linza

I disagree with that comment, based on my experience.

> Why would you ask questions that don't match the actual work they'll be doing?

As an interviewer, and likely peer or manager of the potential new hire, I want to understand growth potentials as well, so I want to challenge you during the interview. In my particular situation, there are so many candidates, and so many mediocre ones, we needed to raise the bar, and it served us well.

I agree with the comment you were replying to. There will always be outliers, but testing prowess in technical problem solving and grit correlates well enough with the job of a software engineer.

The "amazing scientist" maybe was not a good culture fit, or, yes, the interview was botched.

Good candidates are so good that they often enough compensate for bad interviews. Sure it means we sometimes don't hire the best, but that's better IME than sometimes hiring a not so good candiate.

True, but in my experience it's easier to teach resourcefulness after hiring than injecting motivation for solving problems somehow.

I think if it this way (very simplified): there are candidates that like challenges and who don't mind imperfect interviewing situations, and i had my fair share of people who dislike it would fare better if we just let them work on a real world problem. We did both for each candidate for some time, but the latter was much more costly and didn't provide such a good signal in the end.

Open-mindedness goes a long way. Also typically our interview questions are set up in a way where it's expected you won't finish but try, which reveals a lot about personality and how problems are attacked.

That may be true. But then why hire someone with just look-up skills before hiring someone who really tries, and enjoys the challenge?

I'm interviewing engineers frequently and although I agree that the question asked by GP is maybe not the best it still gives the signal if someone is willing to power through a problem with minimal guidance and/or ambiguous constraints. Something I'm willing to find out at the peril of pissing off a few candidates.

Did you mean to reply to another comment perhaps? I'm against these changes and as an engineer and as my comment suggested, I'm ill equipped bring useful arguments against or in favor.

Many good points and I agree with all of them except for the last: it's probably not just a US problem although it's the most visible at the moment.

Ironically to me, these efforts are to be more inclusive but I can't see any of that. I can see that the purpose is to evoke these discussions, and in that sense the effort to change the language is not pointless: by having these changes adopted the movement can point at successes to show it was taken seriously at least once.

We are at the opposite pendulum swing now.

I think shame is the actual reason why so many oppose these changes and why they are adopted in the end.

The change itself is often interpreted as finger waggling, implying something was done wrong. In technical fields, one expects technical answers for why changes should be adopted, and engineers are largely not equipped to have this intently non technical discussion. And many feel that the Linux kernel is not the right place for these discussions, but it's hard to argue that because... shame.

My personal takeaway was that I don't know as much as I think. I didn't produce any data at the time to prove my point (not that I would have known how to), and because of that it's hard for me to analyse the situation more meaningfully as to why I was wrong.

Why they were successful in the end: the team struggled for some time before they got momentum with a single really large customer that put in resources, and made other customers follow. It's not that the tech got better that much, customers were just more willing after they saw one of the leaders in that space invest in that approach, and they were afraid of falling behind. It was not because of machine learning, but despite of it.

A small team in a company I worked for got into machine learning a few years back. They had some success with some toy examples and were now looking for applications. They tried to use it for optimizing some specific engineering procesess.

Two people (one was me) were warning them that this is a waste of time and will cost the company a fortune and then no one will want it because the quality will be so much poorer. And the whole thing looked like an instance of hammer-looking-for-a-nail.

Fast forward a few years, the team tripled in size, built a multi-million-euro product, and some very large customers now trust their operations research to that new thing.

I'm in the same boat. I got excited when i heard about containers in Firefox but was disappointed when i actually used it for the reasons you mentioned.

I'm still on Chrome mostly because of this, even though profiles are a crutch and, for example I cannot force Chrome to open specific URLs in specific profiles--this would be a killer feature for me.

It's not that simple, but it could be a factor, in my experience. It's probably not one single thing.

Overly generalized, formal education seems to give one more self awareness. Lesser educated peers overestimate their abilities which helps them getting hired and be successful through the first few years. Then a promotion would require a different skill set and they cannot appreciate the complexity of learning it, so they fail.

Peers with a degree often are not confident enough, and overthink. But they can adapt quicker.

I work in hiring and people/performance management. In my experience, people with a formal education in average outperform the ones without. There are outliers on either side of course.

We investigate the reasons for this but so far couldn't pin point it to anything specific.

We too don't look at degrees when hiring, but we do see a correlation of education and promotions.

I haven't worked on a product that used analytics to drive feature development.

What you wrote here sounds very naive to me.

I might be completely wrong, but i assume if you have a large enough user base you would use telemetry only in an aggregated way, and then prioritize the majority of the user base. So I might totally be underrepresented but still have the same loss of privacy as everyone else.

I also feel i always have the right to complain about a product, publicly and vocally (it's just a different channel for analytics/telemetry, imo). Much like product owners have the right to just change it remove features that break my workflow.

If more than (or equal to) half of computers are used by only one person, then the median user count is 1, no?

> 1. [...] Every day you stay at Google the more valuable you become.

I'd argue that posts like these decrease the value of Google engineers (and Dell engineers) in my eyes. Maybe that's too shallow though.

I'm involved in hiring a lot and interviewed potential candidates coming from Google and Amazon--none of them seemed like slackers, but also none of them were hired.

What i meant was that i believe they try to follow the law around privacy. The law might not be "good enough", but that's in us not them (modulo the lobbying).

I'm not trying to say larger companies are innocent. Saying they don't respect privacy insinuates to me that they intentionally violate the law, and i don't think that that's true.

I doubt think this is accurate.

Google might not respect the desire for an open internet without ads and no single large player.

But i believe they fully respect their users privacy, comply with most of the law around privacy already, and have the strong desire to fully comply with it in the future.

Maybe I'm naive that way. But painting them as not respecting privacy at all is a bit blunt and not nuanced enough.

I was curious about ServiceNow and googled it and was excited as they offer demos. But they require registration and a lot of information about myself, so i stopped. Is it not meant for small businesses perhaps?

Circumstances sometimes are not that clear. Being put on a PIP where I'm employed is at the discretion of the manager, and sometimes it's just the combination of the report and the manager. One of my colleagues was put on a PIP, switched teams, and is now doing much better. However, some companies limit mobility during a PIP so it's not always possible to achieve this outcome.

Yes of course. What's your point? All marketing lies, and there is no spectrum, and therefore no moral ambiguity in doing shady things?

Yes, oh no. Dark patterns are closer to fraud than to a legitimate business model I'd recommend to my friends and family. Nigerian princes selling you gold is a business model too.

I feel your tone is slightly too condescending, but I have to agree with the general statement.

I'm responsible for hiring in my small department, and the OPs blog post would be a red flag.

We appreciate if candidates show they can learn quickly, but it's not useful to us in isolation. You already need to have a good base set of skills (CS, physics) but more importantly the humility to accept that with 5 years of experience you probably don't really know the thing you claim to know.

Some bay area tech companies like to hire more riskily, so it might be a good strategy after all though.

It's still interesting to hear comments like in the GP for an unknowing person like me.

Your comment is interesting as well, if only for the defensive reaction without addressing the "being scummy" claim. I'm basically hearing, yeah it's scummy, now get off my lawn.

Same here. I use Firefox+adblocker on mobile for some sites. I don't know why it is, but i just dislike the UI of Firefox. I want to like it more, but it just doesn't work out...

You are just chasing your own tail by looking at those metrics. Your system needs to be resilient to these random events and you must account for those, that's for sure. But you would not put your focus on those, it's still the higher level alerts that are more relevant to the business.

Crashing more often is caught by an alert that looks at total capacity is s service. Doesn't matter if it's random bit flips or OOMing nodes at first. Longer term these metrics can be useful to increase efficiency again (should i first fix random bit flips or OOMing tasks). I would not base SLA relevant alerts on too low level alerts.

The deep metrics, as you call them, get vanishingly irrelevant the larger the system gets, at least for the use case you mention.

To put it unscientifically, something always goes wrong, but that does not mean SLA is violated. As a corrollary, you will be alerted constantly about something that might go wrong because of some signal that someone thought might lead to some outage.

At face value it seems proactive, but it's really not. Better spend time actively making the system more reliable (e.g. look at your or someone else's postmortems, or do premortem exercises).

Is this really necessary? The exchange seems quite civil. What exactly in the GP gave offense that warrants pointing it out?

HN seems like a generally civil place. Comments like these make it seem more uncivil, just like police patrolling "bad" neighborhoods more frequently.

Fair enough, maybe we (rather small company in central Europe, but with gift profile customers) are an outlier here but I'm my hiring experience there weren't really any imposters. Usually they come from companies we know well, it are new grads in which case the question of experience is moot anyway.

I don't work for Google and i haven't interviewed with them. In our company (low level systems engineering) we ask similar question, with the following rationale:

I don't want to test if you can build systems, your resume already says so and there is but enough time to assess this properly anyway.

But, can you be bothered to try to solve problems outside of your comfort zone? Will you humor me as an interviewer for one hour with something that is maybe new to you?

If you rise to the challenge and attempt to solve these problems,i extrapolate to the systems engineering part.