CodeMage

1. Even the best designed and well thought-out coding quizzes are not guaranteed to be a good predictor of the candidate's abilities. And that's when we're talking about the best. A great deal of coding quizzes currently in use are things interviewers came up with because they had to come up with something. So I guess the real sentiment is: coding quizzes need to be crafted and used better.

2. If you use take-home projects in your interview process, you'll invariably be filtering out people who value their free time, regardless of their skills. Put yourself in your candidates' shoes. A typical hiring process is already quite involved. Your candidate has to set aside the time for a recruiter chat, phone screen, a meeting with some of your team, etc. And the vast majority of devs don't get any overtime pay. The bottom line is that free time is extremely valuable. If you're asking your candidates to spend a weekend coding a project for free, be prepared for a whole bunch of them to lose interest and go looking somewhere else.

3. Yes, it's quite reasonable that a candidate with 15+ years of experience doesn't have any side projects to show. I've lost count of things I've played and fiddled with, and then abandoned, because they're simply not good enough to publish. Not to mention that your responsibility for your code doesn't end when you publish it. You're expected to maintain it, keep it documented, bug free, etc. A candidate might not have anything to show because they're "not good enough", but they also might be a mature and responsible dev.

I don't doubt that you've done a lot of hiring and that you're able to find candidates to suit your requirements, but don't fool yourself into thinking that there isn't a whole bunch of bias baked into your process. The fact that this bias isn't hurting you right now should make you question whether today's market really is as competitive as you think.

For example, I left my country 20 years ago because I wanted a better future and I had no desire nor conviction to stay and try to make that future happen there. Of those who stayed, most had no other choice. However, there's a non-negligible number of people who stayed despite having opportunities to leave, precisely because they are willing to fight to make things better.

It's the same old discussion about whether something is right just because it's legal or allowed. Just because a company has a right -- and an incentive -- to do something, doesn't mean that's a morally or ethically right thing to do.

In my opinion, what Whittaker is doing is, in a way, analogous to civil disobedience. And, just like with civil disobedience, reprisals are expected. It's worth keeping in mind that those reprisals aren't automatically right by virtue of being expected, just as her actions aren't automatically right by virtue of being similar to civil disobedience.

In other words, some of us feel we can't afford to, as another commenter put it, "leave your politics at home and let me do my job in peace". I believe this attitude -- that science and engineering should somehow remain orthogonal to and decoupled from ethics and morality -- to be downright pernicious to the society.

Make no mistake, I'm also against completely open borders without deportation, for a variety of reasons. "Fuck you, got mine" is not one of those reasons.

To quote Ronald Wright, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." The gig economy is just a new way of exploiting that mindset.

"Was" is the correct word to use. Here's a fun example: try explaining to someone non-technical why you can't simply download your e-mails. I went through that exercise this morning, when my wife asked me to download a bunch of e-mails and send them to her in a "folder", which she can then send to someone else.

So then I had to explain that GMail allows me to download a single message -- no bulk downloads, of course -- but it saves it in .eml format, which you can't open with programs that come installed on a typical Windows box. And even if you could, there's no guarantee that the guy you're sending them to can.

Of course, she thought that was stupid: why offer saving e-mails in an "obscure" format? So I had to explain why the Internet is now a bunch of walled gardens and closed services, all built on top of open and standardized protocols and formats. And, of course, those open standards can't improve and evolve easily, because each player in the game wants to lock users and their data inside their own walled garden.

So yeah, the takeaway in a nutshell is that the Internet was once open, but then it became lucrative.

EDIT: I think a lot of people replying here might be missing the point. Like I stated above, I was trying to explain the situation to a non-technical person. Yes, I'm aware of POP and IMAP support. Yes, I know RFC5322 is not an obscure format. But I'm talking about people who don't know or care what these things are. Try downloading a bunch of messages in RFC5322 format, zipping them and sending them to your average lawyer and see how they react.

Or a particular browser. Or a specific operating system. Or the wrong brand of device.

You can probably see where I'm going with that, but in case it's not perfectly clear, I'm trying to say that a company might want to dictate a lot more than just what extension you're using in a browser. Not everyone is going to agree that they are right to do that.

Bear in mind that there's more to consider here than the legality of what they're doing. The openness of the Internet, the interoperability of different operating systems and devices over a particular somewhat-standardized protocol -- these aspects aren't regulated by a law, but they're still important. I'm one of those people who remember the Browser Wars and I don't remember them fondly.

Of course, it's not just about technical aspects, either. There's the whole grey area of whether it's okay for LinkedIn to metaphorically rifle through our proverbial pockets, looking for stuff they don't like and don't want to admit on their virtual premises.

So no, I wouldn't agree that things are as clear cut as you present them.

I could write an in-depth critique of the whole post, but it's 5:30 pm and I would rather focus on finishing my work so I can go home and be with my family.

So instead of that, I'll just give you a summary of what I think about the post:

1) The post essentially compares two different approaches: a specific variant of object-oriented programming and a specific variant of functional programming.

2) There are various points in the post where the author plays fast and loose with definitions of certain concepts, in order to make them fit his narrative.

3) The Socratic dialogue format does not help make the reasoning clearer, it just makes the readers uncomfortably aware that they're being railroaded into reaching certain conclusions.

4) The conclusions reached in the post are a mixed bag of: a) useful and interesting, b) correct but incomplete, and c) correct only under very specific circumstances, rendering them potentially dangerous.

I couldn't get much further past this:

What is an object?

    An object is a set of functions that operate upon encapsulated data elements.

Let's say a doctor screws up and you end up having to do an extremely expensive procedure to fix that. Wouldn't winning a malpractice lawsuit allow you to cover those expenses? That's just one of the ways medical malpractice lawsuits make sense.

> For another, presumably the underlying logic of malpractice suits is to punish the underlying error in order to incentivise ... something ... that would prevent a recurrence. Is there any plausible, actionable outcome here which would prevent this type of repeated human error in future? One that that isn't counterbalanced by costs that would yield worse outcomes in other cases?

Honest question: what do you think is grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit these days? As far as I've been able to figure out, it seems that there has to be some kind of relatively serious, provable negligence involved.

> If so, why are we so sure the courts are best placed to locate and enforce this vs the medical profession itself, which I believe already aims to save as many lives as possible?

I'm having a hard time addressing that idea, because your way of thinking is foreign to me. Look, we are talking about things that seriously screw up people's lives or even end them. To me, your idea of self-regulated medical profession sounds like proposing that, instead of suing the truck driver who ran over your kid, you should let his employer deal with him.

> In the software industry there are no malpractice suits.

Medicine and software industry are not the same thing.

> random people who happened to sweet-talk the court into perceiving "malpractice" vs ordinary mistakes

Well, there it is. You seem to believe that there is no such thing as malpractice, it's all just "ordinary mistakes" that just might end up killing people or screwing up their health permanently.

Here:

> would try harder to [...] move to another location.

Again, I find this logic to be extremely confusing. How related is "car camping" to Seattle's homeless? Is there some implication that the majority of them have cars they sleep in? Or am I missing something there?

As for the incentive to follow basic property or drug laws, again, how does that encourage homelessness? I could understand if you argued it encourages crime, but why homelessness?

The only remaining argument is basically "this encourages already homeless people to move to Seattle", which I can see being a problem, but of a different kind. It shares certain aspects with the immigration-related problems: in both cases, it's an effect of a deeper underlying problem that acts as a root cause and should be solved.

Honest question, because I'm not a security expert: can you do this without having already pwned your target to such a degree that this would be unnecessary?

However, there's still the fact that @dev_dull is not distinguishing between people arguing about government restricting individual freedoms and government regulating corporations. It's not about whether people can be trusted with high interest cards, it's about whether corporations should be allowed to set any interest rate they want.

Funny, one of my pet peeves since I moved to the US is the "keep right unless passing" or "left lane is for passing only" or any other variation of the same sermon. Sounds logical at first, but it's really bureocracy.

If the highway is congested, then the rule becomes meaningless. The traffic density is so high, that it's perfectly natural to use all of the available lanes.

If the highway is not congested, then the density is low enough that you should be able to change lanes as necessary, with minimal fuss. If that's the case, then the whole "keep to the right unless passing" is really just a crutch. In this situation, what we really want is something along the lines of "pay attention and don't make people pass you on the right", but that's not enforceable. So we come up with a rule like "keep to the right unless passing", because that can be enforced by cops.

It's not that I disagree with you on the topic of transparency, it's that I think we can't really compare opinions on two very different topics as if they were the same topic. People complaining about too many subscription content providers are not really arguing for or against a monopoly. It's not the same discussion.

> And I'd say Google and Facebook haven't done a sufficient job in proactively informing the public about what they collect, how they generate revenue from it, and what's currently stored about a user.

Granted, but I'm pretty sure that even if they did so, it wouldn't make much difference. I always refer people to Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON keynote called "Changing threats to privacy" [1]. I would definitely recommend watching it in full, but the key takeaway from it -- for the purposes of this discussion -- is that it all boils down to choice. He talks about the way technology changes the fabric of the society, how it changes the way people interact, communicate and coordinate, and declining to participate in this new way of doing things exposes you to the "no network effect".

This is why it's not enough for Google and Facebook to merely inform people about what they collect and how they use it. As long as they're practically monopolies, they can disclose and inform and then go on just the same, because there's no other viable alternative and they'll work hard to ensure it stays that way.

The traditional way of dealing with an incumbent that is too powerful to reasonably compete with is to break it up, in hopes of diminishing not its power to compete, but rather its power to stifle competition.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk

First of all, you're treating two very different types of services as equal and identical. Netflix and Hulu are subscription content providers. Google and Facebook can be defined and described in many ways, but subscription content providers is not among them [1]. It's quite natural and understandable that people would have different expectations and complaints.

Second, the situation with content providers isn't binary. The solution to the problem of not being to afford a whole bunch of subscription content providers is not limited to having one become a monopoly.

Third, it's not just cost and convenience when it comes to access to content. Take Spotify Premium, for example. It's a subscription service that gives you access to all the music in its catalog as long as you pay your subscription. Except that there is absolutely no legal way for you to ensure access to any subset of the content. Have a favorite song, album or artist? Tomorrow it might disappear from Spotify's catalog and you have no way of hanging on to it.

Fourth, the concerns that lead people to suggest that Google, Facebook or Amazon should be broken up are varied and nuanced, and they go way beyond cost and convenience.

So no, I don't think you can sum up people's opinions into two seemingly contradictory mindsets.

[1] Yes, I'm aware of YouTube and Spotify having a similar model. That actually happens to be a pretty good argument to break up Google.

It's easy to dig up a survey someone did that supports the conclusions you wish were true. It's much harder to find the actual state of reality.

If you click through to their report, you'll realize that there's not much information about their sample, other than this:

From January 14 to February 15, 2019, Malwarebytes Labs conducted a survey on nearly 4,000 participants to measure respondents’ confidence in their own privacy and security practices, as well as their confidence in privacy being maintained by businesses.

There's absolutely no information about the demographic breakdown of the participants and no way to access the dataset itself. In other words, we have no way of establishing that this survey is worth anything more than a blog post on a site that tries to promote its software.

And gated by Google, for the most part.

This is precisely what bothers me about the vast majority of software out there. It's hard to find software that doesn't suffer from what I call, for lack of a better name, "forced evolution": the devs keep fiddling with the UI and adding new features of dubious usefulness. Meanwhile, the quality slowly, but surely deteriorates: the software gets bloated, runs slower, becomes harder to use, etc.

No, we don't all want to get rid of drug cultivation. We do all want to ensure that substance abuse doesn't affect our lives and our families. Of course, that's a vague sentiment and it's hard to get everyone to agree on the specifics of what it means. That didn't stop certain politicians from exploiting that and manipulating general opinion and passing laws and foreign policies that ended up creating a whole lot of suffering for a whole lot of people in different parts of the world.

As a result, there's a whole lot of systemic oppression involved in drug cultivation these days. Unlike child labor, it's not the drug cultivation itself that we should strive to get rid of, but that doesn't negate my original point, which is that just trying to solve the problem in the most direct way possible is going to make things worse.

If you think about it, the other two examples I gave can also be adapted to become something that isn't pernicious in and of itself. If you legalize prostitution and make it a safe profession that adults can choose, instead of resorting to out of necessity, then sex tourism isn't necessarily something you want to get rid of. Similarly, if my kid wants to mow neighborhood lawns to get some money or sell lemonade or babysit other kids, that's not the kind of child labor we're trying to get rid of.

Going back to the topic of drug cultivation, I would recommend reading "Lacrónica" by Martín Caparrós. In one of the chapters, he describes the situation in Bolivia in 1991. One of the many things that fascinated me in his account was the fact that, at that time, a farmer could get 100-150 bolivianos (local currency) for a hand-carried load of coca leaves or 1 boliviano for a hundred oranges. That meant that, to make the same amount of money for one load of coca, a farmer would have to sell 15,000 oranges and there's no way -- even if there's enough demand -- to carry 15,000 oranges in one trip.

I mention this because I think it's a fascinating insight into the systemic oppression I've been talking about. These farmers were not getting rich off their drug cultivation. On the contrary, they lived in quite precarious conditions and they had to cultivate coca leaves to be able to feed themselves and their families.

So yeah, maybe we don't all want get rid of all drug cultivation, but we definitely want to get rid of it in its present form.

None of the advances in software development have eliminated software development. Hell, there are still job openings for COBOL developers. CI hasn't resulted in a whole swaths of people suddenly out of work because they were running tests by hand and now there's nothing else they can do.

Others in this thread have already given a few examples and explanations of what is wrong with those jobs, as they are now. Much has also been written and reported about it. All in all, there's not much I feel the need to add to that.

Instead, I would like to point out that systemic oppression that is tightly entangled with economy is not a new thing that Amazon invented and that humanity is facing all of a sudden. A few examples would be child labor, sex tourism and drug cultivation. We all want to get rid of those, but history has shown that trying to do so in the most direct way possible only makes things worse. Nobody's arguing that we should stop trying, just that the solution is not as straightforward as most people imagine.

As for "having it both ways", you're presenting a false dichotomy. You're implying that the society must: either 1) preserve the status quo that makes those people work in those conditions, or 2) eliminate those jobs in a fashion that makes it worse for those people. Those are not the only options.

This is not really a completely new situation that humanity has never faced before. Throughout our history, there have been numerous examples of undesirable jobs being so tightly entangled with the economy that getting rid of them is problematic.

A few examples that come to mind are cocaleros in places like Bolivia, sex tourism for pedophiles in places like Sri Lanka, or child labor just about everywhere. I think that -- despite the horrific lack of empathy present in some other comments -- we can assume most people would agree that these are things we need to get rid of. If you study the history of the efforts to do so, you will find that going about it in a ham-fisted way only makes things worse. Despite that, nobody will argue that the only alternative is to just preserve status quo.

Except that's not how that works. Increasing the productivity of a job does not eliminate it. A job is eliminated when it's no longer necessary.

Unless you live in a parallel dimension, we're both in the world where there's more and more software development being done every day. Twice the speed results in twice the output, not half the developers.