To be honest I think you should go ahead and delete that account (and this, my main). Upon further reflection I think my engagement with HN has become unhealthy.
The cause is that more people moved into the city than there were housing units constructed. It isn't an either-or question, it's both. San Francisco has more demand than supply precisely because an insufficient number of housing units were constructed relative to the rising population. Had the city built sufficient units to accommodate the new residents there would be no shortage of supply. Had there been no influx of residents there wouldn't be either. But we can't just outlaw people from moving into the city, so the solution is to increase the supply of housing. And NIMBYism is a big obstacle in increasing the supply of housing.
The factor that drives up price for grid level storage is scale. Only ~300 GWh worth of batteries is produced globally each year. The world uses 2.5 TWh of electricity each hour. If anyone tries to install battery storage at a significant scale, demand will vastly outstrip supply and drive prices up.
That's lithium batteries, isn't it? For storage to balance out fluctuations in renewable sources you shouldn't need to use lithium.
It's used in cars and consumer devices because it can store a lot of energy for its size and weight and you don't have to mollycoddle it to avoid memory effects.
Those are much less important concerns for this application. You'd build you battery facilities somewhere outside your cities, perhaps near where you build your solar farms, and you don't need the batteries to move. Batteries that take up more room and/or weigh more than lithium batteries for a given capacity should be fine.
Right. Lithium batteries won't cut it. That leaves geographically-dependent hydroelectricity, which isn't so easy to build. And then proposed solutions that are still in the prototyping phase, and aren't commercially available.
I've really enjoyed reading your contribution to this discussion. To the extent I kind of wished there was a private message function.
Partially this is because we have similar views on a lot of the challenges facing a move to renewables. I think sometimes this comes across as being sceptical of the progress of renewables.
In my case, and I suspect in yours, that's not really the case. In fact I'm excited and interested in how we will solve these problems in a variety of different ways.
I think we are in agreement that lithium isn't going to be the answer to energy storage at grid scale. If for no other reason than being in direct competition with the electrification of transportation isn't ideal.
Personally I'm hopeful that Ambri's liquid metal battery will materialize.
Assuming there aren't economies of scale. Demand for solar had gone way up in recent decades (e.g. in germany, before it was cheap), and the price subsequently went down.
It's not clear batteries will do the same. While there's been effort to make batteries less reliant on scarce natural resources and mining, there's no guarantee we really get there. If we don't, price can be expected to go up, not down, with scale.
I would bet on price going down slightly with scale, but one can't really tell now what will happen: it might go up a lot, it might go down a lot, or it might stay flat.
These discussions are always super boring. There are dozens of technologies that can scale to the level needed but everyone goes goes lithium ion and pumped hydro as if everything else didn't exist.
Sure cell batteries might not work, we can try out flow batteries, we can try liquid metal batteries, we can try hydraulic hydro storage, we can try out hydrogen, we can try compressed air, we can try electrolyzing iron or aluminum, we can try another dozen different things and it is highly likely that at least 3 will work out just fine.
None of those other battery chemistries are seeing the massive growth that lithium ion batteries have experienced. The nuclear "stans" are just pointing out that these are potential solutions, not actual solutions. If iron oxide batteries, or some other chemistry, suddenly becomes cheap and easily deployed at the TWh scale, great. But until then they're not a solution.
Yes, you all are engaging in the "nothing can be invented" argument. It's profoundly reactionary, and also hypocritical, because nuclear itself is dead without great improvement. Uranium quickly runs out if the world is powered by burner reactors and known uranium resources, so either massive seawater uranium extraction or breeding cycles would be needed.
Batteries have the advantage of being explorable at a small scale. Now that the potential market has become so clear this is happening, in many companies.
> Yes, you all are engaging in the "nothing can be invented" argument.
No, we're engaging in the "this has been resistant to being invented so far, so let's not bet everything on it showing up tomorrow" argument.
> Uranium quickly runs out if the world is powered by burner reactors and known uranium resources
You could quadruple the present rate of uranium use, representing in a major contribution to mankind's energy use, and have 35 years of supply, just using known reserves and no breeding.
And if you were using that much uranium, more reserves would be quickly proven. Do you think we've found all the uranium we'll ever find, even if market prices go up significantly?
And breeding is possible, and understood. Yes, there's proliferation concerns, but that's not the end of the world.
And seawater extraction is practical without much increase in cost.
No one is saying "no renewables" or "no battery storage" or "no pumped storage". Or "no power to gas to power". We need all of these things. And we need the diversity of having nuclear in the mix, too.
Not at all. The technology for hydrogen energy storage is (with the possible exception of cheap electrolysers) is off the shelf. It's not widely used not because it's not available, but because natural gas is cheaper to store and burn when there are no CO2 taxes. But the CO2 taxes will be raised enough to push natural gas out, if we're going to control global warming.
When the largest electrolyzer we have in the world is 10MW... and hydrogen storage hasn't been demonstrated at anywhere near the scale you're talking about... it's a tad of a stretch to talk about it being "off the shelf." Particularly when you point to nuclear fuel reprocessing and breeding as nonexistent in the same thread.
We can run electrolysers in parallel to scale to any desired output level. There might be economies of scale to make them even larger, or there could be economies of manufacturing scale of making smaller ones at higher volume. PV and wind are examples of technologies that work well with large numbers of not so large units, replicated as needed. This is a nice place for a technology to be.
Electrolytic hydrogen plants of up to 250 MW were constructed in the 20th century by the use of smaller electrolysis units in parallel. All of them were for producing ammonia from hydrogen. See table 3-2 on page 99 of this NASA report from 1975:
"Survey of Hydrogen Production and Utilization Methods"
I think that you slipped a decimal point. The mass of a cubic foot of hydrogen is about 0.00236 kg, not 0.000236 [1]. That means that the output power is an order of magnitude greater than you calculated -- 173 megawatts.
It's more expensive than mined uranium, but since fissile material is so energy-dense that increase in fuel cost amounts to hardly any change in overall cost.
LOL. Hydrogen storage is much more invented than seawater uranium extraction. All the components are close to off the shelf; it's just a matter of putting them together (and for the CO2 tax to be high enough to make it worthwhile).
Seawater uranium extraction is at a much lower TRL (technology readiness level).
This is an excellent example of your hypocritical double standards on this subject.
I will repeat the reply I gave elsewhere to this argument:
Dude. You are falling back to the "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done" argument. Please stop this foolishness.
Hydrogen is being stored in a few places. That the storage isn't larger isn't because of any technical obstacles, it's because there's no reason to store it now. In particular, when we can burn natural gas without CO2 charges, using the hydrogen for energy storage is pointless.
This doesn't mean hydrogen CAN'T be stored, it just means the market conditions for widespread adoption of an off-the-self technology aren't there yet.
You're falling back to the "if it works on paper it'll be guaranteed to work at scale, and work cheaply" argument. Please stop this foolishness.
It's not just a question of storage, you can just use a salt cavern for that.
It's also a question of electrolyzing water into hydrogen efficiently.
And converting it back into electricity efficently.
And building all of these systems cheaply.
And deploying all of these systems at massive scale.
We're still on the first phase of that. As per your other comment we still don't even have effective elctrolysers to do this cost-effectively [1].
Will hydrogen storage pan out? Maybe. But until then it's not a solution. It's a potential solution, like fusion, or algae in vats, and thermal storage, and all the other potential solutions being proposed. It's not a solution that has actually demonstrated viability.
Why shouldn't it scale? It's not as if it uses any rare materials. The geological formations in which hydrogen can be stored are abundant. The cost estimation should be good, since the technology is just integrating existing components. That's the easiest and surest kind of technology to roll out.
That's a question that can't be answered until people actually build hydrogen storage facilities at scale.
Why shouldn't nuclear plants scale? They're mostly just steel and concrete. Uranium is more than 40 times more prevalent than gold, and it's energy density is such that it represents a negligible cost of operations. The technology is just scaling up existing components, we had nuclear powered submarines for a while. This is what people thought about nuclear power in the 1950s and early 60s. As plants actually started being constructed problems such as corrosion, large amounts of earth moving, metal impurities, and more were discovered and made the plants more expensive.
We haven't discovered these issues with hydrogen storage. We won't discover these issues until we actually build hydrogen storage facilities at scale. We don't know what challenges will lie in store when building hydrogen storage, because we've never done it before. This is why it's useless to talk about the cost of hydrogen storage until we actually have experience building and operating hydrogen storage plants. Our knowledge of cost of hydrogen storage is in the same situation as nuclear power in the 1950s.
Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually. That leaves geographically limited options like pumped hydroelectricity, and solutions not yet deployed at any significant scale like hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic methane, thermal batteries, flywheels, etc.
Realistically we should saturate daytime energy demand with solar, and if there aren't any scalable storage options by then switch gears and proceed with hydroelectric where it's viable and nuclear where it's not.
>By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually.
And this will increase a hundredfold to make EV production possible.
That means that if 10% of production goes to stationary storage then within 10 years, we'll have 10 full global hours of storage.
If there's serious demand then the supply will scale up to create it.
Also, old EV batteries will provide plenty of extra stationary storage. Not to mention batteries still in EVs, in a pinch.
Realistically we won't throw insane amounts of storage at the problem. We'll make demand more flexible so it does work when electricity is cheap and eases off when it becomes more expensive.
For instance, something like heating: why store the electricity for heating? Wouldn't it make more sense for a house to have some form of heavily-insulated thermal mass that it can massively heat when electricity is dirt cheap, then tap into at midnight without drawing power? Storing heat is cheap, you just need a giant block of concrete with solid insulation. You don't need fancy nanoscale tech like with lithium-ion.
Even something like a kettle: the hot water taps you see at companies that are pre-heated. Have a home-version. Insulate the shit out of that and do 90% of the boiling with peak electricity.
And that's not even touching industrial power usage.
Trying to ape past systems that were based on flat electricity prices just seems like a failure of imagination. Of course it would be expensive, but why the heck would you even want to?
I had a house for a time that had just what you describe: a concrete block thermal mass set in the foundation. There were ducts running through it as part of the forced-air system. During the days, especially sunny days, the block soaked up the excess heat and then radiated it back out during the night. It worked quite well; indoor temperatures stayed remarkably consistent. A company called Adirondack Alternate Energy were the architects.
https://aaepassivesolar.com/low-energy.html
> Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery annually
... so if we could increase battery production by just 10x, then we could create an hours worth of storage every year. That seems... very doable.
And then we'd have to continue that production for two and a half decades to get to 1 day of storage. And we'd also have to drastically increase our battery recycling capacity to match (remember most lithium ion batteries last 1000-2000 cycles).
One could imagine a series of cloudy windless days in the northern latitudes during the winter. Perhaps a large enough gird solves that problem? I have no clue.
One would not use batteries for the "rare, but prolonged" storage use case. You'd want something with lower capital cost, even if it were much less efficient. For example: hydrogen burned in turbines.
Hydrogen storage remains in the prototyping phase. We have no significant amount of hydrogen grid storage. Like thermal batteries or synthetic methane, hydrogen represents a potential storage solution but not one that we know will scale and be effectively deployed at the scope required.
If we actually deploy 50 GWh of hydrogen storage, and demonstrate that it can cheaply and reliability be built at scale then your point would be valid. But until then, hydrogen represents a theoretical solution not an actual solution.
Hydrogen is stored underground in Texas salt formations at Clemens Dome, Moss Bluff, and Spindletop. The largest of them, Spindletop, was completed in 2017:
All the components of hydrogen, with the possible exception of low cost electrolyzers, don't need to be prototyped. It's existing technology. It's not like (say) molten salt reactors, in which fundamental development remains to be done.
Right, and what company can I call right now to install 50GWh of hydrogen storage?
It's existing technology, but it's a novel application of that technology. We haven't used hydrogen electrolysis as a form of grid storage before. And we certainly haven't used it for grid storage at the Terawatt hour scale. And that the scale we'll need to make wind and solar viable. 1 TWh isn't even 30 minutes of global electricity consumption.
50 GWh of hydrogen would fit in one salt cavern of the kind already made for natural gas. Any numbers of companies can solution mine those caverns for you; that technology is many decades old. I'd need more information about the rest of what you want, as that scales by power not by energy capacity.
And are we currently using any of these caverns for electrolysis and grid storage? All you said is that we have a big cavern that we could fill with hydrogen. I'm asking if anybody is actually building hydrogen grid storage at any significant scale. Are there any facilities that take in excess energy from renewables, turn it into hydrogen, and then turn that hydrogen back into electricity?
We both know the answer: there aren't any.
Back in the 1950s people thought nuclear power would be cheaper than fossil fuels. They thought it'd be effectively free. The energy density of uranium is so much better, so clearly generating electricity with it would be much cheaper. But actually deploying a technology at scale reveals more and more challenges.
Your proposal for hydrogen storage is in the same phase that nuclear power was in during the 1950s. A solution that exists on paper, but one that hasn't actually encountered and overcome the challenges of implementing it at scale. Same with thermal batteries, synthetic methane, and so on. These are proposals that haven't passed the test of actual implementation at scale.
Dude. You are falling back to the "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done" argument. Please stop this foolishness.
Hydrogen is being stored in a few places. That the storage isn't larger isn't because of any technical obstacles, it's because there's no reason to store it now. In particular, when we can burn natural gas without CO2 charges, using the hydrogen for energy storage is pointless.
This doesn't mean hydrogen CAN'T be stored, it just means the market conditions for widespread adoption of an off-the-self technology aren't there yet.
Storing hydrogen is only one piece of the puzzle. Yes, if you happen to live near an abandoned salt mine that's a convenient place to put a large quantity of hydrogen. That doesn't solve the problem of massive electrolysis facilities, and turbines that can burn hydrogen.
And it certainly doesn't answer the question of whether or not this represents a viable grid-storage solution, since we haven't built it at remotely close to the scale required.
It's not "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done"
It's "if it isn't already being done, it is extremely reckless to assume that it can be done cheaply at a massive scale".
Screw it, let's just use fusion. Nobody has actually built a fusion plant? Well, who cares if it hasn't already been done, that's a "foolish argument" in your own words. /s
These are not abandoned salt mines, they are deliberately created caverns in salt domes. The cost of creating them is included in the capital cost ($1/kWh capacity).
Hydrogen could also be stored in depleted gas fields and in deep saline aquifers. The storage capacity available is more than adequate.
For the third time, storage is only one part of the puzzle. We also need a way to cheaply electrolyze water into hydrogen, compress it into the storage facility, and then use it to generate electricity. Nobody doubts that you can pump hydrogen into a big cave. What's dubious is transforming this into a usable energy-storage facility.
We haven't done this to provide 100 MWh of storage. How on earth can we be confident it'll be easy to provide 1 TWh of storage, or 10 TWh?
People mostly talk about lithium ion storage because that's what's actually available, besides geographically limited options like hydroelectricity. Until there's a company that's building dozens of gigawatt hours of hydrogen storage it's a moot point. It's a technology that exists the laboratory, not one that's commercially available.
No, you have salt caverns with a volume sufficient to accommodate a lot of hydrogen. Actually implementing such a solution involves massive scale electrolysis, and either massive scales of oxidation cells or gas turbines designed to burn hydrogen. Neither of these things have been done at anything remotely close to the scale required to make renewables feasible.
Back in the 1950s people thought that nuclear power would be effectively free. But actually building it at scale exposed challenges of implementation that weren't foreseen. The cost of a system on paper and the cost after overcoming the challenges of actually building it are two very different things. For hydrogen storage, you only have the former.
Those gas turbines you're referring to can simply be modified natural gas gas turbines. The only limiting factor would be electrolysis, but that is already something people are planning to build a lot of.
Nuclear's problem are fundamentally political in nature. If we really cared about green energy, nuclear power could easily be built out at scale.
> No, hydrogen rapidly corrodes any metals that it comes into contact with.
The industries that manipulate tens of millions of tons of hydrogen each year would be astounded to hear this statement of yours. What are those facilities made of, unobtainium?
A claim which simply isn't true. Only certain alloys have a problem with hydrogen. We've been using hydrogen in industry for decades and most of this problem has been solved.
We've been using hydrogen in the chemical industry. We haven't been using hydrogen to drive combustion turbines very much, and even then it's in a mixture of natural gas.
Who pays for the shadow generation system that we keep perfectly maintained and ready to generate 100% of system demand on the 5 days stretch of cloudy windless days? This cost has to be added to the cost of building a 100% solar/wind system.
Nobody is arguing the solar and wind power isn’t cheap, but the cost of power on those cloudy windless weeks is going to be real high to make having all that standby generation around. It’s the cost to achieve the same reliability and 99% carbon free that is expensive.
Money is imaginary and global warming isn’t so let’s just print some bonds or move some numbers around in some database and build it all!
- an electrical power engineer
I guess not, but when two or three projects come in at the 10 billion cad mark it’s a pretty good sign that’s our cost to build. Not necessarily unique to hydro - we might have high cost to build anything
That’s a problem if you’re an island isolated from everyone else, and you don’t have geothermal, hydroelectric, or nuclear options. The better question is how much capacity you’d need on a national grid to be able to handle large regional sags in production without endangering people.
As we recently saw with Texas’ catastrophic fossil fuel production failures the big problem is not the source but poor management and not being able to get help from the neighbors.
But the key is that if you're averaging globally, the solar power probably doesn't change much. You'll need a way to transport the energy instead, obviously.
A solar heavy network would still need 12 hours of storage to accommodate nighttime energy use. More actually, because of greater seasonal fluctuations further from the equator.
All of the Americas experience night time simultaneously for at least 8 hours a day. Even if we ran HVDC lines to the Sahara, there's still a period of time where most sunlight is shining on the pacific ocean.
>Even achieving just one hour of storage globally amounts to 2.5 TWh of storage. By comparison the entire world produces ~300 GWh worth of lithium ion battery
What's the point of this comparison?
Lithium ion batteries are probably the least cost effective means of dealing with intermittency. It's also rare that the entire world is without wind and sun simultaneously.
"Demand shaping" is a nice euphemism for energy shortages. And if we demand shaping we're just externalizing the cost to consumers that need to buy their own energy storage or change their energy usage patterns to accommodate the unreliable supply.
Overproduction helps but doesn't eliminate intermittency. And pumped hydroelectricity is geographically dependent. The irony is that most places with extensive hydroelectric storage potential don't need wind and solar in the first place because they get their energy from hydroelectric generation.
>Demand shaping" is a nice euphemism for energy shortages.
It's a euphemism for storage heaters, storage air-conditioning, aluminium smelters that dial usage up and down and smart car chargers.
Lithium ion batteries are useful too, of course, but they cost more.
This is a problem where market based solutions shine. The only reason that fact isn't getting rammed down our throats by lobbyists is that the people who got religion about markets tended to be oil/gas people, who have since been thrashing the "renewables are unreliable" drum.
>Overproduction helps but doesn't eliminate intermittency.
Why should the goal be to eliminate it when we can adapt to it and thrive?
Personally, I'm more excited for applications of periodic free/-ve priced electricity than I am worried about shortages.
Isn't demand shaping things like discounts during certain periods? My electricity provider lets me set a 'free hour of power' every day, as long as that hour is off peak.
Yes, those incentives exist to try and shape demand. But in practice, people rarely take advantage of them. And some things really can't be shaped. The pumps that deliver your water cannot have their demand shaped, unless you're willing to go without running water for some hours of the day.
>in practice, people rarely take advantage of them
Overproduction is still not that common. These days wind and solar mostly just provide power that would have otherwise been produced by natural gas even when operating at peak capacity.
It is getting off the ground though. The UK has an energy tarriff popular with electric car owners for this reason. They can occasionally get paid to charge their cars. This type of thing will only become more common.
>And some things really can't be shaped.
Obviously not. Nonetheless pretending that all renewable intermittency has to be made up for with expensive lithium ion batteries is backwards thinking.
Then our transition to solar + wind needs to include the cost of installing a septic tank and water reservoir in every household. And a thermal battery for heating. And an electric battery for lighting. And all the other things we'll need to do to accommodate an unreliable energy grid.
There is always a shortage of electricity. Someone could always use more if it were free to do so. Economics is the study of the allocation of resources in the face of scarcity -- that is, all allocation of resources except perhaps breathable air. There's no need for a euphemism here because limitations on the consumption of energy are ever-present -- demand shaping is simply about making the signal stronger.
There are rarely shortages of electricity in the US. There were some in California during Covid, and the state had to do rolling blackouts. But no, there are rarely shortages of electricity.
Yes, someone could use more of it than we could supply. But they don't. The existing supply is sufficient to meet demand. And when demand changes, we are capable of increasing supply.
You're conflating "expensive" with "unreliable". Even with infinite batteries, buying stored energy will always be more expensive than direct solar/wind.
I would imagine the approach to store the energy would be to use the energy from solar panels to do work that can be used to produce electricity later.
For example, you could use solar energy to pump water back uphill to flow down through a hydro electric dam later.
Even if it isn't the most efficient, in the long run it would likely provide the best scalability and least long term environmental impact. Once you have the facility in place, the same water could be pumped uphill to flow back down a million times over with the only overhead replacing water lost through evaporation and maintaining the facility.
Am I missing something that makes such an approach unfeasible?
My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26597661 links to a number of overviews of the issue, including MacKay's chapter in which he covers pumped storage in about as much depth as you can possibly hope in a 20-page chapter aimed at a general audience. Go read it!
Hydroelectric storage is geographically dependent. You need the right topography and access to water. Likewise, hydroelectric storage takes a long time to build.
If you're not well equipped to refute the claim, why do you feel equipped to call it horrible, a conspiracy theory, and a harm to society? The notion that women are more selective than men is something I consider neither harmful, nor particularly far fetched.
Because the attitudes about women that embodied in this kind of garbage are so abhorrent that they need to be called ou, debunked, and ridiculed. That's why my original point was that more attention needs to be drawn to this nonsense, so it doesn't quietly fester in corners of the internet.
If it needs to be debunked, why haven't you done so? You're spouting angry moralistic judgements but since you know this must be debunked and yet haven't done so, you're morally complicit. Until you can thoroughly debunk this, you are as much of the problem as anyone else. So come on, show us your data.
I don't identify with it at all. But I abhor the current trend of simply calling someone a name and pretending you've won on moral grounds, low-effort discourse like that should always be called out. It's dogwhistling plain and simple.
The comments above have one person being reasonable and trying to engage on the matter, the other is being outright obnoxious. You decide for yourself.
I think you're taking the response a very narrow set of people have to this dynamic and assuming a substantial contingent of readers are sharing this response. When I discuss the observations made in the original post with people, the overwhelming response is "of course" without a hint of controversy.
This output of this kind of test is determined by the order in which the categories are presented. Put male on the left and humanities on the right first, then put male and science simultaneously on the left side and it will produce the opposite result: men associated with liberal arts and women with science.
> There are so many literary authors that aren't white men, that arguing that he should have the right to decide to only teach works from white men (if he deems them to be the best works), does seem to me like arguing that we shouldn't teach the history of marginalized people.
No, it does not remotely seem like arguing that we shouldn't teach the history of marginalized people. How do you go from "I should be able to decide to only teach works from white men" to "other people shouldn't teach anyone other than white men"? To go from "I should be allowed to _____" to "nobody should do anything except ______" is a massive leap.
A course in classics is going to have overwhelmingly male authors, likely exclusively so. The reality of the ancient Mediterranean was that patriarchy was extensive, and women were not afforded the opportunity to contribute in that space. This is in now way saying that other courses in other fields should feature women or minority authors.
That's fair. I should have said he's arguing for the right to not teach the history of marginalized people, not that he's arguing that others shouldn't (though he does seem to be arguing that others should be allowed to not teach it).
As I read it, he's arguing for the right not to have to choose what literature to teach on the basis of whether it came from marginalized people. He wants to teach the best literature, not black literature or brown literature or white literature.
I mean, if you were teaching physics, you wouldn't teach ideas based on what race or nationality the person was who came up with the idea. I know, literature is different - it's more subjective, it's not empirically verifiable to determine the quality. Still, the desire to pick the best books based on the content of the books rather than the race of the author does not seem to me to be that horrible of an idea.
"I have a dream that one day my children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." And let books be judged not by the color of their author's skin, but by their content.
> A course in classics is going to have overwhelmingly male authors, likely exclusively so.
Not of necessity; there are plenty of known women writers of the period (it's hard to imagine a broad survey excluding Sappho, but she's far from the only example.)
> The reality of the ancient Mediterranean was that patriarchy was extensive.
Perhaps, but also much less so than in the exclusively male, until very recently, academic society which did so much to shape the lens through which we see the classics.
I know a lot of people (mostly white, mostly men) don't think that's true, but these types of attitudes can easily allow harmful messages to fester in academic classrooms.
> 88 percent of students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “the climate on my campus prevents students/faculty from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.” Sixty-three percent of faculty agreed or strongly agreed with the same statement.
No, it's not mostly white men, 88% is a figure large enough that it necessarily includes large swathes of other demographics.
The question in that survey is different: it asks whether people self-censor because of others. That's pretty different than whether inclusivity is a worthwhile goal, and surveys are notoriously variable based on wording. For example, I would answer yes to that question, I censor myself to avoid offending people (I have done so in this thread, to try to keep it constructive), but I strongly support work to make colleges and workplaces more inclusive places.
It didn't just ask about censoring specific words or terms, or staying polite. It asked about censoring beliefs.
Say someone who is very much in favor of legal abortion stays silent as one of their co-workers goes on about how abortion should be banned, for fear of offending said co-worker. Is the fact that this person held back from sharing their beliefs an example of inclusivity? I'd say that this is not only false, it is the opposite of what is true. The fact that this person self-censored out of fear of causing offense is evidence of an environment intolerant of pro-choice people.
Inclusivity is a worthwhile goal. That is why such extensive self-censoring beliefs is a prominent concern, it's strong evidence that we are not being inclusive of people of different beliefs.
First a note on how to read the relevant study. The link to the study in the WSJ article is paywalled. This is a non-paywalled link [1] is the results [2]. 22 applicants solved a problem alone, 26 with a proctor present. Without the proctor present about 2/3rds passed, with the proctor present 1/2 passed. Using score >= 2 as "passing", 12 out of 16 men passed in private and 4 out of 4 women. 11 our of 20 men passed with the proctor, and 0 out of 6 women. The methodology looks robust, but especially with the claims with respect to gender I'd want to see a sample size larger than the single digits before making any generalizations.
With that aside, my broader thoughts on tech interview processes: Companies want an interview process that are,
- Successfully distinguishes between people that have the
knowledge and abilities required to perform the job.
- Has systems on accountability, consistency.
- Is relatively easy to train employees to administer the interview.
- Has a relatively low time-commitment for everyone involved, both interviewer and candidate.
In reality, though, there are tradeoffs between each of these points. For instance, using a set question bank improves consistency and accountability. Rubrics can be more explicitly defined, and bias limited. But it means candidates can google for questions beforehand. This was a salient issue when I worked at Dropbox, there were only about a dozen technical. interview questions for a 2,500+ person company. Having developers come up with their own unique question helps mitigate this, but reduces accountability.
Likewise, I've had some novel interview processes that more closely approximate real working conditions. One company's interview was conducted over git-hub. It was asynchronous, with tasks spread out over a week. After building the first solution, the interview came back with further feature requests and comments on the first iteration. This tested the candidate's ability to refactor existing solutions to meet changing tasks, and the ability to integrate feedback. These are things that are rarely captured by whiteboard interviews, but are arguably some of the more important skills in software development. But on the flip side, it was much more time-consuming in aggregate than 4 hour-long interviews.
No one interview process has all the advantages. I think a lot of companies settle into a pattern of 1 or 2 remote technical screens followed by a circuit 3-4 hour-long interviews because it's logistically robust. It's a format candidates are familiar with. It's easy to train new employees to conduct these interviews, and there's broad enough set of people participating that one biased signal isn't going to be decisive.
> Companies could also drop problem-solving tests as currently offered and instead ask candidates to spend five minutes explaining how they would perform a particular job-related task, Dr. Parnin says. Focusing on communication skills in this way, Dr. Parnin says, can reveal how a candidate thinks.
But do we want to hire the candidate that can talk about high level ideas for five minutes in a convincing manner, but can't code Fizz Buzz? Or a binary search? I get that some people might stumble due to pressure, but at the end of the day if you need some mechanism to determine if the candidate has the required skills or not. And administering a test is an effective way of doing this.
This isn't the first time articles like these have been written. X group is disadvantaged by problem-solving tests, so don't use said tests. But how then do you determine whether or not the candidate has the required skills? Usually whatever supplants the technical interviews are also subject to unfairness: referrals, recruiting alumni from specific universities or companies. While far from perfect, I still have trouble seeing what could replace problem-based tasks as a means of demonstrating skills.
> Likewise, I've had some novel interview processes that more closely approximate real working conditions. One company's interview was conducted over git-hub. It was asynchronous, with tasks spread out over a week. After building the first solution, the interview came back with further feature requests and comments on the first iteration. This tested the candidate's ability to refactor existing solutions to meet changing tasks, and the ability to integrate feedback. These are things that are rarely captured by whiteboard interviews, but are arguably some of the more important skills in software development. But on the flip side, it was much more time-consuming in aggregate than 4 hour-long interviews.
These you can afford to do if you are Google. If you aren't, candidate sort the places they want to work at in descending order. By the time they get to that take-home, they might already be further along the interview stages at better companies.
Google certainly has more monetary resources. But in my experience large companies like Google are the ones that can't afford to do something like this. The logistical benefits of white-boarding interviews and the accountability gains are much more important to large companies. This interview process was for a smaller company.
But you're absolutely correct that the more time-consuming the interview process is for the candidate, the more likely they'll interview somewhere else. In fact, that's exactly what I did: I received an offer partway through this git-based interview process, and the offer was good enough that I didn't see value in completing it.
Google is a large well known and well paying company that can get candidates to make that sort of time investment, smaller companies can't because they're just generic companies that no one particular wants to work for, I'll skip the elaborate test and apply for the next generic company in the list.
Aside from that, I really don't have time for these elaborate interviews if I'm already in a job, companies that do this are limiting their potential candidates to the unemployed.
I'm always kind of surprised that the "take-home exam" type of job interview gets so much hate on HN.
Even if it takes me up to 8 hours to do the work at home, I think I'd rather do that. I feel like I'm pretty good at application security and programming, but I struggle to think on my feet when someone is grilling me with a job on the line. As soon as the interview is over, I get a huge case of staircase wit and think of all the better answers I could have given for each question. Even something as simple as "What's CSRF?", I could write pages about. But at a job interview? I have a hard time coming up with more than two-sentence answers.
Same thing with coding. I've written programs using breadth-first search, depth-first search, quicksort, binary searching, etc. Ask me to do it in a job interview and suddenly I'll forget the syntax for `if`.
Though FWIW, I haven't had a take-home interview test. Maybe I'd feel differently if I was actually given one.
These "exam"-style interviews are innately suspect for the same reason they are useful: because they approximate real work very closely.
Look at how many malicious entities use spurious job postings to farm resumes and other kinds of data. You think there aren't unscrupulous companies out there extracting free labor from their "interviews"?
If the employer is very reputable, you might be able to feel safe undertaking this kind of interview. But when you are applying to a shady tech start-up (and they are all shady, and they're where most of the jobs are), there is no way to know whether the job actually exists.
The thing is, if I spend 8 hours prepping for algorithmic interviews, I can use that prep for several interviews. If I spend 8 hours solving a toy problem, it is completely useless anywhere else.
> determine if the candidate has the required skills or not
What are the required skills, and how long will they be the required skills?
I've yet to have a job where I was doing the exact things they hired me for 6-12 months later. Things change constantly, why isn't "dealing with change" a highly-ranked skill for job candidates?
I think it's hard to argue that th Fallout 3 formula was more popular than the New Vegas formula. I enjoyed obsidian's take on the fallout setting, but it's hard to deny that Bethesda's was better received.
