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Here are some slides summarizing the shorter paper this is based on:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170809055122id_/https://learni...

tl;dr They did a qualitative survey of what other people think makes a great software engineer at Microsoft.

Their take aways:

- The ability to learn is more important than any individual technical skill

- Making good decisions is rarely discussed in the software engineering literature, but it is critical to being a great software engineer

- Software engineering is a sociotechnical undertaking

- Delivering the code is often insufficient; complex contextual technical considerations abound.

* decision anxiety - agree

* fear of writing original ideas, both natural language and code - agree

* the inability to measure things - who said this is something that is necessary at all stages? sometimes you just need it done. when you have 1000 people teams selling to enterprises, sure. If it is you and your buddies, no need to measure, necessarily.

* preference towards bias - Why? If it works, a good engineer won't go to the newest tech/framework. They will stay with their biased favorite.

* cognitive conservatism - Disagree. See previous comment

* inability to form assertion criteria - Not exactly sure what you mean, but if you mean to reason about code and state at various points, then I agree

Why are your best practices better than whoever you'll hire's?

Just accept another person to be an adult, and help you in increasingly good ways and communicate well. Or fire them if they don't

Sounds like an AI wrote this.

> Maintaining Culture: As the team grows, it's vital to preserve the company culture and ensure new hires align with core values.

I honestly disagree. You should allow the culture to evolve, but make sure it doesnt evolve in a direction that is different than where your values are now.

As an analogy, if you have a child who is 3, their culture is "energy", "constant learning", and "being cute". When they are 13, they should evolve beyond #3. And, they probably should add "be social/fit in", and "do good work (on homework etc)"

If you try to keep the 13 year old on the "being cute" value, you'll miss out on a lot

Sounds great! Where do you work?

1000% agree. I'd rather spin my wheels for an hour on Google than ask a silly question in public

Meeting in person >1 hour away is difficult for people in many life circumstances. And if there are constant meetings, it either strains families or makes the person who can't make it feel left out

Totally disagree. For introverts, "everything public in slack" means that I would rather not say something than have 50 people see my thoughts/rants/silly questions in public

Why do you have to login to even try it? Non-starter.

"few"

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/03/22/poll-hamas-remains-p...

Thanks. I appreciate the encouragement. It was definitely pretty slow at the end of the year.

It isn't about getting responses though. That is generally fine, from what I can tell.

It is more that I feel like every company wants to talk, and they want to test you, but really are not interested in hiring even if you seem like a good candidate.

E.g. they want to wait for other candidates, are slow in scheduling, have tons of required interviews where they ask similar things

This is not the first case by a long shot.

Can I just say I love these threads? I got multiple interviews and an offer from a great company for an internship from one of them.

Is it possible to go back to phones with physical buttons? When it was obvious where to press, and not a guessing game?

Wonderful point. There's a Doctorow article I read somewhere that essentially put forth the following logic for digital distribution:

There will be a group of people who would not acquire the content unless it was digital. They may buy or pirate it. This is the group of interest. If more people who weren't going to get the content (b/c of lack of exposure, lack of interest, etc.) pay for it than don't pay for it, the digital venture is worthwhile (This ignores that some people who would have bought it non-digitally may pirate it, though that group is small; if you wish to support to movie by paying for it, you'll most likely do it regardless of medium)

For example: 100 people would have bought the movie if it was only physical.

100 other people will have never heard of the movie unless it is released digitally. Of these 100, 75 people buy the movie, 25 pirate it.

By listing it digitally, the publisher gets 175 people's worth of profit, and 25 people's worth of "loss". Therefore, it is worth listing digitally.

Background checks will show where you've worked, unless you were getting paid illegally. Still, I agree with you. It isn't something to scream out loud.

Why would I write tests for Tic-Tac-Toe? It's insanely easy to exhaustively hand-test, or just look at the code to see its validity. If you expect tests on something that simple, then you're expecting people to waste 1/3 of their time testing code that is sure to work.

How is that good? It's all memorization

Sounds like a decent start-up idea

Sadly enough, I've been ask the UDP/TCP question many times, so I have a good answer, though I have never studied either in depth. So, in theory that would be a great question. But, it is asked too often to really be of any use.

Well that is unfair. I got did not get an interview at a financial company for this reason. Unless stated explicitly, I'm not going to gold-plate interview code, because my assumption is that you are weeding out people who cannot code.

If you tell me to write it as OO as possible, then I'll do that. But if I can write it in a shorter, more efficient way using only arrays, I'll do that.

For the guy with friends that he doesn't trust. Actually, for the guy who thinks he has friends.

Not to criticize unnecessarily, but what would anyone want to code web apps in C? I'm not saying rails, etc. are the be-all-end-all, but why C? To seem extreme?