1,432 karma · joined October 22, 2007
Person A: I'm doing <this thing> to support <cause> Person B: You shouldn't do <that thing> Person A (or more often, C): Inaction is equal to support / silence is violence
I think there is almost always more than one possible action, even in support of <cause>. Also, some well intentioned actions can hurt a cause, so inaction is obviously preferable. Or, there may be a third outcome that I like better than <cause> or <not cause>.
Let me get specific, to avoid my own criticism.
I don't know if what the original commenter is doing is worth the effort, in terms of supporting Ukraine in this conflict. There's obviously a cost, in terms of dev time and false positives (showing the message to an unintended audience). I do think it is usually annoying, distracting, and unnecessarily polarizing to add politics to technical projects, so I would lean against doing this, even if I agree with the politics. Good technical work is hard enough on its own.
I'm not terribly offended by this action, and I wouldn't criticize it on its own; but I definitely think that "inaction supports the Russian invasion" is out of line here.
No, no it isn't, in this or in other situations. More than two choices _usually_ exist. Statements like this present a false dichotomy in an attempt to coerce people to support a preferred position or interpretation.
I personally like take-home problems. It's hard for an employer to time-box them without resorting to basically leetcode though. I know that, as a student, I definitely spent many hours on them.
That's not strictly true, given that reviewers are often sent pre-release versions of things in order to do that work before release day.
From the other side of this: as a developer who is required to _use_ in-house recruiters as part of hiring, my experience has almost never been good. I don't know if the incentives are bad, or if we just have a _much_ lower bar for hiring recruiters than developers, but our recruiters can't be depended upon for simple things like sending prep emails to candidates or telling us what position a candidate is interviewing for. I honestly think we'd be better off cutting them totally out of the process.
I can see the advantage to developing something in-house if there aren't options that meet some special need, I just personally haven't seen it work out much. Maybe because of the size of companies I've worked at. I've definitely written helpful software for myself and my own team.