learc83

Other engineering disciplines hire engineers who don’t have a PE all the time. There are more engineering disciplines where taking the PE exam is the minority than the other way around.

>Because it's a huge financial

It shouldn't be. From my experience, the financial cost that comes from increasing the number of people you fire after a few weeks is less than what companies spend furiously guarding against making a bad hire.

>and organisational burden on the hirer

There's no reason this needs to be the case.

The BLS reports 6 different unemployment metrics. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

Several of them do measure underemployment.

I wrote small webserver for proxying serial port requests from the browser to solve a similar problem about 10 years ago. It's not generic enough for what you're doing, but something similar would be quick to code.

https://github.com/learc83/adapter

Sorry the source is my brother who worked at the FSI, and every single is not really correct because of edge cases, but that's the officers and the people at the FSI talk about it. Some countries speak more than one language, some speak English (which all Foreign Service Officers are already required to speak), and in some countries there are many positions where you will be almost exclusively dealing with English speakers even if it isn't widely spoken there (some positions in Iraq). And finally not all postings are really what you'd think of as being a "diplomat" (dealing with Americans who lost their passport for example).

Each posting has a number of language designated positions, which range from 90% of the total positions in Columbia to 8% in a Iceland (where English is almost universally spoken).

In this example at least 90% of the officers in Columbia are required to speak Spanish (and it's likely that most of the other 10% do as well). If there aren't enough people proficient in a language they will train more at the FSI. In most countries language designated positions are the majority.

So yes it's not strictly required to speak Spanish to be posted in Columbia, but you're only going to be able to get one of the 10% of non language designated positions which aren't likely to be positions that we would think of as diplomatic work.

Additionally when you join the Foreign Service you have 5 years to become proficient in a Foreign Language before you get forced out, and during that time you can only serve in the limited non language designated positions.

> who learned the local languages, respected local cultural nuances and customs

The US is the only country who requires every single Foreign service officer to learn the local language before being stationed in a country.

The Foreign Service Language institute is the most prestigious language school in the world.

US foreign policy has plenty of problems, but leaning the local culture and language is not one of them.

The Foreign Service and our embassies and consulates are on of the shinning successes of US foreign policy (among many failures).

>Of course. I have a wide variety of coworkers with a wide variety of opinions of my skill-set. I'd select the ones that I think would resonate best with you.

Could it be that you have people who will give you good references because you're a good developer?

>Barring that I have half a dozen friends that would tell you whatever I want them to.

So if I pull those friends up on linked in, they're developers too, and you'll have some plausible overlapping work history?

> I fail to see how references are any sort of magic bullet.

It's not a magic bullet. But faking 10 years of development work history and multiple decent quality references is a fairly high bar. It's not going to catch everyone but neither is whiteboarding. The goal shouldn't be to catch everyone.

Sometimes you make a bad hire. Despite every test you put someone through, you'll get false positives. The problem is that if you ratchet your test up to far to avoid false positives, you end up turning off good engineers, or failing good engineers.

I think the problem is that the company wasn't willing to just admit they made a mistake and fire the guy, not that he was hired in the first place. America (assuming you're in the US) has nearly unrestricted at will employment. Why are you so afraid of hiring one bad employee? If you can't identify bad employees after a few weeks of working with, you have zero chance identifying them before you hire them.

Maybe instead of spending months trying to find the perfect candidate, just do what literally every other industry does and hire experienced candidates based on reputation, resume, talking to them about the job and past projects, and fire them if it turns out they were completely lying to you.

There's definitely a double standard. But Canadians and Europeans make up less than 5% of the total number of undocumented immigrants in the US.

So I still stand by my point that poor white people aren't likely to have undocumented people living in their household at all. Regardless of race.

>I've known a number of local households that had undocumented Canadians, Brits and Germans.

Also how many of those households were poor? There isn't nearly as much incentive for a poor Canadian, Brit, or German to come here as an undocumented immigrant because they'd be giving up guaranteed health care and far more permissive social services.

A binary heap has some advantages over using a balanced tree that could have significant performance impacts (and vice versa). Particularly in a situation where you need to roll your own priority queue.

That's why I said it's likely the person who built it would done a bit of research. When hiring someone I care that they remember enough to realize that and are capable of doing the research, more than that they remember exactly how to implement some data structure.

>If I could have this conversation that we're having right here, right now with them then they'd probably pass my hiring bar.

I think that's a totally reasonable. My problem is that this isn't what people are complaining about when complaining about white board interviews.

99% of the time the interviewer is asking for the answer to a very specific problem that is highly biased towards new grads who would have just seen it on a test.

And even if they say you don't care about the optimal solution they will always hire the person who gets the optimal solution in 15 minutes b/c they memorized it versus the person takes 30 min to bang out something that kind of works.

Here's my approach:

I ask someone else on my team to come up with an interview problem, so I haven't seen it before hand. Then I work with the candidate on hashing out a solution.

The census bureau was original granted an extension that has been rolled back. It's not being cut "unusually" short, but the pandemic drastically impacted the census bureau's ability to do their work, and we are giving them less extra time than they say they need.

Poor white people aren't likely to have an undocumented person living in their household though. People in that situation are much less likely to talk to government employees or to fill out census forms in the first place.

So yes it's is undercounting poor people, but also disproportionately immigrants and relatives of immigrants.

I can almost guarantee that the person who implemented it as part of their job brushed up on priority queues before they built it.

I remember how to build one from a binary heap, but I wouldn't launch right into the code without reading a bit first.

So you had one bad experience with one person who didn't do a whiteboard?

How many bad experiences have you had with someone who did? I've had enough that I've lost count.

>like using mutable objects with changing hash codes as dictionary keys kind of bad

I don't think a leet code question would necessarily have screened stuff like that out at all.

>Yeah, but when you ask someone for references they're not likely to give you people who wouldn't speak well of them.

Did you actually talk with these references about what it was like to work with him?

>On the last day he cornered me in the elevator and offered me $100/hr to do his work for him under the table so that he could claim it was his.

That's $200k a year. I find it pretty hard to believe that he was serious.

There's intense critique of the Big Five model within psychology, and with what we've learned about the reproducibility of psychology studies , I'd be shocked if those studies you linked were reproducible.

Did you ever actual hire any of those people? Did you ever verify that they actually had the experience they claimed? Did you follow up with their references? Were they able to walk you through projects they worked, or discuss solutions implemented?

Every job gets applicants that aren't qualified. Only software engineering out of every single non-performance based (musicians, actors etc...) industry out there has white board interviews.

That says more about the President than anything else.

>You say that, but the connection seems likely which is my point. The indirect symptoms of heart disease such as loss of athleticism and cognitive function would be important.

Only if as you say the meaningful symptoms show up during common reproductive years.

So far I see no evidence that that is the case.

>Heredity is one of the stronger predictors of heart disease so it’s got a strong genetic component beyond diet and lifestyle.

Again there is no evidence that it is common that hereditary heart disease that generally affects people 50+ has meaningful symptoms during reproductive years.

And there is even less evidence that these symptoms are meaningful enough to impact fertility to such an extent that it creates significant short term evolutionary pressure.

You're taking 1 condition which is common in later life and saying: well maybe some people with that condition actually develop it earlier in life, and just maybe some people that develop it earlier have some externally significant symptoms, and maybe some of those people have specific symptoms that would make them less likely to reproduce all else being equal.

Each step of that funnel is a complete unknown, and each step diminishes the overall impact that genes that control the most common forms of hereditary heart disease have on reproductive fitness.

Subscenes are still in the preview stage, and they recently even removed the ECS stuff from the package manager listings (you have to find the names of the packages directly from the forums) to prevent people from thinking that they were production ready.

I was using the ECS for the last 2 years, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who actually wants to get something into production. My guess is it will be somewhere late 2021 or 2022 before it's actually production ready.

> But none of this fundamentally required me to keep it all in code _if_ the tooling allows it. With ~2020 it feels like the tooling is getting to that point.

I don't think Unity is nearly at that point for my use case. Part of the problem is that I tend to build games that require a lot of procedural generation and user created content.

I basically end up needing to build some kind of level/content editor for my end users, which removes a lot of the value Unity brings to the table.

It's a problem that many people on the forum complain about. It's mostly based on the size of your codebase (plus other assets), and which version of Unity you're using--newer versions have gotten much slower. Using the new DOTS stuff also increases it pretty dramatically (they say they are working on fixing this).

Changing a single line of code can take close to a minute on a medium to large sized game under a 2020.1.

Using something like Heaps where you can compile a large game like Northgard completely in 4 seconds is a completely different experience.

That completely depends on the specialty. I know plenty who work around 30 hours a week.

I finally ditched Unity because I’m sick of compile times in the newer versions of Unity. It’s been getting worse since 2017 or so and it finally got to be too much for me.

I’ve switched over to the Heaps engine by the creator of the Haxe language.

In addition to the compile time issues, I found myself constantly fighting the Unity way of doing things in that I prefer doing things in code as opposed to using the editor.

You’re trying awful hard to save your point.

Target heart rate declining and blood pressure rising with age in no way implies that most people who later die of heart disease are somehow less reproductively fit when they are younger.

No it doesn’t. At least not normally. Google the prevalence rates of heart disease in people under 40.

About 0.6% of people under 40 have the most common type of heart disease

https://www.heart.org/idc/groups/heart-public/@wcm/@sop/@smd...

Again pointing out that it is the 2nd most common killer vastly overestimates its evolutionary impact. The same is true of cancer.

Yes, but the vast majority of people who die from heart disease don’t develop it until they are older. Which is why it’s misleading to talk about it being America’s #2 cause of death when discussing evolutionary pressure.

If you're talking about a mutation that will increase the reproductive success of your children(or more likely grandchildren in the case of reduced chance of a heart attack), then the advantage would have to be even greater because of the high chance that your descendants don't have the same mutation.

I'm not saying there's no natural selection occurring, but that saying that heart disease is the #2 killer of Americans out of context likely overstates the selection pressure heart disease causes.

If we're talking about a trend strong enough that most humans will have this trait in 80 years, then if natural selection is driving it, none of those advantages are great enough to explain that.

The most likely answer is that natural selection isn't directly driving this specific trait.

> #2 killer in the US it’s likely for the circulatory system to be undergoing rapid change.

Primarily killing people past reproductive age though.

> Admittedly, this prevents you from accessing name until you provide an address, but I don't think there are many valid use cases where you want to access data before the Customer value is corrrectly initialized. I'd consider this a code smell to be refactored.

If you really needed to do that you could just define a partial customer with no address field and pass are that around.

Post WWI Germany was in a much worse state economically than the US currently is. Consequently, there were far more people who were capable of that kind of planning who also weren’t invested in the status quo.