kaspm

I would say this is fine, this position will likely inherit the bad juju from the previous candidate and should go into the position eyes-wide open. What they need is a person who can acknowledge previous mistakes and make incremental changes to guide the team to the right operations. They want to understand what about this candidate will make the situation different from the last candidate and in order to do that they need to discuss the previous employees shortcoming.

I actually enjoy replacing someone who is a poor communicator because you have a real chance to influence direction and growth just by acting like a normal, decent person.

To answer the original poster's question - if you have to ask this question, it's very likely there are organizational challenges. In fact, at every company there are organizational challenges, team challenges, your job as a leader is to address them. If you want to only work for great teams and never have to deal with challenges, you should consider not being a manager/leader at all, then you don't have to worry about them.

I would pay more attention to whether the company itself is financially stable, growing, hiring and innovating. If not, run.

Even at the companies (both big and small) that utilize this method for interviewing/hiring, generally aren't having their engineers work on these types of problems day-to-day. You utilize tools to solve business or technology issues and advance the company, it's much more satisfying than a puzzle (for those who don't like puzzles).

If you'd like to solve real business challenges, practice and get good at this kind of puzzle, algorithmic interviews, decomposing technical problems. Approach them in the spirit they are intended: to showcase your skill. Get past the interviews and work on real problems. Then when you're in a position to influence how your company hires, switch to a interview style that works for you. I prefer 1:1 real-world pair coding exercises on a computer with Google and I specifically test for the ability to look things up on SO.

I agree, my first thought in seeing this headline, even the applicable market of people is much, much bigger for Pokemon GO. In addition to the entire market of Tinder, there's also kids and married people.

Don't forget more relevantly, RIM who had the smartphone market completely locked up but couldn't get comfortable with a large, keyboardless, touchscreen device that was graphically oriented despite Microsoft having created these devices before the iPhone explosion. The question is are the innovations coming out of non-Apple mobile computing on par with the touchscreen/gui revolution of the late 2000s. Water Resistant? Wireless Charging? Wearables? Voice Control? None seem likely to supplant the basic form factor.

After all, post 1995, there wasn't a major innovation in the desktop or mobile pc market that took over. Flat Panel monitors maybe. Desktops and Laptops are simply faster and possibly smaller versions of what we had then.

The point I'm making is that tech innovation is going to shif t to something outside handheld. Cloud, IOT, VR/AR, AI, Wearables, Voice are leading contenders right now and Apple is certainly thinking about all of them.

How about "Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is either elegant, efficient or effective, a good engineer designs systems to be two out of the three, a great engineer designs them to be all 3."

And I also fundamentally disagree with the notion that moving a large amount of realtime data reliably and with accuracy, monitored and consistent with relatively little failure is not an interesting engineering challenge in itself. I find that for all the talk about data-driven organizations, most don't use a tenth of what is available but that when the tenth is needed, it's hugely satisfying to be able to provide it.

The world is already short-sighted (e.g. Climate Change)

I don't understand why this is on the top of Hacker News. It seems to be one person's opinions and experiences about complex issues that face hundreds of thousands of engineers in thousands of companies across the world.

Nothing in the article makes me trust this persons perspective over any other. It's not thoroughly investigated with metrics over many case studies. There's no empirical evidence to back up his assertions. He doesn't have a reputation for other work that would make me trust his informed opinion over any others.

There seems to be hundreds of articles touting every possible side of this issue, why did this one strike a chord?

Of course they would have usable skills - general understanding of computing, superb analytical minds, 36 years of advancement in education, excellent problem solving ability.

At most they would have to learn a new lexicon of programming languages and operating systems which are FAR less complicated than the current range of languages and design patterns software engineers must master today.

A few weeks (days?) of studying and figuring out how to pre-optimize for much smaller workloads and they'd be able to keep pace easily.

I think in this case it just means the new slimmed-down Google won't include X, Calico, Wing, etc...

I think perhaps instead of saying "powerpoint should be banned" perhaps poorly built diagrams and powerpoint slides with too much data that are meant to be read should be banned. Slides and visuals as part of a presentation are used to focus the listener visually on the main point being discussed. People are (generally) visually oriented and enhancing a presentation with visuals using slides can make your presentation better.

This probably would have been better put as "*nix-based" operating systems. If you include MacOS, iOS and Android as nix-based, it's very much happening at both the consumer and the enterprise level.

In context it was meant as reference to the story of Bangladesh, meaning you don't know how lucky you are until you travel a bit of the world.

My story however, is pretty typical, I worked through my 20s and didn't take time to travel then even though I had disposable income and more importantly was in charge of only myself. When I got married, got a dog and had kids, traveling increases in complexity at O(an^k) where k is the number of people traveling together and a is the number of people you have to arrange babysitting (or dogsitting) for.

Now travel seems like a giant luxury an I doubt I will truly enjoy it again until the kids are in college. By then we'll be so bogged down with college costs, there will be no money.

I had the opportunity to go to China for work and it really opened my eyes about how little of the world I have seen.

| put in long hours and do very good work

And in addition, you have to have the mental fortitude for this kind of career. Despite not being "well-known" there is an intense amount of competition from a group of the most ambitious people in the world. Being able to compete at that level is insanely hard, much harder than than being a software engineer.

I have had the fortune in my life to attempt both careers. I went to a top-tier undergrad, and got a job as an associate consultant at a strategy firm directly out of college. And guess what? It was terrible. Working every day from 9am-2am 6 days a week, no time for friends, family, hobbies, fun of any kind. After a few years of that life, I went right back to doing software engineering. Would I be richer now had I stayed in it? Probably. But happier? no.

I think it's important to remember in the end that very very few people in the world do work that matters, whether they make "something" or not. I think about this a lot while listening to stories about 14 year old Bangladeshi factory workers making $3 a month to support their families and being padlocked inside factories that are on fire so our clothes are cheaper.

We are all very lucky to be born into a country that gives us the opportunity to do comfortable jobs and complain about them freely. Use work to make enough money do the things you care about outside of work, and for god sakes, travel.

Yeah, there are many legitimate reasons to prefer Mac to Linux or Windows, not the least of which is that Ruby gems just work better on a Mac because they are developed there (regardless of whether you will have to figure out those problems when you deploy to your Linux-based production environment in AWS :P). The issue isn't whether you use Mac or PC but in the holier-than-thou attitude about it. You are recruiting a team of (potentially) one-trick ponies who are religious about making judgement calls.

Probably a looooooooong stretch from just saying "Justify a PC" to you are building a uncompromising team but I would just say "The Best Equipment (We mostly use Apple)" would accomplish the same goal with less annoying language

100% agree, developer here who sees snarky recruiting posts like this and immediately says no thanks. Makes it clear the company is gimmicky and not focused on the true challenges of software development: clarity, focus and rational decision-making