I am suprised anyone still gives out take-home coding assignments as part of the interview process. I have been hiring for 15+ years and have tried this approach many times. While long time ago maybe it did help a bit even then its usefulness was questionable. But last few years I am quite convinced it's the worst thing you can do as part of your hiring process, as it dramatically worsens your candidate pool and makes it harder to sift through.
The basic premise of take-home test is that it is meant to entirely eliminate the bottom percentile of your candidate pool at the cost of also eliminating a chunk of the top percentile (which is supposed to be an acceptable trade off, especially if you are hiring for junior to mid roles). But I found it does not eliminate bad programmers at all. In fact, after we did some in-person interviewing we discovered a negative correlation between take-home test score and actual coding ability. Most likely explanation is that those with really good scores are the ones who paid 50 bucks to some comp-sci prodigy from <random_country> to sit with them in screen share session for an hour. In contrast, those with poor scores are the ones who actually tried to do the test honestly. Another unintended consequence here is that your candidate pool now has a higher percentage of unscupulous people than it did before the test.
Our conclusion in the end was that we still have to test the coding ability in person, which means take-home test does not really eliminate any work for us as part of the interview process, but imposes additional costs as per above.
I can't believe this story ended with a bunch of slogans fit for big corp motivational posters.
This was a story of depravity, desperation, starvation and the horrible choices one has to make when they feel that the only choices left all lead to likely death.
To draw career or enterpreneurship inspiration from it just seems... wrong...
Ukraine has been sounding an alarm about battles happening next to its nuclear reactors. I would think it's very hard to make any nuclear safety guarantees if the power station gets hit with missiles.
War also makes people do crazy things, and it's very easy to imagine a reactor being sabotaged on purpose, even by defenders themselves (scorched earth tactics).
So on the whole it seems like we have another reminder that nuclear just cannot be made 100% safe.
There are some tools, I think the reason they will never become widespread or high quality is that voice is just not a great medium for conveying that type of info in the first place.
If I type a sentence and then decide to make a correction it is very difficult to explain in words but very quick to click and retype. If I want to position my window somewhere, I wouldn't even want to start thinking about how to explain it, I would just click and drag. And so on and so forth.
This limits any potential markets for such tools greatly, so there is little economic incentive to develop them into anything truly high quality.
But it is a well studied topic, with much more than 5 possible explanations offered for it.
I personally think the whole thing is a bit of a nothingburger that comes about as a simple consequence of how we measure productivity, which is via measuring how much money is paid to people. And since monetory / fiscal policy more or less ensures that all the people are always paid something for something, productivity growth is manifested as invention of new service industries, from personal trainers to dietologists. In other words, our productivity metrics mostly measure hours worked.
Better metric would be how many hours worked it takes to produce a ton of nickel, or a bushel of corn, or a typical family car. And those number have been going down consistently, suggestive of strong productivity growth and no paradox.
given that the article is about inefficient use of content delivery technology, it is poetically ironic to try (and kinda fail) to post said article on a website that doesn't allow the article to be fully posted
Bone conducting headphones for running: Titanium AfterShockz. Love them, and not just because they don't block ambient sounds, but also the sound is almost unaffected by the wind, whereas all the other headphones would get completely drowned out by the wind whistling.
Vaccum: Henry. Don't know if you can buy it outside UK, but it is the perfect vacuum. I tried robotic one a few years back (Eufy) but my floor is full of obstacles like stools, shoes, backpacks, etc, so the poor thing would get stuck all the time.
Home computer: Airtop from CompuLab. I am very annoyed by fan noise so quiet or silent computer has always been a must for me. Airtop is by far the best one I could find or build. Expensive though...
I followed your advice, turned on VPN, went private browsing and searched for "elm list".
On DDG the first result was elm-lang homepage but the second was a tutorial on lists in Elm. Down the page I also saw a wikipedia entry for a list of elm trees. Seems ok overall to me.
Then I tried the same thing with Google and first I was stopped by captcha and had to spend a minute clicking hydrants and traffic lights. Then I got a whole page of results about various programming discussions on lists in Elm, but nothing in the entire page about the trees. That does not seem right, I think regular person would be much more likely to search for a tree, not for an obscure programming language.
Verdict: I found DDG results better as in more relevant for general population while still surfacing the programming ones. Also no hydrants on DDG.
Best practice advice used to be "dont leave your commit message empty" and now it seems headed in a direction of some kind of storytelling guide. Up next: the role of character development in your commit messages
>> The math is brutal. While perhaps 9 out of 10 startups fail, the one that succeeds will pay the founders more than 10 times what they would have made in an ordinary job.
> So .. what happens to everyone else?
You end up with a society where 90% are destitute and 10% are rich?
> but is this really a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich? Doesn't most tax revenue in the US come from the rich, meaning they're covering most of the bill?
Doesn't matter where tax money came from, that part we are not changing. What changes is where that money goes. It could pay for schools, Medicaid, homeless shelters. Now there is going to be less of that, as we are building a helipad for Bezos with some of that money instead.
Which is why it's a wealth transfer towards the rich.
All of that would be true in any other location. One could argue other locations actually need such infrastructure more. Amazon was not hiding the fact that they would build HQ2 anyways, and in USA. There was absolutely no need to donate them taxpayer money for it. And if you do, then taxpayer should own the infrastructure, with Amazon paying for use.
I don't know who you are referring to as NYC, but citizens of USA as a whole are worse off. Pitting one USA municipality against another to extract subsidy for what Amazon would do anyways is just another mechanism for wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
Wow when trying to leave that page I was hit with some of the worst adware attacks I have seen. It completely locked my android browser, filled history with dozens of entries of itself so that I cannot go back, and left me with some flashy ads that I could only get rid of by closing the tab.
There is a very interesting theory that claims one of the major factors leading to the start of WWI (not II) was that Germans could not change their mobilization plans to anything softer than outright invasion of Belgium because there was no easy way to modify the railway schedules on which mobilization plans rely:
http://www.ae.metu.edu.tr/~evren/history/texts/taylor1.htm
So once they were forced into some kind of escalation, they had to escalate all the way. Other countries did not realize that (obviously) so they kept putting pressure on Germany with escalations on their end.
I also found it bizarre to use this term. It's called World War for a reason, on both sides there were multiple countries and nationalities involved. "German" side was also full of soldiers of Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, etc origin.
The article pointed out that couple years earlier the captain did exactly as you suggest and pulled away from the brink because of safety concerns. His company punished him immediately with a big demotion.
It seems clear that the culture in the industry is set up to weed out those who want to err on the side of safety, and reward those who err on the side of maintaining their shipping schedules.
The basic premise of take-home test is that it is meant to entirely eliminate the bottom percentile of your candidate pool at the cost of also eliminating a chunk of the top percentile (which is supposed to be an acceptable trade off, especially if you are hiring for junior to mid roles). But I found it does not eliminate bad programmers at all. In fact, after we did some in-person interviewing we discovered a negative correlation between take-home test score and actual coding ability. Most likely explanation is that those with really good scores are the ones who paid 50 bucks to some comp-sci prodigy from <random_country> to sit with them in screen share session for an hour. In contrast, those with poor scores are the ones who actually tried to do the test honestly. Another unintended consequence here is that your candidate pool now has a higher percentage of unscupulous people than it did before the test. Our conclusion in the end was that we still have to test the coding ability in person, which means take-home test does not really eliminate any work for us as part of the interview process, but imposes additional costs as per above.