jaymicha

Slight tangent, but Upchuck from ATL gives me some RATM-adjacent vibes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woFOlhweGbs

I'm not sure this is true - the base case seems to be the Eurozone, the countries of which intervened in their economies enough to forestall a depression, but not to the extent that the US did. Eurozone inflation is just a notch above 5%, unemployment rate right about 7%. In the US it's 7% and 4% respectively. In effect, the US traded a ~2% rise in yearly inflation for a ~3% reduction in unemployment. Reasonable people can disagree on whether that was a good trade, but to say that we could have just "skipped" all the COVID disruptions and maintained low inflation, low unemployment and typical GDP growth strikes me as fantasy land. There wasn't any magical economic policy prescription that would make everything "normal".

This kinda describes something I've always internally thought of as the "talkers-to-typers ratio" at companies I've worked at. Back in the early IT/dotcom days, the "appointee class" were primarily on their phones or in meetings, talking. The technocrats were at their computers, typing. I don't think that's as bright a red line these days, obviously, but I've still kept that name in my head and check in on the ratio every now and then when I'm taking a company's pulse or looking to join a new company.

Yeah, that's a good followup. It's akin to having a strong counterargument in an academic paper. What I'm going for with the question is an understanding of how the candidate acquires knowledge. Are they generating it themselves via some process like the scientific method? Are they mostly doing that but maybe taking shortcuts here and there by credulously taking on the opinions of trusted sources? Are they throwing all of that overboard and just embracing opinions/received wisdom that are popular or correlate with higher compensation?

The problem I've run into is that it's a pretty easy question to game, if you know the purpose behind asking it; nobody is going to come out and say, e.g., "I think ORMs are dumb because that's what other folks seem to say, and I see those people having high-status/well-compensated jobs, and I'd like some of that too, plz." So maybe it's not a great "weeder" question. /shrug

Tell me about an opinion you hold on some piece of technology (framework, language, design pattern, etc.), one you have a fair amount of conviction about and hold pretty strongly. Now tell me how you arrived at that opinion and conviction.