tempsolution

Yeah except that for 99.9999% of software engineering jobs, that knowledge is irrelevant. Also, to be a good engineer, you need to have MUCH more than just some math and raw computer science knowledge. I would go as far as saying that all scientific tasks are mostly carried out by research scientists these days anyway. The skills you need at companies like Google or Amazon, as a regular engineer, have VERY little to do with what you learned at University, which is why we hire even PhDs as junior engineers, and they usually are. They know a lot of stuff that doesn't matter (like how to color a graph), sure, but they also don't know a lot of stuff that matters (how to build production quality software, without shooting yourself into the foot at every turn).

> Nobody likes whiteboarding

That's why companies should allow laptops.

> Take-home assignments are unpaid work

True, they could be optional. You may not get the job if you don't do it. Honestly, if you can't spend one or two hours on a take home assignment during a 7 day period, you certainly have different problems than applying at this company.

> Pair programming during interviews makes people uncomfortable

I agree, pair programming during an interview is mostly a no go. Not because of the issues you mentioned but because most interviewers are totally unqualified to do this properly (unfortunately, most interviewers are also unqualified in general to conduct interviews). It takes a lot of skill to conduct pair programming interviews and draw the correct conclusions.

> People who currently have good jobs are unwilling to consider contract-to-hire

In US, there is practically no difference between those three. You can be fired any day anyway. But yes, if you have a secure job that is good, the bar for switching is high, but so what? Why even switch? It's your choice then... Luxury problem!

> Credentials, including graduate degrees, are no guarantee that someone is a good engineer

I would go as far as saying your credentials and degrees are horrendously irrelevant in predicting your skills as an engineer. The only thing you might be able to conclude is that a GPA 4 M.I.T. graduate probably can pick up missing knowledge quickly, as opposed to a no degree dish washer who learned "how to code" in a 6 week bootcamp.

On that note I have experienced first hand, Berkeley and Georgia Tech CS majors, who were absolutely incompetent on the job and just had no idea what the hell they were doing, with little improvement in sight...

Yeah, or get a full-time job that actually satisfies you. Ever since I started working I never created a private project anymore. If I don't like what I do at work, I find a different team or company that does something I want to do.

I could never imagine working on a side project while having a full-time job. That will inevitably mean you are doing neither of these things well.

The article is a bit ironic. It apparently talks about people who don't learn and don't change but suggests to them to just go and "find a new profession"...

A new grad, compared to a 10 year veteran :D. Yes sure, it levels the playing field, totally. As if language and frameworks would mean anything. I don't even want to know what kind of "veterans" would compare to a new grad. If you are worth anything at what you are doing, you would kick any smaller team of new grads out of the park, even when working alone, in a language you don't know and with a framework you don't know. New grads essentially know nothing about software engineering, nada...

It's baffling to me how any company would think otherwise. Perhaps they should review their hiring policies then.

There needs to be a new international law that classifies nations who deliberately destroy nature as "at war". The idea is simple: Wrecking your local environment is not a local action. It affects the entire planet and should be seen tantamount to war. This will likely pretty much put a lot of nations into the war section... Then negotiations can continue from there.

While military action is not feasible and in this case counterproductive, aggressive sanctions might help. Sanctioning these nations back into stone age if they don't change their course...

Right now, there is no accepted means to stop this from happening.

You need to earn money, sure. But it's really sad that things like this are not OpenSource for people to play around with. I am sure the possibilities would be endless. This seems to make a great foundation for a new MMORPG in space.

Yeah as if Earth doesn't have any other problems right now than putting million of super-rich people into space lol. What a stupid waste of time and resources. Maybe there should be some laws indeed for Earth orbit, for instance, banning densely populated, orbiting space craft, for starters. Or fixing or problems on Earth before spending hundreds of billions on useless space projects. We might not be around long enough to populate space otherwise. Now is not the time...

You can't compare it to Java checked exceptions. Java checked exceptions are one of those billion dollar "mistakes". It is the single worst thing in Java for me. Checked exceptions add nothing and break almost everything around clean design & code.

For that comparison to work, java would have needed to only have checked exceptions, with some added language features to deal with them cleanly, and then it might actually have been a viable design. Littering your code with try-catch is what makes exceptions infeasible for error handling.

This reads like a typical blockchain non-sense hype article. Before you even go down the road of comparing sia to S3, what about some unbiased benchmarks? Show us the 99.999999999% durability, the pretty much unlimited bandwidth, the single digit milli-second latencies, the practically unlimited capacity.

If you want to compare Sia to anything, compare it to Dropbox or OneDrive. S3 was made for an entirely different purpose and Sia can't even remotely compete with it.

As a personal data store? Maybe. But wait until this thing becomes more popular and hackers start making a mess. Will be interesting to see how stable this "fully decentralized" network is, once it gets the full attention from bad actors as all the cloud providers.

Cool, finally people can utilize the statistical human average by automatically boiler-plating their code with what the average developer would produce.

Sounds like this has good chance of bringing the "human intelligence on deep-learning auto-pilot" into the world of developers. Don't think, just accept what the computer tells you. Over time, why think at all.

There is no bigger enemy to concise, clean code, than too much auto-completion. If it doesn't pain you to repeat patterns, then there is literally no incentive no to litter your code with anti-patterns and copy paste. Now it's even worse, because this copy paste gets "smart" enough to look alright, which is in itself the very definition of an anti-pattern.

Any of the warehouse workers has or had the chance to obtain the skills of an AWS employee... Or are you advocating communism?

This suggestion is about as intelligible as saying back in 2006: "To break Microsoft's monopoly in the OS market, make it's kernel source code public". (i.e. Absolutely useless)

True, but there is a big difference in the quality of produced software between:

* I need to develop for this shitty platform, which I hate, because my customers are on it

* I want to develop for this awesome platform, because I just love it and my customers are also on it

If Apple loses touch & favor with developers, their platform will slowly but surely die out over a decade or two. Apple is expensive, the only reason for Apple to even exist is because they deliver quality products. If they ever go down the road of consistently failing this core value, they will die more quickly than reindeer thrown down a cliff.

Good luck assuming that life needs a planet and an orbit. All you need is a way for particles to make explicit decisions and experience some sort of consciousness (but even that is debatable, since few life forms on earth seem to have that).

And I would even question that you need particles. Particles might just be what we can experience in 3 dimensions.

I always find it funny how humans are so eager to draw generalized conclusions based on their own meager 100 years of scientific existence. We should be more humble and realize that we know jack shit about anything.

Yet another myth that comes from not working in big companies... Learning a language is mostly useless for several reasons: 1) You will be among the only person who is willing to learn it 2) You will have no capable reviewers, and usually you need about 2 for each CR 3) Your team has no production knowledge and muscle memory for that language. Ergo pretty much all you do will be garbage for a very long time and a huge operational risk. 4) Other teams at your company will not know this language either.

Bottom line: Pick the language most teams at your company are familiar with. At Amazon that simply is Java for anything that is not frontend, period. Even getting into Kotlin presents a major obstacle. Clojure? Yeah right.

Edit: Just to clarify. Working in a big company is not meant as a restriction. In fact, having worked in several startups before, these would do well to adopt the same principles for programming and prohibit this "university graduate" way of developing software. In the end, if your startup is going to survive, it's going to become a big company itself someday.

Sorry but this is just crazy. I always wonder if people writing blog posts like that have ever worked in a big company. You need to spend at least 2-3 hours a day doing code reviews and most of the rest you are writing code, which subsequently involves reading the code you wrote yourself and others have written.

Now we currently use Java here. I worked with other programming languages in companies too, for instance C and C++ which were a nightmare with no equal. Don't get me wrong, when I was in college I just loved creating crazy shit with template metaprogramming and preprocessor metaprogramming. Once you mature out of it, this is just the most craziest thing you could ever do.

The reason is simple. Even plain, stupid Java is already incredibly hard to verify during a CodeReview. Spend 2 hours in a row trying to find problems with other's people well written Java code and your brain feels like it explodes. Now with C++ that same task is almost impossible and will likely require 8 hours of your day for the same code volume. With Haskell I would go out on a limb here and say it would require 24 hours of your daily time to handle the same code volume...

Not to mention that most programmers even at Google and Amazon would not even be able to either read or write such code and people like me, who could and did in the past would just shake their heads and move on. Nobody wants to deal with such code outside of university...

Yes it does. If there actually was a bigger demand than there is supply, the salary would raise. The main reason why it doesn't is because a programming language or frameworks are not a barrier for any top developer. Skills usually transfer very well.

The real crux of the matter is that these companies don't want to pay top salaries and thus don't get top developers. As long as there are people who navigate themselves into such niches and are proud of it, the salary for these specialized jobs will stay where it is. Simple as that.

Last thing I heard, high buildings are mostly infeasible in Berlin due to the unstable underground. You can't build New York everywhere...

The author really hasn't learnt anything if he thinks that enabling all Google recovery options is the right thing to do. The only thing you should ever use is "Google Authenticator" and then store a copy of its recovery codes in a safe place (bank vault or zero-knowledge encrypted online storage). But better yet, don't use GMail in the first place.

Patching a critical system file with python on a regular basis... What could go wrong?

Ha I just did the exact same thing yesterday evening... Funny how stuff like this hits place one in HackerNews these days.

Sounds good. In reality this likely means Trump will abuse this power for some absurd changes and surveillance.

Yeah this is the M.I.T. and Harvard "process". Hire success, instead of fostering success. Works well for small companies. If you need to hire 10.000 to 30.000 people a year, this approach is absolutely useless.

Also just because someone can't come up with the coolest solution for your project, doesn't mean they aren't good developers. This is even more biased than algorithmic interviews, because algorithmic interviews have structure. I actually CAN solve a puzzle in 20 mins. You definitely can not solve a project in 20 minutes or even an hour. It is impossible. And the best candidates will be those who sit back, analyze the problem for days or even weeks and come up with a good solution for your project. This approach is so infeasible for general interviewing that I don't even know where to begin. You are basically filtering out EVERYONE and take the one person who knew enough upfront to accidentially solve your problem best...

Sorry but interviews at the big tech companies have become so easy these days, due to their insatiable demand for "talent", that I can't really hear these whinings about difficult interviews anymore. The candidates we usually get are just absolutely inadequate at coding and behavioral questions. This is not something you can overlook. They just lack the very basic skills to express themselves in code even when disregarding the correctness of their solutions.

"You can't invert a binary tree". Well doh! Maybe you should go through the effort of at least looking at some of the basic algorithmic concepts again, you know just to show that you even remotely care to be hired by the company. They have a much harder job than you do. They get hundred thousands of applicants per month and need to filter them out. You are one person applying at maybe 2-3 companies a month or week.

To me, this sounds like someone who thinks too highly of himself and "he doesn't need to prove himself to a FANNG company". Well think again, writing Homebrew doesn't mean anything. Pretty much anyone at a FANNG company could do that, but not everyone wants to do it. If you want to work at FANNG instead Homebrew, you need to prove yourself to them, not vice versa...

Is it really too much to ask to spend a few days solving some programming puzzles on a whiteboard? If few days are not enough, then maybe you really aren't as smart as you think?

I think people these days really tend to always put the blame on others. What about starting to look at yourself more critically, think about if you are really a "senior" engineer? I work in tech for years now at FANNG companies and "senior engineers" are in a different league. I think I will get there in one or two years but it has been a long ride. These people are paradigms of programming that can always give you useful insights and advise. They excel at a wide range of soft skills and management too.

If you see what most companies (outside of FANNG) consider "senior" you will know why (1) senior engineer means absolutely nothing and (2) why FANNG is not interested whatsoever if you were a senior engineer somewhere else...