danjac

A reasonably-scoped take-home project is fine in isolation.

The problem is the sheer number of steps required, of which the project is just one step. For example for a recent position I looked at:

1. Initial interview with some HR person: 1 hour

2. Interview with a tech person and review some code sample (spot security issues, bugs etc): 1.5 hours

3. Take home project (supposed to take 2 hours, but you'll want to make it look good so you'll probably spend twice that): 4 hours

4. Another in-depth interview with a couple other tech people: 2 hours

5. Another interview with the CTO: 30 mins

6. References & background check.

That's not atypical. Round after round of interviews. It becomes an endurance test, where only the most dedicated will stay the distance. While the 8-10 hours might not seem much stretched out over several days, you want to add some prep, keep your calendar clear so it does eat up your spare time, especially if you are already working.

And that's just one job. What if you are interviewing at multiple companies?

Note the take-home is at the start of the process, not the end: so you can end up putting a lot of effort in before you have even cleared four or five other hurdles. Oh, and I don't even have an offer yet. It could well be the offer on the table isn't worth my time.

Now you could say "well, we only want dedicated people". Fine, but I'm dedicated in so far as I get paid to be working for you. I don't get paid to run your interview gauntlet. Maybe you want people willing to do free overtime?

And this is way more than it used to be maybe 10 years ago, and it's for small to medium sized companies, not FAANG or other big corps. Nor is it a feature of recent layoffs and resulting increase in the talent pool: this has been the case for a few years now.

I think there's a few factors at work:

- Endurance test

- Risk aversion culture in management

- Copypasta whatever Google or Apple do

Some people here (there is a rude word for these cheerleaders of the feudal system, but I'll save that for less polite corners of social media) saying "he deserves a vacation".

A CEO is a leadership role - akin to being prime minister of a country, or captain of a ship.

Their ridiculously outsized rewards come with responsibilities, and they are supposed to lead by example. There was not much sympathy for the captain of an Italian cruise ship when he abandoned his post before his crew and passengers. Or a PM who partied through lockdown.

Likewise a CEO who lays off a huge number of employees and then fucks off to a Pacific island is not deserving of any sympathy, let alone nice sunsets and cocktails.

What should a CEO do? I dunno, but some CEOs took pay cuts, because they realized the impact on morale on their employees. Instead this guy just dumped more work on the employees left behind and went off on holiday.

Russia does not have a "justice system" in the way that we would understand it in the West. Instead it has (and indeed, always had) a system of patronage and bribery, where your status within the system determines your sentence. If you are an oligarch, or the son of an oligarch, you will walk free, unless you cross Putin. If you are a nobody, you pay off the right people or you go to prison or end up freezing to death in a foxhole in the Donbass (Wagner recruits directly from prison, just as Stalin emptied the gulags for his cannon-fodder in WWII).

That's just how Russia is and always has been, and unfortunately, very likely always will be.

Is Denis guilty? Perhaps, but he will not have had a fair trial by any Western standard, and so we have to presume innocence.

I contribute what amounts to a few euros a month to a few open source projects. I do these because these projects have significantly helped my career and added to my personal enjoyment. Perhaps not much in the grand scheme of things, but I feel I owe at least that much, especially if I'm not able to help in other ways (PRs for example).

However, when I've asked employers to do the same - just throw what to them is would be tax-deductible chump change at some projects that have helped them make fortunes - there's lot of muttering and foot-dragging. More trouble than it's worth to do the paperwork, apparently.

So we end up in a ludicrous situation where essential software, used by companies with revenues in the billions, depend on a single, relatively impoverished and stressed out developer toiling in obscurity. Google or Facebook or Microsoft could, for what amounts to a rounding error, have just put him on an annual salary or grant.

It also depends on the larger ecosystem. If you know Python, it's not just Python the language, but the frameworks, libraries and tooling around it that boost productivity in specific tasks: for example Django and Pandas. Rust may have rough equivalents but they may or may not be as well developed and supported for all the edge cases.

Hetzner is excellent value of money, especially if you are based in Europe.

"The first step is to save and discover freedom"

And make sure you don't have kids, health issues, etc etc.

You are shrinking your pool of talent quite a bit, don't you think?

Sure I'm on board.

I just want to check first that my mortgage provider, landlord, utilities company and supermarket all accept equity...

True, but the advancements seem incremental rather than revolutionary (i.e. compared to the first half of the 20th century)

Maybe, but how much advancement has been seen in aerospace 1977-2023 compared to 1903-1976?

> There's not a single person on here who wouldn't be making these decisions right now.

What about Tim Cook?

I think the problem with agile (whatever the exact flavour) is that if you don't adopt the mindset across the organization, and just enforce it in your dev team, you just end up with waterfall-with-extra-steps.

The "insanely detailed deliverables from design" is a red flag and indicates a factory conveyor belt mentality: product comes up with idea, hands off idea to design, design hands off to developers, who then have to implement the design down to the pixel. The "hand-off" approach is incredibly wasteful and counter-productive.

The design team should be building designs in tandem with input from developers and product, so that the final agreed-upon design takes into account business requirements and technical constraints.

Nor should this be "final" in the sense that during implementation there may be unexpected problems that require modification of that design - "hey, turns out this widget doesn't work in Safari, we're going to have to come up with a workaround". As long as what comes out in the end is a usable implementation of the business requirement, it doesn't matter whether it matches some arbitrary design ideas from three months ago.

There's a difference between, say, a tech worker not making an effort to learn the language because they can get by in English, and someone whose actual job description is to understand the politics and culture of their host country not bothering to learn it. In the second case it looks like professional negligence.

This is why I absolutely avoid using Azure, AWS or GCP for my own side projects. On the company account, sure, it's your money. But I'm not going to risk my savings because I misconfigured a lambda or something.

If so, doesn't that say something about the low quality of the current crop of CEOs?

A smarter CEO might not go on a hiring spree just because everyone else does; or conversely might hire when others are firing as they know they'll get some good quality developers at a lower price.

Sure, but then one questions the need of these extremely-well renumerated CEOs. If they are guided purely by quarterly numbers, stock market trends and industry groupthink, then why not save a fortune and replace them wholesale with an AI.

Then again, Facebook did a slow rollout - first it was just for American college students, then (if memory serves) it was rolled out internationally for colleges and universities outside the US, then finally it was available everyone.

This helped build word-of-mouth. While a social network has value, so does an exclusive nightclub with a long queue around the block to get in.

I've no idea, but I wonder if this was the thinking behind Google+. Build up a demand with artificial exclusivity, so you build buzz (maybe "buzz" is the wrong word, given Google's other dead project of that name). This approach also helps you from the technical side - easier to deal with scaling and other teething issues when you have a few users at once rather than the mad rush.

At the end though it was probably the wrong decision - people were already on Facebook so they just shrugged and forgot Google+ existed.

What's weird is that all of these CEOs are saying the same thing: "I hired too many folks a couple years ago, welp, guess I was wrong".

You would think some companies hired too many, some hired too few, others more or less just stayed the same. Instead we're seeing this groupthink of these so-called geniuses of the industry moving this way and that like a flock of sheep.

"I take full responsibility" is the new "our incredible journey" of failing tech company cliches.

It's a tip of the iceberg. The part you see - the UI - is a small part, the complexity is in the backend (advertising/marketing tools, content moderation, metrics, devops etc).

Musk being the archetypal Mr First Principles Guy, he probably thought just the same: "it's a simple webapp, how hard can it be?"

The only industry the UK government cares about is providing real estate and money-laundering services to Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern despots.

Maybe because there are already major programming languages at that level already, which arguably do things better: if you are going to have a Java-like OO model, then just use Java (and leverage its ecosystem, tooling etc). Whereas there is a niche for a quick-and-dirty scripting language for just getting something up and running.

It depends on your needs and workflow. Personally I spend most of my time on my laptop in the terminal, browser, email and one or two other apps like Discord. I just want something that is simple and stays out of my way and I don't want to spend my time crafting the perfect desktop. Stock Fedora+Gnome with a couple extensions pretty much covers all my needs.

Other users have different expectations and needs and perhaps KDE suits them better, and maybe they are happy spending hours fine-tuning their desktop experience. All good and I'm happy we all get to have a choice.

I wonder how much of this is due to Netflix' "algorithm" punishing promising new shows by cancelling them after season 1, or letting shows drag on way past their sell by date (Stranger Things anyone?).

In the old days of network television, a new show might struggle in the ratings trying to gain its audience, but a producer might champion and protect it enough until it gains a footing. For example, Lucille Ball kept this weird little scifi show called Star Trek alive until it became the hit franchise that's still going to this day. The Netflix algorithm would have cancelled Star Trek after a season and it would have been forgotten.

On the other hand, perhaps many shows got cancelled because a dumb producer just didn't get it, or there was behind-the-scenes politics where they fell out with a director or lead actor. But it seems overall that Netflix perhaps needs more of a human taste behind the scenes and less reliance on data-driven decision making.

Crons are fine for running Django commands that are just talking to the same services as your web views (databases, cache, email services etc). It should be fine to let them run in their dedicated VM/containers, using Ansible etc to keep the crontab configurations in the repo.

Celerybeat has the advantage of better visibility e.g. you can configure them in the Django admin and check when they are running. If you are not using Celery though and your needs are simple, it's easier to just use plain crons.

I remember the endless Scrum meetings where we debated points with all the seriousness of medieval monks discussing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. As a rough heuristic points aren't bad, per se, and they are a bit better than straight time estimates.

But when they become the subject of endless meetings it's a tell that maybe the company has hired too many people too quickly and is in the "bullshit jobs" phase where it's happy to waste precious salaried hours on meaningless debate.

"irl_chad" is a very apt username here...

You could do us all a service by telling us the name of your company so we (especially junior developers) could give it a very wide berth.

Both these points are unfair to junior developers. Suppose your first job out of college was in crypto? Yeah a mistake, but it shouldn't blacken your entire career, especially if you learned some non-crypto skills in the process. And if it's your first job you need something else in your resume to show you have some non-tech skills and responsibilities. Nothing wrong with cashier in McDonalds, it shows you can work in a team, talk to customers, and deal with pressure.

I'm deeply crypto-skeptic but that seems grossly unfair.

I've worked for a number of startups that, in retrospect, had terrible business models. Does that make me a "true believer" in their viability? Maybe, but then I learned better. Or maybe I joined because I needed a paycheck and they had a good offer. Either way, my performance as a developer had nothing to do with the viability of their business model.

Even if you make the argument that "crypto is a terrible idea as a technology, so anyone who engaged with it is stupid", well, again, in a long enough career you maybe make a wrong pick every now and again, especially early on in your career when it's harder to distinguish hype from reality. A good developer would learn from this and be a more valuable employee as a result.