brooklyndavs

This is very true. While clunky to use most support sites for enterprise software includes these types of fields as mandatory to complete a support ticket.

As someone who has opened issues myself on projects in gitHub its easy to be unaware or even forget all the information a maintainer would need to reproduce the issue. As someone who uses an open source stack every day anything to make the whole issue flow better for maintainers and users I'm for 110%

Also remember Piketty, while concerned about income inequality, was most concerned about wealth/capital inequality. Thus his worldwide tax on wealth proposal. I would argue that Piketty did say that wealth inequality, on the extreme, is a net bad for society. He brought up many examples of how destabilizing extreme levels of wealth inequality, like what England and France saw at the start of the 1900s and what the United States is seeing now, can be for a society.

With that said, as it becomes easier to start and run a company with less and less human capital more of the value of that company is going to go to the capitalists who invested in said company. This I believe might make that self-perpetuating wealth cycle easier to get into. So, I can see a situation where the aggregate result of this negative pattern across all startups in the economy would outweigh any positive results an individual startup might have on society.

Note, the above is without any policy solutions and is why I strongly believe we need things like a basic income and wealth tax to help stabilize society worldwide as technology continues to make us humans more productive.

I would argue in some cases they don't. Take for example the artist who works for years, decades even, on their art without expectation of large monetary gain.

In a broad sense some people don't respond at all to incentives (assuming monetary) and others do respond but its not a recipe for personal happiness.

Personally, that's why I'm such a fan of some sort of basic income. While it reduces inequality it keeps the monetary incentive response as a choice, which ultimately equals more personal freedom.

I think asking this question without addressing the overall cost/benefit to society is not very productive. The overall goal, I think, is to allow startups to grow and thrive while at the same time being a net plus for society. I would argue that "ask for permission later" mentality of some US based startups is a net minus to society overall. While I don't have any love for the taxi industry the regulations around cars for hire were put in place for consumer protection. These are some of the same regulations Uber is currently trying to get around (surge pricing in particular). Similarly, while I don't have any love for the hotel industry the regulations around short term housing exist to allow ample housing supply for long term residents of that city.

While inconvenient for the entrepreneur/investor/1%class most regulations exist for the common good of society. If a startup can prove that the regulation is outdated and doesn't make sense in the context of a new technology they should be able to convince the regulators that the regulation needs to be adjusted.

> The Tea Party is really just farther-right conservative.

Republicans with funny hats :)

> There is no one-system-fits-all and it can't even be said that one system is necessarily a better choice in any given situation. Status-quo is usually a good choice though, if it is working

I mostly agree with this except currently the Status-qou isn't working for most people and the environment. The pendulum swung too far towards the "government bad, markets good" end of the spectrum. To tackle the big problems of the day (Climate change, income inequality, chronic unemployment/underemployment due to technology changes and automation, etc) we will need much more government regulation. That includes local and national regulation with unprecedented global cooperation. The free market on its own has proven itself incapable of solving the problems society faces and in fact is causing some of the above problems.

Damn, someone beat to this joke!

Soylent will never be the future. Just like slim fast or ensure were not the future in the 80s and 90s. This is because food, and to some extent drink, are central to cultures around the world. Many countries have food traditions dating back 100s and 1000s of years. Heck, ever since we discovered fire humans have been taking a break from the day, gathering around something, and enjoying the fruits of a hunt or harvest with their community. This is why outside of tech and maybe health/weight loss circles meal replacement of any type will have an incredibly hard time catching on. In my opinion that's a great thing.

Sigh. If you are drinking a Soylent or some other drink because you literally don't have the time to get up from your desk for 30-60 minutes for a meal I question what type of human existence you are living. There are so many things central to living life that revolve around eating (social benefits, maybe fresh air and sunshine, tasting and smelling the food itself) that one misses out on by just drinking a shake and not seeing daylight for days on end. It seems like another way to make people more productive. Who needs a lunch break? Just drink a shake and keep coding! If you don't have any ownership in what you are making why one would give up one of the rights they have as a worker, a break in the day to get something to eat, is beyond me.

With that said I understand the value of a meal replacement if you are trying to loose weight. Soylent seems to be better vs the older meal replacement shakes out there, ie that slim fast junk.

Are the weather and short lived climate impacts of major eruptions limited to that hemisphere? I would think that an eruption in Chile wouldn't have an impact on northern hemisphere climate. While there was global cooling after Pinatubo I assume the cooling was mostly limited to the northern hemisphere?

Maybe next time have the candidate try to do a shopping cart calculation? You could explain that this is a problem our business faces a lot. Give him or her a laptop with tools and internet access. If they can't come up with anything then yeah, maybe not the right person. If they come up with something but it's not optimal it might be a judgement call at that point. Do have a good personality? Do they understand other development fundamentals? Are they smart overall and can they pick things up quickly? Some of this talent shortage buisness talks about I think is related to hiring and what buiness expects of the developers they hired. Most people are not going to be the perfect technical fit. A lot will have the capacity to grow and learn in the position.

Also, this is a SOLVED problem. A quick search on Google, or on gitHub, or in various programming books will result in code to solve Fibonacci in any language of your choice. I would wager to guess that most developers had a hard time solving problems in this sort of environment because its not the actual way most of us work. My ideal technical interview as a candidate would be for me to be presented with an intermediate level problem that your company is facing right now. Provide me with a laptop that includes all the tools I would have on the job. If the team is big on collaboration let the candidate know where you will be, either in person or via a chat, in case the candidate has any questions. And then leave them the hell alone. Ideally this should be around an hour so time is not wasted on both ends.

Interviewing candidates is hard. I know because I've done it before. It's much easier to have a boilerplate CS 201 problem that you give to every candidate vs tailoring the interview to each candidate each time. However, I've hired some of the smartest people I know based on this tailored, specific to the business, approach. Most of the candidates I helped hire were still at the company when I left.

If you do boilerplate CS questions you'll get either students right out of CS programs that have these concepts fresh in their minds or people that have been unemployed for a while who have brushed up on their algorithm skills via Cracking the Coding Interview. Maybe these are the types of people you want because they might be cheaper? Most of the software work I've done in the past 7 years has been taking existing frameworks, libraries, systems and adding in some custom logic. Maybe that custom logic becomes a new library on its own and maybe not. You know what's more important to me than the ability to solve Fibonacci? Do you write clean, documented code? What is your ideal software development methodology and can you ship code in that environment? Do you test? Are you a dick or not? What does your gitHub account look like?

Software development employment isn't college. The hiring process shouldn't be a "hazing" as others have stated. I recently had an interview where I as the candidate partially spaced out a problem that was similar to Fibonacci (duh on my part). However, at the end of it the interviewer I think recognized the situation and said "We are all a team here and we help each other out. I'm OK if you are a little weak on generic algorithms in this situation because you know things I'm weak on." That was a good experience and hopefully I'll get a chance to be on that team.

Overall, I'm guessing most companies out there aren't trying to solve "Google" like problems. We should stop interviewing like we are.

I think they had to make another account because the bot was having issues...

Wait, there are places in the world that get more than two weeks of vacation?! :)

Location: NYC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes, to LA

Technologies: Python, HTML5, CSS3, Java, VB.NET, SQL, JavaScript, Django, IdM Products (ForgeRock OpenAM, Quest One, CA Identity Manager, Sun Identity Manager), authentication technology (SAML, OAUTH), SSO

Resume: On request

gitHub: https://github.com/dsimandl

Email: mail[at]davidsimandl[dot]com

About: I'm a software engineer with 8 years of overall technology industry experience. Most of my experience comes from the enterprise space where I developed and configured Identity Management systems. 2 years ago I started using Python professionally. I'm looking for either a full-stack or back-end development position using Python or a related language. I might be open to Identity and Access work as well depending on the opportunity. Email me for more info.

Thanks!

And the who wants to be hired?

Is there a way to compensate someone monetarily for this week? Bring them on in some sort contractor capacity? Maybe more people would bite at an opportunity like this, especially if they are getting paid for their time. Personally, I know I would.

I'm talking about complex algorithms here. Not something simple like FizzBuzz. Besides, I hope FizzBuzz (or something similarly simple) could be done via an initial phone screen. If you need to see the code fire up some sort of collaboration tool. It seems like a waste of everyone's time if they come in for an in person and they fail at FizzBuzz.

SEEKING WORK - NYC and Remote

I'm a generalist software developer who has spent 9 years as a developer and consultant for enterprise identity systems. I'm diving head first into the freelance world and I'm currently accepting clients. Ideally I'd like to focus on Python and related technologies.

Tech: Python and Django, some front end (HTML/CSS/JS), a little bit of Flask, a sprinkle of Rails, and enterprise heavy tech such as Java and .NET.

Homepage and Resume: http://davidsimandl.com

Contact: mail@davidsimandl.com

gitHub: https://github.com/dsimandl

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsimandl

Most software that address management of identities in a enterprise is bad. The "solutions" sold by CA, Oracle, and Dell are particularly terrible.