It's not evolution. It's symbiosis. Certain bacteria can eat the pesticides. The bugs ingest the bacteria which live in bugs gut. Bug eats pesticide. Bacteria eats pesticide, bug lives.
My morals and ethics keep me from adopting Apple (after abandoning them a year ago), and I often find myself threatening the same thing.
Every once in a while I actually make the switch. Two weeks later I switch back when I realize that there's a reason the world hasn't switched to linux en masse. There's always a small set of 3-4 applications I regularly use that linux has no decent alternative for....
Our interviews are three hours, and are a gauntlet of technical questions, laptop + coding problems, general problem solving tests, examples of prior work, and also we make sure they could be passionate about what we're doing... Honestly the last point is the most important. Passionate coders are the best coders, even if they lack experience.
The fact is that some people are just not good at coding....and probably never will be. I've seen programmers turn it around, but usually a lousy programmer is just that...a lousy programmer. Just like you can't train some people to be NFL players, you can't train all people to be good programmers.
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here... Your interview sounds very similar to mine.
They get a laptop and two coding projects. One they have to code from scratch, another is an intentionally broken program which they have to fix. They need to be able to solve both problems in a timely manner (read: less than 45 minutes, and our best applicants take about 15 minutes), and need to impress me with their ability to solve the problems without producing a hackjob.
We do use the whiteboard for some really simple one-liner stuff like SQL questions where they need to provide an example query against an imaginary database design...but I'd imagine that's pretty normal.
Trust me, you would not find any gems in our rejects. Unless you live in silicon valley (and maybe even there too), programmers with an ounce of ingenuity are very hard to come by. I generally look for someone that I feel I "could" turn into a lead developer in less than a year.
I will say that "how you get to a solution" makes a HUGE difference to me. We have complex systems that have to all function well together, and hacking together some piece of crap that breaks 5 other things is not an acceptable "solution." We adhere to our own established coding standards, and a developer should ALWAYS know how to write something so it doesn't break the rest of the system. I also expect my developers to write code that others can maintain with minimal effort. We've all seen our share of daily-wtf code, and that's no way to get a job done.
The point is that people with Asian names (statistically) have a much higher likelihood of having a language barrier than, for instance, John Smith. Saying that people with Asian names get hired less than similar american counterparts means nothing. If you can prove that the candidates did not have a language barrier, then the figures are legitimate. Otherwise, I can assume, based on prior experience, that they were probably passed over because there was a barrier in communication.
I've passed on several candidates over the years because of barriers in communication due to immature english comprehension. This is not racism in any way. You wouldn't expect that I could waltz into any given russian software company and get a programming job if I know very little, or no russian. If you can't do the job, you're not going to get hired. More often than not it's because of lack of experience, but sometimes language stands in the way.
The last thing I'm interested in is what a person looks like. If someone aces our programming tests, code questions, shows a good ability to solve problems on the fly, are good communicators and "comprehenders," they're pretty much hired, (barring any red flags in past jobs).
The fact that you cite a few studies means literally nothing, when you're hiring someone purely on their technical merits.
So...by your logic, women falsely perceive men as being bad company in the workplace (sexism), so they choose career paths that they "think" is friendlier to women (more sexism), and then they complain that the career path they chose NOT to pursue is biased against women (even more sexism).
By your logic, women are the entire reason this bias exists...and the bias is completely artificial. The so-called feedback loop was started, and is continued by women themselves.
That fails to take into account the language barriers that can, and do, make some employees less likely to be hired. If I can't communicate with you...I'm not going to hire you, even if you are as good, or better, than others.
Actively inclusive? What does that even mean? Including females just because they're females even though they aren't skilled? That's blatant sexism in itself. I sure hope that's not what you're encouraging...
As the lead developer on a software team, I'm one of the ones interviewing potential candidates. Typically the vast majority of applicants are male, and the females who apply typically can't pass our coding questions and tests. Granted most males can't either, so the ratio is probably about the same (in regards to the pass vs fail). The fact isn't that women aren't pushed away, it's that there are just very vary few of them.
I'm completely unbiased on the male vs female front, but if a male OR a female can't answer the tech questions and complete the coding tests properly, there's no way I'm going to hire them. End of story. We only hire Sr level devs (or ALMOST Sr), and only about 1 in 15 or 1 in 20 applicants are actually capable of high-mid-level or sr-level coding. We typically see less than 1 in 20 candidates actually being women. In our current round of hiring over the past month, we've seen about 15 males, and only one female. We've only hired one person so far, and it happened to be one of the males.
It's not that we're biased against women, it's just that the numbers are against them. I honestly couldn't say if males are better programmers than women, because I haven't worked with, or interviewed enough women to know if there are decent female coders out there... I HAVE hired a very capable sysadmin who was female once, and she was absolutely wonderful at her job. There was nothing we asked of her that she couldn't do... She was lost in a round of layoffs a few years ago, and I've been sad about that ever since.
There will unfortunately be sexism, racism, and other forms of bias in ALL environments, but saying the coding industry has an ugly underbelly of sexism is just ignorant. The fact of the matter is that most young male programmers would jump at the chance to get a talented female among them.
However, the more likely scenario is just a repeat of what happened with PC games.
You can't really buy PC Games used anymore, so a large portion of the pc game traffic moved on and got consoles instead. When consoles suffer from the same thing, people are going to move on to mobile games on platforms like the iPad, Android, and soon windows 8 tablets.
Sure, you can't resell mobile apps, but it's a rarity when a mobile game costs more than $10. At that price, you can afford to buy 6 games for the same price as 1 console game. Who cares if you can't sell them back. And, for that matter, most mobile games are less than $5, and the majority are stuck squarely at $0.99.
I dunno, I think Sony is well within their rights to do this... Not to mention...gamestop COULD technically still re-sell the games, but players would then have to pay more to get them fully working.
If gamestop came up with a standard sales model that would work well, but I can't see them selling hampered games for more than $5 with any success... That means players would only get a dollar or two, if that, for their trades. Players wouldn't even bother trading anything anymore.
The biggest annoyance of the whole thing is that in order to play your game at your friends house, you have to migrate your profile to their "PS4" or just play a broken game...
It's still kinda true... The WP7 versions of apps are mostly inferior to their iOS/Android alternatives. There are also several key apps still missing that have some poor quality third party alternatives... (Pandora, Linkedin, I'm looking at you.)
Do you have the latest version? I've got it and it's not bad at all. The interface is great. The only complaint is the confusing lack of any kind of push notifications...
You're forgetting the IP "value" that is being served off these "$1000" servers in the sky. If the owner of said missile (wouldn't be a cruise missile or anywhere near $1M in value) can be convinced that the value of the loss due to the drone is worth the missile cost....it's game over.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not evolution. It's symbiosis. Certain bacteria can eat the pesticides. The bugs ingest the bacteria which live in bugs gut. Bug eats pesticide. Bacteria eats pesticide, bug lives.
My morals and ethics keep me from adopting Apple (after abandoning them a year ago), and I often find myself threatening the same thing.
Every once in a while I actually make the switch. Two weeks later I switch back when I realize that there's a reason the world hasn't switched to linux en masse. There's always a small set of 3-4 applications I regularly use that linux has no decent alternative for....
Probably buy a mac...for all the misguided good that would do them these days.
The sad part here is that you posted about FF11, and in my head I instantly retorted that FF13 is out....oops. WTG Mozilla...
Our interviews are three hours, and are a gauntlet of technical questions, laptop + coding problems, general problem solving tests, examples of prior work, and also we make sure they could be passionate about what we're doing... Honestly the last point is the most important. Passionate coders are the best coders, even if they lack experience.
The fact is that some people are just not good at coding....and probably never will be. I've seen programmers turn it around, but usually a lousy programmer is just that...a lousy programmer. Just like you can't train some people to be NFL players, you can't train all people to be good programmers.
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here... Your interview sounds very similar to mine.
They get a laptop and two coding projects. One they have to code from scratch, another is an intentionally broken program which they have to fix. They need to be able to solve both problems in a timely manner (read: less than 45 minutes, and our best applicants take about 15 minutes), and need to impress me with their ability to solve the problems without producing a hackjob.
We do use the whiteboard for some really simple one-liner stuff like SQL questions where they need to provide an example query against an imaginary database design...but I'd imagine that's pretty normal.
Trust me, you would not find any gems in our rejects. Unless you live in silicon valley (and maybe even there too), programmers with an ounce of ingenuity are very hard to come by. I generally look for someone that I feel I "could" turn into a lead developer in less than a year.
I will say that "how you get to a solution" makes a HUGE difference to me. We have complex systems that have to all function well together, and hacking together some piece of crap that breaks 5 other things is not an acceptable "solution." We adhere to our own established coding standards, and a developer should ALWAYS know how to write something so it doesn't break the rest of the system. I also expect my developers to write code that others can maintain with minimal effort. We've all seen our share of daily-wtf code, and that's no way to get a job done.
The point is that people with Asian names (statistically) have a much higher likelihood of having a language barrier than, for instance, John Smith. Saying that people with Asian names get hired less than similar american counterparts means nothing. If you can prove that the candidates did not have a language barrier, then the figures are legitimate. Otherwise, I can assume, based on prior experience, that they were probably passed over because there was a barrier in communication.
I've passed on several candidates over the years because of barriers in communication due to immature english comprehension. This is not racism in any way. You wouldn't expect that I could waltz into any given russian software company and get a programming job if I know very little, or no russian. If you can't do the job, you're not going to get hired. More often than not it's because of lack of experience, but sometimes language stands in the way.
The last thing I'm interested in is what a person looks like. If someone aces our programming tests, code questions, shows a good ability to solve problems on the fly, are good communicators and "comprehenders," they're pretty much hired, (barring any red flags in past jobs).
The fact that you cite a few studies means literally nothing, when you're hiring someone purely on their technical merits.
So...by your logic, women falsely perceive men as being bad company in the workplace (sexism), so they choose career paths that they "think" is friendlier to women (more sexism), and then they complain that the career path they chose NOT to pursue is biased against women (even more sexism).
By your logic, women are the entire reason this bias exists...and the bias is completely artificial. The so-called feedback loop was started, and is continued by women themselves.
That fails to take into account the language barriers that can, and do, make some employees less likely to be hired. If I can't communicate with you...I'm not going to hire you, even if you are as good, or better, than others.
Actively inclusive? What does that even mean? Including females just because they're females even though they aren't skilled? That's blatant sexism in itself. I sure hope that's not what you're encouraging...
Please excuse my typos in that first paragraph. *facepalm*
Yeah the article is ignoring the real problem...
As the lead developer on a software team, I'm one of the ones interviewing potential candidates. Typically the vast majority of applicants are male, and the females who apply typically can't pass our coding questions and tests. Granted most males can't either, so the ratio is probably about the same (in regards to the pass vs fail). The fact isn't that women aren't pushed away, it's that there are just very vary few of them.
I'm completely unbiased on the male vs female front, but if a male OR a female can't answer the tech questions and complete the coding tests properly, there's no way I'm going to hire them. End of story. We only hire Sr level devs (or ALMOST Sr), and only about 1 in 15 or 1 in 20 applicants are actually capable of high-mid-level or sr-level coding. We typically see less than 1 in 20 candidates actually being women. In our current round of hiring over the past month, we've seen about 15 males, and only one female. We've only hired one person so far, and it happened to be one of the males.
It's not that we're biased against women, it's just that the numbers are against them. I honestly couldn't say if males are better programmers than women, because I haven't worked with, or interviewed enough women to know if there are decent female coders out there... I HAVE hired a very capable sysadmin who was female once, and she was absolutely wonderful at her job. There was nothing we asked of her that she couldn't do... She was lost in a round of layoffs a few years ago, and I've been sad about that ever since.
There will unfortunately be sexism, racism, and other forms of bias in ALL environments, but saying the coding industry has an ugly underbelly of sexism is just ignorant. The fact of the matter is that most young male programmers would jump at the chance to get a talented female among them.
Gamestop releases their financial statements every year. The vast majority comes from used game sales.
However, the more likely scenario is just a repeat of what happened with PC games.
You can't really buy PC Games used anymore, so a large portion of the pc game traffic moved on and got consoles instead. When consoles suffer from the same thing, people are going to move on to mobile games on platforms like the iPad, Android, and soon windows 8 tablets.
Sure, you can't resell mobile apps, but it's a rarity when a mobile game costs more than $10. At that price, you can afford to buy 6 games for the same price as 1 console game. Who cares if you can't sell them back. And, for that matter, most mobile games are less than $5, and the majority are stuck squarely at $0.99.
Sounds good in theory, but people would just go to target, walmart, or best buy instead.
I dunno, I think Sony is well within their rights to do this... Not to mention...gamestop COULD technically still re-sell the games, but players would then have to pay more to get them fully working.
If gamestop came up with a standard sales model that would work well, but I can't see them selling hampered games for more than $5 with any success... That means players would only get a dollar or two, if that, for their trades. Players wouldn't even bother trading anything anymore.
The biggest annoyance of the whole thing is that in order to play your game at your friends house, you have to migrate your profile to their "PS4" or just play a broken game...
s/they're/they'll
Not only will retailers revolt...but they're straight go out of business. Gamestop makes the vast majority of its money off of used game sales.
When a large percentage of their income evaporates...it won't bode well for them.
On the flip side, if MS doesn't put this limitation on the next XBOX, sony can probably kiss their console goodbye before it even launches...
It's still kinda true... The WP7 versions of apps are mostly inferior to their iOS/Android alternatives. There are also several key apps still missing that have some poor quality third party alternatives... (Pandora, Linkedin, I'm looking at you.)
Do you have the latest version? I've got it and it's not bad at all. The interface is great. The only complaint is the confusing lack of any kind of push notifications...
There are SAMs that are FAR cheaper than $1M... Could easily be launched by any equipped navy vessel that happens to be in the general vicinity.
You're forgetting the IP "value" that is being served off these "$1000" servers in the sky. If the owner of said missile (wouldn't be a cruise missile or anywhere near $1M in value) can be convinced that the value of the loss due to the drone is worth the missile cost....it's game over.
Yeah, I wonder what happened to erythromycin. That was the drug I ALWAYS got as a kid because of my allergies.