Even if it's satire — which I think it should be more clear when you write about such a delicate topic — I think it represents quite well the levels of "assholiness" the software industry is reaching these days.
I think they can get away today with so many silly hoops because the supply of engineers is quite high these days, and I guess, the FAANG industry standard is the "fair" way to identify the best candidates.
Engineers now are putting up with all this because there is not much choice than to spend more time training for this kind of interviews.
No matter how much do they talk about talent, judgment, IQ or whatnot, the fact is the more you train, the better you get at this kind of interviews, independently of how capable in your day to day job you are as an engineer. Proof that training works is the whole emerging cottage industry around interview preparation that is thriving these days.
Perhaps this is a bubble that will burst at some point, but I'm afraid the bar of ridiculousness will keep raising. If any of the FAANG companies started requiring to complete a marathon in less than 5 hours, they will still find great candidates that will train hard to achieve it.
The rationalization after fact would be something like the ability to complete a marathon correlates well with the ability to deliver a project or whatever, but they are just selecting for engineers that will do whatever it takes to get the position, no matter how silly the requirement is.
It's so great the whole code is available under the MIT license.
After seeing many open source projects with paid services going for more protective licenses, like the AGPL or the newer eventually open licenses (i.e. Business Source License), I wonder what was your rationale to still pick the MIT.
Conditions are improving in Madrid and Barcelona for startups, but in general I'd say the laws, the banks, the bureaucrats and the system in general are all very startup unfriendly.
That I think it's the root of the problem. Dev salaries don't rise because there is no real competition for top talent. Many established software companies in Spain can get away with mediocre programmers with low salaries because they operate in captive markets and the quality of their products don't really matter.
If politicians really wanted to fix this problem they'd make it easier for new companies to compete with the old ones, but they are doing just the opposite.
The tricky bit is to decide when not go to along with his demands and take a stand to not get trampled. Sometimes giving in too much makes the situation worse, other times it's the opposite.
Is this using the Facebook GraphQL C bindings? If not, what's the advantage of a full reimplementation in Scala?
I'm not implying that the bindings should have been used. I'm now considering writing a implementation of GraphQL in Haskell and I'm trying to assess whether it's worth using the Facebook C bindings or it's better to implement the whole protocol from scratch.
Exactly, the price for a driver spot is driven by demand, it's not expensive just by law.
Traditionally, getting a driver license in Spain has always been like signing for a relatively well paid and secure job for life. And moreover, there is no need for any investment learning any particularly difficult skill. This is all supported by ridiculously high fares backed by regulations.
This is not to put the blame on taxi drivers, I truly believe they are choosing a honest option to make a living. But considering that an important factor, if not the most important, for the Spanish economical crisis is the inability to adapt to a global economy, with this kind of actions, the message the government is sending is: "don't invest your time learning to code, or getting engineering degrees because we are still trying everything in our hand to keep traditional professions secure and well paid, not like those new risky technological jobs". The average Spanish programmer is in a more precarious situation than anyone with a highly regulated unskilled profession.
Here in Spain, I'm constantly seeing measures to try to maintain the old ways of living at any cost with total disregard about how the rest of the world is evolving. I'm not claiming globalization is good or bad but it's happening, and if the Spanish government keeps trying to hide it from its population with more debt, in the long term, it only means less economical competitiveness for the country and slimmer chances to catch up with the rest of the world in the future.
Defending these minority groups only means more poverty overall for everyone in Spain.
Could it be a unified alternative to Python virtualenv, rvm, rbenv, cabal sandbox, etc? This would be specially important for projects needing heterogeneous builds.
It'd also be interesting to see a typical Nix development workflow taking advantages of Nix goodies like continuous integration with Hydra or staging and production deployment with NixOps.
Officially Arch Linux doesn't follow the platform. The Haskell platform tries to pick the most mature and well tested versions. Arch Linux, on the other hand, picks the upstream bleeding edge for all its packages, not only Haskell ones. Right now, the policy seems to pick the latest package versions needed to build the latest version of pandoc and XMonad.
This is not necessarily bad. I like to develop in Arch because it usually comes with future versions that will eventually make it into the platform (I have the GHC version in mind, mostly). However, if you want to distribute your code widely, you'd better be sure it builds properly with the current Haskell platform.
It's also meant to be used as a reference for distro package maintainers. If your code builds properly with the current platform, you can be confident it will build properly in most systems.
I hear so many disparate opinions about Bitcoin economy that I don't consider them anymore. The classic counter argument to this one is that hardware is constantly improving and still people buy hardware even though everyone knows that in 6 months with the same money you can buy something better. And another one is that Bitcoin is so divisible that deflation is not a problem.
In the end, Economics involves the behavior of people acting on free will. How anyone can attempt how people are going to behave with respect to something? If anyone could predict what society is going to value in the future, or how people will react to some new technology would he be writing blog posts about what is going to fail? Has there been anything remotely similar to the Bitcoin now in history?
I don't know whether deflation is good or bad but I consider the potential advantages of a deflationary currency, if it works, worth trying it. Why not, nobody is being forced to get into Bitcoins. If you don't like it, ignore it and move along.
The current way of exchanging Bitcoins is not decentralized at all. I guess the first thing governments will do, if they ever consider Bitcoin a real threat, is to try to shutdown the major exchanges.
If they succeed, which still will be hard, I'm not entirely sure Bitcoin will continue to be that usable in spite of other decentralized ways of exchange like http://bitcoin-otc.com/ or http://localbitcoins.com
Measuring education quality of a country by how many nobel prizes came out is like measuring the quality of car manufacturing of a country by checking how many F1 championship winners came from that country.
I get really sad when I see education policies just to increase the output nobel prize winners, no matter what. As if education and science where all about winning prizes that are highly political.
I found the post interesting, that's why I submitted HN. I can't be blamed for other people upvoting it.
I didn't notice the errors but having people at HN showing me what is wrong helped me learn more about Haskell. I hope that pointing those errors helps make the post more robust, too.
Sometimes stupidity is indistinguishable from pure evilness. That's why I believe it's more practical to focus on removing inefficiency instead of corruption.
I think they can get away today with so many silly hoops because the supply of engineers is quite high these days, and I guess, the FAANG industry standard is the "fair" way to identify the best candidates.
Engineers now are putting up with all this because there is not much choice than to spend more time training for this kind of interviews.
No matter how much do they talk about talent, judgment, IQ or whatnot, the fact is the more you train, the better you get at this kind of interviews, independently of how capable in your day to day job you are as an engineer. Proof that training works is the whole emerging cottage industry around interview preparation that is thriving these days.
Perhaps this is a bubble that will burst at some point, but I'm afraid the bar of ridiculousness will keep raising. If any of the FAANG companies started requiring to complete a marathon in less than 5 hours, they will still find great candidates that will train hard to achieve it.
The rationalization after fact would be something like the ability to complete a marathon correlates well with the ability to deliver a project or whatever, but they are just selecting for engineers that will do whatever it takes to get the position, no matter how silly the requirement is.