elptacek

Your logic is side-stepping the point. There was a period of time, at least in the USA, where the goal was economical and social stability (New Deal, GI Bill, unions). Over the course of my life, the goal has morphed into wealth transfer. You can track this with the Gini coefficient, right? Sharp upward climb during the Reagan years. A "losing faith" metric is also a bellwether. The promise of economic gains is the reason to show up. No gains, no show. There's only so much you can pump out of a system with churn before it collapses. Meanwhile, there is no such thing as "make your own path," and this is a direct contradiction to "what people want to pay for" -- definitionally a "pre-made path". We all make choices from the options that are available to us in a system where many of the variables and constants are completely out of our control (eg, what the market desires). In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.

Wait... you didn't know about this?

I had a single phone interview with someone at Northwestern (a long time ago) where they were looking for someone to build a pen of developers to "partner" with MBA students to turn ideas into apps. I laughed so hard my sides hurt.

Not a bad idea.

No, we never really got far enough that we were able to collect that kind of data. I'm glad it was fun; certainly doing it for a living is entertaining. Mostly.

IMO, the messiness of hiring processes and the lack of adoption of work sample testing have a lot to do with each other. One of the questions I regularly ask in interviews (and have for a long time) is, "What are the first 5 things you'll have me work on?" During the last round of interviews, no one I talked to could answer that. I even had a couple of interviewers who didn't even know the name of the hiring manager or the position. Then you have other artificial filters like preferred certifications where the assumption seems to be that whatever training was required to pass can be mapped onto every organisation... or that simply possessing a cert magically grants insight into how most companies do stuff. The point is that companies don't really seem to have a good idea of what they're actually hiring for, but they get by hiring more senior people who have enough experience (hopefully) that they can figure it out on their own.

One of the things we discussed early on was avoiding having Starfighter turn into a certification process and maybe that's one of the reasons why we stumbled around a bit. I am aware that certifications have their place, but they're not really a substitute for industry experience and they definitely aren't a guarantee that a candidate can quickly figure out how a company's tech is glued together. IMO that's the power of work sample testing: you're giving a candidate a challenge where they can demonstrate aptitude. But if you don't know what actually needs to be done, you can't create that challenge, much less a rubric for describing expectations.

I may or may not have picked the locks to my middle school's computer room and I definitely didn't hide in there when I was supposed to be in class.

I think if we'd survived there would have come a day when we got a letter from somebody's lawyer. But as a kid who grew up below the poverty level, the idea of an epic escape remains near and dear to my heart. I've probably seen it 50x.

The way I remember it, the general experience was that companies reached out to us and were very excited by the idea, but when we actually sent a candidate, they scotched it. I did make exactly one placement where I waived the fee (because friends). They were super happy with him but it was too little, too late.

Invisible, forgotten third partner here... more made it through all of them than you might think. They even set up their own Slack community to help each other out.

Yes to "existing bad hiring pipelines." In at least one case, the in-house recruiter was obviously offended that she had to speak to us at all. The one placement we made was with an old pal and I had to yell at him to even give the guy a chance. Six months after we'd shuttered for good, he contacted me to ask me if I had any more Bens. Nope.

Attracting entry level hires is part of the point, but the problem remains that most companies lack the resources and/or desire to train entry level hires. Heck, most of the ones I've worked for didn't really train me at a senior level. But definitely yes on the personal issues.

I left a job in 2007. Things were so stacked against me that I had no choice but to leave. Two years later, the manager contacted me to apologise. He told me that they'd had to hire five people to replace me because they could not find one person who could do everything I could do. He said, "We didn't know what we had in you." I reminded him that he had asked me in the interview why he should hire me and I had responded, "Because I am the best candidate who will interview for this job."

Someone shared this post with me because I was complaining in a Slack about how the theme of my career seems to be not getting hired for the position but later getting hired to fix the things that were fucked up by the person they did hire. Begs the question, is hiring really that difficult?

Losing plants is still a bummer. I think I average over my lifetime ~60/40 for survive/die over here. The soil here is hard clay, which is not helped by decades of previous owners mowing the grass and setting the clippings out for collection. I've seen plants slowly push up and die because the roots couldn't work into the soil. Even with nearly 2 decades of amendment, it's nowhere near ideal. Weeds don't seem to mind, though. Funny how that works.

This tracks. As a gardener, you also have to be comfortable with things dying and general risks caused by events that are beyond your control. The weather, municipalities trying to kill mosquitoes and inadvertently killing pollinators, fauna that are hungrier than you are... the list is pretty long. It feels roughly the same to write 10K lines of code and then walk away from it when things don't work out.

You're gaining a skill, though. For example, in future interviews, you will see obvious red flags that indicate a similar environment. Being able to gracefully navigate bureaucracy and not get burnt out by it is a very underrated skill.

These past few months, I have been slowly working through the audiobook version of Steven Strogatz' Infinite Powers. The work is enjoyable exactly because there's a bit of effort made to breathe life into the names everyone remembers. For example, Strogatz describes Archimedes as being so "neglectful of his person" that he had to be dragged to the bath; the irony being that one of the most famous anecdotes about him was a discovery he figured out in the bath. This is extra delightful to me since the beginning of my career was spent supporting these absent-minded professor types. I clearly remember realising that the path ahead of me was not going to result in some obvious legacy, despite whatever ambitions I had, but I could fix Dr Gell-Mann's printer. The working printer seemed to make him very happy, and I decided that was good enough. In 250 BC, someone just like me made sure Archimedes was clean and fed.

This post is pretty old, and I'm curious why it's been put up here today and what sort of conversation mmphosis was hoping for. To me, it reads as a half-considered opinion. Could it be that the siren song of ambition and personal legacy is a nice little perk if you can afford it? Is there a counter argument to be made that if you can't keep your personal shit together, you obviously lack the discipline required to turn those deep-thinky thoughts into a legacy? Are we taking digs at how the progress 2-3 productive coders make in the early, dark hours of a startup loses steam as it tries to scale? Anyone of these conversations overlooks a pretty crucial idea, which is potentially a more productive conversation in itself: how do we find and conscript those people who will fix our printers, run our errands, and generally work to move objects out of our way while we follow our delight? Do we have to occasionally treat their fiddly petitions for reassurance with respect, as a sort of payment for their efforts or do we simply assume that being around greatness is enough?

What’s doing the verification of the email on the server side? How does this service associate the email with the account? Specifically, what could be put in the email header or body by the MUA that is equivalent to a single use auth token?

Thanks for this. I recently left an otherwise awesome job mostly because of OKRs. I am still trying to articulate why.

I'm going to correct you, because it's relevant. Mehta says, "but only if it is actually accretive to the strategy." I think the accretive is important here, because one of my observations on how we were doing it wrong was that there were no stated goals for security against the company as a whole. This made it seem like each teams' OKRs were a chaotic free-for-all. Intuitively, the goals for security as a whole should be based on the overall needs of the company, divided up across the appropriate teams. These teams will have the tribal knowledge to write the best roadmap, determine who will own the workflow that the project generates on completion and generally know how to scope each task.

Going to listen to the podcast now. Maybe I will have more to say after. Cheers.

And there it is, the one thing I can never have an honest conversation about. The rules are different for ugly people, based on my personal experience as one data point. We're the last lot that everyone can discriminate against, or abuse, and get away with it.

I'll bite. We're coming up on our 24th anniversary. I will likely regret this, but this is what I have learned.

1. Misery is a function of expectations management. As is said, every relationship is different. Expectations could range everywhere from

"You are an adult and this is your house, too. Clean up after yourself like an adult who owns a house."

to what is common in our house,

"Housework gets done when it gets done. Fortunately we live in an area that doesn't have roaches."

It is notable that the author does little more than speculate on his wife's expectations. After that many disagreements, not fully understanding the other person's expectations is a big red flag. We can argue all day long as to whose responsibility the understanding is; that is also a big red flag.

2. It's not about the work you do, it's about the work you make. This one is a big deal to me, since I grew up in a family that expected me to clean up after them. All the laundry, dishes, yard and additional housework was my job starting when I was 10. And no matter how well or poorly I did, chances were high that I was going to get hit for something. Note that the author does not provide any of this context. His wife very well may have been looking forward to spending the rest of her life with a partner who was an adult who didn't leave crap laying around, knowing that it would somehow magically reappear clean in its designated storage location. Or she could just be uptight.

3. No relationship of any kind is fire and forget. It is a daily commitment to a complicated matrix of rules and accommodations, all of which has a cost. If a person does the cost/benefit analysis of doing this work and decides it's not worth it, hurt feelings and financial implications aside, it's not worth it. This is not only true of marriages, it's also the case for friendships, family, employers and coworkers. We're making hundreds of these calculations every day. It's a thing we do to feel safe. When the benefit does not outweigh the cost, you don't feel safe. That's bad for everyone's health.

4. It takes 5 positive experiences of someone to reconcile one negative one. I think I read another comment that was adjacent to this. I see this as sort of an economy of deposits and withdrawals, and that's not a particularly original analogy. At the end of the day, we are social animals; both small and large gestures of allegiance foster an environment of safety and comfort. Our lizard brain needs these things.

5. Capuchin monkeys prefer grapes. Fairness is a reflex. It is not rational and does not respond to logic. Though I can respect, "I might want to use it again."

I've seen many apps sending metrics to domains owned by Facebook while I was testing them. This does not surprise me at all.

My money is on there being a direct correlation between companies who did early adoption of internet technologies as crucial to business and 'doing it right' versus those other companies who view IT and security as a 'cost centers.'

I may not be caffeinated enough to participate in these threads articulately, but this question made me realize something that hadn't quite clicked before. As I have experienced it, the existing (waterfall?) model for deploying new features and bug fixes in large organizations requires going through QA and security review, where (hopefully) the on site security team has some sort of checklist or guideline for doing whatever analyses they do. But as they move over to agile, continuous integration/delivery, is there still time to deploy a complete staging build and wait? We have been working with small companies for ~2 years now and I haven't rigged up something to test code in at least a year. Mostly I just stare at it until I've figured out if I can exploit it.

This is where large companies might trip and fall, if they expect their existing security analysts/teams to do this (or, as you say, if they try to offload it onto developers or ops people, even ones who are more interested in security). I don't like how this sounds, what I am about to type, but the majority of security people -- particularly the ones at the level where they are hired to run QA-type audits -- do not know how to review code. It really does make me uncomfortable to say this, but if that's the rock, the hard place is how many times I've had to tell someone they really need to learn to code if they want to "work in security."

So when you say, "good security people," what you mean is people who can read and write code, and also have enough experience to know when that code can be used in a way that the original author did not intend to. It's almost as if there's a misconception that being able to read and write code is what you do if you're a dev or devops. This mindset is odd to me in so many ways. It's like saying, "I don't need to know how to use a screwdriver or a hammer because I'm not a carpenter." Even better, someone who understands what it feels like to be under some pressure to roll out changes where there might not have been a lot of time to consider malicious behavior. Someone who has your back.

Just yesterday or the day before, I had this inexplicable crisis where I was concerned about the value I am providing. It's gone now. Thanks!

There's a word for that. Gaslighting.

If this is a way to treat depression, maybe dialing back the crap way we treat each other is preventative. I've been angry for a long time that I have to take medication because most of my life was full of people who seemed to get some sort of perverse pleasure out of making me feel bad for things I cannot control (like being female, nearsighted and unattractive). Somehow it's not possible to simply disagree with someone else and state your contrary opinion, but rather to escalate quickly to aggression and personal attacks. Somehow it's not possible that we can organize ourselves so that a greater number of people can have their physiological needs met, much less feel safe and heaven forbid we should feel love/belonging or have a modicum of self-esteem because how would advertisers ever sell anybody anything? And along comes the internet where anyone is entitled to say anything from a distance and not have to look into the eyes of the human being they're taking a scrap of dignity from.

Any measure like a PIP is an attempt to reinforce a political/power structure. Where "mismatched expectations" indicate that it is not clear whether the behavior of the employee or the manager -- specifically, whichever manager has some part in that employee's success within the organization -- is the larger contributor to the failure to meet expectations. Most organizations are notorious for a systemic inability to distinguish one from the other, defaulting to laying the onus on the employee. So "working like hell" ends up as "effort expended in the wrong place." On the part of both parties. An "honest PIP" would be one where the intention is perceived as good, even though the need for a formal process is the result of some other weakness or failure where the net result is a less robust relationship, overall.

Oxytocin levels also increase. That would be the first one I'd test for -- if there was a correlation between oxytocin levels and extent of grey matter loss.

"Mice Splicer" on your resume, though? That'd be an interesting interview conversation.

No, no boarding school. Just a seriously crappy childhood.

This is particularly fascinating to me, because I am a deeply and painfully lonely person. My current working hypothesis is that my life experience has caused some level of attachment disorder, resulting in a feeling of loneliness even when I am not alone. The main reason I started going to various roller derby practices and events was to grow my circle of friends (the common sense advice -- clubs, events). This has happened, but I still feel a sense of apartness, which I suspect will take a long time to go away.

I've learned a lot about the mechanism of establishing friendships, though. As niftich points out above, I had the tendency to consider friendly encounters as one-offs; more specifically, "Oh, that happened. How pleasant." And then go through the mental acrobatics of wondering if the person would like to continue being friendly or [s]he was simply being polite. So the idea of "broken fantasy world" works in reverse here: I have a broken core belief where I don't understand the value someone gets out of hanging out with me.

Just a week ago, friends came over to celebrate my birthday and watch the WFTDA champs. Another friend who is not part of that circle remarked on something that hadn't really clicked for me -- I must be a good friend (and loved) because my house was full of people. So the feeling of loneliness, somehow baked into a bunch of erroneous core beliefs, also masks reality and hinders the formation of relationships.