If I have a serious wreck in my car, I win the insurance bet—that is, it may well pay out more than I've paid in. Even crappy health insurance policies have cases where they do the same.
Not so with pet deposits in any lease I've seen. They take your money, which is usually non-refundable, and will still charge you for any cleaning and repair not covered by the deposits you paid.
Perhaps it's insurance from the landlord's perspective, but it's an added cost the tenant bears that offers them no financial protection at all.
The extra money isn't meant to protect you (the tenant) from anything. It's there to protect the landlord's interest in being able to recoup losses caused by a destructive pet.
If a landlord isn't returning your pet deposit when you move out, it's not a deposit, it's a fee. If they're misrepresenting it as a deposit that will be returned, you might have legal recourse, depending on where you live.
Ah, gotcha. Why is that so objectionable, though? Can you state with certainty that a dog (not specifically your dog, but the average or maybe even a majority of dogs) does not increase wear-and-tear on an apartment at a level that justifies a higher rent? I live in SF, so I'm certainly no stranger to the concept of the greedy landlord who jacks up prices just because they can, but extra pet rent seems entirely reasonable to me and not just a manifestation of greed.
The objection is generally landlords have to show damages to collect compensation from renters. They collect deposits to ensure at least some of the bill gets paid should you damage the place beyond normal wear and tear, but if you leave your home in the condition it was in when you moved in the landlord owes you your deposit back. That makes sense.
What justifies pet deposits being different? What justifies pet rent but not, say, charging extra rent or an extra non-refundable deposit because you have a toddler?
(Is pet rent even collected and applied to the cost of repairing any damage your pet causes? I should find out what's common here.)
As an aside: I've also had a landlord charge almost $5 for a paper statement, or just under $1 to e-mail me a statement instead. (No statement was no option.) They're clearly not above nickel-and-diming their customers—which I found weird because $1 on top of, say, $800 (plausible rent for a two-bedroom unit in not-SF) is nothing—about 0.1% of rent. Which makes it a minor annoyance at worst, but… why bother? $400 (common pet deposit amount in not-SF) + $10/mo (common pet rent, when pet rent is charged) is also nothing—just over 5% of one year's rent. But it's more of a something than a $1 fee for them telling you what you owe this month, which they felt the need to do regardless.
If you really do have a model pet that damages nothing, why does the landlord get to keep your deposit anyway?
I can grant, say, compulsory carpet replacement—but even then, what if you live there 10 years and the carpet really ought to be replaced whether you had a pet or not? And do two pets double the cost of replacing the carpet?
(Also I know for a fact scroogier landlords will leave the old carpet in when they really shouldn't—when it's 10 years old, the last tenant's cat peed all over it, and also the last tenant chainsmoked indoors. But they'll still collect a non-refundable pet deposit, and probably bill for cleaning in excess of deposits even when that cleaning did not happen.)
Why is that reasonable risk management and not gouging?
Because I'm buying the service of them paying my liability, and also my own damages if I opt for it, if suddenly I crash. They sell the service of protecting you from financial risk.
A car insurance policy that costs $400 once but only pays for $400 worth of damage ever, and isn't refundable, is a bad deal. No one would buy this unless forced to.
They could even do this without preventing the machine from squeezing improperly-ordained-by-DRM bags.
"If we recognize the bag, and it's recalled, we'll stop you—or at least yell at you. If you use someone else's bag you're on your own, but we won't stop you."
Surely they were capable of having this thought. That they didn't or chose to ignore it hints at ulterior motives—most obvious is overcharging for the bags, since not buying them makes you the proud owner of a $400 paperweight.
But a prediction: almost everyone who attempts to block consumers from consuming bad food with technology will do it to overcharge for the food. Safety will be the excuse, not the purpose.
Oh yeah, it's a shitty move to use that as your excuse.
If your goal is reducing food poisoning through TECHNOLOGY! and CONNECTIVITY! to better inform consumers if their food has been recalled, you'd be better off developing food packaging that could eg change color when the food is recalled - a big giant red skull and crossbones appearing on my food packages would probably keep me from accidentally eating bad food. That would both be a challenging engineering project (since it'd have to be cheap, food-safe, and ideally biodegradable), and work for a far wider range of foods and ingredients.
The Linux kernel seems to have a centisecond obsession too. Probably from way back when HZ was 100 and your computer woke up once every centiseecond to make sure it still had nothing to do.
Recent surprise: exponentiation by squaring. Not by name, but by being the correct answer to the question. (This is in the list of 500, by the way.)
It's trivial to explain:
x^n = x(x^2)^((n-1)/2), if n is odd
= (x^2)^(n/2) , if n is even
Knowing that (or having figured that out yourself if an interview was your first exposure to this problem), it's even more trivial to implement, making it a math quiz far more than a programming exercise. (Though I later turned it into a programming exercise entirely to exploit an arbitrary eye bleedecution bug in the human brain: https://gist.github.com/LnxPrgr3/7154873d3eb8b1e5960851628c7...)
Maybe that's what they intended. It's certainly legit if the job will have you actually doing, rather than applying, math. Except that it concludes you can math if you're smart enough to pretend to derive the answer you memorized after encountering it before. You might accidentally hire a bunch of crypto nerds.
For what it's worth I learned that explicitly in a data structures & algorithms class. I've seen it come up in a bunch of other introductory material, so it seems like a relatively standard part of "the curriculum." I think somebody might have a chance of coming up with this shortcut on their own, if, for example, they wanted to compute the Nth Fibonacci number efficiently (using matrix exponentiation -- the bignum arithmetic makes it O(n^2) if you just do n multiplications) or if they wanted to compute a polynomial more efficiently by memoizing the values x^(2^n), or if you kidnapped them and threatened to kill their family if they couldn't figure out how to compute x^n using O(log_2(n)) multiplications...
The difficult thing about that shortcut isn't that you couldn't come up with it, it's that you wouldn't think to try coming up with it unless you are in a particularly painful situation.
I don't view this exponentiation speedup stuff as math-specific, it's something you can come across when efficiently updating string checksums under random access modifications and concatenations, or when solving some graph problem where you exponentiate an adjacency matrix.
I'm glad your algorithm class covered this. Mine did not. It surely covered some other obscure material that you don't know. You are missing the point. If we had a standard CS curriculum, you can fault people for missing out on stuff they should know. I think part of the problem is people is that CS is too big of a discipline at this point. A systems person couldn't pass a graphics person's interview, etc.
For functional purposes, I consider myself to know something if I could page in the details well enough to implement it in 5 minutes with Wikipedia or less.
How this plays in interviews is interesting for just how inconsistent it is. Sometimes I win the algorithm lottery and have had reason to implement the obvious solution myself at least once, and the interviewer learns my memory works. Sometimes I don't know what they're going for but come up with a reasonable answer anyway and the interviewer is thrilled I managed to have an independent thought. Sometimes I lose and the interviewer is clearly trying to guide me to the answer they want to see and I have no idea what they're getting at.
Though not quite as bad as a friend failing an interview for not using a hash table, even though the answer he described was a hash table—just with the identity function as the hash.
(Though maybe about as absurd as one interviewer digging for any formal training I might have had in C++. Like you can teach that language in a semester—please. There are maybe 4 proper experts on the planet.)
I did not buy 64GB of flash storage so Facebook could be lazy. I bought 64GB of flash storage to store media that gets noticeably better, to a point, when you throw more bits at it.
Things that are smaller than Facebook's iOS app:
- Windows, through at least Windows 95, if you count stuff written to disk during install
- The Java Runtime Environment
- Eclipse IDE
- Google Chrome for OS X (beware—updater leaves old versions in the app bundle)
- Firefox for OS X
- Pokémon Go
- A two-disc set encoded in 256kbps AAC
And to add insult to injury, Messenger is another 155MB, and is a separate app for some reason, probably with a second copy of that bigger-than-the-JRE-by-itself FBSharedFramework.
And while the sudden almost 300MB is new, the "I can't believe this is a Web service front-end and not an experimental operating system" bloat has been with us for a while.
Fair enough. But people will decide not caring even slightly about binary size is admirable (move fast and make users buy new phones, I guess) and eventually everything will be huge. Already the number of sub-60MB apps is dwindling and the 100-and-up club is growing, if my recent updates list is any indication.
That's intentionally awkward. If I tap the messages icon on Facebook.com on mobile, I get redirected to a page telling me to download the app. Similarly, messenger.com points me to the App Store.
On the contrary: You can even enable push notifications with Chrome for Android. Chat included. I haven't touched the native apps for ages and everything works just fine.
Counterexample: I did not apply to, nor interview for, my current gig, and I'm not cheating by working for myself.
And I bet almost everyone reading this has worked with at least one person they think shouldn't have survived the interview, and that person was making a boatload because they convinced the boss they're brilliant. Meanwhile 90% of their day was spent talking about how great they are, and 10% creating new bugs, and no one dared say anything because the thought of them being more "productive" was horrifying.
'It' mostly successfully matches employees to employers, but the quality of those matches may vary wildly.
Interview processes also vary wildly—you can't really say that it works without defining 'it.' Are we talking multiple technical screens that require writing code or a single fluffy buzzword-laden conversation with a C-level? Both have failure modes, but those failure modes sure are different.
> Interview processes also vary wildly—you can't really say that it works without defining 'it.' Are we talking multiple technical screens that require writing code or a single fluffy buzzword-laden conversation with a C-level? Both have failure modes, but those failure modes sure are different.
End of the day, everything evens out. People add the structure they need when they hire people. If your engineering interview process for some detail oriented gig is buzzword trivia with the CIO, the company will probably tank anyway. Conversely, if you do some nerd-fest whiteboard interview for a CTO in a bigger organization, you're probably not getting the right outcome either.
Did you read the article? People add the structure they think they need to interviews, but are clearly able to troll themselves into worsening their judgments by requiring steps that not only don't help, but actively hurt.
And this is a near universal phenomenon. Almost everyone wants to "get to know the candidate."
When users of code I've written complain that something sucks to use, I don't demand they come up with a better solution. Probably I don't even want to know what they think the answer is—unless they design user interfaces for a living, odds are their answer will be terrible and they won't even be happy with it if I build it.
This is as it should be—I'm paid to solve problems.
Why is this different?
The more I read about interviewing, the more I realize too many people think they have this problem solved—their amateur psychology is impeccable and their technical screens test for exactly the right things, no more and no less. Did they do a bunch of controlled studies to convince themselves of this, or are they taking sounding good, or intuition about the statistical outcomes of different techniques, to be equivalent to truth?
Maybe the first step is to collectively realize we have close to no clue what we're doing, and are being asked to solve a hard problem: individually, to talk to someone for an hour and make a hiring recommendation. In aggregate, to make the decision based on a handful of these one-hour conversations.
Maybe the first step is to realize this is a problem worth trying to solve.
