DoubleGlazing

I've been experience this more and more lately. Some employers make their own tests, some rip off those from big players like Facebook/IBM/Google and some are just blatant attempts to get some work done for free.

There is a lot of talk on HN about the best way to do IT recruitment, but whatever method is close it really shouldn't take more than a few hours of face-to-face contact and some legitimate tests. With HR doing due diligence by checking references etc after an offer is made.

The first time I encountered this I was told that I would have to do a 8-12 hour coding challenger over the weekend. They wanted me to come up with a way of proving someone has watched a training video without skipping or faking an API call - something they admitted in their interview that their system was lacking i.e. free work for them. I told the recruiter that I would not be doing any such thing. I have young children and my weekend time is precious. If you can't validate my skills from my a few interviews, my detailed CV, plus HR doing due-diligence, then it makes me wonder about the organisational culture of your company.

My wife is a private practice speech therapist. She goes to great lengths to separate her personal social media from work social media. She has separate work and personal accounts for Facebook, Google, WhatsApp etc. Still she gets friend suggestions for her clients on her personal accounts. And it's not just once or twice, usually her suggested friends list is almost the exact same as her current client list.

Its creepy, and slightly disturbing to realise just how much effort they are putting in to mapping out your life and acquaintances even when you try to prevent it.

The author nails my thoughts on Slack (and its OS clone Mattermost). It is less a communications tool, more of a productivity tracker.

I've worked in places where it was unofficially compulsory to have Slack always open. If you didn't respond to a message is a timely fashion then you'd be asked why. It became the case that Activity on Slack = Productivity.

This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that I think Slack is a pretty poor way to do workplace communication. It's the textual equivalent of shouting out a question to the whole office. Everything seems to mush together in to one big conversation about everything that is hard to track and search.

I grew up with a Rhotacism, I pronounced my Rs like Ws.

For me the biggest issue was bullying. My first name is Robert, so I became known as Wobert. What also didn't help was that I was born in England and moved to Northern Ireland in the mid-80s. My non-rhotic English accent made me a target for bullying like you wouldn't believe.

I spent my teenage years working on fixing it by myself. Just sitting practicing my speech. Eventually I lost my English accent and sort-of fixed my rhotacism. I say sort-of my Rs sound like Rs, but they ae very flat and I can't roll them at all.

Occasionally I'll mispronounce an R as a W, but usually that only happens when I'm tired or very distracted.

I agree. I'm an adult, if you ask me to not use my phone I will comply. If other adults can't do the same, then simply ask them to leave.

Yondr feels patronising, almost like we are being treated like children.

That being said, I generally don't go to gigs anymore because its getting more like flying. Expensive tickets with hidden fees, being forced to queue neatly like school children, searches, and then the overpriced food and drink. This is just one more thing to add to the list.

There is no one magic bullet to deal with such a problem. Instead there are several things you can do in parallel to help. Whichever of these works for you depends on the industry and age of the company you are in.

If the company is fairly new, then bad code is kind of expected. There is a rush to get a product out the door, so shortcuts are taken. Given time for things to settle v2 will be better.

If its an established company or the code is legacy you can fix little bits as you go along. If documentation is lacking, write some - maybe even set up a wiki and bug tracking system if need be. If comments are lacking add some.

If you can demonstrate the bad code is costing the company more in man hours (and therefore money), then maybe propose a a series of refactoring projects in order to help improve the code and increase efficiency. I worked at a company that would have refactoring parties once a month with pizza and chipper. On the last Friday afternoon of the month we would review 10 random code files changed in the last month and tidy messy code, add comments, docs, unit test etc.

Suggest the company adopt some coding standards if they already haven't. Ditto code reviews and unit testing.

Of course not all companies are receptive to such changes. Some take the view that if the product works, why wasted time on frivolous extra like docs and code reviews. Sometimes when the code has been primarily the work of one person they might not take kindly to criticism - even if valid. In those cases all you can do is just do is to write your own code as best you can and not worry about what goes on around you. Bad code is a lot more common than you expect and life is easier when you accept that.

I would favour indiviualised pricing and I don't think it would be too hard to achieve without getting too invasive. Basically, your driving record should speak for itself over time.

The problem would be that approach is that insurance companies want to be able to keep an element of fuzziness in their pricing. Predictable pricing is the last thing they want. Why do they only care about beating your current quote, but have no interest in what you were paying for insurance in years gone by? If you have a 10+ year history of perfect driving in dull boring cars, how can insurance companies significantly increase your premium without being able to justify why they suddenly think you are now riskier?

By putting people in buckets they can adjust prices without singling anyone out, and as a by product keep the consume a bit confused abut what is going on.

I see it happening all the time. Drivers with no claims, no points, no convictions and who drive safe, dull dull cars suddenly having the premiums increased. Its not because of them or what they did, its because the insurance company decided to put them in a bucket that justified a price hike.

The same company that wanted to force people to give them access to their social media to help determine their premiums.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/02/admiral-t...

Thankfully, facebook put a stop to it. But if they hadn't I'm certain it would have become a common practice.

Oh yes, this rings true with me.

I once worked at a company where the powers that be decided to go all Scrum. They hired a PM to convert all project, inc ongoing ones, to Scrum. It turned an enjoyable job in to a miserable one.

There is a compromise that would work for YouTube and its "less desirable" creators.

YouTube can stop monetising those channels with advertising it has sold. That keeps YouTubes normal advertisers happy.

The owners of those channels could instead sources their own advertisers and use the YouTube ad management systems to inject the adverts in to their videos - with YouTube taking a cut of the revenue.

This way everyone is happy, the channel owners get revenue, the advertisers know exactly where their adverts are appearing and YouTube gets a cut too.

The prosecuting Garda Sargeant could not provide a calibration certificate for the speed detector, but the judge still didn't care. It was just a production line

I live in Ireland and recently my wife got a speeding ticket having supposedly been caught by a mobile speed detector van. She was pretty certain that she hadn't been speeding as she knows the particular stretch of road is notorious for hidden speed traps.

The court summons photo had the GPS co-ordinates of the vans location embedded in the corner. So I types them in to Google Maps and it supposedly showed that the van was 50 meters away from the road in a farmers field. I tried again with other mapping sources including Ordnance Survey Ireland - all produced the same result.

So our case was simple, if the GPS in the van was so inaccurate then that called in to question the accuracy of the rest of the attached equipment - including the speed detection gear.

So I built up a portfolio of documents from both government, commercial and academic sources stating that the GPS equipment in the van should have been more accurate - to at least 5m and ideally more than that. I was also able to call upon my experience having worked on various GIS systems and on the development of lone worker emergency beacons in the past.

When I spoke for my wife in court the prosecutor asked me if I was was a certified GPS engineer. I said that I didn't believe such a title existed and that I was offering evidence based on my professional experience. But that was enough to sway the judge who said that unless I had someone from "GPS" [sic] with me than my evidence counted for nothing.

Fair play to the guy in the article for putting up a fight.

I think the EFF are clutching at straws a bit. Blocking someone from contracting you on social media isn't really a freedom of speech issue - so long as an alternatives means exists. Though restricting them from reading your content if those posts are in an official capacity is very questionable. More so considering how much official communication is moving online.

For example Twitter now seems to have become a default channel of sorts for announcing power outages and for urgent press releases from government agencies. Is it right that someone misses out on updates because they were blocked?

Maybe what is needed is for twitter/facebook etc to have a special kind of "read only" blocking for government and public official accounts?

Interactive digital TV.

back when digital TV launched in the UK during late 1998, the major platofrm (Sky, ONdigital, Telewest and ntl) were all hyping up their interactive services.

Sky's service was called Open.... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open....) and you could order pizza, email, go shopping, dating, betting etc. Sky were so convinced it was going to be a money spinner they gave away all the boxes for free.

The underlying technology was also used to add interactively to TV shows. For example you could choose the camera angle in some football games and the BBC made a documentary about dinosaurs that worked like a multimedia CD-ROM.

Most of these services lasted less than five years, the services were sluggish, the proprietary tech didn't help and in any case the web did it better.

I didn't think the shopping/commercial side would succeed, but I was convinced there would be a huge market for interactive TV. Nope, there wasn't.

I had to cold shower for a January fortnight when we had issues with our gas boiler.

One thing I noticed was that it got me alert much sooner in the morning. Typically I would get up at 7:00am, shower, eat and then head off to work to start at 9:00am, but my brain wouldn't really be in gear till about 9:30am.

With cold showering the brain was in gear far sooner. I felt more willing to get out and get stuff done. Maybe that earlier alertness helps cancel out a desire to pull a sickie?

That being said, the extra alertness wasn't worth the sheer torture of a cold shower.

It can scale when the company starts to let go of the notion that only senior devs and managers can do interviews.

I was in a growing company that allowed anyone who had been there six months or more to conduct interviews. It massively increased the speed of recruitment and prevented managers and senior devs being tied up with recruitment stuff.

In Ireland a recruiter can impose a one year probationary period, but in practice most opt for six months with a two week notice period.

As for Helpful, I wouldn't work for a company that uses those sorts of recruitment practices. What they are doing feels very sketchy to me.

It massively balances the recruitment process in their favour. They are putting all the risk on to the candidates as they have much more to lose if they fail probation. I know from experience short duration jobs on CVs/Resumes raises alarm bells with recruiters. Plus, it could affect benefit entitlements too if they fail probation as that could be seen as a firing.

What if they have one position and decided to hire all five candidates on probation and make them compete against each other? That would be so stressful.

They could also misuse this process to quickly boost staff numbers for a short period instead of hiring contract staff.

It feels like the author is trying to use spin to make what is an unfair recruitment process sound like a good thing.

As someone who has had to conduct technical interviews I have found the best way to evaluate technical skills is to just chat. No tests, no whiteboard challenges, no list of requirements to tick off.

Just let the candidate talk about their career and what they have done. Ask their opinion of certain things. Ask about how they tackled certain projects and give them the time to answer and go off on tangents. Treat it like you are a few friends having an in-depth discussion over drinks.

Technical interviews focus too much on headline points. They want the candidate to touch on or mention certain things that everyone should know about the subject. I'm not interested in that, I'm more interested about them mentioning less obvious things such as known quirks, bugs or tricks about the subject matter. Stuff that only a regular user would learn about.

The problem with this approach is that for many companies HR insists on structured interviews. I once had do some interviews for a couple of C# roles. The interview format was literally the same as the game show Talk About. The interviewee was given time to talk about a subject and we had to tick off a list whether they mentioned certain keywords and phrases in the allotted time. The same format applied to the HR interview. Whoever scored highest got the job, a very silly way to do recruitment.

I get this totally. I don't like calling, not because of any anxiety, but because I don't know what awaits me. When I call a company I feel like although I am initiating the contact, they will take control of the call.

And as for receiving I remember someone mentioning that a ringing phone is essentially someone saying "Speak to me now, speak to me now, speak to me now". It is an inherently rude form of communication because it demands instant attention with no regard to what you may be doing.

I just don't answer calls these days unless they are from family. I was getting a lot of sales calls from my electricity provider who also wanted to sell me gas. We don't have gas at our home, but they wouldn't log that fact. So I blocked their number.

Last week I got an email from them saying that they had been trying to call me for some time to let me know about an amazing offer, and that they think I may have accidentally blocked their number.

Of course, they couldn't just put the details of the offer in the email. I had to call them.

I know a few people who bought Smart TVs from various manufacturers a few years ago and the Smart functions have one by one been withdrawn as the manufacturers no longer supports them. E.G. YouTube, Netflix and other media player apps. Eventually you are left with a TV with a pretty basic, slow and probably insecure web browser. We got nearly 30 years out of Teletext, nowadays expecting a Smart TV app to be supported for five years is being optimistic.

And will the manufactures open up their TV OSes to allow 3rd parties to offer support. Of course not, but they will helpfully let you know how great their new TVs are.

I've been tempted to bring claims. The problem is it's your word against theirs

Plus, once your name gets out as a potential trouble maker then it's even harder to get a job.

I think the use of the term "over qualified" is often used to mask the real reasons for rejection.

I was rejected for a job when I was aged 39 for supposedly being over qualified. When I applied for the job in question I was upfront about my experience, qualifications and desired salary which was market rate for my experience. I didn't sell myself short. The product I would be working on was unified message distribution system not too dissimilar to Twilio.

After a code test, a whiteboard exam and two rounds of interviews I was told "Yeah, we really like you and you undoubtedly have the skills. But we were really looking for someone a little less qualified". I pushed a bit to find out what that meant and the HR person claimed it was my salary expectations, but I had my doubts.

During both interviews I was asked if I had children. I said I had two. I was then asked their ages and where they went to school. This led on to questions about how they got to school and what happens if one or both of them are sick etc. The questioning style was casual, but they were definitely probing me. In Ireland this line of questioning is illegal, but it happens a lot. At the time I answered the questions with a feeling of reluctance. I do believe that having young children lost me the job. I was asked what would happen if my children were sick off school, I answered that either me or my wife would have to stay home. I was asked why my wife wouldn't take on that responsibility exclusively. I responded because we share our responsibilities to our family. I could see the interviewers brow furrow when I said that.

I have a strong suspicion that the reason why age affects IT recruitment so much is not because of "over qualification". It's because the older you are the more likely you are to have family that you want to spend time with. Or if you don't have children you might have other interests that take priority over work. I've had managers who have straight up admitted that the older you are the less likely you are to put up with overtime and more likely to challenge over bearing bosses.

Put simply younger people have fewer adult life distractions, will work longer hours and put up with more crap.

Very meta.

Look, I just don't want to be treading on eggshells when using social media.

The thing I have noticed about my friends on facebook is how their opinions have got stronger or more extreme.

My ultra catholic relatives have become more extreme in their views. The opinions of my left and right leaning friends have become more extreme. The outgoing party animal types seem to want to post more and more about how much they party. The people who sometimes feel down post more and more about how awful it is and how much help they need.

I know it is all down to how facebook has us all figured out and shows us stuff that only reinforces previously held beliefs and opinions.

The problem is that is seems to have also created a strange desire among many reasonable people to unwittingly troll others. For example people who used to rarely talk about politics will post provocative things that seem designed to elicit negative responses. I have Catholic in-law relatives that have I met only only once at my wedding posting on my timeline demanding I promise to not vote to repeal the 8th in the forthcoming Irish abortion referendum. My polite refusal to give an answer only angers them, yet somehow I am at fault.

Those who only see stuff about what they already believed will only believe in it stronger. And what do you do when you really believe in something? You try to spread your belief, which social media makes it easy to do. But of course in doing so you will potentially anger or annoy other who might have listened to your message if it wasn't so in-your-face.

The problem is that this spills over in to the real world. Religious people may avoid interacting with someone because they said something trivial on facebook they didn't like. Come election time people will be less willing to switch political parties because someone who supports a different party said something rude.

Even without the political meddling, targeted advertising and profiling, social media lacks the context and nuance of the real world. Something that in itself only serves to negatively reinforce opinions.

Its easier to fudge the numbers when you are dealing with something that isn't physically tangible.

In my experience some or all of the following will happen on big software projects...

The sales team will bid unrealistically to get the contract, either by underestimating development time or by bidding too low. They will also ignore the advice of experienced devs an PMs when planning their bid.

On winning the bid there will be a ruthless focus on doing things as cheaply as possible. A PM with no experience of this type of project will be put in charge. The rest of the team will largely be chosen based on availability rather than skills or experience. The positions of software architect or technical lead will be seen as optional.

Whatever PM methodology is chosen (probably Scrum), no one will really understand the finer details of how it works. Work will be divvied up poorly, e.g. tasks that need two people working on it together will be given to one person and vice versa.

There will be no thought given to training. Devs will arrive in to find out they are working on some hyper complex financial system, but they will never be given training on what that system is for or how it works.

Inevitably the specs as defined in the bid document will be discovered to be incomplete or faulty. No one will want to actually change the specs, but somehow the devs will be expected to just deal with it.

If the contract is time and materials based as opposed to fixed price then the contractor will massively over-resource the project meaning you end up with a too many cooks situation.

The client will get wind that there are problems and raise concerns. The PMs and hgh-ups in the contracting firm will claim everything is Okay and demand devs work overtime to get things right. They may also utilize smoke and mirrors to fool the client.

As stress builds among the PMs they will start to micro-manage, this will alienate senior devs who know they don't need to take that and they may leave for pastures new. Junior devs will carry on despite still not having the required skills or experience. New devs will be hired, only to leave soon after when they realise that the place is in a mess.

Eventually the project will be delivered late and full of bugs, yet somehow the contractor firm will claim everything went great and organise a piss-up to celebrate.

I've seen this sort of behaviour modification with online competitions, especially on facebook. E.g. The "like, comment and share" type competitions. I would argue many of these competitions are dubious as there is no oversight and I've read enough about fake ones to take the view that I would rather not go near any of them. But so many of my acquaintances slavishly follow the instructions in the hope of winning a gift card or some other piece of tat.

Actually facebook and its more savvy advertisers and posters seem to really good at this sort of thing. The amount of people, whom I would consider educated, who share freebooted and farm-produced content surprises me.

Similarly there is a UK Fishing forum that requires you to accept and open promotional emails from the store that owns the forum in order to be a member. I'll happily throw in a few quid a year to support a useful forum, but going through the hoops of having to open marketing emails to reactivate my membership is just too much.

That's Okay because it is your genuine intention to fulfill your obligations. If you don't have enough widgets you can just order more, all orders will be fulfilled eventually.

But flights are different. There is a hard limit on availability, plus most bookings are time sensitive. There are only a a certain number of seats available on each flight. You might be fine with being moved on to a later flight, but then again you might not. If you book and pay for a specific flight you should have every right to assume that the seat is yours.

If I had exactly 100 widgets to sell, I can't take payment for 105 in the hope that at least 5 people won't show up to collect their purchases. That would be straight up fraud as I am knowingly taking payment for goods or services I know I can't provide to some of my customers. If it happened as a one-off accident then of course I can give refunds and offer something in compensation, but if I make a habit of it then the authorities would almost certainly start feeling my collar.

Even allowing for the complex financials and T&Cs of the airline industry I really struggle to see how this is acceptable. If it in any other industry people would be arrested.

Instead of legislation that simply says that products must be repairable I would prefer to see some form of scaling "repairability tax" on purchases of consumer products.

It would be based on the following...

* The manufacturer making full schematics and service manuals available on the day a product is launched.

* Making all parts and specialised servicing tools available to anyone who wants to buy them.

* Not using unusual fixtures, fastenings or glues.

* Allowing people to downgrade any software if the feel a newer version slows down their otherwise perfectly serviceable device.

The more repairable a product is the less this tax would be, potentially dropping to zero. Crucially, the actual price of the products would play no part in the calculation. Cheap disposable Android tablets would attract the same rate that a high end smartphone would if they were equally as repairable.

I'd also levy a reduced, or even zero, rate of VAT on repair services to encourage repair over replacement.

I don't see a problem with letting people buy non-repairable devices, so long as they pay a levy for the waste it will produce.

I used to work as a developer in a logistics firm.

For a short while it was going through some financial difficulties. It was no secret among the staff, many of whom were jumping ship. Those that weren't (myself included) were making plans to do the same.

Despite this the MD insisted on keeping the recruitment process going and carrying through with the graduate recruitment scheme. His reasoning was that he couldn't claim that his company was growing if it wasn't hiring. It was deception plain and simple, but for this particular MD morals were merely something he had once heard about.

Come the hour they did have to withdraw firm offers for both experienced hires and five graduates. It was particularly nasty for the graduates as they went through a ridiculously extensive recruitment process - including spending a weekend away at a woodland activity centre where they were forced to do team building exercises and climb a mountain in the dark.

Long story short, they kept the recruitment process going to make it look like the company was doing better than it was.

It was brutal, but the MD didn't care. He was probably more worried about where his next Merc was coming from.