throwaway71958

Ouch, "making stuff up". That's harsh, my man. Thus far I've made absolutely nothing up in this thread, or indeed in any others under this account. And you're using a PR puff piece written by Google HR to discount years of personal experience that I'm sharing here. You're free to not believe me, but let's not level accusations without evidence, OK?

Did I say it was "data"? The closest anyone has come to "data" on this (that I know of) is Google, in that experiment where they just hired people at random. But they decided to ignore the results and stick to the soul crushing 5 hour interviews anyway, so data did not change the relevant people's minds.

To quote Abraham Lincoln: "Do not trust anything you read on the internet".

I know it from my own experience and that of many others who have been through the gauntlet. Take it for what it's worth, I'm not selling you anything. I don't look impressive on the whiteboard, but I do have a rather impressive track record. Something doesn't line up. :-)

FWIW, as far as I recall there was another experiment at Google where they tried to establish correlation between interview performance and job performance, and as far as I recall, there was no meaningful correlation. This, of course, is not fully representative, because it does not include poor whiteboard performers.

Well, don't wait to get fired then. Find a better paying job you like and go for it. It doesn't seem like you have much to lose anyway, and the best way to increase your paycheck is by moving around and not letting employers take you for granted. Just don't sell your soul for a buck in the process. This game is a marathon, and grinding it out never really works in the long term.

I'm not sure I believe that, actually. As elaborate as the process is, there are still plenty of false positives. I'm not convinced a simpler process would have produced a materially different outcome.

They certainly still _are_ among the top choices for top people, but they're no longer the _best_ choice for most. I can't in good conscience advise anyone to join any 70K person company. "Cog in a machine" describes it pretty well. Ignore "self driving cars" and "internet balloons" and other BS: there's near zero chance you'll get to work on any of that, particularly if you don't already have a stellar track record at some company Google/Alphabet respects (of which there are very few).

Yes. Getting hired by Google is only part of the deal. Actually _succeeding_ when you're already there is much more difficult. It's a high pressure environment with a lot of very smart overachievers. Because of this it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and people who don't measure up also don't feel welcome, as it were. Since performance reviews are largely derived from peer feedback, hiring mistakes tend to be self-correcting. Most of the time, though, I've seen great people leave just because they didn't like the pressure. The amount of pressure depends on the team. The higher the profile -- the more pressure (but also more rewards, greater career potential, etc). But the general bar for what's considered "good work" is pretty high, and more uniform than in any other large company I have ever worked at.

Then there's the issue that by the time you even get an on-site, you're already very much not a random candidate. Recruiters actually do look at your track record, etc. You can bullshit there, but I don't recommend it, since references will be spot checked, and they better line up.

Google interviews are largely a roll of the dice above certain level of basic engineering competence. I.e. if you don't know the basics, you will almost certainly not pass them. But if you're a more senior candidate, Google doesn't really know how to interview you, and their interview process turns into a random number generator biased heavily towards "no hire".

They don't. In fact they even did an experiment and admitted some people at random, irrespective of how well they did in the interviews. Those people were found to perform about as well as the legitimate interview "lottery winners" hired during the same time period.

A lot of people (anecdotally, the majority) at Google have the "impostor syndrome", and the news of the experiment did nothing whatsoever to quell the symptoms. Now they don't know if they are, in fact, not impostors, but they do know that on average they perform about as well. :-)

Don't take his word as a word of god from heaven. Google's interview process is just as shitty as anyone else's, and shittier than some I've been through. It selects for people who do well on the whiteboard under pressure, which are very often not the best workers overall. It also wastes a ton of time both on the employer and on the candidate side. Source: interviewed ~100 people in my 6+ years at Google.

One thing interviews can't select for: creativity and motivation. And in tech those two criteria are the most vital, especially motivation. I can easily fill in the skills gap in someone who's motivated. I can't do anything with someone who doesn't give a shit, even if they're the second coming of Albert Einstein. So folks, please, don't apply for jobs you don't really care about. Save yourself and your prospective employer time, aggravation, and the opportunity cost.

It's not so much about "making it look like Russia" as it is about making the current administration look illegitimate. There are literally trillions of dollars at stake, as well as very affluent lifestyles of some very influential people who have been running things for decades. They might end up being replaced by a different group of people, and they don't like that one bit. And they are fighting it tooth and nail. Just goes to show how little power is really vested in the officials we elect (yes, "we", I am a US citizen), and how much of it is wielded by the amorphous Washington DC apparatus that doesn't change no matter who you vote into office. Explicitly going after them, the way Trump promised in the final months of his campaign, is a suicide mission, if he actually decides to follow through on the threat. But I don't think he actually has the power or indeed the smarts to "drain the swamp" in any kind of meaningful way. This draining is long overdue, but there's no way to accomplish this without some world class statesmanship, and without having the intelligence community on your side, and Trump is at odds with both of those things.

And here's some Russian perspective on "draining the swamp": that's actually one thing Putin did when he came to power. Under Yeltsin, the government was basically run by oligarchs, and they could do whatever the hell they wanted. Putin and Russia's security/intelligence community that installed him laid down the ground rules, and made it clear that from there on out orders would be coming down from the Kremlin, not the other way around. One oligarch rebelled (Khodorkovsky) and was put in prison for a decade. Which, by the way, was entirely deserved. Most Russians were disappointed that other oligarchs didn't follow.

The issue with "draining the swamp" is that this creates voids that other people fill. Which they did under Putin. So even though oligarchs are pretty obedient now, there's a much stronger swamp sub-structure of Putin's pals under the covers which is darn near impossible to remove until he dies, and they're all under his control.

So armed with this perspective, I like two features of the US political system that many other Americans (native and naturalized) intensely dislike: the divided congress and the constant Mexican standoff between the executive and the legislative branch. If those guys could agree on anything, that's when we'd really be in trouble. Case in point is once again Russia, where the executive branch can request whatever laws it wants and be 100% sure they'll pass the Duma. The result is predictable: harebrained laws protecting the incumbent regime.

It's a proper noun that describes an obscure sub-structure of US Congress. Now, quickly, name some sub-structures of the Russian Duma for us, and tell us what Putin thinks about them.

Russian here: Russia very definitely does use online trolling domestically (same as the US I guess). They also use paid "pro-government" rally attendees. That's very well documented, including direct video evidence on Youtube.

I very much doubt they're competent enough to pull something like this convincingly here in the US and avoid early detection and counter-intelligence response. Thus far no evidence whatsoever was presented that any of this was Russian, let alone state sponsored. That's either some truly elite level GRU work, to the standard we have not ever seen before, or there is, in fact, no "paid Russian trolls" on The_Donald. My opinion: there's no way in hell they could pull this off without getting noticed _well before_ the anointed Democratic candidate lost the election.

To quote a Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin: "Oh it is not hard to fool me, for I am willing to be fooled."

To this day I don't know what the word "caucus" would even correspond to in Russian. And English/Russian language pair is notoriously bad in machine translation systems. We're talking borderline unreadable, in either direction.

I'm not saying he/she was. But do consider that in one case the most cursory circumstantial evidence is enough to convict, but in this case the same level of "evidence" is not enough to exonerate. Double standard, anyone?

For a pro-Russian shill I seem to be doing a bad job, seeing how I'm actually Russian and made no attempt to conceal this fact.

Sure. But if that's what you really think, then you don't get to assume that the DNC was hacked "by the Russians". Agreed?

I've observed the whole Brexit thing with great interest, but I don't feel well versed in the vernacular. And for someone well versed, it'd be difficult to know what the person who's not well versed wouldn't know. Which is what we're observing here.

"The peoples" is unlikely. "-ing" after most verbs is unlikely. "the" is unlikely before "Freedom Caucus" and "NSC". There's no "the" in Russian, and ESL speakers often omit it, or put it where it doesn't really belong. The word "caucus" in itself is unlikely: I've never even heard of it before I moved to the US, it's not in common use abroad. "Whose" is unlikely. "To destroying" is very unlikely. "Will be happening" is unlikely ("will happen" is far more likely). "Be remembering" is very unlikely. "Do you be thinking" is very unlikely. And so on.

To my ear, this obfuscation sounds Middle Eastern, due to the frequent use of "-ing" in verbs whether it belongs there or not. I know an Iranian guy who does this a lot.

Well, there's no Russian first-language bias in that text for sure. Another argument in favor of the opinion that this was written by an American: the author seems to be well versed in the memes of the US political discourse. Someone from outside the US is unlikely to even know or care about Trump's "movement", or who "Bannon" is, or "drain the swamp", or "white privilege" etc. They're also unlikely to abbreviate "New York Times" as "NYT". The telltale signs are all over the text.

As a Russian myself, I can tell you with certainty that there are mistakes in that text that a Russian ESL speaker would never make, and verb tenses are a bit too good for an unskilled speaker. Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. They're wrong.

This is incomplete: they need to also include the political affiliations of owners of "fact check" sites, and perhaps also FEC disclosure for donations above threshold, and sources of financial support. I.e. this site comes from PolitiFact, but its owner is a liberal and he took a bunch of money from Pierre Omidyar who also donated heavily to the Clinton Global Initiative. Puts the fact checks in a more "factual" light, IMO. Fact check on the fact check: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/jan/14/...

Things have gotten hyper-partisan to the extreme in the past year or so, so you sometimes see things that are factually true rated as "mostly false" if they do not align with the narrative of the (typically liberal) owners.

At least one person is thinking straight. This is basically a blanket license to learn from everything you do, even if you do it in third party apps. Right now those apps are opaque, and Google can't see what you're doing there. As an ad company (which is what they are, first and foremost) this pisses them off pretty bad. They would like to know which brands you buy on Amazon, what you like on FB and Pinterest, who your friends are, etc. And they want to tie it all to your advertising GUID, preferably across devices and into the real world. The info doesn't even have to be in their cloud, as long as they're the only ones with access to it. It's pretty cool, in a way. It also ensures I'll never buy an Android phone.

Note however, that on Intel it's actually slower than run off the mill float32 linear algebra library like Eigen or OpenBLAS. Its main forte seems to be ARM.

They're also not very interested in making it easier for you to train models at home. Not that it's a big risk for them if you were able to do so: you don't have the data, and your models are only as good as your data, but they'd rather you came to their cloud and paid $2/hr per die for an outdated Tesla K80. Which, to their credit, they've made it very easy to hook up to your VM. Literally, you just tell them how many you need and your VM starts with that many GPUs attached. Super slick.

Some of the multi-author articles on Distill have a very important (IMO) innovation. They quantify precisely the contribution each author has made to the article. I would like to see this become norm in scientific papers, so on the one hand it'd be clear who to ask questions if they arise, and on the other the various dignitaries won't get their honorary spot on the authors list of papers they were barely involved with scientifically.

Have you tried to manage projects across timezones and cultures? Usually the way this works is all of the outsourced work has to be redone in the US anyway, at twice the original cost.

> should be normalized for geographic location

No it shouldn't. Top N thousand by salary should be admitted, the rest -- rejected. How are you going to enforce your "geographic location" once the worker is here? We can't even enforce our borders let alone movement of people once they're in the country.