Yes, I am old enough to remember the floppy disk days - when wanting to play Doom, with its billboarded sprites and single-floor rooms, meant loading 18 zillion floppies into your drive. When wanting to draw a freakin' Mandelbrot set meant waiting 3 minutes, and god help you if you wanted to dabble in 3D graphics - I guess you could look up quaternions in the encyclopedia and try to go from there?
Doesn't anyone hear themselves making the "back in the good old days" argument? I hear it again and again, and no one ever seems to notice themselves re-hashing the same tired old pining for a glorious past that never was, or lamenting how terrible "kids today" don't care about quality and want to destroy society.
Things are *good* today. Not perfect, but that's natural in software. The programs of old (that we still use) have fewer bugs because they had like 1% of the code of modern projects, and have now had 40 years of experts staring at them. Of course they'll be less buggy than anything ambitious and new.
If you don't like it, get your hands on the keyboard and build something better. That's what engineers do.
Of course not. If it's 10,000 BC and your opponent is wielding an antelope's femur, having a sword is an overwhelming advantage! But in modern times, that answer changes. Now, a person clearly *can* be very effective with a sword, with a lot of training. But they could be much more effective with a.38, with much less training.
C++ is kind of like the sword of programming. It occupies an important place in history that should be remembered, and in the right hands, it's still fearsome. But gimme a break - in modern times, there are just better options, in every arena of computing. Other languages offer faster learning curves, less ability to blow your foot off because you didn't know some obscure intricacy of the language, and are simpler in pretty much every conceivable way.
C++ is a relic we should regard with a certain reverence, while not taking it seriously for the future.
That's like calling identical twins "duplicate twins" and saying we should drop half of them in any study of population genetics.
If two code files are the same, that's not just noise - a person made that happen for some purpose. It makes no difference whether you find that "bad" or "sloppy" - it's a legitimate part of the in-use population.
Now, that doesn't mean some studies shouldn't still drop them - for example, if I'm studying the *writing* of code, I might want a sample of unique stretches of code that were directly written, not just copied or forked. It just means we shouldn't presume we're improving the work of "other researchers" by casting all these files as useless filler (and I'm guessing most people who are smart enough to research code have already thought of this and are either accounting for it in some way).
Please, before you post on Slashdot about code vulnerabilities, make sure you have at least programmed a "Hello, World" before. This post reminds me of the time a frustrated boss demanded to know why the game AI I was programming didn't "just use common sense."
More vulnerabilities are happening because there is a *massive* increase in software in consumer products. A bazillion products now have codebases that didn't before - ovens, toys, even my damn Christmas tree. Combine that with professional and social media that's always looking to dredge up outrage, and an increase in bad actors who realize that public outrage can work in their favor, and boom! You have a constant stream of stories about security holes. Why is that hard to understand?
Engineers are increasingly educated about new security threats - we evolve much faster in dealing with new challenges than almost any other type of worker. But yes, things get through, because this shit is hard - much harder than clueless internet whining. Also, because we're on the front lines of two wars - against those who tear down what others build, and against those who squelch innovation to preserve their own fat-cat positions - that is exponentially more intense than it was even a few years ago.
Expect the future to get *much* bumpier than this.
While this is an excellent example of silicon valley BS-speak that really means something else, it reminds me a lot of the right-wing code words we hear so often these days: "law and order," "unity," "freedom," etc. We all know what these words really mean, when spoken by certain people.
But, these phrases were all chosen for the honor of being used to cover up dumbness for a reason - because they do represent good ideas, when they are used genuinely and not as some flimsy sheep's clothing for something else. Much like freedom, pivots are good - when they are real. They *can* represent innovation, humility and persistence. Netflix used to send me DVDs in the mail, but they pivoted into the world's streaming overlord. A previous poster mentioned others, all valid.
I'd probably try to focus fire on the hypocrisy of the cover-up rather than on the cover being used.
Seriously, "be very afraid"? Of what, seeing a poorly-targeted ad?
This kind of sky-is-falling rhetoric is usually accompanied by some hysterical but hypothetical situation - what if we are denied jobs for our political stances? What if our employer found out we watch pee-pee porn? What if the jack boots come and...yadda yadda yadda. This post doesn't even bother with that anymore, which I think is what the real threat is in modern times - mindless, shrieky fearmongering about abstract threats. That's basically Fox News's business model, and it gave us Trump.
We've been living with these "dire threats" for a long time now, and nothing has materialized. I don't care if my employer knows my adult entertainment preferences, because they still need my skills. If I'm denied a job for my political stances, they were probably doing me a favor anyway. And if the jack boots aren't at my door under Fuhrer Trump, they aren't coming. Plus, the jack boots probably have their own porn preferences to hide.
I'm not saying it's not an outrage that our government is disregarding the Fourth Amendment, along with most of the others by now. Of course it is, and that's worth discussing. But how, concretely, bad are those things in our everyday lives? Can we at least remain civilized enough to not sound like a bunch of damn conspiracy nuts, long enough to consider that other priorities might be more worth our "fear"?
The internet was built by DARPA and universities, and the web by large research labs - paragons of decentralization? I think not. This fantasy of decentralization got added on later by college kids listening to Napster and thinking it would all turn into some golden, trans-national mass of utopian rainbows. I was one of those college kids in the 90s, and gave that kind of thinking a funny look even back then. Much like nuclear power and Tang, the internet is just a weapon of war that we have somewhat re-purposed into cat videos and porn (both of which are better than Tang).
There was never a "we" that "had" the internet (unless one believes in said utopian rainbows), so "we" cannot "lose" it. it's just a medium for ideas, like books or democracy, although a darned good one, and frankly one that has caused more democratization of more ideas than anything since the printing press. Just because some power-hungry curmudgeons have figured out how to fat-finger their way into a few tweets that help win political office, it doesn't mean the internet wasn't a step forward for ideas overall. It's working, it's healthy, so forget this drama-dude.
Yes, 100% this. However, we pros learn new things on an almost daily basis, and most have found de-coupling their learning process from other people to be an essential skill in programming. I realize that's far easier said than done, and requires a certain critical mass of knowledge and experience in order to become self-sustaining. I relied on senior people for my own on-the-job training.
BUT, when I was 22, I would never have thrown up my hands and equated mastery of multi-threading to solving P vs. NP. I would much more likely have erred the other way: being overly cocky and assuming I knew better than everyone else what to do. That's also not optimal, but far better than being defeatist, since it drove me to learn independently ("I guess I'm going to have to do this myself!").
One of the biggest, most vexing problems in computer science is newbies who equate basic programming to the hardest problems of the field.
OK, I realize this is arcane. Let me give an equivalent situation in, let's say, agriculture.
Farmer: "OK, young intern, today we'll learn how to water plants!" Intern: "Waaaaah! This is as hard as the manipulation of space-time with thought alone!" Farmer: "...Grab a goddamned watering can, moron."
Remember that one time when rats killed off half of Europe? And we're now discussing how best to hug them until they go night-night?
I do believe in compassion for animals. That means we take no pleasure in their deaths, and protect them from suffering beyond what's necessary for our civilization. I buy cage-free eggs, for example. But humanity must have two aspects - a hand of love, and a fist of justice. Rats are up there with mosquitoes in terms of existential threats to us, so isn't it obvious which side of us they should see?
I am lucky enough to have never seen a rat, in person, in my 37 years, and I realize they are probably important in natural ecosystems. But even still, inside of our settlements, no method of dealing with them would feel off-limits to me. When I first read the headline of this story, I assumed the rats were somehow being tricked into eating the dry ice, and later exploding. I thought, "oh, that's clever! I guess that's why it's on Slashdot."
I am part owner of an established startup doing mobile games aimed at kids. The decision to support Android was always a contentious one for us, and after years of beating our heads against that wall, I wish we had never done it.
I won't get into value judgments or rhetoric about openness - the revenue on Android just isn't even faintly close to iOS. Maybe 20 cents on the dollar on a *good* day. But as you might guess, it's taken up a lot more than 20% of our time. This fact is sometimes presented with undertones that iOS developers are just greedy, but it's literally a matter of survival - for us, Android simply cannot sustain a viable business.
As far as ease of development: the other comments capture it pretty well; both platforms have a lot of annoyances that you have to work around. Compared to my background developing server applications on Linux, I find both platforms shamefully bug-ridden and slapped together, but I wouldn't say that one is noticeably worse in the big picture.
No, that doesn't follow. This "toxic employee" thing isn't a big enough problem for anyone to torch their hard-won career by mounting a discrimination lawsuit that's doomed to fail anyway. I clearly said this does not apply to most minority employees, and was merely making the point that such bad behavior *exists,* not that it's prevalent.
This is patently *absolutely* true. I, my wife, and my friends have all directly observed this happening, right out in the open. It doesn't happen with all "disadvantaged" employees, but with problem employees who use their political status as a weapon and veiled lawsuit threat against HR.
To be crystal-clear, I and others close to me have explicitly heard sentences of the form "we can't fire him/her; it's not worth the lawsuit," spoken aloud, by decision-makers, clearly as a matter of policy and not as an off-hand crack, more times than can be considered a fluke.
These "poison pill" employees are a minority among minorities, but they definitely exist, and they ruin things for everyone.
Energy production has impacts all over our culture and economy - it's short-sighted to look only at the (clearly negative) environmental effects. We also need to consider the job and GDP growth that oil can produce, at a time when our economy badly needs it. Then there are the (clearly positive) national and economic security implications of being energy-independent.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't also have a balls-to-the-wall, fully government-assisted race toward cleaner energy. But we're far from being able to rely on that for more than a small fraction of our needs. The R&D and infrastructure upgrades will take decades, and our only usable "bridge" to get there is to continue burning anything that will hold a flame.
I am part of a small independent app company as well, and we have been on the opposite side of this issue a couple times. It is just as common, particularly on Android, for low-budget teams (often in third-world countries) to purposely build a confusingly similar product in an attempt to make a few bucks before they get shut down. Honest developers face trolls on both sides.
Half our defense is what steps we've taken to work within our awful, awful system of IP law. Copyrights, trademarks, even a couple patents. The other half is maintaining good relationships with Google and Apple, so that when a problem arises, we can appeal to them quickly. I think both have been absolutely essential.
If you have not spent the time and money to build your legal bullshit-shield, you should do so ASAP but be prepared that you may take some heavy losses before the dust settles - your troll has home-turf advantage here.
Good grief, it's a resume point system. It's *supposed* to be over-simplified and callously reduce all the richness of a human being's life efforts to a single, faceless number. Its sole job is to efficiently extract a strong team from a given applicant pool, and do it fast enough to get the best applicants before other companies do, as well as not wrecking the team's productivity interviewing every candidate under the sun. A willingness to search for hidden gems may sound fair-minded, but it doesn't have a good outcome.
And, I hate to say it, since this will likely not help build agreement, but my startup-focused point system also explicitly dings freelancers, as well as former non-military government workers. So, despite your likely objection to this, hopefully you'll grant that the system is at least internally consistent.
No, I wouldn't interview you because you mis-interpreted what I said to mean "no interview," rather than a -2 score for a single resume line item, as well as assuming me to be a manager, which I didn't say I was. Engineers need to be precise thinkers. Otherwise, though, I'm sure the rest of your extensive resume would have added up to a pretty good number in my made-up system.
The reason why your certification is both good, and still irrelevant to the posting, is that a pro-serv contractor is a completely different beast than a normal software engineer. Someone being put in front of customers certainly should have all the "pieces of flair" that impress customers, regardless of what they actually represent. My only assertion is about interviewing pure software engineers, which the OP would seem to be about.
This is not about Google - I do not work there. I have not for a long time. I mentioned them solely for their study on certification. And FYI, the Google employees in my group were pissed about the trash-can thing too.
Your final sentence, about each company having its own unique needs, supports my point that one-size-fits-all certifications are BS.
Yeah...accounting turns out to be a different field than software. I am not saying that sheriffs shouldn't be certified in firearms, or surgeons shouldn't be certified by the medical board. But in the specific field of software engineering, certification is a (mostly) sure sign of reduced competence.
Furthermore, I have spent the vast majority of my career (and all of those hundreds of interviews and resume reviews) outside of Google. My personal experience, which I will back up with the firmest of conviction, is that filling an office full of XXX-certified software engineers involves basically the same level of intelligence as buying Powerball tickets.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I am old enough to remember the floppy disk days - when wanting to play Doom, with its billboarded sprites and single-floor rooms, meant loading 18 zillion floppies into your drive. When wanting to draw a freakin' Mandelbrot set meant waiting 3 minutes, and god help you if you wanted to dabble in 3D graphics - I guess you could look up quaternions in the encyclopedia and try to go from there?
Doesn't anyone hear themselves making the "back in the good old days" argument? I hear it again and again, and no one ever seems to notice themselves re-hashing the same tired old pining for a glorious past that never was, or lamenting how terrible "kids today" don't care about quality and want to destroy society.
Things are *good* today. Not perfect, but that's natural in software. The programs of old (that we still use) have fewer bugs because they had like 1% of the code of modern projects, and have now had 40 years of experts staring at them. Of course they'll be less buggy than anything ambitious and new.
If you don't like it, get your hands on the keyboard and build something better. That's what engineers do.
Of course not. If it's 10,000 BC and your opponent is wielding an antelope's femur, having a sword is an overwhelming advantage! But in modern times, that answer changes. Now, a person clearly *can* be very effective with a sword, with a lot of training. But they could be much more effective with a .38, with much less training.
C++ is kind of like the sword of programming. It occupies an important place in history that should be remembered, and in the right hands, it's still fearsome. But gimme a break - in modern times, there are just better options, in every arena of computing. Other languages offer faster learning curves, less ability to blow your foot off because you didn't know some obscure intricacy of the language, and are simpler in pretty much every conceivable way.
C++ is a relic we should regard with a certain reverence, while not taking it seriously for the future.
That's like calling identical twins "duplicate twins" and saying we should drop half of them in any study of population genetics.
If two code files are the same, that's not just noise - a person made that happen for some purpose. It makes no difference whether you find that "bad" or "sloppy" - it's a legitimate part of the in-use population.
Now, that doesn't mean some studies shouldn't still drop them - for example, if I'm studying the *writing* of code, I might want a sample of unique stretches of code that were directly written, not just copied or forked. It just means we shouldn't presume we're improving the work of "other researchers" by casting all these files as useless filler (and I'm guessing most people who are smart enough to research code have already thought of this and are either accounting for it in some way).
Please, before you post on Slashdot about code vulnerabilities, make sure you have at least programmed a "Hello, World" before. This post reminds me of the time a frustrated boss demanded to know why the game AI I was programming didn't "just use common sense."
More vulnerabilities are happening because there is a *massive* increase in software in consumer products. A bazillion products now have codebases that didn't before - ovens, toys, even my damn Christmas tree. Combine that with professional and social media that's always looking to dredge up outrage, and an increase in bad actors who realize that public outrage can work in their favor, and boom! You have a constant stream of stories about security holes. Why is that hard to understand?
Engineers are increasingly educated about new security threats - we evolve much faster in dealing with new challenges than almost any other type of worker. But yes, things get through, because this shit is hard - much harder than clueless internet whining. Also, because we're on the front lines of two wars - against those who tear down what others build, and against those who squelch innovation to preserve their own fat-cat positions - that is exponentially more intense than it was even a few years ago.
Expect the future to get *much* bumpier than this.
While this is an excellent example of silicon valley BS-speak that really means something else, it reminds me a lot of the right-wing code words we hear so often these days: "law and order," "unity," "freedom," etc. We all know what these words really mean, when spoken by certain people.
But, these phrases were all chosen for the honor of being used to cover up dumbness for a reason - because they do represent good ideas, when they are used genuinely and not as some flimsy sheep's clothing for something else. Much like freedom, pivots are good - when they are real. They *can* represent innovation, humility and persistence. Netflix used to send me DVDs in the mail, but they pivoted into the world's streaming overlord. A previous poster mentioned others, all valid.
I'd probably try to focus fire on the hypocrisy of the cover-up rather than on the cover being used.
Seriously, "be very afraid"? Of what, seeing a poorly-targeted ad?
This kind of sky-is-falling rhetoric is usually accompanied by some hysterical but hypothetical situation - what if we are denied jobs for our political stances? What if our employer found out we watch pee-pee porn? What if the jack boots come and...yadda yadda yadda. This post doesn't even bother with that anymore, which I think is what the real threat is in modern times - mindless, shrieky fearmongering about abstract threats. That's basically Fox News's business model, and it gave us Trump.
We've been living with these "dire threats" for a long time now, and nothing has materialized. I don't care if my employer knows my adult entertainment preferences, because they still need my skills. If I'm denied a job for my political stances, they were probably doing me a favor anyway. And if the jack boots aren't at my door under Fuhrer Trump, they aren't coming. Plus, the jack boots probably have their own porn preferences to hide.
I'm not saying it's not an outrage that our government is disregarding the Fourth Amendment, along with most of the others by now. Of course it is, and that's worth discussing. But how, concretely, bad are those things in our everyday lives? Can we at least remain civilized enough to not sound like a bunch of damn conspiracy nuts, long enough to consider that other priorities might be more worth our "fear"?
The internet was built by DARPA and universities, and the web by large research labs - paragons of decentralization? I think not. This fantasy of decentralization got added on later by college kids listening to Napster and thinking it would all turn into some golden, trans-national mass of utopian rainbows. I was one of those college kids in the 90s, and gave that kind of thinking a funny look even back then. Much like nuclear power and Tang, the internet is just a weapon of war that we have somewhat re-purposed into cat videos and porn (both of which are better than Tang).
There was never a "we" that "had" the internet (unless one believes in said utopian rainbows), so "we" cannot "lose" it. it's just a medium for ideas, like books or democracy, although a darned good one, and frankly one that has caused more democratization of more ideas than anything since the printing press. Just because some power-hungry curmudgeons have figured out how to fat-finger their way into a few tweets that help win political office, it doesn't mean the internet wasn't a step forward for ideas overall. It's working, it's healthy, so forget this drama-dude.
...get some ammo to discredit my point of view in our next meeting.
Yes, 100% this. However, we pros learn new things on an almost daily basis, and most have found de-coupling their learning process from other people to be an essential skill in programming. I realize that's far easier said than done, and requires a certain critical mass of knowledge and experience in order to become self-sustaining. I relied on senior people for my own on-the-job training.
BUT, when I was 22, I would never have thrown up my hands and equated mastery of multi-threading to solving P vs. NP. I would much more likely have erred the other way: being overly cocky and assuming I knew better than everyone else what to do. That's also not optimal, but far better than being defeatist, since it drove me to learn independently ("I guess I'm going to have to do this myself!").
One of the biggest, most vexing problems in computer science is newbies who equate basic programming to the hardest problems of the field.
OK, I realize this is arcane. Let me give an equivalent situation in, let's say, agriculture.
Farmer: "OK, young intern, today we'll learn how to water plants!"
Intern: "Waaaaah! This is as hard as the manipulation of space-time with thought alone!"
Farmer: "...Grab a goddamned watering can, moron."
Remember that one time when rats killed off half of Europe? And we're now discussing how best to hug them until they go night-night?
I do believe in compassion for animals. That means we take no pleasure in their deaths, and protect them from suffering beyond what's necessary for our civilization. I buy cage-free eggs, for example. But humanity must have two aspects - a hand of love, and a fist of justice. Rats are up there with mosquitoes in terms of existential threats to us, so isn't it obvious which side of us they should see?
I am lucky enough to have never seen a rat, in person, in my 37 years, and I realize they are probably important in natural ecosystems. But even still, inside of our settlements, no method of dealing with them would feel off-limits to me. When I first read the headline of this story, I assumed the rats were somehow being tricked into eating the dry ice, and later exploding. I thought, "oh, that's clever! I guess that's why it's on Slashdot."
He wouldn't have to re-start so often if he were using a Mac.
My Scrum Lord says that I'll drive peak stakeholder value for a billion years if I but open my heart to the One True Methodology.
I am part owner of an established startup doing mobile games aimed at kids. The decision to support Android was always a contentious one for us, and after years of beating our heads against that wall, I wish we had never done it.
I won't get into value judgments or rhetoric about openness - the revenue on Android just isn't even faintly close to iOS. Maybe 20 cents on the dollar on a *good* day. But as you might guess, it's taken up a lot more than 20% of our time. This fact is sometimes presented with undertones that iOS developers are just greedy, but it's literally a matter of survival - for us, Android simply cannot sustain a viable business.
As far as ease of development: the other comments capture it pretty well; both platforms have a lot of annoyances that you have to work around. Compared to my background developing server applications on Linux, I find both platforms shamefully bug-ridden and slapped together, but I wouldn't say that one is noticeably worse in the big picture.
"The Actinobacteria phylum includes..." OMG I'm scared! Except that biology classification is a bit over-broad...
Let's review what badasses *our* phylum includes:
- The honey badger.
- The Kodiak bear.
- The goddamned T-Rex.
- that Japanese guy who killed bulls with nothing but karate
In a phylum-off, I'm betting on Team Chordata.
This is about the town of Alabama, Massachusetts.
Can we replace the real national debt of $18.3 trillion with this $4 trillion chump-change? 'Cause that would be shweet.
No, that doesn't follow. This "toxic employee" thing isn't a big enough problem for anyone to torch their hard-won career by mounting a discrimination lawsuit that's doomed to fail anyway. I clearly said this does not apply to most minority employees, and was merely making the point that such bad behavior *exists,* not that it's prevalent.
This is patently *absolutely* true. I, my wife, and my friends have all directly observed this happening, right out in the open. It doesn't happen with all "disadvantaged" employees, but with problem employees who use their political status as a weapon and veiled lawsuit threat against HR.
To be crystal-clear, I and others close to me have explicitly heard sentences of the form "we can't fire him/her; it's not worth the lawsuit," spoken aloud, by decision-makers, clearly as a matter of policy and not as an off-hand crack, more times than can be considered a fluke.
These "poison pill" employees are a minority among minorities, but they definitely exist, and they ruin things for everyone.
Energy production has impacts all over our culture and economy - it's short-sighted to look only at the (clearly negative) environmental effects. We also need to consider the job and GDP growth that oil can produce, at a time when our economy badly needs it. Then there are the (clearly positive) national and economic security implications of being energy-independent.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't also have a balls-to-the-wall, fully government-assisted race toward cleaner energy. But we're far from being able to rely on that for more than a small fraction of our needs. The R&D and infrastructure upgrades will take decades, and our only usable "bridge" to get there is to continue burning anything that will hold a flame.
I am part of a small independent app company as well, and we have been on the opposite side of this issue a couple times. It is just as common, particularly on Android, for low-budget teams (often in third-world countries) to purposely build a confusingly similar product in an attempt to make a few bucks before they get shut down. Honest developers face trolls on both sides.
Half our defense is what steps we've taken to work within our awful, awful system of IP law. Copyrights, trademarks, even a couple patents. The other half is maintaining good relationships with Google and Apple, so that when a problem arises, we can appeal to them quickly. I think both have been absolutely essential.
If you have not spent the time and money to build your legal bullshit-shield, you should do so ASAP but be prepared that you may take some heavy losses before the dust settles - your troll has home-turf advantage here.
Good grief, it's a resume point system. It's *supposed* to be over-simplified and callously reduce all the richness of a human being's life efforts to a single, faceless number. Its sole job is to efficiently extract a strong team from a given applicant pool, and do it fast enough to get the best applicants before other companies do, as well as not wrecking the team's productivity interviewing every candidate under the sun. A willingness to search for hidden gems may sound fair-minded, but it doesn't have a good outcome.
And, I hate to say it, since this will likely not help build agreement, but my startup-focused point system also explicitly dings freelancers, as well as former non-military government workers. So, despite your likely objection to this, hopefully you'll grant that the system is at least internally consistent.
No, I wouldn't interview you because you mis-interpreted what I said to mean "no interview," rather than a -2 score for a single resume line item, as well as assuming me to be a manager, which I didn't say I was. Engineers need to be precise thinkers. Otherwise, though, I'm sure the rest of your extensive resume would have added up to a pretty good number in my made-up system.
The reason why your certification is both good, and still irrelevant to the posting, is that a pro-serv contractor is a completely different beast than a normal software engineer. Someone being put in front of customers certainly should have all the "pieces of flair" that impress customers, regardless of what they actually represent. My only assertion is about interviewing pure software engineers, which the OP would seem to be about.
This is not about Google - I do not work there. I have not for a long time. I mentioned them solely for their study on certification. And FYI, the Google employees in my group were pissed about the trash-can thing too.
Your final sentence, about each company having its own unique needs, supports my point that one-size-fits-all certifications are BS.
Yeah...accounting turns out to be a different field than software. I am not saying that sheriffs shouldn't be certified in firearms, or surgeons shouldn't be certified by the medical board. But in the specific field of software engineering, certification is a (mostly) sure sign of reduced competence.
Furthermore, I have spent the vast majority of my career (and all of those hundreds of interviews and resume reviews) outside of Google. My personal experience, which I will back up with the firmest of conviction, is that filling an office full of XXX-certified software engineers involves basically the same level of intelligence as buying Powerball tickets.