I’ve been pointing to Google Maps, drive as specific but not the complete set of fantastic innovation we saw around ~2007 for how great developers used to be.
I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.
You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.
Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.
So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.
Was leetcode-style interviewing not a thing before that? Cracking the coding interview was published in 2008 so I would assume it was already quite established by then.
I would argue that back then leetcode-style interviews probably filtered for the real talent Google was looking for (and that made possible many things). Then companies started cargo-culting it and people started gaming the system.
I wasn’t a dev at the time but in my research of how we got here, Google started with more abstract mental discovery questions.
Then people got frustrated on both ends because some people got through it by just BSing, and people who lack any creative or big idea processing coming from the Microsoft Outlook team I imagine couldn’t comprehend a connection between abstract question discussion vs solving a math test. So they whined and threw a temper tantrum until the process was based around dev work (leetcode) but the Google abstract discussion was still the key part of the interview; you didn’t need to literally solve the leetcode question perfectly.
Then you needed to solve the leetcode question perfectly because people who BSed through that process by knowing just enough to mislead interviewers snuck in and turned out to be toxic employees. So you have to get the question 100% correct, character for character, or it’s wrong and you’re a toxic bad dev. But what if you memorize that question—- they’re all posted online now (thus defeating the purpose of it being an abstract discussion centered around programming)…. Well using statistics we’ll just determine that getting past 5-10 of them in a row is acceptable odds. And just in case that’s not good enough, we’ll have multiple prison guards in every interview. Each round new guards. If any guard doesn’t pass you for any reason or for no reason then you’re out.
Then people started writing books about this, making videos about it, selling courses. While they work at FAANG. They’re the ones interviewing so they can get you through the interview if you buy their course. Of course they’re not going to want to get rid of the process they’ve spent years mastering and make more money on the side than their full time Google job. If they had to grind and get past the first guards who asked light silly questions, why can’t you get through hardcore legendary no respawn no tools timed trial elite 4 group panel lecture interviews. It’s literally identical to what they went through right?
Even still, it was relatively justifiable for Google who had a legitimate reason to use masters of programming who could live-invent answers to these without using a mental hashmap lookup of answers. They can solve problems fast and make things scalable for big internet work.
But now that every company is cloning that, they’re picking and choosing to “improve” off of Google’s hiring process. Why should we settle for Google’s engineers when our shoe company website can do better. Fixed the flaw in Google’s process where there’s a discussion about your thought process by just fully automating the process. Live monitor solve 10 leetcode problems on your own time and if it’s not an exact character match then it’s wrong and you’re blacklisted.
New hires getting in can’t even get their foot in the door to begin to have an opportunity to invent Google Maps. All time that would have gone to exploring ideas like that now has to go to memorizing leetcode and basic day to day survival with every layer of badly cloned bloat like Agile Scrum meetings where the project manager is screaming at devs when they point a story “wrong.” Despite every sprint for the past 3 years not being able to complete because everyody’s overloaded. Google does it so we just cloned what they’re doing and made it better and the lazy devs are sandbagging. Just imagine how bad it would be if we DIDN’T use leetcode. Thank god the CFO introduced leetcode and personally sits in every engineer interview to let us know when they’re fake bad devs.
My first job, in California, was just transitioning to leetcode-style interviews in 2007 following the industry trend. So it was probably spreading around that time.
"refuse emails" already exists, that's the "hard bounce" thing that the OP is talking about.
Phishing and malicious links exists on every kind of messaging - email, forums, whatsapp, telegram, SMS... you name it, it has spam/phishing. You'd think that at least "real name" or "pay a bit per message" might discourage this, but example of SMS (text) shows otherwise.
With any system the server operator will be able to delete messages, and/or gatekeep information - unless you have some sort of "big brother" setup where every message goes through government-operated monitoring server, and I cannot believe anyone intentionally choosing such a system.
I can refuse a very specific email configuration, but there are so many simple variations, it isn't all that effective. Tons of cold email providers have you first buy 100 domain names, warm up the IP's with bots, and then send the same emails from a variety of email addresses/domains/servers. I think the question is does this low barrier to entry really outweigh the added challenge of allowing low volume actors host their own systems?
(steps on soapbox) And as long as we are talking about SPAM, why in God's name if I block a text message and then the phone number from ringing is there an additional block required to prevent voicemail? Oh, I see, it is so Verizon and others can charge me to block voicemails. Even on Google FI, if I block a number on Messages it doesn't carry over to calls which doesn't carry over to voicemail. Enshitification. (steps down)
It’s bots pushing another false narrative. You’ll notice this in anything around politics or intelligence the past 10+ years, with big booms around 2016 and 2024 “for some reason”
No. There are significant numbers of real people who genuinely support this type of thing. Dismissing it as "bots" or a "false narrative" leads to complacency that allows this stuff to pass unchallenged.
The problem is: The people who typically support this type of thing are either technically illiterate and they support it, because it sounds good. Or they are promoting these laws because they actually want more surveillance and control. It's not about protecting children.
I still haven't read any truly compelling argument, why this type of surveillance is actually effective and proportionate.
There’s a lot of stupid shit garbage on the internet that needs more blocking and nobody’s doing anything about it. Aside from bad JavaScript and css garbage and other things that are obvious and still only slightly blocked by ubo, there’s entire swaths of categories that are going completely untouched.
Every Reddit mod post is cancer for example. So is every pinned post and automod. 99% of email. Any story about farting or buttholes or diarrhea or any other child joke about how you were unable to be in control of your butthole. I don’t want to hear it and every single day there it is. Any pro-terrorism post from jihadist groups like maga, posts from other nations pretending to be Americans, posts asking people to explain a loaded joke they understand but are trying to get more views on or spread the topic about. Any ai video any video about crypto any fake news.
There’s a lot of room for improvement. Even just detecting things like if a news article doesn’t actually contain information. It seems like we have a ton of areas we could be filtering out cancer a lot better.
Best I can come up with: people flag shit and it goes to a server, and like PiHole, anyone subscribed to that server will have the crap excised.
I'm liking Apple's "Hide Distracting Items…" feature in Safari. Now if only everyone's audits could be shared, a consensus arrived at, then others could be spared having to spend time hiding-distracting-items themselves.
Remember when people wrote things online because they had something useful to say and share and that was enough?
Now it’s slop factory of people having a writing quota to get enough ads because they don’t want to work. Particularly true for tech writers who praise things like leetcode then can’t get a real job.
Now it’s supercharged by ai and they’re upset how accessible their slop job is. I just find that funny I suppose.
1. All tech discussion is irrelevant unless it’s leetcode. Don’t fill my brain with any other useless, unproductive information.
2. How much time (points) will this presentation take to get to prod. Then how many points (time) will it take to deploy to prod. Do we need a spike for this presentation. I’m going to put it in the backlog and close it out since we’ll never get to it.
IBM isn’t really a tech company anymore. More of a legal trolling company that cosplays as tech.
They seem to primarily benefit from kickbacks in the form of both leasing and technical contracts for things like opening offices in a location for tax benefits or to promote local economy.
Then they see how far they can cut back their end of the contract after the first few months (e.g. Maybe we agreed to have 500 employees in an office, but since nobody is allowed in, we think we can get away with 100 employees.) Then this turns into trolling about how the contract never defines what in office means so can we offshore… Too much undefined confusion, so I guess we get to break the contract but keep what the mayor paid us… Then they just shut down the office and move on to the next location.
It seems like the local government must be in on these schemes for leasing. Otherwise this wouldn’t be going on for decades as it has been.
The other part of business, technical contracts, is similar except instead of leasing it’s providing some sort of infrastructure coverage for something big. It starts off with good faith fulfilling the contract. Then a few months later it’s like well we have a US military contract that demands US employees but US employees are too expensive. What if we offshore but all the traffic is technically going through a single US employee’s computer which is what the contract technically demands.
Then it turns into well we have offshore people working on this anyway, why not just give them direct access and we’ll have a US person overseeing them. Lay everyone else off.
Then they see how long they can get away with this until someone gets mad. Then they take one step back to see how close to the technical contract they can get while threatening to abandon the whole thing at the same time.
Along with this sort of atmosphere and attitude for the law, it seems we see them constantly doing everything possible to constantly fire old people or anyone else that has legally protected status. So you’ll get statistical analytics on ways to fire protected people based around the constant performance reviews with statistics being used to see how close groups of protected people can be removed without statistically breaking the law. Whatever that algorithm is.
That plays into just straight up cutting people, but it also goes into a lot of other subsystems of skirting the law, like if old people can’t relocate as easily then hopping offices and forcing people to relocate 5000 miles is a way they can be eliminated. Part of this might be moving people onto new teams and then saying that team has to be in office for some made up reason, and then firing them for not relocating or using some made up metric like badging timestamps to get them, or some other technicality like leaving for lunch 5 minutes early despite being a salaried employee which is reported as hourly because of tax trolling.
I don’t know how IBM still exists because from my perspective it’s pretty clear they’re breaking or at best on razor thin gray line on ice on just about every possible law you could break.
This is yet another thing I’ve been saying is technically feasible in a large variety of games immediately since it started happening to game sizes around 2015.
I’ve had nothing except people screaming at me that I’m wrong and that this is just how modern games have to be. There’s always some gaslight argument about how I’m wrong and actually the devs are in fact geniuses because of some genius trick about a variety of systems significantly bloating the size.
Rather than try to look at the problem, I get continuously attacked with retconned reasons trying to justify every decision going into this bloat. This is exactly the same dev retcon trend train we saw with Cloud (“No, wrong, it’s not computers. It’s servers. Totally different. And it’s not even servers, it’s cloud.”) and MicroServices (“There’s literally no reason to ever not use microservices unless you’re a legacy dev. Especially on The Cloud, which is different and not comparable in any way to a a self hosted server.”)
I’m 3/3 so far. Waiting for you guys to still figure out leetcode and how this actually captures the inverse of the thing you’re trying to account for. But I already know you’re going to retcon that argument too and say ackshully leetcode DOES work to hire developers because we want to hire people who are wealthy enough to have time to memorize questions and answers. We always knew developers would have AI (lol) and this paper that retroactively applies a matching hypothesis that trends with leetcode is actually what smart developers like me knew all along.”
This is a direct result of using leetcode in interviews instead of any other, more legitimate tests like winning a tekken 1v1. Have you ever seen a good developer who’s not good at real video games?
If companies had hired real developers instead of cosplayers who are stunlocked with imposter syndrome as the only candidate pool with time to memorize a rainbow table of arbitrary game trivia questions and answers, things would actually work.
I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.
You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.
Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.
So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.
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