Well, the point of me not revealing a title is so that if you run across this book later, you won't think, "OH! This is the one where Pavel said X happens!"
A spoiler by itself, without a link to the book, isn't a spoiler at all, which is why I didn't include the title.
If you're curious, I can drop five recommendations for good books, one of which is the work I'm referring to :)
I suspect the technical interview devolves into an act of shunting the blame of potential bad hires away at some places. Elite credentials and leetcode shibboleths serve the same purpose: this person has checked the boxes we've agreed upon as important in the hiring process, regardless of the job duties. If they turn out to be a bad hire, who could've known, esp. with that Ivy League bachelor's degree?
It's less the tree operations themselves and more that this candidate just didn't know the shibboleth, so they shouldn't be allowed in. Cue the vague feeling of disgust on the interviewer's part that the interviewee didn't know something "so simple" in a tense environment with lopsided power dynamics.
>shibboleth
Fantastic word right there, had to look it up.
That's exactly how I'd describe the hiring process these days. Relevant expertise seems like its only seen as a bonus. That or I'm interviewing at some terrible companies.
The role of such standardized coding interviews is to ensure consistency when hiring at very large scale. Some big tech companies hire thousands of people a year, and interview ten times that.
Candidates have a very diverse set of backgrounds, age, experience, culture, education, interests, experience. The coding interview is a common denominator: undergrad algorithmic knowledge, being able to solve problems which are application of classic algorithms. This is something that a decent coder should be able to prepare for within a few months of regular practice. In my case, I can tell that these months of practice were the best investment in my life. And honestly, I feel I'm a better programmer after this preparation.
> Cue the vague feeling of disgust on the interviewer's part that the interviewee didn't know something "so simple" in a tense environment with lopsided power dynamics.
This is your interpretation of the situation. As an interviewer, I want the interviewee to succeed, I understand it's stressful for them as I've been in their shoes before.
Ultimately, there are more candidates than positions, so whatever the interview is, people will complain about it. I think leetcode is a decent interview technique. I wish we would give more time to candidates though.
You could also solve this with competition. If there were 10 ISPs it would be disadvantageous to give your customers reasons to leave you. Why aren’t there more ISPs? Maybe too many regulations. It is trivial to lay cable, except of course all the permits.
Or maybe it's an oligopoly where the incumbents have carved up the market and stopped competing, milking their customers instead.
Broadband is then extra special if you let the ISP also own the infrastructure as everyone has to reconnect their service to every house instead of one company (or forbid, the govt) owning the pipes and several companies competing for providing services over those shared pipes.
Imo the competition model doesn't necessarily (always) work that well for infra.
Because it's illegal to dig up the road without a permit and they won't give a permit to install new fiber when the road is already full of perfectly good unused fiber. They only grant one of those the first time.
Also old people. They need younger people to support them, like grow their food, fix their houses, etc. But given that I plan on growing old, as I hope you do too, we should make sure the generations after us are capable of taking care of us.
The current best solution is written by Fabrice Bellard, probably more famous for his other works like FFMPEG, QEMU and TCC - https://bellard.org/. Check him, pretty much everything coming from him is pure gold.
When people say there are no 10x programmer, I name Fabrice Bellard. Him being a 100x programmer invalidates the logic of those trying to explain there aren't 10x programmers.
Interestingly, this is the first time I'm seeing apple recommend using neovim+terminal for development work. They even showed that LSP integration is supported.
Haven't they been announcing Pros and Max's around December? I don't remember. If they're debuting them at WWDC I'll definitely upgrade my M1. I don't even feel the need to, but it's been 2.5 years.
