danjac

You seem to lack reading comprehension skills.

I pointed out that cities - taking London as an example - are unaffordable to people who do not have a high salary. Yet for some reason you are attacking me for...having a high salary?

Um, where did I show disdain for the homeless? On the contrary, I pointed out that London has become unaffordable for all but the rich. One might say the same of San Francisco and other cities with gross wealth disparities and sky-high rents.

A "nest egg" means "having a bit saved up" so one might have some economic security. Again, what does that have to do with the homeless?

If you want to make money so that you can save up a nice nest egg rather than be broke at the end of every month, London is probably the worst place to move to, unless you are working in the City or some other very high paid job, or you are lucky to have a permanent line of credit from the Bank of Mum and Dad. And not only will you be broke, you'll be living in a damp hovel shared with strangers. Kind of like being a student, but with all the responsibilities of having a job.

Protip: if you complain about being downvoted, you are guaranteed to get downvoted.

So sucks to be you if you happen to be on the janitor tier, no?

That's not really what a meritocracy is supposed to be.

> The bloodiest wars were not religious, or I should say, not traditionally religious

The bloodiest war fought on European soil, right up until World War One, was the Thirty Years' War. The world wars' higher death toll can be attributed to 20th century technology; the Thirty Years War was fought with 17th century weapons yet still led to the death of 5-8 million people. And sure, while there were political motivations involved - you could say the same of any religious war, including the Crusades - the driving force was the schism between Protestants and Catholics.

75K is a good salary in Germany, well above the average of 49K:

https://housinganywhere.com/Germany/average-salaries-in-germ...

As Kaplan-Moss pointed out in the original article, "incompetent" depends on the context and circumstances, and you may be able to remedy these in order to turn an incompetent employee into a competent one.

To take a very straw-mannish example, suppose you hired a Python developer but due to some admin fuckup they were added to the Android team. The easiest remedy is to move them to the Python team. The second easiest is to ask if they are interested in learning Android, and if so give them the time and support to get up to speed. The worst option here is to just fire them: you lose a potentially valuable employee you spent time and money bringing on board, possibly damage their career as a result, and hurt team morale overall.

> supposed to "wipe your ass for you" by spraying water at your asshole

Presumably the tech is called Google Wave?

Sensible legislation would be a level playing field - better privacy laws and regulations that apply to all players.

Instead you have hick senators asking if TikTok listens to your Wifi.

It may be about competition, but it's more likely grandstanding over the latest Red Scare.

Europe (mostly, at least) does have a unified market on paper, but not culturally, which makes marketing, localization etc. harder - a commercial that sells well to Germans might go down like a lead balloon in Spain.

The biggest advantage I've seen in the US has been the VC ecosystem. For all we deride VCs - and sometimes (particularly given events over the past few weeks) with very good reason, the money spigot is just much more generous in the US. Of course that will change in the new low interest rate economy, but that to me seems more the deciding factor than silly claims that Americans are somehow more innately "innovative" than Europeans.

That's the point though. Van Rossum, Stroustrup and Torvalds made their name early on in their careers or even at college, while still in Europe. Sure, later on they emigrated to the US for the money, but that was on the back of their accomplishments.

Of course Nokia was eclipsed by foreign competition (mostly due to terrible management), but it was still innovative in its time. Just as US companies today face competition from Asia.

> Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.

Yes, but they didn't, did they? It's easy to look at something with 20/20 hindsight and say "anyone could have done this". Back in 1989 Berners-Lee had that insight.

Um...Python, C++, Linux, Erlang, mobile phones (Nokia), Spotify, HTML...

Having worked for both European and US companies, I would say that a) innovation is mutual (we learn from each other) and talent/mediocrity are pretty much evenly distributed.

The US has a more "dynamic" economy in some sense - for example the VC ecosystem is far better funded - but is detrimental in others (Byzantine health care system deters would-be entrepreneurs).

There was a fear that nanotechnology could accidentally turn everything into gray goo.

AI is that, but for intellectual output.

3. Look forward to an awesome new job after your current one is made obsolete.

You do realize that "awesome new job" will require years of training and experience?

Enjoy working at the Amazon Fulfilment Center in the meantime (until of course that's automated too).

It's not a reasoning I would agree with either. The core of my original comment is "avoid responsibility": people don't want to be held responsible for a bad hire (or a discrimination lawsuit), so adding multiple rounds to the process shares that responsibility among as many other people as possible. By cargo-culting from FAANG you can also use the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" argument and this dilutes responsibility further.

So does that actually reduce bad hires (or increase good to excellent hires)? Probably not, but that's not really the purpose of all this theatre. The purpose is that if there's a bad hire, do I, personally, get the blame?

To pull a quote from the article "No atheists in a foxhole. No libertarians in a bank run"

Unless you count the UK as a banana republic (well maybe these days...a turnip monarchy perhaps?) they did manage to fleece the NHS quite successfully:

https://www.digitalhealth.net/2021/05/nhs-digital-denies-con...

How many are developers vs sales, HR etc?

I'm not sure how well 37Signals is doing these days - Hey didn't make as big an impact as they had hoped and Basecamp probably has a core of loyal users but I don't think it's getting a ton of new customers. They're small and could probably keep going until their founders decide to retire though.

There's a lot of "I didn't expect the leopard to eat my face" around here at the moment.

My guess is because of the opportunity cost. If you hire the wrong person you end up firing 3 months later, you likely missed your chance to hire a better candidate (who is unlikely to apply again to work for you) and you will need to restart the whole expensive hiring process again (even a more lightweight process is expensive in employee time, maybe paying recruiters and job listing sites, etc).

Also onboarding is expensive: even an experienced developer who has all the skills you need still has to learn your codebase, processes, business logic etc. while drawing a salary, and all that goes to waste if they leave before they can start becoming a net positive to your company.

From the point of view of the applicant, I wonder if I would prefer a long probation period over a long interview period.

If I'm unemployed and I have bills to pay, a paid probation period is the better option - even if I get fired after 90 days, that's still 3 months' salary. On the other hand, if I already have a job, joining another company is a big risk - I'm giving up a comfortable position for a job I might lose in 90 days if it doesn't work out - maybe I'll be in over my head, maybe I don't get along with the manager or the team, whatever. A long interview process gives me plenty of opportunity to gauge my prospective employers and back out at any point.

That's just it. They are willing to lose the occasional great hire in order to avoid the risk of a bad hire.

If someone is that dedicated I don't think a rigorous hiring process is going to stop them. Perhaps just ask for a couple references?

Oh good. Hopefully by the time it's available in my country I'll have a week to try it out before it goes into the Graveyard.

The multiple rounds, take home test + online examination, followed by 3 interviews etc nonsense has been a part of tech interviews for the past few years. Perhaps more people are exposed to it now because they haven't been seriously job hunting until the recent bloodbath of layoffs, but it's certainly not a new thing. I think there's many reasons:

1. There's a lot of risk aversion in corporate culture these days, the cost of a bad hire can be very high and nobody wants to be held responsible. By having multiple rounds - which in turn requires a lot of people involved - responsibility is diluted so if there's a bad hire you can blame the process rather than one manager.

2. It's an endurance test. Someone who can power their way through round after round of interviews, home projects, online tests and so on shows good "work ethic" or at least a genuine interest in the job.

3. Cargo-culting FAANG. If Google or Meta do this, then we should too (even though we're a tiny startup). It's a bit like picking microservices or Kubernetes: there's good use cases, but for a lot of projects they are overkill.

4. Concern about discrimination: companies are scared of showing bias (whether against or for certain ethnic groups, genders etc) and a formal process should in theory be meritocratic than the old days of "let's just have a quick chat and hire based on gut feeling".

There's good reasons here, but it's probably gone to extremes, particularly for positions at smaller companies with corresponding smaller salaries and benefits.

A possible reason is that the layoffs are localized to the tech industry so far, but not all (perhaps even most?) tech workers don't work in the tech industry - they do tech work for other industries such as construction, finance, health etc, either embedded directly or for companies that specialize in providing tech services to them. So until those industries are impacted by the recession they won't see the same layoffs.

Sure, the concept of a social network wasn't novel, but Zuckerberg had some insights that led to FB becoming the dominant network within a few years - for example incubating inside US colleges to gain traction among younger demographics through word of mouth, building an ecosystem around games and apps, creating a social graph based on real identities and relationships that yielded lucrative marketing data, and so on.

Meta's problems are due to a lack of direction and very poor decision making from the very top. The Metaverse was a huge expensive failure, their core demographics are old people and their Instagram demographic is being eaten up by TikTok.

Zuckerberg is not an "ideas" guy. He had that one great idea back in the early 2000s (whether you believe it was his idea or not, he did execute on it) and everything since then has been acquisitions. Sure maybe they can wring out more "productivity" by return to office or firing their middle managers or whatever but so what? It doesn't matter how fast you can run if you are running in the wrong direction.