That's not to say it couldn't have. The Constitution and its new SCOTUS interpretation places such a heavy emphasis on the executive branch that even with safeguards and a 25th amendment, maybe protecting the electorate from itself is warranted.
But then collectively as a labor force, where do we go from here? We can't all dumb ourselves down - or won't, and it seems to me that people understand what it is we do less and less.
I will never forget the time I was given a coding "challenge" and sent home with the instruction to send it back whenever I felt it was complete. This sent my OCD into overdrive, of course. For the better part of two days straight I coded my heart out and came up with this (what I thought perfect) robust system with all the bells and whistles. Heard nothing back. At all. My calls into the recruiter went unreturned and I figured I must have offended them somehow.
Fast forward a year and a friend of mine gets hired there. Turns out not only was my code pretty good, but had magically made its way into one of their production systems. The test cases that I wrote for my interview the year before word for word copied and pasted right into the prod test runs.
I know this because I used my name as the input for fname, lname trying to be a bit cheeky.
One has to wonder, then, why they didn't hire you.
I have a theory. It's quite cynical, but it's taken me about 5 decades to arrive at it: life is a beauty pageant. I don't say this lightly. It was a very slow process to get to this point.
A friend, colleague recently interviewed at a very popular, pre-IPO company that is often discussed (positively) here. He doesn't look like your typical engineer, but he's literally the smartest person I've worked with. He gets shit done. He learns new things all the time. As his current manager, I told him I would give him a perfect recommendation. He had an "in" with a current employee. He aced 5/6 of the mini interviews, but "failed" one. Fine, it happens. But, something he said to me stuck in my head: the building of said company was filled with rows and rows of 20-30 white kids. He saw 2 people of color, and one was a greeter at the front door.
I don't believe the people that interviewed him were racist, but I think every person applies a "does he/she look the part" filter and if the answer is no, the mind finds reasons to not hire.
It's not just hiring that I think is pageant-like. So many things in life are. So much so, that I think people themselves actually live up or down to their physical features and characteristics. Look at the executives at a F500 company. Male and female. Why do they look so similar? I live in a somewhat affluent community. Why does everyone here look like they "belong"? This is not a gated community, so why does that happen?
Physical features are such a basic filter, applied to ourselves and others, that I don't think we are hardly aware of it.
EDIT: there are always exceptions. It's been my experience that exceptions are rare, though. And the exceptions sort of prove my point.
Lots of biomimetic optimization algorithms like Ant Colony Optimization do this. Maybe adding some randomness in the hiring process would be a good thing?
I'd just download the next version of their app off the store and save a copy of it, then decompile it to prove my code is there and sue the living shit out of them
I guess that's not an option if you write server code for them though.. I'd probably negotiate to be paid for the work in that case
Isn't this also a facet of our "war" with the rest of the world to be at the forefront of technology? There are those that think ceding being the first in things like AI would be so detrimental to the US economy that we'd never recover.
Wouldn't accepting only those that had such advanced cancers though skew any results? I'm very much in favor of these individuals getting any and all help they can as soon as possible but I want to remain optimistic about the validity of the results.
(I can't tell if you meant to imply that you are in remission or going through chemo now).
I think what you're saying is that an example is not generally proof that just anyone can. It goes a long way in disproving that its impossible, however. There could be a large amount of luck involved in everything and we just don't know it.
Another way to look at it, is as a scientific experiment, which is by definition falsifiable. "X became a multi-billionaire by using only skills" is hardly a falsifiable statement.
When my grandfather died a few years back, I went to the funeral and one night sat at a table with all the men of my family as we went around lamenting about how we'll miss him and what he wanted out of life. I am the first in my family to go to college, went straight out of HS. Every other member of my family has been extremely blue collar. Miners and factory workers, for generations that's how it was. I wanted something different out of life, and they found happiness doing what they did. it was ultimately more of a means to an end for them. They wanted to provide for their family and the work let them do that.
When the conversation came to me, I didn't know what to say. Here were men who spent 14-16 hrs a day in some of the worst conditions, and that's when they weren't on strike-- there I was, the guy who gets to work from home and sits at a desk all day. Its hard to think of a place where you could feel more alone than at a table with family who share nothing in common with you but DNA.
I love what I do. Well what hasn't been whittled away in the name of efficiency or productivity, but I would consider giving it all up.
