He decided to scam large companies out of thousands of dollars in employee wages and productivity in order to market his cheating tool. You can hate leetcode, you can think it is antiquated and not a good indicator of developer performance. But that doesn't suddenly mean you can dip into the pockets of companies for your marketing budget.
Average of 6 people involved in an interview loop. Let's say they make $250k a year each fully loaded on average (at the FAANGs, I'm probably underestimating). There's a 30-minute prep, a 30-minute debrief, the actual hour long interview, and probably 15 minutes of writing up the notes about the interview. Let's call it 2 hours. Taking the rough 2000 hours a year, that $250k is $125 an hour. So $250 per person times 6 people is $1,500. Times 4 companies is $6,000. Now, trade that 10 hours back for tickets. Who knows what the tickets would be, but it's 10 hours of work, with some likely positive ROI. I won't pretend to put a value on that, but it's non-zero.
He openly admits that he had no intention of taking the offers for these companies. He just wanted to test his cheating tool to see if it would work.
If that doesn't scream theft to you, I don't know what would.
And sure, can FAANG pay the bill? Yes. But should they have to?
What if he did it at a tiny 50-person bootstrapped startup? Can he be called a thief then?
How terrible it would be for someone (or some company) to waste the time of 6 people (or 600 people) in an unnecessary and ultimately useless interview process.
Turn it around. Do these companies pay every developer they interview, including the ones they reject for the bullshit they put candidates through?
Sorry mate, but as a hiring manager, spending time to talk to people for fit assessment is part of the cost of doing business. You don't get to call it theft because the guy wasn't game to play your games. You're the one erecting barriers, not them.
So "searching around" where? On some 4chan board with unverifiable conjecture perhaps? Maybe on Twitter, home of factual information? Please, I would LOVE to hear that there is some kind of proof this person was actually a legitimate concern to national security or something. I'm just afraid I'm going to find out that no, it's just that our government has gone to hell, and I should be worried myself, a naturalized citizen with a passport but not born American, that I can somehow have my citizenship revoked because I think the president is a buffoon.
I find the NYC public transit system to be one of the most interesting in the world. Beyond the subways and LIRR and Metro North (which are covered by the MTA's app), there are literally dozens of other transit providers: Nassau bus, red bus, Suffolk bus, NJT, PATH, HBLR, Roosevelt Island Tram, and a shocking number of smaller targeted transit providers, as well as specialized transit modes like Citibike. No app, except maybe Citymapper, comes close to representing it all.
But Citymapper was acquired, by Via. A company who makes money when you don't choose public/mass transit. So that doesn't make me feel too good. Also, Citymapper doesn't work well offline.
Another important thing is that accessibility and alerts are regarded as very 2nd rate citizens on other apps, and for various reasons, I think these should be easier to see.
Enter my little tool. It has a long way to go, it doesn't do navigation very well (it's my own implementation of a weak algorithm), and doesn't work across modalities. But it does tell you the upcoming trains at stations (using the real time data), along with all the accessibility info, and alerts for the station and line. And links to complex maps, neighborhood maps, and more. And it can map schedules for the entire network 30 minutes into the future (2 hours for LIRR and Metro North), meaning you can go into airplane mode and it will keep working. Additionally, I have found it updates faster than other apps, as it is continually polling the MTA APIs.
A map with arrival times is all that is needed, this is great. Routing also doesn't need to be fancy, departures can be locked to actual stations and the transfer station is the only bit of info needed if it's not already a one-train trip. People who use buses generally know their own feeder lines and that's it, and they don't need to see them again.
I feel like Transit does a pretty good job. I don't love the UI, but it's a personal preference. CityMapper was my go-to for years, and still is if I need something specific that I don't yet handle. But one day, I hope mine is sufficient to never require another app.
The sheer scale combined with the density combined with the mismanagement and history, as a few examples. I imagine if I lived in London or Paris or Tokyo I'd probably feel just as partial to their unique intricacies. I was recently in Milan and found their public transit system similar and equally interesting. The fact that entire lines were created and then summarily removed, only to be rebuilt decades later in some cases, or turned into green space in others, continues to surprise me.
Not to say there couldn't be better tooling for infra diagram generation. I don't know anything open source and cross-provider, I wish someone worked on that. Hiding the grand overview from the user behind a bot with a fuzzy interface just seems counter productive.
Now do college tuitions, bank bailouts, auto bailouts, solar subsidies, oil subsidies, farm subsidies, and all the other nearly countless ways that the government plays around with your tax dollars to put the money into the pockets the current administration and Congress decided was the most important.
Well, that’s a pretty interesting connection. If you look here, besides one or two states, every state is much much larger than it was 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, and 20 years ago. So, it’s not shocking or absurd to imagine state populations continuing an upward trend and therefore, more people, and therefore, without anyone passing union busting or other anti-union laws and regulations, you would expect union membership in most sectors to grow and have plenty of data to back it up. This isn’t like Mary Kay or Noni Juice or whatever where you have to sell someone on the promise very hard or demand some upfront investment to pay the current membership. Just wait around and people will be born.
