mrbgty

Honorable guy

eh, even original and good ideas aren't that valuable. Sometimes an individual can get lucky with a gimmick but a sustainable business is usually successful when a team of great people are both having and executing on good ideas on a daily basis - and still needs luck.

I honestly doubt that a team of diverse engineers (young and old) would have a hard time figuring out whether it is a graph problem in a reasonable amount of time with the internet at their disposal under normal working conditions.

The interview isn't set up that way and introduces non-natural pressures that can easily alter the way a good engineer responds to such a question.

I would think younger candidates have likely been more recently immersed in problems such as graph problems and tend to be more aware that they need to spend time training on leetcode or hackerrank in order to pass an interview but I don't know.

You could always still get lucky or be making decisions for reasons you aren't aware of.

> You don't need to think about graphs or runtimes every day- but that one time each year or so that you do need to know it, it's critical that you do.

That one time a year when it's critical, I would want someone who is likely to engage on the rest of the team to come up with a solid solution together and spend at least a day thinking about it.

This isn't how interviews work so if you think you're selecting for that one time a year when its critical at the expense of the rest of the year, I don't think you're getting what you think you are.

For quick workarounds to deal with a critical error while allowing time to solve it properly, I think an experienced person may have an edge.

"New ideas come mostly from recombining old ideas."

Does this suggest that new ideas would become easier to find over time because there are more combinations of old ideas?

Good to hear that you care about your employees and understand that he likes the chats.

Generally, IMO, you shouldn't be hiring people and then checking up on them and their hours to keep them honest. There's better uses of time. That time spent tracking and keeping them honest doesn't really improve you, them or the company.

yep, should include a hotel room

In addition to having space to learn on a daily basis, more tech companies should consider offering a week of study leave in addition to what they offer in their vacation policy.

I'm imagining the type of week that Bill Gates and John Carmack take.

Flight of the Navigator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4v-dMfzp3E

There's another problem here that isn't addressed by whether its a net plus revenue to the city. The tax break isn't applied across the board to all companies which means that Amazon is getting an unfair competitive advantage.

I don't really think of a company like Amazon needing a competitive advantage.

If you haven't seen this, I recommend watching it as it explains the nightmares.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig

Interesting comment. I agree with you and yet as a developer I've often observed sales staff with extremely flexible working hours, often expensing quite a bit to the company making base salaries as high or higher than devs while getting huge commissions.

And yet I don't really ever observe devs or others suggesting that the sales staff isn't grounded in reality. I honestly don't think the dev team cares and would fully appreciate a salesman who said he would be able to sell better if he slept in till noon.

"Because if you manage to finish the tasks early and leave at 2, they'll make sure you have enough tasks so that this doesn't happen again."

Yes. I've had managers get offended at the idea of taking a break when tasks are complete because you should be jumping on the next thing.

From what I've noticed, though, jumping on that next task doesn't help your career at Big Corp in any way and usually doesn't significantly lead to more personal accomplishment.

Taking some time to reflect can have a big impact on what you accomplish, though.

"We are busy as beavers. We’re doing two to four deals a week."

You weren't exaggerating.

more likely select all copy + paste

"Once HP recovered, I'm assuming they reinstated previous salary levels and then some."

No way this happened.

"The risk of choosing the wrong person is so great, that it's often better to not choose anyone"

This risk can be great, but the team and company can be organized such that the risk is extremely reduced. A pairing schedule, for example, can be very effective.

Do you think those people abusing it are getting less work done than they otherwise would?

I would rather see less standardization and more diversity in teaching methods. All of my children learn differently and would benefit being able to go to schools that match teaching style with learning style.

It's much easier to buy companies (revenue) than to produce it yourself. This is their strategy. Buy companies to get revenue up, then cut costs via layoffs where there's overlap.

In general I'm curious how people handle managing diffs in the workflow over time. I've found when working with Microsoft SSIS, that I end up preferring something in code where changes are obvious.

UO had a great risk and reward environment. I remember feeling emotions of anxiety when hunting due to the chance that real people might show up, kill me, take everything I have on my body and move on. It meant using strategy to decide what to keep in your backpack out in the wild and what to leave in the bank or in your private house. Houses could be broken into if you lost your key which meant more danger.

The fact that real groups of people were out in the world hunting each other also meant for a lot of fun and dynamic battles to re-claim property, etc.

github too

http://www.fastcompany.com/3020181/open-company/inside-githu...

"But "the government" is people. Society said, "let people take care of people", and government is the answer to how to do that. The government is "full of corruption and waste" because people are."

The government is one answer for how to do that.

Society and government are not the same.

Sounds to me like no matter what system is used, the problem is that there's a limited number of promotions/raises to give out.

If your employees really are adding value to the company, then why should the promotions/raises be limited?

The idea that we aren't naturally born anonymous is a little frustrating. We aren't born anonymous to everyone but we're born anonymous to most people we don't have a personal relationship with. Those we have personal relationships with have more reason to not do us harm than some organization on the other side of the world.

Re 1. Standardized tests reminds me of software dev managers who want to track bug counts to measure productivity.

There are so many factors to education that the result of any standardized test is questionable. Everyone thinks and problem solves differently and what the tests do is encourage teachers to teach students to all think in the same way in order to get the best result on the test. They teach to the test in order to make their own statistics look good so they won't be punished.

The type of job must make a big difference in whether 'feel-bad' works better than 'feel-good'.

Why do you need them to explain how a closure works when you could do something like the OP suggested and give them some work to do on their own time that allows them to show you how it works?

The company he mentioned was able to get 10 hours worth of work info on him this way.

How do you feel about the concept that these types of programs in part may be what drives terrorists to do what they do?