The tech sites are already going crazy over "M1 malware", which in reality is just malware authors updating their Xcode version and recompiling.
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He had a 77% average in college, which made him a C student. He even characterized himself as an average student, which is accurate. The idea that he was a secret genius is patently ludicrous and is only proffered by political hacks.
That seems to be jumping the gun. You don't normally get an onsite immediately, you usually have to go through much shorter screens, the first of which may only be an hour max. So you don't necessarily waste a lot of time on any one company unless you go deep into the process, and you're probably going to be screened out early by lot of them. The take home assignments are generally supposed to be replacements for technical screens, but they invariably take a much longer amount of time.
There's also an investment differential. Every hour that a candidate has to spend in an interview is also an hour the employer has to spend in the interview. Whereas an employer can send you off with a take home project for an indefinite number of hours while they sit back and do nothing. Are they going to spend the same amount of time reviewing the project as the candidate did writing it? Extremely doubtful.
Indeed. Is there any scientific evidence that tech interviews are better than random selection?
Again, the sports metaphor breaks down, because winning and losing is a zero-sum game, whereas companies aren't necessarily playing a zero-sum game. Moreover, a team's draft position is inversely correlated with its record, so there's an incentive to "tank" to get better draft picks. ("Rebuilding" often means getting rid of your expensive best players and intentionally losing for a while.) No such analogous situation exists in business, it's just an arbitrary effect of how sports leagues are organized. It's actually designed that way to encourage competitive parity among teams, prevent any one team from dominating forever.
What is my "monopoly theory"? I clarified what I meant: "A platform so gigantic that it's impossible for humans to intelligently manage it". We don't really have a good term for a corporation that has undue, oversized market power. Pedants like to argue "so-and-so is not literally a monopoly!" but this is just wordplay and doesn't really address the serious social issues involved.
> Your point 2 says you really want to join the Amish.
Maybe!
> You mean smaller platforms like Parler or 4chan?
I mean smaller platforms. It would be ridiculous to suggest that your cherrypicked examples are representative. You can make anything look bad by cherrypicking.
The results are pretty obvious and depressing when you see Apple throw engineers at the Mac who don't understand the Mac. Low quality, bugs, constant accidental breakage, bad design in opposition to the platform standards.
Not every engineer can work on "the next great thing". You need a lot of engineers to work on the old great thing too. A mixture, a balance of engineers is important. A company gets diminishing returns from having all jack-of-all-trades engineers.
Google is the absolute worst at this. They're constantly creating new things... and then discontinuing them a few years later. Their follow through is terrible. Nobody wants to do long-term maintenance. Even though most of Google's revenue comes from the old things, such as search. (My impression that Google search is actually less accurate and useful now than it was 10 years ago.)
People love to make sports analogies, so here's mine: imagine a football team that put 11 all-star quarterbacks on the field. They would be the worst football team in the world. Every team needs role players.
Is this supposed to be a pro or a con?
This is very hard on people who are already employed. Who wants to work 2 jobs simultaneously? The pay of a short-term contract is basically nothing compared to the pay of a full-time permanent job.
Suppose I apply to 20 places, and they all want me to do this? It doesn't scale at all.
You can't really compare with an anonymous junior engineer position.
There's also no hard industry-wide salary cap. With the salary cap, the best way to maximize your overall team performance is to get superstars under contract when they're young and underpaid, because a team can only afford a few veteran superstars. Also, sports teams have a hard roster limit, whereas big tech companies can hire as many employees as they like. The analogy breaks down in so many ways.
2) Somehow humanity survived without these networks pre-2007ish.
3) I have no problem with the existence of many smaller special-interest social networks. Those are manageable, and we had them before the rise of the BigCos. The problem is with the existence of a few all-encompassing, world-consuming, general-purpose social networks. They have proven to be completely unmanageable and toxic.
"Abolish Gmail", for instance, doesn't mean abolish email providers. Not at all. And it doesn't mean that "the next gmail" will replace it. Healthy competition is good, unhealthy monopolies are bad.
A platform so gigantic that it's impossible for humans to intelligently manage it should simply not exist.
Are there? How many historical precedents are there for "curation" at the scale of today's tech giants: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple App Store, Amazon.com? IMO none of them do it well, or even reasonably.
> given the number of _potential_ instance of mishap that do not regularly occur
We only hear about the "notable" cases. Every day, people are accidentally or intentionally banned by Twitter or one of the other tech giants, and nobody ever hears about it, because these people are not famous and have nobody else to speak for them and raise a public fuss.
> any the relatively minor consequences of the mishaps that do occur
Regardless of one's opinion on the matter, you can hardly call the banning of the POTUS, for example, from the world's largest and most important social networks as a "relatively minor consequence". This is very consequential. You may think the consequences are good, or you may think they're bad, but it's consequential.
If these "mishaps" are not consequential, why are we all here talking about them?
We all eagerly await this utopia.
Or maybe expecting that is silly, given the many years of empirical evidence?
What isn't? A lot of "hard news" stories nowadays are just republishing tweets. So-and-so famous person tweeted this, so-and-so other famous person tweeted a response, yadda yadda. [James Earl Jones voice] This is CNN.
Individuals can't win in this scenario. Like it or not, the big social networks have captured the masses.
This has nothing to do with euthanasia, but that's the point. It could be anything, or nothing. Twitter doesn't even have to give a reason for suspending accounts. There is no accountability.
"Just don't use Twitter", some say. But Twitter has 300 million users, and you're supposed to "just" ignore that audience. How about "Just don't sell your product in the United States"? Doesn't sound so great, does it. The excuse is always is Twitter is a "private" company (not really, they're publicly traded). But Twitter is literally the size of the United States, it has approximately the same population. Facebook has a larger population than any country on Earth. These aren't just companies, they're almost nations.
Did he?
"I’ve mostly stopped sharing unsolicited “helpful” just-a-thoughts and comments at work. I save them for Twitter"
This is why I said it's not even clear what exactly the author is talking about. I actually have no idea, but everyone else seems to think they know, despite the fact that they have very different interpretations of what it is.
Who is commenting on gardens? Who is commenting on bridges? I mean, if a bridge collapses, then a lot of people will comment on it, deservedly so. "Yes, people died, but don't criticize, go off and make your own bridge!"
The very same brilliant Republican Governor Scott Walker did however offer massive state subsidies to Foxconn to build a factory here... which Foxconn never actually did. The whole thing turned out to be a giant scam.
Taxpayer subsidized services for corporations? Hell yes! Taxpayer subsidized services for individuals? Hell no! The irony is that building public infrastructure would actually create jobs, which was the nominal justification for the factory.
Or is it that only makers of this particular thing are qualified to comment? But that would be a strange principle, because again, who are you making things for?
If you're a maker, then you're making things for someone. If you're only making things for yourself, then of course nobody else has a right to comment. But if you're making things for other people, then it seems to me that those other people have the right, perhaps even the obligation, to comment on the product, right? The article verges on the parodic idea that no maker should ever be subject to any criticism. If that's not the author's intention, then the author ought to be clearer what is intended.
That's my drive-by comment.
Ok, but that came later and wasn't present in 2014.
> they did a "hard-sell" with Swift
I agree with that. :-)
> "Full System API" is the native frameworks; UIKit, AppKit, WatchKit, etc., as well as things like WebKit and MapKit.
Swift did of course have bridging to Objective-C and the preexisting Objective-C API. I find it strange to equate language bridging with announcing a full system API — an API originally announced around the turn of the century (can't believe I'm using that phrase now). Cocoa-Java, which no longer exists, also had such bridging, as does PyObjC and MacRuby/RubyCocoa. Still, most of the system API to this day are written by Apple in Objective-C.
I'm rereading your previous comment multiple times but unfortunately still failing to see what you're referring to. The only explanation I can see is "we were quite familiar with Lattner and LLVM, so we were quite aware of his propensity for WIN. That gave me some confidence, going forward."
> They also announced a full system API, as well as a product roadmap.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "a full system API", and does Apple ever announce a product roadmap? I would definitely be interested in this roadmap of which you speak. :-)
> I’ve been writing in Swift since the day it was announced
May I ask how you consider these to be compatible?
I've seen no evidence that companies are even trying to hire developers who "avoid complexity". If anything, the interview processes are designed to select for engineers who bathe in complexity. There are so many interviews which consist of "How would you rewrite from scratch this thing that already exists?"
I trust Microsoft not to be literal malware, but I don't trust Microsoft to avoid doing stupid unnecessary crap to your Mac.