twright0

> I have to praise Google for the way the situation was handled

The original creator of the spreadsheet claimed that she was retaliated against in the form of her manager rejecting peer bonuses sent to her.

If this is true, why do computers regularly and consistently defeat even the best humans in full games of chess that last dozens of moves?

> using taxing authority as a weapon against political opponents (Tea Party thing.)

Can you elaborate on this one? I can't figure out what it's referencing.

> Successful startups all, and I mean ALL, have serious compliance issues.

This feels like a very hyperbolic claim. There are definitely high-profile examples of startups that had compliance issues and are struggling to bring them under control or remain in arguably grey areas (Zenefits is an example of the former, Airbnb the latter). But it's hard to imagine that it's a truly universal problem; many startups are in industries without heavy regulatory rules. Can you elaborate on what makes you believe this to be the case?

> ruined a perfectly good Daft Punk song

It's not like he painted over the Mona Lisa. You can still go listen to the original Daft Punk song if you prefer it - it sounds just the same as it did before Kanye sampled it.

Bizarrely, I get identical results to yours, both when hitting the center option over and over, and when going back and forth sequentially.

Have we both opted out of using our personal data to train our keyboard leaving only the global defaults or some such thing? I am sure that I don't type "please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns" particularly often.

Messages posted on people's walls are also public to all their friends, which I'm sure plays a larger role in reception than the UI they use to consume the message, and certainly influences what you're willing to say.

> If Fb goes the MySpace way, how much is that donation worth?

If Fb goes the Google way and its value continues to go up, the donation will be worth more. It's true that the donation is of unclear value. But calling it $45 billion is a way to communicate the scope of the pledge that they've committed to.

> Secondly there appears to be a duality between how the company operates and what this post tries to rally for.

It's important to distinguish between the behavior of a person and the behavior of Facebook, Inc. Every time the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation does something, we don't get dozens of people rising out of the woodwork harping on Microsoft's unethical business practices - but Bill Gates' mid-90s Microsoft was definitely on par with Facebook at its worst. It's okay to celebrate good things done, as long as we don't fully forget how we got there. We should continue to criticize Facebook as a company even as we recognize that the individual here is attempting something great.

> Finally, using the pretense of writing a letter to their newly born daughter rubs some the wrong way.

It's a pretty easy and effective rhetorical device. The letter is obviously targeted at the world, or he wouldn't have published it. But it's a good way to present some emotional framing - this is why he cares so much, why he's invested in a better world. Not all attempts to inspire pathos in the reader are rooted in evil, it's just a tool for effective writing.

This seems like your mental model assumes relatively small codebases. On a codebase with 1m LOC, your estimation of 2500 lines/day still takes ~400 person-days. That's a big investment to put into something that doesn't present clear benefits. Moreover, converting a huge codebase piecemeal is something of a challenge; I don't know if it's even possible to have python 2 importing python 3 (or vice versa) but assuming your large codebase is relatively interdependent, reorganizing the codebase such that you can split it into modules which can be migrated independently could also be a big undertaking. I would also anticipate that there would be a long tail of fixing bugs caused by incorrect migration (are we code reviewing those 2500 lines/day?) as well as lower productivity as developers get used to the new language.

This is why you frequently hear that large, established codebases that control their environment aren't updating to Python 3. It's pretty easy to move a few thousand lines over but complexity scales non-linearly with the size of the codebase.

This approach is backwards. This is the kind of problem that is easy for a person, but not for an AI. So if M was an AI pretending to be a human, you could use this to determine that. But in this case, the suspicion is that M is a human pretending to be an AI - and they could simply decline to attempt the task, or pretend to be unable (or do a bad job deliberately), and you'd learn nothing from negative results.

Nobody used the word "trigger". It's interesting to me that you're conflating pointing out a potential issue (their sarcastic "classy") with being personally upset ("triggered") - what's going on there? Also, why are age and gender the two attributes you want to learn about them as a result?

Most 'software guys' have academic backgrounds in computer science, which typically doesn't include anything like engineering ethics. An outright 'Software Engineering' degree might include something like that, but it's definitely emphasized far less than it would be in something like mechanical or civil engineering.

Do you work on "a technology that converts those smoke coming out from factories to oxygen instantly or something that will clean the water or fix the ozone"? If not, why not? I find that I can often understand why others make the decisions they do by comparing my own motivations for similar decisions.

There's not a lot of black hat activity, but there's plenty of good- to neutral-natured messing about. The "Wall of Sheep" is a great example; if you send something that looks like a username/password on the public wifi, someone will put it up on a big display (though they'll obscure some of the password field) along with the other 'sheep'. Not "black hat" but definitely not the kind of thing you want on a real account.

As for burner clothes, the only thing I've ever heard is to not wear company-branded clothes - wearing an obvious Google t-shirt is a great way to attract attention you may not want.

> mortgage rates are dirt cheap and rent versus own pricing is at parity.

I think you're discounting the down payment factor. As a single engineer in SF, I could afford the monthly payment on a mortgage, but putting down 20% of a $1m house is beyond me and probably will be for a while (a few years).

The other trick is concern about this being the peak or close to the peak of the housing bubble in SF - so if I drop that kind of cash into a house, the market might collapse leaving me with property worth substantially less than what I'm paying.

> Offer $500 as a 1099 contractor to complete the assignment within the next 2 weeks or so.

Just as an aside, I would actually be more willing to undertake this type of interview if you weren't paying me. I don't have any ethical qualms about interviewing while working a full-time engineering job, but I'm not entirely comfortable taking a contracting job under the table. It may be something of a symbolic gesture given that it's such a small time investment and small amount of money, but it feels fundamentally dishonest, especially if you're a current or plausible future competitor to the company I currently work at.

The official policy where I currently work is that moonlighting is allowed but must be approved by our legal team, and while I could probably get away with not asking for permission, I'd be pretty uncomfortable in both cases (asking, or not asking).

If this is what they were actually doing, and not hyperbole, I suspect you would have a reasonable case to fill out an FCC complaint - see their "Rules and Resources for Dealing with Unwanted Calls and Texts" at https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/2028738...

> like the driving equivalent of a "thought police" society from 1984 -- but automated.

Except in this case it's reporting a crime that you have actually already done - you broke a traffic law. It might not be an extremely serious crime most of the time, but it's absolutely not the same as punishment for thinking about breaking the law.

Google's acceptance rate is well above .01%, just using basic reasoning. Google employs tens of thousands of engineers, which means they would have had to reject hundreds of millions of candidates for the role of software engineer.

After a few months of frequently working weekends, Google started giving me directions to work on Saturdays when I stayed at home. I very much like the idea behind this kind of prompt but something like this has so much surface area that it's mostly impossible for them to handle every single edge case (like ours).

If you're working solely in an environment so minimal and obscure that it can't view a PDF, I think you've lost the right to be catered to (and complain) when it comes to document format decisions.

The comparison to Excel is absurd; PDF is an open format and has been for more than five years.

But surely if we can observe that a "free-er and more market-based" approach is working less well than the approaches taken by other countries, we should change our approach? Our dubious superpower status will not be much comfort to those dying from treatable diseases they cannot afford to treat.

Silicon Valley interns (in tech fields) are generally paid reasonably well. There may be some cases where tech companies here don't pay their interns but the majority certainly do. The cases of systemic intern non-payment seem to generally happen outside of the tech industry.

"Stack ranking employee evaluations"

I agree with a great many criticisms of Microsoft, but this one always strikes me as nonsensical. I was an intern at Microsoft and (while I never participated in stack ranking) it never seemed particularly destructive. I went on a tour of Valve and one question that was asked during the Q&A was what kind of evaluation and ranking system they used - the answer was stack ranking. Companies have to use some form of evaluation and ranking for their employees once they grow past a certain size - it's just an organizational requirement. The alternative is upper management without quantifiable information about the many people under them, which makes it harder to allocate resources and operate efficiently. Or so I imagine, I'm not in upper management at a very large company, but that certainly seems to be the case pretty much everywhere.

Unless you happen to be standing too close to someone a human decides to kill with a drone, of course.