_Donny

I have switched back to hotels too, due to my recent experience.

My friends and I were staying over at a 4-subroom Airbnb during the summer. The apartment looked great, and we really could not complain about the price either.

However, we started noticing that none of the furniture match; there we no more than two of the same chairs, the beds were all different, the cutlery was bent and visibly used, etc.

When two of my friends sat on the edge of a double-bed at once, the whole frame collapsed. Puzzled, we inspected further only to find custom fitted planks, badly mounted by too small screws, legs made of cheap wood, and so on.

Contacting the host, we were told that we had to reimburse him for a completely new bed, as well as the transport and installation costs. Meanwhile, we could just "sleep on the floor".

It became all to clear that the host picked up furniture from some kind of recycling station, and expected the guests to pay for it when it inevitably breaks. This way, he could continuously replace the furniture for new one, and having the guests pay for it!

Luckily, we could prove to Airbnb that the furniture was not original, and that it was modified multiple times, badly. After the whole vacation spent worrying about the communication between the host and the Airbnb, we managed to avoid having to pay.

It scares me that the host was willing and able to ignore the safety of his guests, and he got away with it without any repercussions from Airbnb.

PS: While my bad review of the host did not even put a nudge in his almost perfect 4.5/5 score, mine fell so drastically that most decent hosts might now reconsider housing me.

As someone who is soon to graduate in CS from an university, these seemingly reoccurring stories of terrible interviews really scare me.

Is it normal for the interviewing process to take up all the candidates day? Is it always expected to spend 3 weeks brushing up on algorithms for an interview?

How important are the coding interviews in the decision process? I consider myself a decent programmer, and I have passed and even enjoyed all the algorithmics courses at my university. However, asking me to implement, lets say, the Minimum Cut algorithm on a whiteboard in front of multiple interviewers, would totally break me down.

From my limited professional experience, the average day of a developer is the exact opposite of what you have to display at these interviews I read about. When I code, I need my silence and time to think, I need a relaxing and comfortable environment, I need the internet, man-pages, StackOverflow, IRC. I need my own notepad on which I can doodle, and occasionally write down notes for later. I need room to make and learn from my mistakes. And last but not least, I will have bad days where I might underperform. Interviews seem to be the exact opposite of all this.

I am somewhat surprised how important fast typing seems to be for computer users, mainly developers.

It is never the typing that is my personal bottleneck. As a developer, I spend perhaps 99% of my time thinking of the problem, before actually writing the best and most concise solution. When writing reports or other academic papers, I first construct the sentences before writing them slowly while reading out loud.

I guess this is personal preference, but I think it is worth the time to type slowly, instead of letting the fingers do the thinking.

Even though it is a 'minor' feature, I find the !bangs feature incredibly useful and time-saving. They even make searching on Google faster!

I really enjoyed the story, but it really scares me that I might end up the same way.

I am a CS student, but I have had a lot of student jobs related to my studies. At most workplaces, they appreciated my skills and abilities, but being able to only work 1 day a week, the tasks I get assigned are not of any real value to the company, and I suspect my managers never really cared if I finished them. Since nobody cared about what I did, I quickly got demotivated, and I usually ended up browsing Hot Questions on SO, IRC, and HN. These sites look somewhat relevant, and did not cause any suspicion, like Facebook or Twitter.

Now I am soon to finish my degree, and get a full-time job. However, I am really anxious whether I am actually able to work for 8 hours in succession every day, 5 days a week. University is a lot of work, but it is scattered throughout the day. I am not sure if I have ever programmed for more than 2 hours in succession. Programming 8 hours a day seems like an incredibly burden, and mentally unbearable...

I understand that the article is about how many developers are inclined to use wrong "hammers" for certain tasks.

However, it also makes me think about how we actually code. At my university, we learn to sort files, parse data-structures, model various data formats, etc.

But in most UNIX systems, we already have the basic building blocks in the form of simple programs that do one thing, very well. Will programming ever evolve from programming languages to more complex building blocks in the form of programs combined with pipes in the bash terminal?

I remember seeing a documentary featuring Edward Snowden, where he said something along the lines:

"Saying "I do not care about my privacy, because I have nothing to hide", is like saying "I do not care about freedom of speech, because I have nothing to say""

This explanation stuck with me, because I find it extremely useful in situations when explaining the importance of privacy online to non-technical people.