bpyne

It depended on the company. MS interviewers came in khaki slacks and buttoned down shirts. Google came in jeans with lots of ink and piercings on display.

Part of my friend's responsibility was to give feedback to the interviewers. Her students were passing over MS to go to Google, despite MS offering significantly more for a salary. Their interviewers asked her for feedback to figure out why. She had to politely say that Google was seen as cooler. (The cooler impression wasn't just the image gained from the interviewers, it was the problems Google was trying to solve. But, the interviewers added to the company's image of "coolness".)

She held this position probably a decade ago and left after a few years. Things may be different now.

Funny that this was brought up. I agree fully that it's rare. But...a friend of mine was "den mother" for graduate students in a top 20 comp sci program. The students were often doctoral candidates but could also be MS students doing a thesis. A large part of her job was prepping them for interviews with companies like Google, MS, Oracle, etc. Here are a few gems she had to remind/inform them of.

"Yes, you have to shower the day of an interview."

"It's never acceptable to pull out your lunch and eat in the middle of the interview, please don't do it again."

"Yes, you have to wear something other than the shirt you slept in."

We enjoyed Quebec and Montreal. The singular rude experience didn't diminish it. We're eager to introduce our daughter to both cities now that she's old enough to appreciate them.

I would have appreciated your approach. When I studied French we focused on reading and writing, not speaking. So, I was admittedly not a strong French speaker. I can understand their frustration. Had I been given the choice I might have chosen English.

You've been to American restaurants and only been interrupted once or twice by waiters? You were quite blessed then. Ordinarily, we expect conversations to be interrupted 5-6 times per meal. (I'm only slightly exaggerating.) Here's a true story illustrating how ridiculous it gets. I proposed to my wife in our favorite restaurant. I chose purposefully an early dinner time so we would have the restaurant to ourselves. As I began to kneel and pull the engagement ring out of my pocket, a busboy stepped between my wife and I to refill our water glasses. It was a bit awkward for about 20 seconds or so.

LOL! Love it. We could learn a fair bit about humor from the British as well.

You make a fair point. I can understand fear about a loss of cultural identity. But, speaking from a strategic standpoint, if you want to preserve the language, you need to get more people speaking it. Corrections can come later. It's like a child learning a musical instrument. Rare is the child who can tolerate being stopped every few seconds with corrections. But, teach a child to play a song in a rudimentary way on the instrument and you capture their interest. Once interest is captured, you can start teaching proper technique.

And yes, we of the US butchered English. I have no qualm with that statement. We also can't get metric right. At least we drive on the proper side of the road though. ;-)

I visited Germany (West Germany at the time) in the Summer of 1988. At the time, I had taken one course in German (Hochdeutsch) at my university. People seemed very friendly and willing to speak German or English. Mistakes were tolerated and they provided assistance when I couldn't remember a word. It was a short trip. I visited four cities. But, people were consistent throughout.

An anecdote from a trip to Paris, I walked into a store to look for a gift for someone back home. After making the greeting in French, I started to explain what I was looking for. The woman stopped me. With a dramatic eye roll she said, "Speak English, pleeeease."

An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."

It's only two anecdotes. I may have simply run into rude people. But, they made me not care to ever speak French.

My daughter is taking Spanish in school right now. I'm learning a little as well. We have a large population of people around us from different Spanish speaking countries. They seem to be very tolerant of mistakes. I'm very much looking forward to learning more of their language.

I've only met French speakers who could switch to perfect English in Quebec province.

French speakers from France make mistakes all the time and their pronunciation is very far from perfect. (As long as I can understand them, I don't care.) That being said, someone from France's English is more than likely many times better than my French.

I hope we're seeing the pendulum swinging a little back. I'm not giving up my e-reader. But, there's a place for paper books and the culture they bring to a neighborhood.

Good observation. Not being busy is seen as being lazy in the US. Not working 10 hour days and commuting a couple of hours daily is seen as not being invested in your career. Not running your kids to two activities per night and all-weekend athletic tournaments is seen as being a bad parent. Then we spend money on stuff we don't need as a reward for being so productive, such a good employee, and such a good parent.

My daughter decided to stop playing Spring basketball, which entailed two 1.5 hour practices during the week and four games a weekend with travel involved. She made the very mature decision that she didn't want to sacrifice free time and friends to play a game. At first I was skeptical about her having so much downtime, but she's happier, doing better in school, and has a tight-knit group of friends. I'm enjoying it quite a bit too since I don't have to rush from work to drive her around and have every weekend tied up for months.

I have a feeling a counter-cultural movement is going to start. Maybe not yet, but soon.

I worked in a small sales and marketing office for IBM in the early 90's. I remember the sales people, who made very good money from mainframe sales, openly discussing how they didn't even want customers to know about RS6000's. I think the margins were pretty low on RS6000's at the time.

Anyway, internal struggles holding back product lines is a very real thing.

I'm glad you made this comment. The article's author made wu-wei sound like "do whatever comes natural". But, that misses the thousands of hours of deliberate practice bringing you to wu-wei.

Your comment reminds me of another from HN a few years ago, "If you love software development, don't do it for a living."

All that and it's important, for me, that the organization's mission aligns with my values.

Anders made a great point in the discussion about optimization: his hunches are often enough at odds with the profiler. I was heartened by it due to the high-skilled developer that he is.

Lack of exercise causes me a mixture of depression and anxiety. In a society in which we engineered physical challenge out of our lives, it's no wonder a segment of the population experiences depression.

The problem has multiple parts: pay, benefits, and definition of "skills". Two years ago I did a search for software engineering jobs within 30 miles of my geographic area, which covered Boston. I had a steady stream of opportunities. After three months of disappointment, I called off the search.

I received an offer from an organization I loved: the industry, mission, people I met, everything was perfect. My interviewers halted the interview after 30 minutes, saying that they were going to start the hiring process. The salary became the stickler. The job was mine if I wanted to take a $10-15K decrease in salary. Unfortunately, I had to let it pass by. (In retrospect, I should have taken it. I would have caught up in pay within a few years. Oh well.)

Another organization seemed pretty inline with my goals and personality. The tech was interesting and I mostly aligned with it. The stickler became the vacation time. I have 4 weeks of vacation. They needed me to start again at 2 weeks. (2 weeks, seriously?) Doing so would have screwed up family life as my wife has 5 weeks. Honestly, I can trade salary sooner than I can trade vacation time.

Employers seem to have strayed into Crazy Land with the requirements for "skills". A skill, to me, isn't the knowledge of the Python ecosystem or Java ecosystem for building applications. Python vs. Java is just a knowledge of tool sets: Stanley vs. DeWitt. It's easy to learn one if you know the other. Skill is choosing the right trade-offs in design for the particular organization and industrial sector you're working in. It's knowing when transaction throughput is more important than rock-solid error handling. When extensibility is worth the extra abstractions. When readability trumps everything for a particular organization due to the skill level of the other development teams. Yet, employers have gotten to the point of not just requiring particular tools, but particular versions of them.

So, I'm not convinced the problem is a lack of available software engineers, at least not completely. Much of the problem in hiring is outrageous demands from employers.

It's not common. But a few cafes around me are wooden utensil only. Metal and paper straws I've also seen an uptick in.

It's not just Boeing, though. Formal training, at least in my limited perspective, is seen as a luxury now.

A related point is that training used to signify a ramp up time for an employee with an unfamiliar technology. Employees didn't go onto projects until they passed through a training course. Companies now expect zero ramp up time. Hence, they pass over highly qualified software engineers, who may not have a lot of experience in a particular technology, to get less experienced engineers who don't need training in the technology.

Another issue with living in urban areas, at least in the US, is education. Schools in urban areas deal with more issues around family and poverty. The school buildings themselves are often older and require more maintenance. For young parents who may love urban life, the quality of education becomes a big factor.

I think it depends on your idea of suburbia. We tend to have smaller cities surrounding our major city. These smaller cities have mixed use neighborhoods - commercial and residential - and lots of multi-family homes. I grew up in such a city in a multi-family home (locally, we knew them as tenements). An article appeared recently about the trend toward purchasing multi-families again due to their cost-effectiveness. So, I'm not certain of the 30-somthings move to the burbs trend yet.

It could be done more out of politeness than effectiveness in reducing transmission. It would make a lot of sense in places with a high population density.

The participation rate for the next election is where I hope to see a jump for that age group. The last presidential election hopefully scared them into understanding the importance of voting.

I'm curious to see how it plays out with the 20-somethings in the US. They've been brought up on more civic-mindedness and their trend is back to urban areas for living. They'll be a better bellweather.

I've been with Apple Music and Pandora for years. A few months ago my teammates at work convinced me to try Spotify: I love Spotify! Both the content and the UX work for me.

While this post represents Spotify's view without having Apple's to contrast it with, it seem eerily similar to the "Browser War" days leading up to Microsoft's admonishment. Apple seems to be the equivalent of a drunkard walking a fine line.

This sounds suspiciously like the battle software developers have been waging with people who want to run software development in a manufacturing model. The battle itself really sucks the love of making something right out of you.

I had the same concern. My understanding is that finished aluminum doesn't give off the aluminum powder that causes brain damage. The Bialetti's aluminum parts are supposed to be finished.

I tried different drip coffee makers, French press, and percolator over the course of years. The Bialetti Moka Express is perfect for me. However, everything depends on the grind, roast, and quality of the beans. After using medium and light roast coffee beans for five years, I am back with dark roast. I prefer Indonesian beans and a grind slightly coarser than espresso.

The following are at least as important. - communication - compromise - curiosity