, there could ALWAYS be some other more innocent explanation for it.
I don't know how to say this gently, so I'll just be blunt: You didn't do well enough on the phone screens to make the case for bringing you on-site. I stil
Every bussiness where you create value 'from nothing', like fishing and farming, has VAT rates for the sold products that are actully not worth colecting as the oversight about it costs more than the VAT returns.
Huh? VAT is just a percentage of (sale price - cost of goods). If cost of goods is zero (which is basically never true, but ignore that), then it's just a percentage of sale price. The only way this is "not worth collecting" is if the sale price is nothing, in which case those engaged in the business are going to have a hard time eating.
if you mine gold in Icelands and sell the gold you have to add VAT on the sale, and give it to the tax bureaus? If that is the case, bitcoin should be handled similarily
Sure. Cost of goods would be power, hardware, probably cost of leasing space, etc. (labor is not usually included in "cost of goods" for VAT purposes, as I understand it). Revenue would be the sale value of block fees collected (paid in bitcoins) plus bitcoins mined. One complication is that the bitcoin mining operations might find it easy to transfer excess coins to some low-tax jurisdiction and sell them there. I suspect that existing law can probably handle that, though, interpreting it as smuggling untaxed goods out of the country or some such. The regulators might have to figure out novel ways of monitoring the business.
The bigger worry, I think, is building out new generation capacity to supply the miners, then being left with it when they leave or die.
$200k is tiny cost compare to cost to society of what cost to not have Linux Drivers.
While I think the actual number is almost certainly much lower, your line of reasoning here is ridiculous. If society wants Linux drivers, society should pay for Linux drivers.
You missed the "in societies where" that qualified the bit you quoted. I'm not claiming that any such exist (nor am I claiming that they don't), just that in such a society a face recognition algorithm that only works on white guys wouldn't be much use in catching criminals.
There's an option to mirror in the cloud - encrypted on my side, for a nominal fee.
Even better, you should let other people use some of your storage in exchange for using some of theirs, so you have a distributed, off-site backup (and so do they).
I actually started building an open source tool to do that, using the Tahoe Least Access File System (a secure distributed file system) as the basic platform. But then life got busy.
I know for certain that I have more trouble reading facial emotion from black people than white people. The naive response is that I live in a city that's 95% white.
The more likely reason is that you grew up in an environment that was 95% white.
It's well-established (many studies) that people are better at recognizing faces similar to those they grew up looking at. Just like with machine learning, human brains trained on white faces are better at distinguishing white faces, and human brains trained on black faces are better at distinguishing black faces.
I highly suspect that darker skin tone has a detectable coefficient of identity camouflage, also in human cognition.
That would not explain why Africans who grow up without seeing white faces think all white people look alike, but can easily distinguish black faces.
Probably not much good in societies where all the white men are wealthy and privileged, and all the minorities and women are poor and disenfranchised. Not that the wealthy and privileged don't commit crimes, but they don't commit the sort where face recognition is likely to be helpful.
Well you obviously never fly on smaller regional carriers inside or outside the US.
If your plane is not certified for on board wifi, it's not certified for Bluetooth. Full stop. Many regional airlines will ask you to remove your Bluetooth headphones.
I fly on regionals. And I haven't been asked to turn off bluetooth devices since 2013, when the FAA rules changed.
It's somewhat common to be asked to remove headphones of any type during the safety briefing, but that's it.
These islands don't happen to be just above the water by pure chance, but because coral reefs grow until they hit the surface and then stop. When the sea level rises, the reefs will grow to match it.
Eventually. But coral reefs grow very slowly, so it could be that rising sea levels will outpace reef growth and the island will sink for a few thousand years, then reappear. Also, it may take time for corals to adapt to rising temperatures and declining pH levels, further delaying reef growth.
Git hashes aren't intended to be cryptographic strength. (That is, they aren't claimed to provide protection from collision attacks.)
Bah. While SHA-1 is mildly vulnerable to collision attacks, an attacker would need to execute a preimage attack to successfully insert bad code in the threat model under discussion. SHA-1 is not vulnerable to preimage attacks. Not yet, anyway, and I think it's unlikely to be.
No need for signatures. Just always depend on a specific Git commit, identified by hash, for automatically retrieving dependencies. Also prevents changes from breaking stuff.
Okay... here's some evidence. Now at least you can't say you've never heard or seen evidence of google senior managers making comments about employees being âoeobsoleteâ and âoetoo old to matter."
"Evidence" is a strong word to use to describe the unsubstantiated claims of one former employee. I'm not saying it's not true -- I have no idea -- but I don't think it rises to the level of "evidence".
In addition, there's little reason to expect that what happened in 2003, when Google was a much different company, is indicative of the situation today. It's worth pointing out, for example, that the executive named in the suit was 38 in 2003 which means he's now 53.
FWIW: I'm pretty sure this happened to me a few years back when I was in my late 40's. I got through 2 rounds of technical interviews with no problem
Two rounds of face to face interviews? If you had that, then the first round of interviewers must not have been able to make a definitive hire/no-hire decision.
then got a really weird call from someone at Google HR that appeared to be designed to somehow trick me into saying I'm a manager and don't actually program any more
A call from HR seems extremely unlikely. I suspect you were actually called by a recruiter, perhaps because the second round of interviews was also inconclusive and they were trying to decide whether it was worth trying a third time. If so, you might have been better off if you'd said you don't program any more, since it would indicate that there's a good chance that if you did some prep work to blow the rust off, you could pass the interview process. If, on the other hand, you are in practice and still couldn't get a strong "hire" signal in two rounds of interviews, then it's unlikely a third attempt would be any different.
FWIW, Google hired me seven years ago at age 42. Many others on my team were hired in their 50s and 60s. In my time with the company I've seen no evidence whatsoever of ageism, though I've obviously only seen some small slices.
Right. Responsible, non-fake news organizations publish retractions when they make a mistake. Whether or not a given site does that is actually one of the criteria the researchers applied to distinguish fake news.
It should be pointed out that several recent studies have found that the safe-space, anti-speech snowflakes on college campuses are a small but loud minority. Their existence doesn't prove anything other than that about 20% of the population is stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
The Quest To Find the oldest properly commented code is still on-going. None were found so far.
The best code has no comments, because it doesn't need them and would be less readable if it had them. The function and variable names are so well-chosen and the code so logically-organized that comments would only get in the way.
Two rounds of face to face interviews?
Nope, that isn't how they do it. You get a phone interview with a technical person, tied to a Google Doc. They give you a coding puzzle and you implement something (language of your choice, or even pseudo-code. Doesn't matter, since its not being compiled).
I got two of those.
You got two phone screens? That's unusual. The normal process is one phone screen to decide whether or not you are brought in for on-site interviews. The on-site interviews are the actual interviews. If you got a second phone screen, that's because the engineer who did the first one couldn't decide whether you should be brought on-site.
So, I think what happened was the first phone screen was so-so, and the interviewer couldn't make the call. Or maybe it was bad, but your resume was good enough that they thought maybe you just had an off day. So they scheduled a second one. It's not common, but it happens.
BTW, I do lots of interviews at Google, both phone screens and on-site, as well as do campus outreach to teach students what to expect and how to do well, so I'm very familiar with the process.
IMHO, I knocked the first one out of the park.
It's actually quite hard for you to know that. Google interviewers are asked to try to make everyone's experience good, regardless of how well they do in the interview. To make that work, we generally start with a simple question then move to harder questions, or, better yet, use an open-ended question that can start simple and become increasingly difficult. So weak candidates get only the simple questions and feel good about having done well. Better candidates get further and feel good about having done well. Sometimes really outstanding candidates walk away feeling like maybe they didn't do well, even though they blew the interviewer away (not ideal, but sometimes it's hard to gauge the difficulty when you're interviewing someone really, really good).
This "leave them feeling good" bit is not easy to pull off in all cases, but really good interviewers are masters at it. Anyway, the upshot is that your feeling about how you did doesn't mean much about how you did, one way or the other. The fact that you were less certain about the second probably means that the second interviewer was less experienced.
As near as I could tell really the main thing they were querying me for was knowledge of things like design impact on O() time behavior and efficiency/maintainability tradeoffs. That's the kind of things the interviewers seem to be asking me about as I went.
Yep, that's what they asked you about, but it's not what they were looking for. Google interviews are focused on seeing how you solve problems. Interviewers look to see how you go about working your way through a problem you haven't seen before. The language of the conversation is algorithms, data structures, big-O time/space efficiency and coding, but the real focus is on how you think and how you solve problems.
That was exactly what I thought when I got called. But no, she identified herself as being from HR in Cali (as opposed to the recruiters who made the initial calls to me, who were I believe reported being based in Texas.)
I still don't think she was HR. HR has no role in the hiring process at Google. Recruiters gather and screen the resumes, engineers do the interviews, more engineers sit on the hiring committees to make hire/no-hire decisions, recruiters generate the offers. HR doesn't come into the picture until you're hired.
You're right that there could be innocent explanations for it. That's the thing about prejudice, there could ALWAYS be some other more innocent explanation for it.
I don't know how to say this gently, so I'll just be blunt: You didn't do well enough on the phone screens to make the case for bringing you on-site. I stil
If it's not, they're doing it wrong.
Exactly.
Every bussiness where you create value 'from nothing', like fishing and farming, has VAT rates for the sold products that are actully not worth colecting as the oversight about it costs more than the VAT returns.
Huh? VAT is just a percentage of (sale price - cost of goods). If cost of goods is zero (which is basically never true, but ignore that), then it's just a percentage of sale price. The only way this is "not worth collecting" is if the sale price is nothing, in which case those engaged in the business are going to have a hard time eating.
if you mine gold in Icelands and sell the gold you have to add VAT on the sale, and give it to the tax bureaus? If that is the case, bitcoin should be handled similarily
Sure. Cost of goods would be power, hardware, probably cost of leasing space, etc. (labor is not usually included in "cost of goods" for VAT purposes, as I understand it). Revenue would be the sale value of block fees collected (paid in bitcoins) plus bitcoins mined. One complication is that the bitcoin mining operations might find it easy to transfer excess coins to some low-tax jurisdiction and sell them there. I suspect that existing law can probably handle that, though, interpreting it as smuggling untaxed goods out of the country or some such. The regulators might have to figure out novel ways of monitoring the business.
The bigger worry, I think, is building out new generation capacity to supply the miners, then being left with it when they leave or die.
$200k is tiny cost compare to cost to society of what cost to not have Linux Drivers.
While I think the actual number is almost certainly much lower, your line of reasoning here is ridiculous. If society wants Linux drivers, society should pay for Linux drivers.
You assume the docs don't contain important secret stuff.
I'm sure there are a lot of really important secrets in their firmware installation protocol </sarcasm>
In general I'm sympathetic to your point, but in this case we're talking about something really trivial.
âoeAll the white men are wealthy and privilegedâ
LOL
You missed the "in societies where" that qualified the bit you quoted. I'm not claiming that any such exist (nor am I claiming that they don't), just that in such a society a face recognition algorithm that only works on white guys wouldn't be much use in catching criminals.
There's an option to mirror in the cloud - encrypted on my side, for a nominal fee.
Even better, you should let other people use some of your storage in exchange for using some of theirs, so you have a distributed, off-site backup (and so do they).
I actually started building an open source tool to do that, using the Tahoe Least Access File System (a secure distributed file system) as the basic platform. But then life got busy.
I know for certain that I have more trouble reading facial emotion from black people than white people. The naive response is that I live in a city that's 95% white.
The more likely reason is that you grew up in an environment that was 95% white.
It's well-established (many studies) that people are better at recognizing faces similar to those they grew up looking at. Just like with machine learning, human brains trained on white faces are better at distinguishing white faces, and human brains trained on black faces are better at distinguishing black faces.
I highly suspect that darker skin tone has a detectable coefficient of identity camouflage, also in human cognition.
That would not explain why Africans who grow up without seeing white faces think all white people look alike, but can easily distinguish black faces.
For catching criminals then?
Probably not much good in societies where all the white men are wealthy and privileged, and all the minorities and women are poor and disenfranchised. Not that the wealthy and privileged don't commit crimes, but they don't commit the sort where face recognition is likely to be helpful.
Well you obviously never fly on smaller regional carriers inside or outside the US.
If your plane is not certified for on board wifi, it's not certified for Bluetooth. Full stop. Many regional airlines will ask you to remove your Bluetooth headphones.
I fly on regionals. And I haven't been asked to turn off bluetooth devices since 2013, when the FAA rules changed.
It's somewhat common to be asked to remove headphones of any type during the safety briefing, but that's it.
So they want people from different fields. I imagine they still want the best of different fields.
You didn't read the second paragraph of the summary.
Let us know when the Actual "Android" that runs (including Google Play Services) is available.
Google Play Services is not part of Android.
These islands don't happen to be just above the water by pure chance, but because coral reefs grow until they hit the surface and then stop. When the sea level rises, the reefs will grow to match it.
Eventually. But coral reefs grow very slowly, so it could be that rising sea levels will outpace reef growth and the island will sink for a few thousand years, then reappear. Also, it may take time for corals to adapt to rising temperatures and declining pH levels, further delaying reef growth.
Git hashes aren't intended to be cryptographic strength. (That is, they aren't claimed to provide protection from collision attacks.)
Bah. While SHA-1 is mildly vulnerable to collision attacks, an attacker would need to execute a preimage attack to successfully insert bad code in the threat model under discussion. SHA-1 is not vulnerable to preimage attacks. Not yet, anyway, and I think it's unlikely to be.
No need for signatures. Just always depend on a specific Git commit, identified by hash, for automatically retrieving dependencies. Also prevents changes from breaking stuff.
There's been a massive leak of the Android codebase, too. If you're quick you can download a copy here: https://tinyurl.com/4x7rfdd
Guess you've been lucky.
Maybe. But you're assuming that the allegations are valid and also that they're systemic. I see no justification for either of those assumptions.
Okay... here's some evidence. Now at least you can't say you've never heard or seen evidence of google senior managers making comments about employees being âoeobsoleteâ and âoetoo old to matter."
"Evidence" is a strong word to use to describe the unsubstantiated claims of one former employee. I'm not saying it's not true -- I have no idea -- but I don't think it rises to the level of "evidence".
In addition, there's little reason to expect that what happened in 2003, when Google was a much different company, is indicative of the situation today. It's worth pointing out, for example, that the executive named in the suit was 38 in 2003 which means he's now 53.
FWIW: I'm pretty sure this happened to me a few years back when I was in my late 40's. I got through 2 rounds of technical interviews with no problem
Two rounds of face to face interviews? If you had that, then the first round of interviewers must not have been able to make a definitive hire/no-hire decision.
then got a really weird call from someone at Google HR that appeared to be designed to somehow trick me into saying I'm a manager and don't actually program any more
A call from HR seems extremely unlikely. I suspect you were actually called by a recruiter, perhaps because the second round of interviews was also inconclusive and they were trying to decide whether it was worth trying a third time. If so, you might have been better off if you'd said you don't program any more, since it would indicate that there's a good chance that if you did some prep work to blow the rust off, you could pass the interview process. If, on the other hand, you are in practice and still couldn't get a strong "hire" signal in two rounds of interviews, then it's unlikely a third attempt would be any different.
FWIW, Google hired me seven years ago at age 42. Many others on my team were hired in their 50s and 60s. In my time with the company I've seen no evidence whatsoever of ageism, though I've obviously only seen some small slices.
Exactly the same.
He thinks Trumpism and right-wing identity politics are really similar to Marxism?
The FBI and Obama Justice Department are guilty of obstruction of justice?
That's possible, but would be unrelated to the Mueller investigation.
Mind you, I didn't vote for Trump or Hillary, and Trump has his own issues (namely himself).
Same here.
Right. Responsible, non-fake news organizations publish retractions when they make a mistake. Whether or not a given site does that is actually one of the criteria the researchers applied to distinguish fake news.
I mean, granted, we do have a vocal minority of fear-mongering racists, but eh, what can you do?
Yeah, you should come to the USA where we don't have... oh, wait. Never mind.
It should be pointed out that several recent studies have found that the safe-space, anti-speech snowflakes on college campuses are a small but loud minority. Their existence doesn't prove anything other than that about 20% of the population is stupid.