Why is there so much complaining online about algorithmic questions? It’s really weird.
Surely there are way worse questions that companies ask.
Also, I stopped reading after his first argument which is incredibly stupid. He thinks the fact that he found inefficiencies in code at companies asking such questions proves something. The company I work for asks questions about testing yet we still have untested code. This is not strange, because outcomes depend on many things, not solely interview questions. It’s such an idiotic argument.
It's much simpler to provide public services to everyone and handle economic inequality through taxation.
Means-tested benefits result in bureaucracy that sometimes costs more than the increase in cost from giving the benefit to everyone would be, they create poverty traps, and they screw over people in atypical situations (i.e. a kid whose parents care so little they can't even be bothered to get the paperwork done that proves their low income status).
You want to attract candidates that have a high probability of being hired.
If vJ is the perceived value of getting the job, pJ the perceived probability of getting the job, vI the value of the literal payment for going through the interview process, and vT the perceived value of one's time (and any other cost if it exists, such as travel) required to go through the process, we can represent the expected value of going through the interview process as:
EV = pJ * vJ + vI - vT
If we assume vJ >> vI and vJ >> vT (which I think is reasonable if you want the job), we can observe that the importance of vI and vT mostly depends on pJ.
I also assume that the candidate would choose where and whether to apply based on EV for their various options.
One one end, if your pJ is close to 1 (you're highly qualified for the job and will likely get it), the result is dominated by pJ * vJ which is ~= vJ; vI and vT matter little. This means that if you will probably get the job, it doesn't really matter much whether the interview is paid (and it also doesn't matter as much how much time it takes). For top candidates, the difference in pJ * vJ for different companies should be the dominant factor, i.e. they will apply for the best jobs.
On the other end, if your pJ is close to 0 (you're applying on a long shot), then vI and vT become much more significant factors. If your chance to get the job is really low, then the interview being paid makes it significantly more attractive, and it also matters more how much time it takes. The companies that pay for interviews, and companies that are easy to apply and interview for are likely the ones with the highest EV for the poorer candidates.
Basically the worse of a candidate you are for the job, the more important it is for the interview to be paid, because with a low enough probability of getting the job, this payment becomes a big factor in the expected value of doing the interview.
Of course it's not as simple as that, because people are not machines chasing pure financial interest and have feelings about how you treat them. Also, a highly qualified candidate is more likely to have a job that is closer to the one they're applying for, while an unqualified candidate might have a much worse job, making vJ higher for the less qualified candidate. But it is likely that the relative difference in pJ is much greater between a qualified and unqualified candidate than the relative difference in vJ. The candidate's own perception of the probability of being hired (pJ) might also be unrealistic in either direction, and I'm assuming it is a good predictor of the true probability of being hired. But I think in general the rule should hold, paid interviews would decrease the quality of the candidate pool.
Usually they're trying to profit by being the last holdouts, hoping they will be able to get more money this way. It may not be worth paying everyone 3X, but if everyone except one person agreed to X, then paying the last holdout 3X is not a huge expense and gets the project going. At least that's what they're hoping for.
There was a case in my city where they wanted to build a shopping mall and offered the people who owned homes on the plot a deal. Only 1 person refused and asked for much more money (in his words "Who accepts the first offer??"), and since this plot wasn't critical for the project, they never even contacted him after that and just built it without his plot: https://www.vecernji.hr/media/img/38/97/a9f29b9fca44602d5b41... (the lone house in the "corner"). He got mad, sued them, etc.
This was a private company; I'm not sure why the government would have this problem, since they can exercise eminent domain for stuff like infrastructure, it's literally why it exists.
> Remote work feels bad for junior employees, for exactly this reason. So many times in life you're stopped from going down a dark path not because of a meeting or a status update, but because you started chatting with the other people on your team over lunch, and found out that Bob had an idea the other day that would make your change ten times easier to implement, and Alice was refactoring some other bit of code that solves the bigger problem.
This sounds like a lack of technical leadership. If the junior's boss is an engineer, and they do their job, then this won't happen. The story reminds me of my first job, which wasn't even remote, where my boss was a non-technical person and I was going down "dark paths" constantly because he couldn't recognize it as he lacked the expertise.
I think your case is a bit different because you don't actually want to live in the city. Obviously both city and country living have their advantages and disadvantages, and it would likely benefit most developed countries greatly if more people were willing to live outside the major cities.
The issue is mainly people wanting to live in a large city, but also wanting to live in a single family home (and most of them, although maybe not on HN, seem to favor residential zoning instead of mixed) which results in really shitty cities that are environmental disasters with endless sprawl, long commutes in city traffic, having to drive even for basic things like going to a grocery store, etc. And you don't have a "prairie preserve without having to drive" in that case, in fact you more likely than not have a longer drive to get out of the city than a person living in a denser city. Check out Perth, it's probably the best example in the world of this being taken to the extreme, with almost the entire city being just endless rows of houses.
> Microsoft's UI story is a non-starter until they get back to the point that a user can:
Why do you care about this stuff? I don't understand. Surely most developers can build a simple app with a few buttons easily in whichever framework they're using. This stuff doesn't really matter for I'd dare to say 90% of developers. What matters is how hard it is to build and maintain complicated stuff. And there WPF blew WinForms (and VB6) out of the water.
Not sure why you think how difficult it is to put a couple buttons on a page and make them do something would have any effect on the success of a UI framework. That's literally not even a consideration when we make decisions on what to use for a project.
If WPF ran on other platforms, we would use it for everything. We use Avalonia instead, and it's pretty great.
But there are 2 basic types of multiplatform UI frameworks - the ones that wrap native controls and look like most other apps on the platform, and the ones that do their own rendering and look the same on every platform. Avalonia is in the second group, so if the former is a hard requirement then it is not a good choice.
> What matters is how hard it is to build and maintain complicated stuff.
What matters is how hard it is to deliver a product to the end users. As I gave in my personal user story, yeah, I had to eventually pay the piper and refactor significantly to make sure things were maintainable. But it was a good lesson learned, and I've met many other developers over the years who got hooked on C# in a similar way.
> And there WPF blew WinForms (and VB6) out of the water.
WPF would be fine for this scenario. If we could do things like this at a WPF level of designer I'd be happy. It's got a little more of a cognitive load to get started but long term is easier to reason about long term and from a conceptual standpoint is more transferable to other contexts (i.e. Web MVVM Frameworks.)
I haven't looked at Avalonia in it's current state (last time I gave it a peek, it was still in a 'almost-ready' status) but if they really are able to do multiplatform as I see they say now then perhaps that's what I'm saying is needed. (Which may be more of a statement on the state of Real OSS Awareness in the .NET community.)
Definitely will give it a go, since I know it's supposed to be a replacement for WPF so I'm hoping(?) that the existing tooling out there is usable
XAML is the only thing I was ever able to write a complex layout in, run the app, and see it look exactly as what I intended on the first attempt. That would meet my definition of productivity.
For example, my experience with CSS has been the opposite of that. F5 a million times before the layout works the way I want it to. Sometimes even googling how to do create some type of layout because I can't think of it on my own.
> So while having too many "elites" (by which I assume "wealthy people" is meant), we have a storm brewing.
It doesn't mean wealthy people. It means people who feel they deserve to be a part of the elite, usually by virtue of their formal education. If we're "overproducing" such people, a large part of them cannot actually achieve this, because there's a lot more such people than available positions in the "true" elite (ie people having real wealth/power), which causes discontent.
Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.
This however is also not a uniquely American problem.
In this context, physics PhD are awfully odd choice of example. And people who changed from physics to machine learning doubly so. You don't study physics in order to get ahead in politics. You wont be able to influence it as machine learning engineer either.
Both of these are literally occupation with zero claim to be elite in the sense of "having power".
And second, what this argue is that ideal political system has small group of people who have power and wealth. In ideal state, they are unified as they run things. They don't display plurality of opinions, don't have to compromise either.
I've probably spent ~1000 hours writing C++ in my life (admittedly, years ago) and objectively speaking I wouldn't hire myself even as a junior C++ dev.
Surely there are way worse questions that companies ask.
Also, I stopped reading after his first argument which is incredibly stupid. He thinks the fact that he found inefficiencies in code at companies asking such questions proves something. The company I work for asks questions about testing yet we still have untested code. This is not strange, because outcomes depend on many things, not solely interview questions. It’s such an idiotic argument.