asuffield

Also, how many couples actually keep their email secret from each other? How many would have no expectation of privacy here, and hence view the subject differently?

What were the actual survey questions asked? This sort of thing is very sensitive to how you phrase the question.

Having worked at and with small companies that rely on advertising to overcome obscurity and get business to their products - modern analytics tools have pretty much got this problem solved, the marketing people knew and actively tracked their ROI on a daily basis and were shuffling limited funding around between various forms of advertising to optimise sales.

Every time I see somebody claiming that advertising doesn't work, I just think that there's another person who has never tried to run a small online business.

Yes. Click here and you'll be one of them: https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&nco...

There's lots more data over here: http://www.google.com/trends

(I don't believe the author was referring to this, I think he meant something far less interesting.)

The other reason is that workers in technical fields are not interchangeable. The opening article on this thread is operating under the assumption that all workers are effectively the same, therefore any industry which is simultaneously recruiting and cutting staff must be doing something "bad". If workers are not all the same, then the most likely explanation of the behaviour is instead that the industry (or company) is trying to recruit good workers and get rid of bad ones.

I would like to state quite firmly that releasing the signing keys is absolutely the wrong solution to this problem, because that destroys the security that code signing was designed to create.

The correct solution to this problem is to release a tool for people to change the code signing certificates on their devices to ones which they control, and to arrange for this tool to require a reasonable level of physical access so that it cannot be used remotely. Then device owners can have code signing security on their own terms and be confident that only their own trusted builds can be pushed to their devices via remote updates, which is a super useful feature when you have more than two devices.

They refer to distinct things but share a lot of their code. Blaze doesn't contain anything that you would find useful, you need our infrastructure for its other features to work.

> I cannot understand why people really think any system is so foolproof as to charge only those guilty.

A cynical observer might make a connection between the people who think that and the inability of the system to charge only those guilty.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google, and my team is oncall for public DNS.)

I believe you have misunderstood what a network AS number is. This identifies your ISP, not your account. So the permanent logs would say something approximating "a level3 user queried news.ycombinator.com".

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google, and my team is implicated in this infrastructure.)

This stuff is designed to be able to go almost anywhere that's willing to host it under the standard contract. File a request, let the relevant team figure out if it's worth putting a rack in. Nothing bad can happen as a result of asking the question.

(Ah, "major datacenter" in Chicago. It's bad of me to be amused by this. We don't have anything we'd call a "datacenter" in Chicago, that's a small installation ;). The list is here: http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/)

My immediate observation is that "indefinite" means "unknown", not "unlimited". I'm not sure this is the word they wanted to use, but it may be a more accurate description.

Your first team after hiring can be a bit arbitrary - you aren't cut out of the decision loop, but as an outsider it is impossible for you to know enough to make an informed decision.

Every team after that is your choice with full access to information. Google has a thriving internal job market.

We do not even use numeric scores any more. I wasn't at the company in 2011 so I can't comment on possible historical accuracy, but it's nothing like this today.

I'm an engineer at Google. This article's description of stack ranking and perf is fundamentally and completely wrong. There is no stack ranking for perf ratings, there is no percentage of people that have to fail, and managers are not allowed or empowered to give people poor perf ratings in the way described here.

I have no comment on the stuff about unions.

The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it (and they do, extensively). Small companies and startups don't have the time or funding to do it.

Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training.

This article makes the persistent assumption that any graduate is the same as any other engineer.

Having worked for a whole bunch of companies over the past few years, one thing is a constant in the tech industry: there is a limitless supply of candidates for any given job, all of which are bad. It is a huge, challenging problem to find the small number of people you want to hire. I'm not sold that "10x developers" really exist, but I know that "0x developers" are plentiful: these candidates aren't just a "poor fit", they are entirely unable to do the job they're applying for. I've seen far too many graduates who are entirely unable to solve the most basic screening questions, and just don't seem able to write code.

In a similar vein, it is entirely reasonable for a company to be simultaneously cutting jobs and hiring, if they are cutting persistent underperformers and trying to hire more promising replacements. (Some legal fiction is necessary to do this in the current regulatory environment)

When you're on a corp device, your DNS search path includes google.com. It's not magic at all, it's over here: http://goto.google.com/

(You're going to see a login page that you can't authenticate to)

So they haven't solved the problem of getting a free implementation, they've just disabled the security feature that stops rootkits from replacing your bios?

Now I don't have the freedom to modify the code or improved security. How is this making me better off?

I'll just point out that this is a graph of CTR growth y/y, not CTR. It's easy to grow faster when you're further behind.

I believe the GP was trying to say that while your first sentence sounds reasonable, your second one sounds surprising and needs some justifying.

I'm always very hesitant to suggest anything based on a vague description - but it sounds like games are not the problem here, because the same pattern repeats in other things.

So they promised something they couldn't deliver and now haven't delivered it. This appears to have done nothing to help the situation. "Blackmail" might not be precisely the right word, but you could perhaps argue it's some kind of fraud? It's certainly a failure of their entire platform.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody else. I work at Google.)

We have made multiple extremely clear statements on this topic. I link a couple of them here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/19/google-issues-clearest-sta...

It's only true because he's stuck the words "by default" in there. The button to set a password-based key is in the menu and then it does end-to-end crypto.

If you don't give it a key, it does the best it can with an impossible problem.

Here's an alternative hypothesis: the interview process is selecting for different traits than what you are expecting.

https://www.google.com/about/careers/lifeatgoogle/hiringproc... is a pretty good explanation.

To fill in one gap - our hiring process has an extra layer of insulation to better control individual biases. Your interviewers all submit feedback and an independent hiring committee makes the decision, on a different day, with all due deliberation.

The reason nobody has anything to say to you at the end of the day is because none of that has happened so nobody knows what to say at that point, and I don't think it's likely to make you feel better to have somebody give you a completely generic speech that has got nothing to do with you.

As for the more general thing that keeps popping up - do people seriously believe that all the thousands of Google engineers who do interviews haven't figured out that people writing code on a whiteboard under stress aren't the same thing as people sat at their desk grinding out code?

Please drop me an email internally. My username is the same as here. This conversation cannot be meaningfully had in a public forum.

Here's how "net profitable" works. Before:

Merchant buys 5 units of item at $1 each and sells them at $3. Supplier makes $5 in revenue. 5 customers each get one item at $3. Merchant makes a profit of $10.

After:

Merchant buys 20 units of item A at $1 and sells them at $2. Supplier makes $20 in revenue. 20 customers each get one item at $2. Merchant makes a profit of $20.

Net profit: merchant is $10 richer, supplier is $15 richer, 20 customers are each $1 richer.

People have different resources and trade between them generates wealth. More trade generates more wealth. This is not a zero-sum game.

It is of course not the same question: the article poses the question "would you like to have this nice thing?", and the reversed form I posed is "are you willing to pay for it?"

My immediate observation is that the majority of people will tend to say "yes" to the first and "no" to the second, and what we can learn from this is that mostly people tend to want.

I think you have rather casually tossed out the proposition that the status quo brings the customer negative value, without supplying any justification for that claim. I also think that your proposal of passing legislation to force all merchants to raise their lowest prices is unlikely to prove popular. (This proposal is commonly referred to as "increasing sales tax", and seems like it would be regressive in nature)

You can throw away your supermarket loyalty card, and stop getting those 2% discounts. You're not powerless. You're making a choice.