I’ve been in plenty of stupid big SUV’s with air conditioning blasting in the summer while in China. Big SUV’s are a status symbol and China summers are horrendously hot.
That being said I’m much more concerned with trash burning (it still happens, I’ve seen it plenty when driving outside of cities) and the byproducts of the intense construction that can’t be slowed down without seriously hurting their economy. I know multiple Chinese people with their retirement investments in concrete manufacturing companies that are losing big with recent government clamping down on that.
Both of these are anecdotal, sure, but then again I don’t trust official Chinese government data so anecdotal has some value.
The USA and other developed countries went through their own periods of abusing the environment during their industrial revolutions so I have to assume China will get through this as well. Things are already improving. And at least their government acknowledges it’s something they need to improve rather than actively regressing like the USA.
The US emits more CO2 while Europe releases far more NOx and other more “traditional” pollutants.
The diesel emissions scandal in the US had a European counterpart that was never dealt with. 2018 models are still polluting far above the official limits which themselves are more lax than the US. [1]
Per capita CO2 emissions are much worse in the US than China. China also has CO2 reduction policies and a massive drive to adopt modern generating technology.
The US is often singled out because of a dogmatic refusal to accept reality, and policies that actively increase emissions.
Ironically, it is often the non-tenure track positions that pay horribly that attract the best natural teachers, at least initially. These are the people who are doing it for the love of teaching their subject rather than the pay or research opportunities. However, in my experience, this only lasts for a few years, and those passionate people become jaded about their situation and leave the profession.
>Non-tenure track academic teaching positions that pay "horribly"... I can already imagine the kind of talent they attract.
Honestly, as a former CC student, non-TT professors/lectures at the junior level were some amazing teachers. While they may only have a masters in their field, most of them are taking these jobs out of enjoyment as secondary income or after retirement.
Examples: One psych prof is a clinical child psychologist, teaches PT, highest evals in the dept.
Other psych prof, retired psychologist, head of CHARGE research, drove 45 minutes to teach PT
Social work prof, 20+ year professional, teaches PT, was a complete savior to her students.
Eng prof, trans, former Navy, journalist, taught PT.
Chem prof, retired, works at a local grocery store stocking fruit PT, lectures PT
Many schools rely on adjuncts and lecturers to teach. They get paid very little, have no job security, no benefits, etc. But because the academic career path is so completely broken, lots of of very smart, talented instructors take on these jobs to make ends meet while they look for something else that allows them to pursue their passions with their extensive educations.
Don't look down on these people. They're smart, they work hard, and they deserve better.
> lots of of very smart, talented instructors take on these jobs to make ends meet while they look for something else that allows them to pursue their passions with their extensive educations.
My point is that you can't attract and retain top talent by offering low pay and no job security.
You are confirming said point by showing any person of talent taking this job is only for a short, temporary period while looking for something else.
Academic career paths are completely broken, which is why universities can and do get away with it. The problem is not that these instructors aren't "people of talent."
Some of the worst companies I ever encountered also had the best Glassdoor reviews and scores.
Sounds ironic, but makes perfect sense when you consider:
1. When a system is so easy to game simply by acting dishonestly, score will correlate with unscrupulous willingness to lie to your future workforce.
2. For these kinds of unscrupulous terrible employers, Glassdoor is seen as nothing more than an easy way to market themselves. Certainly cheaper than investing in your workforce, trying to make your employees happy, or fixing any of your real issues.
From what I know, it's not that "people lie to themselves" about those terrible jobs, but more like the article describes: concerted effort by the employer to flood their reviews pool with inaccurate positive reviews, and muzzle accurate negative ones.
How do you get senior candidates to spend any time and effort on submitting "work samples"?
I'm a senior engineer. Last time I interviewed, I received multiple offers from brand-name employers. None of them required any work samples, just hard technical interviews.
A few times I saw a small unknown company that piqued my interest. I talked to them. Occasionally one would require me to do some sort of a task.
Why would I do it?
I don't need to do any of that for the top employers in the market. Why would I spend hours of my time, and precious coding time, especially on some small company I never heard of before?
I haven't done that in years, and doubt I'll ever do it again. The only way you could get me to do it is if I was desperate for a job.
By requiring this sort of time and effort from candidates, you are screening out the best ones, those who can get multiple offers from great employers without jumping hoops for you.
This seems extremely off to me - from my POV who the hell has time to study algorithms and implementing data structures every time they need to find a job? Trying to make sure I can whiteboard a random CS problem from a massive set of potentials on the fly in front of observers is drastically more involved and requires much more time that serves no other purpose than facilitating interviewing, versus just spending an hour of my time programming a solution to a problem at home.
I think it may depend on how much your day-to-day work involves data structures and algorithms.
Almost any work on compilers will involve good working familiarity with graphs
Work with concurrency will tend to involve linked data structures, like treiber stacks, or modeling computations as directed acyclic graphs of data dependencies
Working in a memory constrained environment tends to involve data structures and algorithms tailored to that domain, etc.
Now it's totally true that many algorithms questions just reduce to brain teasers, or are so esoteric and interview-specialized (Find out if this linked list has a cycle in O(1) space!) that they only serve to stoke the egos of the interviewer. But I wouldn't say that using algorithms or implementing a data structure is a skill that only exists to facilitate interviewing - and being able to explain your thought process as you work is really important when making contributions to other teams' code. I try to focus my interview questions on miniature versions of problems I've actually had to solve in the course of my job. For example, the futex state machine I wrote here:
If you subtract the interrupt and timeout handling, you have a real problem with a simple, approachable (for someone with some concurrency knowledge) solution, and you only need to know about two futex calls which have simple behavior and are easy to explain in limited time. I wouldn't ask this question of someone looking for a web development position; but then again, I don't interview those candidates because I know nothing about web development. But it's a nice question for someone who listed concurrency on their resume.
Most of the top employers in the market have similar types of interviews so you have to study anyway unless you want to rule out all of them and any time spent preparing for such interviews amortizes across all of them. Meanwhile, a take-home test is almost always a one-off and takes much longer on a marginal basis and rarely is even used to make the final decision - every time I've done a take-home, I've also had to go through the full interview loop.
Also, "an hour of my time programming a solution to a problem" is likely not an actual work-sample/take-home - it's likely a replacement for a phone-screen that doesn't require an engineer to conduct, thus can be given to many more people to keep the top of the funnel large. The only time I've done a real take-home in less than 10 hours, it was rejected for not being polished enough.
I'm fine going through tough technical interviews.
I'm not fine spending 3-5+ hours on some trivial coding task that can be gamed and was issued to me by folks who may not have even thoroughly checked my resume.
Given the current supply/demand curve, and the fact that top employers like FAANGs do not require this sort of time and effort (and for a good reason), I don't have to jump through that hoop.
I think what they're arguing is that since most engineers don't use the algorithmic knowledge on a day-to-day basis (and are thus likely to be rusty), the time they'd need to spend reviewing/prepping to pass a whiteboard coding interview is greater than the time it would take to do the work sample.
Ah I didn't mean to imply that Strongloop was in Austin -- didn't know that Strongloop was in SV though, but I guess that makes sense.
I would think IBM has excellent golden handcuffs, not to speak of prestige and interesting problems. Like other big companies, it just depends on your distance from the C-levels and which team you get to be on -- do you get to do the interesting work or the boring work.
What if you’re only “surrounded by idiots” while in an interview, but otherwise well-regarded amongst family and friends, and most of their acquaintances you meet? Or other strangers, whether on the train/bus, at meetups or online?
On a more serious note, I’ll offer as a point of contrast The Sane Society[0], which puts forth that society can itself be sick–despite it’s being the status quo–detracting from the wellbeing of individuals.
Just something to remember the next time a startup CEO tells you that "we" have to "work hard and give up some of our compensation" to "make a positive change in the world".
> Why would a WeWork object to paying Neumann's rent? WeWork is bascially Neumann anyway! Why would Tesla object to buying Musk's other companies? Tesla is basically Musk anyway!
The shareholders do mind, because these actions may violate the CEO's fiduciary duty to act in their best interest. They can sue him for violating said duty.
Less relevant in WeWork's case, but very relevant in Tesla's case, since it's a public company, and in fact Tesla and Musk have been sued for neglecting their duties before:
>The shareholders do mind, because these actions may violate the CEO's fiduciary duty to act in their best interest. They can sue him for violating said duty.
Yeah, and how well is that going to work out for them? They should have known better than to invest in this company in the first place; companies like that are cults of personality. It's like investing in Sears under Eddie Lampert; you have to be a moron to put your money into Sears stock when it's obvious the guy is solely working to drain as much money out of Sears and into his own bank account as possible. And a lawsuit, even if you win, isn't going to net you much money.
> Yeah, and how well is that going to work out for them? They should have known better than to invest in this company in the first place; companies like that are cults of personality.
So you are saying the investors (who are the current shareholders) stupidly bought into Neumann personality cult.
So now they are paying for their idiocy.
This isn't some failure of capitalism: it's the failure of large, wealthy, sophisticated investors to properly assess their own investment.
Exactly, yes. It's the investors' job to research their investments, and company stock investments have no guarantees (unlike a CD or savings bond, for instance). Personality cult companies can actually be good investments; it just depends on the personality. Investing in Apple while Jobs was running it before he died was generally a very good and profitable investment, for instance. This company doesn't appear to be that way, and I'm saying that as someone who hasn't researched it, I'm just going on what a few negative news articles I've seen about them and their leader. The signs appear to all be there that this company is not a good long-term investment like Apple or Oracle (another company basically run by one guy), it's more like investing in Theranos.
> The entire image and “vibe” of this guy / his team is supposed to be an egalitarian re-invention of the status quo. The kibbutz story. The “community adjusted EBITDA.” The rebranding to “We.”
This is all just marketing. It's like believing all the actors in a commercial really are elated and blissful just because they chose the right brand of soda.
But I think it's very important to remember that companies can have moral standards and follow them. Many companies don't sell-out in crucial ways, and throwing one's hands up and condemning them all is punishing the ones that stay true.
I think moral outrage is a very important and effective market force. It will do things our government never could, like take down facebook. I'm glad we have this tool.
> But I think it's very important to remember that companies can have moral standards and follow them. Many companies don't sell-out in crucial ways, and throwing one's hands up and condemning them all is punishing the ones that stay true.
I agree, which is why I criticize shallow analysis of a company's motivation based on its skin-deep marketing veneer.
In this case it's not even moral standards - the implication is that WeWork's CEO is neglecting his fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value by lining his pocket instead.
That's in fact a corruption of capitalism, it's illegal, and he can be sued for that by shareholders.
> I think moral outrage is a very important and effective market force.
I completely agree, which is why it's important to look beyond the marketing.
If a company can breach standards of morality and decency, but get away thanks to some 30 seconds commercial featuring smiling kids, then we will not be effective as a public in enforcing those very real consequences that companies should face for their actions.
To add to what the other commenter noted about varying levels of truth...
There is marketing of product and then marketing of company and then marketing of person/people. Not only does each have varying levels of truth, but each also has varying types of intent. The later in SV seems designed to encourage beliefs about a person or company that are immune to facts that counter them.
Branding it as marketing starts, to me, to sound like a convenient cover for propaganda.
Marketing can be based on varying depths of truth. Generally speaking, the greater the depth the greater the long term value and efficacy of the marketing.
(Marketing is not always a veneer.)
How about embargo of the EU, which currently pollutes at roughly the same rate?
Did you know that energy production in the US is overall more environmentally friendly than in Germany, for example?