bjones22

Not OP, but I'd like to chime in here. Getting good with computers is often best done by spending a large amount of time on computers. For many of "us" that involved teenage years playing MMORPGs, general programming, IRC, etc.

Despite a certain illusion of sociality involved in these activities, I am of the opinion that they are uniquely anti-social, and thus were in one way or another a deprivation of my childhood.

Sure I now have a much higher earnings potential. But was it worth it? I don't know. And thus I'm in no position to recommend it for anyone else.

Theirs probably a balance in it somewhere. And you can be damned sure if I'm ever a parent I'm going to tread lightly between "my child should learn to program, go to college, etc." and "my child needs to live a happy, normal, life".

That why it's a "for better or for worse" mentality in my opinion. We don't really know which is best do we?

I remember when I first got started with git I committed at an absurd frequency. I don't think it's that unreasonable for someone straight out of college to be relatively new to git, and thus do the same thing.

I remember later on I wrote a script that listened to git hooks and rebuilt my project on a remote server. I was still testing manually at that time, as we all do in the beginning, which resulted in a large number of commits so that I could view the results on the server.

I think it's ok to ask "why do you have so many commits?" but not "why do you have so many commits?!?!?!". It's also not ok to ASSUME that a large number of commits is a bad thing automatically, unless you have reasons far better then any submitted in this thread.

A test is only as good as the engineer who glance's at it with the fate of the candidate in his/her hands.

In my experience 90% tests get 10% of the attention of other assessments.

Not OP, but as someone who took a 6 hour test at full concentration, with no feedback other then a polite 'no', there are a few reasons I don't out them.

1) I didn't score well on the test. It's within reason they read this post and release my scores with a 'it was because he scored low'. Future employers then come across my scores and deny me.

2) Don't bite the hand that's like the hand that MIGHT feed you. You don't yell and storm out of investor meetings. Because then they tell other investors. Similar logic here.

3) This place is very optimistic. Pessimistic people aren't particularly desirable. Whistle blowers are included in the latter group especially by corporate entities. Who knows what it could cause.

It really boils down to the fact that it's not a safe environment to do so. Or at least it doesn't feel so.

But my rent is due the Friday after next and I need to know if I should send out another wave of resumes.

It isn't but it strikes me we are looking very hard to find a new way to do things, when the old way was pretty damn good.

Sit me down and talk about technology for ~thirty minutes. If I don't have the social skills to successfully do this (minority issue) I likely would not be able to communicate well with a team and thus should not be a candidate anyways. You will then know immediately whether you want to hire me (or progress me to another round) or not.

I then get a call two days later and can progress with my life.

People pretend like all this hiring strategy is for the good of the candidate. It's not. As with everything else its for the good of the company and its investors.

Here's a thought:

Invest in a competent hiring manager who can see through applicant bull shit and identify talent within a reasonable range. Includes basic negotiation skills. And assume the rightful risk that is employing another human being.

Out of curiosity, what are the demographics of the people who made these suggestions?

Were they employed? Were they very desirable to companies? Were they very undesirable to companies? Did they have financial hardships? College graduates? College dropouts?

I think it's important to remember how diverse the hiring pool is, and which voices tend to be the loudest. I would argue that the advice most companies get are from very successful companies. Similarly engineers likely seek advice from very successful engineers.

Both these groups are in the minority I think, and would thus not be in the best position to dictate for the majority (strictly in terms of fulfilling individual needs that they themselves have not encountered, personally or otherwise).

Example: 10x programmer wants a hiring process that caters to 10x programmers.

Problem: Vast majority of programmers do not fall into this category, and would not benefit from such a system. Yet companies want 10xers, so they go with it anyways. Then they complain about how hard it is to hire programmers.

Just want to say, in conjecture to my sibling post on this thread, I had a identical experience. In fact, if you're in the Bay Area we likely applied to the same companies.

My take-homes made me fundamentally question my ability as a programmer. And I'm a damn good programmer. That is wrong on so many levels.

I can only pledge that if I'm ever in a position to hire developers (at any level) that I'll never force that kind of experience on a potential applicant.

I feel their is a major gap between junior and senior developers. And in this environment a junior developer has zero leverage with the companies he/she applies to. So they treat us like cattle.

It's like with every generation gap, their isn't much point blaming those who came before us. We can only do the best we can and make an effort not to replicate their mistakes. The next class(es) of software engineers have to improve and be better then the ones before them.

I'm preaching, but I hope you get what I mean.

Its good in theory, but it leaves a lot of ambiguity for the interviewee to parse through. For instance, if given a two week window would it look better for me to do it tonight? Would it show ambition? Or would it seem like I'm desperate, and lead to a lower amount of compensation being offered to me? Should I spend far longer then five hours on the assignment, and turn in superior work while making it seem like I only spent 5 hours? What is my competition doing?

As someone who's recently been through the ringer, including one six hour take-home, all I want is a clear demonstration of respect and rationality.

Bring me into your professional office. Let's talk like professionals. Allow me to demonstrate my professional skills. Call me back with a professional yes or a professional no, all within a professional time frame. That's it.

Remote or otherwise less traditional assignments / roles / jobs will deserve and benefit from their own process. But how we strayed from the straight forward formula is beyond me, my guess it was an initiative started by a handful of companies who had trouble hiring.

I don't think hiring devs is the systematic issue everyone makes it out to be. Assessing talent is always hard, be it an artist's, an athlete's or a programmers. I think rather then assume the cost of the investment in hiring, companies chose to blame the system and that's where this absurd roller coaster started.

shh we only remember the good parts of history...

/s

Fair point. But I think it still nullifies the argument that countries can't modernize without 'civilized' colonial rulers.

It depends. If you're making an attempt at future-proofing yourself, you gotta start at the bottom with "C".

If you're just looking to pick up your first project in the category, consider something simple like a RaspberryPI + Python.

Damn those free, MIT-style licensed, open-source, decently maintained, libraries designed for usecase A!

They don't work for my Usecase D! These people are ass holes. How dare they?!?!?!?

/s

Have you actually submitted issues for the problems you're facing? That repo has 94 open issues and 833 closed ones..

Have you tried contributing by submitting pull requests?

Seriously this community was not built on entitlement, and it won't support yours here now.

Japan was able to modernize without brutal colonial rulers. What makes you say India wasn't capable of the same thing?

As someone who both has a lot of Irish blood (read: many relatives who hate the British), and someone who considers himself an amateur historian I'd like to make a single point:

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943:

"starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks" ~ Churchill 1943

I think this quote captures the ethos of British colonial rule quite nicely.

While the British ruled many of their colonies by a identifiable play-book (i.e. a superiority complex that lead to brutal governance), cultural preference, as it always seems to, lead to favorable treatment of those demographics closest to anglo-saxon / protestant / etc, characteristics.

So I assert while famines were induced by the British in both Ireland and India, the Indians would have been seen as lowlier then the Irish, by a debatable amount.

The Indian population would thus have suffered harsher under colonial rulers.

This is coming from someone who has traced his ancestry back to a British lord, which in all likelihood means a family member (likely 3-4 generations) was raped as a direct result of British colonialism.

History is brutal and everybody likes to call foul. However treatment of different, far off, peoples by colonial powers will never seek to amaze in its vicious and sickening nature.

Like this incident committed by American troops in 1901: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balangiga_massacre

As someone who played around with building Isomorphic games in HTML5, well done. The API is fairly clean, and the examples are solid (although the examples link in the README is broken).

Quick question though, as someone who might use / submit a pull request to this project...

Why coffeescript over ES6? As someone who used to use coffeescript for everything, and has since switched to ES6/7, I see coffeescript heading out the door. Not to mention that compilation to ES5 gets quite convoluted with coffeescript, which could lead to performance issues / weird bugs that force you to drop into raw ES5 anyways.

Awesome project, great work!

An interesting add-on here from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast: The initial plan to force the strait involved risking a large number of out-dated ships, judged by Churchill and co. to be expendable in the context of their utility in the war. However the admiralty, who included a number of men who had served on said ships, shared an emotional attachment to the old-war-dog fleet which they had earned their stars and stripes on. Thus they were unwilling to fully commit the necessary expenditure for the plan to work (microcosm of why the greater plan failed).

A good example of ineptitude in war. Churchill was no saint, and I couldn't get to OP's article (hug of death?), but history is always viewed through a lens and is mostly op-ed pieces.

I'll get the ice. Personally though I always wonder why their stack stands as it does. Does anyone else get the impression that it is somewhat monolithic? Would be interested to hear from some one whose had the opportunity to comb through more of their code then I have.

I think there is something to be said about the quality of life in these individual cities.

From San Jose through Carlmont, Burlingame etc., each city already has a large amount of development and more importantly, are residential neighborhoods containing schools, parks, and the like.

There are already very large amounts of traffic congestion at certain points (currently have Ralston and Hillsdale in my mind), and near the various high schools in the area.

I'm not saying we shouldn't strive for better infrastructure and development planning but the Camino Real strip is not the low hanging fruit in my opinion.

I was just considering the same point. While I didn't answer it in the first draft of the accidental essay I just wrote, I'll include it in the second.

The jest is that by having two disparate groups so close to each other, it encourages an us versus them mentality that discourages community members from embracing some of the attributes of the other group (in the case of my essay it would be education, because I write a lot about the different ethos that students had depending on which region they lived in).

Regardless I believe your points still have a large amount of merit. Especially the last which points out how those that are fortunate tend to alternate between fads of 'caring' for various less fortunate groups, in this case it is that of East Palo Alto.

I grew up in Redwood City and maintain very close friendships with high school teammates from EPA. This article caused me to make an account on hacker news so I could share a not so unique, but perhaps unheard, perspective on what it means to have a community like East Palo Alto (a.k.a. 'EPA') in the middle of silicon valley.

EDIT: this post quickly digressed into a four page behemoth that was too long to post in a single comment. It's long and I fear the formatting would have been awful. I will put up a WP site sometime tomorrow so that I may edit it and format it nicely. Below is a brief excerpt from the end. I'll make an edit to this post as soon as the WP site is up.

----------------------

If anything is to be taken away from my experience and these stories is that the men and women who are forced to grow up in this environment live in cyclical state of despair. A vacuum that requires quite nearly a winning lottery ticket to escape.

For it to be located so close to the affluent areas of silicon valley is practically criminal. It is eerily close to being the pit in which Bane grew up in during the Batman movies, the one where he lived in a prison that could see freedom and happiness just a couple hundred feet away.

If I make any sort of dime in Silicon Valley I fully intend to research and hopefully participate in philanthropy that will contribute to problems such as these.

I believe it becomes our responsibility when it is in our own back yard.