alexbanks

As I said in the other post of mine that you commented on, you're welcome to not agree with me (or anyone, I don't care), that's totally fine with me.

We can agree to disagree.

I mean, without knowing anything about you or your company other than what you posted above, it's hard to say. But in my experience the industry could use more morality based hiring standards, as well as morality-based repercussions for bad behavior. Kudos to you.

It's difficult to know what/where the line is for sure, but I think lots of software has shifted away from making people's lives better. Facebook, Amazon, Uber, are doing more negative for humanity than positive I think. Sure, they offer a service that might not've existed before, at least in that iteration or scale, but at what point are the negatives outweighing the positives?

Sure, you "connect" people to friends/family they may not be able to see in person or communicate with regularly. You're also verifiably playing god with information and misinformation, as well as spying on your users, selling their data to other people that want to spy on them, paying employees to view toxic content (which results in PTSD), etc. Is all this worth being able to communicate with people you don't really care about, or that don't really care about you?

I feel this way about lots more than Facebook. BigTech is committing atrocities every day, and the developers that work there are generally complicit in that behavior. I think it's fine to say "I'm not proud but the money was life changing" - that can be true, when most people are faced with that proposition would go with the life changing money. But it seems wild to think that Amazon or Facebook or Google employees should be applauded for their work, or should feel proud - lots of it is actively harmful to me as a human.

There is no reason to not be honest about these types of things (unless of course you're doing something shady). If you want to fill the position quickly, you should say so. Now, of course, as a candidate if I heard that I would jack up my compensation numbers, but again, if you want to fill the seat quickly that's how it works.

And if you were going to believe a company's metrics on productivity, JP Morgan is almost certainly not the place to start.

In this thread: "It's not done because I want it to be different."

Just because you disagree with a design decision doesn't change the done/dead debate. It's done, because its maintainers have agreed the project has gone as far as it needs to go, and its current iteration is stable. You (as always) can choose not to use a project you do not agree with; that has no bearing on the project's status.

Yes, and my point is to not take that critical failure out on the candidate.

So...practically none of them...?

If someone's resume was only wordpress sites, and they somehow made it into a technical interview for a team that managed twitter-like systems, I'd consider that a critical failure of the selection process. As an interviewer, I would try and make that experience as painless as possible for the candidate, and if not totally shocked by their abilities, have very direct conversations about the shortcomings of the selection process with whoever brought them in in the first place.

If it's a pub/sub model, you wouldn't care at all about how many were watching right? You'd just publish.

And for something like Twitter, you'd probably Publish but then also log to some kind of "Notifications" store, so if a user did care but was not actively watching, on their next subscription they'd receive the messages they'd missed.

This comment is all kinds of wrong. FAANG is "used to" pulling down anywhere from 150-400k.

On the flipside, many many remote jobs pay significantly more than you're describing, more in line with every other non-FAANG developer jobs. If you're just looking at those poorly managed "Remote Job Board" sites, of course you'll think that, because most of those jobs are just subcontracts and gig-type roles.

Yes, there'll be a COL difference, but it's not like you're describing. Gitlab, as an example, pays a Data Engineer in nowhere Indiana 90-120k for remote work.

whenever the virus is neutralized.

I suspect not before 2022. And even that is generous.

In my experience, being an advocate for the candidate (during the interview) is the best way to make interviewing more pleasant. My goals (during the interview) are to learn as much as I possibly can about the candidate without making them feel under pressure. I ask a lot of questions about what's on their resume, but with the goal of finding out what gets that candidate excited about tech (since I pretty much only interview developers).

I generally take a look at their resume and then do some research about the tools they've used in advance. Then, during the interview, I ask about what they like/don't like/find interesting about those tools. The goal is absolutely not to gotcha them, but instead to find out what they're interested in in that space. If I ask a question that it becomes clear they've lied/fabricated about on their resume, I say something to the effect of "No worries" and change the subject.

Depending on the role, you need more info than just what languages/frameworks they've used. For more senior roles, or roles that involve architecture/cloud functionality, I'd ask about how they've built systems in the past. If they call out AWS, I ask about what resources they've used, how, and why. If you've written down DynamoDB but cannot speak intelligently about access patterns or secondary indexing, it's kinda clear that you just used a system someone else defined. Whether or not that's a problem depends on what role they're applying for. If they can speak intelligently about how they got to a specific DynamoDB structure, they probably are being honest enough about their experience. Note, it needs to be clear that the candidate is not speaking in the abstract, but about things they've actually done. Googling stuff is easy, finding the weird parts of tech in practice is hard.

Ultimately I want them to feel comfortable enough to get chatty about development. Usually I find out enough about their skills while they're chatting - I think most would be surprised to find how clearly you can understand a person's abilities without directly asking about them. You just kinda have to spend some time up front learning pros/cons/common pitfalls of the tech on their resume.

I think it's more that the ability to work remotely has been unlocked for pretty much every business that operates online (which, as I type it, sounds kind of crazy that it didn't already work that way).

At the very least, for the most part, businesses won't forget that possibility, even if they don't rely on it heavily post-pandemic. We've removed a significant blocker, that doesn't necessarily mean that we've reinvented the office dynamic or anything like that, but we've at least opened up a new channel for some businesses that didn't have it before, which IMO is objective improvement.

The long term shakeout of this will be that everybody realizes that yes, we need offices.

You said this, and then wrote the rest of your post about the opposite? Why do you think we'll need offices?

If one group has firing power, and the other does not, they are not equal, regardless of what's written down.

It seems that our city government is essentially giving the ok for this crime to continue

I don't know how you possibly came to this conclusion from the ordinances, but I would rethink this take.

So the company that repeatedly does bad things, and continually gets exposed as doing more bad things, tells you they're not doing a bad thing, you believe them?

From my post:

but lived in an area where you couldn't safely walk.

It was 1 mile on a four lane heavy traffic road with no sidewalks.

I just noticed this comment. I appreciate your and tome's obvious concern for the community you're a part of, and I hope very much that you both continue to enjoy it and thrive. I mean you no ill-will and wish you best of luck.

I guess, based on all that we know about BigTech, is there any reason to actually think they're behaving this way? And if they are now, they'll continue to?

The author in question may be a bit of a cracked pot.

I genuinely tried to read this and take it seriously but this is just the most cringe-worthy thing I've read in ages. I'm sorry.

As a composition of prose, this little essay is just stylistically terrible and reallllly hard to read.

A really dumb essay.

Just from the one post.

I'm not who you're responding to, but you've responded to my posts on this topic. I think, what they're trying to illustrate, is that Haskell is still an incredibly niche language. Sure, yes, there are jobs at a handful of big names, and then a handful of not big names and companies that found their success using it. But if you were trying to maximize your employability or open up new doorways in your career, you definitely wouldn't pick Haskell as the language to do that with.

Separating "I like and use Haskell" from "Learning Haskell will amplify your career and employability" is, I think, what they're going for, and I would generally agree with. "The exception that proves the rule" is a thing, after all.

How would you trigger a device with a sound without continuous capture?

To a larger sense (the Haskell community being kind of exhausting and toxic), there are tons of examples. As cliche as it sounds, Reddit is an integral part of programming communities in 2020 and /r/haskell is a pretty toxic wasteland. The responses to this very article on /r/haskell are a great place to find what I'm talking about at a general level.

Specifically, though, this comment is a pretty good example of what this article (and I, now), am talking about:

Certain problems, like working with databases in the principle Haskell way, are still open questions (e.g. see effect systems). But to call a mere difference in approach "arrogant" is extremely arrogant in itself

Which points to a problem very specific to haskell, brought up in the article, which is "How do I actually get things done?" Which, according to that comment (supposedly in support of Haskell) even points out that something as obvious and boring as "using a database" isn't clearly defined in Haskell. Most programmers want to use a programming language to solve a problem. The haskeller's argument, I guess, is that Haskell tries to do that while also applying very strict constraints on how problems are solved. Great, right? Except that those constraints are so strict that even problems that aren't significant or meaningful are difficult/not well defined (like using a database).

So if the answer to "How do I get things done?" isn't "Like this" but instead "Haskell doesn't work that way", most programmers will consider this a nonstarter.

I"m not sure why this thread is so polarized. I am 30 and I don't have kids - I am burnt out from the pandemic and can assume that those trapped inside with their kids are orders of magnitude more burnt out than me. I feel bad for them. I am also very burnt out, which shows itself in an array of different symptoms (more irritable, more prone to being frustrated/resentful for those that have different situations than me, etc).

It's fine to acknowledge that some have it harder than you, but to also wish that you had it easier. I wish we all had it easier. Sometimes, when I'm feeling most frustrated with everything, I wish I also had an excuse to work part time but keep my entire pay (which is, ignoring all else, what a lot of peers with children get). Humans are complicated and can have lots of feelings, some of which are irrational and some of which are unempathetic. We're all getting squeezed right now.

From me: Haskell will not catch on because the community thinks it is too smart to have to actually accommodate the programming community. Simple as that.

From the article: There was an arrogance in the Haskell community. Not the evil kind, but the kind that told them that they were somehow better. That the tools they were using were somehow better. That the things they were doing were somehow better. There was the arrogance of those people who believed that victory was inevitable. This was not the slapping your face “you, stupid fool golang programmers” kind of arrogance, although there was plenty of that, too. Instead, it was a kind of arrogance of power. Because the Haskell people were writing a pretty powerful code, they did have a tiger by the tail. It was a powerful compiler, it was a powerful language, and they knew they could work miracles. And yet, that wasn’t enough. Something insidious, something subtle happened. It caused their separation, they set aside the rest of the industry. The people outside the community who were writing everyday programs began to look at the corner of the eye where the Haskell people were doing: “Emm… Haskell people don’t seem to like us very much, I don’t think we’re gonna like them”. Some of you might remember the Reddit discussions in the mid 2000s. A bunch of people were there. And they were talking about cool math things there. In those talks, they often were snickering about other languages like Go. It wasn’t anything significant, it wasn’t anything evil, they were just snickering: “He-he-he, mainstream people, ha!”. But I was a mainstream golang guy at that time! I didn’t like that. And I’ve been dealing with language wars in the next couple of years. And I said to them at that time “Do we really want to have language wars on Reddit?”. And the interesting thing about it was not about what they were snickering about, because they probably had a right to do that. What was interesting about is my reaction. My reaction was defensive. My reaction was “Well, you guys, go ahead and do your Haskell thing, but I’m the one who gets real work done.” That’s the interesting division that got set up at the time. And it was fairly pervasive. There was an attitude among the Haskell community, and again, it’s not an evil attitude, not one that was born out of ill will. But there was an attitude that said “You know, our tools are so good, our language is so good, we don’t need to follow the rules. We can do something else. We don’t have to talk to other people. We don’t have to do the other kinds of programs.” Haskell people didn’t want to do the regular kinds of programs. They didn’t want to have to deal with the corporate database. They didn’t want to have to deal with the horrible schema that had evolved twenty years. It was just distasteful. And they found ways instead to do things like using category theory, and dependent types. They’ve built a wall around themselves, and they’ve chosen to live in a technological bubble. Isolated from the evils of the outside world.

I'll take this opportunity to remove that common variable by wrapping up discussion here.

This conversation has continued to be the status quo.

Snark aside, I wish you well.

Best of luck!