I have owned my Pixelbook for almost 1½ years now. Before that, I had a decked out fully-featured Linux laptop. Ever since I started using the Pixelbook, I have touched my old laptop maybe three times -- once every six months.
To be honest, my Pixelbook is the nicest Linux laptop I have ever owned. And it requires the least amount of maintenance. Pixelbooks get all the newest ChromeOS features first, but other modern Chromebooks such eventually have the same integration with Linux. Things work amazingly well. I can run (almost) all the Linux apps that I have gotten used to over the last 20 odd years. I can also run the handful of Android apps that I need. And everything comes in a secure package that doesn't require any maintenance at all.
You are seriously misrepresenting the facts. First of all, it is highly unlikely that all the people who voted in the referendum would also sign the petition. In fact, it is amazing that so many people did sign. That's pretty much unprecedented. Participation rates in online petitions are traditionally tiny compared to actual referenda and elections. And the UK parliament assures everybody that the petition actively filters out bot activity. So, we have to assume that the numbers are close to accurate.
Secondly, the petition is just that. It is a petition. It doesn't invalidate the non-binding referendum. It asks parliament to do their job and to actually confirm that "the will of the people" is in fact to leave the EU, as Theresa May keeps pretending. And from the numbers presented so far, I personally doubt that the vast part of the population shares that believe. It's just that Brexiteers are louder -- and parliament seems to have their fingers in their ears. So, if they hear anything over their own self-imposed din, it's the loud voices.
Typically, online petitions and opinion polls only have a tiny participation rate. Not everybody has readily available internet access, not everybody follow the media, and most importantly, not everybody bothers to get involved, even if it is in their own interest. This means, seeing 4+M signatures equals a much much bigger actual number of voters. And as is, the petition already represents about a quarter of the people who voted to "remain" in the referendum. That's significant. It suggests that there is a groundswell of support for remaining in the EU.
The petition site isn't run by some shady online opinion poll. It's run by the UK parliament. According to a spokeperson, it actively filters submissions to detect bot activity. At the very least, it requires a unique name, verified (!) e-mail address and UK postal address. Some unconfirmed reports also state that it requires a UK passport number (maybe, that only happens for suspect submissions?). The UK parliament trusts that these numbers are substantially accurate.
That's huge. It means anybody saying "the will of the people" is to continue with Brexit is blatantly lying to themselves and to the rest of the world.
Fair enough. Let me correct that: They can subpoena their theater performance... or they can do their job and talk to somebody who can actually answer their questions.
Somebody is really distorting the truth here. Google offered to send an executive who would be competent to answer the questions that the committee posed. But the committee was apparently more interested in putting up a show than having their questions answered. If they cared about answers, they can get them from Google's Kent Walker: http://services.google.com/fh/...
If they want more theater, well, then they have to keep waiting.
Have you used a TiVo recently? They nicely merge both streaming and linear content in a single user interface. They also allow for watching your own shows remotely and they skip commercials. And they are 4K. It's honestly one of the best ways to get legal content
I just bought another TiVo. They have super nice streaming integration, and they record free over-the-air TV (in addition to cable, which I have no need for). It might be a little more expensive than a Roku, but you also get a lot more. IMHO, this is currently one of the best devices for getting content.
As for dial-up, I think a lot of people misunderstand. It's not at all about internet access. It's about what is easiest to wire up in your living room. A few years ago, few people had Ethernet all the way to their TV. But a telephone line was often readily available. TiVo gave these users the option of connecting the device to whatever was easiest. But that came at an extra cost to TiVo. I guess they no longer want to pay for that and they expect that most of their users now have the ability to plug into a network drop behind the TV, or to connect to the home WiFi network
And many other surveys find that people go to brick and mortar stores to browse and see product in person and then go online to buy it from a cheaper source.
That does happen. But for me it is very rarely. More commonly, I do all my research online. Much easier to do, much more useful information readily available, and much larger inventory. Coincidentally, 80% of my research happens on Amazon. Their website is really good for that.
When I am done researching, I decide whether I need the item right away; and then I'll pop over to my local Target, Walgreens, or Costco. If it can wait, I'll order it with Amazon Prime and it'll show up in the next two to four days (free two day shipping unfortunately no longer means it'll actually arrive in two days).
The only wild-card are Add-On items and Subscribe-And-Save. Most of the time, I can't practically order them from Amazon and I'll buy local. But if Amazon lets me, then I'll order from them.
The automatic 5% discount with Amazon is nice. But then, I do get the same deal with Target. And Costco also has good incentives. So, price is rarely a determining factor.
This is a common misconception that is surprisingly difficult to dispel. A quick look on the USPS web site would have told you:
The Postal Service receives NO tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.
USPS is subject to all sorts of regulation that cost it a lot of money. During the Bush administration, a new law was passed that forced them to pre-fund retirement benefits to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars. They are on track to get there, but it is slow going.
Also, USPS can't determine its own rates. For instance, in 2016, it was ordered by regulators to decrease the cost of regular stamps.
It's amazing that despite all these complications, they are running a business that successfully competes with private carriers.
I wish I had moderator points today. I can't believe I had to scroll down this far for somebody to explain what's happening.
USPS could hypothetically decide to increase rates so that Amazon needed to pay average instead of amortized cost. But that would simply force Amazon to use a different shipping company. The cost for Amazon would be minimal (but of course not zero). The cost for USPS would be a large amount of lost profit. They benefit from the extra volume of mail that Amazon ships and pays for.
By charging amortized cost the USPS is doing exactly the correct thing to maximize profits -- and that's in the interest of all postal customers.
This is one of the two complaints that I have with Amazon. The intro ads are annoying and each time I watch a movie on Amazon they serve to remind me, why I hated doing so the last time round.
The other problem is the FireTV user interface. It really needs a serious UI overhaul. I always find myself randomly mashing buttons until I can figure out how to watch the show that I want to see. There are so many bad UI design choices, it's not even funny.
AlphaGo keeps track of both the score and of the statistical likelihood that it'll win the game. Being able to constantly evaluate these two values with high accuracy is actually a big competitive advantage. As the score doesn't really matter, it is entirely by design that during the end-game, AlphaGo deliberately sacrifices score points in order to gain a stronger position and increase the likelihood of an overall win.
In some way, winning with a minimal score demonstrates better control of the game than winning with an arbitrary and larger score. That just means you needlessly took risks that you didn't have to.
When iGoogle went away, I whipped up a quick little Javascript that does essentially the same thing. My home page is a collection of RSS feeds. And yes, that's pretty much how I find all the news that I read.
That's why you don't implement some random proprietary protocol, but instead go with a standard like Fido U2F. You only need a single token for an arbitrary number of sites
Text messages almost always get sent to a cell phone, and in the US there really only are three or four mobile providers. If you have a phone number, you can often look up the provider in public databases, and if that doesn't work, you simply take a guess and call each of the major providers.
Time and time again, it has been shown that all mobile cell phone providers are easily attackable by social engineering. It takes very little effort to have them either redirect SMS or issue a new SIM card and mail it to a random address. And this isn't even to talk about attacks on SS7, which more well-funded adversaries can pull off.
So, now, the only real protection is whether the phone number can be found easily, if you already know the rest of the credentials. In most cases, that's unfortunately a really low hurdle.
In other words, a half way determined and experienced attacker can subvert SMS authentication, if only they have enough of an incentive to spend the effort. There are countless reports of this attack succeeding. So, it's no wonder the US government (in this case NIST) discourages the use of SMS authentication.
Fortunately, there is a modern alternative to the old token that EBay used to support. FIDO U2F tokens are cheap, you only need a single token for an arbitrary number of sites, they are provably secure against MitM and phishing attacks (something that EBay's old token didn't do), they are easy to use, they support having multiple backup tokens, and there are plenty of opensource implementations and very good documentation. There really isn't a good excuse not to implement FIDO U2F except for laziness.
Or you could take the hit once and spend half a day writing a script that requests certificates from LetsEncrypt and pushes them to your IPMI controllers. These days, there really is no good excuse for lack of proper certificates other than either laziness or using really poorly designed consumer-grade hardware. Even ancient enterprise-grade hardware has always had support for installing custom certificates. It's really not that difficult, and it even makes your network a little more secure. How much more secure, is of course debatable, as many IPMI controllers seem to have questionable security practices in my experience.
That's honestly a little sad to hear. I would consider an introduction to computability to be part of any first-semester curriculum in computer science. Now, if you only ever learned how to write code, but not how to understand algorithms, then that's a different skillset and a different education program. You wouldn't have learned about P vs. NP, but you also would not necessarily be a great fit for the positions that I try to fill. The CS programs that I am familiar with generally don't even offer classes on programming languages. That's something they expect students to pick up on their own. So, yes, computability is probably the very first thing you learn.
No, I don't expect candidates to remember the intricate details of finite state vs. Turing machines, even if they technically learned that in their first month at school. And I don't need you to rigorously state what P vs. NP means and how to proof any of these assertions. Nobody needs this level of detail after having graduated. And if you are curious, you can always look up the Wikipedia page.
But I want you to be familiar with the high-level concept. That actually does help on the job. And if you speak the same language (i.e. you actually have heard the word NP before and know how to use it in a conversation), that'll make it so much easier to talk to your future co-workers.
I can't say I've ever received a word problem like how do you get a fox and a sheep across a river in a real work setting.
Funny you would say that:-) Yes, the actually brain teaser is pretty pointless. But this exact question happens to be the one that taught me how to learn about different graph traversal algorithms. Wow, that takes me back now. That was sometime in the 1980s.
What it lacks for as a brain teaser, it can make up by being a wonderful introductory question to a more in-depth discussion about graph traversal, heuristics, big-O behavior, pathological worst-case scenarios, and overall engineering decisions that are made when designing complex data-driven applications. Of course, nobody should be talking about foxes and sheep after the first 60 seconds. It's an ice breaker; nothing more.
You left out a crucial bit of information though. If you actually did well in those two years and gained real-life experience, would you actually fail any of these parts? I honestly have no idea, but you should have included this detail.
As is, your statement is similar to "spent four years in high-school, advancing every year; in the final exam, they test whether you can read, write, and multiply numbers; fail any of these three and you failed all of high-school." Yeah, duh, that would do it. It's a fundamental skill that anybody who actually performed as expected in the past few years would not even consider a challenge. It also is a basic requirement to do future tasks.
Who knows, maybe CPA exams are different. Maybe they are all full of brain teasers and of rote memorization. But you didn't say either way.
You are absolutely correct. There are cases where bubble sort is entirely applicable and in fact preferable. I don't require a candidate to have memorized the exact implementation of bubble sort (why would they; that is in fact something you can look up). But if a candidate can meaningfully discuss performance characteristics and explain why a certain algorithm would do better or worse in a specific situation, then that's exactly what I am looking for.
It demonstrates a better understanding of how computers actually work. For some tasks, it is perfectly acceptable to treat a computer as a black box and to fully rely on very abstract high-level APIs. And there are in fact advantages to this approach. But there are plenty of problems where this results in horrible scalability problems that can never be fixed afterwards. And in this day and age, we need to know how to scale to millions or hundreds of millions of users. A software engineer who doesn't understand these concepts is not a good fit for the openings that I am looking to fill.
I would vote you up, if I had moderator points today.
I am in full agreement. Whiteboard tests are very informative and they often are the easiest part of any interview. I usually ask candidates a problem that they can demonstrate with pencil-and-paper or with everyday objects. Yes, this could be a sorting problem, or it could be a simplified subset of long-hand multiplication, or it could be a resource pooling problem,... . It's things that they intuitively understand how to do in the real world, and I want to see if they can transfer this simple task to something that remotely looks like working code. If they remember the basic tools and concepts of what they learned in their first semester, that certainly helps (and I am worried, if they don't remember that much), but I agree with you that rote memorization doesn't give me any useful insights. And yes, I fully expect that this is a dialog and I'll have to keep dropping hints and answer questions as we go. That's actually another thing I test for. Asking for help is good.
Same as you, I don't care about correct use of the API or of the language's syntax. Heck, I have accepted pseudo code, and I have accepted code where somebody wrote C and Java simultaneously -- with a little bit of Ruby sprinkled in for good measure.
I do expect though that candidates have a solid sense of the scale of their problem. They have to be able to explain how many resources they need and how performance goes up when there are millions, billions or even more data sets or users. This might not be needed for every job opening, but in this day and age it is needed for many -- including the ones that I do interviews for. In other words, I expect a high-level understanding of algorithms, of CS theory (e.g. big-O behavior), and of fundamental engineering concepts (e.g. estimate latency of operations, estimate caching performance,...).
These are things we actually need for a candidate to be successful in their work. And there are literally thousands of candidates applying for each job. It only makes sense to sort through them and find the candidates who can do the work.
These tend to be very highly qualified interns, though. Landing an internship that pays this well requires a grueling interview process. And most applicants have advanced degrees (typically PhD's from the more well-known universities). It is generally a good way to enter the work force. In fact, without any other job experience to show for, this is often the only way to enter the work force. And at the end of the internship, most interns will be offered a full time position.
So, if you think of the type of internship you did in highschool, when you helped restock the shelves in your local supermarket, then you are thoroughly misunderstanding the scope of these positions. A more accurate view would be that this is an extended job interview. The candidate already passed all the other requirements (i.e. great resume, multiple phone screens, multiple in-house interviews,...), but the company isn't quite ready to extend an offer, or the candidate has stated that they still need to go back to school for another year before finally graduating.
While transitioning from a J1 internship visa to an H1B employment visa is not entirely unusual, it also isn't a particularly useful strategy for the particular example that you are citing. J1 visas are limited to at most 18 months. They are only available for recent graduates or for students who are still in school. For many countries (including India), the visa holder must return to their home country for at least one year after the end of their internship program. Even if this restriction doesn't apply, transitioning to an H1B visa is difficult as there are about four times as many applicants as available visas. And there is only a single day each year, when H1B visas can be applied for. So, in the majority of cases, a J1 visa holder would need to return to their home countries after only a year or at most a year and a half. Also, requirements for H1B visas are somewhat strict. Lots of companies/employees don't even qualify.
Having said that, switching from a J1 to an H1B is an officially sanctioned and intended path to bring highly qualified graduates into the US. It just isn't a particularly easy route these days. And it is quite competitive in those cases, where the paperwork can be worked out. Employers don't get cheap labor this way. They'll have to pay a premium (including thousands of dollars in legal fees) for these qualified employees. Nobody in their right mind would do this, if they can just as easily much more cheaply hire from the local work force.
So, while your posting sounds quite inflammatory, I don't think you are fully aware of the actual facts.
Slashdot Mirror
I have owned my Pixelbook for almost 1½ years now. Before that, I had a decked out fully-featured Linux laptop. Ever since I started using the Pixelbook, I have touched my old laptop maybe three times -- once every six months.
To be honest, my Pixelbook is the nicest Linux laptop I have ever owned. And it requires the least amount of maintenance. Pixelbooks get all the newest ChromeOS features first, but other modern Chromebooks such eventually have the same integration with Linux. Things work amazingly well. I can run (almost) all the Linux apps that I have gotten used to over the last 20 odd years. I can also run the handful of Android apps that I need. And everything comes in a secure package that doesn't require any maintenance at all.
This truly is what computing should be.
You are seriously misrepresenting the facts. First of all, it is highly unlikely that all the people who voted in the referendum would also sign the petition. In fact, it is amazing that so many people did sign. That's pretty much unprecedented. Participation rates in online petitions are traditionally tiny compared to actual referenda and elections. And the UK parliament assures everybody that the petition actively filters out bot activity. So, we have to assume that the numbers are close to accurate.
Secondly, the petition is just that. It is a petition. It doesn't invalidate the non-binding referendum. It asks parliament to do their job and to actually confirm that "the will of the people" is in fact to leave the EU, as Theresa May keeps pretending. And from the numbers presented so far, I personally doubt that the vast part of the population shares that believe. It's just that Brexiteers are louder -- and parliament seems to have their fingers in their ears. So, if they hear anything over their own self-imposed din, it's the loud voices.
Typically, online petitions and opinion polls only have a tiny participation rate. Not everybody has readily available internet access, not everybody follow the media, and most importantly, not everybody bothers to get involved, even if it is in their own interest. This means, seeing 4+M signatures equals a much much bigger actual number of voters. And as is, the petition already represents about a quarter of the people who voted to "remain" in the referendum. That's significant. It suggests that there is a groundswell of support for remaining in the EU.
The petition site isn't run by some shady online opinion poll. It's run by the UK parliament. According to a spokeperson, it actively filters submissions to detect bot activity. At the very least, it requires a unique name, verified (!) e-mail address and UK postal address. Some unconfirmed reports also state that it requires a UK passport number (maybe, that only happens for suspect submissions?). The UK parliament trusts that these numbers are substantially accurate.
That's huge. It means anybody saying "the will of the people" is to continue with Brexit is blatantly lying to themselves and to the rest of the world.
Stop spreading rumors. You can verify for yourself that more than 95% of the votes come from within the UK: https://docs.google.com/spread...
Fair enough. Let me correct that: They can subpoena their theater performance ... or they can do their job and talk to somebody who can actually answer their questions.
Somebody is really distorting the truth here. Google offered to send an executive who would be competent to answer the questions that the committee posed. But the committee was apparently more interested in putting up a show than having their questions answered. If they cared about answers, they can get them from Google's Kent Walker: http://services.google.com/fh/... If they want more theater, well, then they have to keep waiting.
Have you used a TiVo recently? They nicely merge both streaming and linear content in a single user interface. They also allow for watching your own shows remotely and they skip commercials. And they are 4K. It's honestly one of the best ways to get legal content
I just bought another TiVo. They have super nice streaming integration, and they record free over-the-air TV (in addition to cable, which I have no need for). It might be a little more expensive than a Roku, but you also get a lot more. IMHO, this is currently one of the best devices for getting content. As for dial-up, I think a lot of people misunderstand. It's not at all about internet access. It's about what is easiest to wire up in your living room. A few years ago, few people had Ethernet all the way to their TV. But a telephone line was often readily available. TiVo gave these users the option of connecting the device to whatever was easiest. But that came at an extra cost to TiVo. I guess they no longer want to pay for that and they expect that most of their users now have the ability to plug into a network drop behind the TV, or to connect to the home WiFi network
Where are my mod points when I need them?
Thank you for the concise and accurate summary. The only isolated quark is a dairy product.
And many other surveys find that people go to brick and mortar stores to browse and see product in person and then go online to buy it from a cheaper source.
That does happen. But for me it is very rarely. More commonly, I do all my research online. Much easier to do, much more useful information readily available, and much larger inventory. Coincidentally, 80% of my research happens on Amazon. Their website is really good for that.
When I am done researching, I decide whether I need the item right away; and then I'll pop over to my local Target, Walgreens, or Costco. If it can wait, I'll order it with Amazon Prime and it'll show up in the next two to four days (free two day shipping unfortunately no longer means it'll actually arrive in two days).
The only wild-card are Add-On items and Subscribe-And-Save. Most of the time, I can't practically order them from Amazon and I'll buy local. But if Amazon lets me, then I'll order from them.
The automatic 5% discount with Amazon is nice. But then, I do get the same deal with Target. And Costco also has good incentives. So, price is rarely a determining factor.
This is a common misconception that is surprisingly difficult to dispel. A quick look on the USPS web site would have told you:
The Postal Service receives NO tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.
USPS is subject to all sorts of regulation that cost it a lot of money. During the Bush administration, a new law was passed that forced them to pre-fund retirement benefits to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars. They are on track to get there, but it is slow going.
Also, USPS can't determine its own rates. For instance, in 2016, it was ordered by regulators to decrease the cost of regular stamps.
It's amazing that despite all these complications, they are running a business that successfully competes with private carriers.
I wish I had moderator points today. I can't believe I had to scroll down this far for somebody to explain what's happening.
USPS could hypothetically decide to increase rates so that Amazon needed to pay average instead of amortized cost. But that would simply force Amazon to use a different shipping company. The cost for Amazon would be minimal (but of course not zero). The cost for USPS would be a large amount of lost profit. They benefit from the extra volume of mail that Amazon ships and pays for.
By charging amortized cost the USPS is doing exactly the correct thing to maximize profits -- and that's in the interest of all postal customers.
This is one of the two complaints that I have with Amazon. The intro ads are annoying and each time I watch a movie on Amazon they serve to remind me, why I hated doing so the last time round.
The other problem is the FireTV user interface. It really needs a serious UI overhaul. I always find myself randomly mashing buttons until I can figure out how to watch the show that I want to see. There are so many bad UI design choices, it's not even funny.
AlphaGo keeps track of both the score and of the statistical likelihood that it'll win the game. Being able to constantly evaluate these two values with high accuracy is actually a big competitive advantage. As the score doesn't really matter, it is entirely by design that during the end-game, AlphaGo deliberately sacrifices score points in order to gain a stronger position and increase the likelihood of an overall win.
In some way, winning with a minimal score demonstrates better control of the game than winning with an arbitrary and larger score. That just means you needlessly took risks that you didn't have to.
When iGoogle went away, I whipped up a quick little Javascript that does essentially the same thing. My home page is a collection of RSS feeds. And yes, that's pretty much how I find all the news that I read.
That's why you don't implement some random proprietary protocol, but instead go with a standard like Fido U2F. You only need a single token for an arbitrary number of sites
Text messages almost always get sent to a cell phone, and in the US there really only are three or four mobile providers. If you have a phone number, you can often look up the provider in public databases, and if that doesn't work, you simply take a guess and call each of the major providers.
Time and time again, it has been shown that all mobile cell phone providers are easily attackable by social engineering. It takes very little effort to have them either redirect SMS or issue a new SIM card and mail it to a random address. And this isn't even to talk about attacks on SS7, which more well-funded adversaries can pull off.
So, now, the only real protection is whether the phone number can be found easily, if you already know the rest of the credentials. In most cases, that's unfortunately a really low hurdle.
In other words, a half way determined and experienced attacker can subvert SMS authentication, if only they have enough of an incentive to spend the effort. There are countless reports of this attack succeeding. So, it's no wonder the US government (in this case NIST) discourages the use of SMS authentication.
Fortunately, there is a modern alternative to the old token that EBay used to support. FIDO U2F tokens are cheap, you only need a single token for an arbitrary number of sites, they are provably secure against MitM and phishing attacks (something that EBay's old token didn't do), they are easy to use, they support having multiple backup tokens, and there are plenty of opensource implementations and very good documentation. There really isn't a good excuse not to implement FIDO U2F except for laziness.
Or you could take the hit once and spend half a day writing a script that requests certificates from LetsEncrypt and pushes them to your IPMI controllers. These days, there really is no good excuse for lack of proper certificates other than either laziness or using really poorly designed consumer-grade hardware. Even ancient enterprise-grade hardware has always had support for installing custom certificates. It's really not that difficult, and it even makes your network a little more secure. How much more secure, is of course debatable, as many IPMI controllers seem to have questionable security practices in my experience.
That's honestly a little sad to hear. I would consider an introduction to computability to be part of any first-semester curriculum in computer science. Now, if you only ever learned how to write code, but not how to understand algorithms, then that's a different skillset and a different education program. You wouldn't have learned about P vs. NP, but you also would not necessarily be a great fit for the positions that I try to fill. The CS programs that I am familiar with generally don't even offer classes on programming languages. That's something they expect students to pick up on their own. So, yes, computability is probably the very first thing you learn.
No, I don't expect candidates to remember the intricate details of finite state vs. Turing machines, even if they technically learned that in their first month at school. And I don't need you to rigorously state what P vs. NP means and how to proof any of these assertions. Nobody needs this level of detail after having graduated. And if you are curious, you can always look up the Wikipedia page.
But I want you to be familiar with the high-level concept. That actually does help on the job. And if you speak the same language (i.e. you actually have heard the word NP before and know how to use it in a conversation), that'll make it so much easier to talk to your future co-workers.
I can't say I've ever received a word problem like how do you get a fox and a sheep across a river in a real work setting.
Funny you would say that :-) Yes, the actually brain teaser is pretty pointless. But this exact question happens to be the one that taught me how to learn about different graph traversal algorithms. Wow, that takes me back now. That was sometime in the 1980s.
What it lacks for as a brain teaser, it can make up by being a wonderful introductory question to a more in-depth discussion about graph traversal, heuristics, big-O behavior, pathological worst-case scenarios, and overall engineering decisions that are made when designing complex data-driven applications. Of course, nobody should be talking about foxes and sheep after the first 60 seconds. It's an ice breaker; nothing more.
You left out a crucial bit of information though. If you actually did well in those two years and gained real-life experience, would you actually fail any of these parts? I honestly have no idea, but you should have included this detail.
As is, your statement is similar to "spent four years in high-school, advancing every year; in the final exam, they test whether you can read, write, and multiply numbers; fail any of these three and you failed all of high-school." Yeah, duh, that would do it. It's a fundamental skill that anybody who actually performed as expected in the past few years would not even consider a challenge. It also is a basic requirement to do future tasks.
Who knows, maybe CPA exams are different. Maybe they are all full of brain teasers and of rote memorization. But you didn't say either way.
I am not sure why you got downvoted.
You are absolutely correct. There are cases where bubble sort is entirely applicable and in fact preferable. I don't require a candidate to have memorized the exact implementation of bubble sort (why would they; that is in fact something you can look up). But if a candidate can meaningfully discuss performance characteristics and explain why a certain algorithm would do better or worse in a specific situation, then that's exactly what I am looking for.
It demonstrates a better understanding of how computers actually work. For some tasks, it is perfectly acceptable to treat a computer as a black box and to fully rely on very abstract high-level APIs. And there are in fact advantages to this approach. But there are plenty of problems where this results in horrible scalability problems that can never be fixed afterwards. And in this day and age, we need to know how to scale to millions or hundreds of millions of users. A software engineer who doesn't understand these concepts is not a good fit for the openings that I am looking to fill.
I would vote you up, if I had moderator points today.
I am in full agreement. Whiteboard tests are very informative and they often are the easiest part of any interview. I usually ask candidates a problem that they can demonstrate with pencil-and-paper or with everyday objects. Yes, this could be a sorting problem, or it could be a simplified subset of long-hand multiplication, or it could be a resource pooling problem, ... . It's things that they intuitively understand how to do in the real world, and I want to see if they can transfer this simple task to something that remotely looks like working code. If they remember the basic tools and concepts of what they learned in their first semester, that certainly helps (and I am worried, if they don't remember that much), but I agree with you that rote memorization doesn't give me any useful insights. And yes, I fully expect that this is a dialog and I'll have to keep dropping hints and answer questions as we go. That's actually another thing I test for. Asking for help is good.
Same as you, I don't care about correct use of the API or of the language's syntax. Heck, I have accepted pseudo code, and I have accepted code where somebody wrote C and Java simultaneously -- with a little bit of Ruby sprinkled in for good measure.
I do expect though that candidates have a solid sense of the scale of their problem. They have to be able to explain how many resources they need and how performance goes up when there are millions, billions or even more data sets or users. This might not be needed for every job opening, but in this day and age it is needed for many -- including the ones that I do interviews for. In other words, I expect a high-level understanding of algorithms, of CS theory (e.g. big-O behavior), and of fundamental engineering concepts (e.g. estimate latency of operations, estimate caching performance, ...).
These are things we actually need for a candidate to be successful in their work. And there are literally thousands of candidates applying for each job. It only makes sense to sort through them and find the candidates who can do the work.
These tend to be very highly qualified interns, though. Landing an internship that pays this well requires a grueling interview process. And most applicants have advanced degrees (typically PhD's from the more well-known universities). It is generally a good way to enter the work force. In fact, without any other job experience to show for, this is often the only way to enter the work force. And at the end of the internship, most interns will be offered a full time position.
So, if you think of the type of internship you did in highschool, when you helped restock the shelves in your local supermarket, then you are thoroughly misunderstanding the scope of these positions. A more accurate view would be that this is an extended job interview. The candidate already passed all the other requirements (i.e. great resume, multiple phone screens, multiple in-house interviews, ...), but the company isn't quite ready to extend an offer, or the candidate has stated that they still need to go back to school for another year before finally graduating.
While transitioning from a J1 internship visa to an H1B employment visa is not entirely unusual, it also isn't a particularly useful strategy for the particular example that you are citing. J1 visas are limited to at most 18 months. They are only available for recent graduates or for students who are still in school. For many countries (including India), the visa holder must return to their home country for at least one year after the end of their internship program. Even if this restriction doesn't apply, transitioning to an H1B visa is difficult as there are about four times as many applicants as available visas. And there is only a single day each year, when H1B visas can be applied for. So, in the majority of cases, a J1 visa holder would need to return to their home countries after only a year or at most a year and a half. Also, requirements for H1B visas are somewhat strict. Lots of companies/employees don't even qualify.
Having said that, switching from a J1 to an H1B is an officially sanctioned and intended path to bring highly qualified graduates into the US. It just isn't a particularly easy route these days. And it is quite competitive in those cases, where the paperwork can be worked out. Employers don't get cheap labor this way. They'll have to pay a premium (including thousands of dollars in legal fees) for these qualified employees. Nobody in their right mind would do this, if they can just as easily much more cheaply hire from the local work force.
So, while your posting sounds quite inflammatory, I don't think you are fully aware of the actual facts.