HN user
You don't have to rely purely on subjective human judgement.
And yet (aside from mega deal-breakers, like clearly overstating competence in some category) that's pretty much what hiring decisions come down to: "Are they for real? Can I rely on them? Will I get along with them?" -- the battery of contrived, essentially "objective" assessment that get thrown at candidates notwithstanding.
What is greatness, you ask? It is the ability of a man to stand on his own, against the whole world, against the very flow of time itself:
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
all the into you => all that into you, of course
To be fair, sometimes proficiency in some framework or CMS or vertical skill area does matter a lot more than you think it does. Remember now, the problem isn't that they get candidates who don't know $whatever_niche_topic, it's that they "don't know what they don't know", i.e. they have no inkling that the general "depth of terrain" in that area is much greater than what they were able to size up from their casual acquaintance with it... or that they think they can hit the ground running on a project that a serious heavy hitter with 5-10 years experience in that "niche" area been working on, when of course they can't.
That said, if your interviewers are doing their jobs properly, they should be able to filter for (or simply ask about) that level of skill awareness during the phone screen.
More likely, when you get told post-interview that "we need someone with more experience in X" it's usually a polite way of saying that they just weren't, you know, all the into you, and are trying to save face on both sides by pointing to something dry and objective, rather than things that actually matter. Like you know, the fact that you were underdressed (or overdressed), all those awkward silences you had with that second or third guy you interviewed with (remember, the one who announced his presence in the room by slouching in a chair and saying "I'm hungover"), or that you seemed to exhibit a slight latency in your recognizing some technical term that's common coin in the circles they run in (and so therefore, you just don't have enough chest hair), etc.
Conversely, we can think of this as a rather poor filtering technique, because it grants an a nearly automatic pass to anyone who happens to have read any of the popular programming books (or blogs) where the "problem" is presented in easily digestible form, is presented as an "interesting" problem, and it's known that a tractable and optimal solution exists.
A much more important (and deeper) skill is to be able to solve (or reasonably approach) problems they have never seen. And an even more important and deeper skill than that is the ability to recognize algorithmic problems embedded "in the wild" (in naturally occurring business contexts), and to tell the interesting ones from the non-interesting ones (and the trivial from the hard... and among the hard, the plausibly solvable ones from the intractable rabbit holes) without the imprimatur of having someone from a place like Google or MIT telling you that they're "interesting" problems (let alone tractably solvable).
Of course, this kind of skill is much, much harder to test for -- if it can be tested for in the awkward setting of a tech interview at all.
Design patterns, at least as defined by Fowler and company, ... have no justification in robust software design.
I don't particularly venerate the concept of design patterns, nor would I bother asking about them during an interview. But could you justify this statement?
That she was "bored" by the exercise doesn't necessarily mean that she doesn't share you and your brother's bold, hard-driving, searingly intense curiosity about the world, and the nature of our ability to infer knowledge about it.
It might, instead, have had something do with the fact that the point you guys were trying to make was rather trivial.
That's cool. Still, it's better form to at least try to not to use language that smacks of category-based discrimination. Just stating your age, for example, will instantly repel anyone in the pushing-30-or-over set.
And very heavy, 3-pager tl;dr pdfs at that.
So -- blatant age discrimination, huh? That's... awesome, dude.
This is just like any other claim to own some particular piece of real estate: it will have abundant "standing", "merit" and "legitimacy" as soon as she is able to back her claim up by force.
It's been that way since the beginning of time; and (if you follow eminent domain disputes, and the handling of most aboriginal land claims carefully enough), after all is said and done, that's pretty much the way things work nowadays, also.
There are plenty of reasons not to publish on CPAN. Not everyone has time to "babysit" all the modules they write (and deal with people's complaints that they're misnamed, aren't complete enough, etc).
Also, lots of people who were once productive on CPAN years ago have "gone dark" in recent years. Generally has something to do with having a life (fulltime job, family, that sort of thing).
So all in all that's a pretty snarky question to ask. It's definitely a plus to show that you have the sense of civic engagement to go through the full-fledged publishing process on CPAN (including processing testing reports, RT issues, etc) but it should suffice to provide code samples with clean coding style and decent enough documentation (even if it's a well-written README).
Umm, for one thing, the description of the instruments as "derivatives" is not due to Kedrosky, but to Avi Levy, the author of the Bloomberg article he was quoting. You did see that he was quoting another article, didn't you?
Also, it's not a "scare word" in this context at all. It's a fairly neutral term, and an accurate enough description of what these investment firms are doing (even if they chose to use other words to market these instruments).
Someething like a github repo for every arXiv submission - shouldn't be that hard to do.
Basically, you should only take a significant options stake if you're in love with the team, the work and the business models for their own sakes. A good quantifier for "in love with", BTW, is if they're doing something that you would almost do for free (if you you had your FY money already).
Either that, or you're working for one of those (very few) startups for which the outsize payout odds are deemed to be especially high, independent of all the other factors. (Advice from friends who happen to be veteran startup junkies can be very, very helpful in assessing this). And provided you have some minimal savings buffer for the case that things go 'poof' -- which is always more likely than not, even given the best of circumstances.
But if it's just a paycheck you're after, then by all means, go for the (substantially bigger) paycheck.
Well, the global history of hype, at least.
silly, yes. but nonetheless, an accurate reflection of how many people view that sphere of activity known as "perl scripting." i.e. pretty much like bash scripting, but with slightly different punctuation.
It's Paris, man. You don't need recommendations. It's mind-blowing, sensory overload everywhere. Just walk down the street.
Some of Northrop Grumman's more interesting accomplishments under Ronald Sugar's tenure:
Acting as goodwill ambassadors to the people of Iraq:
Northrop Grumman’s subsidiary, Vinnell Corporation, has been catching a lot of flack lately. They landed a $48 million contract with the US occupational authority to train the Iraqi National Army, but have botched the job so badly that the Jordanian Army has recently been brought in to take over the job.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=11
Lobbying Congress on the Armenia genocide bill:
Corporate America typically hires lobbyists to pressure Congress on taxes and trade rules. But in an unusual -- some say risky -- move, five military contractors and an energy company have stepped into a fight over whether the U.S. should label Turkey's slaughter of a million Armenians nearly a century ago as genocide.
The six companies have strong ties to Turkey, a key strategic ally of the U.S. in Mideast peace efforts and the fight against terrorism. None would state their position on the House resolution, but industry analysts and others said they likely lobbied against the measure to show support for Turkey, an important market for weapons and industrial products.
"They don't want to be seen opposing a resolution that has a very evident human rights element," said Rouben Adalian, director of the Armenian National Institute, a Washington research organization. "It would put them on the side of denying history and denying genocide."
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15404
Helping the Pentagon build (probably illegal) databases of "suspect domestic activity" like anti-war protests:
Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish and "maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense." Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide "non-validated domestic threat information" from military units throughout the United States that are collected and retained in a CIFA database. The reports include details on potential surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles, bomb threats and planned anti-war protests. In the program’s first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports. The database obtained by NBC News is generated by Counterintelligence Field Activity.
CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its operational and analytical records include reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats. Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies.
One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop Grumman and dubbed "Person Search," is designed "to provide comprehensive information about people of interest." It will include the ability to search government as well as commercial databases. Another project, "The Insider Threat Initiative," intends to "develop systems able to detect, mitigate and investigate insider threats," as well as the ability to "identify and document normal and abnormal activities and ‘behaviors,’" according to the Computer Sciences Corp. contract. A separate CIFA contract with a small Virginia-based defense contractor seeks to develop methods "to track and monitor activities of suspect individuals."
Or Zagat, or Yelp -- or anyone willing to setup up to the task of answering simple, pertinent questions like "how do I find a decent Thai restaurant nearby that's open at this hour?" seriously.
Trophy cases for badges. Jeez.
But as the community is growing, this is kind of inevitable. And desirable.
What HN needs is enhanced search (and tagging) capabilities, precisely to allow user to select content from specfic regions (and in different languages).
For example, I think it'd be extremely useful to be able to bring up posts specifically about China, or Paris, or only in French or Russian.
His sudden withdrawal from a successful musical comedy career was a mystery to many.
Well, the official explanation was that Henry Kissinger's winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 made musical comedy obsolete:
"It was at that moment that satire died," says Lehrer.
"There was nothing more to say after that."
"Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention."
Because Wikipedia -- to its credit -- has no intention of being acquired by anyone.
The djb way: "straight, no chaser":
http://cr.yp.to/
BTW, his code is not easy to understand (quite the opposite) -- there are few source comments, and most of these are snarky, cryptic or both; and not only does he explain almost nothing on a global scale but oftentimes what he is doing might look, at first blush, kinda wrong, obtuse even.
But that's precisely the point -- there are a lot of idioms in there that most C programmers just wouldn't think of, especially if you're into minimalism (when it comes to things like dealing with strings, error handling, forking, etc).
BTW also: you're young, and most likely have neither a family, nor a terribly serious relationship that can't buck the strain -- so go ahead, kill yourself with work for a year or two.
The main benefit you get from being a consultant for a while is that you get to learn just how much BS lies at the heart of most "consulting", as well as the companies that like to hire (tons and tons of) consultants.
That is, mostly consultants are hired for (as other have said here) psychological / CYA reasons, rather than for the actual business value of the advice they provide (which is often mediocre). And of course when it comes to technology products, the actual (source code) contributions of consultants, dollar for dollar, is often especially low, indeed.
Another nifty thing you'll learn when doing consulting, which is hard to learn otherwise, is that the higher rate you charge, the more people value you and you work, for some reason. Which is a very useful thing to have a visceral, bone-marrow-level grasp for, indeed.
Hate to say this, but reading that article made me feel like I was reading Foursquare's obituary, 3 years from now.
You probably should have left a long time ago, from the sound of what you're saying.
Main thing to keep in mind (and that people too often forget in situations like these) is that you don't owe it to them to stay in this job. If something in your gut is telling you that what you're doing isn't just isn't right, "it's insane", killing you financially... then it probably is.
Another thing to keep in mind is that it's much better to quit and have nothing to show for 6 months of work, than... to get fired / laid off and have nothing to show for 6 months of work (and/or possibly not getting paid for the last several weeks of this.) Get my drift?
So it's up to you to "do the right thing" here. You'll wait until finding another job before giving notice of course. But the main thing is to do what's right for you, and on your timetable, not theirs.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndromeAre you hiring?