burnThemAll

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

So, ultimately, we're all inclined to hate each other for selfish reasons, isolate ourselves, and lob smug animated GIF potshots and 140 character zingers from self aggrandizing user profiles on social media websites, in an effort to puff up our egos, and seem superior through the lens of a user avatar? (see also: karma whoring)

And... all in a blind, rabid quest for materialistic status symbols that still leave us bereft of hope amid a listless emptiness, leading to a fate where we can only die alone, in a hospital, unfulfilled?

Gee, I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles, huh? Hands are tied. Software eats the world. Birds, bees, and the existential dread of social media. Incontrovertible facts of life.

And the fix? Maddeningly asinine robot companions to pat us on the back, and say there, there. Got it!

burnThemAll

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

  PHP zero-day vulnerability.

Better off offline, honestly.

burnThemAll

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Think about the odds of the beam being perfectly aligned and aimed to hit the planet with dead-on accuracy though. Even if the spread of the beam is as wide as Pluto's orbit, we'd have to be pretty unlucky to get hit.

If it's as narrow as the arc of a season, one quarter of the Earth's orbit, it could hit us during Autumn or miss us during Winter, or not at all if it's not pointed into the path of our orbit.

burnThemAll

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

  Okay, fam, I know how 
  to use Excel. I can 
  answer a multi-line 
  phone. I can greet 
  customers. Please. 
  Just put me to work.

This is the software development technical interview cycle in a nutshell, except replace "Excel" with almost any technology you want. SQL, NoSQL, C, Lisp, whatever.

In most cases, the technical interviewer demands that you paint the Mona Lisa in ten minutes, only to offer a stern frown and furrowed brow when ten minutes gets perhaps a stick figure or a smiley face.

The truth, however, has two competing versions.

From the interviewer's perspective, they've asked for something perfectly reasonable. They've been looking at the same challenge problem for weeks or months, they have the answer, they've watched ten people fail in ten different ways, and the ones that had the answer still couldn't perfectly refine the problem's follow-up questions. Surely Cindarella exists, and we will know it's her, when the glass slipper fits.

From the candidate's perspective, cartwheels and backflips are well understood to be possible for some people to perform, but even being asked to use a hula hoop is slightly degrading. Nevermind that none of us will actually ever perform backflips or hula hoops in production. It's mostly jumping jacks and push ups, so why the all elite high performance tests?

The truth though is that first impressions and introductions are a class of human activity, and as a singleton event in the history of interaction between two parties, they happen once and only once, and unfold according to their own rules. First dates, roommates, a new doctor, buying a puppy. All of these things have a certain pattern of realization, exposition and gut instinct to follow through on.

The ritual is actually an arbitrary dousing rod disconnected from the subliminal conceptual formulation of whether the two parties actually like each other on a superficial level, regardless of talent, skill or capability.

burnThemAll

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It's all designed to fuck you over. Ignore whatever they throw at you. They're rejecting you by default, if they subject you to the quiz show.

That's the real lesson of the coding quiz. You are rejected by default. Take aims to flunk it by default, is the natural response.

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