My dad was a military analyst in the Balkans in the 90s. I am telling this story second-hand, but I'll try to get it correct. While in Albania, my dad shared a taxi with an older Albania gentleman. The man recounted his time working in the Albanian military in the 60s. His platoon had constructed a large number of bunkers, more than any other platoon. The dictator Enver Hoxha was slated to visit, to give them an award for building the most bunkers in the whole country. When Enver arrived, he walked around, and looked at a bunch of the bunkers they had constructed. He pointed at the bunkers. "Look! You have not used enough rebar! Obviously, you are trying to jeopardize the security of our nation, by neglecting to use enough rebar! You are traitors to Albania!" He swiftly sentenced the entire platoon of young men straight to 30 years in prison, which they approximately served. This man, after serving this time, had just gotten freed from jail. The taxi was transporting him from the halfway house.
Readit Newsqez2 commented on Bunkers in Albania en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bun... · Posted by u/samclemens
qez2 commented on We just caught our first "BANANA " twitter.com/karinemellata... · Posted by u/redbell
It seems to me that both job seekers and employers hiring now are largely victims of the arms race that's been going on for over a decade now. The LLM angle is just the latest note in it.
The thing is, it is not a symmetric situation. Barring serious outliers, the worst that's going to happen to a company that can't find "the perfect candidate" is that they hire someone who is suboptimal. Maybe they even don't have the skills they claimed at all. Oh no, efficiency will be down and the execs' stock options might not be worth quite as much.
On the other hand, the worst thing that's going to happen to a typical job seeker who can't find a company that will hire them is that they will run through their savings—wait, do they have savings? this is America we're talking about, so probably not!—and be unable to pay their bills, causing them to become homeless.
So forgive me for having exactly zero sympathy for the companies that perpetuate this ugly arms race.
It's true that both sides of the arms race make things worse. But the thing is, at risk of sounding like a child: companies started it.
We've all heard the complaints, "why does this job make me submit my resume, and then fill out a form with all the same information on my resume??" and "why is this job listed as entry level when it requires 3 years of experience??", and "this job posting isn't even maintained, it only exists so someone can say they did due diligence before they hired their friend" -- these are all very valid complaints. And also a few of my complaints: why is every job posting super long, require a large amount of highly specific technologies that can easily be learned on-the-job, and also paradoxically really vague about the /actual/ checkboxes that they'll be using to screen out your resume? And what is the point of cover letters; what am I supposed to say on the cover letter that wouldn't be covered on my resume?
Companies have been doing this BS for many years. I don't blame people at all for adopting strategies which let them spam applications. I haven't even heard one coherent argument, from the hiring managers who claim to despise it, why spamming applications is supposed to be bad in the first place.
qez2 commented on My favourite Git commit (2019) dhwthompson.com/2019/my-f... · Posted by u/karagenit
I know the OP didn't mean it this way, but after reading HackerNews for the last decade or whatnot, it never ceases to surprise me how often developer complaints stem from developers just not doing their damn job.
"Almost nobody ever sees it.... nobody reads anything other than the first 50 chars of the headline."
On the one hand, I get it. If a tool makes something difficult, people are less likely to do it, and as engineers we want to make tools to cause people to fall into the pit of success. So, improving this part of git makes sense.
On the other hand, just do your damn job. If a coworker doesn't understand a code change, because they didn't bother to read the commit message, they're a bad developer. If they didn't write a git commit message because "no one is going to read it anyway", they're a lazy engineer. These things aren't excuses, they're incompetence, and not everything needs to cater to the least competent people in our profession.
> If they didn't write a git commit message because "no one is going to read it anyway", they're a lazy engineer.
If an engineer spends an hour writing a commit message that no one reads, that's an unproductive engineer, compared to where they should be.
I have to admit, I am lazy. I don't spread seeds by hand; I use a tractor. I don't swim across the ocean; I use an air plane. Likewise, I don't write documentation in commit messages; I write documentation in PR descriptions, READMEs, and official document sources. You got me, I'm incompetent.
My "job" is to write software, not follow some arbitrary "pure" practices.
> If a coworker doesn't understand a code change, because they didn't bother to read the commit message
And I would argue we shouldn't cater to developers who make documentation difficult to access for everyone else by hiding it where only crappy tools can reach it.
In my first CS class at university the professor started with "We are not going to teach you programming. You can do it on your own time. This program is called computer science, and that's what it will cover."
It was a bit harsh at the time, but over the next semester or two plenty of students switched majors when they couldn't keep up with graph theory, combinatorics, linear algebra, advanced algorithms, computer architecture, compilers. Too many people are enrolling in CS programs these days because they want a quick ticket to a cushy tech job, and I'm happy that's not what reputed programs are catering to.
Funny enough there were a few classes on debugging, but it wasn't about the process of finding bugs in code but rather "here's the GNU debugger, crack it open and figure out what's going on inside". I also don't understand how one can even "teach" debugging like the author envisions. It's like saying why don't schools teach problem solving or why don't schools teach intelligence. If students are getting regular non-trivial programming assignments they have no choice but to develop the skill themselves.
> Too many people are enrolling in CS programs these days because they want a quick ticket to a cushy tech job
Or maybe, people are enrolling in CS programs these days because they want to learn how to program. Which is a perfectly appropriate skill to teach. The fact that schools fail to teach it is their defect.
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qez2 commented on A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/deter... · Posted by u/z7
A state of mind that disposes one to various thoughts and behaviors. There doesn't seem to be any tension between belief and a lack of free will.
There is indeed a tension of one defines free will in terms of thoughts and behaviors.
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