biscottigelato

Science was supposed to be about objectivity. Not who published it or how it was funded... Had to question whether I'm living in the 1600s or 2020...

Maybe even more troubling than the potential that the virus is engineered. It's that why are American institutions trying to limit distribution on a scientific literature just because of the literature's implications? Chilling...

Maybe even more troubling than the potential that the virus is engineered. It's that why are American institutions trying to limit distribution on a scientific literature just because of the literature's implications? Chilling...

We give so much more slack when it's a company that supports a totalitarian regime.

When it's Facebook which is subject to scrutiny of many major democratic governments and press, we gives it no slack.

Ironic and funny.

Having of all people FB to be your arbiter of truth of what is a fact based political ad vs a non-fact based political ad sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

What we perceive as fact is actually something derived from a lot of open discourse based on a lot of evidence. Removing open discourse based on whether the discourse is fact based is circular reasoning and a chicken & egg problem. It's not fact check, it just becomes outright censorship.

Well, nothing is black or white. It's always a trade-off. Destroy the intrinsic property of the system to trade for broader access. Is it worth it?

It makes me think of the Bitcoin scaling debate. Destroy the ease of running nodes for the ease of trading at low fees. Is it worth it?

In this case, I don't think the suggestion is for people to 'care' more. At the same time we also have to recognize that we can't accommodate for everyone's situation without destroying the fundamentals of the system itself. It's a balancing act. Where the line should be drawn is probably very subjective.

Sure, but CCP's goal have been achieved. Conspiracy theorist would validly suspect that Zoom have been working with the CCP and they have compromised and agreed to do this one time thing then back track. Getting what the CCP needs (censor Tiananman Square discussion during the peak of US/China tension) while preserving Zoom's long term business interest.

Maybe some of us has no double standard. We are against US aggression outside of its borders, especially at tremendous cost to local civilians, local economy and US taxpayers. Also of China's, which is at the cost of human rights globally.

I think whether said law came about from a system with separations of power and a democratic process makes a big difference in palatability.

I think a lot of employees feel that since their company have a great website, a great product, a great business, they conflate it as their own and that 'anybody can do it'. In fact they have only done a tiny portion of anything themselves. It's not until they get thrown out on a blank canvas they'd learn to appreciate how hard it is if all they have is their own pair of hands.

Unfortunately the people interviewing are often going to be life-long employees that are expert of climbing the corp ladder, not so much the entrepreneurs who found and own the business.

Just saying they don't help as much as months of CTCI & Leetcode in an interview (I'd say they are exams, as they didn't interview me regarding these projects). They are definitely better than nothing of course.

I agree to a point. Making something people love doesn't mean it can be a great business. A successful startup is a lot of things.

PM is even harder to get into. Everybody thinks they fit in a PM job, so their application to openings rate is even worse. So ends up most PM job's first requirement is you have been a PM before... Entrepreneurship is so vague that it doesn't apply.

One'd think a Github with commit history is going to go further for dev positions. Not exactly it seems...

Craziest part is I'm applying for just front-end positions. And these companies claim that 'we want well rounded full-stacker for every position'. Not saying knowing some backend stuff wont' be helpful, but wouldn't UI/UX and design be more relevant in a front-end position?

I want to work for unicorns before they become unicorns. Those are hard to find tho... They also have very limited openings.

I think the problem is not knowing these terminologies makes these stories hard to describe. And the interview process won't even go down the questions you have mentioned. I'd have a lot to talk about if what you asked were the question instead. If they play with the apps and even just ask me point questions about them, I think I already won half the battle.

I'm more getting: "Cool app demo. Now lets not waste time and go into algorithm puzzles."

Yeah, I got next step for all the take-homes. Usually impressed cuz I'd whip up not only a working app but great UI/UX designs in a day turn-around. But there aren't a lot of those. And these processes sometimes can go awry for weird reasons. Toronto company that doesn't respond after I said I'm in Vancouver. A New York company that don't want to fly me over and schedules a new round of video interview every 2 weeks (and still on-going)....

Nice. I have a process that's 6 weeks in already. And they say they still need another 2 weeks to make a decision....

Or you work 100 hours weeks. 5 features every release. While juggling marketing campaigns, UI/UX design, project management tools, etc etc. It's a lot of stuff over the year...

Deep or not I don't know. Deep enough to have a performant app that creates native content to our own backend which involves video streaming and prefetching.

It's really hard to make money from these projects. Hence going back for employment. Either they succeed as a startup, or they are worthless. Building on contract is a tough business also. Software is great if it works and goes viral because it costs so little to scale Software. But otherwise lines and lines of code are pretty much worthless aside from learning experiences.

I did have 9 years working in a medium sized NASDAQ trade company doing firmware (C). It's not OO, but definitely team based development there. I think my problem is still to have interviews be focused on these projects. I don't mind if they grill me on the details of them to demonstrate what kind of person I am. But more often than not it's about standard behavioural and algorithmic puzzles.

Yeah, they were more full blown startups in mind. If full blown projects doesn't help, side project of lesser quality (cuz less effort for the same person), prob won't help either?

And I am following my advice now totally. Just doing CTCI and Leetcode... Not gonna count on any other projects as an employment crutch. They either work as a business or doesn't. Employment is a completely independent thing... This is just in counter to a lot of others that claims they can always build a startup and if fails, go back to employment. At least with current employment practices, it just doesn't work like that. No matter how much applicable skills one got, it seems it boils down to 90% algorithm puzzles and that's it...

Thanks for the kind words. I am proud of my projects, but it takes a lot more than a good looking product to create a financially sustainable startup. I am pretty confident in my ability to build products. But the skill that's really needed is to identify the opportunity vs cost of an idea, to sell a vision, to motivate others to product good quality contribution to your vision, and a crazy amount of luck... That's why I'm putting startup projects in the back burner for now.

In terms of the job hunt process, I don't get it either. FAANGs do have a huge supply/demand imbalance when it comes to tech positions. I guess I just need to be more aggressive in concentrate on more smaller companies.

I was leading a team of 4 (the rest are part-time). Definitely humbled in how crappy of a manager I am. But learned a heck lot tho. Stuff that doesn't translate through an algorithm puzzle yet again...

I'm doing live demos either in-person or on video calls. The Unicorns/FAANGs doesn't give a damn. Heck, some don't even give you the space/time to do such demos. 10 minutes behavioural grilling, and then 45 minutes algorithm puzzles. 5 minutes left for you... Shouldn't be called an interview. Should be called it what it is, a straight out standardized exam.

Yeah. Gonna do my last 'standard interview' with yet another FAANG, and the last FAANG I'm gonna apply to, coming up Tuesday. Startups excites me a lot more anyways... Just that they have a lot less openings and budget & logistical support for relocations.

I basically implemented join tables to keep track of reputation, along with a periodic reputation calculation algorithm that accounts for freshness and other feed prioritization metrics. Without knowing the words 'Joint Table' or 'Freshness'. This is one of the hundreds fo things I did. I can harp about marketing, conversion funnel. or UI/UX design. or Customer Validation and Lean Startup...

But all I ended up getting is 'Cool App'. But 'Your technical competency because you can't finish implement a working Trie in the 30 minutes that's left after you spent 15 minute talking about your cool project.'... So basically 99% weighting is on the algorithmic puzzles.

My thought is that the projects will be what really sets you apart. Everybody can say they learn quick, they are self starters. And these are often touted as the 'most important attributes'.

But it just boiled down to algorithm challenges which is mostly down to how much time one have 'wasted' to excel at them.....

For FAANGS, I bet half my interviews didn't even go to my landing sites. And no way would any of them have downloaded the app to see the complexity and performance of the application. I'm purely evaluated on algorithms and data structures. If so why bother with the projects? It's much cheaper to just spend the time to study algorithms and data structures. I'd argue I learn 1/100th of what I did. But if companies only look for what's missing out of their list of attributes (and a lot not even relevant to the job at hand), and discount the 99 other things that I have demonstrated to excel at, it's not only demoralizing, it's plain stupid.

Yeah, as I said, did a hundred things. I designed database schema without picking up a single book on database. First implementation was 100 DB accesses per Story fetch, and it blew the cap on my BaaS in days of development. LOL. Quickly figured out what's wrong via API documentation, redesigned the schema (I didn't even know what the word schema is, I thought it's just Excel table rows & columns). Shrunk it down to 0 accesses for query actions (query also fetch basic metadata for 50 Stories at the same time). Probably got all these done in 2/3 weeks, a quarter of the time someone goes thru a DB design course?

It's really hard to even recall dozens of these experience and shrink them into stories and putting words to these. In the startup world, it's called 'Get Shit Done'. In the monolithic FAANG & FAANG wannabe world, I dunno what it's called...

I demo'ed my work up front. And then did their algorithm puzzles. I don't think I aced them all. I have an answer to them all and demonstrate that I can tackle these kinda problems.

But it seems they want people that have studied for months and probably have seen the problem before, so they can go thru all the possible optimizations and come up with the best answer in 45 minutes. Basically they are hiring an 'Interview Cracking Engineer'. Not a developer...

I thought it used to be that they look at your resume and they ask you questions to confirm that your resume is real. And that's that. Now it's basically just an exam, period...