lessnonymous

This link is common in these emails. But as a user it's annoying as all the people I'd forward it to are in my address book.

Plus I don't trust you with these email addresses. I'll send the email on thankyouverymuch.

So what's with the Dakotas and Wyoming? No interwebs?

Edit: Missed Alaska and Vermont

One interesting point that's glossed over here is the mind's propensity to see things that aren't there.

Because we see flame in the nearest manhole and a similar color repeated down the street our lazy brains tell us it's a whole series of flames.

But when you learn they're not, and you go back to the photo, it's obvious as heck that they're not further explosions.

I think the OP realises pg would not go for this easily, so by making a poll that's a ahem run away success the OP hopes to present pg with evidence.

My take on this:

* Those that put in enough to just 'click' say yes.

* Those who want to participate in the conversation say 'no'.

To commit at least one logical fallacy: Those who would participate in the AMA intelligently say 'no'.

An AMA with people like these would be awesome! I wonder if we could get them into a forum where anyone from HN (and anyone who happens by) could ask them anything.

We could set up a whole site aimed at it. Maybe we could call it reddit.com/r/IAmA ????

It would be the perfect place for anyone from HN to ask these people questions!

(Seriously: why? If you want to ask these people questions, just ask them on Reddit. Unless you can offer a better experience or audience, there's no win here.)

Talk on ozbargains is that the deal still works.

It's interesting to see Melbourne and Sydney at the bottom of the top 25 list. I heard the other day that 20% of the Australian workforce is in IT -- more than the US and UK. So it seems we have a lot of non-startup IT companies (or, more likely, companies that don't identify that way or appear on HN)

If you want to enter under the skilled migrant program, I expect you're correct.

However as an employer, I've hired a bunch of people from overseas on a 457 visa and never thought to get them to talk to the ACS. I don't really care if your university degree has been rubber stamped or not. (And if you can write code, I don't really care too much about your degree)

We know they exist. They're just irrelevant.

It says a lot if you prefer to tell us you're an ACS member rather than that you write code for fun at home.

Oh wow .. I wonder if I could convince an electrician to put a massive plug and socket in my meter box ..

Former employer bought me an ACS membership one year (mainly so we could get access to their members in the hope of selling our services).

The entire membership seems to be guys who built a homebrew PC in the 70s and haven't showered since, or international students who believe so much in their education they're fooled into believing they need the ACS to rubber stamp their degree.

They're totally irrelevant in today's "but can you write good code?" hiring practice.

The ACS preys on uninformed international students. (Who, in interviews, all seem to want to work for Cisco in five years time! Are they taught this by the ACS?)

Ridiculously cheap really

Wow .. wouldn't it be nice to get the diff lines highlighted in ST3. Then you get theirs/mine option on each line (with an 'all' option of course).

Surely not hard to implement (if it's easy to say, it's easy to code, right??)

The story here is not about the person, but about the prosecution. weev is an ass, but the story should be about the persecution from the US DoJ. Being an ass doesn't mean you're not entitled to fair justice.

"Different from Aaron" isn't a legal defense. This guy is an ass, but he's not a criminal.

But they did publish it. Just because they didn't _intend_ to publish it doesn't mean it wasn't published.

Right now the URL I'm looking at has "id=5095821" in it. If I change that to "id=5095822", I'm looking at something else published by Hacker News. But by DoJ standards, I'm "hacking" and have broken the law if HN didn't deliberately publish it.

weev is an ass. But he didn't hack anything.

These cases are trying to set a standard of "security by intent". There is no such thing. It's like my internet banking saying "To access your bank account, please type in your account number. Be careful to get it right or you'll be looking at someone else's account"

I wont pay 10 times as much, but I'll pay a premium.

And someone else getting up to speed wont make them the best person for the job. It will make them adequate.

"Not shit" is the way we get rid of 90% of people. "Superstar" is how we hire from the remaining.

We absolutely cannot bring in someone crap. Our job is to hire, so if we're hiring crap people, we're crap at our job.

See my comments elsewhere in this thread regarding learning fast, but basically I'm going to hire someone who can learn fast. But primarily I'm going to hire someone who doesn't need to learn the 'right now' skill.

I'd love to see a system that tied each of my hire's success to my success. It happens for the first three months: "Hey lessnonymous: this guy is brilliant! Good job!".

But I want to see a system where each pay-rise or promotion the engineer ever gets is recorded against my success too.

"We see your hires got a salary increase of 10% on average. Here's your 10% increase." (It would need to be waaaay more complex than that to look at churn, promotions, firings etc.)

Please read my other replies on this thread concerning this.

Where did I complain about not finding candidates? Where did I whinge about a 'talent crisis'. Nowhere I'm aware of.

At a guess you're projecting other managers complaints on to me. I'm not in the U.S. and don't have these problems.

So you've got actual words from actual me:

* Those three people are worth the bidding war. They're worth 10 times the next rung down.

* I need to fill the position with the best possible person. It doesn't matter that Google et al have take the top people, I still need a new engineer.

* Universities generally suck time and deliver little. Spend the three or four years getting a ton of experience and participating in the community and you'll jump ahead of someone who's passed university, but doesn't have their own project.

Of course I'm looking for people who can learn. I'm looking for people who will jump onto Stack Overflow and Google before spending a week reinventing the wheel. I'm looking for someone who writes in a dozen languages (like human languages, someone who knows a couple can pick up more very easily).

But I don't want people learning the "right now" skill on my time.

If I need a PHP developer right now, then I'm going to hire someone who knows it right now. I'll preference someone with C skills and I'll preference someone who participates in an open source project. And I'll preference someone who reads Hacker News. And I'll preference someone who has a great profile on Stack Overflow. And I'll preference someone who attends or presents at conferences.

But if they don't know PHP, they're not going to be learning it on my time as I need someone who knows it right now.

There's no need to feel sorry for my team. The things you read on a Hacker News comment reply aren't the entirety of working for me. Maybe you'll be sitting across the desk from me one day and you'll get to work with an awesome team of talented engineers. Carefully selected.

First point has nothing to do with my company in particular. Talent interviews are just different from vacancy interviews. In a talent interview I really am looking for someone who meets our future needs. And without my crystal ball, that means I'm looking for someone with the currently require skill set, but who has the ability to pick up wherever we go in the future.

Agree with you on the second point. This comes into us not explaining ourselves very well. Questions like this ARE banal and ludicrous. But FizzBuzz filters are a great first screening. People lie (shock! horror!) on their resumes all the time. So asking them to write something banal in front of you is annoying for the people who can do it, but quickly finds the pretenders and lets me cut an interview short.

(Oh, and before anyone calls out 'interview pressure', I'll work through the problem with people who struggle. The difference between nerves and talent is blatantly obvious)

If you're hiring 100 people, you still only get the same number of applicants. If you get 100 applicants, you're not going to fill your 100 positions. (Note the "at least 99" in my post)

If I'm desperate to hire 100 people and I can't get 100 qualified applicants, that's when I start looking to people who could be the right people in very quick order. I've done that and ended up with some true super stars. But that was a three month investment that could have failed. I'd rather hire someone who already has the skills I need.

Whether you're hiring 1 person or 100, you're still looking for reasons to cull them.

Yes, the analogy is silly.

The problem with the analogy is that it's too specific. But I'm still hiring for right now. That you can easily learn next year's technology is something I'd rather you don't do on my time.

As a hiring manager, the thing I find most interesting on posts like this (ignoring that the analogy is TERRIBLE) are the comments of people used to being on the other side of the desk. I don't think we (as interviewers) do a good job of explaining why we ask the questions we ask. And I don't think we do a good job of communicating what our job is.

Our job is to stop you getting hired.

If we get 100 people applying for the job, then our job is to not employ at least 99. So we are looking for anything that identifies you as being one of the 99.

That you could go away and learn what color the middle wire is is great. But the guy next to you has been fixing wiring in distributor caps for years. And right now, I need people that know what color the middle wire is.

I've heard this story before. The only difference is that the third party didn't access the company systems and that Bob was truly an expert.

In my version Bob got permission from his employer to go overseas for a year where he would work remotely.

Instead he spent a year on the beach in Bali shipping change requests to India and doing code reviews of the work coming back. He still understood the code and everything about it. He explained and interpreted requirement from his employer to his Indian developer(s).

So instead of 8 hours at a desk, he spent 2 hours at a desk providing the expertise he was paid for (to both his Indian developer and to company meetings) and spent 6 hours on the beach.

The only thing he didn't provide was the actual keypresses.

The only problem I see with this is that the company's IP (the source code) was given to someone they company wasn't aware of (which isn't a trivial thing).

The company paid an expert to provide them with his expertise and to complete particular requirements. He did both.

This sounds like its clarifying what the founding fathers really meant when they wrote the law way back in 2002.

I don't see what problem you're solving by open sourcing, therefore this is just a misguided publicity grab.

* The "open letter" goes from addressing Apple to addressing potential developers.

* What does open-sourcing give you other than people to help you write code for free? You still can't put the app on the app store and therefore can't release it to users.

You can get it on third-party app stores instantly already.

I don't see what problem you're solving by open sourcing, therefore this is just a misguided publicity grab.

If this hiccup is going to stop you creating new things, you're not going to get far.