42 comes to Silicon Valley: free, non profit coding university - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OKfktv3k-0&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> What is the reason for having the age restriction of 30? Does it not implicitly contribute to the existing ageism issue in tech industry. Why can't a professional working in another industry learn something new at the age of 35 or a mother who wants to come back to the workforce after her kids start going to school?

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing most people over 30 can not commit to a 3-year full time study, but it's weird indeed that they're not even allowed in.

<comment><USER4> _3 years of study_?? What!? That's insane, you do not need 3 years of study to enter this industry. At that point, I may as well go and get a Computer Science degree at a local college and at least have a legitimate degree.

<comment><USER5> Would it be tuition free ?

<comment><USER4> Can you afford to take 3 years off? Tuition at a community college is pennies compared to living expenses for 3 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why did they move to such an expensive area? If their goal is to provide services and help everyone why not build your university in an area like Detroit?

No one who is really interested won't go because of the location and it makes rent really cheap.

Hell, you could also have the Detroit government chip in and give you a great deal on land. What is bad for an economy about bringing some of our nations smartest programmers to a single location?

I'd love this if I could afford to go to it.

<comment><USER7> So...start a coding school in a place in the world where you are likely to find a very dense population of people who already know how to write code ?

<comment><USER6> If you want to go to teach people how to program, then going some place where most people already know how to program lowers your prospective client base.

If you go to some place that is currently economically unstable, you can have a huge client base as many people there will want to improve themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I am to strive to become a "very valuable asset for any company" ... I guess dehumanization is bad only when it is done by noncorporation people.

Also - can we stop with teaching to code already. Assume instead of literacy and writing in schools we thought people how to flip pages on books with green covers. Or we were teaching people how to multiply only by 8.

Without the broader body of IT literacy, coding is not that useful skill. Except for future corporate drones working on waterfall.

We need to give people basic IT literacy - the critical mass of knowledge that allows them to obtain more and diverse knowledge on their own - so when faced with a problem to know how to formulate a question and where to look for solution.

<comment><USER5> It is not only teaching development, it's teaching UNIX, 3d, Security and much more [0].

In fact, the most important thing it's teaching is to learn by yourself. Most people just don't know how to learn without a teacher and that's the best skill you can learn if you wish to work in the industry.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(school)#Academics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_\(school\)#Academics)

<comment><USER8> That is surprising. But it seems that the talking heads in the video have not gotten that memo. Come to us to make 3d games, AI and viruses would have been a killer slogan. And instant differentiation from all the others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The age restrictions are odd. 3 years to learn a skill seems too much. Having to apply, so it is becomes an elitist programs, seems wrong. And their web site describes having to prove your worth in a 4 week 24x7 code fest before getting final acceptance into the program, which sounds like they do not understand the concept of burnout.

There are so many ways to learn to code... the only part these guys seem to have right is "free"

<comment><USER10> If you like coding and learning, the 24x7 coding period is a blast

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > There are no school fees: running costs for the 10 first years (estimated at > 20 to 50 million euros) have been personally funded by Xavier Niel. 42 will > train each year one thousand students...

There are so many billionaires and millionaires in Silicon Valley who could easily fund a school like this, it simply baffles me that none of them have a tuition-free school of their own.

</comment><comment><USER11> So Xavier Niel ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Niel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Niel) French entrepreneur, do not own any US interest) is committing millions from his personal fortune to open a FREE school to teach programming and computer science in the US to student regardless of their academic background and commenters critics the initiative because the school have an age limit.

I really love 42, and I'm happy that they open a new school in US. Their curriculum is great and previous iteration have give us technical talents like the docker team.

<comment><USER12> He invested in more than 1000 startups, some of them in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From their site:

WELCOME TO 42,THE MOST DARING CODING UNIVERSITY. DISRUPTIVE EDUCATION. TUITION FREE. NON-PROFIT. OPEN TO ALL.

False Advertising.

"OPEN TO ALL" "42 is open to anyone who is between the ages of 18 and 30"

Perhaps someone there should attend a class on demographics.

I suspect in the land of 42, you don't exist if you are <18 or >30\. Such special little snowflakes they are.

<comment><USER14> I'm 49, mostly agree with your sentiment, but shouty all caps and the tiresome "snowflake" thing totally ruins your point. Sigh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why not call it 30? 42 is 12 years too old apparently.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why the 18-30 age limit? Seems a bit... ageist?

<comment><USER17> I couldn't agree more with you. This seems like an old model of assuming that those under 30 can't work well with those over yet they are expected to enter a diverse workforce. I'm 37 and in my 4th month at a school similar to 42 in SF. I'm glad that Holberton School didn't have that age restriction or I'd still be looking for another option.

<comment><USER16> Yea, with you on that. 32 and back in school. There are a few folks that are late 30s, early 40s. Sure majority are early to mid twenties, but that hasn't stopped anyone from working together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised with all the negative comments focusing on the age limit. Xavier Niel committed millions to launch the school in Paris and it was an immense success which already benefits to the whole ecosystem. What is not said in the video is the type of candidates they are looking for. In France, as education is free, traditional "excellent" high school student don't apply to 42 and prefer to secure a place in the notorious engineering schools. 42 is rather focused on giving a second chance to bright people that didn't fit into the traditional system. The test to get qualified for the 4weeks session is only about fit/culture questions: no maths, no logic, no programming. No skills required, everyone has the same chance. Although the target in the US might be different as tuition fees are a real problem there. Curious to see what type of students will go there.

<comment><USER19> > Curious to see what type of students will go there.

Well, we know they'll all be between the ages 18-30.

And yes, tuition fees are a real problem here, for people of all ages. Shame he chose to limit the program to a demographic that is already welcome and advantaged in the US's technical community.

<comment><USER20> All people over 30 can send us an email and we look To all files. When we think it can match we let people over 30 to come. In Paris we have a lot of people over 30. We also work with the french gov service for unemployed people over 50 and we have special cursus for them To give them basics to apply To new jobs. But the Time and investment needed the first year can clearly destroy people over 30 who have already family children ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am currently 41, went to a Coding bootcamp in Bay area and after I graduated, I struggled to find a job for 6-8 months but ultimately succeeded to land one as a developer job. But I have had to drop $12k on tuition which I think it will take couple of years to pay off. The bootcamp did very little to add value to my learning skill and portfolio of projects.

I would have applied to institution like this in a heartbeat but I guess 42 would have been a no-entry for me. Why this discrimination? And also it is irony that they wont take anybody above 30 much less 40 years old but the institution is named as 42. Can anybody tell me why the organization named itself 42?

<comment><USER22> 42 is from Douglas Adams, the answer to the question of life and all that.

I do t know about the age limit, but it might be some (possibly faulty) reasoning about commitment. Staff have been tight-lipped. We have some people from the Pole Emploi (unemployment agency) here at the moment, and they are a bit older, so some kind of trial is underway.

<comment><USER21> Ah. got it. I suspect they discourage people older than 30 assuming it will be tough to get a position in a age-biased job market? May be. Just my guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's an already existing university in San Francisco named Holberton School running on this non-profit, peer-reviewed, project-based non traditional curriculum. If the arbitrary limit set by 42 excludes you, Holberton doesn't and diversity is actually one of their grander mandates. I have spoken with the current students and school staff: they really are getting quality training. (Disclaimer: I'm a mentor at this school)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd love to signup to 42, specially after E.E. to become a soft. Eng. In fact I've been looking something like this (an internship or codecamp) that will accept someone from abroad. But as always, the need for the in-person signup and test it's what deters me.

</comment><comment><USER25> From the website:

> 42 allows students who have successfully completed the selection tests to > continue their training at the Silicon Valley or Paris campuses (under the > condition that they have the necessary immigration visa for their choice. > The visa formalities need to be completed by the student, 42 cannot give a > visa).

In the application form itself:

> If you are applying for 42 Paris you must either be a citizen of the > European Union or have a valid titre de séjour while you are a student at > 42.

> 42 cannot provide immigration visas for students. If you are applying for 42 > Fremont you must be a citizen of the United States or have a valid green > card while you are a student at 42.

What does this mean? Would 42 be able to act as a sponsor of sort if a student is successfully admitted into the program, or will this be open only to those fortunate enough to either be born in the US or EU, or have a residence permit of some sort?

<comment><USER22> From what the staff have told us in Paris, 42 isn't approved by the authorities, so they cannot use the official channels to offer visa sponsorships.

Some students sign up for language courses so they can attend. Sad, but not much that can be done at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is something that looks very interesting. I wonder if this would ever come to the UK. I know France is just across the channel but there surely is massive demand for this in the UK as well.

<comment><USER22> There is something similar called NMITE, which is run by a few universities.

If you want a 42-like school, speak with your local MP. 42 is run on a budget of €7m (approximately) per year, and it would be very affordable if the government got behind it with a Royal Charter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Has there been any discussion as to what happens after Neil's funding runs out? Is the school then going to start charging tuition?

<comment><USER20> Nop. We have already funding solution for now or after.</comment></comment>


Inside the Marriott-Starwood Loyalty Program Turbulence - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-marriott-starwood-loyalty-program-turbulence-1543416010 <comment><USER2> I travel 80% of the year and before the merger, I was splitting my stays between Starwood and Hyatt. Occasionally I would be forced to stay at a Hilton or Marriott because of smaller market coverage.

Since the merger, I have barely stayed at Starwood/Marriott and don't plan on giving much business to them next year.

I typically stay at hotels 150-200 nights a year and with Starwood's upper tier, I was being treated very well and never had issues getting an agent on the phone for changes. Now, at the same level (Platinum Premier w/Ambassador), I have found myself spending more time waiting to talk to an agent and basic requests going unfulfilled.

Add to this that Marriott's website is one of the worst I have ever used and I just don't see much reason to stick around.

<comment><USER3> > with Starwood's upper tier, I was being treated very well

What do you get out of hotel rewards? With airline rewards I can upgrade to first, which is a pretty big deal to be able to do and makes a massive difference to my comfort. What do you get with hotels? A suite instead of a room? Doesn't seem worth it? Free hotel stays for personal use? Do you want to stay in a same corporate business hotels that you are doing a lot for business in your free time as well?

Hilton give me a free bottle of water when I stay. It's not very inspiring.

<comment><USER4> > What do you get out of hotel rewards

Starwood in particular

1) used to have great deals for converting points to airline miles,

2) higher tiers earned very generous point multiples, and

3) offered a pay-with-points structure that was exceptionally generous all around--tons of points earned at higher-end properties which went really far at lower-end properties.

In addition, an AMEX Platinum card provided Gold tier membership, and the AMEX Starwood card compounded your point multiples--basically you just kept your Platinum current but paid for everything with the Starwood card. Moochers like me could enjoy many of the same perks as power travelers. For several years I think I spent at least as many free nights at Starwood properties as paid, including several paid vacations with family--it was amazing how far points went at Fourpoint properties in Asia.

Since the Marriott merger the calculus sucks. IIRC Chase Card + Hilton Honors is the best deal now, but nothing will ever be as amazing as the AMEX + Starwood program. I was religious about staying at Starwood properties, even if I had to pay a premium in a particular city. But lately I'm as likely to stay at a Marriott as any other hotel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having worked for both companies in my old career this is unsurprising. Marriott has a history of changing things for the worse.

One great example is when they bought Ritz Carlton. They said they wouldn't change much, and then did a sweeping rebranding (changing a lot of internal verbiage, changing the 20 basics to the 12 service values, etc). A lot of the veterans felt like the brand lost a core part of its identity then.

Starwood's rewards program was award winning and pretty much everyone I knew considered it best in the industry. It's unfortunate that they bought such a great program and can't even integrate it with theirs. It's really sad and I can't imagine them salvaging it.

</comment><comment><USER6> One data point: I'm a former Marriott loyalist and was Platinum for many years in my 100% travel days. I travel less now, so I was down to just Gold, which was still fine... but when the plans were merged and that became "Gold Elite" (read: the new Silver), they stripped away lounge access: no more free breakfast, no more access to a quiet place to work, have a drink or coffee with a friend, etc.

So now I don't book with Marriott/SPG anymore. Why would I?

<comment><USER7> Me too, basically. I had Gold status (30 nights) with lounge access, which was super-useful. Now that got shifted to Platinum (50 nights), Marriott is a much tougher sell.

But there are credit cards that will (as of 2019) give you 15 elite qualifying nights per year so Platinum will be "only" 35 nights... not that much different.

The SPG Gold status was about the last useful benefit I got from Amex platinum though so that card is probably dead to me now.

<comment><USER8> > _I had Gold status (30 nights) with lounge access, which was super-useful. > Now that got shifted to Platinum (50 nights)_

Marriott seems to be running into the same problem as American airline rewards: counting nights and miles, only, doesn't adequately differentiate between high-spend and low-spend nights and miles. So you have to set the nightly rate such that someone staying at your cheapest property can access perks at the most-expensive property. That, in turn, ends up making the perks less valuable for those who frequent your pricy properties. (This is Gresham's Law [1].)

The loyalty programs should have been kept separate, with the benefit of high- value programs getting credit at low-value ones (but not the other way, at least not at parity).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law)

<comment><USER9> This sounds like a misinterpretation of Gresham's Law. That's specifically talking about currency, which I suppose in this case would be the reward points. There is no "good" vs "bad" version of the currency though. Certain types of points are not driving other types of points out of circulation. The value of the points depends on how you use them, with people more eager to spend points on high-value redemptions.

<comment><USER8> > _There is no "good" vs "bad" version of the currency though. Certain types > of points are not driving other types of points out of circulation_

Imagine Marriott has two brands: Fairfield Inn and Ritz-Carlton. They each have a rewards program which grants one free night for every night stayed.

Now suppose, in a fit of idiocy, the rewards programs are made cross- compatible. So a Ritz-Carlton reward night can be spent at Fairfield Inn and vice versa. Where do you think the rewards will be earned? Where do you think they'll be spent? The "bad" (Fairfield Inn rewards) drove out the "good" (Ritz-Carlton rewards).

I accentuated the number of brands, magnitude of their value difference and rewards program juiciness. This was to bring into relief the resulting effect. In reality, these terms--and the effect--are smaller. Still, Gresham's law applies if one treats rewards nights earned at different hotels as different currencies. They've simply, now, been brought into a currency union.

<comment><USER9> The issue I'm having with this comparison is that you are equating the "nights stayed" with the points earned (the more accurate currency).

>They each have a rewards program which grants one free night for every night stayed.

It's a lot more fair to say for every $1000 spent, you have enough points to redeem a free night. In which case, some people might choose to spend more nights at the cheaper Fairfield Inn, and some might choose to stay fewer nights at the luxury Ritz. The bad money is not driving out the good.

It's true when it comes to qualifying nights, people will try to hit elite night requirements at cheaper properties. But that's not driving out the business for higher-end properties. Especially because award redemption is (mostly) based on how much you spend, not how many nights you stay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny, I've been unable to get credit for any of my stays Marriott hotels in the last year. I rarely stay in Marriott/Starwood, so I assumed that my loyalty account had just expired or otherwise gotten in to a bad state even though I could still log in to the account online. I don't stay in hotels enough to get to higher rewards tiers so I just wrote it off. This likely explains all my failed attempts to accrue nights...

<comment><USER11> At least you could log in. After I merged my Mariott and SPG accounts, trying to log in to either one is met with a "You have already merged this account" error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I guess I'm one of the odd people out that hasn't had a real problem with the merger. I'm only a Platinum member, so I can't speak to perks at highest levels, but I've had no problem getting ahold of regular Platinum customer service. I've also had no trouble getting room upgrades (I've ALWAYS had to ask for them, despite the claims of 'automatic' upgrades), no trouble getting early/late checkout, still get treated by staff like they care about me as someone with an upper tier loyalty status, etc. No technical issues, and all of my stays have recorded just fine (knock on wood!).

On top of the status perks being the same, I'm loving the increased availability of hotels. There's been times where I've wanted to book at a specific Starwood property, but because it's rates were way higher than they normally are (e.g. 220/night to nearly 500/night), I'd end up fairly downmarket in comparison because I don't want any pushback on my expense report. The addition of Marriott properties has solved that for me a couple of times already this year - the W or St. Regis is way up, but the Ritz-Carlton or JW Marriott have been reasonable.

I will say I have found the lounges in Marriott properties to be a little less nice than their Starwood compatriots, however.

<comment><USER13> For what it's worth, I do +/\- 50 days a year and haven't noticed anything aside from the migration process being clumsy from a website UX perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I never gave a sh __about worthless hotel rewards inviting you to stick with their brand, pay more and sacrifice more important reasons for questionable (always in a future) benefits.

I choose hotel for proximity or convenience to my destination, or cost.

Hence this loyalty turbulence is largely a non-event for me.

I never played hotel currency games and when their values goes down - it does not affect my decision to stay at that hotel or at their competition next door.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been SPG platinum for the last 6 years and am also lifetime gold. The big pain point for me is that you can no longer qualify by stays OR nights. I don't travel quite enough to meet the platinum qualification by nights but always did with stays. Given that I have no chance of requalifying for platinum next year I'll be shifting my spend to other brands to see how they treat their frequent guests.

<comment><USER12> The Starwood Amex is going from 5 qualifying night credit to 15 qualifying night credit next year. It might be enough to get me plat premier some years, so I'm excited about that.

Would the extra 10 nights on it help you get regular Plat on nights vs. stays?

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately no as the plat night requirement also bumped up to 75 from 50. I'm a big Kimpton fan so now that IHG bought them I shifted enough of my travel this year to IHG to qualify for Spire Elite. I doubt the treatment will be as good as SPG Plat but we shall see.

<comment><USER12> Platinum is still 50 nights, and has basically all the same perks. You do go from 10 suite night awards to 5 suite night awards

The 75 night tier gets you your additional 5 awards back, and bumps you up to 75% point bonus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Loved the old SPG. By far the best perk was getting 1 point per dollar, then being able to transfer that to almost every airline. American was 20K points for 25K miles. International Business class tickets would be around 120K miles round trip, so $100K spend for $5K plane tickets (5% return). Back in the day american used to count all miles towards the 2M mile club (lifetime platinum), so I was able enter it mainly using credit card earned miles.

Hotel stays were often times 12K points for a $400/night hotel in maui (3.3% return).

When they converted SPG to marriott they did it at a 1spg:3marriott conversion rate, but ongoing only earns at a $1:2 point rate. The card is a significantly worse value.

</comment><comment><USER17> Then, question for all the readers: what's the best loyalty program now, for someone who doesn't travel too much? (50 nights/year).

<comment><USER12> I would argue the SPG/Marriott program is still excellent at 50 nights a year. That's still Platinum status, and some of my other posts in here detail the benefits I enjoy from plat status.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recently tried to transfer miles from Marriott to another airline.

What a nightmare. The miles apparently got "lost". I had to make many phone calls which meant being on hold for 30 minutes each time.

Wasted probably a full work day trying to sort everything out with them.

Eventually, I just gave up as I didn't want to waste more time with this company.

About 5 weeks later my miles appeared in the airline account. Very frustrating experience.

</comment><comment><USER19> Because of stuffups I now have three Marriott account I can't merge. Nightmare of lemon scented towel proportions except for the moment of discretionary payback: choice of hotel. Vote with your feet people.

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://outline.com/cwFG2V](https://outline.com/cwFG2V)

</comment><comment><USER21> And then there's this: [https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/30/starwood-hotels- says-500-m...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/30/starwood-hotels- says-500-million-guest-records-stolen-in-massive-data- breach/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29)

Tl;dr: 500m guest records stolen from Starwood in data breach

</comment><comment><USER22> _Most involved data conversion and software bugs._

I tried to book a haircut using my barber's new online reservation thing. Of course it was all fucked up.

Everything's fucked up and no one cares. I wonder what it will take to change the mentality around quality/testing in these companies.

<comment><USER23> Most businesses just don't seem to respect good/working tech. Even though it's often critical to their bottom line, they'll think "$5,000?! My idiot nephew could do it for $100. Those coder monkeys think what they do is soooo hard as to charge $5,000?? Ha! Look, this guy here says he can do it for $250." <1 year later> "I hate tech and every techie. They think they're god's gift to humanity. My system never works. I paid good money for it" ($250). I think the corporate equivalent to that is, "It costs _what_?! Outsource it overseas right now!"

<comment><USER24> I don't believe this is exactly right: the major problem is most businesses can't distinguish which techies are worth $250 or $5,000 up front. So they make the choice of going cheap and hoping it works out. Some of the few do go the premium route, and still end up in a project failure or overrun. So can you fault them?

<comment><USER23> You're right, but I think the general disdain for tech/techies is upstream of their inability to distinguish. Though it's a huge, huge problem trying to identify who/what is worth it and who/what isn't.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TED: What will future jobs look like? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXQrbxD9_Ng

<comment><AUTHOR> This is one of the best talks I've seen this year. On the challenges society is facing as we move into 'the new machine age' as more and more jobs are done by machines. Very inspiring and challenging glimpse of the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> The talk also touches on concepts like a guaranteed minimum income.

<comment><USER2> > guaranteed minimum income

A guaranteed minimum income is basically welfare.

Welfare enslaves the poor.

Instead of using income that is not work-dependent or welfare checks as a means to try eliminate poor health and quality of life, allow charitable organizations to help those people instead.

Kids today that can vote don't remember in 1996, Clinton said, "Today, we are ending welfare as we know it," and, "This day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began." They don't know why he said those things. Redistribution and economic tricks to try to raise the poor up don't work. People have to have incentive and work not only because it is something that is important to them, but because it is the way to survive. If you have any doubt of this, read books about those that have won the lottery or who have had rich families and money just handed to them.

Poverty is awful, but money is a curse. The way to assist those that are poor is through charity of time and effort, not through wealth redistribution by the government in any form.</comment></comment></comment>


Pipelight: Use Silverlight in Your Linux Browser to Watch Netflix and Maxdome - <AUTHOR> http://www.webupd8.org/2013/08/pipelight-use-silverlight-in-your-linux.html <comment><USER2> This hack isn't needed anymore - if you're willing to use the Google's closed- source version of Chrome, which has a DRM plugin.

eg [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2824623/ubuntu-linux-gets- net...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2824623/ubuntu-linux-gets-netflix- without-weird-workarounds.html)</comment>


NUKEM – Your service provider for the nuclear industry (uranium supplier) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nukem.de/index.php?id=1&L=1

<comment><USER2> Pretty scary company name for a German business. But looks like these types of businesses are bound to be interesting with that Finland nuclear deal and all.</comment>


Don't ask engineers how long it takes to build a feature, just sell it! - <AUTHOR> http://code.dblock.org/ShowPost.aspx?id=185

<comment><USER2> The title is more provocative than the story. There's actually a lot I agree with there. Nothing is worse than "status update?" emails. If you want to know how a project is going, or you want to accelerate it, come participate and watch what is going on.

</comment><comment><USER3> IMO, just plain wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> do tell! make sure to mention whether you're a pm or dev or someone else</comment></comment>


Ask YC: How important is location when your startup isn't looking for lots of VC money? - <AUTHOR>

I have read in many places that if you are considering a startup, Silicon Valley, Boston and Seattle are your choices for places to work and live.  The odds of success in these places are significantly higher than anywhere else in North America.
I am asking this because I am currently living in Western Canada in a fairly low tech area and my future plans include web startups.
My co-founder and I are trying to weigh the pros and cons of relocating.  Because we are not planning to look for large rounds of funding or to begin a hiring binge in the near future, are there other large benefits to basing our web company out of these "startup friendly" centers?
Does Canada have any areas that stand out as being startup friendly? <comment><USER2> I've asked this before, but it bears repeating:

Have there been many wildly successful tech startups that were based on the premise "save money", to the point that they located themselves some place incredibly cheap (but far outside of tech industry circles)?

I'm not saying it isn't a valid business plan, as I don't know, but I can point to an awful lot of Silicon Valley startups that have been wildly successful, and no wildly successful tech startups from Idaho. It's really cheap to live in Idaho, so you've got a REALLY long runway. Why aren't there success stories? (Expand it to the whole midwest, and the story isn't remarkably better.)

Then again, Kevin Hale from Wufoo told me a great story about a technique he uses in one of his presentations (which are awesome)...he passes around printouts about the top 20 or so fastest growing companies according to Inc. Magazine, and asks questions about them, asking folks to raise their hand if the answer is "yes". One of the questions is "Is the company you're looking at based in California or Boston or New York?" and only one or two hands go up (Wufoo is based in Florida, and thus they take great satisfaction in talking about successful companies outside of the tech startup hubs). But, Inc. Magazine covers stuff that isn't tech.

<comment><USER3> I've not got data, but I'd imagine that reporting bias causes a tendency to conflate the cool web 2.0 and 90's dot-com startups with the tech sector as a whole. There are plenty of less sexy tech companies that are thriving outside of hubs. The technology sector is not a unique snowflake -- microeconomics still applies. Lowering your costs is a good thing.

The world is flat. If you've founded, say, an enterprise software firm with no interest in outside funding and you have all the employees you need, there's no reason to be in a "startup hub" unless you want to be.

<comment><USER2> "The world is flat."

I'm not sure I believe this one. I've lived in a lot of different places...and I _know_ that I build better technology when I'm surrounded by technology people. Humans are social animals, and if your peer group is building next generation technology you're more likely to do the same...likewise, if your peer group is pushing paper, building cars, milking cows, packing chicken, etc. I suspect you're far less likely to be producing the best technology. You might be happier. You might be able to run your company for longer without raising money or running out of what you did raise. But, I doubt you're building the best technology you're capable of building. Maybe I'm unique...maybe nobody else is effected this way, but I doubt it.

Of course, if by saying "enterprise software", you mean "a market no one else is interested in, and thus I can build any old technology I want and people will have to buy mine", then sure. No matter where you are, you'll do fine. But what happens when an agile web-based competitor arrives who are using modern techniques and have hired the best nerds they could find in the technology center where they're based (which are, let's face it, better than the nerds you can find in a non-tech-focused city)?

I also have very little data, I just think the reasoning is flawed somewhere, since whenever I've met someone starting a company in the sticks (often "to save money"), it is fatally flawed from the get-go--often based on five year old thinking. I'm just suggesting that maybe there is a continuum of "tech productivity goodness" and that the Valley is near the top and Idaho is near the bottom, and placing yourself at the bottom of the continuum might be bad for your odds. Balancing other elements is certainly fine...but beware of what you're giving up by "saving money".

In my previous business I did a lot of work in out of the way places ("packing chicken" was actually true of the city where I once worked on a pretty big project, and the IT and software managers there were desperate for talent but simply couldn't hire it at any price)...you keep acting as though "once you have your employees" it doesn't matter where you are. But, employees leave, and if you're lucky your company will grow. You have to hire sometime if you survive.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think the evidence is much stronger that you are than that you're not.

<comment><USER3> _Of course, if by saying "enterprise software", you mean "a market no one else is interested in, and thus I can build any old technology I want and people will have to buy mine", then sure. No matter where you are, you'll do fine. But what happens when an agile web-based competitor arrives who are using modern techniques and have hired the best nerds they could find in the technology center where they're based (which are, let's face it, better than the nerds you can find in a non-tech-focused city)?_

Isn't it presumptuous to think that one's city would dictate one's knowledge of "modern" technology? If you're going to stagnate, you'll do it wherever you live.

I'll concede the point about local staffing but, again, if you've got your team together and build your startup so that it's profitable, you'll have no problem hiring when you need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Canada right now I'd have to say the hottest area is Montreal, with Vancouver and Toronto on a second tier. There's more momentum and innovation going on in Montreal, and some interesting early-stage funds have opened up there.

Toronto has an internet community, but not really a startup community. And Vancouver has a bunch of highlights (Flickr comes to mind), but is really stagnating right now IMO (I live there currently). In Canada, the money and attention disproportionately follows the local tech celebrities, and it's hard to get either if you're starting out on your own. And if it's hard to get investment, it's hard to get your ideas off the ground.

The question of whether to relocate is one that I've thought about quite a bit recently. I think to get a foot in the door, you have to meet the right people first. And it's really hard to meet those people when you're not in a tech- hub. Once you're a success, you can extrapolate that success in your hometown or where-ever with more certainty.

Canadian VCs fawn over local people who have a well-known name in the Valley. I know that for a fact - more than a few startups in town are created by people who are purely riding notoriety from Web 1.0. If you don't have the notoriety, they'll always be suspicious of you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Move to Austin! I consider this THE place to be. It is a tech city, we have Silicon Hills, its MUCH MORE CHEAPER than SF and you have all the commodities of the tech cities like SF, Seattle and Boston. Plus, we have UT Austin, a top 10 school in CS, in case you are looking to recruit.

<comment><USER3> I've been thinking about it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 37signals are in Chicago (and until around 1½ year ago one of them was in Denmark), and Skype was done in Estonia. There are many other stories of successful companies that aren't in the major hubs. So I would say that it is definitely possible. Especially now where almost all business can be taken care of over the web. A designer I know even moved to Thailand, and did his work from the beach without skipping a beat - without his customers knowing about it.

</comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Resources 2\. Talent 3\. Money 4\. Travel Costs / Accessibility

These ideas all come to mind on why you would want to be in a major hub. That said I believe a start up can start anywhere but needs to be prepared to relocate should the needs of the business demand that they do so.

<comment><USER3> _That said I believe a start up can start anywhere but needs to be prepared to relocate should the needs of the business demand that they do so._

Yeah, moving away from major hubs can be a good way to save money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're based in Geneva, Switzerland and Sweden. We even have our own developers (not outsourced) in Bangladesh. Its easy to be distributed, and we've had no problems being in Europe. Geneva is not huge, but I try and get out and meet local entrepreneurs, participate in Open Coffees, talk to some local VCs etc. You can be anywhere if you have a great product and people want it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I started my company in Seattle and just recently moved to SF -- even though Seattle is extremely tech-friendly, it's still like moving from the countryside into the Big City. Ideas abound, it's like the whole city is involved in a big brainstorming session. Even if you don't need more talent or money (lucky you!), your product benefits.</comment>


Warren Buffett's 10 Ways To Get Rich - <AUTHOR> http://www.warrenbuffett.com/warren-buffett-10-ways-to-get-rich/

<comment><USER2> Just to note, warrenbuffett.com is not an official Warren Buffett site. The front page does say this - but this article does not. This doesn't detract from the article's quality - just the provenance of this copy.

</comment><comment><USER3> How about listening to actual rich people, not those who run websites acting as if they know what made someone rich.

<comment><USER4> In that case, may I recommend _The Millionaire Next Door_?

[http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas- Stanley/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas- Stanley/dp/0671015206)

EDIT: Must say I'm not really sure why I was downmodded; this is an excellent book (a classic really) that provides advice from 'actual rich people'. Maybe it's the get-rich-slowly aspect?

<comment><USER5> I haven't read this, but Nasim Taleb talks about it a lot in Fooled by Randomness. For example, Thomas Stanley, the book's author, states that risk taking is a common characteristic that rich people have. Nasim basically says "Yeah, sure, but what about the masses of people who are poor because of their risk taking?"

I recommend reading Fooled by Randomness first and then, if you're still interested, The Millionaire Next Door.

<comment><USER6> That's a good point. Lots of the factoids about rich people don't say anything about all the people who used those approaches. So, besides things like common sense and intuition, it is hard to get a statistically accurate idea about the correlation between the methods and their users' success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> #11: Listen to your own advice and not speculate in derivatives

_(re:[http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstocks/archive/2008/11/...](http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstocks/archive/2008/11/20/buffett- s-huge-derivatives-bet-proves-costly.aspx))_

</comment><comment><USER8> I think "10. Know What Success Really Means" is awesome. Truly shows what a man he is.

</comment><comment><USER9> why is this typo-riddled article, full of "folksy" tales, on the front page? "save money and reinvest profits"? is that so, cap'n obvious? :D

<comment><USER10> It's not obvious. Most of the people on this site, if they sold their website or whatever project for 100.000, will blow at least 20.000 on pointless stuff.

<comment><USER11> I think it is pretty obvious; it's just not easy to restrain yourself from the temptation of getting a new toy, and it's too easy to rationalize why it's not necessary to save right now.

<comment><USER12> The fact that it's obvious but not easy does not necessarily mean that it's not worth reiterating periodically. Quite the opposite.

Another good example of something that's obvious and hard to do is "Make something people want" :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 5\. Watch Small Expenses

...sounds like a good way to lose your best employees. When done without thinking.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who are rich and those who are not.

</comment><comment><USER15> This kind of article would be appropriate for newmogul.com also. Which is run by nickb.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's amazing how many people think that flashy and fancy is more important than common sense which those 10 points were all about!

</comment><comment><USER17> my boss always told me you can either save more or make more, and to ways treat those atleast as equals because the savings usually come with free time. I found this advice better than the 10 but that's probably cause I know my boss; I don't know warren

</comment><comment><USER18> How about this:

Build things people want (and are willing to pay for).

<comment><USER19> Build things people will pay for. It's too easy to build something people want but won't pay for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> why dont you just save money thats what i do</comment>


What is SOPA is a good thing? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/104428814384443083380/posts/9PyE1cxJbtt

<comment><USER2> I dunno, this seems like a prima facie argument where the "inherency" step got missed. Does the solution cause more problems than it fixes? If yes, then don't do that solution, live with the problem.

But I guess that in the case of SOPA, those who imagine themselves plagued by the problem aren't the ones that have to suffer the consequences of the bad solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand what you're saying.

Certainly I'm not making a airtight case as to why SOPA needs to pass. I'm suggesting that SOPA passing wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing to ever happen to us.

If it causes us to rethink some assumptions we have about the internet (the people in charge are benevolent) which have historically caused problems, (There has been attack after attack where the attacker pretends to be the DNS server and because clients blindly trust DNS servers the attack succeeds without question) maybe the internet will come out of SOPA stronger than ever before.</comment></comment>


How Much Does Tenure Cost? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/07/how-much-does-tenure-cost/60238/

<comment><USER2> Interesting article. The main argument for tenure is that it lets a professor focus on what they want to do without worrying about politics or backlash. The main argument against is that once employment is guaranteed regardless of performance, some people don't care as much about performing well.

There's merits to both arguments. I think all things considered, I'd prefer to have anyone instructing me or someone I cared about not having guaranteed employment regardless of performance.</comment>


20-line patch to Firefox 4 that makes startup on Windows 2x as fast - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627591 <comment><USER2> Taras Glek's blog (<http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek>) contains a lot more information about link optimizations to improve startup times of Firefox.

One of the reasons why loading libxul is so slow normally is that the chain of constructors called at initialization time is arranged _backwards_ in the library ([http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/05/27/startup-backward- co...](http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/05/27/startup-backward- constructors/)) so the OS (which is usually optimized for forward loading) cannot efficiently prefetch the pages.

There is also a post that explains how they measure the startup time on Windows ([http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/10/04/diagnosing-slow- sta...](http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/10/04/diagnosing-slow-startup/)) and Unix ([http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2011/01/14/builtin-startup- mea...](http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2011/01/14/builtin-startup- measurement/)).

</comment><comment><USER3> After using FF for 5 years it got so slow on my Mac that it became unusable. I made the switch to Chrome last year and I'm not looking back. I was an early adopter and supporter (including money) but FF is no longer what it used to be. The code base is bloated, performance is sluggish, they don't seem to care about developers anymore (websql anyone, lack of officially supported debugging tool). All of this in spite of cream-of-the-crop tallent that they have acquired in the last few years. I keep asking mysel and just can't figure: how did it all go so wrong.

<comment><USER4> > The code base is bloated

Evidence?

> performance is sluggish

In 3.6, right? 4.0 improves on a lot of that.

> websql

Which pretty much everyone developing web browsers and working on the relevant standards now agrees was a bad idea, last I checked (if nothing else because it can't be sanely standardized). Firefox 4 is shipping with IndexedDB, if you note.

> they have acquired in the last few years

And who have been working on Firefox 4. Firefox 3.6 branched from trunk in August 2009...

Yes, the release cycle is too long; that's being fixed.

<comment><USER5> Well, bloat is somewhat subjective, so "evidence" is hard to come by. I don't know about the other poster's reasons, but I agree, so here are mine. That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc. are built from the same tree is the first indicator. Then there are the multitude of build options, a few pages' worth. The output of these two commands is somewhat telling:

~/src/mozilla-1.9.2$ find -name \ _.c -o -name \_.cpp -o -name \ _.h -o -name \_.idl -o -name \ _.js -o -name \_.xml | grep -v /tests/ | wc -l 11740 ~/src/mozilla-1.9.2$ find -name \ _.c -o -name \_.cpp -o -name \ _.h -o -name \_.idl -o -name \ _.js -o -name \_.xml | grep -v /tests/ | xargs cat | wc -l 4386362

(Painful to construct command lines like that on a phone, and that is a somewhat old version of the tree, but unless FF4 is significantly smaller than 4m lines and doesn't require building xulrunner _and_ FF, the point stands.) The large number of dependencies is another indicator.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that FF is still my "workhorse" browser, and I like it a lot, despite the flaws and the bloat. (I've been using Arora for a long time, but it has some stability issues still. I like Luakit, which is small and hackable, but it's kind of a niche browser. I'm not at all a fan of Chrome.)

<comment><USER6> > That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc are built form the same tree > ... running > wc -l on the codebase

These are your "bloat" indicators? That's about as primitive as using SLOC as an indicator for programmer productivity.

<comment><USER5> It's not a scientific metric; I did preface this by saying that "bloat" is a subjective term. But LOC of the codebase is a pretty good rule-of-thumb metric; I'm not pretending any more credibility than that. It's not hard evidence, but it _is_ an indicator (and I chose the word carefully) that the codebase may be trying to do more than it ought to. It is an indicator in the same way that fatigue and a rash around your joints are indicators that you have strep throat, but the evidence would be the presence of some strain of streptococcus in your blood. There's no line of code that one can point to and say "Hey, that conclusively proves bloat."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

The 2x improvement is for cold startup on specific configurations, mainly on hard drives with slow seek times. For faster hard drives, the improvement is less, and for SSDs it may be much less.

I should also note this is just one of many startup speed improvements coming in Firefox 4.

<comment><USER8> There are lot of user with slow machines in developing nations. They are typically using a pirated copy of windows xp on a slow hardware and since initially microsoft didn't allow upgrade to IE 7 on pirated copies, lot of people moved to firefox. They would certainly enjoy the fast startup time.And considering that lot of such people are there( it was in the news that Ballmer told Hu that 90 percent of China is using pirated windows) it is still a big win for firefox usuability overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmmm, so I suspect in practice that you're not going to see this kind of difference usually - since he's probably testing on a binary he _just built_ , SuperFetch (the built in OS prefetcher) hasn't had a chance to determine what pages are usually used by Firefox. Once you've used FF as your browser for awhile, SuperFetch will know better and won't do as badly.

That being said, this trick will probably beat SuperFetch, since they know up front that they'll be using big chunks of xul.dll. Don't do this in every app though, or else every app in the system is just chewing through IOs on pages they might not actually be using.

<comment><USER10> SuperFetch only hits the first 10 meg of a DLL. If any of these are larger than that, you'll still see significant thrashing on pages located further back in the binaries. I implemented a similar solution for chrome.dll last summer and it had a gigantic effect on cold start times. Glad to see Mozilla prioritizing startup too.

<comment><USER11> Alex, can you link the bug(s) or patch set for your similar changes?

<comment><USER12> <http://crbug.com/45510>, <http://crrev.com/50386>, <http://crrev.com/51486>, <http://crrev.com/51594> and <http://crrev.com/54934> seem to be appropriate links.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pretty please put this in Firefox 3.6.15 as well because it will be quite some time before many power-users can upgrade to 4.0</comment>


Username/username is a special repository that adds README.md to your profile - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cedricbonhomme <comment><USER2> That sounds cool, but it's not working when I try it. Can you elaborate?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This link is an example. It is needed to be authenticated to GitHub in order to see the result.</comment>


Tech Hiring: The Hunt for Highly Technical Superhumans - <AUTHOR> https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/tech-hiring-the-hunt-for-highly-technical-superhumans

<comment><USER2> There are two types of coding interviews that I have encountered in the last few years.

One is a grueling several hour interview on data structures and algorithms taught in college-level CS classes. These are typically data structures and algorithms that are almost never implemented in real work. They have been known for decades and are now incorporated in most computer programming languages, libraries, and toolkits. Experienced software developers with CS degrees typically have not used this knowledge in years and need to brush up. Experience software developers with other degrees or purely self-taught software engineers often never learned these at all -- or in a very limited way.

Thus this first type of coding interview is geared toward hiring new college graduates, very strong new college graduates, with a CS degree. It effectively discriminates against experienced/older candidates.

The other type of coding interview is a grueling test on specific languages, tools, algorithms, data structures etc. that the candidate would use in the actual job they are interviewing for.

Both types of coding interviews don't necessarilly identify the ability to learn and adapt to new technologies or many other skills that are critical in many technical jobs.

The coding interviews tend to favor candidates who have both the time and inclination to drill heavily on the typical coding interview test questions.

Contrary to the writer's comments, there are a large number of non-white "Asians" in software development jobs. Asian cultures and educational systems often favor this type of heavy drilling and practice on specific skills.

<comment><USER3> I had an interview with Salesforce as a new grad and they spent one round asking basic algo questions, one hour long phone screening asking specifics of Java, Python, C++, Javascript, one onsite whiteboard round designing tests with an in house framework for an in house product. And another round traversing trees and graphs. I didn't make it to the next two rounds, but man these engineering interviews are intense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's very important to understand three things about (tech) interview process:

1\. Hiring at scale is a VERY different problem from hiring slower.

When we were looking for 25 engineers a quarter at Box or eBay, there were very few methods that would scale to that level. Asking data- structure/algorithms questions is one method that scales. Is it perfect? No. Is it the least evil? Yes.

2\. An interview is not a test; it's a date.

Interview depends on the interview-er, as much as it depends on you. You may be fully prepared, but you may still fail interviews for no fault of your own. Just the way you cannot expect to get married with everyone you date, you cannot expect to clear every interview. The more you think of it as a test, the more you will agonize about it.

3\. You have to prepare

Tech salaries are at peak these days. People on the other end know that. As a result, they are _not_ going to give an easy interview. Especially true of hot companies. This is also the artifact/reason why it feels that most good companies are discriminating.

[About me: I've seen this machine inside and out from all ends, many times over. I now run a bootcamp to prepare candidates for technical interviews: [http://InterviewKickstart.com](http://InterviewKickstart.com)]

<comment><USER5> "An interview is not a test; it's a date"

I think understand where you're going with the analogy, and I think that your advice not to dwell too much on any one interview is a sound. However, I do think it's important to recognize the extent to which a technical interview really is an exam. I'm not just quibbling about terms or analogies here, I'm bringing this up because I think a lot of the problems associated with tech "interviews" are related to the fact that they are exams, but don't observe many of the practices that support the student or examinee in typical exam- based institutions.

For instance, in college, an exam should be associated with a study path, students should be aware of how to prepare for it. While questions on a good exam should need not be shared in advance and may test creativity and problem solving, they shouldn't be out of the blue either, they should be related to the study path. An exam should be graded consistently and fairly, by people who are qualified to recognize a strong performance, and perhaps an approach that was not anticipated (a grader for a math exam, for instance, should be able to evaluate a proof that differs from the one a professor had in mind when he or she wrote the question). Students often have the right to receive feed back on their performance, and they often obtain a lasting credential, credit for a course, or other artifact that demonstrates that they successfully demonstrated knowledge of or competence in the subject matter.

Unfortunately, I believe that tech exams are very stressful, but don't observe many of these practices that I believe exist in universities and other exam- related institutions for a good reason.

The first step, I think, is to recognize tech interviews for what they are, which is a form of exam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I agree that having you jump through these hoops is really time consuming and annoying, for most if not all companies it's a necessary evil in order to identify potential employees. How else do you assess a potential employee? It's gonna be either through whiteboarding/live coding with the interviewer(s) or through you portfolio, which your github repos and contributions serve as a good example.

Having said that, some companies take it to the extreme, and honestly they sound like a more traditional office type of environment where I doubt you want to work at from what I can infer from your comments.

I also do not agree with the assumption that only the privileged have time to contribute to open source (aka free projects). You either do it because a) you love it, or b) because you need to beef up your portfolio and you are motivated enough to do so. I'm considered a minority in the tech industry as well, yet I got into it many years ago by working on pro bono projects after going home every day from my telemarketing job at 2.am.

Either in technology or in any industry, you'll get your foot on the door and you will advance faster if you enjoy what you do. This is easily recognized by potential employers when they see you participate in hackathons and that you contribute to OSS.

Sure, I began doing free projects to get into the industry, but I keep doing it today because I love it and that's what makes it so easy for me to find employment as a software developer. In fact I get contacted by recruiters at least twice a week on linkedin and it's somewhat annoying. I hope Anna learns enough at her job to the point where she'll be able to easily find a job and be able to recognize toxic environments that make you jump through excessive hoops.

Just my 2 cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just off the top of my head, a few possible hiring processes.

\- Recommendations from people you trust

\- Pairing interview

\- Give a difficult/open ended homework problem

\- Whiteboarding interviews are suitable for some candidates, they're not all bad ;)

\- Pick from your list ([http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/12/whos- on-your...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/12/whos-on-your- list.html))

\- Asking the candidate for ideas as to how they'd best be assessed

\- Culture fit ; Gut feeling ; or any conversational interview followed by review of performance after 1 month

\- Portfolio review (no one actually does it in my experience)

\- Hiring off reputation in the community

I'm sure there are plenty more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really hate live coding, for example I could do a small app with re-sizing table cells for iOS but animations I would need to read the documentation. So what? Why can't I read the documentation, am I a bad programmer now?

I had to design some tasks applicants need to do for hiring and it is not so easy to come up with something related to the work we do without being too complex or too easy. Whiteboard or live programming tasks are easier to find because they can be quite easy and the time pressure and nervousness make them hard enough. So as an applicant it probably tells me that the employer is lazy?

And I never understood interview marathons, I have friends in business jobs and they have that of almost every interview. It is exhausting and demoralizing, that also tells me more about the employer than it tells about the applicant. If an applicant does not want to do that, maybe she is not desperate enough or has other offers but maybe the job later is also exhausting because the employer does not think enough about the people at the company.

I don't think of me as a extraordinary programmer but I think if the interview is hard the job needs to be totally awesome to justify it. My experience shows me, it is not like that.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to start by thanking Anna (the author of this post) for identifying and writing about something that I consider to be a very serious problem in tech. While I disagree about some of the details, I'm in complete agreement that hiring practices (among other things) are a serious in our industry, and I feel increasing frustration with an industry that constantly talks about a "shortage" of talent while tolerating or even perpetuating practices that (in my opinion) clearly drive away talented people.

I recently went through the interview gauntlet, including (at one company) five hours of whiteboard exercises with a short break for lunch. While I can't post exact interview questions, I would say that the difficult level questions from "cracking the coding interview" and other sites are probably indicative of the difficulty level of my interview. For example "find the least common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree" or "find the sub matrix with the larges sum in an NXM matrix" would be pretty typical questions (though of course you won't know the questions in advance). This is at the whiteboard, no programming environment to try things out, under time pressure, in what can only reasonably be called a stressful environment. Many people who took difficult in-person exams consider these to be among their most stressful academic experiences. In software, we consider this to be a normal part of changing jobs.

I agree with Anna that the amount of preparation is considerable. I brushed up on data structures and algorithms, but I only allowed myself three weeks (I'm employed full time, married, have kids, coach soccer, shuttle kids around to music practices, and so forth, so getting time to study isn't as easy as it used to be). I should have asked for three _months_. I did get the basics back, so I could implement various tree traversals, code up a hash map, do dfs and bfs on a tree, solve binary problems, but I just didn't get fluid enough to do this in a creative way at a whiteboard (On the bright side, I actually enjoyed the work, and I still study these things now. I'm probably much stronger now than I was when I did my interviews. I actually kind of like challenging data structure problems, it's a side of programming that I kind of missed).

But here's what I learned from the experience: where it comes to _interviewing_ and getting a job, you really need to be exceptionally strong on the basics if you're going to be able to solve these kinds of problems at a whiteboard in a 45 minute interview. I know you can look up DFS, but only if you have a while to solve a problem, under less time pressure. I you need to use DFS to solve a related problem that you haven't seen before, in 45 minutes, at the whiteboard… you just need to know this cold. You need to be read to apply it cold. I'm not defending the interview process here, I'm just trying to explain to people what they need to do to be prepped for these interviews.

Now, I do have a few disagreements with Anna's article, in particular around the solution of the "take home". Although I'm sympathetic to the idea of a "take home" exam rather than an in person, and I see some benefits, ultimately, I don't like this approach. This is partly because of my own personal experiences - I once spent the requested 5-7 hours on a homework assignment, sent it back to the recruiter, and heard nothing back, crickets chirping, aside from checking in with the recruiter politely even week or so, until I got a one sentence call back (again from the recruiter, never did talk to a developer) "we've decided not to move forward with your application at this time". I think Gayle Laakman McDowell wrote a very good summary of how this practice can become abusive - ultimately, her argument is rooted in the way it allows companies to burn a lot of a candidate's time without a comparable investment themselves, here's the full link:

[http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give- cand...](http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give-candidates- homework-assignments-knock-it-off)

To me, I think the first thing we need to do is recognize that any "shortage" that tech companies are experiencing needs to be considered in the context of how tech hires. A cynical part of me thinks that this process did exactly what it was intended to do, that it's not about whether a candidate can find all matching subtrees in a binary tree, it's whether that candidate can afford to drop everything to get into such mental/coding shape that they are able to do this at the whiteboard. If they can't, perhaps that's a sign that they have life demands that are incompatible with what tech companies are looking for?

This has been a long comment, thanks to everyone who read this far. I do think tech has a long way to go. The problems run much deeper than the solutions I hear about from silicon valley "leaders". Until tech addresses these problems on a much more fundamental level, expect those with choice (ie., those aren't compelled to study certain subjects and work certain jobs as a condition of getting to live and work in the US) to continue to avoid this field in favor of other professions and trades.

I do think that the recent focus on tech hiring is a positive sign that we're starting to look beyond superficial fixes ("make programming cool!") and more deeply at the process itself.

Here's another very good blog post that addresses this: [http://www.fastcompany.com/3043082/most-creative- people/why-...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3043082/most-creative-people/why- software-maker-fog-creek-is-helping-its-competitors-hire-women)).

</comment><comment><USER8> What's with the section on volunteer work? Is that a thing now?

</comment><comment><USER2> The article raised some questions about how much time to spend for free on the interview process and also on free work whether at the whiteboard or "homework" for an interview process.

Here are my thoughts and experience and rules of thumb.

A rigorous interview process is something like:

1\. send resume or CV

2\. half hour phone or sometimes video screening interview

3\. one hour in person screening interview (optional)

4\. all day interview or equivalent with at least three different people including the hiring manager (unless there are fewer than three people at the company). This usually includes free lunch with the hiring manager and/or his team.

5\. company checks references after the interview

A really rigorous interview is about 6-8 hours of the candidate's time, generally without compensation except for travel and often free lunch during the day.

In most cases, a lengthy interview process like this means about a 1 in 2 or at worst 1 in 3 chance of getting an actual job offer.

My general rules are:

Avoid phone screening interviews longer than 30 minutes unless the employer is out of the area. I once had a lot of 60 minute phone screening interviews that went nowhere. My feeling is if the employer is serious about you and in your area, they can and should meet you in person for a longer screening interview. Longer being over 30 minutes. Despite the many limitations of interviewing, it is easier and more reliable to evaluate each other in person than on the phone or even by video conferencing.

It is reasonable for a potential employer to have a longer screening interview if they are going to pay to fly you to an interview, provide a hotel, etc. Prefer a video screening interview to audio only if you can get a good video connection. Prefer the phone if the video connection is poor.

The potential employer should at least pay for travel including air faire, rental cars, hotels, any public transit. If they won't pay, they aren't serious and you should not pay for the trip either. A per diem or reimbursement to cover meals is nice, but not everybody does this and I would not turn down an interview if everything else was covered.

If they want more than at most eight (8) hours of free work whether whiteboard or "homework" to evaluate you, they should pay for your time. It should be a "try and buy" consulting project for them to get to know you and for you to get to know them. It is not just technical competence, but how well do the two of you work together; that is generally a bigger concern than technical competence.

Actually, I would be very cautious about more than three (3) hours of free "homework" or actual coding (not whiteboard) that they could directly use. If they are serious, they can pay a reasonable hourly consulting rate (e.g. $50-$100/hour) to try you out and vice versa. That is not that different from the cost of the time to interview you in person or cover travel expenses. If they won't pay, they probably aren't that serious and may simply be conning you to get free work.

In general, avoid doing work for free unless you get something else of lasting value to you from the free work such as something for your portfolio, lasting credit and recognition, or valuable experience you cannot get otherwise. Cash is king.</comment>


Financiers and Sex Trafficking - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/kristof-financers-and-sex-trafficking.html

<comment><USER2> It's... a Craigslist clone. The article makes it seem like backpage.com is some online brothel whose sole (or main) focus is "teh trafficking of innocent wimminz and children oh my!", but a quick spin through the site seems to show that it's more like Craigslist with less traffic and the greatest site design techniques from 2004. With that in mind, the NYT article strikes me as more of an attack piece against Village Voice Media, and a screed against online prostitution in general.

In my experience as a semi-professional musician who gets a significant chunk of work from the 'gigs' and 'talent' section of Craigslist, the quality of those sections diminished GREATLY when Craigslist shuttered their 'adult' section. I say leave backpage.com alone, and don't penalize the rest of their community by using a sledgehammer to squash a housefly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Such a hysterical, over-amped campaign. I can't wait till he turns his guns on the Internet itself because, to paraphrase him a bit "There's no doubt that [lots of stuff on the Internet is placed there] by consenting adults. But it's equally clear that [the Internet] plays a major role in the trafficking of minors or women who are coerced.

And he cites one recent case where, yes indeed, a girl was "drugged, tied up, raped and sold to johns through Backpage and other sites."

So even if a medium is used by adults for consensual activity, it should be stomped out if there's any chance that someone will abuse it.</comment>


Do Historians Have No Such Boxes? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://s-usih.org/2017/09/do-historians-have-no-such-boxes-guest-post-by-anthony-chaney/ <comment><USER2> "One thinks of the big wooden box, locked, in Isaac Newton's rooms in Trinity College. In this box he kept alchemistic manuscripts, deistic tracts and other occult materials."

Interesting thing is, most of the contents of this box was later bought by Keynes, he has a great lecture on Newton being the last magician, i.e. pre- Newtonian: [http://www-groups.dcs.st- and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Keynes_New...](http://www-groups.dcs.st- and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html)

What became of the box?

"They remained in the box to shock profoundly any eighteenth- or nineteenth- century prying eyes. They became the possession of Catharine Barton and then of her daughter, the Countess of Portsmouth. So Newton's chest, with many hundreds of thousands of words of his unpublished writings, came to contain the 'Portsmouth Papers'.

In 1888 the mathematical portion was given to the University Library at Cambridge. They have been indexed, but they have never been edited. The rest, a very large collection, were dispersed in the auction room in 1936 by Catharine Barton's descendant, the present Lord Lymington. Disturbed by this impiety, I managed gradually to reassemble about half of them, including nearly the whole of the biographical portion, that is, the 'Conduitt Papers', in order to bring them to Cambridge which I hope they will never leave. The greater part of the rest were snatched out of my reach by a syndicate which hoped to sell them at a high price, probably in America, on the occasion of the recent tercentenary."

For more info, see this Newton Project page: [http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/history-of-newtons- papers/...](http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/history-of-newtons- papers/newton-related-papers-of-john-maynard-keynes)</comment>


Ask YC: How did you name your startup? - <AUTHOR>

I've been having trouble naming my startup (or renaming). I'm wondering how you guys came up with your name, what criteria you used, and how long it took?<p>My criteria is basically this: http://alexkaminski.blogspot.com/2008/03/naming-your-startup.html <comment><USER2> I am working on that right now. Something that is easy to remember - easy to spell correctly - and creative...

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you just thinking of names? Or do you do something like making a list of words related to your startup, and then combining them to see what works (and isn't taken)?

<comment><USER2> I start with names related to the concept but it always seems to morph into names that aren't related. I end up pulling words out of my brain and then break them apart and put them together in different forms. I also use a thesaurus to find other meanings for words...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> the following 2 links should help you - good luck

[http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/223/The-Startup- Na...](http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/223/The-Startup-Name- Game.aspx)

<http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_name_game.html></comment>


Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.matuzo.at/blog/building-the-most-inaccessible-site-possible-with-a-perfect-lighthouse-score/ <comment><USER3> Imho, the problem with Lighthouse (and Pagespeed before it) isn't that they're not perfect, it's that they assign scores/grades.

When Google assigns a score to something, people understand it to mean highest score = best and start optimizing for the grade Google gives them, not for performance and user experience, which the grade is supposed to represent.

It would be more fruitful to list the issues and their severity but not add overall scores, because scores change the objective from fixing the problems to getting high scores. They occasionally also have the have bugs where they will punish something with a worse score that is actually an improvement in the real world, discouraging people from doing the right thing ("I want my site to load faster, but Google is buggy and will rank me down if I do").

<comment><USER4> The problem, as I see it, is it more or less makes Google the arbiter of the internet, and when their purpose is to provide internet advertising then I see a conflict of interest. Especially when things like "supporting AMP" will likely impact your score.

While unfortunately many businesses have to care about Google SEO due to their complete monopoly status in the search field (one that is of course growing increasingly unhealthy), I'd prefer to not let Google be an ML-driven judge, jury and executioner when it comes to being visible on the net.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure the argument in your post or the parents hold water - <USER2> scores aren't a "judge, jury, and executioner"

sometimes dev tools are just dev tools, and nothing is perfect.

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't be surprised if they use it in search rankings, chances are they already do. And not being on Google effectively == dead. They already take into account page load speed (which discriminates against complex but useful & good web apps) and iirc also whether you have AMP.

<comment><USER7> Do a test and compare your own optimized site to an amp site. See if you can't beat it. Not that hard when you consider the 3rd party requests amp requires.

<comment><USER6> I never said amp is good or fast, just that (iirc, but 90% sure) Google penalizes you for not having amp.

<comment><USER7> My experience is that AMP is necessary for google news etc. Haven't seen the outcome you speak of as compared to regular pages which are optimized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, CSS system color keywords seem like a massive privacy leak. I just tested setting the property:

      background: Background;

on an element, and then changing my Windows desktop background. The element immediately changes color to match my desktop. Then if I call getComputedStyle on the element, I get my desktop background color in javascript. This is in Firefox private mode, and apparently every website can read all my system colors. Why in the world is this enabled by default?

[https://www.w3.org/wiki/CSS/Properties/color/keywords#System...](https://www.w3.org/wiki/CSS/Properties/color/keywords#System_Colors)

<comment><USER9> It's already trivially easy to fingerprint a user in about a dozen other ways via:

User Agent String (being fixed soon by the Chrome team)

HTTP_ACCEPT headers

Browser plugin metadata

Time zone

System fonts

Supercookies

Canvas and WebGL fingerprinting

AudioContext

Device CPU and memory

What's one more bit of information?

<comment><USER10> Many of these should also not be exposed to websites without explicit authorization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the "philosophers' stone" goals of the software industry is to completely replace human testing with automated testing.

Basically, I think automated testing is a very good thing, and we should _definitely_ try to do as much of it as possible.

So we can clear the way for more useful and meaningful human testing.

I've always thought that the engineers in QC should be just as skilled and qualified as the ones building the product.

Part of what they should do, is design and build really cool automated tests, but I think that they should also be figuring out how to "monkey-test" the products, and get true users (this is 1000% required for usability and accessibility testing) banging on the product.

"True users" != anyone even _remotely_ connected with the product development or testing, beyond a contract agreement.

But I'm kind of a curmudgeonly guy, and my opinions are not always welcomed.

I do write about why I prefer using test harnesses, as opposed to [automated] unit tests, here: [https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/testing-harness-vs- unit-4...](https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/testing-harness-vs- unit-498766c499aa)

<comment><USER12> >I've always thought that the engineers in QC should be just as skilled and qualified as the ones building the product.

I agree, but then they need to be equally well payed... and I don't think it is possible to find a manager willing to pay them as much

<comment><USER11> I worked for a Japanese company that was _renowned_ for Quality (with a capital "Q").

In the US, having "Quality" in your title often means that you are in a dead- end job.

In that company, it meant that you were an elite, and that you had considerable power over Engineering.

It also meant that you were a completely anal-retentive S.O.B.

They had spreadsheets with 3,000 rows (each row was a test -usually "monkey" test).

If even _one_ of those rows got a red "X," the whole shooting match would come to a screeching halt, with heads rolling around like foozballs.

It also meant that they double-checked every bug report six ways to Sunday. If they reported a bug, It. Was. A. Bug. No ifs, ands, or buts. If you questioned it, they would get quite huffy; which was not a good thing (see "power," above).

Management kept the QC organization quite separate from Engineering, and they often had an adversarial relationship; which was sometimes encouraged.

This led to engineering departments having some very large testing teams; often outnumbering the engineers. The engineering departments would be penalized for bugs found by the official QC organization, so having large in- house testing teams was worth it.

Their QC doesn't work especially well for software. They would get frowny faces, when I'd suggest automated testing, or process quality best practices.

Quality was always treated separately from construction. I could never quite agree with that, but it also meant that I was "on my own," if I wanted to try using modern quality engineering techniques.

Their [hardware] products are damn good, though. What many companies would consider minor quality issues are treated like Extinction-Level Events, at that company. They've been doing it for 100 years, so it's difficult to argue with them.

<comment><USER13> > The engineering departments would be penalized for bugs found by the > official QC organization, so having large in-house testing teams was worth > it.

Some more details about that behavior are:

In Japan, employees start with a zero score, then for each mistake lose a point. So they will analyze/block anything that could potentially cause a demerit. Obviously that's the polar opposite of "move fast and break things."

Regarding the "3,000 line spreadsheet", yup, that's normal there and part of why their meetings often run to midnight. Gotta check and double-check every row before moving on to the next one. :)

If you want to learn more about these cultural differences, read patio11's excellent posts about working in Japan.

<comment><USER11> > their meetings often run to midnight.

I still have PTSD from that.

Nothing quite like a 14-hour flight, massive jet lag, and an all-day (and all- night) meeting in a packed, cramped, overheated conference room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having seen many other instances where chasing numbers has lead to a worse outcome, I think "metrics driven development" is an abomination that must be abolished. Unfortunately, management seems to really like the idea of turning everything into a number and increasing it at all costs --- I have fought against such things, and when I pointed out all the negatives associated with it, they would often agree; but then dismiss the thought completely with a response that essentially means "but it makes the numbers look better."

As the saying goes: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts."

<comment><USER15> I think what you are describing is a case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

On the other hand, a true accessibility score (for example, one awarded by a human or a robust grading process) could reliably quantify accessiblity. Goodhart wouldn't apply in that case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cool, but this article would have been more useful with some practical examples of things Lighthouse doesn't catch. If the point is "this automated metric isn't perfect", no automated metric is but how bad is it exactly?

I still don't have a sense for how bad Lighthouse is because I've never disabled all keyboard events, disabled all mouse events, or changed the high contrast stylings. The article almost makes the opposite point to me -- how bad can Lighthouse be if the only loopholes are things that would pretty obviously have accessibility issues?

The only useful examples I could see were the ones at the bottom of the article, which show up in Lighthouse next to the score.

<comment><USER17> You didn't understand the article. The article doesn't contain a single loophole. Each of those features has legitimate use cases and it is impossible to detect whether they are illegitimate.

Just look at the first example. It straight up denies access to the content and the reason why lighthouse accepts it is because hiding content just hides content. Usually when content is marked hidden the user is not supposed to see it. It is therefore not a concern if a user can't see hidden content. Imagine if you had a hidden dialog that is only shown on user interaction. Any automated tool cannot tell if this is an accessibility issue or not. It's like deciding if your car should be blue or black. There is no objective answer and choosing the wrong color won't reduce your score.

All the other tricks in the article follow the same pattern.

<comment><USER18> Mostly; I can't think of a good reason for 1px sized text.

<comment><USER19> The only thing I can imagine are screen reader-only labels (although you're usually achieving this with a special "sr-only" or "visually-hidden" utility class that doesn't touch the font size)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This reminds me of a time when a team member was adamant about code coverage metrics. It felt like an intense amount of busy work that really didn't improve our codebase or ensure thoughtful tests that actually, you know, caught stuff.

It was just some weird metric we were chasing that involved making sure we go through each function and superficially test calls, regardless of the fact that some of the stuff we were testing gave us no confidence on the actual internals. I will not even mention that code coverage became this _number_ that he/she believed was this standard, even though no attempts were made to build the codebase via TDD from the get to (making chasing the code coverage metric after the fact laughable). What could I say? The person appealed to the authority of the code coverage metric.

But hey, we got that code coverage percentage up :)

<comment><USER21> As one of those people who pushes for code coverage, I'd just like to jump in and dump my thoughts, because no tool does what I want and because of that most people don't understand what I'm going for.

The single most important thing is getting code where no consideration was given down to 0%.

This doesn't necessarily mean "all code is covered by tests", though definitely I'd prefer that be a high percent. What it means is all code was either covered by tests, or deemed not worth the time to add a test for _and marked as such so the coverage tool ignores it_.

Unfortunately, all coverage tools I've ever seen only allow "skip this for coverage", with no nuance. I want at least two reasons for skipping to be built in to the tool, that would be separated in the report:

* Things intentionally not covered because they're simple helpers in the realm of "obviously no bugs", or a small manually-tested API wrapper that works and shouldn't ever change again but that would be a pain or waste of time to write a worthwhile test (significantly reducing the value-to-effort ratio). There are probably other reasons, but those are the two that jump into my mind as the most common in the codebases I've worked with.

* Things that you're not writing a test for because of some other reason, but a test probably could be written for - such as a time crunch while fixing a bug, something complicated you know should have a test but are uncertain about, and so on. This one is measurable technical debt, and ideally should trend towards 0%, but isn't terribly important to do right away - it's a place where a decision was actually made, where losing test coverage is acceptable.

And of course, that leaves code that's covered by no tests and was not intentionally left uncovered. This is what I mean by "no consideration was given" \- it's not covered by tests by accident. It's a likely place to find bugs. This is what, IMO, should always be at 0%.

(Quick aside, adding coverage to a legacy codebase would involve marking everything as the second exception. The project functions, but adding all tests immediately is not feasible, so it becomes explicitly marked as technical debt to be reduced over time. All new code then becomes unmarked-by- default where a decision should be made or a test added as the new code is written.)

Having the separate ways to mark uncovered code, and actually using them, is a way to signal to future developers "here be dragons!" when they look at the uncovered and unmarked code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> An Interesting and entertaining article.

The most interesting part to me (as someone with vision problems) was the WebAIM link [1]. The biggest problem I have is with the almost total blind adoption of low contrast (so often too low for me to even read) and sure enough the section about low contrast [2] says:

"found on 86.3% of home pages. _This was the most commonly-detected accessibility issue_.

My basic question then is why do so many designers and websites choose to break the WCAG guidelines?

[1] [https://webaim.org/projects/million](https://webaim.org/projects/million)

[2] [https://webaim.org/projects/million/#contrast](https://webaim.org/projects/million/#contrast)

<comment><USER19> From my experience, it is often not an active choice to break the guidelines. It's rather the lack of knowledge/experience or ignorance - or a mix of both ("What is this accessibility thing? Do we need it?").

For contrast ratio specifically, I wished more people would adapt the approach that USWDS uses [1]. It enforces accessible color combinations by using standardized naming with a special property. E.g., I know that `blue-60` on `purple-10` is accessible (WCAG AA), because the absolute difference is 50+ (60 - 10). I'm currently writing a blog post regarding this approach to spread the awareness.

[1] [https://designsystem.digital.gov/design- tokens/color/overvie...](https://designsystem.digital.gov/design- tokens/color/overview/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> First, let me start by saying that this is a good article and sheds light on one of the challenges of accessibility adoption.

All of tools like lighthouse, axe-core etc. run a subset of tests that gives a false sense of security about accessibility. Similarly, tools like Accessibility Insights for Web has a fast-pass option, which does the same thing where it runs a subset of tests to catch the most common issues on a website.

But it does not and cannot(at this moment) catch all the issues that require semantic analysis of a website, like checking that the alt text on an image has meaningful text. For tests like those, a human is needed to perform a comprehensive assessment, something like Accessibility insights for web offers as an Assessment option.

In my opinion, all of the tools are doing one thing good and that is raise awareness about the problems that users with a disability face daily, when trying to use a website. They are making accessibility a must. Tools still needs more work and I feel confident that it will continue to improve. It all kind of comes down to how much time a development team puts in to make their website completely accessible, which ideally every team should budget and plan for.

<comment><USER24> Where I am, we use axe-core as part of our automated integration testing. Any change that regresses on accessibility (i.e. new severe a11y issue etc) is blocked from submission in the same way that it would be blocked from submission by causing tests to fail.

I find this useful as it prevents "accessibility rot" where people think "Oh we'll sort out the aria stuff later".

But yeah I agree that a human test is best. I think of axe et al as an equivalent of a "static analysis" that can pick out the obvious mistakes, but wont understand the dynamic nature of the application - it is after all great for flagging the "easy" problems, allowing the human tester to focus on the major a11y issues without ending up raising hundreds of bugs for every button and link and colour combination that should have been sorted out way before any human testing is involved.

<comment><USER19> I usually rephrase the same point as: "Automatic testing is able to tell you if a page is _inaccessible_. However, it cannot tell you if a page is _accessible_."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Oh, man. This is so evil. My LinkedIn inbox will be filled with job > offerings by companies like Facebook and Uber.

I really enjoyed this part

</comment><comment><USER26> So this is what people mean by "following the letter of the law instead of the spirit of the law"?

</comment><comment><USER27> Another technique to mess up keyboard users: don't use the document scroll area, but make your own (and don't focus it or anything in JavaScript). Thus the user will have to press Tab or click in the area before keyboard navigation keys will work. So for best results put a large number of focusable elements before the scrollable pane, so that the keyboard user must press Tab a large and unpredictable number of times before it works.

It'll be something like this:

          …

You could probably mess with other tabindexes (randomly jump through the document with Tab!) without Lighthouse baulking.

I was going to suggest adding `pointer-events: none` so that the user can't just click to focus it, but that was already done!

(I mentioned focusing your scroll area element as something you need to do if you roll your own rather than using the document scroll area; but that's not all you need to do. You also need to monitor blur events and change any .blur() calls, so as to avoid the document element ever retaining focus. It inherently depends on JavaScript, and is very fiddly to get fully right—I'm actually not sure if _anyone_ gets it _fully_ right; the interactions of focus and selection are nuanced and inconsistent, and it's extremely easy to mess up accessibility software; I haven't finished my research on the topic. I strongly recommend against the technique on web pages; web apps can _occasionally_ warrant it.)

</comment><comment><USER28> I just read an article a couple days ago about how even YouTube widgets and stuff have huge a11y problems. I think it's time to admit Google is terrible at accessibility. All their devrels talk like it's important and have all these beautiful demos but whenever you look behind the curtain at their products it's terrible.

<comment><USER19> The classic "do as I say and not as I do". That said, the YouTube widget is actually quite accessible compared to most other video players [1].

[1] [https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2020/03/16/why-videos- on-g...](https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2020/03/16/why-videos-on-gov-uk- use-the-youtube-video-player/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Stop giving people ideas. I can almost guarantee that there is someone out there getting ideas of things to add to their site from this post ;-)

</comment><comment><USER30> Google invents new metric, web shifts to accommodate new Google metric, people learn how to abuse metric, Google invents new metric...

</comment><comment><USER31> I think this actually outlines the standard design process for most major web sites

</comment><comment><USER32> This is hilarious. It's like if McSweeny's staff were programmers.

</comment><comment><USER33> So disapointed this isn't about building a tall building at a super remote site on antarctica or something like that :(

<comment><USER34> I'm sure that you find it funny. Consider though those for whom accessibility is matter of great importance, because for those of us taxes, health and employment might depend on the diligence of some motherfucker who was not in the mood or just decided to copy/paste from Stack Overflow and just ruined someones experience on a rather important webpage. Not to talk about Atlasian who had the habit of adding aria-hidden to Jira so that enterprises felt insentivized to purchase the accessibility plugin for their employees.</comment></comment>