einars

Have you not been in a stressful technical interview situation? I have even heard of people doing this on purpose to weed out people who don't "perform under pressure".

Why? I have had same thought as op. Even as an address buck of loose employee connections it feels pretty useless. A lot of people I might want to ask for a recommendation or advice on a role, I would probably reach out over Facebook or email since it feels more sincere and so much is lost in the recruitment noise on linkedin, especially for software people.

I also liked this:

A vast majority of aid — 94 percent — is noncash. Donor resistance is one reason for this; it is not easy to persuade American oligarchs, British inheritors and Japanese industrialists to fork over their money to the extremely poor to use as they see fit. “There’s the usual worries about welfare dependency, the whole ‘Give a man a fish’ thing,” said Amanda Glassman, a public health and development expert at the Center for Global Development. “It’s so powerful. It’s really a basic psychological feature of the landscape. You’ll start drinking. You’ll start lying around at home because you’re getting paid.”

...

If cash transfers flourished, “the whole aid industry would have to fire itself.”