I think you've summed the nature of HN pretty well. I wish I knew that before I joined (recently), but unfortunately I had to learn it the hard way.
>> The set of opinions that will not get you downvoted into oblivion / pushed out of the community is so narrow...
That is exactly the conclusion which I arrived at after about three weeks of active participation. At that point I lost any interest in continuing trying to become a part of the community.
In my opinion, the HN community is not very healthy and has become incestuous in its nature. People basically choose to exchange with the like-minded only, share the same opinions, upvote the things that match their view of the world and downvote deviant opinions.
This all is aggravated by the fact that the HN user base is mostly North American and visitors from other world regions are somewhat of a minority in here (my observation). That's why a lot of ideas and opinions that I see around here are just "alien" to me, although I've never had a problem finding a common language with Europeans, for instance.
In its current form, I can often look at any new question that comes in here, and if I have seen its equivalent on HN before, I already know what will be the most upvoted comment and what kinds of downvoted comments I will find at the bottom of the page. The mechanics of HN is such that it works as a giant "echo chamber" and users are "taught" which kind of opinions they're supposed to like, support and help to spread and what will happen to them if they defy the state (downvoting sanctions).
I'm sure many like this way of things, but the way I view it you can't have healthy offsprings (which are ideas and opinions) if your community embraces incestuous relationships as its core defining value. Without diversity, there is no evolution.
On a related note, I used to be one of the early users of StackOverflow/StackExchange sites. In its first couple of years they had a liberal content policy and this invited a healthy, diverse and vibrant community that produced many profound and wise ideas. When they went down the deletionism route and started discouraging deviant opinions, the most interesting people started to quit and in about a year or two the sites degraded to such an extent that made it pointless to return in the search of quality content.
HN is not there yet, as I still see some high quality answers now and then. Usually they're neither upvoted not downvoted, they just stick somewhere in the middle-bottom area and I have to dig for them. Sadly this requires much time which I'd rather spend on more important things.
I also very much dislike that anti Russia/China/Turkey/Islam rhetoric that comes every now and then. It's not that bad as on Reddit where you can just say some not very intelligent bad thing about those countries and get yourself a few hundred upvotes and a dozen gifted "reddit golds". That's just the new bottom that Reddit recently hit. I sadly see HN moving in the same direction.
>> assuming you like a decent proportion of highly upvoted submissions and comments, you'll almost assuredly like all of them.
>> There are plenty of people who don't. They are just not on HN (anymore).
Apparently I'm with that group as I no longer have any wish to hang around HN. At that point I'd be ashamed to admit I've tried to be a HN member, as it would be an embarrassment to admit to having an active SO/SE account these days. To me, that was a mistake in judgement. I'd like to delete my account and make the divorce official, but apparently HN does not allow that and does not buy into the "Right to be forgotten" idea. I have no doubt that most of the HN users share that same official opinion being the "example citizens" that they are.
That's just hilarious. For as long as I'm saying things that conform with the majority's opinion, I will be upvoted. But when a have a different opinion, then I will be downvoted until I censor myself back into conformity. Is that how things work here, on Hacker News?
Have you by any chance heard of concepts like pluralism of opinions, freedom of expression and that sort of things? I'm not sure where you come from, but in some parts of the world people are freely able to have a civilized discussion around complex and sometimes controversial matters. You may consider going abroad, living there for a while and learning how a liberal society works. Will be a great help to you.
What if it happens to be my opinion, the way I view things? I should be able to express it, right?
I can't really crop my ideas if some parts of them are not well received. They come as packages, I either tell what's truly on my mind regarding some matter or I don't tell it at all.
If I can't say what I mean, then I can never mean what I say. And then the entire dialogue becomes meaningless.
As a rule, never travel to a job interview on your own expenses, unless it's just a few USD/EUR for a local bus/train ticket or something similar. That would demonstrate to them that you don't value your time and money and that they can potentially abuse you further down the road. You will also encourage them to continue with that strategy in the future.
As for the red flags, google the names of the people who you will be working with and also of those who manage the organization. Go through their public activities and get an idea of their personalities. Sometimes you will find out that your potential colleagues are real jerks, and it can happen that the organization (especially if it's a startup) is run by a 24-year-old arrogant kid. In both cases I would skip that "opportunity" and would look for something else.
That second advice is gold. I've been doing it since day one and it definitely helped to paint a picture the type of culture a company has. Luckily, most of the people that have been interviewing me seem like genuinely nice folks.
Not the first time that I see academia teaching their students the wrong way of doing things. I had to work with some graduates with certain strange ideas about approaching the work and tried to teach them an alternative, at least open their eyes and consider the possibility that what they are doing might not be the right way. Tough job. Sometimes it feels easier to hire somebody with no programming skills and teach them from scratch than to change the mental pathways of stubborn graduates.
On that note, my experience has been that academic environment often does more damage than good to its students. It sometimes takes a monumental effort to make the graduates unlearn all the wrong things they learned in the academic environment before they can proceed further in their professional development without all that bad baggage that keeps pulling them in the wrong direction.
It's like children mistreated by their parents in their youth who will carry their psychological trauma from the childhood through the years and that would detrimentally affect their lives until they get some professional help from a skilled counselor.
I'd been programming for nearly 20 years when I made it to University, everything about the way they taught programming was pretty much hilariously wrong* (not the language choices or any of that, that's just noise in the grand scheme of things) but the approaches and the way they explained how to decompose a problem, write it, test it etc.
Not helped by lecturers who'd either always been lecturers or lecturers who'd left industry 15 years earlier (this was 2005 so they'd have left in 1990).
It was still a valuable experience since a lot of the other stuff was valid but I took all the programming stuff with a massive pinch of salt.
* Except Charlie, Charlie was an ex-telecomms C/Unix God he didn't like the way a lot of the programming stuff was taught but he did point us all to where we should be looking.
>> Not helped by lecturers who'd either always been lecturers or lecturers who'd left industry 15 years earlier (this was 2005 so they'd have left in 1990).
Exactly what I'm talking about. I've met graduates with very weird ideas about how to approach problem solving, and they would eventually confirm it had been taught to them at the university as the one true method of doing things. I remember that I myself had to "accept" some of the ideas being taught to us and recite them at the examination, pretending I agreed with them. Was the only way to get through some courses, and I recall many other students suffering from wrongful instruction. Some tried to argue with the academic staff and get those wrong things fixed, many of them would pay the price later by failing the examination. Apparently, those lecturers and professors didn't like their competence questioned.
About 15 years ago we had a new lecturer come to teach our group. I remember my thoughts after a couple of his lectures: this guy must have been thrown out of every shop that's out there. Was completely useless, even if senior by age (around 50 I believe). Tried to teach us about computers by reading aloud a book similar to the "Computers for dummies" series. Was not a good reader either. From the rumor that was circulating around he had a buddy in the hierarchy and used that to land a job at our university. Was truly pathetic.
As the common saying goes: Those who can do, do. Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, manage.
> It's like children mistreated by their parents in their youth who will carry their psychological trauma from the childhood through the years and that would detrimentally affect their lives until they get some professional help from a skilled counselor.
Please, your analogy just doesn't make any sense. Just because someone is stubborn and doesn't want to relearn something doesn't make it professor fault. Nor does it mean he/she suffered child mistreatment.
Parents beating their children leads to mental illnesses if the right genes are present. You are reducing child abuse to banality.
I currently work in academia so I'm obviously biased, but I'll argue that wrong things learned in college is quite a bit different paradigm than child abuse. Hard to unlearn child abuse, it seems.
Consider that as a lecturer every your word will carry a meaning. Even an innocuous remark may turn out to be something that will stick with one of your pupils for years and will lead them to make a sequence of wrong decisions that will eventually ruin their life.
Having access to younger minds and influencing their personal and professional development is not a joke. It's that kind of a job which if not done properly may potentially produce the next tyrant.
Being taught the wrong thing for a couple months by a shitty professor when youre a young adult isnt comparable to your parents hitting you as a child. The professor is not your entire world, your brain is much more developed, and youre unlikely to consider all your waking actions in terms of your professional skills.
Your comment saddens me and only confirms what I've been suspecting: a lot of people including those working in academia don't take education seriously and do not comprehend the far-reaching repercussions of their actions.
Generally speaking, a person only begins to reach psychological maturity at around 30 years of age. Until that time all incoming ideas generally fall on a fertile ground, as the person is not yet capable of telling bad apples from the good ones apart and can't always discard the wrong ideas. Sometimes it's exactly those ideas that take and derail somebody's life, unnoticeably, one step at a time.
I mean Im just having trouble understanding a substantial link between wrong information learned in an acedemic envirnment (diverse peer group, diverse set of professors, bulk of learning being self directed, having already developed a worldview thats slightly more robust than "mommy knows everything") and trauma. Yes, it has negative economic reprecussions. Sure, in very rare and extreme cases, doing some wrong due to something you learned in college miight lose you a job (I say rare because it should be obvious that most work processes are wrong or out of date and there aint alot of firing done because of it.) But to equate that one source of incorrect knowledge (as opposed to everything else you hear or see which is true somehow?) with your whole fucking world regularly hitting you, telling you youre worthless, being absent in your life, etc, doesnt really gel with my understanding of childhood trauma.
As a solid example of this... A fellow student was working on a problem that had a key-value mapping, but instead of storing them in a hash table/map/whatever the language wants to call it, he was storing them as pairs in a list and complaining about the performance on a large data set.
I asked him why he wasn't just storing it in a hash table instead. His answer: "Because I sometimes need to iterate over it and get both the key and the value"
My brain had to sit and parse what he'd said for a few moments, before I realized what the heck he was talking about. In all of the data structure courses, he'd been taught "A hash table hashes the key, and stores the value in the corresponding slot". In that mental model, there's no way to retrieve the key, only to retrieve the value given the key.
I explained to him that real-world implementations do do that, but also store the key along-side the value, so that you can still iterate across it. You could see the look of amazement wash over him, and then he frustratingly declared "Why the hell didn't they mention that?!"
What does that have to do with academia? That's just having an overly simplified mental model of something, which all humans do when learning any new thing, whether through a lecture, a random stack overflow question, the compiler manual, or through pure experimentation.
Academia carries with it a larger amount of authority than a random programming forum. Students have the expectation that the academic staff is generally knowledgeable and wise and what they say in all probability is very important, has to be remembered and followed (even if you don't quite understand why yet but perhaps you will in the future).
I agree. And yet, this seems to be the rare type. Often it's just a few people in the staff that are trying to do things the right way, for the others it's simply a nice job (with few responsibilities and seemingly no obligations). That's what I've been trying to get across. Teaching is a sensitive job with far-reaching consequences, yet more often than not people don't take it seriously and don't care what their students will carry with them into the life when they leave the walls of that academic institution.
They probably did mention that, perhaps he wasn't paying attention? Besides, unless you have perfect hashing, you're bound to have a hash collision at some point. How did he expect a hashmap to work in that case, without also keeping track of the key? If he never asked that question he doesn't understand hashing either.
I was in the same lecture, it definitely wasn't mentioned. I'd been hacking on Perl for years before starting school, so I already "knew it in my heart" how it worked in practice. Just one of those little but critical details where something important got missed.
And yes, when you've got a complete understanding, it seems quite obvious that the key has to be stored with it. That's why I got it. He'd just learned it though, and there were still those gaps in his knowledge that he would have carried for a long time until someone else helped point out the missing piece (or he had decided to sit through and make sure he understood everything)
So this is a personal attack then. Frankly, I expected better from the HN community. It looked more evolved when I was just an occasional visitor prior to joining. Rather disappointing.
>> So this is a personal attack then. Frankly, I expected better from the HN community.
It seemed like a bit of a snipe maybe (or a joke where they forgot the smiley). I went back and re-read your original "GP" comment and it seemed like you had encountered a number of students who had trouble as a result of such teaching. The snipe implied your experience was just your own personal problem, which seems false in looking at it again. Relax, it's just people you don't know responding to someone they don't know.
>On that note, my experience has been that academic environment often does more damage than good to its students.
How bad are we talking? My small bubble doesn't constitute mountains of data, but I have friends across the US from top-tier and not-so-top-tier schools that aren't damaged goods from academia.
Better yet, are you sure it's academia that screwed up or stubborn individuals who worship the ground their professors walk on? Those are the types of people that see academia as the end all, be all of what's right.
Actually, the web is more open than it was a decade ago. Back then I had to use IE-only tricks to make my pages look okay in IE. Today I don't care anymore. It's been several years since I last used an IE trick, and I have no plans of using tricks specific to other browsers in the future. If something doesn't work out of the box in all browsers, I consider this functionality not implemented and do not use it. That's something you could do too and educate others to approach it the same way.
You are both absolutely correct. It's better than it was AND we have to be very careful to keep it that way.
I use the exact same strategy you do: if the feature doesn't work in all browsers, it's not ready yet and I don't use it. It can be painful, but I will NEVER AGAIN use browser-specific tricks or hacks because I remember a time when we pretty-much had to.
If I may contribute to the article somehow, I'd tell people this: stop using JavaScript for basic markup. I sigh every time I visit a site whose entire navigation structure is spit out in front of me as a disorganized wall of text, and only when I enable JavaScript that mess gets cleaned up and arranged back into something organized. It's just no way to design pages. CSS is for visual appearance and styling. JavaScript is for interactivity. If you can't give your site a proper look without resorting to JavaScript then you have no business designing web pages yet and need to go learn the basics first.
Most of enterprise development is on rich web apps that couldn't work at all with javascript. Saying that people who write javascript and don't use semantic html need to "learn the basics" is like complaining about people typing emails instead of hand-writing letters in cursive.
People like yourself who want HTML fallbacks for everything have a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of technology. At some point, it doesn't make sense for the biggest roads to have support for both cars and horse-drawn wagons.
Any road will support a horse-drawn carriage. Unless you take extraordinary measures and start building vehicles using wheels with special profiles for which custom-designed roads will be necessary where those wheels will be held on track like with trains.
Naturally horses will stumble on those, and people like you will say the others don't understand the nature of transportation and should get rid of their old horses and conventional cars.
But perhaps the problem is just with you and you newly designed fancy wheels.
Except you're a a tiny and economically irrelevant minority who own cars but are intentionally disabling them due to some sort of mental block about it not being the year 1994 anymore.
If you want to be Cyber-Amish, that's absolutely your right, but much like the actual Amish, you will need to create your own society that serves your needs instead of trying to drag us back into the past with you.The Amish are not demanding that the International Space Station build a wooden module to accommodate them, nor do they buy plane tickets with the expectation that the pilot will still get them there but won't turn on the engine due to the religious beliefs of a tiny minority. Everyone has the right to unreasonable beliefs, but when they try to be smug and condescending about their own backwardness... yeah. You are the human equivalent of IE6.
> Most of enterprise development is on rich web apps that couldn't work at all with javascript.
Doesn't enterprise development stay within enterprises? As for the public facing web, even if the functionality requires Javascript, having it look like crap without Javascript does seem kind of lazy. I'm even for being lazy, I don't test everything and on every device, but when something is pointed out to me, at least I realize it's suboptimal, and don't rationalize regression into progress.
Most of the enterprise internet ends up becoming the public facing internet. Enterprise isn't a moral agent for accessibility, it's saying "why should we spend hundreds or thousands of developer hours accommodating less than 1% of the market?"
With rare exceptions, (such as supporting IE6 clones in China) there's no business case for doing so, so it isn't done.
W3 is great, but the very page that information on violates their standards--it's div soup and won't work screenreaders, there are images without descriptions, and even the sidebar is using javascript to open the menu and change classes when it could use pure HTML.
So yes, those best practices are obsolete when the people recommending them can't even be bothered to follow them on their own page.
Thats because CSS is not powerful enough, not helped that you can't use something like flexbox if you need to support old browsers but even the latest version of $YOUR_BROWSER does not have a way to say that I want a list element to layout its elements in one vertical column that is also centered vertically on the screen if it has fewer elements than there is space for on a screen, but having it split into additional columns and align all elements in all columns to the top if there are more elements than space on the screen. It is a fairly simple layout and I ended up having to do it in JS because flexbox only has a few standard modes for what to do when the content overflows and those don't effect the margins of the element.
CSS needs to be replaced with a more capable scripting language, or at least one based on constraints but until that happens we are stuck with javascript.
This kind of objection is totally missing the point.
And this isn't an argument that CSS doesn't have painful limits (it does) or even about what constitutes "enough" (within its limits, CSS offers enough possibilities that your own ideas of what the app "should" be like may be as much as a limit as the problems of CSS are).
The power of CSS is largely orthogonal to the underlying issue.
Ideally, your web site/app is still usable even with every last stylesheet completely ignored. It should work with Lynx, or with entirely non-visual user agents (screenreaders, search bots, Siri etc).
CSS should enhance via layout and other presentation rules where that's possible.
JS should provide more convenient application behavior where that's possible.
Instead, we've slipped into a space where the browser (and, frequently enough, one browser) is simply considered The VM That Lived™, just another runtime target. And that's a sign of its growing power, and that power isn't a bad thing because there are in fact some applications that don't fit the hypermedia model well and the browser's ability to play the just another runtime role opens a space for them. But the rush to get into that space is considerably overdone and apparently executed without a lot of awareness of what's been lost in moving that way.
My mom just bought a new phone and asks why it's still too slow and clunky like her old one. I found out she likes to click Buzzfeed-esque links from Facebook and most of those sites slow the device to a crawl because of the massive amounts of Javascript running.
People care about the downstream effects, they don't know the how or why, but they care.
In 2014 I bought a ~50$ Android while traveling Latin America. I didn't expect much more of the browsing experience than reading mostly text based articles. But I didn't even get that. Literally half the linked articles I clicked on hacker news led to sites which where close to or impossible to navigate because of JS shenanigans and the assumption of an least a 4G internet connection.
It is especially annoying if one claims to target a world audience, but expects them to have a +500$ phones and vast data subscriptions.
The market fixes this, though. If your websites don't load on a low-end Android over 3G, you won't attract the sort of audience that uses that setup. Conversely, if you know what a large portion of your audience uses specs like that, you'll go through great lengths to ensure your sites are performant and usable.
It seems that most 'western' sites have decided focus on people with desktops or +500$ phones and vast data subscriptions.
So it's really a Western web and not an open web. You've proven exactly what everyone on here is saying: there's so much focus on marketing and audiences that many users get completely shafted. That's sad to see given that the web is often heralded as something that gives under privileged people access, and the ability to share, to powerful and useful information.
In some places, $500 is about a half-year salary from which one has to live and feed their family. Nobody in their right mind would waste it on an electronic toy.
Indeed. I think it’s important for engineers working on any kind of end-user facing software to remember that a lot of people aren’t using cutting edge or even recent hardware. There’s lots of Core 2 Duo laptops and 3+ year old smartphones floating around in use out there and their users need to be able to use the websites and apps we make as much as the guy who buys new everything every year.
I think this is particularly easy to forget for those of us living in tech hubs where everyone is using almost-new Macbook Pros and iPhone 6Ss.
Sure, sometimes you have to make tradeoffs for what you have time to invest in.
But this isn't really about supporting the world's Lynx users specifically. There's a reason I put a whole class of non-mainstream UAs in there (and in particular Siri, given how likely it is that entirely non-visual UAs are to become more mainstream at some point, perhaps soon, on top of the awareness that intermediary UAs like GoogleBot are of course ubiquitous and clearly important). And which UAs you try to support has a chicken and egg effect on which UAs get employed as intermediaries in accessing your site/app... and therefore which UAs you think you see using it. Usage follows accessibility perhaps even more surely than accomodation follows demand.
If that weren't enough, the decision to do the things that would mean that your site is usable in Lynx is not just a feature -- it's also a technical decision. And like other technical decisions (database, language, library, application architecture, idioms and patterns you use, and data serialization/interchange format... which is actually part of what this decision actually is), it matters to how well your product performs and how tractable it is to develop and maintain, as well as how widely it can be consumed.
If you're having to make cold hard decisions about ROI for features, chances are decent that you're better off for thinking about whether it works in Lynx and why, even if not one single user visits with that specific UA.
Fair enough in a way, but on the other hand.. will that be like JPEG2000, which browsers might support when websites use it, which might be when browsers support it?
Or put differently, how would someone who can't use or even see your thing become your user?
When I was a beginner I also tried to design all kinds of fancy, flexible and auto-adjusting stuff. With years I came to the understanding that most of it is just unnecessary and wouldn't diminish the user experience in any way if you didn't do it the fancy way and instead went with a simpler route.
CSS like any technology has its limits. In reality it is often good because it forces you to rethink what you're doing and reconsider whether you really need it. If we had a technology with unlimited capabilities, a lot of developers would be lost there forever and wouldn't be able to accomplish the larger goal completely lost in pursuing all the secondary details they could possibly imagine.
Most of the places I see javascript being used for layout are not doing complex things that can only be done in javascript. At the very least, there should be a non-javascript fallback so the content is visible and somewhat layed out.
I didn't realize Chrome was becoming the default testing environment. I find it weird, given its terrible font rendering. I tried using Chrome but just couldn't. Smaller size fonts render weak, pale, bleak, like drawn with a dull pencil. I found it rather difficult to read large bodies of text in Chrome which was giving me quite a bit of eye strain. Not sure why anyone would want to test their pages in that in my opinion broken rendering engine.
I'm aware there is a setting which has to do with subpixel rendering or whatever this is called, I tried switching it on and off for no perceivable visual change. So I gave up on Chrome.
IE also has had broken font rendering since they moved to subpixel rendering several years ago, but at least it draws fonts in a strong and dark fashion making them more readable than in Chrome.
Personally, I design for Firefox which I consider the gold standard of web development. Then, at some intervals I check if things are okay in IE and Chrome and usually they are fine. Chrome was useful once in helping me spot some sort of a race condition, its developer tools also conveniently allow you to quickly bypass caching for testing purposes, but other than that I found it useless and unusable.
I mainly use Chrome, with some testing in Firefox. It used to be the other way around, but Firefox's single threaded nature just makes it very painful when you have multiple windows with multiple tabs open. Having it use only 12% of the available CPU in the system when I am doing lots of work is not acceptable especially when I need the browser to be responsive.
Yes I know about e10s and servo, but they aren't in the regular Firefox right now, and especially weren't several years ago when I was forced to change from Firefox to Chrome. I'd love to go back ...
You're probably seeing this bug https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=146407... and it is indeed a sad story, especially because Chrome 21 worked just fine. Then they rewrote some gamma correction code in the Skia that shipped with Chrome 22.
Thanks for the link. Based on some of the screenshots posted over there it indeed looks like what I've been observing on my machine (version 47-something).
Not a problem really. Never used Chrome before. Only installed it out of curiosity and also for testing purposes. Within the first day of using it on my development machine it became clear I wouldn't be using this piece of software in the future either.
>I didn't realize Chrome was becoming the default testing environment. I find it weird, given its terrible font rendering. I tried using Chrome but just couldn't. Smaller size fonts render weak, pale, bleak, like drawn with a dull pencil.
I find the opposite: never could stand Firefox's font rendering -- and I've used the thing for years back in early 00s.
I think it is in certain circles. For Google, obviously, in particular. Many of their new sites launch completely incompatible with Firefox and Edge. Some of the frameworks they push, like Polymer and Angular, have been repeat offenders in the past, which leads web apps built with them to also be broken.
To be clear, it still specifies "Edge" in it's UA string and can be specifically detected. And just about every browser now mentions Mozilla, Chrome, and Webkit in their UAs.
So we all realize technical interviews serve no practical purpose and should be quietly abandoned, but instead of looking into the future and discovering better ways of identifying talent, people keep inventing stuff that makes the torturing mechanism even more sophisticated so that the suffering can be prolonged.
I'd like to see the people behind this project apply their technical skills to something more useful to the industry and the society in general.
>> to get to pipeline parity, we actually have to increase the number of women studying computer science by an entire order of magnitude
Any woman who's gone through that process will likely want to get another career, that where people are treated with more respect. And I suppose many men are having the exact same thoughts.
The more you mock your talent pool, the more actively that talent is running in the opposite direction, just to get out of this mess.
So we all realize technical interviews serve no practical purpose and should be quietly abandoned
We don't really know that at all. Technical interviews are an invaluable tool in finding people who can write software and be collaborative co-workers.
A lot of software developers on the receiving end don't like them. Part of that is because a good technical interview pushes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to show that you can think through problems. Not all developers appreciate being taken out of their comfort zone.
The other part of the problem is that some technical interviews are conducted clumsily. "Code FizzBuzz, go!" As with the rest of the interview, skill of the interviewer matters.
What is the point of pushing people out of their comfort zone? Practical software engineering doesn't happen when you're uncomfortable. Discovering quality solutions requires concentration and immersion into problems.
YMMV, but I've always worked in service-oriented development organizations for startups or companies that behaved like startups on the development side. Pressure comes with the territory and I'd rather know how potential colleagues behave with a small amount of interview pressure before being stuck with a veritable basket case in a real-world high-pressure situation.
I had a guy freak out walking through a simple algorithm in java at the white board in an interview. Maybe he was the best developer ever if he were put in a quiet dark room and never made eye contact with anyone. Given that we had other candidates who could actually interact calmly and intelligently in an interview/collaborative situation, we weren't going to go with the guy that freaked out.
Why do people in tech think "proving you can do your job" is unique to tech? Tons of industrues has practical interviews. Do you really think a roofer shows up and says "I know what I am doing, just take me on my word" and gets a job?
throwaway_xx9 I don't know why your post is dead, but your example is obviously silly. That is not applying for a job, that is contracting to an individual. You don't face a technical interview contracting to an individual in programming either. But if you apply for a job as a roofer with a construction company, you absolutely have a practical interview.
Because hiring is akin to dating and therefore it suffers from the same problems:
1) It's mostly about subjective impressions and often weird ideas of what a suitable date/candidate must be. There are no official rule books or guidelines about how to proceed. It's not about hard skills and efficiency, it very much revolves around soft skills, presentation abilities and invisible chemistry.
2) More often than not both parties in dating/hiring aren't serious about conducting a transaction and getting to a serious business. It's about meeting new people, hanging out, checking the pulse of the job market but no more. Misrepresenting oneself, one's abilities/features and intentions is the norm with both dates/candidates(companies), which leads to a lot of frustration and bad feelings, keeping the success rate of activities in the both fields rather low.
Different industries, similar problems. And for the both of them no technological/software solution in sight.
P.S. See how "candi-date" is linguistically just a particular case or subset of "date". Just another validation of the point.
It's not that much of a joke, more of a curiosity, if you choose to look at both words from a certain angle. I realize that their etymology might be different, but in the end of the day their spelling has become close and the concepts they denote have also developed certain commonalities.
I'm living polyamor for about 5 years now. This has forced me to really dive into this whole "how do relationships really work" thing. More fluctuation, more partners etc. I learned so much.
Suddendly, after a few years, I also found that "work" is like having "relationship".
Sad thing is, I found most parallels with monogamous relationships and not so much with polyamory.
Anyway, the biggest thing I learned was, that employers are like potential partners. They have some wishes about the job/relationship and these are (globally seen) completely arbitary.
Some partners pick by attractiveness, some by child-wish, some by long-term support. Some even just by sexual preferences. But most of them by stuff they heard somewhere. They don't even know what they really want and end up in years of relationships with people they don't really like.
Same goes with employers. They want you because you can solve some dumb puzzles or because you're cheap, or whatnot.
Point is, if you're not in a hurry to get a job and are not bound to a place (or can work remote) you will eventually meet someone who thinks it's okay to give your money for your work, haha.
Very true. I hold the same liberal view as to what people truly are.
An interesting idea just struck me. If a seasoned software developer quits his full-time job to work on a startup of his dream, while taking a part time job at a bar to be able to pay his bills, who is he then? Is he no longer a professional software engineer? Is he now a bar tender? An entrepreneur? What is he truly then during this period?
By the same token, if say an economist has been getting frustrated at his job and starts learning web programming, building simple personal sites for himself and friends, is it insufficient to call him a programmer, even if we would all agree he is only a junior one?
Where do we draw a line?
If someone is serious about a new vocation and invests a lot of time and energy into mastering it, then by all rights he's already in part what he aspires to become.
I think you've summed the nature of HN pretty well. I wish I knew that before I joined (recently), but unfortunately I had to learn it the hard way.
>> The set of opinions that will not get you downvoted into oblivion / pushed out of the community is so narrow...
That is exactly the conclusion which I arrived at after about three weeks of active participation. At that point I lost any interest in continuing trying to become a part of the community.
In my opinion, the HN community is not very healthy and has become incestuous in its nature. People basically choose to exchange with the like-minded only, share the same opinions, upvote the things that match their view of the world and downvote deviant opinions.
This all is aggravated by the fact that the HN user base is mostly North American and visitors from other world regions are somewhat of a minority in here (my observation). That's why a lot of ideas and opinions that I see around here are just "alien" to me, although I've never had a problem finding a common language with Europeans, for instance.
In its current form, I can often look at any new question that comes in here, and if I have seen its equivalent on HN before, I already know what will be the most upvoted comment and what kinds of downvoted comments I will find at the bottom of the page. The mechanics of HN is such that it works as a giant "echo chamber" and users are "taught" which kind of opinions they're supposed to like, support and help to spread and what will happen to them if they defy the state (downvoting sanctions).
I'm sure many like this way of things, but the way I view it you can't have healthy offsprings (which are ideas and opinions) if your community embraces incestuous relationships as its core defining value. Without diversity, there is no evolution.
On a related note, I used to be one of the early users of StackOverflow/StackExchange sites. In its first couple of years they had a liberal content policy and this invited a healthy, diverse and vibrant community that produced many profound and wise ideas. When they went down the deletionism route and started discouraging deviant opinions, the most interesting people started to quit and in about a year or two the sites degraded to such an extent that made it pointless to return in the search of quality content.
HN is not there yet, as I still see some high quality answers now and then. Usually they're neither upvoted not downvoted, they just stick somewhere in the middle-bottom area and I have to dig for them. Sadly this requires much time which I'd rather spend on more important things.
I also very much dislike that anti Russia/China/Turkey/Islam rhetoric that comes every now and then. It's not that bad as on Reddit where you can just say some not very intelligent bad thing about those countries and get yourself a few hundred upvotes and a dozen gifted "reddit golds". That's just the new bottom that Reddit recently hit. I sadly see HN moving in the same direction.
>> assuming you like a decent proportion of highly upvoted submissions and comments, you'll almost assuredly like all of them.
>> There are plenty of people who don't. They are just not on HN (anymore).
Apparently I'm with that group as I no longer have any wish to hang around HN. At that point I'd be ashamed to admit I've tried to be a HN member, as it would be an embarrassment to admit to having an active SO/SE account these days. To me, that was a mistake in judgement. I'd like to delete my account and make the divorce official, but apparently HN does not allow that and does not buy into the "Right to be forgotten" idea. I have no doubt that most of the HN users share that same official opinion being the "example citizens" that they are.