obstacle1

If a prerequisite to making progress on your work is getting an answer to a simple yes/no question within minutes, that's a fundamental problem with how you're planning your work, not some commentary on the nature of 'active' vs 'passive' jobs.

Expecting instant answers from others is the WFH equivalent to "I love being able to walk to my coworker's desk and ask them questions!" Sure, because being able to do that lets you off the hook for needing to break down large tasks into parallel chunks, plan phases of work in advance, juggle multiple plates for when you are blocked, etc. It's making your job easier at the expense of everyone else around you, by basically outsourcing part of your job.

WFH is a mindset shift.

> I don't understand why so many large companies use platform abstractions.

At a certain point you'd rather have your developers focusing on tackling domain complexity, not stack complexity. If I can normalize my developers' skillsets I can shuffle them around at will to address whatever problems the business/product needs to be addressing -- quickly. Can't do that as easily if you need to do a bunch of platform-specific stuff as well.

It's not an entirely relevant analogy though. It's good practice to seek mastery of craft. But an engineer in a team/organization has to navigate a system that is literally based around comparing peers, i.e. for promotions. There isn't really an objective metric for engineer performance, it's based pretty much entirely on what co-workers/managers/promo committees think of you.

This is not something athletes have to deal with, they can focus on improving personal performance and trust that it'll lead to an objective result (winning a race or game).

An alternative to scattering null checks around or using exceptions for control flow could be more thoughtfully designing your data/object model. No additional language constructs required!

A big problem IME is people tend to define "simple" as "written in a style I prefer". For example you can extract a series of 10 obviously-related methods from some 2000-line God class into their own class, but have others who are used to a more procedural coding style complain that the indirection is "hard to read" because they need to open a new file. This despite the facts that others find the God class "harder to read" because it contains 2000 lines of code doing everything under the sun, and that class is objectively harder to maintain/change for everyone because nobody knows what things are necessary to change to achieve some goal, because there are no logical boundaries between code functions so you can't tell what needs changing without reading everything.

Cue endless bikeshedding in the name of "simplicity", which nobody is using an objective metric to define.

> I guess we do live in a post-truth era.

Lawyers and representatives have been making stretch arguments for the entities they represent for centuries. Did you really expect the company's legal group to not try and argue around this? Why do you think they have jobs?

Why does it matter either way?

> This cannot be something that is "taught or learned", as I had years of experience in the field, while they had to learn it.

What? This can't be learned, but they learned it? Why isn't it possible that they learned to write more maintainable software faster than you?

99% of the value is in the exercises. I would re-think the strategy of a first read-through without the exercises and spend the time to do the exercises.

The literal next paragraph:

> Google’s engineering teams detected the issue within seconds, but diagnosis and correction took far longer than our target of a few minutes. Once alerted, engineering teams quickly identified the cause of the network congestion, but the same network congestion which was creating service degradation also slowed the engineering teams’ ability to restore the correct configurations, prolonging the outage

I'm not sure you mean the same thing by self-distant as what the article is talking about.

It seems like you are talking about altruism, or looking at situations with an eye towards acting selflessly. Taking actions that will benefit others without regard to how they affect you.

The article is talking about visualizing a situation from a third-person perspective, so that "you" are an object to be analyzed in an emotionally detached way. Rather than viewing a situation from "your" perspective. The idea is looking at your 'self' as some other person helps you to detach from the emotions you feel internally. And this leads to making decisions based on reality rather than how you feel.

All the factors that might lead to you being exploited by other people are still visible when you self-distance. You can still see the co-worker waiting in the wings to throw you under the bus. But rather than _feel_ the discomfort and rage of knowing that the person is after you, you see objectively how you stand in relation to that person. This makes it less likely that you will take impulsive actions driven by instinct, and more likely to take a well-reasoned path that minimizes the likelihood/impact of being exploited.

You negotiate when you have leverage. Leverage is an implied threat that you will leave the company where the cost to the company of you leaving will be significant. You have to be ready to actually leave the company in order for this to work. Generally this involves having a competing offer in hand.

Since you do not have an actual offer and you are not going to leave the company, you should not try any tactics in negotiating a raise. Your best play is to make a case based on the value of your work and ask politely and hope for the best. This will not get you a big raise, but it may get you a modest one.

This is not the optimal position for you in terms of career development, but it is the position you are putting yourself in by wanting to stay in your current job regardless of potential opportunities externally.

Can you think of any societies/cultures in history within which killing became highly normalized behavior? I can think of a few.

Please don't ever give a person a copy of your passport as part of a job application. You are being scammed.

The entire point of this thread is that even small doses of alcohol -- doses well within what we consider to be moderate drinking -- have fairly extreme negative effects on memory. This is a problem even for the 80% of drinkers who do not develop alcohol addiction.

As we start to actually study the effects of alcohol, it really looks like it is a hard drug with no net positive effects at anything over a minuscule dose.

>I don't see an issue with refusing to leave a store when you're denied a refund you're legally owed.

The issue is you are literally trespassing at that point. It is illegal, you are committing a crime.

You can't take the law into your own hands. If you are "legally owed" a refund, you can take that to court, prove it, and receive judgment for your refund.

What you cannot do is judge for yourself that you are legally owed a refund and therefore entitled to stay in a retail store regardless of whether or not you are wanted there. That is not a protest, it is just exhibiting a shocking lack of self-awareness and -- trespassing.

Netflix had 5,700 employees in 2017, and only a 'couple hundred' of those were engineers?

> Balance is important.

Not for everyone.

There's a difference between "feeling unproductive" and actually being unproductive. The person you're responding to said the former, not the latter. And in my experience it's nearly universal that when you ask excellent and very senior engineers "how long did it take you to feel ramped up?" they answer "I still don't!" despite having been there for months/years.

>The problem is people use facebook because they have to.

It's remarkable how common this opinion is given its obvious shallowness. Nobody has to use Facebook. What are the consequences of not? You can't chat with your friends or view their selfies or see event listings. Or rather to do these things, you have to make an effort to use some other more private mode of communication like phone or in-person or classifieds or whatever. It's easier to use Facebook than to not.

That is an extremely far cry from "having to" use the service. The problem really is people are lazy, and use Facebook because it saves them time, effort, and energy. In most cases, people care about this saved energy more than they do their privacy.

>At what point would you need the implementation details of any of these to write code?

...literally any time you are performing a computation on a collection of items and care even the least bit about performance?

It sounds like your bar for what makes "excellent code" simply excludes performance issues completely. That's fine if you're talking about scrappy startup devs who move from MVP to MVP. But when it comes time to turn an MVP into an honest-to-goodness P, you can't totally ignore the efficiency of your code. And you can't write efficient code without understanding the basic strengths and weaknesses of the data structures your programming language implements.

Almost nobody is working 100 or even 80 hours a week.

You can fully understand the -EV of gambling yet still act against your own self-interest by engaging in it.

(Most) humans aren't emotionless machines, even highly intelligent people engage in self-destructive behaviour despite recognizing it as such.

>Almost all fooeds seem to have one of those

Almost all prepared, packaged, or preserved foods have one of those.

The solution is actually pretty simple: eat meals made from base/raw ingredients only.

Beans, nuts, meats, vegetables, fruits, vegetable oils, spices... Endless varieties of stuff to cook with, combine, and eat alone. People just aren't used to eating this way, because prepackaged crap has been the norm for so long.

You are right that if you're poor, it's difficult to eat this way, though.

That's a good idea. But I think the TV dinner itself might be worse for you than ingesting whatever the by-product of microwaving the dinner's plastic container might be.

Because saying "X is worse than Y" is not useful unless you provide reasons as to why you believe that.

Imagine being someone reading your post. What are they to think? "Oh, this person says X is worse than Y -- I'll go ahead and take their word for it, despite no justification"? That's them buying into an appeal to your authority.

Now imagine if you'd actually provided reasoning. "Oh, this person says X is worse than Y because Z -- Z is a good point, therefore this is useful!" How different.

Providing baseless opinions is not useful, which is why you got downvoted; and incidentally, it's the exact same reason why you should "care to elaborate".

I think it's a) really bizarre how invested you are in defending this obviously exploitative process -- do real work for us and then work for free for 3 months, sure, all the Django devs line up, it's easy game; and b) ridiculous the extent to which you are minimizing the requirements of the exercise. It's a code screen -- reasonable is making sure the candidate can write code, not that the candidate ships you a full stack functional product with a test suite and design pattern justification document. What is insane is trying to justify this with "its ok Django is basically magic lol". I don't think we have anything further to productively discuss.

What does your post have to do with the OP?

The company in question is asking for someone to do actual work that they will use as part of the job interview, and then to work for free for 3 months, "non-negotiable".

You somehow think that is reasonable, and that anyone on HN who complains about it is simply whiny?

This seems like a deflection.

It's totally legit to ask you what your definition of the 'best' candidate is, because you made a claim: that the best people come from the top schools.

How are we to conclude that your argument has any worth whatsoever when you aren't able to even define the components of the claim you are making?

It's _one hundred_ times more difficult for women?

No. That's hyperbole.

It's more difficult for women? Reasonable, if debatable. But not _one hundred times_ in any possible case. That's just an exaggeration aimed at derailing an argument into the realm of emotion.