RandomOpinion

> Some people work like tortoises. They may appear slow, but the culminated effect of their very deliberate and careful decisions accumulates far better than a hare. I'm pretty sure my current process doesn't work in their favor, but I'm at a loss for better alternatives at this time.

As someone who prefers to contemplate a question carefully before answering and stutters considerably when put on the spot, kudos for you for considering taking a more inclusive and compassionate approach.

Triplebyte seems to angled toward doing pre-screening; the hiring organization still does a full interview loop afterward. What I proposed would be more along the line of handling the mechanics of administering a coding interview for a hiring organization while allowing their hiring manager & HR full control and also making the candidate as unstressed as reasonably possible.

I think there's a business opportunity here. Imagine something like ETS's system for administering the GRE: Come into a location in your city at a particular date/time, sit down at a computer pre-loaded with various editors / IDEs for common languages, and run through an 4-hour coding exercise specified by the hiring organization, and, at the end, your code is provided to the hiring organization for examination. Internet access is freely permitted but it is fully logged and reviewable by the hiring organization. A proctor is present to keep an eye out for cheating and to resolve any technical difficulties. This reduces the pressure to something not much higher than working in a regular office.

Bear in mind that this is for the coding part, which people seem to have the most difficulty doing on a whiteboard under pressure. There would still need to be a conventional behavioral interview as well.

Somebody want to run the idea past YC? ;)

Pretty much what other have said: if you want to retain the ability to code, you're going to have to keep coding. The bare minimum would be running through the exercises on various coding sites, such as HackerRank. What would be best is to devote a weekend a month (more if you can afford the time) to actually building something, be it a mobile app, web site, etc. for something that interests you.

Also, bear in mind that the farther along you go in your career, the harder it becomes to switch tracks. If you go more than a decade without coding professionally, it may be hard to get yourself considered for a coding job by many employers without an exceptional demonstration of your coding skills.

C# is a much better language and has better stewardship but Java has extremely broad usage.

Plus, speaking from personal experience, learning Java first and then learning C# is probably going to be a positive experience, whereas doing it the other way around feels like going back ten years in time.

> White CS grads do. not. want. to work in boring tech such as QA, etc.

Speaking as a longtime QA professional, if engineering teams want to interest and retain good people in QA, then stop. crapping. on. QA. people.

That means equal pay for equal talent. That means building career growth paths for testers to become SDETs or other QA specializations. That means any dev who talks down to QA gets to have a nice little conversation with their manager and HR about professional respect in the workplace.

Outside of a few die-hards, the software industry is not going to get good QA people until that happens.

> I am a 20 something who was hired for a salaried position shortly after graduation with a bachelors degree in math. ... The world is not as dismal as it may seem for millenials. It's just that demand for STEM + CS continues to grow while the demand for other fields is stagnant, relying on people leaving the workforce to create new openings.

That means you weren't around for the dot-com bust in 2001 or so. Yes, things are good right now but the situation can go south very suddenly and with very little warning and stay bad for several years.

Never seen one myself but it's entirely possible for a business to solicit volunteers to be laid off [1] or take early retirement [2].

[1] e.g. http://www.nyguild.org/time-inc-news-details/items/spots-ill...

[2] e.g. http://www.wcpo.com/money/local-business-news/kroger-offers-...

> Why do this when http://bitbucket.com will host private git repos for free?

Because you never know when one of these online services will suffer an outage, suffer a security breach that leasks your private repos or email & credentials, or even lose your data entirely. The fact that the service is free doesn't mean that it doesn't come without potential issues.

> "People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming."

EEs in the semiconductor industry have been talking about it for the past 20 years; they didn't know exactly when it would occur but they knew it was coming. It's only software developers who were blissfully unaware.

EDIT: The interesting thing about the end of Moore's Law from AMD's (and everybody who isn't Intel) perspective is that finally the playing field is moving closer to even. Before, Intel always had the most advanced fab processes because of the vast amounts of money they funneled into it, which meant that everybody else had to have a better architecture than Intel chips just to get equal performance. Now that Intel is losing that process advantage, it should become possible for everyone to compete purely on the basis of architecture again.

Hasn't that effectively already occurred in the form of YouTube? A bit of curation is really all it would take to form a virtual TV station.

Wish I could move (and ten years ago I would've in a heartbeat) but today I have too many personal ties where I am.

Thank you, though; that is a darned tempting offer.

> "Customer obsession" is not actual, actionable advice because it's not even measurable.

Not quantitatively perhaps, but qualitatively? Oh yes; it can be felt. There are some very large organizations where the employee and managers' main objectives are to get themselves a promotion or bigger bonus and, though it's never explicitly said, the health of the company or welfare of the customer is only a secondary goal.

Take a look through the monthly HN "Who's hiring?" posts. Jobs of any kind that aren't web (front-end, back-end, or full stack) or mobile apps are vanishingly scarce.

It's really quite depressing.

Any hacker who's employed, whether self- or by another, should be very, very interested in the business health of their employer since it directly affects their compensation and possibly their continued employment. Hacking cool technology might be interesting but it's the business that pays the bills.

Failing to perceive when your employer or business unit ceases to be a going concern will result in some very unpleasant surprises.

> Perhaps more to the point, Japan, which uses Chinese characters for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verb-roots, has a very high literacy rate.

While literacy might be high, there's been a stream of articles over the years in Japanese media noting that literacy in kanji (the component of Japanese based on Chinese characters) in particular has been steadily declining, even among the highly educated; e.g. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/07/03/national/kanji-w...

> How in this decade, with all we know and have learned about security and exploits, can this kind of thing still happen?

The software industry has learned a lot about a security and exploits, certainly.

The hardware industry, including embedded developers, well, not so much...

I'll take the take-home project. Though I communicate fine otherwise, I stutter miserably when an interviewer is staring at me while I'm trying to whiteboard.

Be a little flexible; not everyone finds the same things "insulting".

> If I were interviewing someone and they claimed to know C++, and then used "sizeof(A) / sizeof(A[0])" to get the size of an array, I'd question how much C++ they actually knew.

Or they've spent a lot of time in embedded systems development. Many of us write rather C-ish C++ because of the limitations of older compilers and the age of the code bases.

If you have a MSDN subscription, you have access to various versions of Windows 10, including the Enterprise version.

Between browsing, searching, Android phone telemetry, and GMail, Google already has better than that level of data on pretty much everyone already.

The underlying publication from the World Health Organization on which the article is based seems to be "Depression and Other Common Mental Disorders - Global Health Estimates" and is available at the following link:

http://www.who.int/mental_health/management/depression/preva...

"BEGIN" and "END" aren't all that bad. Some of us got our start in software using Turbo Pascal long, long ago.

Digging into the history briefly, patchable microcode seems to have existed in commercially released computers as far back as the 1960s.

"...CCROS [microcode] cards on the [IBM System/360] Model 30 could be replaced in the field. This made design modifications easier to accomplish, as well as providing for field diagnosis. ...

The later System/360 Model 25 and models of the later System/370 series were configured with at least one portion of the control store being read-write for loading microcode patches and microdiagnostics."

https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/uprog.html

To put it politely, if you think that, you don't know enough about the military or its training to have a meaningful opinion.

>Sounds like the sugar cookie test is a way of filtering out people who won't blindly accept arbitrary rules from authority.

Quite a non sequitur there.

As mentioned during the speech, Adm. McRaven was describing his own SEAL training. Since SEALs are an elite branch of the US Navy, individuals have to explicitly volunteer to enter SEAL training, are screened to a very high standard, and are warned well in advance that the training is extremely taxing, both physically and mentally.

That's not a very good analogy. Most would agree, I think, that the separation between CS, as taught in most programs, and professional software development is far, far smaller than the separation between physics and aerospace engineering.

It's rather simple: A proper CS education, one that has all that "useless" theory that a number of HNers love to deride, equips its bearer to understand how anything in the software world is implemented. You don't have to study as hard to pick up a new technology or stack because you will know roughly what the underlying implementation has to look like and can simply poke around to identify the components and interfaces that you know have to be there.

Or, as a recent blog posting that made HN succinctly put it "'How' ages faster than 'Why'" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13500883). Knowing the "why" of CS means you never have to chase the "how" of the latest flavor of the month stack or framework.

> I still think smart phones that dock and become full PC work stations would be great

The HP Elite x3 phone already does that.

http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/tablets-243002--1/hp-elite-x3

> The PM's get paid to do the mock interview.

This violates the anti-moonlighting clause that most companies have.

> Will a Google PM be ok in doing this mock considering that it may be considered unethical?

There is no incentive for top companies to permit their employees coach applicants with questions from their interview process. It would amount to being able to pay money to get an edge in their hiring process and the top companies wouldn't even be getting any of the fee.

The employees at the top companies are making enough money that they would have no interest in it anyway.