HN user
I don't know if anyone here has exposure to the recruiting side of things. Friends who have worked recruiting for Facebook have told me of very blatant and direct age discrimination for the older set; regardless of their talent & experience. It's not "dead-end" but there are certainly issues.
Try applying for a job as if you don't have any professional experience. Almost everyone wants Python, Java, and something with 'C' in the name for junior positions. However, in my limited experience, they only (reasonably) expect (somewhat) in depth knowledge of one ecosystem and just syntactic knowledge of the other two. Took me about six hours to learn Python to answer the interview questions.
Those are reasonable requirements, except the 'no large companies' and 'no stupid apps' probably contradict each other.
Please stop acting as if tech hiring is beyond criticism.
Article seems not very well written. Even the initial "You might expect a less corrupt exam system to allow ability to shine through regardless of the economic status of the students" doesn't make sense on its face.
Why would I think exam cheating would influence structural problems, advantages and disadvantages, associated with SES levels? Getting rid of cheating doesn't get rid of private tutors, better equipped schools, less distracting home environments, etc.
They can build functional, well-written products and solve complex problems, but they don't know this arbitrary task-specific trivia! Terrible!
Manager has piss poor communication then "solves" it by threatening to fire people. Genius.
Obviously true. Women as a group are shorter than men as group, but some women are taller than some men. That seems so trivially obvious as to not bear mentioning.
But, there's a substantial amount of evidence that if you pair up a woman and man in the same situation, the man in contemporary society has a lot of intrinsic advantages. He has easier access to relevant education and social networks. His applications, work, and words are judged more highly simply for having a male name on them.
There's an overwhelming amount of evidence, you could put the slightest bit of effort into looking it up. Being privileged isn't something that takes effort or one is guilty of. Let's say I'm 6' 4"; it's intrinsically easier for me to reach things high up. That's a privilege. I'll spend 3 minutes on Google then I need to get back to work.
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500693.2015.11...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-stic...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-stic...
Then you're selecting for people who are overconfident blowhards, who don't really know as much as they think they do.
Difficulty doesn't make things 'sacred' unless you're obsessed & delusional. It would be difficult to stand on one-leg for 40 hours but it would also be pointless & stupid, not 'sacred'.
No, I don't need to make my whole life about X to be decent at X.
"Just splashing around. Keep looking"
"Seems ok. Keep looking"
Lifeguard grabs him 1 second later...