Many readers are skeptical about the usefulness of personal AI assistants. This reminds me of what Jeff Bezos said about disruptive technologies [1], which I think resonates well among many tech company executives. You (they) need to be willing to be doubted for a very long time.
Any time you do something big, that’s disruptive — Kindle, AWS — there will be critics. And there will be at least two kinds of critics. There will be well-meaning critics who genuinely misunderstand what you are doing or genuinely have a different opinion. And there will be the self-interested critics that have a vested interest in not liking what you are doing and they will have reason to misunderstand. And you have to be willing to ignore both types of critics. You listen to them, because you want to see, always testing, is it possible they are right?
I'd argue they are consistent in that every candidate who made it past resume screening is given equal opportunity to partake in a well documented process. Whether or not the process itself is effective is a different question.
Sure, interviewers themselves are inconsistent (accents, prejudice, interview difficulty, etc), but that's not something that can be fully mitigated when every candidate gets a different set of interviewers.
Again, I'm not defending the practice and would just like to have a constructive discussion.
To be clear, I can see why big companies prefer coding interviews (it's more "consistent" when interview feedbacks are boiled down to a score), but at the same time I'm not defending it because like many have said it's not a great measure of an engineer's capability. I'm looking at the problem from the employers' point of view.
DeepMind reduced Google data center cooling bill by 40% in an experiment. If this effect is real, it probably more than justified the $500m tag Google paid to acquire DeepMind. Google might not have come up with a killer app, but perhaps the real killer app is not in the consumer space.
Just because someone claimed Google manipulated search suggestions doesn't mean they actually did it. The video itself even acknowledged the lack of concrete proofs.
I agree that if you strip out all the complexities behind what you see on the screen, then yes someone can definitely build a bootstrap-y clone in a weekend.
If you boil down the entirety of Twitter into just a CRUD app that allows you to post 140 characters at a time, then yes, you can make that in a weekend.
Well, how about recommended posts / people to follow (ML)? Sponsored posts with a buy button (3rd part integration)? Growth and metrics (data analytics)? A software product is never just about pixels on the screen; and trivializing the engineering effort behind it is insulting to Twitter employees, some of whom are brilliant engineers I know.
G+ wanted to be a rendezvous for all social/sharing activities on Google, and it turned out that many users didn't like it. Would G+ have fared better if it didn't force G+ onto every Google property? Maybe? It's easy to do armchair analysis, but hindsight is 20/20.