ricardoreis

There's too many of us. And most of the good land has been taken and/or ruined.

and yet:

Still pretty happy to be rid of her.

Either way -- in tech (and for some reason more so than in other industries) -- when it comes to hiring, it's head games all up and down. And generally to an extent far more than can really be called "necessary".

Or in a broader sense: "De-regulated money transfer of any kind" -- for which the costs and risks of a cryptocurrency transaction are an acceptable tradeoff.

But for vanilla payments -- apparently they aren't (and never will be).

And your answer is: "Well, problem Y. Except it doesn't solve it."

Or am I missing something?

It seems we were reading different articles, then. In any case your synopsis provides a very skewed representation of what the article actually said.

Nothing of the sort. Hopefully you'll stick to your guns.

But I guess those discussions will need to happen elsewhere.

But compared to just about any major city in Europe... seriously, it's almost a joke.

If I was to give a "gut" estimate for the overall deterioration of the subway service in recent years, though -- I'd peg it at closer to 30 or 40 percent than merely 20.

Which is, well, hugely significant when you think about it.

However, it is a valuable augment to the surface system. The point is that it helps "connect the dots" (providing more options for people to get from A to B) - hence making the system more effective as a whole.

Worthless? The ferries are one of the few unequivocally positive things to have happened to the city in recent decades.

I was merely responding to someone else who brought up a numbers-based argument only to find out that they... apparently don't have any.

But eyeballing that chart suggests an average deterioration significantly worse than 20 percent.

By what metric?

But they shouldn't have been downvoted for expressing that sentiment.

Wait, it gets better. I was asked the "divisible by two" question and gave the standard bitmasking technique in response. But then my interviewer said that wasn't "allowed" either, because apparently this programming environment they do their daily work in (this was an old-school web development shop basically) doesn't support basic math operations of any kind except equality, plus and minus.

He then pressed me for something "even simpler", "perhaps using function calls". Then I figured out what the "right" answer was -- he wanted be to test for odd- or even-ness recursively by, well, you know how.

So after reminding him about the obvious performance drawbacks of such an approach, I asked him -- "So do you actually write code like this in production?"

To which his answer was: "No, but I do during interviews".

The only problem is... at some point the tech industry basically started saying to itself, "That worked pretty well! Now if we can just make our tests 50 times harder the must be... 50 times as good!"

Which explains a lot about the situation we're in now.

Indeed. Especially when those who are quick to accuse others of not doing the math themselves are not... really doing the math.

Unless they can swear up and down that what they actually do at this company, for at least a significant part of the day, is throw each other against the wall (er umm, whiteboard) and insist that they solve problems like these (and do so elegantly) within 10 minutes or less...

... or get fired ...

... then what I'll be looking for is simply -- the door.

How do you find the missing number in a given integer array of 1 to 100? (solution) [1]

How do you land a job at "startups like Uber and Netflix; big organizations like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google; and service-based companies like Infosys or Luxsoft"?

Easy - by rote memorization. And a healthy sense that it's to best not question the basic idiocy behind cargo-cult interview tactics like these.

Because apparently genuinely useful critical thinking skills -- beyond such trivial matters such as how to get a better space-time tradeoff on that petabyte-scale fibanocci generator[2] our customer desperately needs you to design a viable POC for right now, on the whiteboard, before lunch -- basically aren't needed at these companies.

Notes:

[1] You think I'm just being snarky? It's famously common out in hedgefund-land for people to get hired more or less on the basis of being able to whip out a deadpan response to "gee-whiz" questions like these. And to get "flushed" for their inability to do the same. Startups aren't quite so naively reliant on shibboleth questions of this sort -- but but only slightly so.

[2] I'm being slightly hyperbolic with this example -- but only slightly. I've long since lost count of the number of times been asked "design" questions really only slightly more ridiculous than this example. And as a matter of fact I've been asked an "advanced fibanocci" question -- and apparently received a job offer to a large extent on the basis of my ability to "nail" it -- quite recently

The commenter wasn't saying that everyone they talked to was in that category. But rather that one person they talked to who basically tanked the whole interview for them. You know, the one who reported back everyone about what an uninspired dolt you are because you didn't answer that "Tell us about your dreams" question with quite the level of gushing enthusiasm they were expecting.

So what are the odds that you'll run into at least one person in that category, in a random tech interview these days?

When we take into account how toxic and culturally dysfunctional the tech industry in general has become in recent years -- I'm speaking specifically of it is huge vanity problem (from which this "we only hire the best" nonsense stems); combined with its insatiable addiction to bullshit and the cargo-culting of bad practices (and its worship of dumb and/or useless interview questions specifically) --

actually, fairly high.

Nor were tech interviews (usually), until about 10 years ago.

Yup - that's all it is. And you're going to have a certain envelope of negatives (usually far worse than this) in any environment.

So while it does make the flag a bit bless verdant... to call it a "red flag" seems to be a bit of a stretch.