I like it, thanks for posting. It brings some interesting ideas to mind.
For example thinking of fractal scopes and the concept of fractal similarity, it makes me think of e.g. the human pattern, here--well, can we expect the lesser-human pattern, the greater-human pattern, elsewhere? Is a greater-earth model applicable out there somewhere? In what ways, and so on.
Computers shut the door on all human skulduggery. Humans are terrible at arbitrating fairness. Even when they think they're being fair, they are not.
Why are you only considering the upside of having humans in the loop, having the heart to wait the extra second for the filing? What about the human that looks you up and down before making that decision? What about the human that wants a bribe to take your filing? What about the human that's in good or bad mood?
Convince yourself that you really, really want it.
Every day/night, spend 30 minutes sitting alone in a quiet space, emotionally involved in how much you want to lose weight.
Then during the day -- and this is important -- don't fight the urge to eat. At all. Just live your life.
Once your daily meditation/prayer/yearning starts to take hold, you will automatically start making better choices.
This advice goes for anything you want to change about yourself. You have convince the part of your brain that runs your life moment-to-moment that you want to behave differently. And the only way to do it is by getting that part of your brain to understand how much you want it. You have to prove it by going emotionally deep over and over and over.
Always keep a diamond in your mind.
Always keep a diamond in your mind.
Wherever you may wander, wherever you roam,
You got to always keep a diamond in your mind.
Create an exam, broadcast an invite to take it, hire randomly from all who pass.
All excuses for why this won't work can be answered with: then make a better test.
As a species, across all cultures, we tell ourselves that the human we're after -- the student, the employee, the promotee -- can't possibly be selected by test alone.
When in fact, if we can't write a test to select the qualified humans, then either we're too lazy to write one, or, more likely, we actually want to leave plenty of room for human bias to do the actual selecting.
And this is ok because we have a special power: we can judge the value of every human, and its future likelihood for success, with a single conversation. If we weren't in a tech company, we could make a very good living reading palms.
We never hire people who don't pass our wonderfully fuzzy exams, so we have no evidence that we're selecting the best people or not. No worries, though, our palm reading is very, very accurate.
The way we look at it is like this. We make a test no one can pass. We always have one more question or one more "level" that there's not enough time for. Because when all candidates fail, we have to fall back on our palm reading, which is just how we like it.
Power and privilege are precious resources to us. We give them out to those most likely to reciprocate. That's what we're poking for with our "culture fit".
In the future, students of our culture will look back on our hiring practices and say, "It was illegal to hire based on race, age, sex, and a million other things, but not beauty??? They didn't start with beauty? And they never realized that beauty needed to be in the mix? I don't understand."
That's the whiteboard interview in a nutshell. Standard problems given to everyone and asked to answer them in a standard way. Done in person to lower the chance of cheating.
The same reasons whiteboard interviews are problematic will apply to any test done at scale.
Not standard questions. Companies switch away from a problem as soon a it becomes known they use it. They want a problem the applicant has never seen before. And I'm saying, it's not because they are testing for intelligence -- they will help you through it if they like you -- it's because they want you to struggle with it. Which gives them the right to use their gut to decide.
That's not been my experience at all. Companies keep using the same problems that are on leetcode or some minor variant of it. More to the point, in many places companies don't assign problems, the interviewer has full leeway in doing that. They will keep using the same problem since they have a rubric for how people perform on it.
if we can't write a test to select the qualified humans, then either we're too lazy to write one, or, more likely, we actually want to leave plenty of room for human bias to do the actual selecting.
What makes you think that such a test exists? Why is that a given?
Do we ever say, for the code we write, that no such test exists for it? Why is this different for the jobs we hire for? What is this ineffable thing that can't be tested for?
These kinda of “unbiased” exams only work if people can’t cheat (either directly, by learning the questions from someone who already took the exam, or indirectly by preparing in a way that helps them score more on the exam, while not actually improving the skills the exam is supposed to be a proxy of).
The test can be open source and dynamic. It can be a test the applicant can take over and over again every day to practice. When she applies for the job, she takes that very same test under controlled conditions so we know she is taking it and not someone else.
Why can't we write a test to see if she can code in Python at an appropriate level of expertise without mixing it in with algorithm gotchas? What are the algorithms she needs to know? Why can't we provide her with a list of those algorithms and show her how we will test for mastery of them?
>The test can be open source and dynamic. It can be a test the applicant can take over and over again every day to practice.
>Why can't we provide her with a list of those algorithms and show her how we will test for mastery of them?
That's exactly what is done, it's called leetcode.com, recruiters send you a link to it and tell you to study. I don't see how anything you're describing isn't covered by the existing whiteboard interview dynamic.
Most every coding question asked to me by FAANG was on leetcode (I think 1 out of 10+ wasn't but maybe I just missed it). Had I gone through all of leetcode I'd have covered almost every question asked of me. The behavioral questions asked were basically told to me by the recruiter verbatim ahead of time so were not a surprise in any way. The system design is broader but most cover a few common areas that you can google to find.
So it's all standard questions that have answers you can study for ahead of time.
I think we're talking past each other. I'm saying that no company tell you that (1) all questions you will be asked are on leetcode, (2) these are the acceptable answers -- passing the tests does not always count as acceptable, and (3) if you pass all these tests you will be offered a job, or entered into a lottery with all other people who pass them?
leetcode as used by FAANG is a hurdle that you can't ever be sure you actually cleared. it's not a test that returns a pass fail score.
The array of numbers represents some opaque statistical property of the sentence with respect to the others in the corpus the model was trained from. The hope is that this property will correlate with what we believe to be the sentence's meaning.
You're at the foot of Mt. Everest asking if there's a shortcut to the top. Learning a second language is like having a child. It's a life long commitment that will consume much of your time for 10 years or so, assuming you really want to be fluent, and will require maintenance thereafter. Consider learning Russian history and culture instead if it sounds too daunting. That's almost always a better choice for native English speakers, in my opinion.
Well, I was asking if I was wearing the right kind of boots. The conclusion seems to be that while there are many boots to choose from, none will make you walk any faster.
I think your suggestion about history and culture is wise. Sometimes when I get tired of learning the language I'll read Russian politics or recipes, just to remind myself why I'm trying to learn it in the first place.
The answer lies deep down in your soul. No trick, no formula, no epiphany is going to save you. It's about you keeping promises you make to yourself. You know this. Wrestle with why you are unable to do it. That's your only salvation.
