Programming Languages to watch in 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://java.dzone.com/news/9-programming-languages-watch

<comment><USER2> Scheme is _second_ in jobs on indeed.com, and the author doesn't realize that his search is off?

Erlang could become "the next Python"?

What a shoddy article.

Edit: I realize that Scheme is second only among the nine niche languages. It's still bogus, as a simple search for scheme on indeed.com shows.

<comment><USER3> What did he do wrong?

<comment><USER4> Scheme is a niche language, and it's niche is education. It's almost _never_ used in industry because it lacks a single popular standard library adds enough functionality to make it practical to use in the real world. In general, you don't write a practical scheme application, you write a practical [insert implementation]-scheme application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why would I choose any language which runs on the JVM now that Oracle is flexing its muscles? As much as I like Clojure, Scala and Groovy, I'm starting to steer clear of anything related to Oracle's intellectual properties.

<comment><USER6> I'm not concerned. IBM has an independent implementation, so copyright is not an issue. Oracle is not about to start a patent war with IBM, so patents are actually less of an issue than they usually are with software. The trademark issue is trivial. I'm not concerned about Oracle's IP.

<comment><USER7> "I'm not concerned about Oracle's IP." - famous last words.

<comment><USER8> Oracle owns the trademark to JavaScript now too. We are going to have to call it ECMAScript to be safe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article compares languages based on numbers of job postings. Quality of jobs != quantity of jobs.

<comment><USER10> Agreed!

One _possible_ explanation for the number of job postings for Actionscript is that the culture around doing Flash animations is one where there is high turnover. Thus there are lots of open jobs at any one time.

Another possible explanation is that there is a culture of paying people very little for full time jobs but overpaying agencies (who also pay little). As a result, companies are constantly hoping to hire someone at a bargain but rarely finding anyone willing to work long hours for low wages, and they are forced to go to agencies for their needs.

I don't know if either explanation is true, of course, but I do know that I'd look into a lot more than a single cherry-picked statistic before deciding I wanted to learn a new programming language.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if a more useful comparison would be salary (or rate of change of salary over time).

I started learning functional programming over Christmas 2008 for two reasons:

\- Mainly because it looked fun, and very different from what I'd done before

\- Although I had no idea whether F# or Haskell jobs would come up, I knew that if they did come up, they'd be just right for me

<comment><USER2> So, did any jobs come up? Looking at your blog, you seem to be have been pretty involved in F# until May.

<comment><USER9> An F# job did come up, and I'm quite happy with it :)

I'd like to be more involved in the functional programming community; it's easy to dip in and out of Twitter and forum discussions, but blogging is one thing that's dropped off since the summer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to that graph actionscript got stopped on its tracks the day Steve Jobs started the war against flash.

</comment><comment><USER12> Agree with R, but certainly not with Go (not even google is dedicated to make this the next big language, they call it an "experiment") ActionScript is Flash, right?! I would say JavaScript..

And Scala and Scheme? Maybe some academics use that, but I don't know a business which relies on it.

<comment><USER13> A number of web startups are using scala for their apps, most notably foursquare. I wouldn't dismiss it as academic when the big push I am seeing for it is for use with lift (scala webapp framework).

<comment><USER14> Last time I tried it, getting started with Lift was a convoluted process. Scala is a nice language but, IMO, it needs to rid itself of dependencies on Java tools like Maven and Eclipse if it wants to get anywhere.

sbaz is nice. More sbaz everywhere would be nicer. It's one of the best language-specific package managers I've used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why no javascript? Seems like an obvious language to watch in terms of popularity, job market, and interesting progress.

<comment><USER16> JavaScript isn't really up-and-coming. It's been in mainstream use in browsers for a long (in internet years) time now. There may be a lot of emerging enthusiasm around JavaScript for non-browser programming such as with node.js, but it's going to be swamped by the demand for JavaScript developers in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a really odd way to approach programming languages, I feel. According to the article, none of these are very mainstream languages (although certainly scheme and clojure have their adherents, and LUA is used extensively in the game industry), but they should be watched because of hiring trends?

I'd much rather pick up a language because it has some interesting features, or because it solves a problem I have with one of the languages I already know. Seems they're missing the forest for the trees, somehow.

</comment><comment><USER18> Whew! Haskell's not on the list.</comment>


My Latest Self Hosted Hugo Workflow - <AUTHOR> https://www.jaredwolff.com/my-latest-self-hosted-hugo-workflow/ <comment><USER2> I just switched from self hosted hugo to netlify + docsy yesterday, pretty great and happy so far. All I do now is make git pushes to master (before I tagged, but ran my own CI/K8S)

[https://docs.hofstadter.io](https://docs.hofstadter.io) if you want to see what it looks like</comment>


How Apple Pay handles a canceled credit card - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2014/10/30/how-apple-pay-handles-a-canceled-credit-card/ <comment><USER2> fantastic. glad they went through such lengths to keep a non-invasive user experience</comment>


Why the future doesn't need us (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

<comment><USER2> What is the end goal for humans?

Floating through space with near unlimited computing power seeding planets?

Will we keep our human bodies and enjoy the simplicity of living while machines build us giant (on scales we can barely fathom) structures in space?

Will we have to teach machines the value of life and why they shouldn't take it? It would be relatively simple to teach a machine about living. Humans don't really have persistent memory when turned off, humans only have RAM, if you remove the power source, our RAM gets cleared and we no longer exist. I think a computer could fairly easily understand that.

Will advanced AI machines or human/machine hybrids instantly understand that war and violence is harmful and pointless?

What would the goals of an AI system be? To grow? To help humanity? To ensure it's own survival? To colonize other worlds? To experiment, invent, and build?

I'd be very interested in listening in on the AI meetings at Google that Kurzweil is involved in, I'm sure they're fascinating.

I can't imagine having two brains hooked up to myself or having a secondary computing device attached to my brain, would it be information overload? Will humans ever be able to near instantly learn things?

What happens when multiple human brains connect to the same network? Would we be essentially one organism?

<comment><USER3> It's funny that your explanation by analogy of death rests on the assumption the machines already understand how themselves work. There's really no reason why that should be case.

<comment><USER2> My definition of AI was based on human-like intelligence. I see your point that AI won't necessarily have human-like intelligence but could have something completely different, something that my puny human brain can't even comprehend.

Then again, if an AI system can't understand how itself works, is it really intelligent?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions. I'm just asking them in effort to help myself try to understand technology and AI.

Maybe simple curiosity and the ability to learn and retain data is the key to AI.

Will the first generation of true AI be like a simple human child or a god- like "being"?

Why even bother making pure AI systems when we are so close to BCIs? Why not just take recently deceased people, keep the brain alive, and attach a computer system to it?

<comment><USER4> You've posed some interesting questions.

> Then again, if an AI system can't understand how itself works, is it really > intelligent?

This question is particularly interesting as it can be applied to us as well.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. If a human baby can't identify that it's hand are in fact it's own hands is it intelligent by any reasonable standard? I'd say no. So couldn't this be how a machine AI begins it's own process of self awareness, then proceed to understand it's own surroundings and it's own sensors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> T-A There is a crucial sentence in this old article: "But because of the recent rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics - where individual atoms and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed the Moore's law rate of progress for another 30 years."

As far as I can tell, this expectation has not proved correct. Instead, we are getting talks like [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpgV6rCn5-g](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpgV6rCn5-g)

</comment><comment><USER6> There is an alternative possibility: That the human need to dominate, procreate, etc. operates at a much lower level than the human intellect. That human intelligence is a tool of our selfish genes, and not the master or driver.

A superhuman machine intelligence would have no genes, no body, no fear of biological death. It seems obvious that a key challenge will be to recognize whether a machine is thinking because it is extraordinarily unlikely it will think like we do.

Our fear of super-intelligent machines may be a result of projecting human psychology onto machines. It is not likely they will work that way.

<comment><USER7> You _should_ be afraid of any system which is potentially much more intelligent than you and doesn't share your goals. In the event that machine intelligence doesn't work like humans at all, the chances seem much higher that their goals will be at odds with ours, or even completely incomprehensible or nonsensical to us.

<comment><USER8> I would be afraid _if_ my goals are to procreate and perpetuate the human race.</comment></comment></comment>


Indian phones are weird - <AUTHOR> http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2016/07/indian_phones_a.html <comment><USER2> I know that Intex will soon be shipping (currently is shipping?) phones with SailfishOS (Jolla's OS).

I've been using SailfishOS for almost two years, and I confidently say that underneath the GUI, it is just a regular GNU/Linux system[1].

Why do I bring this up? Jolla, and the community are developing a more inclusive mobile OS (that has Android app compatibility, and can be ported to Android devices relatively easily using libhyris[2]). I'm hopeful that it will help minimise the hackery described in the article.

For example, SailfishOS ships with Gecko engine v31 at the moment (soon to be updated...), QtWebkit, and (soon, after the port to Qt5.6 is complete), QtWebEngine (Chromium).

I'm hopeful that more Indian (and Chinese) phone manufacturers can start contracts with Jolla. I'm not aware of any software houses (as opposed to internal) that customise _Android_ for your device.

[1] glibc, systemd, BlueZ, Pulseaudio, gstreamer, connman, Telepathy, Python, gcc, Qt, etc.

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29)

<comment><USER3> One thing to note there - currently Android compatibility is only available on Jolla phones, not third-party ports, due to their licensing agreement with Myriad. Hopefully, any official releases on third-party phones will be able to include it as well.

<comment><USER2> > Hopefully, any official releases on third-party phones will be able to > include it as well.

Yes, while I have no official word (I'm just a fan), I think this will be the case. As long as it's an official port done by Jolla, Myriad/Alien Dalvik should be available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slightly related, one of the worst things about the Indian phones and telcos are the spam advertisements that have subscription opt-ins by default.

Essentially, you will get several sms messages a day which if you accidentally hit one of the keys on your phone ( which is actually very easy ), you get billed $1 every week ( think daily fortunes / love poems / etc ). It's very easy to accidentally opt-in to several of these.

To opt-out of these advertisements you need to find a hidden number on the telcos website, send an sms message, and wait 10-14 days until the advertisements stop.

I have to think that the telcos are taking in millions of dollars every month from these spam ads.

<comment><USER5> May I know which operator was that? I've used Airtel and Vodafone in India, and I didn't had any "services" enabled by default.

By the way, there's a centralized DND registry in India called _" Commercial Communications Customer Preference Portal"_[0]. You just need to send an SMS to enable/disable unsolicited commercial calls/SMS. It has been very effective so far.

[0] [http://www.nccptrai.gov.in/](http://www.nccptrai.gov.in/)

<comment><USER6> That thing is a joke. I'm registered as 'fully blocked' and I still get spam SMS. Last few offenders were EaseMyTrip, the Ministry of Tourism and some guy called Hemant.

<comment><USER7> Start reporting on those messages. If you are on Android, use India Against Spam. If iphone, you'll have to report manually on the operator's website. for example - airtel.in/dnd

It's a pain in the ass but I kept on reporting for a month after activating DND and the calls and messages dropped. I've even received calls from people begging me to take my complaints back or otherwise they'll loose their jobs. I agreed twice but holy hell those exact same companies spammed me again. I stopped being a good samaritan and just told them to sort it out with their companies since it's the companies fault. Now spam has reduced to a message or two a month.

From what I understand there are old mobile numbers list being passed around from before DND was available and that's why you need to start reporting the spam messages. Word quickly spreads between the companies to remove your number from the lists.

<comment><USER6> I have reported them via India Against Spam but the responses from Airtel were, roughly, 'thanks but this is not spam' so I stopped reporting. Complaining on Twitter helped with some, but not all, spammers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most Indian company started with no technical capabilities, they bought complete package from Chinese OEMs and handled only marketing, distribution and service. As the grew larger, they added technical teams and have more control on the phone.

So possible for Intex, OEMs added Chromium browser since they don't have Google in China, then added Google play services with Chrome, and finally has a marketing deal with Opera to add it as only browser on main screen.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if the Firefox phones are still around / in use in India? I actually had a friend import the Intex Firefox phone (don't remember the name, it's got 128mb of RAM and a dead-end FXOS version). It's utterly painful to use - I hope the situation has gotten better for users there.

<comment><USER10> > It's utterly painful to use - I hope the situation has gotten better for > users there.

I bought the bright orange ZTE Open C fxos phone to try it out.

Haven't done much more with it that travel around with it, mostly using it as a primary phone for calls. The battery life is insane on that one - I went about 4-5 days without charging it when I was traveling (barely any calls, mostly standby).

The good part was the HERE maps downloaded onto its SDCARD and I could use at least some of the GPS functionality when it is offline.

However for the same amount of money I could easily buy a Micromax or Karbonn phone which would have 2 killer apps to use - PayTM and Ola Cabs.

<comment><USER11> > I went about 4-5 days without charging it when I was traveling (barely any > calls, mostly standby).

To be fair, most Android devices and iPhone would achieve similar battery life if you're not actually using the phone.

Apple claims to get 10 days of standby out of an iPhone. I would imagine with 'barely any calls' or using the device you would get somewhere between 5 to 10 days. 5 days doesn't really sound that impressive.

<comment><USER12> > Apple claims to get 10 days of standby out of an iPhone.

I have a work iPhone that I barely use (since I prefer Android personally), and it usually lasts 4-5 days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just to give people some context, Indians generally use the usual Samsung/HTC/Moto/Xiaomi/... fare, and the ones reviewed here are _~~made~~ marketed and sold by Indian companies_ but don't have a very high market share here. They're also lower end phones generally used by relatively poor folks - I haven't checked, but all of these are probably <Rs.8000 (~$115) phones.

One reason I post this is because I was hoping the article was something about changes made in international brands for Indian context, which might reveal some aspect of Indian telco environment I wasn't aware of. No such luck, just the usual lack of attention to detail by not-paid-enough employees at the phone companies.

<comment><USER14> Phones are not made by indian copanies. Intex and friends source and rebrand from china.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not sure, what was the point of this post.

<comment><USER16> It's Peter-Paul Koch. He's well known for providing painstakingly detailed tests and compatibility tables on browser capabilities and web standards support, particularly js.

I'm not sure what stats are like for users of the specific devices he's looking at here, but India's a big market: I'm guessing browser compatibility here is going to be of some interest to more than one or two folks.</comment></comment>


19th Century "law of epidemics" predicts peak of drug overdose deaths in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.mailman.columbia.edu/news/back-future <comment><USER2> While I'm in favour of robust methods like Farr's law, one question the article doesn't mention is: what would the law's prediction have been had it been applied ten years ago? This gives us some idea of the stability of the result.

The paper (open access for the win!) is here: [http://www.injepijournal.com/content/1/1/31](http://www.injepijournal.com/content/1/1/31)

It doesn't seem to have run the alternative-date analyses, which is too bad.</comment>


J.C. Penney's troubles are reflected in satellite images of its parking lots - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/1169/jc-penney-satellite-imaging <comment><USER2> I see huge crowds, maybe the most cars in a parking lot ever, I don't know, you look out the door and its nothing but cars, huge. Many people say that JC Penny is the best store, huge store, way bigger than Amazon. Have you seen an Amazon store when walking by yourself in the Mall? I haven't. You know why? Amazon is a fake store. That's right, fake store. Nobody buys anything there because its fake, all fake. Malls are wonderful places, I love Malls, everyone goes there and loves them, all our shopping is done at Malls, and I have to say I know a thing or two about Malls. Huge crowds, JC Penny is the best. No more questions.

<comment><USER3> Trolling, bro?

<comment><USER2> I was going for sarcasm. The slow steady death of Malls (the home of nearly all JC Penny stores) has been going on for over a decade now, and pretty much all of the articles I see about JC Penny's or Malls blame Amazon and people shopping from home for stuff. Given our current President's speech tonight and his preference for seeing things in an alternate light and his issues with estimating how full or how empty an aerial photo can be I thought "What would Trump say?" and well it just came out.

My apologies for those who were offended or missed the joke.

<comment><USER4> For me, arriving at a giant parking lot takes all the fun out of shopping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I find this sort of data extraction interesting (I especially like the guys who try to validate trade numbers by counting containers in shipping ports as an example) but wonder about correlation here. JC Penny is in malls, malls are getting fewer and fewer customers, cars in mall parking lots are going down. JC Penny seems to be slowly dying because their online presence cannot compete with Amazon, so is this 'watch along with the satellites as fewer and fewer people go to brick and mortar stores' ?

That said, there are so many interesting things that having open spy satellites has made available to the non-spy.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a real world application of the same IMINT principles used during the cold war (and currently in use), with large nation states that had the money to build and launch photo reconnaissance satellites. Now applied to privately acquired satellite imagery. Example: Soviet Union analysts looking at photos of parking lots at key US defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, etc) and correlating them with intelligence related to certain projects. And vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what it costs to get these images, and if you could get them more cheaply by flying drones? I guess that would require a presence in a lot of places though. . . . Still, maybe you could focus on just a few cities, and get pictures more frequently than you'd get with satellites? Maybe there is an opportunity there.

<comment><USER7> By the time you've paid for a drone and someone to fly it in each city, you might as well just pay someone minimum wage to drive around photographing the lots from ground level. It'd probably work out cheaper.

<comment><USER8> That probably wouldn't work for image analysis however, since it would be hard to see all the cars in the lot from ground level.

<comment><USER9> If you drove a Google Street View-style car up and down a mall parking lot, you'd get a lot of information. I doubt that a more in-depth sweep would cost significantly more to do than to just do a single drive by. The biggest cost would be driving to the parking lot in the first place.

And if you were trying to collect information, you'd be able to get a lot more info from the license plate numbers or the make/models of cars. You could also get information on employment by looking for which cars are parked where, since store employees typically have to park further from the entrance. There's a lot of information that you could get from ground-level that you miss at satellite level.

The real question is - is it worth it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A couple of years ago, JC Penney's was on to something. They were moving to stylish affordable clothing and it was starting to take with young people. Investors got nervous and wanted to move back to the inflate prices and have constant fake sales model. They are seriously wasting their real estate and potential.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it pure coincidence that the use of satellites to gauge retail traffic was a minor plot point in the [latest episode of _Billions_ ]([http://www.sho.com/billions/season/2/episode/2](http://www.sho.com/billions/season/2/episode/2))?

</comment><comment><USER12> I would be interested in the number of trailers unloading.

I wonder how much intelligence will be gleaned when and if automated semis make deliveries to retailers? At any given moment the quantity, weight, destination, etc can be real-time tracked with these self driving semis. Would be an interesting business. Especially if the truck could be tracked from manufacturer to store

If others could track automatic Amazon truck deliveries from their warehouses that would probably be desired.

I assume that once driverless vehicles are in the main then the trucks would have to broadcast and thus be able to be picked up by private listening sites.

Then some company will create a spoofing truck runs to give false intelligence.. and on and on...

</comment><comment><USER13> Most big store parking lots tend to be legally mandated vast wastes of asphalt. New Urbanists celebrate Black Friday as "Parking Day": taking photos of nearly empty parking lots on supposedly the busiest shopping day of the year.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a little off topic, but did anyone else see the absolutely huge ad in the middle of the article? It takes up 670px in a window that's only 960px tall. Is this a new trend in advertising?

<comment><USER15> No because we have ad blockers installed :)

<comment><USER14> I use uBlock origin and I still saw it. I added a rule to block it but I just thought it was a little crazy that an ad was so large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Off topic - I recommend this site. Breadth and depth in terms of the article types. And the design is kind of weird, but I do dig it.

<comment><USER17> This article is basically a couple paragraphs of wikipedia-level explanation and a bogus graph. I wouldn't call it very deep analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> J.C. Penny's troubles are Target[1]: we have sufficently fashionable clothing for -10% less.

[1]any fast fashion retailer really.

<comment><USER8> The days of JC Penney, Sears, Kmart etc. are pretty much over. Walmart/Target have eaten their lunch. There isn't anything those three stores do particularly well that a different store doesn't do cheaper and better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Clicked but got a certificate error

</comment><comment><USER20> There is a lot of this going on in Prague. There is even an entire specialty called geoinformatics that you can study. I have an aquantance who's first comercial project was to tell the city which street lights are out.

This really goes to show, however, how the everyday man has no hope, as an investor, against the big boys.

Edit: I origionally wanted to link to this startup [https://spaceknow.com/](https://spaceknow.com/) but couldn't remember the name.

<comment><USER21> The everyday man should not be investing in individual stocks like this. They should be parking their money in low cost indexes[1].

[1] [http://seekingalpha.com/article/4049862-investment-advice- wa...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/4049862-investment-advice-warren- buffett-invest-low-cost-index-funds-advice-ignored-elites)

<comment><USER22> There have been lot of talks that index funds are not what they used to :). The reason stock goes high or low is because there is asymmetry in demand and supply. Previously, some people intelligently bought _average_ stock noticing that _average_ always go up high over long run. However, imagine a world where everyone is always buying _average_ of all stocks. Now there is no longer asymmetry and no longer profits for people who settled for average. So as everyone move towards low cost index funds, they receive diminishing returns.

<comment><USER21> There will still be that asymmetry. My comment was specifically with regards to "the everyday man" who is _not_ a savvy investor, does _not_ have access to all the tools and data, etc. Wallstreet will keep doing its thing just fine even if more Mainstreet investors jump on indexes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh no, not another graph with misleading axes. It doesn't really show such a perfect fit as it looks like. They've both scaled and translated the axes to make the two curves look similar to each other. If they counted cars upwards from 0 instead of downwards from the previous amount, then it'd make more sense but then we would see if the slopes were different or there was an offset indicating, for example, that cars are expected to still remain after the stock price reaches 0.

Good on them for starting the stock price axis at 0, that's a rarity in stock- price graphs.

<comment><USER24> Of course one of the axes has been scaled. We're interested in the _proportionality_ between the two variables, to see how good their claim that cars parked is a good proxy measure for stock price. I see where "percent since arbitrary start time x" is a poor choice of units for cars, but since it's a linear transformation, you'd get the same picture (and conclusion) were you using "thousands of cars" instead.

<comment><USER23> I disagree that it shows proportionality. Since we don't know where the zero would be with "thousands of cars", it could be way off the bottom of the chart, which means car numbers are relatively constant, even as stock price falls to a few percent of it's starting value.

The graph does show that both variables are decreasing, and that they both have a knee in the middle where the rate slows. But that's about all they clearly have in common.

An yes, scaling is of course necessary. It's translating that's the problem. I shouldn't have said scaling in my first post.

<comment><USER24> Sorry, I still disagree with that comment. They're not comparing apples and oranges, here, they're saying "here's why we're using apples to approximate oranges". The graph is showing a close linear relationship between # of cars and stock price.

It's saying "There is some a and b such that:

        a * "number of cars" + b ~ "stock price"

You can have a gripe with that method, sure, but the graph is fine.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone using a markdown file based CMS for more than a year? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone use a flat file-based CMS for more than a year? How have you dealt with all the file in time, with scaling? Has performance degraded through time?<p>I want to start a new blog and I don't want Wordpress or related CMS. I would love to try flat file based CMS but I am worried about scaling and other issues that might arise through time and growth. So, what are some of the challenges that you faced with time and growth? <comment><USER2> I've only been using Gatsby for a little over a year, but before I started I did wonder about performance as a potential problem, so I tested it. It generated a clean build of a site with 1000 source files in about 3 seconds on my 5 year old Mac Air. I don't imagine I'll ever actually write that much.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1000 is a lot and I would consider my project a success if it goes that much.</comment></comment>


Do You Have Enough Hustle to Build a Successful Startup? - <AUTHOR> http://technori.com/2013/07/4695-startup-hustle/

<comment><USER3> Interesting article... I found some of the presuppositions annoying - <USER2> seem, for example, to assume that all startups are something web-based and depend on website visitors as customers; and there seems to be an assumption baked in this piece that "hackers" and "hustlers" are mutually exclusive.

But looking past that, there's a nugget or two of good stuff.

One actionable item I took away from this was from here:

 _There is no social proof on your website. Without testimonials, social media following numbers, "as-seen-in" PR credentials, association memberships or some kind of third-party evidence that you're legitimate, you're not building credibility._

Since we're very early-stage with little name recognition and no brand association to speak of, we should be leveraging any avenue we can to gain this "social proof". Off-hand, I could see having a page that mentions companies the founders worked for before Fogbeam (a list that would include IBM, Red Hat, Lulu.com, Redwood Software, UNC-CH, etc.), and a place to mention industry associations and other 3rd party groups that we are associated with. We (either as individual founders or as a company) are members of NCTA (North Carolina Technology Association), AITP (Association of Information Technology Professionals), CED (Council for Entrepreneurial Development), AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), ISA (International Society for Automation), EFF, IEEE, and the ACM. But none of that is on our website! D'oh.

So, speaking only for myself, I found at least one useful, actionable takeaway from this article.</comment>


Some thoughts on the scala REPL - <AUTHOR> http://monkey.org/~jose/blog//viewpage.php?page=thoughts_on_scala_repl <comment><USER2> > while visually useful, i dislike the leading "|" (pipe) at the beginning of > a continuation - it breaks copy and paste.

Do you mean copying stuff from the REPL to something else?

Because this works:

      scala> scala> def foo(x: Int) = {

      // Detected repl transcript paste: ctrl-D to finish.

           |     x > 1
           | }
      foo: (x: Int)Boolean
      // Replaying 1 commands from transcript.

      scala> def foo(x: Int) = {
          x > 1
      }
      foo: (x: Int)Boolean

<comment><AUTHOR> usually i'm pasting somewhere else, e.g. some code i'm composing in an editor (and using the REPL to help debug it). thanks for the tip, though, i don't know if i have ever pasted it back into the REPL itself.

<comment><USER2> For this use-case, :save might be useful, although I agree that's it is still not as easy as copy-paste.</comment></comment></comment>


Our (CSS) Best Practices Are Killing Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2011/04/28/our-best-practices-are-killing-us/ <comment><USER2> "How in the world did we even get the idea that some aspects of CSS were good and others evil? Who decided and what data did they use to judge? Did their goals fit our goals? There is nothing wrong with using classes. In almost every case, classes work well and have fewer unintended consequences than either IDs or element selectors."

What happened is that CSS was two things at the same time: It was a way of refactoring HTML to remove massive amounts of redundant style information, and a way of trying to bring more "semantic" meaning to HTML, for a suitably ill- defined definition of "semantic". It was way more successful at the former than the latter, but the latter is what made it the toast of the town and what all the sales pitches were about. You might say the goal was "semantic", but especially in the earlier version the _result_ was merely the ability to refactor common styles.

As I like to say, goals aren't results. But they are very commonly confused by, well, almost everyone. It is this confusion that got the parts of CSS that were "merely" enabling refactoring but weren't "semantic" labeled _bad and evil_. Adding an element like a div to refactor styles is one valid choice that may be useful; adding a "non-semantic div" is evil from the semantic point of view.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess it's what happens when people who are not programmers set out to jobs involving code implicitly via WYSIWYG editors.</comment>


Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews - <AUTHOR> http://blog.interviewing.io/6-red-flags-i-saw-while-doing-60-technical-interviews-in-30-days/ <comment><USER3> Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I've turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren't clear.

From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring manager only has a vague idea what to do with someone because they are simply building an empire.

At least some of them are more upfront and say stupid things like "you get to define your role". Which is fine, if it comes with a grand vision, or your selling them on one, but frequently the grand vision is little more than "evolve our huge product, and justify it". Which is frequently just make work, and you won't be provided resources to actually implement a vision. And you can see this stuff in the public releases of products. Its the split personality of the windows control panel, where someone decided the current one wasn't good for a touch environment, but only had the manpower/political will to fix like the 5 most common things people want to change. So the results are garbage, and are the functional equivalent of 1/2 a wing glued to a car because someone wants an airplane but they only had a car.

<comment><USER4> Of the big tech companies, I've worked at Facebook, Google, & Apple. I've still not quite cracked what's different about Apple culturally that they seem to be more immune to this problem. The only main difference I can spot is I don't recall ever encountering a PM at Apple. To do planning engineers would propose improvements, new features, etc. These were bubbled up. Then executives would be responsible for building a theme around those developments & how that fit larger company-wide themes for iOS. On the other hand, I don't know if that was an Apple-wide thing or iOS-specific (at the time it was hard to distinguish since the entire company was largely organized around iOS/MacOS).

Another difference is that design is top-down at Apple. Any UI redesign was driven by Johnny's team which was responsible for a holistic and consistent across-the-board implementation. I don't believe you were allowed to deviate from the design language. This one I have less visibility into as I worked on technology pieces rather than things that had a user-facing component.

<comment><USER5> The way Apple manages to do this is that, _to a larger degree than others_ , the company is run as a collection of different companies. This has pros AND cons but one of the pros in this context is that their hiring is less "work at Apple", and more "work for THIS team at Apple". Hands-down unbeatable for the specific question of role clarity, but it's naive to pretend there aren't downsides to the practice.

<comment><USER6> This is how Bell Labs was back prior to divestiture, up until the mid 1990s.

There really wasn't one huge Bell Labs, there were literally hundreds of hundred person teams run as if they were little companies, but with a huge bureaucracy providing funding, guidance, and all sharing a knowledge pool.

If you changed teams, you could find a completely different team culture using completely different tools. And like biology, some teams thrived, and some failed.

<comment><USER7> This sounds an awful lot like research at a university. It definitely has it's strenths and weaknesses. Some labs collaborate more than others. Some feel like islands in the ocean, while others feel like a townhouse in the city. Some labs are poor and a few are incredibly wealthy. All of them seem to filled with hard working interesting people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc.

I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressful work to prove myself to you.

The vibe I get from that is: they're not interested in senior or experienced talent. What they want is new grads. So I just tell them I am not interested. Either that or the hiring market isn't nearly as tight as people claim. There must be a surplus of talent if companies can get away with this.

I don't like whiteboard coding exercises, but would be willing to do them for the right position. We need to see if this is the right position for me/them before we proceed to that phase. That means that that process comes as one of the last steps, before an offer. If they're not willing to do that, I just politely decline.

<comment><USER9> After being on both sides of the interview situation for quite a while now, my feeling on this is more nuanced.

The thing is, when you look for a job, you will often go for 5 to 10 interviews.

On the other end, when I'm looking for someone to fill a position in my team, I will interview at the very least 50 candidates.

That is to say, all things equal, the interviewer has most likely more incentive than the interviewee to go straight to the point, and thus perform a technical check early in the process.

Also, you have to realize than the vast majority of candidates applying for a position are highly unfit for it. Seriously, even for very senior positions, you would be amazed at the sheer amount of people applying with grossly pumped resumes, and overall low skill level once tested.

Even after careful picking of resumes, I would estimate that 80% of candidates end up being obviously unfit after the first 10 minutes of a technical interview. That's why, as an interviewer, I'm not very inclined to have a long open discussion about the job until I have at least some degree of confidence that the candidate is worth it.

Of course that process is unfair for the "good" candidates. Those who apply to positions fitting their skill set. But when you have more than 50 interviews ahead of you, and an actual job to do, you have to make compromises and tailor your process for efficiency.

<comment><USER8> Honestly, I question most interviewers ability to evaluate someone as low or high skill. I honestly don't think the testing works most of the time.

<comment><USER10> If you really believe so, then I think you are failing to grasp how low "low skill" truly happens to be.

<comment><USER8> Nope, I think lots of people perform 'low skill' in a whiteboard scenario that are not. And the arrogance of their interviewers gets them on HN making very bold claims about other people's skill levels without consideration for the scenarios involved.

Don't get me wrong-- I've worked with very incompetent people. Many of them would have passed a coding interview though.

<comment><USER11> My whiteboard coding interviews now mostly consist of asking someone to write a for loop with one state variable. That's my bar for low skill. If you can't write 6 lines of code in 45 minutes with one loop and one variable, then you and I are going to have problems working on logic problems on a whiteboard on the actual job.

I've interviewed enough people who don't even know the _syntax_ of a for loop for the language that they chose to use.

As a general matter for how the industry as a whole interviews, I agree though; I am no longer a fan of tricky algorithmic or esoteric data structure questions in whiteboard interviews. The problem I find with other people's interviewing questions is that most people are still asking things that are way too difficult, and they don't end up judging anything other than "Did this person just cram hundreds of hours of algorithms questions?" or "Did this person get lucky and happen to know this type of problem ahead of time?".

For better or for worse, my company schedules me for like >90% system design questions now, which I prefer anyways. Start with a very simple problem and system, and then just throw wrenches.

<comment><USER12> I'm only 90% sure I know the syntax of a for loop in my chosen language, C#. The reason for the missing 10% is that I never write this syntax.

Most loops are covered by a foreach or by LINQ (think: map and reduce, buy nicer).

The few times I actually need a for loop I type: "for" <press enter> <type the limit for i> <press enter> and then I focus on the loop body. If my needs are more complicated, I _modify_ the for loop my IDE gives me.

<comment><USER11> Yea I meant a for-each loop.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure the last time I wrote a for loop that wasn't for-each.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Not Enough Clarity about your Role" \- Like the author mentions, this can definitely signify that the role is not important. The other thing I've noticed over my career is that it could be that the role involves "grunge" work (awful oncall shifts, doing backend work when you want to do only frontend, etc). Companies hide behind cool titles/department names/etc, promising whatever you want to hear to get you in.

<comment><USER14> IMO it's not really 'not important' as much as 'not honest'.

Someone, somewhere at that company chose to hire someone... and they know what they want them to do. Why aren't they telling me?

Here I am sitting down expecting to divulge all sorts of things / do a dance, but they can't tell me what they want...

There's all sorts of reasons to not tell anyone / corporate circumstances, but it's a really bad foot to start off with / makes me worry.

<comment><USER15> You're probably right that sometimes people are hiding something from you. But I think a lot of the time it's more like "I have 10 people doing a bunch of things that vary over time and on a day to day basis, and what each of them does specifically really depends on what they are good at and what comes up. I really want those 10 people to be able to do 10% more of that confusing mix of activities than they are currently doing. So I guess I'll hire someone new."

And when that new person asks what they will be doing, the answer actually is, honestly, sort of ambiguous.

It's not a great sign for how organized they are, but it's still a realistic way someone could both be hiring and not know exactly what the new person's day to day will be like.

<comment><USER14> Yeah I don't think of it as 'deceptive', but more so just not through through or even clearly sharing what the situation is.

For me "we've got like 20 things going on, here's a little about them, so that kinda stuff, but I've no idea day to day how it will play out" is actually plenty honest if that's the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> compiler-guy The "Not Enough Clarity about your Role" issue has killed Google with so many potentially outstanding employees. For years and years you wouldn't interview with your team, or even be told what team you would be joining. It is slightly better now, but you still don't interview with your specific team until very, very late in the process, if you even do.

One of the worst things about interviewing at the big G.

<comment><USER8> Part of that is because of the expectation at Google that you will just move around. You don't really hire specifically into a given team, and that could be disconcerting, for sure. But you are also given enough respect by the company to assume that as a competent SWE you should be able to move around fairly easily to almost any team in the company.

When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that you would be expected to move every two years or so. That's probably softened a bit, but it's still a part of the culture.

So even if you don't love where you're initially slotted, nobody is going to frown excessively when you transfer elsewhere after getting past your noogler phase.

I've found it frustrating to interview at other places and get blank stares when I ask about how team mobility works within the company, what happens when the team is restructured, etc.

<comment><USER16> Doesn't that put off a lot of very high-quality candidates though? If someone joins because they want to work in an interesting machine learning team, they probably don't want to be potentially moved on to a legacy Java CRUD app. Or is transferring determined more by what the employee wants?

<comment><USER17> 1 point by kinkrtyavimoodh 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [–]

Among the bigger companies, Google is by far the friendliest when it comes to intra-company transfers. All you need is the manager of the destination team to accept you. If the team is in a different country, the immigration teams will do what needs to be done. You don't need permission from your current manager.

Maybe you don't care about this, but many would consider this a huge 'perk', that justifies Google's focus on hiring good generalist SWEs who are not too wedded to a specific team.

It's a very strong part of Google culture, and it manifests itself in every aspect of Google life, such as general openness wrt code and documentation across the whole company, internal job boards etc. which make it easy to take a call about what team you want to work on next.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some of my hall of shame interviewers:

\- Everyone I interviewed on my would-be team felt like they were attending a funeral, never met a more depressed unenthusiastic bunch.

\- One of the interviewers wondering why I wanted this job as it was terrible, he stated he was looking to leave and warned me about the company.

\- Meeting room of interview room(conference room) reeked of sweat(when no one was there), it was disgusting, this from a company that was heavily funded(going public this year!) also trash on the floor and interviewers unprepared as well.

\- Interviewer saying there was not much work here, the company mainly collects royalties from IP and the position would see alot of downtime/doing nothing(manager saying this!).

<comment><USER19> Why hall of shame? 2 and 4 are top mates.

<comment><USER20> I once had a manager try to hire me back from another position:

'Look you will be overworked and underpaid, but you will get to do really cool hands on things here.."

I appreciated the honesty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can identify with the red flag where they try to pressure you to accept the offer in a short period. This is also called an exploding offer. I had a place do that to me and I ended up turning the opportunity down.

<comment><USER22> On the other hand, there often needs to be a time limit, or else they will be too late to make an offer to the runner-up (when the leader turns it down). I am not sure what a 'reasonable period' is.

<comment> compiler-guy A reasonable period is: You tell them up front your ideal timeline, that you have a couple of other irons in the fire (if you do), and you keep them informed of the progress of those other fires. And they do the same for you. Maybe you can't get a timing that works for both sides together, but that is OK. The pressuring is what isn't.

<comment><USER23> I've been the recruiter in this position. I think it is unethical to string your runners-up along in this situation. You're essentially taking up their (and your) valuable time with little chance at success.

Exploding offers are the least bad solution. Give them 48-72 hours, with a small extension if they are currently talking to someone else.

<comment><USER24> If you don't like being a runner-up then you should negotiate with the candidate so that your company ends up in a more competitive position.

<comment><USER25> It's extremely hard for smaller companies to compete with the likes of Google and Facebook, who (I've heard) offer 25% more than everyone else. Which is why they end up with all the talent. Lather, rinse, repeat.

<comment><USER24> If this is a company's reason for not finding talent then the hiring team is simply not competent at hiring.

You can do any number of things to differentiate yourself from a FAANG to make your company more appealing. However, each candidate will have different values, so in order to gain an edge you first have to engage each candidate with the goal of discovering these values.

For example, this morning I was reading a recruiting email while considering a Sr SDE role on the AWS S3 team. They list 4 basic requirements for candidates, one of which reads:

· Able to debug, troubleshoot and resolve complex technical issues reported by customers

This screams of being responsible for legacy code and spending time on-call resolving other people's bugs. Can your company offer green-field development? Then congratulations, you've just gained an edge over a FAANG!

Other ways to differentiate are to consider the candidate's career trajectory. Maybe they want to become a manager, a technical lead, or pick up new technical skills. Can you place them on a team that will facilitate their professional development? If so then holy cow, this small company is looking better and better!

The point is that you can't go to war with a Goliath and expect to win using brute force. So if your opponent has 10 ships while you only have 1 then do yourself a favor and fight on land.

For context, I've had to lead and grow technical teams in the Seattle market, which means competing with Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and to a lesser degree Apple and Google. Having filled ~50 technical roles, I can say that succeeding in a competitive market requires you to be hands-on and highly engaged. And if your recruiting pipeline begins and ends with a submit form then you're going to make life really hard on yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I complained about there being very few posts about how _companies_ (not applicants) fail interviews only two weeks ago [0].

Thanks for showing off this side!

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24323816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24323816)

</comment><comment><USER27> I generally agree with the points, but have a few places of disagreement:

> Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way

If this is someone you'll be working closely with, it's a yellow flag, but the common complaint you read here about algorithmic interviews not being the best way to evaluate someone for a job, this really just tells you how good this person is at either that problem or interviewing.

> Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers

Normally, I'd agree fully, and as an interviewer, I go in with a sales hat on over my technical hat. During covid, I have no idea how to read low morale.

> based in Palo Alto...a six-figure offer definitely didn't seem like a bad > start

This is table stakes for a software engineer in the Bay Area, now. Not sure why it was worth adding.

<comment><USER28> If the interviewer has no flexibility in understanding algorithmic solutions, it means they accept that applicants spend a month or more exercising whiteboard riddles while the interviewer just compares the solution with existing notes. I think there is a valid case for whiteboard interviews, especially when the company needs to optimize code a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Tech interviewing articles seem to do well on HN.

I'm guessing because it's something most of us can relate to and that's what made me click on it. But I feel like I've read this same content in different articles, that I've found on HN, multiple times.

<comment><USER30> I like to think that it's one of the few factors that really unite the whole HN community - most of us lurkers here have gone through or will go through a tech interview at some point. So it's universally educational for the HN audience and it's not a polarizing topic.

It's also kind of like somebody posting true life pro tips because it's useful for most of us hence why it gathers so mony upvotes probably.

<comment><USER29> That's a nice way of seeing it and there's definitely good information being shared in these comments, which may help many people.

Maybe these transparent content marketing articles ignite my skepticism

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I sometimes feel self-conscious asking deep questions about morale, especially when I'm on the fence about working at a place and am just being polite in case I need this as a Plan C.

There are some questions where if you get the person to take them seriously you may pop whatever bubble they're living in that helps them get through the day.

One place, I was not doing so great. I was participating in the interview process, mostly trying to make sure our candidates were better than our status quo, so new people would make my life better. This one kid asks, "what do you like about working here?" and I froze. I didn't have an answer. Luckily there were three of us, and I had time to come up with a half-assed answer that didn't consist of "Run!"

Shortly after that I decided to leave, and just making that decision let me make it to the next bonus payout, which was something on the order of 10% of salary after taxes (so ~8 weeks?), plus a few more options vesting. And then I was out the door, along with about 1/5th of the engineering department. It's like people forget there's a door until someone else goes through it. Afterward, the members of the exodus sat around over beers to celebrate the check clearing. Someone (possibly me) asked if sticking around for the bonus was worth it. Almost all of us said no.

<comment><USER32> Interesting. It seems almost immoral to interview new hires when you know there are insurmountable problems at the company that make you consider leaving.

Not saying you are immoral here -- just that it does seem to pose a dilemma. I have not had to interview someone for a company that I want to leave. It sounds like it would suck and require some level of internalized rationalization to go through with it.

<comment><USER31> Two things. One, you don't always know the answer to a question until someone asks it, and then you can't un-hear the question. I thought I was just grouchy until asked, and then I realized I was properly unhappy in this role. Which I said makes me uncomfortable about asking hard questions of people I don't know and probably will never work with.

Two, it's easier to leave a place when you know you've left a project in good hands, instead of knowing things will unravel if you do. Mostly, it's an ethical problem if you sabotage the hiring.

But I'll agree that there is a tension between professionalism and social responsibility. What do I owe to my employer, what do I owe to the local developer community? The next time I interviewed, a guy I had a lot of respect for referred me to a used-car-salesman of a recruiter for a place he was leaving. I did contract-to-hire, walked away from that one. Felt a bit like a meat shield to cover his retreat. I realized all the things I respected him for were past tense, and honor that but stay the hell away from him now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> To the page author: if you adjust the following link (logo) to be the https variant, the site should read as fully secure:

[http://blog.interviewing.io/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/just-...](http://blog.interviewing.io/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/just-logo.png)

Also, maybe add a redirect from http to https?

</comment><comment><USER34> I had already accepted a position in a local bank when they called me again because one of my future colleagues wanted to ask me some further questions.

I got there and met with a guy who had 3 or 4 "AWS Certified" pins attached to his shirt. He wanted to know how I had learned AWS since I did not have any courses or certifications on my resume.

I dropped the position immediately after.

<comment><USER35> The disregard for proper process would already a red flag, but the prospect of working with that coworker would make me nope out of that job before I left the building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great list. For big companies, I'd also add looking out for tenure in the management chain that you'll be reporting into (although this information can be a bit tough to get). Walking into a musical chairs situation above your head may land you in a position where gravity lands you in harms way.

</comment><comment><USER37> " _Not enough clarity about your role_ "

:-) Back when I interviewed at Google, this was their signature. If they made you an offer, it could be to work on any team, anywhere. Their choice.

" _Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers_ "

And this is why I never got a research job. Telcordia Research, 2004. The only group actually hiring was really doing product development. Everybody else left in the big, empty building were the people who hadn't already escaped.

</comment><comment><USER38> > If through all the different stages of the interview process, you experience > a consistent lack of interest or low morale from your interviewers, you > might want to pay attention

This is good advice. I certainly have a different perspective of a number of companies, where my outlook of those companies has changed are after witnessing this. It was easy to pass on those companies.

<comment><USER39> Agreed and I want to add that it can go the other way as well. I've interviewed with a few companies that I was ambivalent about going in, but after interacting with some extremely sharp and pleasant interviewers I got quite a bit more excited about the job.

</comment></comment><comment> site-packages1 This is a really good list, and I don't think I can add much to the discussion already here. But the article introduces the author as "passionate about architecting and building scalable software systems." Is _anyone_ passionate about this, or is this just marketing speak. It's like introducing someone as "passionate about customer service," give me a break.

<comment><USER40> Maybe it depends on what you mean by "passionate," but I would say I'm passionate about customer service and about architecting and building scalable software systems. I cofounded a professional services firm, and it makes me happy to provide our clients a lot of value, and I do really enjoy thinking about scalable systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> One of my unmentioned red flags is a company with significant funding, no monetization plan and caring only about growth.

That's 100% personal taste, as I'd rather work for a "calm company".

</comment><comment><USER42> > Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way

Haha, I've happily been in the "interviewer" side of this two times:

One time, as part of a DevOps interview I asked the candidate to run something in a POSIX OS every 15 seconds using a cronjob (that was the general idea). Crontab granularity is only in minutes, so you have to use your head or Google to get a Cronjob answer. The interviewee however told me about the 1 minute granularity of CronJob, and offered instead to create a small service on init.d. with a while/sleep 15. I loved his response :-)

The other was someone who, while solving a binary search problem without a ceiling integer value, used the fact that his language of choice C++ has an INT_MAX macro defined to set the limit of the search... TOUCHE.

As an interviewer I personally love when these sort of things happen because it shown the interviewee is really thinking about the problem.

<comment><USER43> That's the first thing I thought reading your sentence, cron cannot do seconds granularity (I think the lowest was 1 hour on the last OS I was working with).

Why would you ask questions which you know are impossible? That's setting up the candidate to fail.

<comment><USER44> It's not "impossible", just not natively obvious. The solution I remember using is

        0 * * * * foo()
        0 * * * * sleep 30; foo()

It's not the prettiest but is a reasonable imitation of a 30 second cron.

<comment><USER42> You got it! the main idea is for it to be a "solve the problem" thing with certain framework.

I've got guys that just google it, others that do a script and sleep within the script, and the guy that suggested the while. All of them are "right" answers for me... I don't really care about how they do it, but the process perform while doing it.

Fact is, during the life of a DevOps, they will need to solve things that they don't know how to, so they'll need to be able to at least Google-fu themselves out of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How did they get 60 interviews? Do I really need to join LinkedIn?

<comment><USER46> He is exactly what most tech companies are trying to hire. Very strong resume, masters from respected college, clearly passionate about tech, and a PoC to top it off, he literally checks every box.

<comment><USER47> Is that actually a helpful comment, its certainly not in the sprit of HN

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The HN thread this article refers to is at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555).

</comment><comment><USER49> I applied for jobs last year, after having been on the reviewing side of technical interviews for a good while (at my second job). I found a few things.

One, wrt the companies I worked for, I didn't feel like they were vetting my technical skills enough; at best it was an hour of chatting and going through some of the code I wrote, but in my head there's just so much more to it. I felt like they were easily impressed. I also felt like I was cheating because I had reviewed so many interviews, so I knew what to look out for.

Second, I initially went in there just to orient myself, to prove myself in technical interviews, but for both recruiters and employers, it felt like going into the process already meant I really wanted to work there. I never felt like I learned enough about the job to make that decision yet (although there is usually a one month grace period where you can quit or get fired without cause).

Third, wages varied wildly. One job that was interesting was right across the street from me, flew through the interviews easily etc, but their offer was at best 2/3rds of what I earned at the time, it would have put me back years. I wonder if their wages were just not that great in general, or if they were betting on me preferring a one minute commute over a decent wage. I couldn't afford to live here on what they were offering so I declined. They did get back to me a few months later, I wonder if they changed their wage structure. I might reconsider if they can go over my current income.

I did find a new job in the end, one where I didn't actually do a technical interview, but where I felt like they actually needed me (instead of just an ass on a seat), like I had a Mission to accomplish. Still working on that, slowly. What also helped is that while I work 4 hours / week less now (I was looking for that), I still earn the same as I did at my previous job - <USER2> taxes for a lease car, and income tax laws changed.

</comment><comment> Seb-C With experience I have learned to stop relying on how the interview feels, but look more at the facts instead.

Some companies who did feel strict during the interviews actually were really good companies.

The opposite is true, I interviewed a company that seemed open minded and fun.

The interview in appearance was quite enjoyable, but with huge red flags. The CTO was always talking (super fast) and just wouldn't let me speak. I could ask only one question (during 1h) and was rudely interrupted in the end because he had no more time.

The CTO also said something like "If you join this company you will work with very competent engineers, smarter than you". To which I humorously answered while defending my pride, but probably ended up looking like someone full of himself.

Clearly this is not someone I would enjoy working with on a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER50> I want to make the point that I always make on this topic - as software engineers we are very lucky to be in a sellers market. We get to pick and choose companies and have the luxury of rejecting 10 companies based on small negative signals (however valid).

It is important when thinking about social issues that the VAST majority of the population have very much the opposite experience - they might have to apply to 20 jobs to get one interview and if they get an offer they _have_ to take it or they won't be able to make rent. The knock on effects on that on their work life are enormous.

</comment><comment><USER51> I do take exception with "no clear direction on where the company is headed". You have to consider who is interviewing you and the size of the company you are interviewing at. I don't expect a low level hiring manager inside of a fortune 500 company to give some amazing elevator pitch. If they could they would likely be a C level exec. Everybody knows where companies like P&G or Coca-Cola are headed. The candidate might reasonably assume they intend to keep developing and selling new shampoo and drinks.

</comment><comment><USER52> I had technical phone interview with one big electronics company. At the end of the interview when I asked the interviewer his daily work and how it looks like, he was honest and told me something that he don't like it. Something the problem is ill-defined with the manager only cares about end result. He seems very depressed from how he talked about the company, and at the end asked me if I am still interested working for such kind of problems. Decided then not to move to next step.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'll add one more red flag: your team is comprised mostly of contractors [1]. This is a common occurrence in big-co corporate engineering. Often times, this indicates that tech comes third fiddle to sales and accounting and that you will not only work with every enterprise-y tool you can think of, but you'll work crap hours with little time for learning.

[1] This doesn't apply for those new to tech or, well, contractors!

</comment><comment><USER54> Red flags: ask if they have a standard operating procedure document or employee handbook. Basic stuff like where to go for healthcare, who to talk to about sick leave etc. This sort of logistical stuff is a weight on employee's to have to constantly be asking direct reports about. It's a bad sign when a company can't take the time to do a basic doc like this.

</comment><comment><USER55> Some of these points make me feel that this person is trying to read too much from few data points in a rather noisy world.

<comment><USER56> Sounds like what's required by the constructed circumstance on both sides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> A view from another side. I am not a recruiting specialist, but have been retained by clients to "screen the candidates for someone like me". Greed and avarice typically win, so I tend to accept these follow-up gigs.

The types of engineering that I do are not the most technically difficult. But it is a very small piece of the engineering pie, so there are not many out there with my combination of skill-set and education and experience. That is, I may not be representative of what the client probably needs in the long- term, as I was hired by the client to solve a particular and unique problem.

So I typically screen for someone under 45 (I am over 60) that has done and is interested in certain types of math, programming, test, and hardware design. This is how interviews need to be structured - and just devolving algorithms and citing random information and doing circuit node calculations from schematics will be less likely to identify the engineer that you need.

As for the problems cited by the writer - they are relevant, but are structural and should be self evident to anyone out of school for more than one or two years.

</comment><comment><USER58> This article seems like another example of mid-level people giving advice to junior-level people. There are far more red flags you can expect from a company by asking the right questions. The article doesn't dive into any of that and reads more like a few gripes from a guy who did way too many interviews and became jaded by it. The technical interview itself is not likely to be a good indicator of what work looks like at the company, and without experiencing the other side of things these red flags become 'things that rubbed me the wrong way.'

Questions you ask are what dig up the red flags. Who am I replacing and why did they leave? What's the largest obstacle the engineering team is trying to overcome? How do you (the manager) manage your team differently? Is there anything you as a manager would like to improve at?

90% of workplace satisfaction can be attributed to (or sabotaged by) one's direct manager. Make sure you'll appreciate their style.

<comment><USER59> It's good to ask a manager whether they read the CIA simple sabotage manual and if they practice any of the techniques in the company.

<comment><USER47> Id be impressed if that I have worked where third part agencies whet that would be an improvement.

Seeing a set of minutes/notes from a couple of meetings would be a good filter

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> At first I was surprised that he didn't mention companies that interview many candidates endlessly and never actually intend to hire. But then I realized, he was the other side of that.

</comment><comment><USER61> I was hoping this was red flags from the interviewer side. Yeah I'm hoping a blog will give me some feedback.

<comment><USER62> Aren't "red flags" from the interviewer side pretty obvious? Most interviews are just noise with very little signal.

Some basic red flags:

* Poor ability to self-reflect or demonstrate that they've learned things from their experiences

* Lack of or otherwise poor critical thinking

* Inability to communicate

* Inability to display core competency in the skills required for the job, especially when challenged (I don't do "adversarial" interviewing, but I do throw a lot of spanners into their answers to see if they can vary their approach)

* Inability to demonstrate handling challenges and negative experiences constructively

* Poor decorum - "putting your hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel." There's not always one single thing that becomes a red flag, but things like badmouthing 3rd parties, airing of grievances, extreme arrogance, and so on. The proverbial "Would I like to work with this person?"

<comment><USER19> The worst candidates know the exact way to act in the interview process. Once they're in, it's really difficult to get them out. I've seen some pretty terrible behaviour, all performed absolutely fine in interviews. So much so that I believe that interviews are only useful to establish basic suitability and that most companies should hire loosely with a long probationary period. Employees that don't perform would be let go.

<comment><USER63> That is definitely one model. The downside is that people are less likely to go to a company with high turnover (high turnover is a red flag for candidates).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> These red flags are the norm in the last decade that I have been interviewing in SV. Issue is that everybody is in the game to further themselves first and foremost rather than helping the company or the candidate. I have talked to many colleagues and managers who are only looking for people that can be "used" to get them promoted and this mindset shapes how they interview candidates.

<comment><USER65> I am a career switcher who did code "for fun" and only figured out that I would like my life more if I did it as my job in my 30s. Somehow, I had built my life around the assumption that your job had to be "hard" as in "you need to constantly force yourself to do the work" as some kind of masochistic virtue, and it took me that long to realize that I could actually _enjoy_ my work _AND_ get paid well for it if I just did what I loved (software).

Anyway, to your comment: there are people like this everywhere, in all industries. The more money there is involved in a domain, the more you will find people that are only in that domain for the money. Doesn't mean those people wont have legit skills that can be utilized, but there are some downsides as you note.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> > Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers

Describes my experience with Conoco-Phillips 7 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER67> I don't like this company. Their business model is parasitic.

</comment><comment><USER68> Regarding this

> Undue pressure to accept an offer

Sometimes the recruiters may do this even the company may be cool about you taking your time. So don't take the recruiter's attitude being representative of the company.

Especially if it's a third party recruiter.

</comment><comment><USER69> Is it just me or did he Photoshop those glasses into his pic?

</comment><comment><USER53> This is a solid list of red flags. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER70> I found this article inspiring. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER71> Thanks for writing and posting this article. Technical interviews are one of the more essential topics in our field right now, and I do think 1) they're badly handled, and 2) difficult to get right.

A couple of thoughts on two points raised here:

1) Pressure to accept an offer. I may have lost out on an offer from a promising company by asking for a decision too quickly, and I did this because I was under pressure to accept a different offer. I believe the company's policy is that 1) they'll never rush their own decision to make an offer and 2) they'll never rush a candidate to accept. They figure that if they want to hire you, that won't change a month from now.

This position has a lot of integrity, but it does come from a position of great stability. Small companies may have only enough funding for one position, and they're terrified that by waiting for a strong candidate who is unlikely to accept, they'll lose out on another excellent candidate. The company I applied to was well established and well funded enough that they could hire anyone they felt was an excellent candidate. They were, in short, always recruiting, never desperately. The scenario I can't really respect is the company that takes weeks or longer about getting to an offer and then wants an answer in 3 days. I suspect that it's always usually best to pass on a company that is so desperate it needs to do this.

2) Not enough clarity about your role, and underprepared interviewers.

I think this can result from the "always recruiting" mentality. When it's tough to hire, and you have the money to hire, it really becomes about finding people when you find them. Companies are less concerned about exactly how to use a new hire, they're more concerned about finding someone they believe can make a strong contribution. As a result, they don't really hire for a specific role. Now, this is understandable as a motivation, but it leads to interview that are bewildering to a candidate. I've had full day whiteboard interviews covering data structures, SQL, and math, but without having read the company's website in advance, I'd be damned if I knew what they did, at all. That just can't happen. It shouldn't be possible for a candidate to go through an entire day of draining exam style interviews and not have the faintest idea what the company does. Even my interview at Google, which was very whiteboard-examish, the interviewers still took the time to explain what they work on before saying "so, suppose the search space were no longer rectangular or convex, how would you modify your code to find all matrices with positive determinants".

They aren't thinking about a role, they're thinking that if you can solve difficult code/math problems at the whiteboard, present and explain your ideas clearly, and seem professional in your interactions with people, they'll find something worthwhile for you to do (or, perhaps, they have confidence you'll find something worthwhile to do). It does make a certain amount of sense, but it leaves the candidate in the dark, and I don't want to join a company where my only interactions have been algorithm and data science questions at a whiteboard.

</comment><comment><USER72> Yes

</comment><comment><USER73> Why is the font on this article so hard to read? Maybe it's not the font, but the weight. I had a hard time reading it and stopped part way through.

<comment><USER74> font-weight: 300 is a bit light.

Bump it up to 500!

<comment><USER75> Dear website creators: Just leave it alone. The default font width is just fine!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I would just be happy to get an interview.

<comment><USER77> Now is the perfect opportunity. Q4 is coming and while the company you're interviewing for may not think in quarters, their client or somebody further in the food chain definitely is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Take this with a grain of salt, however. You will see some of these "red flags" in a Google or Facebook interview (I've done both), and yet they're some of the world's best places to work, and you can have a _great_ time there.

</comment><comment><USER79> Mic drop</comment>


British Expedition to Abyssinia - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Expedition_to_Abyssinia <comment><USER2> 700 dead 1,400 wounded on Ethiopian side, 2 dead for the British. And all because: _Theodore, imprisoned several missionaries and two representatives of the British government in an attempt to get the attention of the British government, which had decided against his requests for military assistance_

The good old days.

<comment><USER3> "... while the native hostages had their hands and feet amputated before being thrown over the edge of the precipice surrounding the plateau."

Good old days when governments weren't afraid to take horrible leaders head on.

<comment><USER2> Do you think that the British where driven by moral imperative to depose an evil ruler?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apropos of nothing: the only other time I recall seeing the word "Abyssinia" is in the song "Re:Definition" by Mos Def & Talib Kweli:

 _Sinking they ship, like Moby Dick to Ahab_

 _Son I 'm way past the minimum, entering millennium_

 _My raps will hold a gat to your back like Palestinians_

 _Ancient Abyssinia, sure to hold the Gideon_

 _Official b-boy gentlemen, long term, never the interim_

 _Born inside the winter, when?_

 _Day after December 10_

* [https://genius.com/Black-star-re-definition-lyrics](https://genius.com/Black-star-re-definition-lyrics)

When Mos Def gives off the rhymes (about 1m28 in) the flow is just crazy smooth:

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr6SrRQnZv4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr6SrRQnZv4)

<comment><USER5> Even more apropos of nothing: it's also used in a famous episode of M _A_ S*H, "Abyssinia, Henry".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abyssinia,_Henry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abyssinia,_Henry)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> romantic glasses on. in today's honorless world, these historical acts are incredible. reminds me of the terrible fights against Burma, as well as the more recent shackleton expedition during ww1, and defence of hong kong during ww2. romantic glasses off.

these kind of acts can only happen when life is cheap. ask 10,000 people today to go to mars knowing that at least a few, at most all, will die. i guarantee almost no one will sign up. because we value life now like in no other period in human history. for better or worse.

<comment><USER7> As far as I can tell dangerous sports seem more popular than ever so I'm not sure that is true (I've known a few people who had died in motorbike accidents and in the mountains so I may be biased).

Also, I'd go to Mars!

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I think we're probably if anything more enthusiastic about elective risking of life than ever before. Risking one's life is a leisure activity! (Both in extreme sports, and in activities that we now know to be dangerous in a way that we didn't really understand before; drinking, smoking, excessive eating, etc)

However, risking _other peoples'_ lives (or at least conscious risking of other peoples' lives; the afore-mentioned extreme sports do sometimes incidentally risk other peoples' lives but the perpetrator isn't normally conscious of this) is certainly frowned upon more now than at any previous time in history, especially to no particularly good purpose (as in the link).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quite bonkers, and news to me. This must have been one of the more grandiose campaigns of the Victorians.

<comment><USER10> The Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan was quite grandiose too.

<comment><USER11> Winston Churchill (a lieutenant at the time) participated in the last calvary charge by the British Army at Battle of Omdurman.

[https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1957-04-4-1](https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1957-04-4-1)

It's amazing to realize that Churchill's army commission was granted by Queen Victoria and the last government he was in was under Queen Elizabeth II.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A more recent similar expedition was the Falkland war of 1982 where the British, at high cost, sent a force to retake the Falklands when they were siezed by Argentina: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War)

<comment><USER13> Wondering if they would do the same for Hong Kong if mainlands breaks the pledge to not force changes until 2046? The costs would be incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [dumb joke redacted]

<comment><USER15> It is pointed out right at the beginning of the wikipedia article that the country was already in a state of civil war.

"By October 1862 Emperor Tewodros's position as ruler had become precarious: much of Ethiopia was in revolt against him, except for a small area stretching from Lake Tana east to his fortress at Magdala. "</comment></comment>