this story resonated a lot with me. Have been in States for a decade and still waiting on GC.
However, throttling(7% quota) based on country of birth appears to be a bad proxy for diversity as India is a very diverse nation with rich cultural and linguistic distinctions. Designing a new immigration system would be a reduction problem from the existing one but we have seen successful implementations in other countries such as Canada and EU (albeit with their own set of problems)
I had reported this to FB security last year when I found it was trivial to find partially masked email ids & phone numbers of anyone behind my Uni's gateway.
I was informed that this was a design decision since previously used IPs are more trustworthy than any new IP. I considered this a design flaw and reported since large institutions are typically behind a NAT and they become susceptible to targeted attacks.
i hope this will curb people from constant backstabbing that I witnessed during my short duration there. It was painful to watch very smart, bright people indulge in really pathetic behavior consciously to 'protect' themselves..
Auditioning sounds great, atleast from a college graduate's perspective. Make the new graduates work on problems. A percentage of new generation of coders end up learning that whiteboard tests work perfectly fine and are the de facto standard.
even though it was almost expected to be bypassed easily, using fingerprints can still be handy if one wants to establish claim on a device. I believe the thinking was to provide a way to uniquely link the device to an entity - security was just a byproduct (but marketing trumpeted it)
I agree with the fact that rejections should not be counted solely as an end result because many a times the reason may just not be a technical one. You've got to be a fit and have a strong synergy with the team.
I am attending interviews these days and can echo a lot of what I read. Sometimes the interviewers just keep forcing you to the answers they have or they ask the same question to everyone - it's new to the first one but anyone coming in later already has the perfect answer. Your past doesn't matter - only the 30 min demo of you will sell. Only if in real world products got sold by their demo and not final functionality.
I recently had a couple of skype interviews with a well-known startup. First one went fine and I got good feedback but during the second one I was asked to share my screen & work on an IDE of my choice. That being something new, I didn't feel comfortable coding and though I did answer, the interviewer felt I was a bit (iffy) - I had written a conditional check & then changed it later. Interviews can get pretty hectic and it is way easier to say no to someone you don't even look at.
twitter presents a unique opportunity to choose the 'people' you want to follow & tailor your own feed. It's like handmade versus machine made feed. The former worth much more than the latter nowadays. I imagine if they could establish a business where people build/manage personalized feeds for others & in turn get paid - that would be fun!
Edit: another that I enjoyed working with 'Burst Tries': https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/506309.506312