stlHusker

Given the nature of the system, when would she have been notified that she needed to take control? Additionally, what did Uber tell her about how the system operated? Ultimately it is on Uber for the lack of serious consideration. Rolling out level 2 & 3 autonomous driving systems where driver attention (especially non-experts in an open world) is still required on a wide scale is absolutely dangerous given human nature. Most people believe that you have to completely jump to level 4 & 5 autonomy which represents fully autonomous systems.

Think of it like this: "Hey, let's get this person who isn't an employee of the company, gets paid a pittance in a "gig" economy where extreme "hustle" is needed, probably isn't an attentive driver anyways and put them as a critical backstop in a system that is still a prototype and that they most likely don't understand."

The Uber engineering team lacked or ignored human factors experts.

> Seriously, think about it. How can someone who isn't qualified to do your job, actually manage you?

When put in a leadership position, above all "resist the urge to manage".

I don't want a manager, I want someone who serves the team, insulates them from unnecessary distractions, removes obstacles, etc. Someone that supports a culture of humility, respect and trust while helping to care and feed for each individual's autonomy, mastery and purpose.

I've worked on some great teams and less than 1/2 of the time these leaders could not do my job yet it did not matter (of course it was a bit "easier" when they did) because they understood the above.

It is the bullshit asymmetry principle: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

As another person mentioned, DerbyCon got tired of dealing with it (https://www.derbycon.com/blog/derbycon-9-0-every-beginning-h...). And then had to respond to a bullshit storm related to their integrity a month later (https://www.derbycon.com/blog/derbycon-clarifications-inclus...).

> You’re being tricked by gurus of the mind to send your money to someone else. How this is legal represents a gap between traditional laws and modern times.

Eh, this has existed for decades at a macro level in over-the-air television and radio. 'If you're not paying for the product, you are the product' is a quote that has been floating around since at least the 1970s. Methods and techniques now have the ability to target you individually but the overall premise is nothing new.

> The sad truth for us software engineers is, a lot of the most exciting work is at least tangentially related to refining this trickery: big data, machine learning, etc.

Well, I'm in Aerospace and there are plenty of interesting problems to solve here that have nothing to do with "trickery"; it's just that 100 year old companies aren't "sexy" to young kids, often don't "move fast and break stuff" and frankly don't throw obscene amounts of money to bait them.

"I'm left with opinion on those days that not much of anything has happened regarding X. But folks still need views!"

In a strange way it validates how well off we are, particularly in the U.S., that outrage needs to be manufactured in this way. Of course the impacts are extremely negative and no journalist ever gets views or prizes for "hey it is important but society won't collapse and we are pretty well off..."

In the end it is a number of factors and cycles between the public and the media:

1) News is now a entertainment with eyes to attract.

2) The public loves death, destruction and crisis. "We like to watch things die from a safe distance; better you than us."

3) Journalists don't get any personal or professional benefit from covering important but "mundane" things. Look at who wins the Pulitzer.

4) On an individual level, people will still find things that are problematic regardless of how well off they are (see "First-World" problems).

5) Knowing of 4) there is a typical over-reaction to actual things of importance; but the reaction is hysterical.

"A kid was kidnapped today, that could happen to mine!"

6) Now that every individual, isolated event can be distributed to millions; every single crisis abstracted to be systematic and endemic (based on 4) and 5) above); it is not that bad things happen, it is that there needs to be a solution and we need to solve for it.

"We've got to do something about this kidnapping crisis, I see it on the news all the time!"

7) Realizing 6) the media can now take political positions and feed into this need to produce more stories that satiate that.

A year later...parents are charged with neglect after letting their kids walk home from school alone. Turns out it was a relative who kidnapped the kid. Also turns out there were only 10 of these this year in your community and the chances of this are much smaller than they were years ago, but all of them hit the news, so...

There is a differentiation here in important to the company vs. important to the individual.

As mentioned in other threads, as people mature they often begin to look for meaning in their work beyond pure compensation. As a software engineer, I can produce something that is of value to the company, be compensated fairly for that work but still derive no personal value from the primary results of the work because software, by nature is so ephemeral. The result is so malleable, that what was done yesterday can be scrapped today. There is little permanence. Couple this with an immature industry that actively disdains "old ideas" and it is pretty easy to get drug down into questioning what you are doing.

For those that care about what they do, this situation almost amounts to maintaining an exercise in double-think as a coping mechanism to make it through the day. But I've found that year after year it gets harder and harder to play that internal mental game.

If you are one of the unlucky few who work in an organization that actively works against personal growth and development, then the lasting second order effects of your work, especially in leadership positions (e.g. the growth and development of those around you) may not last either.

I contrast this to the mechanical / electrical engineers who are around the same age who can point to an airplane and say "I designed that part / system 20 years ago; each time I step on the aircraft, I am reminded of the value of my work."

Again, the op stated these things are put there to "show how people react to stress" -- my post was a response to that, there is no re-creation of a stressful environment in the situations I stated.

"I know it's totally anecdotal, but we've all heard horror stories about candidates who couldn't write a for loop; some of us have witnessed these things first hand. And yes, phone screens should be filtering out those sorts of candidates long before they start sweating with a dry-erase marker in their hand, but, well."

Yes, it is a failure of how you have set up your hiring pipeline which you are now band-aiding. The majority of those folks can be screened by one look at a resume or in the first 30 seconds of the phone interview. Other hiring managers in our company repeatedly had this problem until we got them to focus of the right candidate qualities and ask the appropriate questions.

Take for example your local symphony orchestra; they have the same problem where people with visions of "making it" show up not being able to play at all. Want to audition? Send us an audition tape and a check. When you show up for the audition, you'll play a selection from these pieces and be asked to sight read this music. It is ironic that for an industry that is in a sense so subjective that the gates in the hiring process are more concrete.

To make an analogy, the software world is akin to:

Interviewer: "I see you are interviewing for the 1rst chair violin. The 3rd chair tuba player is really into experimental music, he would like to transpose Vivaldi's Four Seasons into a new scale with 12.5 notes per octave with a slight progressive jazz leaning. Oh, and since we all know there is pressure in performing in front of an audience, you have 30 seconds to think before the 2nd chair begins to throw rotten food at you. Reaction to stress and all you know...here is your tuba."

"But I don't play tuba...Are you asking me to play tuba? Am I going to be playing this nutcase's new music as part of our program?"

"Sigh...you don't know music do you?"

"Interviews are necessarily more stressful than typical work. That's not just a property of whiteboard coding."

My sister, a pediatric ER nurse would disagree with you. The interviews are largely behavioral and are a breeze. No dummy is wheeled in with head trauma, random "new" diseases aren't invented and asked to be treated, etc. The simple fact of the matter is if hospitals hired in the same way, they would have no staff.

I agree but have a bit different take...

"For instance, machine learning is now widely used for surveillance and advertising in ways that violate basic presumptions about privacy rights."

Those same mathematical techniques are also being used to more accurately detect cancer in MRI scans. Saying everyone needs to be held responsible for second order effects is unrealistic and ultimately damaging to society. Blaming the toolmaker for things they cannot control will only cause no tools to be made.

To me it points to a larger issue in our society that we are on a trend of completely removing context. Context no longer matters, what matters are the effects, regardless of whether you can reasonably be held accountable for them or not. It is thought-crime induced by those who in the same breath rail against that totalitarian behavior and then skip to implementing a version of it themselves.

A number of people on this thread immediately jump to the argument on surveillance and data privacy which is a useful discussion but tangential to what is being proposed in the original article. The article is moral hand-wringing with zero clarity or practicality. And the judge of who is culpable or not is left to a hysterical press, driven by a hysterical and sometimes uninformed public.

Look at what this behavior has done to political (and personal) discourse. Now imagine it being applied to science. No thank you.

What are the limits of culpability and what are you responsible for? The article is pushing that definition beyond the first order effects of safety. And the proposed solution is that gate keeping is done by the press and the public. How well do you think that will go?

If you write software that replaces someone's job are you "culpable"? If you create a phone and people are killed when someone texts and drives are you "culpable"? If you create a better facial recognition program as part of building a secure access systems and someone uses that system to discriminate are you "culpable"?

I find this unending process of creating "victims" just so they can be "saved" as tiresome.

And yet that is not even close to the hand-wringing being discussed in the article:

"In my first ever AI class, we learned about how a system had been developed to automate something that had previously been a person’s job. Everyone said, “Isn’t this amazing?” — but I was concerned about who did these jobs. It stuck with me that no one else’s ears perked up at the significant downside to this very cool invention."

"Then, the gatekeepers are the press, and it’s up to them to ask what the negative impacts of the technology are."

Building an entire society of victims and allowing the hysterical press, who are in the business of feeding a hysterical public sounds like a formula for paralysis.

"If Boeing and Airbus weren't artificially inflating administrative barriers to entry we'd definitely have more competition, and consumers would benefit, not suffer."

From the article: "For Bombardier, development of its new C-Series of planes took more time and more money - $6 billion in all - than it had anticipated, requiring what amounted to a bailout from the governments of Canada and Quebec."

Stop and parse that for a second.

So, make city living even more expensive?

"Very few of the lessons my parents taught me apply in the corporate world. Be honest and straight with people, assume good intent, take responsibility, etc."

"All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane every time my career is rewarded for suppressing those behaviors."

The corporate world is only a reflection of the society that makes it up. There are plenty of people who are dishonest and manipulative. There is no real way to "fix" the corporate world.

Ergo there are only two ways to fix it, both of them only involving yourself:

I see a number of comments here opining that the current workforce health crisis is driven by a "money is happiness" society. You know what money buys you in this case? Freedom. The freedom to act how you wish and not care about this game.

Once you are free from that, it is a matter of perspective:

"The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

- "This is Water", David Foster Wallace https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf

"Third level of safety: optional part-time work."

Don't you find it hilarious that a blog on financial independence tries to talk about safety nets vs. risks and devolves to: Well, sh*t just get a job I guess, but call it optional because you are "retired"? I do.

It is how you end up with 80 year old wal-mart greeters.

From my own experience, most people have not. I work in aerospace and there are a large number of employees with 30+ years tenure who are of retirement age who need to stick around because of the quality and cost of the health insurance coverage. Engineers with good salaries who have saved much more than the average Joe, much more than most "financially independent" bloggers.

You can't claim to be financially independent and come back two years later with this gem:

"The secret is that my wife is no longer really retired, and in fact she started a business that is now big enough to FUND OUR ENTIRE FAMILY'S LIFESTYLE."

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/03/06/etsy-shop/

If not outright dishonest, it certainly gives the off appearance that you can't put any weight in the numbers he is throwing out.

I guess I'm one of those "retirement police" who hates seeing a huckster give bad advice while eschewing talking about the real increase in realized risk you take by retiring early and not considering it in your plan. As one of the previous comments stated: your budget is not static, investment returns are not guaranteed, life events and medical situations change drastically.

So when I see, "I made it so can you", I want to respond, "Come back to me when you are 90 and on your death bed and talk with me again." I've seen the cancer treatment bills and what they do to someone with 10x your "financial independent" worth.

I really hope that more people would look at it that way.

Just my own personal experience, but I've honestly seen the trial-by-fire method used either at the sole exclusion of, or weighted more heavily than actually talking to the candidate about their past work. I can't count the number of times in the past where I've encountered this.

At most points when this occurs and it seems there is no end in sight, I typically state: "You know, I've solved some pretty interesting problems over my career, why don't you ask me about that, I think problem xyz it is similar to what you are looking for; let me tell you why". Subsequent laughs and eye-rolls later you get a canned: "I don't care about that, I care about things that matter to me" response.

When you start selecting "problems" for candidates to work through, you add additional layers of interference into the activity: 1) Have you selected the right interviewer for this type of questioning line? Can they describe a the problem adequately? Can they ask probing questions? Are they only able to follow one line of thought? Are they patient? Are they arrogant? 2) Does the problem test for what you think it does? 3) Is the candidate able to think on their feet on a minutes notice on a topic they may not be familiar with in front of an audience?

Where I work (aerospace, embedded systems) interviews are ~75% behavioral and ~25% "technical" with a major focus on having the candidate work through problems they have solved in the past, with the interviewer asking questions not to break but to really learn about them.

I have family members that work at various levels within the medical profession, none of them get the "generic problem solving" trial-by-fire experience when interviewing. (Yes, I realize there is a higher level of trust there, certifications, boards and all. I just think it is a bit crazy that we cannot find a better way).

People have been using this tactic for ages, whether it be for political, professional or personal gains.

The software engineer who is rewarded for putting out the fires, when in reality they are a serial arsonist...

Modern progressivism (https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberal...) ...

So on and so forth...

No one wants to put in the real, hard work and society continues to reward the facade.

In assessing the current poisonous political environment with respect to all parties...

“It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.” -Terry Pratchett, "Jingo"

From the long view, no. Regimes that use pain as control inevitably break as at a certain point, people will no longer willing give that up. This is history.

Walk down to a local AA meeting and see people who at some point willingly made a decision and who are now, unfortunately controlled by it. This will always exist.

"I just struggle with understanding what's wrong with people these days."

On one hand, it is fundamental human nature (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_wi...).

On the other hand, it is a trade off. Your post to HN can be mined, aggregated in a similar manner. Even a level before that, your access to the internet can be mined, aggregated and a profile built of you by your ISP. You are voluntarily cooperating with that are you not?

Bull.

The question as-is ("How do you create a memory leak in java?") is poorly constructed and will, a significant portion of time, lead down the wrong path when interviewing. Both you and the interviewee have to make assumptions.

If you want to know if they have had to deal optimizing memory usage, simply ask. What was the problem? How did you detect it? How did you solve it? No ambiguity, no assumptions.

"It's a very tellin question if they claim Java experience and can't say anything coherent about leaks or "unintentionally reachable" objects."

You didn't answer the root of the OPs question -- why is that knowledge important to the application you are building or the work you are doing? Sorry, you failed his interview...

"That is, in a Darwinian way, clearly the product survived WITHOUT implementing the changes someone thought it needed."

...and this is one reason that many business die, the assumption that past performance is indicative of future results.

The reality is that you are making a bet with unlimited downside (e.g. a naked call in stock parlance) when you don't address technical debt.

"Sometimes, debts are written down."

One word: Enron.

"I've heard from multiple people that I'm the nicest and most patient person they've ever met. I don't know where I went wrong. I used to be intelligent."

I can certainly identify with those feelings. So much of my self-worth early in my career was based on how I felt about my intelligence / ability, etc.

Here is the thing, though, most software is extremely ephemeral. What you write today is gone tomorrow, either because technology shifts, user interest shifts or simply for no damn good reason at all. Here is another thing: your intelligence is also ephemeral. Eventually, you will slow down with age.

What doesn't disappear is the impact you make on the people around you. For every instance I've felt of stupidity and worthlessness from a failed interview or a problem that was just too much for me to grasp, I can take a step back and temper those feelings with a mere handful of comments of appreciation from the past. "That project we worked on 5 years ago was a pile of sh*t but man I enjoyed working with you, we worked as a team you weren't an insufferable a$$hole like that lead we had." "When we worked on project xyz and you were the architect and let me research and develop new approaches and gave me a safe place to fail without really failing; that really helped me in my career." Those comments when you get them are golden.

Again, none of this is to say that your ability isn't part of your worth; it's just that it does not comprise the entirety of who you are. Most certainly you did not get married because your wife thought you were Stephen Hawking. Most certainly you are valued to me as you remind me of what I continue to go through. Most certainly you are of value in many ways.

The elephant in the room is how do you measure fairness? We devolve into measuring the end results in terms of equality which ultimately provide a negative feedback loop and move the conversation and solutions into trying to make things equal instead of fair.

Governmental policy devolves into this to the detriment of everyone involved.

Entire political campaigns are centered around not making things "fair" but "equal". Watch and see who communities vote for and why they vote for them; it is closely related to the child who prefers to have one and everyone else zero as opposed to everyone getting two.

"Do I enjoy decomposing problems into detailed lists of instructions? Am I good at abstract conceptual thinking? Am I comfortable being a digital construction worker?"

It is funny that these three questions appear one after the other in the article yet the author doesn't seem to understand the connection or the fallacy of the analogy.

Construction workers don't have to define what a 2x4 is, it simply exists. Translators don't create a new words. The developer has to work simultaneously in the world of the abstract and the concrete; the 2x4 doesn't actually exist in his world, he needs an abstraction to stand in for reality.

Very few people are able to simultaneously juggle both the abstract and the concrete. Which is why the majority of people quit; they do not have a mechanism for these mappings; how to take a requirement, represent it as a series of instructions, through the abstraction of a language.

So yes, academies are nonsense, but by using poor analogies, we simply reinforce the notion that predicated them in the first place.

Sounds like you might be suffering from "imposter syndrome". A good number of high functioning, highly productive people who really care about their work suffer from this. It's normal and once you learn to control is, it can differentiate you from your peers.

http://lifehacker.com/overcoming-impostor-syndrome-what-to-d...