Not yet but there's a precedent for incredibly perverse incentives caused by sports gambling -- most iconically the White Sox throwing the world series in 1919.
Looking at that smalltowntruth website reminds me of someone I met in 2015.
I stayed at a guy's airbnb in Denver. He was in breach of his renting agreement by hosting the airbnb and had previously spent about a year in jail (forget for what). He said he had 2 websites that he was promoting on Facebook and were making him money. On one website he posted lots of pro-Trump content and on the other he posted lots of pro-Bernie Sanders content. This was during the primaries so these articles were largely in opposition to Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. He said he didn't care about either candidate but both websites were making him good money in ad revenue. He was not actually affiliated with either party.
I wouldn't be surprised if he or someone else like him had scaled up their efforts.
I find that quite satisfying. At least someone is getting something tangible out of the screaming and shouting, and best of all, it’s something straightforward. Money.
I've been learning how to use Blender. For a long time I've thought that working with things in 3D could be made simpler by having an app where your phone is a sort of 3D cursor, and e.g. for modeling you could use your phone as a sculpting knife by moving it around in the air.
So I spent some time trying to make an app that allows you to do that, but can't shake the thought that such an app would work better as a Blender addon/plugin rather a standalone app. And I also am trying to figure out how people work with 3D currently, to see if such a tool would even be an improvement over existing tools.
Cool! Didn't know about the pen, though I've seen clips of similar tech being used.
I've got a long ways to go with this app though so it's still just a pet project. The position tracking is very suboptimal right now, so I need to switch to a better library. And then I need to start adding actual actions because right now the app is just a glorified object viewer.
I'm insanely flattered that you think it's interesting though. Very motivating to me.
I love this space of hybrid computing. If you want to see some inspiration, look at
- bill buxton at Microsoft research
- Disney research has a lot of really cool stuff too
- anything siggraph
Please keep me up to date one way or another. If you have linkedin, add me, a blog or newsletter? I'll sign up. Discord? Let me know. Just let me know where you're active.
That was cool! Yeah this is exactly the kind of thing I'm working on too. I don't have it that you can draw like he does, but it does let you view an object in a similar way & it can stream data to a server connected over wifi so that you can see mirrored behavior on a desktop app. But it's missing so much still, you can't interact with anything yet.
I hate this article. It's a very smug way of blaming the dev who's just trying to make the app better when it's probably the culture that's the problem. Bad refactors usually happen because the person doing the refactor is getting a ton of pushback on it -- they probably underestimated the effort involved and are getting chewed out for taking too long on it, so they cut corners that might accidentally lose functionality, or they don't finish the desired abstraction / clean code they were going for which leaves the code less readable.
For a dev that's a new hire, refactoring the code is also a way for them to feel ownership over it. The PM should be happy that they're thinking about the way the code works and the way the code should work. It's on the company to have review & qa processes that catch problems before they lead to downtime.
I don't disagree that some of the examples given are bad refactors, but in regards to adding inconsistency I see that happen a lot more when rushing out new features or bug fixes than when refactoring; usually the refactor is the effort trying to establish some kind of consistency. And example 5 isn't a refactor it's just removing functionality. If that was the intent, the person should be told not to do that. If it's an accidental side effect of some larger refactor effort, then just add the functionality back in a new PR. Accept that mistakes happen, adopt some QA controls to catch them, and build a culture that encourages your developers to care about your product.
I think the word "easily" is carrying a lot weight here -- for a company the size of Disney, keeping all internal communication records in secure offline storage sounds pretty hard from both a technical and operational standpoint. Certainly doable, but I doubt it'd ever happen unless it were required by law
There are various levels of offline. For example you can have an S3 bucket with write-only access. No, it's not perfectly offline. But it's isolated from both vulnerabilities and from hacked employees, which covers most common types of breaches. You can solve 99% of the offline storage features without having an actual physical location with tapes.
Employees shouldn't have default access to those credentials. This applies to audit/backup/account management/billing privileges. You can have very dedicated roles with lots of restrictions for those specific things.
If the organisation doesn't use SSO coupled with MFA and the enforcement of the least amount of privileges principle on a cloud platform, then they have no right to complain about security breaches.
> And God (PM) forbid, if you ever find yourself with some extra free time you might even reduce the size of dragons over time.
Honest question, what is the company like where you can do that? Everywhere I've worked (only been working in industry for 6 years) has had such rigid agile development that even when I do find myself with free time, there's no flexibility to work on things that haven't been assigned to you and the best I can do is work on profiling/debugging tools.
Usually at smaller companies with just a handful of developers. Can be a "start-up", or just a smaller business running fine with small teams. Or sometimes in a larger company where there's a small team doing its own thing.
There's up-and-downsides to everything. The pay is usually less, and "fewer processes" often also means fewer processes surrounding HR and such. This can mean you're subject to the whims and mood swings of one person. I was once fired over a pretty far-fetched misunderstanding, but 1) they didn't mention it because "I should know myself", so I didn't really have a chance to clear it up, and 2) when I got fired they agreed it was a complete misunderstanding and that they made a huge mistake, but fired me anyway because that was the road already taken now. Great ... thanks ... It's hard to imagine that happening at a larger company with an actual HR department and stuff.
Also: a Wikipedia-esque "be bold" attitude helps. Obviously refactoring things just for the craic isn't a good idea, but if there's something that can really make an impact then I'd just do it and send a PR, regardless of what I've been assigned. Obviously "refactor everything" on your own initiative isn't a good idea, but usually there's tons of smaller stuff that really helps: "introduce new function/package that helps reduce boiler plate", "split up this difficult to understand function", things like that.
Most PMs will realize they don't have a 100% in-depth understanding of the code, and will trust you when you say it helps you do your work better. Usually it's fine as long as you apply proper judgement and don't spend too much time on it. That said, there are some places where this really isn't appreciated regardless. IMHO that's pretty dysfunctional and when I start looking for somewhere else to work.
The best rejection letter I ever got was a personal note from the person hiring, saying "You were good, but we just needed someone who is stronger with [x], [y], and [z]". It felt actionable because it told me things I could improve on.
Aside from that one, the rejections that were the least self-esteem-damaging were ones that said "we've decided not to fill the position". Even if not true, it's a good "it's not you it's me" type of rejection.
I just had one like this from a well known company over Christmas. I had made it to the first interview and it went exceptionally well. I received a follow up the next day that they were excited to continue and the hiring manager would reach out soon to schedule the next round of interviews.
Unfortunately a day later I got a notice from them that the role I was interviewing for was being closed down. They encouraged me to look for other roles I was interested in and we could continue from there. I sent two, and then right after new years was informed they were freezing all hiring until mid January when they finalized their new head count. Then they were among the number of companies announcing new layoffs in the last couple weeks.
Talk about disappointed but still being appreciative. I'm still excited about maybe getting on with the company one day simply because they treated the hiring process with a lot of respect and didn't waste my time. It wasn't a me thing, but just bad news coming down from higher up internally.
I hear this excuse all the time, but can anyone give first hand knowledge of how realistic this fear is when giving feedback about performance during a technical portion? Any lawyers or managers here that have faced actual consequences for giving feedback?
Having now been on the hiring side of things for technical interviews, I'll give feedback when asked, but I think that most people don't give feedback because its kind of a pain in the ass if you aren't organized.
In most non-dictatorships, private parties are free to start almost any civil case against each other. The judge may grant a motion to dismiss for things that are obviously bogus, but a decently filed grievance about the hiring process, supported by the counterparty's own statements, would likely require more scrutiny.
That is: the litigation could probably happen in most countries and even not be summarily dismissed.
I wonder how much of this is just their salary depending on the hiring market being as inefficient as possible. Seems like clear communication could go a long way to reducing HR workloads.
Back in 2016 I got rejected from Square. Admittedly I didn't do well on the interview and wasn't surprised.
The recruiter actually got on the phone with me, and pointed out the signals (from notes from the hiring manager) that I was lacking for them. And how I could improve if I wanted to interview with them again.
It all felt very respectful. Good for them for going above and beyond.
That said I don't expect any company to tell me anything beyond "No thanks" after a failed interview.
I gave someone feedback like that once; they actually came back a few months later to reinterview, having worked on the gaps. got hired and went on to become one of our best developers.
I practically wrote my own rejection letter for Canonical. Their interview process required doing multiple long form writing responses, including telling them why I was an amazing High School student. I wasn't, and I'm quite proud of how much I've changed since then. As if the jerk from 1996 had any bearing on anything of relevance. Laughable.
I don't want to be surrounded by people who can still brag about high school.
I had a very similar experience with Canonical when I was looking for my first job. The entire tone of the transaction was very negative and passive aggressive. It made me nervous about their work culture so I decided not to continue the application process. I'm still a bit bummed about it since I would have loved to work in that space.
Saying that SAT scores correlate closely with income in response to someone claiming that SAT scores measure IQ could be a statement of agreement or disagreement, depending on the relationships among the various measures.
I am disagreeing - why would more money make you inherently smarter? His premise that smart parents make more more is unquestionably false when 99% (or something) of wealth is transferred via inheritance - people don't generally get rich anymore[1].
Also, if you want to measure IQ, why not use an IQ test and not some arbitrary proxy?
It's not that more money would make you inherently smarter, but rather that more intelligent parents might (statistically) both make more money and also have more intelligent children.
Those children might go on to score better on the SAT, leaving a correlation between parental income and SAT scores that would be unsurprising at each step.
Your point about inherited wealth is not demonstrated on the chart you showed, which was parental incomes (not wealth) and in ranges unlikely to be perturbed by vast inheritances.
> Also, if you want to measure IQ, why not use an IQ test and not some arbitrary proxy?
I don't want to; I suspect colleges and D. E. Shaw felt like SAT scores were an acceptable/practical proxy for whatever purpose it was that they had. I thought it was weird and slightly off-putting to be asked, but it seems to work for them.
I've talked to some Canonical interviewers and they all were perfectly nice. No "high school brag" vibe at all. I suspect people who wrote those long form questions and people who actually do the interviews are completely different departments and the latter have no much influence on the former.
The worst ones I've gotten are those that I didn't get. Like, after being actively engaged for several weeks and passing some interviews, just... wall of silence. Come on, people, if you don't want me - drop me a note, at least give me some closure.
The weirdest ones were "we don't want you, but we will keep your data in the database just in case". Like, in which case? Do you have any other positions that you think I could match? Why not talk to me about them then? Do you expect to have them in some indefinite future and expect me to stay unemployed in the meanwhile? Or do you expect me to drop the position I just recently started in the meantime and jump to your company as soon as you call - because that's the kind of employee you're looking for? I'm just not sure what's the message here. Is it just general "we don't want to hire you, but don't worry, you're not a complete basket case, there's still a chance we might hire you eventually. Or maybe not". Confusing.
> Aside from that one, the rejections that were the least self-esteem-damaging were ones that said "we've decided not to fill the position". Even if not true, it's a good "it's not you it's me" type of rejection.
"there is a hiring freeze put into place"
bro it's early Feb-Mar, the job advert is < 30 days, and budgets came out but a few weeks earlier -- hiring ain't frozen.
best guess was that it was a security-related tech company, and turning down people, esp. reasonably qualified ones, in a way that makes them mad is akin to drawing a target on your head. give custom feedback to those who got through the interview process so they feel like they are at least looked at, and shootdown the rest via something that feels impartial -- otherwise these wanna be blackhats will try to DDoS you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal