areyouseriousxx

I'm sorry, but this sounds very strange from someone claiming to know about interviewing and hiring.

You need an engineering manager to filter out SAP programmers who want to be a senior full stack engineer? You need an engineering manager to figure out someone only has 1.5 years of experience?

How many people are you interviewing? How many positions are you filling? Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark.

I'm actually curious who hired you. Because this sounds like dismal operations management. Seriously, you seem to be a great example of how much a bad hire can cost a company.

But what metric are you determining that those 5 or 6 questions are correct?

For example, have you put together a pool of current workers that are successful at your type of work at different companies and seen how many can pass your interview test? Its pretty easy to find a recruiter that will reach out to their network and you pay 10 employed quality engineers $1,000 that do similar work to attempt the questions. If you find a significant amount of successful engineers cannot do it, then you may want to recalibrate.

I have helped several different companies fix their hiring process, purely by recalibrating their interview test questions to their specific needs. This sometimes actually means, more difficult or simply different types of questions. But very often people just do some Google searches for interviewing at FAANG and repeat those questions without tailoring them to their specific roles.

With that said, in the case of your company, it may very well be the case that the work you do requires particularly high IQ candidates, which is actually what most interview questions at the big tech companies test. In that case, you will always have a difficulty finding candidates as there are only a limited amount of high IQ people in the world. So changing your interview questions may not apply. But when that is the case, you can often save yourself quite a bit of time by asking potential hires to take an IQ online. This will cost your organization almost nothing and will likely screen out the vast majority of people that will not be able to pass those types of interview questions.

Most landlords simply purchase, or very often inherit, their property, not unlike feudal lords, and then charge rent to live there. We are drawing some very small lines to separate those two.

I should add that I consider it much different if someone builds a structure and then rents it out. I, and most, would not consider that rend seeking, as they created new value in the creation of the house. Simply purchasing land and then renting it out, creates no new value.

Normal investments, stocks, bonds, etc help to create value in that the things they support need capital to be built. Land itself, will exist with or without capital resources. So the things that make capital markets work, do not apply to land.

If you are having this much trouble hiring, are you 100% sure your interview process is correct?

What is the KPI for your interview process?

> The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a feudal lord who installs a chain across a river that flows through his land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee (or rent of the section of the river for a few minutes) to lower the chain. [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Either way, the effect on hiring is the same.

Sure it isn't free, but remember, this person had made it all the way to the end of the process. The determination was made that they represented such a large gain, for the low salary they were paying, that it was worth the risk of that small cost to get an employee at a 30% reduction in salary.

If you are going to save 30% of $140k, that means you will save $42k. It would take a lot of interviews to make up that gap.

> The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a feudal lord who installs a chain across a river that flows through his land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee (or rent of the section of the river for a few minutes) to lower the chain. [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

So in technical roles there are a lot of companies that are always hiring. Recruiters work for free until they find you someone and placing job listings online is so inexpensive it barely registers as a cost.

On top of that, most states are "at will" employment, so even if a company does not have any openings, if they find someone better, and cheaper, than another employee that is currently working at the company, they can hire them and then eventually let that other employee go.

For example, I'm not in the market for a new laptop, but if a brand new, top of the line laptop came up for sale at half price, I'd probably buy it.

Its so cheap to look for new talent due to automation, so most companies will shop around in case they get lucky and land a fantastic bargain. Many are not seriously looking to fill an immediate need.

With that said, there are still plenty of companies out there with an immediate need, so please do not get discouraged by that group of companies that are "always hiring".

Be a part of the solution and build something. Do not be a part of the problem and become a landlord.

The same is generally true about rebasing etc.

Due to the high visibility of commit messages, a lot of details certainly look pretty bike shed-ish.

What can be important is simply a general concept of meaningful messages when they make sense. For example, bug fixes that may not be obvious by looking at the code, should probably have a reasonably detailed description of the bug. Commits implementing a brand new feature and involving a ton of changes, probably don't need a whole lot more than what the feature is and what is the expected behavior. Possibly some info about potential future bugs that could happen. When updating the readme, "Updating documentation" is just fine plenty of times.

Otherwise, probably just make sure you include some important keywords to make it easier for people to git-grep and I think most projects will be just fine.

There ar certain personality types that really enjoy organization and rules. And the feeling of security that comes from having a well defined set of procedures everyone must follow. It really isn't about making software more maintainable based on any existing research we have about how maintainable software is. But if it benefits some of my coworkers mental health by following those rules, it really doesn't take me any additional effort to follow those rules so I have no problem doing it.

This advice can backfire if your natural state can get you in trouble and cause damage to your life. A perfect example of people not being themselves for their benefit is mental health services for people with minor issues. While a person's natural state may be to be very emotional, current society frowns upon most emotions beyond happiness, so it may be more beneficial for that person to take a drug to make them more in line with other's emotional level.

Behavioral issues in young males without a physical outlet for aggression?

I'm not sure what type of childhood you had, but the idea the soccer and high school football is going to give a person brain damage is goofy simply based on the current and available data.

If you simply look at that massive number of males that played high school football in, for example, the 1970s, we would have epidemic levels of serious brain issues in an enormous percentage of the the male population. We would be talking about 10s of millions of people with serious brain damage. For example, in 2016, over 1,000,000 young males played high school football. I think it is safe to say that men between 50 and 60 years old do not all have serious brain issues. Even though a very high percentage of those men played high school football.

With that said, we have much lower numbers of men that have played division 1 college football and an even smaller number that played more than a few years in the NFL. In the NFL, the average career length is only 3 years. The speed, size, and strength increases dramatically at that level and we are seeing data that could indicate real issues with brain injury.

It is strange to see people on a site like HN that do not even have a basic understanding of data driven concusions.

Which is also why this won't be successful. Female users overwhelmingly prefer the current state of dating apps for various reasons that I won't get into here.

Up until now, Facebook has consistantly provided excellent returns for investors, and this has also allowed other companies, like Snap, to have similar shareholder voting rights. Investors have yet to penalize a company at their IPO or overall stock price for this practice, but I wonder if we may see a change in that attitude if Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's other shareholders start to have significant public disagreements.

[1] https://thinkprogress.org/the-harsh-reality-of-being-an-auto...

Is there a citation I can refer to about this statement?

I would argue that laws and regulations are to prevent the very impactful minority of actors that would willfully harm others to benefit themselves.

So I would suggest that it is a "scummy thing to do", since if done by the majority of actors, it results in the collapse of a society.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12022726

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12022726

With regards to social platforms, I think we need to consider the health of people under 18, just like we do in the real world. If we indeed decide as a democracy, that certain types of social media content are significantly harmful to children, then I think it is our responsibility as adults to impose certain things upon ourselves that may be uncomfortable.

I have gone to the beach and realized that I had left my wallet(and ID) in the car and was unable to purchase alcohol or be let into a bar. We as a democracy have decided that is a reasonable price to pay for protecting children from alcohol abuse.

If age verification were required to access online content, plenty of online services would be available as a third party to verify your age without requiring you to show every website and application your government ID. For example Apple might verify your age and relay that to a website. Or possibly your credit card company or some other new company which provided that service. PayPal for age verification.

I should qualify that I'm not sure we should impose these age restrictions on social platforms, I'm am instead commenting on the feasiblility of such an action.

The way we enforce this with alcohol and tobacco is that law enforcement runs a test were they attempt to purchase alcohol or tobacco from a store with a minor. Law enforcement can run a similar process where they attempt to access pornography(or other age restricted content) and if the site or application fails to restrict usage, apply crimial charges.

There is certainly public debate as to if we should use age restrictions on certain features of Facebook, but to say that enforcement is impossible, seems to contradict the data we have with other age restrictions.

We have significant, long term, data that age restrictions reduced the use of alcohol and tobacco.

What has changed, in the modern era of internet age restrictions, is that the enforcement of age restrictions online has been reduced.

For example, online pornography has massive numbers of users under 18, but there has been little enforcement by law enforcement agencies.

The solution is quite simple. If a person under the age of 18 is in possession of an application that is prohibited for minors and the company that creates that application fails to verify their age, then the company should face criminal charges, just like we do with tobacco and alcohol.

To say that age restrictions do not work is to ignore almost a century of public policy.

Employment is maximized within the limitations of excessive inflation and vice versa. It is well established that a scarcity of workers has a direct, measurable effect on inflation. Therefore, one could conclude that it would be impossible for the Fedral Reserve to allow for a significant scarcity of workers, which is required for low wage workers to have meaningful leverage in negotiations, as it would voilate the mandate to maintain stable prices(inflation) as set forth in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 [2]

To elaborate on this a bit. This it not so much a direct action of the Federal Reserve to create a scarcity of workers, as much as it is a result of a scarcity of workers causing inflation. That inflation would force the Fed to raise interest rates. Those rate hikes would slow the economy and would result in there no longer being a scarcity of workers.

The balance of the Federal Reserves two manadates, maximum employment and stable prices, results in about 4.25% unemployment(a slight scarcity) and 2% inflation(stable enough prices).[3] That is our current comporomise between stable prices and maximum employment.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12848.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act

[3] https://www.chicagofed.org/research/dual-mandate/dual-mandat...

With this is mind, workers at the low end of the pay scale will, by result of US policy, never have significant negotiating power.

To me at least, its feels reasonable that if the government is intentionally preventing low wage workers from having a reasonable ability to negotiate, then the government should also provide minimal protections for those workers.

Would you instead prefer that the Federal Reserve be instructed to allow for a scacity of workers, causing significant inflation, in order to give all workers at all levels significant negotiating power?

The situation is intentional. It is either A or B. Either you have workers at the low end with little negotiating power, or you have high inflation.

In the example given, there is 1 minute between the "Hi" and the question. If 1 minute makes or breaks getting things done in time, you do not have a white collar job, you have a fast paced labor job similar to that of a worker on a factory room floor.

Food for thought.

It is an interesting line of thought to consider these compromises and when they may cross the line. Which means are justified by the ends? Which means are not?