No matter how incoherent an explanation is, always put the failure to understand on yourself.
I agree with that up to certain point. There are quite clear situations. As written to the poster above, she expressly said PST, which seems an undoubted reference (unlikely "Pacific time" or "current time in whatever area"). I wrote a polite reply explaining what I understood that she meant and even further information about how to avoid problems like this in the future. Basically, being nice, sharing some knowledge, minimising the importance of what seemed her error (I wasn't completely sure, perhaps she really meant PST, UTC-8). As a reward for my over-understanding attitude, I didn't get even a thanks, my application was moved from "sensibly considered" to "out for no reason" and, additionally, that person seriously expected her error to prevail (chat actually happening at PDT but labeled as PST).
This whole situation doesn't seem to make too much sense at all in any context, but much less when dealing with technical people filling a technical position meant to only interact with other technical people!!! Any technical-, nerdy-, engineering-, etc. oriented individual wouldn't have been bothered by my email at all; in fact, the most likely reaction (the way in which I would have reacted) would have been to like it pretty much! In fact, that was the real intention of my reply: confirming that I was dealing with people thinking like me. Basically, censoring my behaviour was censoring people who were a priori more compatible with that job! Even by ignoring everything else, she behaved unprofessionally by wrongly expecting similar-to-her personalities to be good at a job which she doesn't like/know anything about.
had a lesson in how not to respond to someone else's mistake.
Even though I am constantly learning and I don't see myself ever saying something like "I cannot learn anything else" or "you cannot teach me anything", I am already old enough and not just of age, but also of having lived lots of things, met lots of people and, more importantly, having reached a stage of really good clarity regarding what I expect from myself and others. That reaction didn't surprise me or was unexpected at all, not in general and much less when dealing with (online) HR/recruiting people with low technical knowledge. In fact, I was expecting to get that kind of reaction, similarly to what I do when dealing with insecure, ignorant people with some kind of power in a situation which overwhelms them: they react like stupid little kids on the lines of "or we play as I say or I nobody plays because the ball is mine and I do whatever I want with it". The only party which might have learned in that incident was that company/person, if not in general, at least when dealing with me or people thinking like me. If you expect any kind of positive reaction when behaving arbitrarily with me, you are in complete denial and/or extremely ignorant and/or you are the one who needs to learn.
By and large, telling other people what they meant tends to wind them up. Given this, asking them to clarify what they meant, perhaps pointing to the area of confusion, would seem to be a more 'user friendly' option.
Generally talking rarely helps to properly understand things, so I will better tell you the exact problem. She said me "day X at time Y PST". PST can be easily understood as Pacific Standard Time (even though, technically speaking, there is at least another time zone with that same acronym) and it is undoubtedly associated with UTC-8, during the whole year full stop. It was some weeks ago, already in summer time and, consequently, the logical interpretation was that she really meant PDT (Pacific Daylight Time), which is UTC-7, again during the whole year and without any doubt. But this might not be always the case and in any scenario. Something like current time in Z area/city would have been accurate enough, but she didn't tell me where she was. I wrote a POLITE reply to her explaining these ideas and highlighting that I thought that she really meant PDT. Her reply was the automated answer of an online scheduling application expressly saying PST and no further comment. We actually had our chat at PDT, UTC-7!!!
I am a very reasonable person, always ready to over-explain and to assume that others act in good faith. I rarely expect anyone's actions to be motivated by dishonesty, unfairness or prejudices of any kind unless clearly proven so. As far as I can tell, most of the problems I have had in my life have been with unreasonable people and when being involved in unfair conditions. A big number of these occasions provoked by ridiculous misinterpretations of my words/actions. I cannot remember the last time when I singlehandedly started a problem with anyone/anywhere for no good reason. And as said, my impression about that company and the whole hiring process so far had being very good. No idea why you have interpreted that I wasn't polite or considerate enough from my original post. I was honest and practical, what might be incompatible with some insecure, arbitrary, imposition-prone individuals.
I wouldn't have wanted to work with you either then. Hopefully, you will never have to deal with people like you from the other side, being unfairly targeted by whatever ridiculous idea.
Just ask for clarification and move on.
I moved on in that exact moment and no clarification was required. A sudden, unreasonable, dishonest change of mind which might have only be motivated by whatever arbitrariness was enough explanation for me. Additionally, what kind of answer can you expect under these conditions? A new lie? Actively contributing towards eradicating this kind of nonsense, even just via a modest aggressive reply, makes much more sense. When dealing with bullies, mobsters and others of this sort, passive attitudes only make the problem worse.
Recently, I went through a pretty demanding hiring process for what seemed a very professional, technical, programming-focused company. In fact, that professionalism was the most-appealing-to-me bit, the reason why I wasn't caring too much about spending some time with interviews, coding challenges, etc. I reached the point of having an informal interview with the person managing my application. She was a woman, apparently with not too much technical knowledge. Her attitude was quite different to mine, to the previous (technical) interviewers and to the one of the people with whom I was expected to be dealing. That job was basically about interacting with (experienced) software developers and taking care of programming issues.
When she sent me the time for our informal interview, she made a mistake with the time zone and proposed me a time 1 hour after what she meant. I wrote her back highlighting that error, explaining what I understood that was her intention and how she could easily avoid this kind of problems in the future. I said that perhaps people within that time zone was fine with her convention, but people from other places might have problems. I also highlighted that this might be a source of further problems in the future as far as certain areas, even within the same country, might have different approaches (it was about daylight saving time). She didn't reply to that explanation or say me anything about that in our subsequent chat. I found her behaviour very impolite, disrespectful and kind of indicative of her personality/insecurities/lacks, but didn't say anything.
Logically, I could have not corrected her error and just waited at the two possible times; basically, assuming that person was too stupid to get involved in a simple conversation, precisely provoked by her own mistake. But this would have been against what I consider sensible and even desirable in a potential employer/client: a place where arbitrariness rules isn't for me. We had that informal interview and she said to me that, 2 days afterwards, will tell me if I would go to the final stage or wait some months (they were over-staffed at that moment, but were expecting a big amount of work in brief). Three days later, she wrote me an email saying that I didn't make the cut. I asked her whether I should re-apply in some months or they will be contacting me to do that last interview. Her answer was something on the lines of only being interested in people more compatible with their views and that they weren't planning to consider my application at all?! No idea why she said that. No idea what isolated issue she misinterpreted to come up with a so wrong conclusion. I did like that company's policy and work conditions a lot. I was going to be really good there, everyone winning: they & me. That's why I disliked a lot that uncalled, unfair, unmotivated, even dishonest decision and I did write a quite hard email back to her. Unfortunately, I am already used to unreasonable arbitrariness when dealing with recruiting/HR people, no matter how technical-oriented the company is. But this time seemed different: a so sensible and technically-focused process! Why suddenly bringing that crap into picture? Why making me waste my time and have a preliminary good impression of that company ('s recruiting process), to change it so drastically?
I think that that woman misunderstood my correction as mansplaining (side clarification: I treat everyone identically and that concept has never even remotely defined any of my actions, as what I think that is the case with most of men of my age, education, expectations, etc. everywhere. I even made pretty much the same correction to a man weeks later). Or perhaps any other irrelevant action during our short chat, like me interrupting her? (read previous side clarification). Perhaps it was because I am a man or I am white or I am from outside the US (it was a US company). All what I know is that I passed all the technical tests, was very interested in that job/company and shared their values (at le
Perhaps this is just one of the possible scenarios and it might even be not as straightforward as it seems (addition of the ASCII codes associated with the characters within certain range + over a given length +...?), but the probability of anyone typing "A" 29 times in this or any other context is actually tremendously low.
Purely speaking, the probability of typing this or any other string of that length is identical. By assuming that the target length is unknown, I could even say that the chances of typing that string or other one of almost any length are quite similar. On the other hand, people are more likely to prefer something like "aaaa" before "a1eb}" and, for that reason, a more variable set of characters might have been a bit tougher. In any case, it seems very curious that someone was able to find that "bug" with no previous knowledge (?).
Finding fuel for nuclear fusion is very easy. The difficult part (if possible at all) is actually building something which can generate electricity by relying on that approach. Without forgetting that mining on the Moon is far from easy. If I was the one to be convinced, I would have preferred a much more honest motivation like "we are just feeling like going there".
you do for yourself and your own enrichment. No one makes you do it, that was the point.
Can you please tell me what are the motivations of full-time employees as opposed to mine? Employees want to enrich themselves and nobody forces them to work on a given company. If they don't like certain conditions, they could try to get a different job. Exactly the same than I do by replacing jobs/bosses with clients. If I want to find ideal clients, I would have to spend much more time/effort/money, like any employee rejecting non-ideal jobs.
Although your intention is slightly clearer now, your post still shows your misconception regarding what self-employment involves. You picture a very famous, rich, successful version without understanding that this is the best possible outcome, not a descriptive sample. Usually, the over-work or stress levels associated with riskier situations are much higher. A salary, long-term job gives stability, quasi-certainty, a controlled environment; even the working conditions are usually easier as far as you have to follow instructions and bear a limited amount of responsibility. Equivalent ideas can be applied to small, struggling companies vs. big, well-established ones.
One descriptive example: company A wants a given piece of software to be built and hires company B. In company B, the upper managers B1, B2 and B3 will take all the blame for any problem with the contract, payments, company A not liking the product, etc. Boss B4 will be responsible for any miscommunication between upper management and the technical levels. Bosses B5 and B6, leading the two development teams taking care of the implementation, will be held responsible for any technical problem avoiding company A to have the contracted product as expected. Developer B53, developing the modules 1, 2 and 3, will take all the blame for any problem provoked by a mistake in any of those. Developer B53 might not like these specific tasks or boss B5 might be pushing him a bit too much (because boss B4 is pushing him too, because...). His working conditions, in this project or in general, might be objectively very hard and he might burn out. But he is doing this work because he wants. He is being pushed because he accepts to be pushed. And he is not looking for any other job because he doesn't want to do so. Now replace company B with self-employee C and unify all these stratified responsibilities, stresses, problems into the same person. This is what self-employment is basically about. A different story is self-employee C (because of having lots of work or having lots of money or because of whatever reason) hiring other people, becoming the top boss with absolute independence and basically performing the kind of tasks that your comments are suggesting. Technically speaking this would be a company and self-employee C would be its owner. On the other hand, this isn't necessarily the normal or even ideal evolution of self-employment; some people might not even aspire to be bosses and to manage people, but just to continue performing their work under the conditions they want.
By taking your Apple analogy, my situation wouldn't be like the one of Jobs (manager) + Wozniak (technical stuff), but like just a Wozniak with no Jobs and not wanting to have one. In fact, this is a very common form of self-employment: specialised workers focusing on what they are good at, by taking all the risk and looking for the conditions they want. They leave the safety of a regular salary and other people taking care of lots of side issues, over-work a lot and, eventually, accomplish what they want or get burnout after having been dealing with many more problems than what a full-time employee will ever do. They certainly decide to do that, exactly the same that anyone working for a company makes that conscious decision. You might prefer a more conservative approach and perhaps cannot even understand why self-employment exist, but thinking that taking much more risk/responsibility doesn't notably increase
So your entire rant is based on a misread of my very clear response, the self-employed are in a different category.
My entire rant was based on the idea underlying your whole post that I or what I do or what most of self-employed programmers do is related at all to what someone like Elon Musk, personally (billionaire) or as per his job (C-level tasks in a multi-billion company), does at work. And I explained you that I do pretty much everything that any full-time employee does (senior developer specialising in quite demanding stuff) + many other things = more burnout probability for me. I understood both your post and your misperception (+ prejudices?) perfectly.
So, I say that I am self-employed and you are automatically assuming that I am rich (Elon-like rich!!). At least in my country, Spain, self-employment represents a relevant proportion of the total workforce and most of them are far from being rich. Usually, this situation is associated with systematically (over-)working and taking lots of risk. In fact, my situation is a quite extreme case as far as meeting my expectations is very difficult and, as clearly highlighted in my profile description, I don't have too much money. Even if my situation wasn't that hard, it would probably have been worse than the one of most of US-based developers, whose salaries and working conditions are really good.
I have to work much harder than someone with a full-time job (looking for clients, promoting myself, managing lots of others issues, etc.) and this doesn't even guarantee me to get money. Logically, the potential benefits are much higher than the ones associated with a more conservative situation, exactly the same that happens with anything else. On the other hand, for someone like Elon (not sure about his whole life story but I understand that his family is wealthy) there isn't exactly a properly speaking risk as far as converting a lot into much more is relatively easy. This is certainly not my situation. My personality is also quite far away from ideas like egoism, narcissism, careerist, etc. which seem advantageous under these conditions. I might even say that my personality and expectations have a relevant negative impact on my growth as a self-employed programmer.
Long story short: burnout would be the most probable outcome of my working conditions if I wouldn't like my job (basically coding, data analysing and having lots of things up and running perfectly; I also might move a couch or take care of lots of things about which a full-time employee will never have to worry, but all of this is unpaid over-work) so much. I can certainly choose my working conditions or with whom I want to work, but that comes at some expense similarly to what happens when you quit a job which you don't like.
I work for myself and I put lots of effort/time into getting what I want in the way I want it. I see it as an long-term investment. Anyone directly enjoying the outputs of my work will always pay the fair price. In any case, my point was that, even under very tough conditions, tech doesn't seem too burnout-prone, at least among those really liking it.
... because that word describes my current situation quite well. I do work a ton, on quite demanding stuff and by taking lots of risk. Currently, I am not precisely earning a lot. But I do love my job, perhaps even a bit too much. And I think that this is the key issue here: really liking what you do or not.
"Most of tech workers not liking their jobs are suffering from job burnout" sounds more descriptive of the actual reality. The tech world does seem quite tough for those not truly enjoying it, in general or under the given conditions.
My point was highlighting that Musk isn't getting this project because of the most logical reasons (e.g., being more reliable or offering a better price), but because of basically paying for it. I also meant that if you can afford to lose lots of money, your chances of getting it back together with much more are very high. By assuming that this project is good for the city and there are various bidders, the one offering to pay for the whole construction (+ celebrity + innovation) seems really strong.
I haven't ever been in Chicago. I don't know anything about its major or the needs of the city. I don't care about whether this system gets built or not. I don't even care about Musk's company failing (at least, not for as long as it has a reasonably honest behaviour). Personally, I don't even find this kind of arrangements too attractive as far as I am not into trendy, marketing, celebrity, dreamy whatever. My comment was exclusively focused on what I think that is the main issue here: lots of money.
In exchange for paying to build the new transit system, Boring would keep the revenue from the system’s transit fees and any money generated by advertisements, branding and in-vehicle sales
Who could reject an offer like this? Innovative, faster, supported by a celebrity, initial costs fully paid and, apparently, with no risk. For Chicago, this seems a no-brainer. For the Boring side, it looks like a long-term investment assumed to be beneficial in any scenario ("1B losses expected to be recovered in 10 years no matter what? It would be excellent if we could build that innovative thing, but putting some stickers on an old train and doing a bit of PR juggling wouldn't be the end of the world either!"). I guess that this is one of the (rare) occasions when having lots of money gives you an unbeatable advantage. It looks like a bit too boring though.
Building & setting up this thing versus conventional. Was the energy savings net positive or negative?
I was about to write pretty much the same thing. Lots of these "disruptive innovations" only focus on the specific issues which they slightly improve, but not on everything else. Also I find kind of curious that building a container to just lie close to the sea surface is so expensive and demanding. On the other hand, if you have a big research budget to burn, ideally in a publicly noticeable fashion, trying this one doesn't seem a so bad idea.
Recognising faces in moving cars sounds like a pretty tough scenario with lots of problems and low reliability. Even in case of forcing drivers to slow down and look at certain spot, it wouldn't be too simple. Other relevant issues are the low number of pictures available for most of people (1, 2?) and the high probability of conditions which might have a negative impact on the faces' visibility.
If I were one the companies trying to push forward automated (facial) recognition systems, I would focus on improving their reliability under more favourable conditions. Getting involved in situations with low probability of success seems a quite bad long-term move for a new technology.
I dislike many things done by Microsoft, but like others. I don't like big companies getting everywhere, but don't have any strong feelings about the current GitHub owners either. I like the attitudes in some of the repositories hosted by GitHub or other sites and dislike quite a few others. Despite having tried different alternatives (+ knew about others in the previous article about this still-rumour, perhaps also in this one and in some of the 2-3 upcoming ones), I am reasonably happy with GitHub. My opinion about them might change at any point and I might start using other alternative right away.
I understand that there are lots of hard feelings against Microsoft, big companies, monopolies, etc. I even share most of them. But I also see lots of egoist interests trying to take advantage from all this to their own gain. I also understand that objective quality isn't the only factor to become the number 1 in this sub-world, that you need to attract users no matter what. I am not censoring anyone's behaviour, just that I am not feeling like being a pawn in what looks like a popularity contest only meant to benefit unrelated-to-me companies. If GitHub continues working as so far, I would continue using it. If things change, I would look for alternatives. If monopoly, arbitrary, Windows-10-like "issues" start happening, my opinion about Microsoft as a whole would get even worse.
Having a limited number (30, 50, a bit more?) of people, who are probably known to the algorithm (fed with basic information of all the students in the given class?), in more or less static positions and well-defined places? That does sound certainly doable. There might be still quite a few problems, misinterpretations, ways to trick the system, etc. though.
I have never used this serialisation (under potentially dangerous conditions) or any other language feature not allowing me to have a reasonably good understanding of what is going on in the code. I also support any effort to reduce unnecessary functionalities from programming languages and, in general, to let them efficiently accomplish their expected goal. On other hand, some people might prefer to rely on certain features about which I don't care and their code might be as good as mine.
What I certainly don't support are the deflecting-responsibility-paternalistic-reaction attitudes which seem so common lately. Descriptive example: - (developer wannabe) "My application has lots of security problems. The responsible is the language for allowing me to do what I shouldn't.". - (paternalistic programming language) "You are right. We are aware that you might do really stupid things in case of being able to do so." (further ridiculous, childish, amateur, tons-of-problems-prone, etc. nonsense...)
Don't you think that certain functionality in your programming language is worth keeping? Remove it! Do you usually have problems when relying on certain feature of a programming language for whatever reason? Don't use it! Or learn to use it properly! But what is with all these generic paternalistic behaviours lately? Making the overall programming experience more comfortable is certainly a good thing. Arbitrarily restricting the capabilities of programming languages (expected to be used by experts!) to somehow account for incompetence or lack of care is ridiculous. Over-protection is usually a very bad idea which provokes lower quality outputs (worse programmers) and other problems (false sense of security, disproportionate trust in what might be faulty, etc.).
As written above, this scenario of multiple owners does sound bad, but accounting for it seems quite difficult. From the point of view of the current approach of the Wayback Machine, there aren't owners but domains, assumed to always belong to the same person. I am not defending their current approach or even saying that I like some of these outcomes, just appraising their honest attitude (in case of doubt, don't keep anything!) and understanding their difficult position. Also as commented above, accounting for different ownerships would add a further layer of complexity/personal data collection which might provoke other problems or might be beyond what they are willing to do.
If the owner of a particular domain wishes that the HTML documents available through that domain be made available indefinitely, even after the domain owner's insolvency, what should the domain owner do to prevent the domain from being snapped up by a third party that sets robots.txt?
I don't like that scenario and, probably, most of people doesn't do either. But it seems an unavoidable drawback of this whole approach. This is a private company with private interests and obligations (not precisely providing a public service for any random internet user) which, as such, can do whatever they want with their data. There seems to only be one limitation to that absolute power: what the person/company referred by that data wants to do with it. Bear in mind that we aren't talking about the typical user-opens-account->generates-data->user-tells-how-to-use-data, but about systematic collections of data which, in most of the cases, happen without the given user knowledge. How to know who is the owner now and yesterday? How to deal with eventual ownership conflicts?, etc. Everything would become too complicated, too invasive (all this additional personal information would have to be stored), etc. They might have chosen a more conservative alternative like deleting only the current files, but preferred to make sure that no information without a clear permission will be kept.
As already commented in this thread and in other previous ones, the Wayback Machine reacts to robots.txt restrictions by deleting all the records retroactively. Even though I might personally prefer a different behaviour, this is undoubtedly a very honest approach: deleting all the collected information after the first indication that the given site/person might not want it! Quite a few sites should learn something from them.
Just in case it isn't clear, for me, this is pretty much like watching a fight between two angry baboons at the zoo. Kind of interesting, fun, even perhaps a bit surprising. But certainly not in a position to provoke deeper feelings like angriness, envy, wanting to be part of it, etc.
Without debts? Without responsibility? By working on what they wanted for as long as they were able to do so? By having probably learned a lot thanks to having enjoyed the most appealing version of the best possible learning proceeding (= momentarily tough conditions without relevant long-term consequences, a bit of fear and stress but nothing too serious)? I have no words!
In case that my point wasn't completely clear, I meant people blindly assuming that, when event A happens, it has to mean that B is true, even though many other options are possible. Although this is relatively common for everyone in a quite a few scenarios, sensible and knowledgeable people (or, at least, those whose actions affect others) should almost never rely on this kind of approaches as the primary source for any important decision. In the current context (determining whether someone has certain expert knowledge whose empirical validation is extremely easily), this seems to make even less sense. Why unreliably guessing whether A implies B, when you (I mean another expert) can accurately determine whether B applies or not right away? I didn't mean generic prejudices (because of my race, gender, age, etc.) which I have never seen as a justification for anything happening to me (or simply included them within plain stupidity).
Sometimes the test is simply whether you can simply stick to the topic and discuss accordingly
I see two problems with that statement. Firstly, you wrongly assume that delivering the exact behaviour that you (perhaps wrongly) expect indicates (in)capability, not mere disagreement or perhaps inapplicability in the given situation (e.g., the assumed-to-be-simple topic was actually more complex) or perhaps limitations in the assessment of the interviewer/test. This kind of prejudice-based understanding is unfortunately too common in the programming skill assessment world, what doesn't sound ideal to me in any scenario and much less when dealing with senior positions. And that brings me to the second issue: expecting "simply stick to" from anyone even slightly experienced in an even slightly complex field seems ridiculous. Perhaps for kids/teens that might be the best thing, but beyond high school any teaching/assessment methodology aspiring to "simply stick to" doesn't sound right. It is certainly completely incompatible with what I would accept on a working environment: I am hired to understand, create, fix whatever, not to comply with abstract/clueless expectations. My work is pretty much the opposite to anything on the lines of what that statement suggests. A company (knowledgeably or ignorantly, it doesn't matter) looking for that kind of people has nothing to do with me.
I see lots of problems with most of (online) programming assessing methodologies: expecting canned knowledge/results, interpreting the reliance on ridiculous restrictions as a way to prove something (rather than as a way to force candidates to learn how to adapt themselves to that assessing system, even to trick it), seriously thinking that a set of ridiculous prejudices/expectations can allow people with virtually no knowledge on that field to assess expert knowledge (?!), etc. I have also been seeing some evolution on this front, every day I find more alternatives which reduce arbitrary restrictions, consider actually knowledgeable inputs (not the abstract conclusions of a set of assumptions) and, in general, care more about allowing candidates to really show what they can/are willing to deliver and analyse that information accordingly. Bear in mind that I am not the only person thinking like this; in fact, most of people in my position tend to have a quite bad opinion of skill assessments, HR policies, etc., in the sense of being very unreliable even arbitrary, kind of weird right? As a rough estimate, I would say that, out of every 10 assessing processes in which I have taken part, an average of 0-2 of them have got an accurate enough idea about me (and just talking about the technical side!); and in these 0-2 cases I have been dealing with other experienced programmers, with wide enough problems and lots of freedom actually allowing me to show something. These 0-2 acceptations/rejections were reasonable, all the other ones weren't (loses for the given companies, skill assessing/HR departments, not for me). BTW, the specific assessing methodology which I am mentioning here has been going quite well so far; I have still to get feedback from that last test, but in principle everything seems OK.
Slashdot Mirror
No matter how incoherent an explanation is, always put the failure to understand on yourself.
I agree with that up to certain point. There are quite clear situations. As written to the poster above, she expressly said PST, which seems an undoubted reference (unlikely "Pacific time" or "current time in whatever area"). I wrote a polite reply explaining what I understood that she meant and even further information about how to avoid problems like this in the future. Basically, being nice, sharing some knowledge, minimising the importance of what seemed her error (I wasn't completely sure, perhaps she really meant PST, UTC-8). As a reward for my over-understanding attitude, I didn't get even a thanks, my application was moved from "sensibly considered" to "out for no reason" and, additionally, that person seriously expected her error to prevail (chat actually happening at PDT but labeled as PST).
This whole situation doesn't seem to make too much sense at all in any context, but much less when dealing with technical people filling a technical position meant to only interact with other technical people!!! Any technical-, nerdy-, engineering-, etc. oriented individual wouldn't have been bothered by my email at all; in fact, the most likely reaction (the way in which I would have reacted) would have been to like it pretty much! In fact, that was the real intention of my reply: confirming that I was dealing with people thinking like me. Basically, censoring my behaviour was censoring people who were a priori more compatible with that job! Even by ignoring everything else, she behaved unprofessionally by wrongly expecting similar-to-her personalities to be good at a job which she doesn't like/know anything about.
had a lesson in how not to respond to someone else's mistake.
Even though I am constantly learning and I don't see myself ever saying something like "I cannot learn anything else" or "you cannot teach me anything", I am already old enough and not just of age, but also of having lived lots of things, met lots of people and, more importantly, having reached a stage of really good clarity regarding what I expect from myself and others. That reaction didn't surprise me or was unexpected at all, not in general and much less when dealing with (online) HR/recruiting people with low technical knowledge. In fact, I was expecting to get that kind of reaction, similarly to what I do when dealing with insecure, ignorant people with some kind of power in a situation which overwhelms them: they react like stupid little kids on the lines of "or we play as I say or I nobody plays because the ball is mine and I do whatever I want with it". The only party which might have learned in that incident was that company/person, if not in general, at least when dealing with me or people thinking like me. If you expect any kind of positive reaction when behaving arbitrarily with me, you are in complete denial and/or extremely ignorant and/or you are the one who needs to learn.
By and large, telling other people what they meant tends to wind them up. Given this, asking them to clarify what they meant, perhaps pointing to the area of confusion, would seem to be a more 'user friendly' option.
Generally talking rarely helps to properly understand things, so I will better tell you the exact problem. She said me "day X at time Y PST". PST can be easily understood as Pacific Standard Time (even though, technically speaking, there is at least another time zone with that same acronym) and it is undoubtedly associated with UTC-8, during the whole year full stop. It was some weeks ago, already in summer time and, consequently, the logical interpretation was that she really meant PDT (Pacific Daylight Time), which is UTC-7, again during the whole year and without any doubt. But this might not be always the case and in any scenario. Something like current time in Z area/city would have been accurate enough, but she didn't tell me where she was. I wrote a POLITE reply to her explaining these ideas and highlighting that I thought that she really meant PDT. Her reply was the automated answer of an online scheduling application expressly saying PST and no further comment. We actually had our chat at PDT, UTC-7!!!
I am a very reasonable person, always ready to over-explain and to assume that others act in good faith. I rarely expect anyone's actions to be motivated by dishonesty, unfairness or prejudices of any kind unless clearly proven so. As far as I can tell, most of the problems I have had in my life have been with unreasonable people and when being involved in unfair conditions. A big number of these occasions provoked by ridiculous misinterpretations of my words/actions. I cannot remember the last time when I singlehandedly started a problem with anyone/anywhere for no good reason. And as said, my impression about that company and the whole hiring process so far had being very good. No idea why you have interpreted that I wasn't polite or considerate enough from my original post. I was honest and practical, what might be incompatible with some insecure, arbitrary, imposition-prone individuals.
I wouldn't have hired you either.
I wouldn't have wanted to work with you either then. Hopefully, you will never have to deal with people like you from the other side, being unfairly targeted by whatever ridiculous idea.
Just ask for clarification and move on.
I moved on in that exact moment and no clarification was required. A sudden, unreasonable, dishonest change of mind which might have only be motivated by whatever arbitrariness was enough explanation for me. Additionally, what kind of answer can you expect under these conditions? A new lie? Actively contributing towards eradicating this kind of nonsense, even just via a modest aggressive reply, makes much more sense. When dealing with bullies, mobsters and others of this sort, passive attitudes only make the problem worse.
Recently, I went through a pretty demanding hiring process for what seemed a very professional, technical, programming-focused company. In fact, that professionalism was the most-appealing-to-me bit, the reason why I wasn't caring too much about spending some time with interviews, coding challenges, etc. I reached the point of having an informal interview with the person managing my application. She was a woman, apparently with not too much technical knowledge. Her attitude was quite different to mine, to the previous (technical) interviewers and to the one of the people with whom I was expected to be dealing. That job was basically about interacting with (experienced) software developers and taking care of programming issues.
When she sent me the time for our informal interview, she made a mistake with the time zone and proposed me a time 1 hour after what she meant. I wrote her back highlighting that error, explaining what I understood that was her intention and how she could easily avoid this kind of problems in the future. I said that perhaps people within that time zone was fine with her convention, but people from other places might have problems. I also highlighted that this might be a source of further problems in the future as far as certain areas, even within the same country, might have different approaches (it was about daylight saving time). She didn't reply to that explanation or say me anything about that in our subsequent chat. I found her behaviour very impolite, disrespectful and kind of indicative of her personality/insecurities/lacks, but didn't say anything.
Logically, I could have not corrected her error and just waited at the two possible times; basically, assuming that person was too stupid to get involved in a simple conversation, precisely provoked by her own mistake. But this would have been against what I consider sensible and even desirable in a potential employer/client: a place where arbitrariness rules isn't for me. We had that informal interview and she said to me that, 2 days afterwards, will tell me if I would go to the final stage or wait some months (they were over-staffed at that moment, but were expecting a big amount of work in brief). Three days later, she wrote me an email saying that I didn't make the cut. I asked her whether I should re-apply in some months or they will be contacting me to do that last interview. Her answer was something on the lines of only being interested in people more compatible with their views and that they weren't planning to consider my application at all?! No idea why she said that. No idea what isolated issue she misinterpreted to come up with a so wrong conclusion. I did like that company's policy and work conditions a lot. I was going to be really good there, everyone winning: they & me. That's why I disliked a lot that uncalled, unfair, unmotivated, even dishonest decision and I did write a quite hard email back to her. Unfortunately, I am already used to unreasonable arbitrariness when dealing with recruiting/HR people, no matter how technical-oriented the company is. But this time seemed different: a so sensible and technically-focused process! Why suddenly bringing that crap into picture? Why making me waste my time and have a preliminary good impression of that company ('s recruiting process), to change it so drastically?
I think that that woman misunderstood my correction as mansplaining (side clarification: I treat everyone identically and that concept has never even remotely defined any of my actions, as what I think that is the case with most of men of my age, education, expectations, etc. everywhere. I even made pretty much the same correction to a man weeks later). Or perhaps any other irrelevant action during our short chat, like me interrupting her? (read previous side clarification). Perhaps it was because I am a man or I am white or I am from outside the US (it was a US company). All what I know is that I passed all the technical tests, was very interested in that job/company and shared their values (at le
Perhaps this is just one of the possible scenarios and it might even be not as straightforward as it seems (addition of the ASCII codes associated with the characters within certain range + over a given length + ...?), but the probability of anyone typing "A" 29 times in this or any other context is actually tremendously low.
Purely speaking, the probability of typing this or any other string of that length is identical. By assuming that the target length is unknown, I could even say that the chances of typing that string or other one of almost any length are quite similar. On the other hand, people are more likely to prefer something like "aaaa" before "a1eb}" and, for that reason, a more variable set of characters might have been a bit tougher. In any case, it seems very curious that someone was able to find that "bug" with no previous knowledge (?).
Finding fuel for nuclear fusion is very easy. The difficult part (if possible at all) is actually building something which can generate electricity by relying on that approach. Without forgetting that mining on the Moon is far from easy. If I was the one to be convinced, I would have preferred a much more honest motivation like "we are just feeling like going there".
you do for yourself and your own enrichment. No one makes you do it, that was the point.
Can you please tell me what are the motivations of full-time employees as opposed to mine? Employees want to enrich themselves and nobody forces them to work on a given company. If they don't like certain conditions, they could try to get a different job. Exactly the same than I do by replacing jobs/bosses with clients. If I want to find ideal clients, I would have to spend much more time/effort/money, like any employee rejecting non-ideal jobs.
Although your intention is slightly clearer now, your post still shows your misconception regarding what self-employment involves. You picture a very famous, rich, successful version without understanding that this is the best possible outcome, not a descriptive sample. Usually, the over-work or stress levels associated with riskier situations are much higher. A salary, long-term job gives stability, quasi-certainty, a controlled environment; even the working conditions are usually easier as far as you have to follow instructions and bear a limited amount of responsibility. Equivalent ideas can be applied to small, struggling companies vs. big, well-established ones.
One descriptive example: company A wants a given piece of software to be built and hires company B. In company B, the upper managers B1, B2 and B3 will take all the blame for any problem with the contract, payments, company A not liking the product, etc. Boss B4 will be responsible for any miscommunication between upper management and the technical levels. Bosses B5 and B6, leading the two development teams taking care of the implementation, will be held responsible for any technical problem avoiding company A to have the contracted product as expected. Developer B53, developing the modules 1, 2 and 3, will take all the blame for any problem provoked by a mistake in any of those. Developer B53 might not like these specific tasks or boss B5 might be pushing him a bit too much (because boss B4 is pushing him too, because...). His working conditions, in this project or in general, might be objectively very hard and he might burn out. But he is doing this work because he wants. He is being pushed because he accepts to be pushed. And he is not looking for any other job because he doesn't want to do so. Now replace company B with self-employee C and unify all these stratified responsibilities, stresses, problems into the same person. This is what self-employment is basically about. A different story is self-employee C (because of having lots of work or having lots of money or because of whatever reason) hiring other people, becoming the top boss with absolute independence and basically performing the kind of tasks that your comments are suggesting. Technically speaking this would be a company and self-employee C would be its owner. On the other hand, this isn't necessarily the normal or even ideal evolution of self-employment; some people might not even aspire to be bosses and to manage people, but just to continue performing their work under the conditions they want.
By taking your Apple analogy, my situation wouldn't be like the one of Jobs (manager) + Wozniak (technical stuff), but like just a Wozniak with no Jobs and not wanting to have one. In fact, this is a very common form of self-employment: specialised workers focusing on what they are good at, by taking all the risk and looking for the conditions they want. They leave the safety of a regular salary and other people taking care of lots of side issues, over-work a lot and, eventually, accomplish what they want or get burnout after having been dealing with many more problems than what a full-time employee will ever do. They certainly decide to do that, exactly the same that anyone working for a company makes that conscious decision. You might prefer a more conservative approach and perhaps cannot even understand why self-employment exist, but thinking that taking much more risk/responsibility doesn't notably increase
So your entire rant is based on a misread of my very clear response, the self-employed are in a different category.
My entire rant was based on the idea underlying your whole post that I or what I do or what most of self-employed programmers do is related at all to what someone like Elon Musk, personally (billionaire) or as per his job (C-level tasks in a multi-billion company), does at work. And I explained you that I do pretty much everything that any full-time employee does (senior developer specialising in quite demanding stuff) + many other things = more burnout probability for me. I understood both your post and your misperception (+ prejudices?) perfectly.
Go set yourself over next to Elon there
So, I say that I am self-employed and you are automatically assuming that I am rich (Elon-like rich!!). At least in my country, Spain, self-employment represents a relevant proportion of the total workforce and most of them are far from being rich. Usually, this situation is associated with systematically (over-)working and taking lots of risk. In fact, my situation is a quite extreme case as far as meeting my expectations is very difficult and, as clearly highlighted in my profile description, I don't have too much money. Even if my situation wasn't that hard, it would probably have been worse than the one of most of US-based developers, whose salaries and working conditions are really good.
I have to work much harder than someone with a full-time job (looking for clients, promoting myself, managing lots of others issues, etc.) and this doesn't even guarantee me to get money. Logically, the potential benefits are much higher than the ones associated with a more conservative situation, exactly the same that happens with anything else. On the other hand, for someone like Elon (not sure about his whole life story but I understand that his family is wealthy) there isn't exactly a properly speaking risk as far as converting a lot into much more is relatively easy. This is certainly not my situation. My personality is also quite far away from ideas like egoism, narcissism, careerist, etc. which seem advantageous under these conditions. I might even say that my personality and expectations have a relevant negative impact on my growth as a self-employed programmer.
Long story short: burnout would be the most probable outcome of my working conditions if I wouldn't like my job (basically coding, data analysing and having lots of things up and running perfectly; I also might move a couch or take care of lots of things about which a full-time employee will never have to worry, but all of this is unpaid over-work) so much. I can certainly choose my working conditions or with whom I want to work, but that comes at some expense similarly to what happens when you quit a job which you don't like.
Stockholm Syndrome?
I work for myself and I put lots of effort/time into getting what I want in the way I want it. I see it as an long-term investment. Anyone directly enjoying the outputs of my work will always pay the fair price. In any case, my point was that, even under very tough conditions, tech doesn't seem too burnout-prone, at least among those really liking it.
... because that word describes my current situation quite well. I do work a ton, on quite demanding stuff and by taking lots of risk. Currently, I am not precisely earning a lot. But I do love my job, perhaps even a bit too much. And I think that this is the key issue here: really liking what you do or not.
"Most of tech workers not liking their jobs are suffering from job burnout" sounds more descriptive of the actual reality. The tech world does seem quite tough for those not truly enjoying it, in general or under the given conditions.
My point was highlighting that Musk isn't getting this project because of the most logical reasons (e.g., being more reliable or offering a better price), but because of basically paying for it. I also meant that if you can afford to lose lots of money, your chances of getting it back together with much more are very high. By assuming that this project is good for the city and there are various bidders, the one offering to pay for the whole construction (+ celebrity + innovation) seems really strong.
I haven't ever been in Chicago. I don't know anything about its major or the needs of the city. I don't care about whether this system gets built or not. I don't even care about Musk's company failing (at least, not for as long as it has a reasonably honest behaviour). Personally, I don't even find this kind of arrangements too attractive as far as I am not into trendy, marketing, celebrity, dreamy whatever. My comment was exclusively focused on what I think that is the main issue here: lots of money.
In exchange for paying to build the new transit system, Boring would keep the revenue from the system’s transit fees and any money generated by advertisements, branding and in-vehicle sales
Who could reject an offer like this? Innovative, faster, supported by a celebrity, initial costs fully paid and, apparently, with no risk. For Chicago, this seems a no-brainer. For the Boring side, it looks like a long-term investment assumed to be beneficial in any scenario ("1B losses expected to be recovered in 10 years no matter what? It would be excellent if we could build that innovative thing, but putting some stickers on an old train and doing a bit of PR juggling wouldn't be the end of the world either!"). I guess that this is one of the (rare) occasions when having lots of money gives you an unbeatable advantage. It looks like a bit too boring though.
Building & setting up this thing versus conventional. Was the energy savings net positive or negative?
I was about to write pretty much the same thing. Lots of these "disruptive innovations" only focus on the specific issues which they slightly improve, but not on everything else. Also I find kind of curious that building a container to just lie close to the sea surface is so expensive and demanding. On the other hand, if you have a big research budget to burn, ideally in a publicly noticeable fashion, trying this one doesn't seem a so bad idea.
Recognising faces in moving cars sounds like a pretty tough scenario with lots of problems and low reliability. Even in case of forcing drivers to slow down and look at certain spot, it wouldn't be too simple. Other relevant issues are the low number of pictures available for most of people (1, 2?) and the high probability of conditions which might have a negative impact on the faces' visibility.
If I were one the companies trying to push forward automated (facial) recognition systems, I would focus on improving their reliability under more favourable conditions. Getting involved in situations with low probability of success seems a quite bad long-term move for a new technology.
I dislike many things done by Microsoft, but like others. I don't like big companies getting everywhere, but don't have any strong feelings about the current GitHub owners either. I like the attitudes in some of the repositories hosted by GitHub or other sites and dislike quite a few others. Despite having tried different alternatives (+ knew about others in the previous article about this still-rumour, perhaps also in this one and in some of the 2-3 upcoming ones), I am reasonably happy with GitHub. My opinion about them might change at any point and I might start using other alternative right away.
I understand that there are lots of hard feelings against Microsoft, big companies, monopolies, etc. I even share most of them. But I also see lots of egoist interests trying to take advantage from all this to their own gain. I also understand that objective quality isn't the only factor to become the number 1 in this sub-world, that you need to attract users no matter what. I am not censoring anyone's behaviour, just that I am not feeling like being a pawn in what looks like a popularity contest only meant to benefit unrelated-to-me companies. If GitHub continues working as so far, I would continue using it. If things change, I would look for alternatives. If monopoly, arbitrary, Windows-10-like "issues" start happening, my opinion about Microsoft as a whole would get even worse.
Having a limited number (30, 50, a bit more?) of people, who are probably known to the algorithm (fed with basic information of all the students in the given class?), in more or less static positions and well-defined places? That does sound certainly doable. There might be still quite a few problems, misinterpretations, ways to trick the system, etc. though.
I have never used this serialisation (under potentially dangerous conditions) or any other language feature not allowing me to have a reasonably good understanding of what is going on in the code. I also support any effort to reduce unnecessary functionalities from programming languages and, in general, to let them efficiently accomplish their expected goal. On other hand, some people might prefer to rely on certain features about which I don't care and their code might be as good as mine.
What I certainly don't support are the deflecting-responsibility-paternalistic-reaction attitudes which seem so common lately. Descriptive example:
- (developer wannabe) "My application has lots of security problems. The responsible is the language for allowing me to do what I shouldn't.".
- (paternalistic programming language) "You are right. We are aware that you might do really stupid things in case of being able to do so."
(further ridiculous, childish, amateur, tons-of-problems-prone, etc. nonsense...)
Don't you think that certain functionality in your programming language is worth keeping? Remove it! Do you usually have problems when relying on certain feature of a programming language for whatever reason? Don't use it! Or learn to use it properly! But what is with all these generic paternalistic behaviours lately? Making the overall programming experience more comfortable is certainly a good thing. Arbitrarily restricting the capabilities of programming languages (expected to be used by experts!) to somehow account for incompetence or lack of care is ridiculous. Over-protection is usually a very bad idea which provokes lower quality outputs (worse programmers) and other problems (false sense of security, disproportionate trust in what might be faulty, etc.).
As written above, this scenario of multiple owners does sound bad, but accounting for it seems quite difficult. From the point of view of the current approach of the Wayback Machine, there aren't owners but domains, assumed to always belong to the same person. I am not defending their current approach or even saying that I like some of these outcomes, just appraising their honest attitude (in case of doubt, don't keep anything!) and understanding their difficult position. Also as commented above, accounting for different ownerships would add a further layer of complexity/personal data collection which might provoke other problems or might be beyond what they are willing to do.
If the owner of a particular domain wishes that the HTML documents available through that domain be made available indefinitely, even after the domain owner's insolvency, what should the domain owner do to prevent the domain from being snapped up by a third party that sets robots.txt?
I don't like that scenario and, probably, most of people doesn't do either. But it seems an unavoidable drawback of this whole approach. This is a private company with private interests and obligations (not precisely providing a public service for any random internet user) which, as such, can do whatever they want with their data. There seems to only be one limitation to that absolute power: what the person/company referred by that data wants to do with it. Bear in mind that we aren't talking about the typical user-opens-account->generates-data->user-tells-how-to-use-data, but about systematic collections of data which, in most of the cases, happen without the given user knowledge. How to know who is the owner now and yesterday? How to deal with eventual ownership conflicts?, etc. Everything would become too complicated, too invasive (all this additional personal information would have to be stored), etc. They might have chosen a more conservative alternative like deleting only the current files, but preferred to make sure that no information without a clear permission will be kept.
As already commented in this thread and in other previous ones, the Wayback Machine reacts to robots.txt restrictions by deleting all the records retroactively. Even though I might personally prefer a different behaviour, this is undoubtedly a very honest approach: deleting all the collected information after the first indication that the given site/person might not want it! Quite a few sites should learn something from them.
Just in case it isn't clear, for me, this is pretty much like watching a fight between two angry baboons at the zoo. Kind of interesting, fun, even perhaps a bit surprising. But certainly not in a position to provoke deeper feelings like angriness, envy, wanting to be part of it, etc.
Without debts? Without responsibility? By working on what they wanted for as long as they were able to do so? By having probably learned a lot thanks to having enjoyed the most appealing version of the best possible learning proceeding (= momentarily tough conditions without relevant long-term consequences, a bit of fear and stress but nothing too serious)? I have no words!
This kind of prejudice-based understanding
In case that my point wasn't completely clear, I meant people blindly assuming that, when event A happens, it has to mean that B is true, even though many other options are possible. Although this is relatively common for everyone in a quite a few scenarios, sensible and knowledgeable people (or, at least, those whose actions affect others) should almost never rely on this kind of approaches as the primary source for any important decision. In the current context (determining whether someone has certain expert knowledge whose empirical validation is extremely easily), this seems to make even less sense. Why unreliably guessing whether A implies B, when you (I mean another expert) can accurately determine whether B applies or not right away? I didn't mean generic prejudices (because of my race, gender, age, etc.) which I have never seen as a justification for anything happening to me (or simply included them within plain stupidity).
Sometimes the test is simply whether you can simply stick to the topic and discuss accordingly
I see two problems with that statement. Firstly, you wrongly assume that delivering the exact behaviour that you (perhaps wrongly) expect indicates (in)capability, not mere disagreement or perhaps inapplicability in the given situation (e.g., the assumed-to-be-simple topic was actually more complex) or perhaps limitations in the assessment of the interviewer/test. This kind of prejudice-based understanding is unfortunately too common in the programming skill assessment world, what doesn't sound ideal to me in any scenario and much less when dealing with senior positions. And that brings me to the second issue: expecting "simply stick to" from anyone even slightly experienced in an even slightly complex field seems ridiculous. Perhaps for kids/teens that might be the best thing, but beyond high school any teaching/assessment methodology aspiring to "simply stick to" doesn't sound right. It is certainly completely incompatible with what I would accept on a working environment: I am hired to understand, create, fix whatever, not to comply with abstract/clueless expectations. My work is pretty much the opposite to anything on the lines of what that statement suggests. A company (knowledgeably or ignorantly, it doesn't matter) looking for that kind of people has nothing to do with me.
I see lots of problems with most of (online) programming assessing methodologies: expecting canned knowledge/results, interpreting the reliance on ridiculous restrictions as a way to prove something (rather than as a way to force candidates to learn how to adapt themselves to that assessing system, even to trick it), seriously thinking that a set of ridiculous prejudices/expectations can allow people with virtually no knowledge on that field to assess expert knowledge (?!), etc. I have also been seeing some evolution on this front, every day I find more alternatives which reduce arbitrary restrictions, consider actually knowledgeable inputs (not the abstract conclusions of a set of assumptions) and, in general, care more about allowing candidates to really show what they can/are willing to deliver and analyse that information accordingly. Bear in mind that I am not the only person thinking like this; in fact, most of people in my position tend to have a quite bad opinion of skill assessments, HR policies, etc., in the sense of being very unreliable even arbitrary, kind of weird right? As a rough estimate, I would say that, out of every 10 assessing processes in which I have taken part, an average of 0-2 of them have got an accurate enough idea about me (and just talking about the technical side!); and in these 0-2 cases I have been dealing with other experienced programmers, with wide enough problems and lots of freedom actually allowing me to show something. These 0-2 acceptations/rejections were reasonable, all the other ones weren't (loses for the given companies, skill assessing/HR departments, not for me). BTW, the specific assessing methodology which I am mentioning here has been going quite well so far; I have still to get feedback from that last test, but in principle everything seems OK.