Without copyright laws, the huge corporations that currently profit from it would certainly find some new ways to profit - but the authors and artists would lose their last shot at getting at least a little bit of pay for their work.
The movie companies would go on selling movies, the music industry would go on selling music. But they would use the abolishment of copyright law as a means of screwing the artists out of their shares within 60 seconds of the law being passed.
We need copyright law, and it still serves a purpose. But we need to make that purpose protection of the artists again, not protection of the distributors.
Exempt private non-profit sharing from copyright law. Put the harsh penalties that are used to bludgeon down individuals against the corporations instead. Don't expect a blogger to 100% correctly attribute every image on his website - he's one guy, give him some slack, make the penalties fit the crime, have him pay a couple bucks and be done with it. But a major politician running a multi-million dollar election campaign, or an international corporation - those entities can be expected to dot their i's and cross their t's and if they take a photo from a starving photographer and use it without permission, they should be made to pay up big time - they have the staff, the time and resources to make sure things like that don't happen and if they don't it's because they are lazy, cheap or both.
Laws that serve the people. Really, you need that spelled out?
Put strict limits on lobbyism, campaign contributions and the rights of large corporations. Don't fix the symptoms of a bad system, fix the system.
Oh, and fix the tax laws. The USA once revolted with the slogan "no taxation without representation". It's high time to reverse it: No representation without taxation. If a corporation wants to dodge taxes, fine. But make it very, very illegal for tax-evaders to influence politics.
And finally, (and yes, you need all three) re-introduce the death penalty for corporations. Come up with a good way to take down a corporation so taking it down does minimal damage to society. Then do it on the appropriate crimes. Like endangering the economy - if Al Qaida had done 10% of the damage that greedy speculators have, you guys would have bombed Afghanistan and everything within a 1000 mile radius into near-earth-orbit.
Beware that this is a typical politicians strategy: Put out ridiculous, overblown ideas and wait for the shitstorm, then reduce it to still outrageous but less overblown - support for the resistance against it usually drops with every move you make towards a "compromise", until you can push something through that is often close to what you really wanted to achieve.
It's a valid point, but remember you are assessing with hindsight.
Actually, no. In many cases I've been telling that in future tense.
I have actually lived through two catastrophic crashes where any effort expended for returns beyond the 3 month horizon would literally have been wasted. It is an unfortunate situation, and to be avoided if possible, but these things do happen.
Yes, they do. About 5% of the time that management claims that the company is in an emergency situation. It is most obvious when management and the legal system clash. I happen to know this in detail regarding the word "emergency". Management very easily declares an emergency. Basically, everytime someone's pants are on fire. The legal definition of a company emergency, however (important for things like bypassing certain employee protection laws, such as those regulating overtime) is much, much, much more narrow. Basically, lives must be in danger or the company must be in present and provable danger of going bancrupt.
Almost no "emergency" declared by management would survive a legal inquiry. The term is easily thrown around to cause fear amongst employees. Unless you see the CEO walking around with a lawyer at his side and checking for the next flight into a country without an extradition treaty, you should take it with a grain of salt.
Throwaway code has a nasty habit of becoming production code, unfortunately.
Yes, of course. I forgot that problem. That's also a management problem: They tell you they want a quick hack that's just for this one problem. Then two weeks later in a meeting with their bosses, they try to score points by mentioning that they already have working code to solve a similar problem and it would be easy to use it to solve that other problem, too...
Again, that's not a coding issue, it's a management issue. I'm great at hacks, and I also treasure quality code - and I know that the two are different animals. If only managers also understood that the spare tire is for getting you to the next garage so you can install a proper one, and not for driving across the country.
Is it really that difficult, just because it's software?
It's an investment into the future. If you need to pick this project up again one, two or five years down the road, and do any non-trivial changes to it, good (and that means correct, short and to the point, not extensive and theoretical) documentation will save you valuable time.
If it's throwaway code, don't waste time and effort on documentation. If you plan to use it for some time, chances are very high it will need fixes, updates and changes, and documentation will make those a lot easier, faster and cheaper.
Decisions are made in the present, and if resources are tight in the present, things of potential value in the future are discounted further.
Yes. I've been trying for years to tell managers that the only reason that resources are so tight in the present is because they've been thinking that way in the past.
a) If you need documentation to understand what the code does except for complex formulas or dirty tricks, you shouldn't be reading my code, much less maintaining it, period. Yes, if I have some math that fills several lines, I'd better put a sentence or two there explaining what it means. But if for anything like creating an object, assigning some values, calling a few methods, storing the result in the database, displaying the result, etc. etc. - if I need to write documentation for anything like that, then either my code totally sucks and is a ton more complicated then it needs to, or whoever is in need of the docs is an idiot who shouldn't be touching code. Sure, "foreach ($row as $key=>$val) { $$key = $val; }" - could be graced with a one-line comment explaining what it does. But if you can't figure it out just by reading the code, then really, get your hands off it, you are more likely to break than fix it.
b) What needs documentation is the relations between code pieces, especially on the inverse side. Good IDEs can cover a part of that, but never completely.
c) Logic needs documentation. "if ($value > 10) {..." has exactly one information that I can't understand purely from reading the code: Why 10? Why not 11 or 9 or -512? What does this number mean and why is it hardcoded?
d) Documentation is worse than worthless if nobody keeps it updated. If your code is changing over time, and you can not guarantee the the documentation will be current, you are probably better off without than with outdated.
Here's what doesn't work: Anything, no matter what, if at the same time you put them under deadlines and other pressure to deliver results by (insert arbitrary, always too-short deadline set by you, your boss or anyone else but the coders themselves).
When the pressure is building, time is running out and the project is late, everyone in the process considers documentation to be the first thing that nobody would miss. So it's the first thing that gets dumped. And, of course, it's not as if the coders would be given time after the deadline to fix it, because there are no bug reports from clients regarding missing comments in code, obviously, and the next deadline for the next project is already approaching.
It's one of the many reasons programming as a craft is still in its diapers: Bad management.
It's probably a matter of POV. I'm also baffled at people who put stickers on their notebooks or otherwise feel the urge to "personalize" their stuff by, essentially, damaging it. Heck, one of the things I love about the Apple notebooks is that they don't have two dozens "Intel inside", "NVidia! Yeah!", "Designed for Windows FuckME", "Free Virus Inside!", "Buy 2, get 1 for the prize of 1" and so on stickers.
When I gave my iPhone (1st generation) to my girlfriend after buying the iPhone 4 (that means it was almost 3 years old) it had one small scratch on the back. And I never had a sleeve or cover for it. How hard is it to not put your phone into the same pocket as your keys or spare change?
You aren't cynical in the least. Lots of people with much more martial arts training than a day or two will simply freeze when they are met with actual danger.
Few people understand that the mind works in contexts and settings. If you ever wondered why you can decide today that you will work out more, and not do it tomorrow, and feel no dissonance whatsoever - it's because the "you" that made the decision and the "you" that didn't follow through are not really the same person.
And for many people it's a rude awakening when they find out that their training "you" never left the dojo.
A major argument of the opinion piece is that having at least a rudimentary understanding of how computers and software actually work is increasingly important, and that learning some programming is a good way to accomplish that. I doubt anyone here would argue with that.
I will.
A little knowledge is often more dangerous than no knowledge. Anyone who has worked for a boss with a little knowledge about what you do can attest to that. The obvious reason is that the 101 in any field leaves out many of the difficult and complex details. When you take physics 101, things seem fairly simple and straightforward, most of the equations are linear or at most power laws. You are in absolutely no way prepared to understand or even appreciate the complexities of quantum physics.
I've seen it time and time again - people, especially people with the power to make decisions - with a little knowledge are the worst kind. The guy who knows Access is the one who has the least appreciation for real databases and what a real database admin does. The guy who knows Word values the job of a real secretary, writer or layouter the least. The boss who once wrote a few scripts in Visual Basic does the most damage to the software development team.
Please don't teach people how to write a little code. That's like telling them the basics of driving. They will end up thinking they can drive, take out a car and kill someone.
That's just what we need. More inexperienced people writing bad software.
No surprise that IT has such a bad reputation. Look at the people we allow to run our servers, write our software and design our systems. Many of them are brilliant, few of them are good craftsmen. That is because we admire hacks and shortcuts so much that we allow them on production systems. No where else in any industry does that happen. Every geeky subculture, be it engineers, scientists or doctors (oh yes, doctors are very geeky - talk to some!) has its admiration for hacks - but the adult crafts see them as steps towards an elegant solution, not as the solution itself.
We don't need lower barriers for programmers, we need higher ones. Much higher ones. We don't have a lack of coders, we have a lack of good code.
I know this is going to be the Firefox version that'll be running on all my private machines. I'm tired of updates that don't serve any purpose that means anything to me. Getting security fixes, but none of the newest idiocity change-things-just-because-we-had-a-cool-idea-after-too-many-beers sounds like the best reason not to switch to some other browser I've heard in a long time.
This is not a programmer vs. designer issue. In fact, all good programmers know very well where their expertise ends and that of the designer begins.
The problem is that e-books are basically HTML+CSS and for some reason, in the heads of management that is still a geek domain and not a designer domain.
What I can't figure out is why haven't the tech giants got together and paid them more money.
In the long term, simply buying out the movie industry would be a cheaper.
Don't fool yourself. For all their yelling and whining, the movie and music industry are tiny compared to any of the real industries out there. Food, for example. Every single one of the major food corporations easily dwarves the entire movie and music industry put together.
Same for the Internet industry, btw. - we see it as this huge thing, but Nestle (to pick a random food company) has four times the revenue and four times the profit of Google.
I'm not even assuming they give a damn about anything but their own interests. It can all come to pass exactly as I wrote, even if they care only about themselves. Side-effects and unintended consequences are beautiful things.
They may realize they have the ultimate political advantage: A direct connection to the voters, and a lot more of their trust than either the politicians or the mainstream media.
A few decades back, that conspiracy theory may have had a ring of truth to it. Today? Our current breed of politicians is too cowardly, stupid, corrupt, lethargic and boring to do something like shaking down an industry. But it'll be interesting to watch the fireworks if they are stupid enough to try.
Non-geeks won't understand it, no matter how you phrase it. What you need to tell them is: "If this passes, the Internet will be shut down. Not immediately, but over time."
I'm doing what I can on the social front (emailing and calling), but if (when) this does pass, what is the best way to route around the damage on a personal level?
Buy a gun. If this passes, two of the four boxes have already failed, and you should be ready for if the third fails as well.
Every once in a while, the people need a wake-up call. Yours is long overdue. This might be it. So here is what I think would be the best-case chain of events:
* SOPA gets passed * all the large Internet sites (Google, Facebook, Twitter, ebay, Amazon, etc. etc.) do as they threatened and shut down for at least a few days * massive outrage ensues * said Internet sites have the advantage of direct communication and explain to the people just what just happened, in terms they understand * massive outrage is directed against every representative who voted for SOPA * the entire corrupt establishment gets kicked out and replaced by other people, who will last the country a century or so before they turn into the next corrupt establishment that needs kicking out.
This is the change that everyone voted for when they voted for Obama, isn't it?
You are sorting out people for things that have nothing to do with their performance in the job, unless you are looking for a puzzle solver. You aren't. Among other things, the problems that arise in the job have a context with meaning, while puzzles are stand-alone - you are sorting out the contextual thinkers. You are also sorting out the people who need some time - "give me until tomorrow" is a perfectly valid answer in almost every non-emergency situation. You are sorting out people who are brilliant teamworkers and need to throw an idea around over lunch - but in the process also improve everyone else and not just themselves.
I could go on. Basically, using puzzles to sort people out dramatically reduces the variety of minds in your company, which makes it worse. And yes, even if Google does it. And yes, I've done a job interview with Google (they called me) - it was one of the worst I've ever done, a total waste of time.
Filtering out applicants for jobs that are in demand is a necessity. I've hired people, including my own secretary for whose position I received over 200 applications. Checking some basic facts, asking a few probing questions to see which listed knowledges are how deep and getting an idea of their personality especially with regards to integration into the team is what matters most. Standard questions and puzzles are HR training wheels so you have something to use if it's the first job interview you are ever conducting. Like training wheels, they are meant to be discarded once you understood how it works.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but you are misguided.
Without copyright laws, the huge corporations that currently profit from it would certainly find some new ways to profit - but the authors and artists would lose their last shot at getting at least a little bit of pay for their work.
The movie companies would go on selling movies, the music industry would go on selling music. But they would use the abolishment of copyright law as a means of screwing the artists out of their shares within 60 seconds of the law being passed.
We need copyright law, and it still serves a purpose. But we need to make that purpose protection of the artists again, not protection of the distributors.
Exempt private non-profit sharing from copyright law. Put the harsh penalties that are used to bludgeon down individuals against the corporations instead. Don't expect a blogger to 100% correctly attribute every image on his website - he's one guy, give him some slack, make the penalties fit the crime, have him pay a couple bucks and be done with it. But a major politician running a multi-million dollar election campaign, or an international corporation - those entities can be expected to dot their i's and cross their t's and if they take a photo from a starving photographer and use it without permission, they should be made to pay up big time - they have the staff, the time and resources to make sure things like that don't happen and if they don't it's because they are lazy, cheap or both.
So, what's right?
Laws that serve the people. Really, you need that spelled out?
Put strict limits on lobbyism, campaign contributions and the rights of large corporations. Don't fix the symptoms of a bad system, fix the system.
Oh, and fix the tax laws. The USA once revolted with the slogan "no taxation without representation". It's high time to reverse it: No representation without taxation. If a corporation wants to dodge taxes, fine. But make it very, very illegal for tax-evaders to influence politics.
And finally, (and yes, you need all three) re-introduce the death penalty for corporations. Come up with a good way to take down a corporation so taking it down does minimal damage to society. Then do it on the appropriate crimes. Like endangering the economy - if Al Qaida had done 10% of the damage that greedy speculators have, you guys would have bombed Afghanistan and everything within a 1000 mile radius into near-earth-orbit.
Beware that this is a typical politicians strategy: Put out ridiculous, overblown ideas and wait for the shitstorm, then reduce it to still outrageous but less overblown - support for the resistance against it usually drops with every move you make towards a "compromise", until you can push something through that is often close to what you really wanted to achieve.
It's a valid point, but remember you are assessing with hindsight.
Actually, no. In many cases I've been telling that in future tense.
I have actually lived through two catastrophic crashes where any effort expended for returns beyond the 3 month horizon would literally have been wasted. It is an unfortunate situation, and to be avoided if possible, but these things do happen.
Yes, they do. About 5% of the time that management claims that the company is in an emergency situation. It is most obvious when management and the legal system clash. I happen to know this in detail regarding the word "emergency". Management very easily declares an emergency. Basically, everytime someone's pants are on fire. The legal definition of a company emergency, however (important for things like bypassing certain employee protection laws, such as those regulating overtime) is much, much, much more narrow. Basically, lives must be in danger or the company must be in present and provable danger of going bancrupt.
Almost no "emergency" declared by management would survive a legal inquiry. The term is easily thrown around to cause fear amongst employees. Unless you see the CEO walking around with a lawyer at his side and checking for the next flight into a country without an extradition treaty, you should take it with a grain of salt.
Throwaway code has a nasty habit of becoming production code, unfortunately.
Yes, of course. I forgot that problem. That's also a management problem: They tell you they want a quick hack that's just for this one problem. Then two weeks later in a meeting with their bosses, they try to score points by mentioning that they already have working code to solve a similar problem and it would be easy to use it to solve that other problem, too...
Again, that's not a coding issue, it's a management issue. I'm great at hacks, and I also treasure quality code - and I know that the two are different animals. If only managers also understood that the spare tire is for getting you to the next garage so you can install a proper one, and not for driving across the country.
Is it really that difficult, just because it's software?
Who is it valuable to?
It's an investment into the future. If you need to pick this project up again one, two or five years down the road, and do any non-trivial changes to it, good (and that means correct, short and to the point, not extensive and theoretical) documentation will save you valuable time.
If it's throwaway code, don't waste time and effort on documentation. If you plan to use it for some time, chances are very high it will need fixes, updates and changes, and documentation will make those a lot easier, faster and cheaper.
Decisions are made in the present, and if resources are tight in the present, things of potential value in the future are discounted further.
Yes. I've been trying for years to tell managers that the only reason that resources are so tight in the present is because they've been thinking that way in the past.
Agree to that in parts. Here's the parts:
a) If you need documentation to understand what the code does except for complex formulas or dirty tricks, you shouldn't be reading my code, much less maintaining it, period. Yes, if I have some math that fills several lines, I'd better put a sentence or two there explaining what it means. But if for anything like creating an object, assigning some values, calling a few methods, storing the result in the database, displaying the result, etc. etc. - if I need to write documentation for anything like that, then either my code totally sucks and is a ton more complicated then it needs to, or whoever is in need of the docs is an idiot who shouldn't be touching code. Sure, "foreach ($row as $key=>$val) { $$key = $val; }" - could be graced with a one-line comment explaining what it does. But if you can't figure it out just by reading the code, then really, get your hands off it, you are more likely to break than fix it.
b) What needs documentation is the relations between code pieces, especially on the inverse side. Good IDEs can cover a part of that, but never completely.
c) Logic needs documentation. "if ($value > 10) { ..." has exactly one information that I can't understand purely from reading the code: Why 10? Why not 11 or 9 or -512? What does this number mean and why is it hardcoded?
d) Documentation is worse than worthless if nobody keeps it updated. If your code is changing over time, and you can not guarantee the the documentation will be current, you are probably better off without than with outdated.
Here's what doesn't work: Anything, no matter what, if at the same time you put them under deadlines and other pressure to deliver results by (insert arbitrary, always too-short deadline set by you, your boss or anyone else but the coders themselves).
When the pressure is building, time is running out and the project is late, everyone in the process considers documentation to be the first thing that nobody would miss. So it's the first thing that gets dumped. And, of course, it's not as if the coders would be given time after the deadline to fix it, because there are no bug reports from clients regarding missing comments in code, obviously, and the next deadline for the next project is already approaching.
It's one of the many reasons programming as a craft is still in its diapers: Bad management.
That.
It's probably a matter of POV. I'm also baffled at people who put stickers on their notebooks or otherwise feel the urge to "personalize" their stuff by, essentially, damaging it. Heck, one of the things I love about the Apple notebooks is that they don't have two dozens "Intel inside", "NVidia! Yeah!", "Designed for Windows FuckME", "Free Virus Inside!", "Buy 2, get 1 for the prize of 1" and so on stickers.
When I gave my iPhone (1st generation) to my girlfriend after buying the iPhone 4 (that means it was almost 3 years old) it had one small scratch on the back. And I never had a sleeve or cover for it. How hard is it to not put your phone into the same pocket as your keys or spare change?
Just an IMHO from a bit of a cynic.
You aren't cynical in the least. Lots of people with much more martial arts training than a day or two will simply freeze when they are met with actual danger.
Few people understand that the mind works in contexts and settings. If you ever wondered why you can decide today that you will work out more, and not do it tomorrow, and feel no dissonance whatsoever - it's because the "you" that made the decision and the "you" that didn't follow through are not really the same person.
And for many people it's a rude awakening when they find out that their training "you" never left the dojo.
A major argument of the opinion piece is that having at least a rudimentary understanding of how computers and software actually work is increasingly important, and that learning some programming is a good way to accomplish that. I doubt anyone here would argue with that.
I will.
A little knowledge is often more dangerous than no knowledge. Anyone who has worked for a boss with a little knowledge about what you do can attest to that. The obvious reason is that the 101 in any field leaves out many of the difficult and complex details. When you take physics 101, things seem fairly simple and straightforward, most of the equations are linear or at most power laws. You are in absolutely no way prepared to understand or even appreciate the complexities of quantum physics.
I've seen it time and time again - people, especially people with the power to make decisions - with a little knowledge are the worst kind. The guy who knows Access is the one who has the least appreciation for real databases and what a real database admin does. The guy who knows Word values the job of a real secretary, writer or layouter the least. The boss who once wrote a few scripts in Visual Basic does the most damage to the software development team.
Please don't teach people how to write a little code. That's like telling them the basics of driving. They will end up thinking they can drive, take out a car and kill someone.
That's just what we need. More inexperienced people writing bad software.
No surprise that IT has such a bad reputation. Look at the people we allow to run our servers, write our software and design our systems. Many of them are brilliant, few of them are good craftsmen. That is because we admire hacks and shortcuts so much that we allow them on production systems. No where else in any industry does that happen. Every geeky subculture, be it engineers, scientists or doctors (oh yes, doctors are very geeky - talk to some!) has its admiration for hacks - but the adult crafts see them as steps towards an elegant solution, not as the solution itself.
We don't need lower barriers for programmers, we need higher ones. Much higher ones. We don't have a lack of coders, we have a lack of good code.
especially if Microsoft's Windows 8 effort succeeds in popularizing touchscreen PCs and laptops.
Bwuahahahaha...
Someone just wrote "I have no clue WTF I'm talking about" in 48pt bright-red bold letters across his own article.
Uh, you did get the memo back in 2008 or 2009 that your interactions and relations are marketing data, yes?
This "social graph" thing didn't become a buzzword because it's so useful to the average user. Marketing people made it popular.
I know this is going to be the Firefox version that'll be running on all my private machines. I'm tired of updates that don't serve any purpose that means anything to me. Getting security fixes, but none of the newest idiocity change-things-just-because-we-had-a-cool-idea-after-too-many-beers sounds like the best reason not to switch to some other browser I've heard in a long time.
Mod parent up.
This is not a programmer vs. designer issue. In fact, all good programmers know very well where their expertise ends and that of the designer begins.
The problem is that e-books are basically HTML+CSS and for some reason, in the heads of management that is still a geek domain and not a designer domain.
It's stupid management, not stupid programmers.
And please, pray tell, how do we force those in power and benefitting from a rigged system to vote for it to end
Robert Heinlein answers that question decades ago: Take Back Your Government
What I can't figure out is why haven't the tech giants got together and paid them more money.
In the long term, simply buying out the movie industry would be a cheaper.
Don't fool yourself. For all their yelling and whining, the movie and music industry are tiny compared to any of the real industries out there. Food, for example. Every single one of the major food corporations easily dwarves the entire movie and music industry put together.
Same for the Internet industry, btw. - we see it as this huge thing, but Nestle (to pick a random food company) has four times the revenue and four times the profit of Google.
I'm not even assuming they give a damn about anything but their own interests. It can all come to pass exactly as I wrote, even if they care only about themselves. Side-effects and unintended consequences are beautiful things.
They may realize they have the ultimate political advantage: A direct connection to the voters, and a lot more of their trust than either the politicians or the mainstream media.
A few decades back, that conspiracy theory may have had a ring of truth to it. Today? Our current breed of politicians is too cowardly, stupid, corrupt, lethargic and boring to do something like shaking down an industry. But it'll be interesting to watch the fireworks if they are stupid enough to try.
Try reading and comprehending an argument before you react to it based on a single word.
Obama promised change, and so far hasn't delivered much of it. The american people voted for change, but didn't get it. Second box used, to no avail.
Non-geeks won't understand it, no matter how you phrase it. What you need to tell them is: "If this passes, the Internet will be shut down. Not immediately, but over time."
I'm doing what I can on the social front (emailing and calling), but if (when) this does pass, what is the best way to route around the damage on a personal level?
Buy a gun. If this passes, two of the four boxes have already failed, and you should be ready for if the third fails as well.
Yeah, I'm actually hoping it will pass.
Every once in a while, the people need a wake-up call. Yours is long overdue. This might be it. So here is what I think would be the best-case chain of events:
* SOPA gets passed
* all the large Internet sites (Google, Facebook, Twitter, ebay, Amazon, etc. etc.) do as they threatened and shut down for at least a few days
* massive outrage ensues
* said Internet sites have the advantage of direct communication and explain to the people just what just happened, in terms they understand
* massive outrage is directed against every representative who voted for SOPA
* the entire corrupt establishment gets kicked out and replaced by other people, who will last the country a century or so before they turn into the next corrupt establishment that needs kicking out.
This is the change that everyone voted for when they voted for Obama, isn't it?
And that's exactly why it is wrong.
You are sorting out people for things that have nothing to do with their performance in the job, unless you are looking for a puzzle solver. You aren't. Among other things, the problems that arise in the job have a context with meaning, while puzzles are stand-alone - you are sorting out the contextual thinkers. You are also sorting out the people who need some time - "give me until tomorrow" is a perfectly valid answer in almost every non-emergency situation. You are sorting out people who are brilliant teamworkers and need to throw an idea around over lunch - but in the process also improve everyone else and not just themselves.
I could go on. Basically, using puzzles to sort people out dramatically reduces the variety of minds in your company, which makes it worse. And yes, even if Google does it. And yes, I've done a job interview with Google (they called me) - it was one of the worst I've ever done, a total waste of time.
Filtering out applicants for jobs that are in demand is a necessity. I've hired people, including my own secretary for whose position I received over 200 applications. Checking some basic facts, asking a few probing questions to see which listed knowledges are how deep and getting an idea of their personality especially with regards to integration into the team is what matters most. Standard questions and puzzles are HR training wheels so you have something to use if it's the first job interview you are ever conducting. Like training wheels, they are meant to be discarded once you understood how it works.