hellllllllooo

> Please check your reading comprehension.

No need for this kind of comment on here.

Yes. I agree with you. I was backing up what nrb was saying and that gesman was wrong. One effect is reduced diversity.

This is a separate issue. TurboTax like software could still exist for people with more complicated tax returns. For the majority the government can just calculate it.

How much does it already cost the tax payers by paying these third parties like TurboTax to do it? It would be cheaper for the public to have the IRS do it since they are doing it already anyway.

> it is amazing to me this guy is the creator of one of the most popular languages today when he is such a poor thinker.

This is unnecessary and a huge stretch given one blog post.

I think the point is that tax isn't driving an exodus of businesses/entrepreneurs as OP suggested. The opposite is true and it's driving out lower income people. Oakland, for example, is growing like SF with 10+ tall buildings going up this year downtown to accommodate tech companies and their employees.

Seems reasonable but not really a lot of data points in this article to show a real trend. It's just an option piece. Could just as easily point at a lot of startups staying and growing in the Bay Area and write an article saying why Bay Area is still the place to be.

> When men comment on women's career choices, they get fired.

James Damore circulated a long unscientific document critical of female engineers as a whole at his place of work. This is far more than just "commenting on career choices".

He made a frankly stupid choice to be unprofessional and it cost him his job. Beyond anything else his judgement was poor. It's fair as is dismissal for other unprofessional behavior at work or for incredibly poor decision making.

Retraining is one of the options when an industrial sector shrinks. Suggesting a growing industry like software development as an option doesn't deserve a "punishment" unless it was spiteful in some way. Mocking journalists, or anyone else, who has lost their job is the toxic part of this.

It's supposed to be a jab at fired journalists and not serious career advice which is how the author appears to have taken it. The toxic part is not that learning to code is going to solve all their problems and be all "rainbows and unicorns" but that it is mocking people for being laid off, whoever they are.

Policing and laws often treat symptoms and not the "root" cause. Financial laws addressing fraud don't try and solve the underlying human greed yet they are valuable in trying to the protect victims of fraud.

Saying we can only solve fraud by addressing the underlying socitial reasons driving people to commit fraud would be crazy. The symptoms can be dealt with it can and make a difference while also working on other causal factors.

It doesn't have to deal directly with the "causal issue". It just has to reduce the negative effect.

Exactly. So the arbitrary line drawn by leetcode interviews filters in one particular way and benefits people closer to colleges age where these kinds of problems are fresher in the mind. As you get older the number of leetcode style problems you actually encounter in real engineering is pretty low.

Have a chat, discuss experience and see how well they actually understand the things they have put on their resume. Dig as deep as you can and see if they actually understand what they say they have done. Also, references are at least as important as the interview.

Right. Maybe it just shows that the interviewer is too inexperienced to ask questions that are relevant.

Solving leetcode is not software engineering.

I've worked with at least 3 older IC software engineers (close to retirement age) and their experience has been invaluable in forseeing issues that younger people don't spot in advance due to limited experience. Also the breadth of the work that these people have been involved in is very useful in being able to pull experience from other areas into an unrelated project. I genuinely don't understand the bias against this unless the person is unwilling to learn new things which hasn't been my experience.

Hopefully this attitude will change as the valley ages and people will learn that a lot of software engineering principles don't change as quickly as the buzzwords do.

I was discussing what solders carry as a primary weapon but since you brought it up why don't "mass shooters" regularly use chemical weapons now instead? Could it be because they're regulated and not readily available to civilians?

So you're suggesting this is the main/only reason poison isn't the primary weapon provided to infantry for most military situations? Interesting.

Violence still happens but the magnitude would be reduced.

It's a lot harder to kill people with things that aren't guns. If it was as easy then soldiers would primarily equipped with "knife, or acid, or poison, or fists". The army chooses guns as the primary weapon are they are clearly much more effective at killing.

This is a false dichotomy. Why do you have to focus on the "root issue"? What's wrong with dealing with a part of the problem? No complex problems get dealt with as a whole. They get broken in to pieces and dealt with using the tools available. Guns are clearly a part of the problem so let's do something about them while also doing something about other social issues.

> Removing guns from the streets may reduce gun deaths, but the violence will probably remain as long as the underlying social injustices are not addressed.

The old no solution unless it's the perfect solution response. No-one is saying social issues and inequality shouldn't be addressed too but easy access to guns sure makes shooting people a lot easier.

Anonymously sharing incomplete personal information about someone you haven't worked with from Amazon's internal systems and making an assessment of them by the number of commits they have made isn't really making a strong case for Amazon having a good culture.

I genuinely question why people are so concerned if people use science to achieve better results at sports. It often seems like some kind of puritanical moral outrage over drugs.

Edit: I understand the reasoning behind why testing is done. I just question if it is really led by safety concerns, fairness and science or just our default knee-jerk "drugs are bad" culture. There are plenty of other safety concerns in sport that are ignored.

The US is so far away from that I wouldn't worry too much. See original article. People often seem to hypothesise and focus on bad things that could happen at the expense of bad things that are happening. The is plenty of room in between the two extremes of US and France.

> The effect of not ever getting into the workforce at all is devastating to those few that don't make the cut.

This devistation is a societal choice made by having a non-existent social safety net in the US. In other countries it's less devastating due to government programs and universal healthcare that protect people while still incentivising them to search for work.

You are using the lack of protections and support for the poorest in our society as an argument against paying them more.

Currently inequality is high, companies are making huge profits and more and more money is going to the executives and shareholders of companies. If a company is making large profits and the minimum wage is increasd to a point where they are making a more modest profit it is still in their interest to employ the workers to keep making money.

Also, read about labour monopsony power. There are other factors at play than just supply and demand that effect the price paid for labour.

I think it's ok for big tech companies to do this (from their point of view) because they have an endless list of candidates and don't care too much if many good people are put off or fail. They will get good people through the sheer volume of people applying and these processes do get good people if you can afford false negatives.

I think the middle and smaller companies need to change their processes more. If they just copy what the large companies do without understanding they don't have the same ability to attract candidates and pay high salaries they will just lose good people that they actually really need.

The point that is being made by the original post is that the process is bad in many companies especially when hiring senior engineers who have a proven track record and have other options. These engineers don't want to spend time and money learning how to crack the coding interview in some bootcamp. They can find work and are put off by the process some companies use and such companies are missing out on good people. Suggesting bootcamps for leetcode and whiteboarding as a solution misses the point as these are not great interview practices.

The top companies with these leetcode tests probably don't care that good people being rejected or avoiding them because of the amount of preparation required. Middle sized companies and startups doing leetcode tests are missing good people and probably can't afford the same number of false negatives as someone like Google with an endless supply of candidates. It seems like smaller companies often lazily copy these processes despite it likely costing them good engineers.

Having gone through the process recently I avoided companies with puzzle solving hiring procedures because I was confident that I could find well paid, interesting, work without jumping though those hoops. As you get more senior there are more people you have met and worked with with employment opportunities. It gets easier to find work by asking around and finding someone who will hire you based on recommendations or having worked together before.

> If Seattle can survive for a couple of weeks without a major chunk of its freeway system, that’s a powerful indication that more modest steps to alter road capacity don’t really mean the end of the world.

It's a little bit of a stretch. The problems people are facing due to road closures are not measured by images of Google maps. Just because complete gridlock doesn't happen doesn't mean that people aren't having significant problems because of it. People adapt but this article provides no real way to measure the cost.

As someone recently interviewing I targeted roles where I didn't have to jump through these hoops and it worked out fine. Contacting people I had worked with before who could vouch for me made it much easier to land a job.

The top companies with these leetcode tests probably don't care that good people being rejected or avoiding them because of the amount of preparation required. Middle sized companies and startups doing leetcode tests are missing good people and probably can't afford the same number of false negatives as someone like Google with an endless supply of candidates.

I would much rather spend a weekend doing a take home test and showing how I actually work than being asked to write irrelevant code on a whiteboard. I think leetcode style interviewing is driven by time constraints of the interviewer and some more effort and thought needs to be put in on how to choose people based on the specifics of the actual role they are hiring for.

People should be able to provide constructive and useful criticism of a technology without having to build their own solution.