Why? None of what he said suggests to me than an incompetent women would be hired over a competent man. The outrage over incentivizing minority hires is ridiculous to me. You’re more likely not to get hired because of random noise in the interview process than because you happened to apply at the same time as an equally qualified minority. If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male. There’s also legitimate business interests for a company to have a diverse body of engineers and managers.
I used to believe that, when I was younger, new to Google and basically naive about these things.
Having had direct experience of how it works over the years, absolutely, incompetent women are more likely to get through the process. You can't constantly, for years, tell everyone that reducing the proportion of men is a critical priority and not have people bend the rules and make exceptions as a consequence. They're only doing what they're told to.
If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male
Likely the proportion would be higher. But yes, it's hard to change the demographics in areas where hard skills are measurable and where women don't really want to be anyway. Probably that's why feminists are moving on from targeting engineering roles: their current thing is leadership positions where less tangible "soft" skills are more important, comp is higher (the ultimate goal) and it's easier to manipulate the recruiting process. Hence laws enforcing that women be allocated board seats, things like that.
And there lots of men have witnessed women being put into management roles in software they were completely unsuited for, over and over. I think most guys have a story like that by now.
I don't think that people care about how it is actually done, we are all in an in-demand sector. People care about the hypocrisy of companies saying, we only hire the smartest! We don't discriminate! Quickly turning around and saying we need to be more diverse (which is a good thing) so let's throw those CVs out.
And it's always HR... they aren't impacted at all with ok:ish hires.
It’s actually much worse than that because of reflected inertia. The inertia of the first gear as seen from the last gear is proportional to the square of the gear ratio
I don’t think this kind of insight even exists into deep learning stuff (yet). One of the main reasons people even care about SVMs is that they have nice analytical properties
You’re not the intended audience. This is meant for small research labs that are just starting up and want to enter the RL/Robotics research space and can’t afford a $400,000 PR2 or $150,000 shadow hand.
How do you go about trying to track the conversion rate on organic advertising-cum-Reddit post? It seems like it'd be impossible without the consent of Reddit.
You would use different metrics. It costs nothing to make the post so you can just pump them out, you don't need to use impressions as a metric anymore because you're not paying for impressions. Instead you get good at curating titles, images and articles that gain traction on the site. This isn't a wild idea, it's all over the reddit frontpage every day.
I don't understand the meaning of saying an employee is paid to do that. You might also pay a marketing agency to do it. The point is, Reddit doesn't get paid. As someone who uses Reddit everyday, I never see their ads, but I do notice posts that mention specific brands, websites, companies, etc.
I mean, once you hit a certain salary more money doesn’t even appreciably increase your quality of life. And I think most good software engineers are already close to that asymptote
In the US maybe, but definitely not in most of Europe. Software engineers are not as valued here as they are in some parts of the US (SF bay area, Seattle, etc.). As a result, salaries here are pretty miserable.
I'm a very senior developer in my 30s who lives in Sweden. I have a "good salary" (make the same or more than every other dev that I know in my age bracket), which translates to a take-home pay of around 45k USD.
Sure, health care is free, education is free (no college fund for my kids) and employer-paid-for pension plans are quite decent, but housing is not cheap (450k USD for a simple 4 bed room family home, luckily I don't live in Stockholm where that costs an additional 200-300k USD) and we also pay 25% VAT on almost everything.
30 days paid vacation (not PTO) per year is pretty sweet and so is the lack of overtime (40 hours is 40 hours) and the parental leave (at home with your kids for a year as a father? no problem!). But man, these salaries that I see quoted here on HN regularly (200-300k) do sting a bit...
The grass is always greener. Earning those salaries usually means you're in the bay area, where the median home price is 1.5m USD and you most definitely won't get that 4th bedroom.
Not true of all of Europe. Irish salaries go as high as twice that for similar seniority.
Cost of living isn't lower, especially in Dublin, our healthcare system is a slightly worse, college isn't totally free (3k/year or so), and pensions less generous.
On balance though, you'd still be better off working here.
This has not been my experience. I can easily see ways to substantially increase my quality of life at $1 million per year, and at $10 million per year, neither of which I'm close to (unless my lottery tickets, I mean options, pay off).
Ignoring early retirement, consider that those salaries come with less free time, less brain cells to do what you like, and more stress.
A lot of the value you can gain from money (e.g. hiring a maid to clean & cook, buying better quality food) is about clawing back what you lost to get the extra money.
All I heard was comment of "SpaceX Steamroller" from industry insiders. The companies that could have invested in rocket reusability decided to sit by and do nothing. It's not like it's an impossible physical achievement either.
Not sure I agree with you on SNOPT. There are many many tools out there that I see people use for convex (and non convex) optimization. Especially considering a single license costs $6000 I would be surprised if SNOPT even captured a plurality of solvers in use.
FWIW in my department (Electrical Engineering) No one is using SNOPT for their work that I know of.
