berdon

I don’t think so. That’s why you’ll have candidates passing the questions but not the interview. We’re not looking got rote answers, we’re looking for comprehension, problem solving, and discussion.

False negatives waste far less time (dollars) than false positives. It’s unfair but worth it to not force a team to have to work with an unqualified candidate for a year or maybe more.

Hmm, perhaps. But interviewing has become big businesses for prep and passing. There are companies that will ghost interview for a candidate, even through actual onsite interviews. It’s a real problem.

Tangentially, candidates should read “Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job” for prep. It was recommended to me a long time ago and it was enough.

That most people have a hard time viewing the world from different lenses.

The article presents a picture of a guy “studying up” for a career and his adventures in interviewing. As someone who’s interviewed hundreds of candidates I noticed red flags right away. For instance, if someone asks you to design a micro service - you don’t say “I can’t”. No FAANGco interviewer wants you to fail. In fact, they want to help you. The best worst answer would have been “I’m not really familiar with micro services but I’ll give it a shot. Could you explain a bit more about them?” This shows the candidate doesn’t falter at a challenge, is willing to dive deep, and is committed to the task.

The lens shift comes into play when 50% of the candidates can’t complete fizz buzz, another 25% simply lied in there resume about any relating experience, and the other 24% don’t have any real understanding about algorithms.

There are software developers and then there are great software developers. It’s generally initiative and algorithms that separate the two.

Ex-Amazon employee from a while back (to which I only speak on behalf of my own feelings and imply no other intent...). IIRC this was driven from a analytics standpoint, wasn't actually really used outside of bug deep dives, and was horrible to implement.

That's not to say it hasn't started to be abused but at the time it was completely from a "customer/UX first" stance.

You're using an Apple product - Apple is known for their tailored and single-path UX that they don't simply expect their users to love, they also don't care when they don't.

I'm not saying your complaints aren't valid or warranted - they're just not relevant to Apple unless their designers agree with you.

Sounds an awful lot like the giggles wore in Stephenson’s Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell. People in the later years wore google that could do that to indicate status, interest, or just anonymize themselves.

They seem benign to me. Monopoly is defined as "the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.".

You yourself say they own "80% of box office hits" but there's still ample competition. They're just not making better content.

+1. Oculus Quest setup takes roughly 15-30s in any room - regardless of having played there before or not.

Did you try fixing the focus?

I have the Quest and an empty basement set up for it. The games are all still too indie feeling but with the focus dialed in the experience is truly remarkable. Oculus is pushing in the right places too - standalone device with PC support, hands free capability (for older/elderly), and hopefully guardian-less mode (outside play).

I've had a number of friends and family members of different ages try it. The older ones struggled with the controls but once they got into Beat Saber they enjoyed it. With better content and games I see it finally taking off. I dream of the day we have parking lots/warehouses where people play MMOs on VR and stay fit.

"well trodden problem" does not make it any easier.

Scaling is hard. For everyone. Testing that scaling works is harder.

There was an opt-out and multiple pages worth of confusing "opt-in" options selected by default. I painstakingly went through and skipped/declined all of them. But I'm still receiving my "moving gifts".

I wonder how that plays with their canabilizing of Hulu subscribers. Does it count those subscribers in the 60 million?

Oh, it doesn't only cost you $1. It also costs you at minimum a years worth of free spam mail from various "You're moving! Here's a bunch of discount coupons for things you don't need" that USPS sells your new address to.

5) Accept responsibility and lock your device

This seems an awful lot like the eye/head tracking in the Amazon Fire phone and that went over super well.

This type of input makes sense in certain applications/platforms but a phone isn't one of them - at least not with current phone usage patterns.

The joke is on "them" in our current day and age. The overwhelming majority that care about children are far more interested in gun safety than backdoors for the NRA backing party.

> to be fair that wasn't the exact request. It was more along the lines of "using whatever (approved) language you'd like, implement x with that assumption that your base language can only loop and increment." x in this case was something like do division. Which I know is possible, but also something I would never need to do and as such the solution wasn't immediately available to my brain.

This sounds like a great interview question. It calls on the candidate to show they understand what a turning complete system is and then put that knowledge into practice to create the fundamental building blocks that are normally given to you.

You used hyperbole to make it out to be something it definitely wasn't.

> Which I know is possible, but also something I would never need to do and as such the solution wasn't immediately available to my brain.

In fact, you do need to do it, you needed to do it for an interview. The fact that you see it that way might underscore a personality trait that the interviewers might not have liked. Thus giving credence to the interview process immediately.

> A non-technical interview is far better and easier to evaluate a persons competency, problem solving, communication, and "personable people".

No it's not. It's far better at providing a "comfortable" place for someone to chat without actually proving anything. A good technical interview is problem solving _with_ time to chat and prove understanding of concepts.

> Point being an entry level person with competency and problem solving skills can be taught technical skills very quickly and/or learn as they go.

This is clearly false otherwise we wouldn't be starved for competent technical candidates. There're thousands of companies looking for qualified candidates and they can't find them.

> their resume should tell you they have the technical skills assuming their references check out. So I really think we should stop wasting time and talent on "technical interviews"

Resumes are worthless - doubly so now that politicians have made lying OK. The majority of people I've interviewed lied on their resumes, either as small white lies, or as large ones. And personal references are also garbage - there was a recent radio host that called random numbers and asked for a "reference" for a candidate they were interviewing. People went out of their way to talk up the fictional candidate.

> Leading back to the argument though, what makes someone good at being a software developer is not technical skills. It is general competency, critical thinking, and being a good communicator.

Yes to critical thinking and communication. You just aren't going to get a good read on a candidate without asking thought-invoking questions. You've either never had a good interview or you don't interview well and disparage the process to feel better.

It probably does. But the query builder doesn’t require architectural constraints, the ORM does.

No, both can dig but one gives you excruciating finesse (assembly/shovel). I’ve updated the ordering.

Your assembly/c analogy is more akin to comparing a shovel to a mini excavator. 95% of the time you’re better off using a query builder library for the convenience rather than locking your architecture into using an ORM that will, inevitably, cause long term headaches.

For the other 5% of the time, you’re just building a todo app, use whatever fancy general purpose libraries are hot at the moment.

I was a bit exaggerative - the entire "development" arm of the bank had read only access to all customer financial data. One of the devs was a customer and pulled up all of his information.

That's a myopic and emotionally charged way of looking at it.

When I interview people, I ask straight forward, probing questions looking for how the candidate approaches the problem and the path they take to the solution. I don't ask trick questions, I don't mislead the candidate, and I help them as much as I can to get to a solution on their own. However, I look for and probe for information throughout the process. It's relatively easy to discern whether someone knows what they're talking about and can apply it versus someone who crammed for the interview. Moreover, if someone did cram for the interview and was able to apply the knowledge that quickly - great, I want to work with people like that.

Had someone asked me to implement a JSON parser in brainfuck - I would have got up and left. More generally - if someone asks me to use a _specific_ language in an interview; it's not someplace aware enough to know that 99% of the time the language is unimportant and not somewhere I want to work.

With all that being said - technical interviews are not "the worst thing ever". They serve a vitally important task of ensuring I work with competent and personable people.

There's a balance point. When I did interviewing at FANG.Co I would occasionally just get people that were severely under qualified for the role. It might be a large swatch filter but the degree requirement does reduce the number of those applicants and time lost by devs doing technical interviews.

What laws?

I've had the opportunity to chat with many ex-bank developers and based on those discussions I'm as positive as I can be, without my own personal experience, that this is assuredly utter garbage.

The last two I've spoken with had read-only access to _everything_. The entire company did.

Doesn't a grocery store give their product manufacturers those things as well? Distribution, traffic, logistics, marketing.

Is this only being down voted because of tone?

I am curious if there actually are any laws relevant to this situation. As far as I can tell, this is exactly like Walmart or BigBoxCo pushing their own brands. It's not illegal and, generally, it's not even a bad thing for the consumer (in the short term).

It really feels like most of the people taking issue with this are doing so because of their personal sentiments rather than legality.