bugsy

Congratulations. Looks like a useful product too.

> he doesn't seem to understand that something that comes naturally for some

I think that is an excuse. Speaking as the person you are claiming doesn't understand, I am highly introverted and awkward. I hate interacting with people in public, it is exhausting. I throw up after having to do public speaking. Yet, I do talk enthusiastically about my work and the field with other people, and I have learned over the years, as introverts do, to be sociable, just as I have learned over the years how to write compilers, design microchips, do web design, etc. (Little of which was covered in depth at all in the university classes I took at a pretty good engineering school.)

OK, let me ask some questions to calibrate your set up and see where you're coming from.

1. What is the width in inches of your display and how many pixels.

2. How many inches from your eyes to the screen in a normal working position?

3. Is your browser set to full screen width right now?

4. How many words per line are there across the screen in this page of hacker news on your set up?

Yes, exactly so. And the company's HR department will interpret the lack of response as: "The screening worked, yet another incompetent guy never replied since obviously the only reason someone wouldn't beg and do tricks is because they are dumb! Wow we are really saving a lot of time with this screening!" What they fail to realize is that the "beg and do tricks" method screens out those of us who are competent.

I forgot to mention, regarding taxes you may be able to take unpaid bills as deductions, they are business losses. So be sure to mention this to your accountant.

Aside from the article itself, I am confused by the title. Are they meaning to call themselves a "design legend"?

I have not heard of them. Also, their blog site layout is quite flawed. The text hits the left edge of the page at 1000px width. First, text should never hit the left side of the page. There should absolutely always be a margin of no less than 8px, but nearly always should be at least 0.25". Second, 1024px is more than half of a 1920px width screen and the site only looks proper at about 1280px width. This is too wide.

We (people using computers) have been forced into wide screen aspect ratio displays because of the need to show movies. Fine, that is the way it is. But this means that common use is to have two pages or tasks side by side. Full screen for tasks of reading produces lines that are much too wide to scan properly. Web pages should not require more than 960px for basic reading. The 960px includes the window scroll bars and frame if present, so the actual page text should be slightly smaller.

Do not design windows that expect 1024px or 1280px width, and do not design windows where the text crashes into the page edge when resized. Both these are very amateur hour mistakes. Therefore, it is inconceivable that the people at this firm are "design legends".

Thomas, yes, what you mention is a problem. I have had quite a few job interviews that were free consultations. It's real painful when you have to fly out on your own dime for this, something I no longer will do at all. If the company can't afford to cover interview costs, it's not profitable and should be avoided. The experience the other guy described of it working out in the end does happen sometimes but it is a minority of cases. A lot of companies will contact domain experts and consultants and want them to come out for a chat. Sometimes they want to talk on the phone for 6 hrs. It's a huge red flag when they pull out specific problems that they are having trouble with and which are for their company, and start asking for a detailed technical analysis of how to solve it. Especially if they take written notes or video tape the interview. Usually what happens is their guy later implements the solution you give them.

Call them every day and politely but firmly ask how it is going. In California, in addition to the check crime, theft of property or services above $950 is "Grand Theft".

Also post his name and a scan of the check and the contract on the internet. Be sure everything you state is factual. Also, since you have not been paid, you have a civil claim against him for copyright violation. File a take down notice with his site's host.

If you want your money back, you will have to go out to California, get a claim against him, then locate and seize his property for the debt if you can. That's going to cost you more than $10,000 to do of course, so whether you get justice is up to you. Just don't expect you'll ever see that $10,000, the value of that work is gone.

It's possible you have a signed contract stating that the venue for disputes is your state of New York. If so, that is easy to get a ruling against him since it's unlikely he'll show up for the hearing and you'll get a default judgement. Then you take that judgement to California and try to locate assets to seize. Since you didn't mention this, it is likely you have no such contract and you'll probably need to fight the whole thing out on his turf. In the future be sure to specify that all legal conflicts must happen in your area.

Also very important. In the future you do not do one day of work until you have 1/3 cash up front. The contract then specifies you get the second 1/3 at a key milestone, and then the final 1/3 when you actually transfer the code. If you had done this (which is very standard with projects for unknown clients) then you'd only be out $3333 right now.

You may have misunderstood my comment. It's not about having a brand. It's about having a professional reputation. Professionals who are of the "excellent" caliber that this service purports to represent usually develop a professional reputation naturally without even trying.

This happens even if one is fairly isolated doing "heads down coding" for much of the year. There are times when you meet with clients in meetings, or talk to customers, and talk to competitors at industry conferences, standards meetings and the like.

People who are competent recognize other people who are also competent just by talking to them. People either know what you are talking about and can respond intelligently, or they don't. When people don't know what you are talking about, you downgrade the conversation and talk about gardening, the weather, sports. This is just normal everyday human interaction. It's strange reading some of the replies here, it sounds like some of the people on this discussion board don't know about how that is done. They seem to not have face to face interactions with other people in their field.

In the cases where you connect with someone who is likewise competent, you both remember the encounter. You trade business cards. And if you have an opening at your job for the sort of work the person does, when the position is mentioned, you pull out his card and say "What about this guy? I met him at the XYZ conference. He invented the ABC protocol that is used in GHI devices, just like the thing we are looking to get into."

Connections made don't have to be with management. Typically it is another engineer, a peer relationship. If you know what you are doing, then you get recommended when there is an opening. That is how most jobs at good companies get filled. It's not "nepotism" as someone below claims (apparently he is lacking a dictionary.) I have never worked for a relative. If I do in the future, they will have tried to hired me not because I am related, but because I am the best. And should that happen I would turn them down since I wouldn't want to mix up family relationships with work, that can be a disaster. In any case, if you are good, even the most reclusive and introverted developer/designer/inventor is going to have some people he talks to. And if he is good some of those people are going to talk to others about his work. If that is not happening for someone, the likely reason is they are not all that great. There is no shame in being incompetent nowadays, but the article under discussion is about hiring "excellent" people, not incompetent ones, so it is relevant for the specific topic at hand.

A computer program automatically torturing applicants with endless puzzle tests is not a way to find talented qualified people with experience delivering working results that delight the user. It's a good way to find people that have a lot of free time to play games because they are unemployed.

In the years following my first job out of school (decades ago) I can't recall any work that I have gotten by going to these sites, or dealing with monkey tests. Work comes because of my reputation and experience which speaks for itself. At conferences people give me their card and tell me to call them if I am looking to 'move up', which generally means "pay more than the last guy". Any time one contract or job ends, I look through these cards. Most of the time I get several phone calls from people I have met of the sort: "Hey Bugsy, I heard rumors of ABC Corp having layoffs. You looking to get out? We have a position..."

It's bad enough when the interviewer wastes more than 10 minutes of time with puzzles. Having it be automated so it can waste hours and hours without any human feedback is extremely offensive. Whoever designed this system knows nothing about acquiring talent.

The note in the article that in the future the site is going to be augmented with "real world tests" that force the user to design entire sites or otherwise labor for free borders on criminal since they are forcing you to do real work and you're not getting paid for it, in violation of state and federal labor laws.

If you haven't already seen examples of someone's work before you contact them, maybe you shouldn't be hiring them. Or maybe you need recruiters who know what they are doing.

Again, I have no doubt that desperate people who are unemployed because of their incompetence or lack of skill will not have any problem devoting the hours needed to google answers, or to hire third parties to help them complete these tests. I am sure complementary businesses will now open up that sell test answers to desperate applicants for a fee.

Yeah, I think so. So now you have to wire your house with a wired network, and when you want to watch TV or use your computer you have to turn the lights in all the rooms on.

This is an awesome success story and shows once again that given a chance (ie not explicitly banned or thwarted) can-do inventive american individuals will come up with great solutions that work well and save money and lives.

I can't help but move past that and, knowing how corruption, waste and inefficiency work, predict that this device will be banned by higher ups for field use, requiring that devices that cost at least $2 million each and are built by military contractors be used instead. I also predict that the public will be happier and more comfortable paying $2 million through taxes than paying $500 through passing the hat at the county fair, which he points out raised $6.

I suppose at night someone could pick this up if there is a window in the room being used, but this is no different than normal wifi which can be picked up outside the house.

More of the problem is that it doesn't work room to room, only line of sight like with a remote control. Could be useful sending to wireless speakers from the media player, if the player is in a different location than the TV for some reason, but in the same room. I suppose it breaks down if you add a second device unless each one grabs its own specific light frequency and you have narrow optical filters able to distinguish between them.

I think you can go from one to the other. Start by leaving work at 5 after 8 hrs work each day, no matter what. Don't bring work home. Don't think about work while at home. Don't carry a notebook around to work outside the office.

There's nothing at all combative in what I said. If you see it as such, the problem is with the way you relate to people.

If someone asks me today specifically for the most recent three things I have invented, I am not going to lie in my answer. I am going to explain why I can not disclose any of those three and ask if they would rather hear about ones I can disclose. That you see this response, which is correct, true and factual, as "combative" shows that you have a problem.

The use of the word "scam" is really inaccurate based on the rest of the post. He agrees that the demo is real, and calls it a scam since others are working on similar things and they are trying to get funding. Neither others working on the same thing nor trying to get funding make something a scam. It would be a scam if they weren't really rendering what they say they are in real time, but Notch doesn't claim that.

> please describe the three most recent things you have invented

The "most recent" qualifier makes this a short answer, which would be:

Of the last three of my inventions, two are trade secrets and the third has not completed the patent application process. I am not able to discuss any of these. Would you rather discuss some of the patents I hold that are public instead? While you are considering I would like to know what your company's exact policy is regarding the projects and things I will be inventing outside work hours using my own equipment. Obviously the policy will have a major impact on whether I decide to consider accepting an offer to work here.

Good point. I am skeptical that listening to why they are crying is a major contributor to a high quality education.

What Chile is doing makes way more sense.

Another attack on america.

It's really strange how we are told by these articles that the reason to worry about all this is "competitiveness on the world market", yet the bottom 10% will never contribute anything to this and can be safely ignored completely. It's irrelevant what is done with them. What is important is how the top 1% are dealt with, and the stability of the society regarding the middle 90%.

International comparative test scores seem kind of irrelevant.

What seems to be important are the contributions of a small number of members of a society, who are either beaten into submission of forced conformity, or allowed to flourish.

Thanks for the warning. To be fair, even big "companies" like yelp.com have been running extortion rackets for years and are still the darlings of the technical press.

Awesome response and the right thing to do for everyone's sake.

I haven't watched all of those RSA videos but I've seen quite a few. It's amazing how every one I have seen is outlandish propaganda that it seems no one would fall for, yet I stand completely alone in this viewpoint.

Mmmm, the actual amount isn't all that relevant to the argument. But as far as "comfortable living" goes, the average $90,000 salary in Silicon Valley, minus the high California tax burden, does not provide "comfortable living" when a run down 3 bedroom home costs on average $860,000, vastly above the ability of said $90,000 wage earner to afford. It barely provides sustenance living. This is why many of these average paid developers have 3-4 hour commutes from far away, and others are living packed 5 to a room, and few are able to attract a mate.

This is completely a different topic from the discussion though so I'd prefer not to continue with it, if you would like to, it would be best to start a new thread.

Developers in many other parts of the country can live comfortably with an average wage. But watch out if you get sick. Sickness is for the rich. As we found out last month, if you are a long term employee at Microsoft and you get brain cancer, they give you a bad review and then declare you ineligible for disability benefits. Shouldn't have gotten cancer!

My idea of comfortable living is you can afford a house, to marry, and to afford health care. Others may disagree, but I don't consider that to be even worth debating.

All right. That is a very good question to bring up. Rules like those described are not as straightforward to understand to ordinary people as they may seem to the experimenter. I had to read it a couple times to understand that the idea was to tell the truth if 2-5, and give a fixed response if 1 or 6. Surely there were participants that didn't understand and the number among rural farmers is going to be different than the number among western college psychology students upon whom most of these sorts of tests are developed and calibrated. 6 is an unlucky number, the number of the devil in some cultures. Other cultures have feelings about 1 (unity), 2 (dualism), 3 (trinity), 4 (chinese good luck, indian sacred number) and 5 (witchcraft). When talking of small effects, there may be emotions experienced that vary from person to person depending on their education, IQ, cultural background and environment. This can skew results in a way that is dependent on the particular population tested. A person from a culture that believes that 6 is an evil number and a bad omen may be very slightly more likely to change their response on a 6, seeing it as a warning. One can't take a test like this that is quite subtle and looks at tiny effects within noise signals that come not from rocket engines but from subjective human reactions and dump it on any population and assume results calibrated on a different population are a valid interpretation. That would have to be shown first, in cross-cultural comparison testing.

The "excellent studies", which engineering management uses to claim that low salaries, but enough to survive, are optimal, are a crock. Where are the top CEOs making just enough to survive?

Here is the flaw. If you are properly compensated and don't have any other options, giving you a big fat raise doesn't improve your productivity, that's true and that's what the studies measure. Hey are you a developer? Here's an extra ten bucks, will you now come up with a better algorithm? No, of course not, because money doesn't make you a better developer, just as paying existing public school teachers more doesn't make them any less severely incompetent.

However, if you want to attract more productive people in the first place, you have to pay them more money because there is a competitive environment. The "excellent studies" try to prevent readers from noticing that that's not what they looked into, and it's clear they do this intentionally.

Do you think that Google would attract the same caliber of developers by paying what McDonalds pays its line workers? You must believe that if you really believe that these studies are correct in their claims that there is no advantage to paying more than survival wages.

The simple fact is that sustenance wages are not in fact ideal for attracting the best developers, designers, writers, actors and inventors.

If you don't recognize that, but continue to insist that the opposite is true, then you are intentionally seeking to deceive people.

It's very interesting that he had the exact same experience and was given the run around by AirBnB. His story also shows that they are not being completely truthful when they said EJ's case was the first time anything like this had happened in 2 million rentals. I wonder what the real statistics are.

That would only, even theoretically, be a possible approach to explore if you had questions that you knew this group of people were exactly as likely to lie about as killing protected leopards. How could one know which questions these would be. They wouldn't. Despite this problem, I would still like to see such calibration questions added to each round such as "Does astrology work for you?" and "Have you even been taken by aliens?" The results to these questions would give some useful data for comparison.