IBM looking for 12 years' experience in Kubernetes administration - <AUTHOR> https://intellijobs.ai/job/IBMCloud-Native-Infrastructure-Engineer-Architect-bvJJ6yraexfWOk1nMRKP-bvJJ6yraexfWOk1nMRKP <comment><USER2> > I saw a job post the other day.

> It required 4+ years of experience in FastAPI.

> I couldn't apply as I only have 1.5+ years of experience since I created > that thing.

[https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830](https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830)

<comment><USER3> The only thing I don't like about it is how every line in this tweet ends in a 'fitting' emoji

I'm not even that old (born in the 80s), but is that the style adults use now?

<comment><USER4> Adults have been using emoticons in casual online conversation for decades. Certainly for most of your lifetime.

<comment><USER5> But do they put one at the end of every sentence like it was punctuation?

<comment><USER6> Sometimes :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Recruiters putting silly time requirements on skills is nothing new. My favorite moment of this type was at a meetup for .NET, where a recruiter came in and asked for too many years of experience, and the entire room burst out laughing. She just smiled, accepted the grief we all were giving her, and changed the job description to be accurate. I forget the exact wording she used, but I remember the gist of her response was, "Thanks for correcting me - if I was an expert in the technology I'd be doing it, not looking for people to do it, so I appreciate it when you all help me understand it better."

<comment><USER8> I get that she was actually a nice person who simply didn't know when .NET was invented. But I do not accept that she made a harmless and easily fixed error on the job requirements because of this.

Frankly, I'm not that concerned that the job requirements demanded more years of .NET experience then it was possible to have. I am more concerned about all the other requirements that were listed on that job description which were just as wrong but in a way that was not obvious.

Consider the analogy to all of the exonerations of convicted prisoners we have had since DNA analysis became possible. The minor problem is that hundreds of innocent people were held in prison for years before DNA analysis proved they were innocent. The bigger problem is that we have now demonstrated that the legal process has a significant rate of error, meaning that there are tens of thousands of innocent people serving years in prison whose cases didn't happen to permit exoneration by DNA.

That line in the job requirements that specifies you must have a college degree -- is that unnecessarily excluding a lot of qualified candidates? The general tendency to request more expertise and years of experience than are really needed -- is that driving off candidates with lower levels of self- aggrandizement? If it is, does that have anything to do with the deplorable number of women succeeding in our industry?

Asking for 12 years experience in Kubernetes isn't just a silly error: it is an unmistakable sign of a much deeper problem.

<comment><USER9> If you are expecting perfection then the world is going to be disappointing, in general.

<comment><USER8> I am sure perfection cannot be reached. I am hoping that we can recognize how far from perfection we are and adjust our systems to take account of that.

For the criminal justice system in the US, one of the clearest implications is that we should allow lawyers -- or at least judges -- to inform jurors about the basics of what we know about witness reliability. Because a huge portion of those we now know to have been falsely convicted we're convicted solely or primarily on the basis of witnesses.

For hiring, I think it means we should deemphasize filtering out candidates using some basic thresholds (like X years experience with Y) and emphasize opportunities for the candidates to demonstrate the skills they will use on the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot of very young people on HN. From my jaded older perspective this is VERY common when they want no external applicants.

So we can't call it a corporate reorganization for Dilbertian process reasons and we're only transferring one person anyway, so we'll abuse the hire/fire/transfer process and put in hilarious requirements like a decade of experience with javascript react framework or this K8S ad.

Or the bosses nephew intern'd with us and we have been ordered to make sure the nephew and only the nephew get hired full time and his resume hilariously listed he's been "doing computer stuff for more than ten years; also does react framework" and we'll translate that into a minimum of a decade of react experience LOL.

This also shows up in stealth ageism. The last I18N guy doing the Spanish L10N project acted too childish for a professional office causing expensive chaos; OK then the next hire "needs" at least 30 years of experience in Spanish language I18N and L10N projects; really all we wanted was a bilingual translator who was not childish by nature of being at least 30 years old. The world's full of 30-something children but the odds are better than 20-something children. We already decided to hire one of the dev's friends who was 35 so all we need to do is make sure nobody else applies. So this project "needs" someone who's spoken Spanish for 30 years to translate stop and go to pare y siga, LOL. Well L10N always ends up being a lot more than merely translating words but whatever.

<comment><USER11> >From my jaded older perspective this is VERY common when they want no external applicants.

Or when they want _very_ external applicants.

<comment><USER10> True, if there's a H1B audit, its much easier a drone to prove to its auditor- drone that there were no local applicants for a job, than to explain the technical details of how there chronologically could not have been any applicants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Overstating requisites, or asking for far too many requisites for a particular job and then settling for less has been a widespread practice since for as long as I can remember in technology fields.

When I was younger, I never thought of it as a bad thing, since it scared away those who weren't bold enough to apply for the job - ultimately reducing the competition for the jobs that I've applied for.

Over the past 3 decades, I've never met the qualifications for any job that I've landed, and I always tell others to apply for tech jobs even if they only meet a small number of the requisites for this same reason. Most are surprised to see how many times they get contacted for an interview.

Of course, this practice is slowly changing today since many talented applicants don't feel comfortable enough to apply, which ultimately equates to lost opportunity for the organization. For example, an HR manager recently told me that she doesn't put the word "rockstar" on developer job ads anymore because HR studies show that the term turns off the female and Gen-Z demographics.

<comment><USER13> Well, seriously, if some HR drone puts "rockstar", "full-stack" or similar buzzword on the job posting, it tells me one thing - the HR person is incompetent, most likely has no idea what the real needs of the company are and is filling the job advert with meaningless filler, especially since at one point everyone wanted only "rockstar" developers.

And if it is a company itself advertising like this, that reeks of the "bro" culture, crazy hours and similar problems.

That's pretty big red flag for me and I am certainly neither female nor Gen-Z (up in my mid-40s now).

<comment><USER5> >Well, seriously, if some HR drone puts "rockstar", "full-stack" or similar buzzword

"full-stack" is a buzzword now? How else would you describe a role where you'll be doing backend and frontend?

<comment><USER14> Full-stack always has been a buzzword. It means everything and nothing. I've seen full-stack mean "assembly code to screen pixel", I've seen it mean LAMP, I've seen it mean three or four specific technologies that the candidate is presumably meant to guess are the technologies being used.

<comment><USER15> Almost no full stack developers are expected to work with assembly (unless explicitly stated) so that seems more than a little hyperbolic.

Full-stack in its common usage doesn't mean "everything and nothing." People might disagree about where the exact boundaries are, but there are a lot of people who definitely don't count by any definition so it does convey information.

Those who only work with HTML & CSS & client-side javascript are definitely not doing full-stack development. Nor or those doing purely server-side work, database administration, cloud computing, systems/network programming, etc. that never involves a UI with user interaction of any kind. That's quite a lot of people who would immediately understand that they don't meet the qualifications for a position that requires experience as a full stack developer.

<comment><USER16> > Almost no full stack developers are expected to work with assembly (unless > explicitly stated) so that seems more than a little hyperbolic.

In the embedded world, a full stack developer would be someone who can read electrical schematics, write drivers, write libraries, and by the time you've done all of that the UI part is, comparatively, trivial.

Been there, done it, would 100% recommend it. You feel much closer to your code than when 10 abstraction layers are in the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Obviously a typo, they probably meant 1-2 years, which is realistic. While this is probably not actually the case here, I see it quite often that companies have unrealistic expectations when it comes to work experience with technologies like k8s. For example it is quite common here in Berlin to expect 4+ years of k8s experience. Which is unrealistic to find taking into account that k8s initial release was 6 years ago. It is paradox that companies want to use the latest technologies and require years of work experience at the same time.

<comment><USER18> Sometimes they just look for a reason to cut the salary or make you more overtime-compliant, or something else. Basically a tool to squeeze out more.

The routine is to take you but make you feel like they do you a favor by taking you with less exp than it was originally stated.

<comment><USER17> Yes, you are right, that might be a reason. But work experience is a huge factor in infrastructure engineering. From my perspective it is what counts the most. Companies usually would like see that a candidate already worked on a similar stack, so that she/he won't make stupid beginner mistakes on your payroll and potentially ruining your business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Speaking of dubious recruiting practices, can anyone explain why applicants frequently get ghosted? I mean some companies give zero reply after the workflow system acks receipt of an application.

I feel this reflects poorly--in public--on a company's culture. The glossy "work here" page means nothing if there's no follow through in practice. A human may have spent days researching your company and preparing a cover letter, and you can't even click the "no" button?

The workflow system, at the very least, should provide state feedback: received, in review, no, or "let's talk".

<comment><USER20> After I had worked as a software engineer for about 5-6 years, struggling with impostor syndrome during portions of that time, I decided to apply for a job at Google mostly just to see what would happen. Guess what happened? They ghosted me. Nothing. No 'thanks, but no'. Just nothing.

I remember that it I felt embarassed and was frankly a bit ashamed that I hadn't received a reply. It took a while before I realized that I had in fact gotten ghosted as well. I waited for a reply from them for weeks. My self esteem took a definite hit from that. This was about 5 years ago now, so I've since gotten over it - but it changed my perception of Google as an employer from a place I'd be lucky to work at, to a place that I would have a really hard time applying for a job at again.

<comment><USER19> It's tough. You can't take it personally. Most likely if you have a good buzzword list you're worth a conversation at least.

Another data point: 30 years exp, I just finished a job search for remote s/w. Total time to sign was about 5 weeks.

* 10 cold applications, all with good fits and detailed covers and research: 1 cold no; 1 few interviews then a no; 8 ghosts after bot ack

* 1 internal referral: got to final talks

* A few external recruiter engagements: two final talks; accepted one of these; and a few ghosts

External recruiters can be a pain but they have one superpower: the ear of their client.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, no, I know. Google is a big company and my application probably got lost, overlooked or buried in a sea of applications. Still, I think it reflects poorly on a potential employer to ghost candidates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 22 years in-deep Kernel development NOT older than 30 years.

Fluent English (please Scottish accent), Chinese (Teochew) and Yarawi (written and spoken)

Additional bonus >22y in a DevOp leader position.

We welcome you in a team of hard working individuals, we are a startup so please bring your own chair and table and computer, but we have a really good coffeemaker (bring your own beans/milk/sugar)

24x7 Availability....

<comment><USER22> This is so painfully accurate. The company will also say you need to be "passionate about their mission" and "ready to disrupt the future" - for a company that makes cell phone cases or an app to subscribe to your favorite candy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I had a recruiter call me to ask if I'm interested in a job for "c hashtag"

<comment><USER24> Best I've heard is "coctothorpe" but I think it was tongue in cheek.

<comment><USER25> C plusplusplusplus

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I recently reviewed some resumes a recruiter (clearly) wrote for their candidates.

The recruiter must have thought that listing every tech the applicant ever used was a good idea. Even long discontinued products. And they seemingly added typos, turned things into acronyms incorrectly, listed tech under incorrect categories, etc. They were so painful to read and I'd imagine would have embarrassed the candidates if they ever saw them. I was going to give a "no" for all of them before I caught on that the recruiter was butchering them. With that context, some were OK and some of those passed the interview.

I suspect the reason for this is that some companies just do keyword matching, so the resume becomes tech jargon word salad to survive poorly written filters.

Seeing this process has convinced me that engineers should review resumes (and in the context of the IBM post, write/review job descriptions). I've gotten fast at it, but only when the candidate writes their own. I think next time I'll ask the recruiter to send a resume the applicant wrote, or just default to "no".

<comment><USER27> Your keyword matching hypothesis is likely correct, but doesn't that make the typos _more_ damning?

<comment><USER28> Yes, but since so far they had success, how would they really know? And computerized search is getting more smart, not less, so .. even less incentive to be precise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As obnoxious as postings like this are, I actually miss the era when the interviewing process was based on evaluating job experience and references rather than forcing people to answer skill testing questions, write code on a whiteboard, and having people with 15, 20 years of experience "prove themselves" to the interview panel by playing games with linked lists and for loops.

And so if it means there's recruiters asking for dumb things like this, sure, that's bad, but at least they're looking for experience and skillset rather than mental gymnastics. Though I suppose they could be looking for both. That would suck.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you are shocked by a job ad like this you haven't been in the industry very long.

In 1995 a recruiter called me saying he has a position for someone with 5 years of Windows NT experience. (WNT shipped officially in 1993)

I told him hat if he finds someone, _I'd_ him them myself! I've never met a person that owns a time machine!

He was very gracious about it.

<comment><USER31> Maybe they were looking to hire a NT core dev. Cutler started working on NT around 1989 if I recall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I attended a testing conference in 1990 (might have been 91) where John Ousterhout gave a talk on Tcl and Expect. His opening slide was on how Tcl "had arrived" and showed a job posting looking for 5 years of Tcl experience, to which he quiped, "in 2 more years, I'll be the only one qualified for the job"

I'm sure Gosling, Stroustrup, etc. have all been in the position to make similar jokes.

<comment><USER33> I was in a CS class with Paul Gosling at Johns Hopkins circa 2000, and the professor read out a particularly egregious example, finishing with "and _maybe_ Mr. Gosling's father would qualify for this entry-level position..."

(By the way, he never went on about who his father was, at least not that I heard, though occasionally wore Java logo stuff, because who wouldn't...)

<comment><USER32> I managed to snag one of the Java One t-shirts that Gosling used to illustrate and throw into the crowd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> northern-lights Some are also designed to be impossible to satisfy so that they can bring non- local talent to satisfy Labour Market tests. Not sure if it is in this case, but there have been plenty of such cases in the past.

<comment><USER34> Given 12+ years requirement with tech that was initially released 6 years ago, the only "non-local talent" this listing would bring in are time travelers from the future.

<comment> northern-lights I'm not sure how exactly it works but if I had to guess, the non-local talent would have fudged resumes showing they had the relevant experience. It's not like the relevant Labour departments would actually do the background check on hired candidates. All the companies/consultancies need to do is to show that they couldn't find a relevant candidate locally to satisfy the sponsorship requirements.

Note that I'm not just talking about US. Most countries in Europe have the Labour Market tests requirement before a foreigner can be sponsored for the position.

<comment><USER35> You have to provide evidence to USCIS (letters from past employers) that you worked on kubernetes for 12 years. They don't simply take your assertions at face value.

<comment><USER5> Do they take the letters at face value, or do they do some basic sanity checks to make sure the technology has been around as long as the experience you claimed to have?

<comment><USER36> I can promise you immigration services are not verifying if someone really knows Kubernetes.

<comment><USER37> Well, maybe this time there'll be more interest. The immigration services officer who fines IBM millions for this kind of illegal immigration scandal should expect a good career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> At first I thought "Even if you excuse this gaffe, who would consider a job with IBM these days?" But then I noticed it was in India, to which IBM has been outsourcing all their positions. Maybe a job at IBM in India is actually a relatively safe career choice? Definitely not in the US though.

Edit: Reread this and realized it might sound like I'm anti-India. I'm not. I'm American but if I was in the job market and could get a work visa I'd consider moving to India. It's a beautiful country and it's a lot cheaper than the US.

<comment><USER39> India is definitely a beautifully and diverse country. But living in urban centers where these technology jobs are located is becoming tougher day by day. Crazy traffic, high real estate prices, air pollution, etc affects quality of life negatively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This sounds like 4-5 years longer than Kubernetes has existed, and is definitely in the 40+ aged senior developer sphere. And at the same time they're busy doing damage control on multiple accusations of age discrimination against older employees. Bra-vo.

</comment><comment><USER41> Almost as silly is to demand kubernetes administration as a primary skill at all from someone whose main job is (apparently?) to use "an ensemble of Deep learning and LSTM models" for "anomaly detection".

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder how this squares with job application disclaimers that try to convince you that:

a) You must not apply unless you meet all of the minimum prerequisites as stated on the listing

b) Lying in any way on the form is tantamount to committing a felony

If IBM realizes their mistake and corrects the listing, are they obligated to immediately reject all of the previous applicants who knowingly submitted false information on their application because the claim was, by definition, impossible?

</comment><comment><USER43> No doubt someone is gonna update their CV to show 12 years of Kubernetes, apply, and get the job being the only suitable applicant with the required experience.

<comment><USER44> Ah, we're now at the "eBay typos" stage of the job market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Isn't the whole X years of experience with kind of silly anyways? You grow as a programmer by exposing yourself to new ideas and ways of doing things, but this pretty much gives you a low number of years in a bunch of stuff, not impressive on a resume.

<comment><USER46> I have become less and less convinced on this. Most recently I had choices for what would ostensibly be a Go-centric job between generalists who had a little Go experience, and people really good at Go, but not as much at the rest of our stack.

We went with the generalist under the theory you're advocating and it was a disaster. The people we hired learned Go, but it takes a while to grok the paradigms and really develop a mental model for what's going on under the hood. Those hiring choices cost us a lot of grief and probably several months of development time as they made choices that were ostensibly reasonable in other languages/frameworks, but didn't necessarily hold in Golang.

In the future if I require someone for something specific, say k8s, I'm hiring someone with direct lengthy experience in k8s and not a devops expert who has some experience with k8s.

<comment><USER47> The optimal strategy depends on the timeframe in which you're looking for the employee to provide a net contribution and how long you expect them to stay, among other particulars.

If you're scaling up quickly or employing a bunch of people to immediately work on a new project, and expect them to stay an average of 2 years, you need preexisting experience.

If you're in a company where people stay on average 4-5 years and, and there's already a well established team with a good set of conventions and technical leadership, a generalist is probably a better call.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Probably just time dilation from those quantum computers IBM is working on.

</comment><comment><USER49> Since that job advert hasn't been removed yet, I'm guessing it's not by accident.

That being the case, I imagine that sometimes these things get lost in translation in large corporations and don't literally mean what you think they mean.

I imagine what they are looking for is someone who can demonstrate how their 12+ years experience can be applied to that technology.

<comment><USER4> It's Sunday, nobody in the corporate HR world is at work.

<comment><USER49> > India, Post Date: June 27, 2020

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This problem of such a mad job description arises because of the disconnect between the hiring manager and the recruiters/sourcers (often aided by extremely broken tech).

Hiring Manager: I need a person with 10+ years of exp

Sourcer/recruiter: Ok, what skillz?

Hiring Manager: Cloud, Dev, Ops, SysAdmin - 10 years

Sourcer/recruiter: mhmm, what else?

Hiring Manager: Oh, also, someone with good k8s experience will be great!

Sourcer/recruiter: so, that's like, how many years?

Hiring Manager: one or two on top of the ones I said before

Sourcer/recruiter: Got it!

This "12+ years with k8s" "15 yrs with React" "10 years with Powershell 5" situation is because of such disconnect. Having worked in that industry sector has made me so aware of how broken hiring is, it is such a dark and gloomy present and future - aided by more tools that get put by people who do not really want to solve the problem but just make it someone else's.

</comment><comment><USER51> I recall field-engineer lore about a particularly bullshity salesman claiming in a meeting back in the day that our company had "been doing Java for years!"

Field engineer stares at table and wants it to swallow him up.

Sun rep just smiles back like nothing is wrong.

That salesman was hugely successful, btw.

</comment><comment><USER52> That job listing doesn't give specific credentials for it, but it seems to also involve:

"...anomaly detection solutions ... leveraging an ensemble of Deep learning and LSTM models. Natural Language Processing for entity, topic clusters and relationship extraction. Text Analytics in human generated tickets and correlation with event tickets for event noise reduction. Apply Natural Language Classification and RNN algorithms to automatically route tickets... Text mining, message clustering / templatization, Logs to metrics, anomaly detection, event annotation and sequencing... for each mainframe batch job ... Identify Anomalies ... using sequence mining techniques"

In all it is an interesting product but it is going to take a lot of people with different skills to make that happen. Many of those areas such as "entity and relationship extraction" and "anomaly detection solutions ... [for] event noise reduction" are still almost pre-paradigmatic from the viewpoint of a working engineer.

The best interpretation I have is that they are hiring a large platoon or small company of software developers, data scientists, project managers, you name it. They are probably using a distributed version of UIMA that spins up at least one container per dev in the production system (because "microservices".)

The person they are hiring here is in charge of keeping that monster going at the K8s level. They may need to settle for hiring 12 people with 1 year of experience, but that would blow their budget -- if the whole team worked that way it would get bloated to a mid-sized or large battalion.

I don't see why they don't just run the system on one of the mainframes it is monitoring. With Parallel Sysplex, Workload Manager, etc. IBM had better stuff than VMWare, Docker, K8S, Zookeeper in the 1990s when they made the transition from bipolar to CMOS and had to go parallel to make up for the single-thread performance loss. z15 mainframes are just crammed with PCIe slots so they should have no problem attaching a tensor accelerator to one.

Trouble is, people who know how to administer mainframes are even harder to find than K8S experts.

<comment><USER53> Pretty sure the neural network they're working on wrote this ad itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I interned at IBM my 4th year of college. I was hired directly by the team I was working for but still had to submit an application through their external hiring board.

Took 5 tries with my new manager filling it out for me because even he didn't know the requirements. This was an internship that assumed the applicants were in college but still required 4+ years in java and c++ - neither of which I touched the entire time I was there.

</comment><comment><USER55> If you have twice as much experience as anyone else in kubernetes, apply to IBM! Principals only, please; we expect to be inundated with applicants.

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm 99% sure they knew, they did it so you would post it and other people would upvote it and we all would see it on front page of hn.

<comment><USER57> well played

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> My 11 years doesn't quite cut it.

I'll have to apply for the RUST job I've been keeping an eye on. 12 years experience should put me on a short shortlist.

</comment><comment><USER59> Rookie recruiter mistake. They should demand 20 years to get someone who has appropriate deep-level experience that can fulfill their mission-critical need for requisite synergistic juxtapositional operational efficacy.

This will pre-select suitable candidates that can spout as much gibberish and misunderstandings as their bureaucracy is obviously already used to.

</comment><comment><USER60> Only as a reference/comparison:

[https://www.forensicfocus.com/forums/employment-and- career-i...](https://www.forensicfocus.com/forums/employment-and-career- issues/message-to-recruiters/)

</comment><comment><USER61> hey, I joke that I'm the only person on the planet with 10+ years of Docker experience.

[https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers/Potter.pdf) [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/atc10/tech/full_papers/...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/atc10/tech/full_papers/Potter.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER62> I went through a resume building seminar once, and the instructor mentioned years of experience are often inflated to deter people from applying. She worked in HR for over 20 years and she said, if a job is looking for 1-2 years then it really means entry level. 5 is more like 2-3 years. I'm not surprised anymore nor do I let the years of experience stopping me from applying. Also, just a tip to those looking for jobs. Most places will bring you to the front of the list if you know someone at the company.

</comment><comment><USER63> I learned why my boss puts "extra" years of experience from what he is actually seeking.

Doing so enables him to get higher pay band set for the position and get better candidates who might accept, even if they have less experience.

</comment><comment><USER64> If I wanted to apply, I'd just evaluate the definite integral of Km(t), the number of Kubernetes systems I managed at time t, over my lifespan so far and put that on my resume as my years of experience.

E.g., if I had 6 systems for 3 years, that's 18 years experience on the resume.

PS: I'd only do this on resume copies sent to companies with obviously impossible experience requirements like this one. For companies with experience requirements that are actually obtainable, I'd just put the usual number of years of my lifespan I've worked with the technology.

</comment><comment><USER65> If you work 16 hours a day for 6 years on Kubernetes, you would have the equivalent of 12 years of experience of a normal person who works 8 hours a day. ;-)

<comment><USER66> There's a joke: "Lingling studied violin 40h a day"

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Meh. It's probably just 2 years mistyped.

Shouldn't be on front page HN.

<comment><USER68> This. To all the people who call this job post "silly", imagine how silly it is if a simple mistake of missing "-" like in "1-2 years" is overblown out of proportions and half the internet is discussing it. I've stumbled upon this "news" a few times during past 2 days. What a waste...

<comment><USER69> You clearly has not been on job hunt :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> It's like asking for ten years' experience with Swift.

The job descriptions (especially in hidebound companies like Big Blue) tend to have mandated experience levels.

HR folks aren't engineers, so they should not be expected to know.

However, this should be highly embarrassing to the hiring manager, who I'm sure, was handed the ad text for approval, and probably rubberstamped it without thinking.

<comment><USER71> It would be trivial for someone to Google it, then make a canonical list for the entire HR department. You're talking about maybe 30 minutes of work to prevent your company from looking like corporate clowns.

<comment><USER72> You're underestimating the amount of friction at most companies. For all your recruiters to use your measly google sheet, it has to be encoded somewhere on your intranet, a memo has to be sent by the director (whom you have to persuade that this is the correct thing to do) that there is this sheet, and you then become the point person to approve all the job ads because "you took initiative in the area."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> If you include Borg (Kubernetes' predecessor as an internal tool at Google), then the tech has been around since 2003:

[https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of- kubernetes/](https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-kubernetes/)

I am sure that's not what they meant though!

</comment><comment><USER74> They just seem to have a table like:

\- Senior: 10+ years

\- Principal: 5 years

\- Junior: 2 years

and fill their job postings like that

Seems like it's a template filling system with that logic

<comment><USER75> They probably got Watson to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> FoxConn^1 was similarly looking for a research scientist with N years of experience using PyTorch when PyTorch was N-2 years old.

[^1]: [https://wisconnvalley.wi.gov/Pages/Home.aspx](https://wisconnvalley.wi.gov/Pages/Home.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER77> Seen this so many times in my LI feed and people point out that kubernetes wasn't even out 12 years ago.

So that's the joke of course but to make this even more sweeter I'd point out that even Go wasn't publicly available. Wikipedia mentioned that first remarks about Go where from 2009 :)

<comment><USER78> K8s was originally written in Java, and then ported over to Go.

<comment><USER30> Really? I haven't heard that before. Citation, please.

<comment><USER78> [https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/kubernetesclu...](https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/kubernetesclusterfuck/)

I'd like to add that I find it scary that this basic info can't be found, neither by a cursory web search, nor on wikipedia. Makes you worry about a future generation raised in naive march-of-progress narratives wondering about how things came to be during the "dark ages" (= today) of the web

<comment><USER79> All of the patterns and default code referenced there were things I wrote or helped write or reviewed, and while a certain "java patterns" mindset was common in early devs, I can assure you we didn't transcribe it from Java, we simply used patterns we were familiar with from previous languages. None of the open-source Kube project was "transcribed from Java" to the level being described here.

Kris isn't wrong, but the details are far more nuanced than that. This talk is a non-primary source :)

<comment><USER78> Understood, just mentioned it in this context. Actually I find the honest "our codebase sucks" attitude a good sign for a proj FWIW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> someone dedicated his entire channel for all kinds of HR bullshit [https://www.youtube.com/user/Tychos1/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/Tychos1/videos) this is just one of them

</comment><comment><USER81> Similar anecdote, I started developing apps for the iPad as soon as it came out (2010). Around 2014, a recruiter didn't want to give me a senior position since "they usually look for people with 8+ years of experience". ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER74> In these cases (or, in most cases) I think it's fair to consider previous related experiences.

In this case: iPhone development or even MacOs development.

(Of course it's hard for recruiters to see this, that's why I usually just say I have it, but yeah, ridiculous requirements gets ridiculous answers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Does anyone know why the recruiter vigorously tries to reduce the salary one is asking for? Do they get a portion of that "saved" amount as a bonus from the company? I had a hard time negotiating the salary.

Edit: spelling.

</comment><comment><USER83> I just hope companies get rid of the "hr recruitment" team. These people are utterly clueless folks, who hardly know anything about technology and worse these people call the shots when the time comes to settle on pay package.

</comment><comment><USER84> Im sure some fake resume from Indian owned sweatshops will have an H-1B visa holder with the non-existent 12 years kubernetes experience. Isn't it how they operate for any position anyways ? Good grief IBM...

</comment><comment><USER85> I don't understand what so hard about looking up this kind of stuff. And someone who is not in HR requested this resource, at least the should now what they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER86> I applied for a front end job once in 2011, it required 5 years of experience with AngularJS. Pretty sure AngularJS released in 2009...

And no, the ad wasn't written by a recruiter.

</comment><comment><USER87> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect)

</comment><comment><USER88> Counting in dog years?

</comment><comment><USER89> These discussions go alongside MacBook trackbar discussions in my mind. Everyone has stories of clueless recruiters. It's sad. I also interview about 1 utterly unqualified candidate per month at a big tech co that has this pretty well streamlined. There is need for filtering. That's what recruiters are paid for, and it's not at all surprising that they're terrible at it.

It seems to me a real licensing process with GRE style in person exams is needed to solve this problem.

Maybe we could even include sections on standards in the licensing process so I don't have to spend my days fixing needlessly "creative" code.

<comment><USER13> Passing an exam or getting a degree proves only one thing - that you can pass exams. It doesn't prove the ability to think and actually solve real-world (as opposed to often contrived exam) problems.

It also doesn't prove anything about the individual's abilities today, only about what they were able to do at the time of passing the exam. How do you know that they didn't become sloppy and aren't spending their days high producing BS?

A successful exam has pretty much zero correlation with the (non)appearance of "creative code". E.g. if you expect a developer hired freshly out of school with no experience to write reasonable code, you are being completely unrealistic (and have already forgotten your own career start). But they did pass all their exams, right?

Yes, there are many incompetent fools in the field. But most of them likely hold degrees already and one extra exam wouldn't solve anything there. E.g. I know a civil engineer who has passed all the required exams, holds all the required diplomas and professional certificates, has 20+ years of experience - and one of his buildings has collapsed and two more had to be torn down because of fatal design mistakes in them.

This is why one hires for a trial period and asks for references and work portfolios at the interviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Does overtime count towards the total? ;-)

Let's say an applicant had put in triple overtime for four years would that count as twelve years of experience?

</comment><comment><USER91> that's only 1 year executed in parallel

</comment><comment><USER92> This is a buffer overflow type of scenario where you apply and say you have that experience even if you have none.

</comment><comment><USER93> This is funny, but the artificial talent shortage created by the recruiting bureaucracy is real.

</comment><comment><USER94> All MNCs tend to hire HR from local companies & the backwardsa$$ mindset follows.

</comment><comment><USER95> It also includes "Deep Learning, LSTM, RNN, and NLP" in roles and responsibilities.

Really?

</comment><comment><USER96> Easy sign to know who to fire even at IBM where it's way easy.

</comment><comment><USER97> I'd rather hire a junior with ambition to learn and work, than a fantasy

</comment><comment><USER98> Wanted: someone willing to lie on their CV.

</comment><comment><USER99> Rather than taking the clichéd lesson that recruiters are not humans and evil.

How about, apply for jobs even if you don't have the skills they are asking for.

<comment><USER100> These sorts of inflated requirements disproportionally discourage women and other underrepresented minorities.

<comment><USER101> Care to source that myth?

[https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs- unless...](https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless- theyre-100-qualified)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> It's base 3?!

</comment><comment><USER103> maybe they mean 12 with base 3, that would be 5 decimal years ;-)

</comment><comment><USER104> The meme strikes again!

</comment><comment><USER105> maybe someone forgot to convert from quaternary to decimal?!?

</comment><comment><USER106> somebody's going to be disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER107> An obvious typo is worth a HN post now? And I'm replying! ye gods.

</comment><comment><USER108> Us programmers tend to be very literal-minded, but my understanding is that in some parts of the Middle East, it is common to exaggerate numbers to provide emphasis, where it's understood that it's not to be taken literally. So maybe they just wanted someone with "a lot" of experience in Kubernetes. (Strange idea: Maybe writing it this way even acts as a filter for literal-minded people). It probably works better in-person though :)

<comment><USER109> I see it as coming down to honesty. When a job requisition has a quantitative requirement that I cannot meet, then absent any ability to double-check and see if there's any wiggle room there (or it's a mistake), I'd have to pass it up. They need x, I lack x, OK, I'll move on, because I won't claim I have what I don't.

From the hiring company's point of view, this is bad, not just because of the people who they miss out on who are still highly skilled, but because those who do interview might not be the most honest. If they are willing to claim they have experience that they can't, then how will they be as an employee? Will they give trustworthy status information, or honest estimates? Will their interactions be customers be forthright? How will their social interactions with their coworkers go?

If a hirer won't take the time to be quite sure they have accurate and realistic requirements in their requisitions, they may end up with quite a problem on their hands down the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> This has little to do with IBM but much more with HR.

Based on my experience, the second most stupid people work in HR. Most stupid people? Real Estate.

I am not saying that people in HR or RE are stupid by definition, I am sure some very smart people work in these fields. But it is a question of entrance barrier. You can get into HR from nearly any background. Yet, some kind of degree is required in most cases. In RE you do a few weeks training and you are ready to go.

Other fields have tremendous entrance barriers. Lets say a professor in a STEM field. You can find average people there but stupidity is rare.</comment>


Launch HN: JetLenses (YC S18) – Lowest Prices on Contact Lenses - <AUTHOR> Hi HN!
I'm Dhaivat and I've been working on JetLenses in the present YC batch. We offer the lowest prices on contact lenses online. On average, each of our customer saves $70 on each order in comparison to buying their contacts from a large online retailer.
It turns out that most of the cost of contacts is just advertising cost and fulfillment overhead.
We've built automation software for the fulfillment and prescription verification processes allowing us to cut overhead. We also use statistical models for ad optimization which allow us to cut our customer acquisition costs dramatically and deliver savings to our customers.
I have a technical background (I studied computer science and statistics, interned at Meteor (YC S11) and a quant hedge fund) and my Dad trained as an ophthalmologist. This was the perfect circumstance to realize that this is a large, fairly overlooked space within ecommerce where improved operations through software/data science can have a strong impact.
We're starting with contact lenses and we'll eventually apply our core tech to other prescription medical products with very similar cost structures. At the end of the day, we'd like to make these products cheaper and more easily accessible. Help us out by buying contacts from us or telling your contact-wearing friends about us!
If you wear contacts: We sell the same contacts as your doctor or other retailers, just for a lot less money. Check out our website at beta.jetlenses.com - order from us and save some dough while supporting our run-up to demo day! You can also check out our price comparison tool at https://beta.jetlenses.com/compare_prices - we're the cheapest for most lenses but not all (yet!).
I would love to hear HN's thoughts about this! I'm particularly keen to learn about your experiences buying contact lenses (or even other medical products) and if what we're doing sounds exciting. You can also reach me at dhaivat AT jetlenses.com
Thanks!
Dhaivat
P.S. We currently only ship to addresses in the United States. <comment><USER2> ContactLensKing.com is substantially cheaper than JetLenses for the contacts I wear, the Bausch & Lomb Ultras. $43 for a 6 pack on JetLenses, $30 on ContactLensKing:

[https://www.jetlenses.com/Ultra-6PK_p_76.html](https://www.jetlenses.com/Ultra-6PK_p_76.html)

[https://www.contactlensking.com/prodDetail.aspx?ItemGroupCod...](https://www.contactlensking.com/prodDetail.aspx?ItemGroupCode=ULTRA)

Why is there such a discrepancy in the pricing on these?

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically: scale and supply chain. On some lenses, where we're on an even playing field, we're able to dramatically beat everyone else on price (e.g. Biofinity Toric XR, MyDay Toric, Proclear Toric XR).

As we grow and we can add more suppliers, we'll be able to have the best prices across the board.

<comment><USER3> so, you're basically saying "we're the lowest price, except when we're not because of 'unfair' competition on scale and supply chain, but help us gain these advantages and we'll be competitive"

Are you the lowest price on contacts or not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm in Ukraine now and it seems that I can buy most of the lenses for a fraction of US price. Here's one of the online shops I used last time: [https://linza.com.ua/](https://linza.com.ua/) to convert UAH to USD you can divide by 25 (actually 27, but 25 gives good enough approximation and is easier to divide by). The same lenses I bought with VSP in the US for >= $150 cost here $14/month. And the most expensive monthly supply of daily lenses here costs $38.

Heck. Here's a vending machine in a random gas station in Moscow selling them contact lenses: [https://imgur.com/a/mCf9XfB](https://imgur.com/a/mCf9XfB)

Going to an eye doctor to check your eyesight can be done in pretty much any contact lens/glasses store on a walk-in basis. Last time my eye exam was free because I happened to buy a pack of lenses (I overpaid for the lenses, though).

The US seriously needs to figure out why the heck are you paying so damn much before you guys consider universal healthcare.

<comment><USER5> Also from Europe. Weird that lenses need a prescription in the US.

<comment><USER6> It isn't like prescription for medication, it's just the numbers that were measured. You don't need a doctor signature to get eyeglasses or contacts (although your insurance company might want an optometrist confirmation that your eyesight isn't perfect).

<comment><USER7> Contact lenses in the USA most certainly need a prescription, they can only be filled by a precise brand match, and it expires after a year.

Any retailer on the web will need a confirmation from a doc or optometrist before filling.

<comment><USER4> Yeah ... about that.

The US seems to be the only country which treats basic optometry like some kind of rocket science. Where did you guys get that idea that prescription should match so very precisely? Unless you have some rare condition +/\- 0.25 dioptre doesn't make much difference. Glasses/contacts are the simplest optical instruments, not a Hubble telescope. Why do you need a specially trained person to dispense a box of contact lenses? If I want a 6-set of monthly -1.25 lenses -- just fucking sell them to me. What the hell do you need to verify with a doctor? I'm not buying a controlled substance or anything. Why did you guys make this transaction more complex than buying a roll of toilet paper? US seems to be the only developed country where I would have a hard time getting a trivial (but necessary) medical thing. Land of the free, my ass.

Also, what's the deal with vision insurance? What are you insuring against? Sudden nearsightedness? I would guess that 99% of VSP members already have a trivially managed chronic condition. And once you get a laser correction there is no point in staying in VSP anymore. So VSP is not really an insurance, but rather some kind of medical union. In theory it should help patients by increasing their collective bargaining power. In practice they seem to be doing the opposite.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all great points.

> Where did you guys get that idea that prescription should match so very > precisely?

It's often much less about the prescription than the characteristics of the material used for the contact lenses and the measurements of your eye. The base curve and diameter portions of the prescription are used to capture this.

> Why do you need a specially trained person to dispense a box of contact > lenses?

There are two reasons. With the wrong set of contact lenses (e.g. off- prescription color contact lenses that people wear on Halloween), you can significantly harm your eyes due to low oxygen permeability in the lenses, lack of fit, etc. Second, the contact lens/glasses prescription renewal process forces people to get an eye checkup done, which can often allow the doctor to identify other problems (e.g. infection, cataract, etc.)

It's subjective whether or not using this as a forcing function is really the "right" thing to do, but it does prevent people from living with undiagnosed issues.

> Also, what's the deal with vision insurance?

As people get older, the likelihood of an eye issue increases dramatically. This depends on your specific policy and what it covers, but there are "insurable" (i.e. low likelihood of occurrence, very high cost) events that can occur with your eyes that your VSP policy may cover. I'm not deeply familiar with this, so I can't comment extensively on it.

<comment><USER8> Sounds someone convinced you that you need an expert. I do not buy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What kind of competitive advantage do you have compared to other similar companies (e.g. Hubble [1])? Is contact lenses just a race to the bottom in terms of pricing? Other than cost, are there any other elements that differentiate you?

[1] [https://www.hubblecontacts.com/](https://www.hubblecontacts.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a really important question and @alaskamiller has got the right points other than the selling software to others bit - we're pretty confident the stuff we're building is impactful in our space since we're seeing the results.

In comparison to Hubble: we don't require customers to get a new prescription. Just order from us, save money.

Long term, the process improvement software that we're building as well as the intelligence around actually acquiring customers will be defensible because it is hinged on customer and supplier data. Happy to talk about this more - email@example.com.

<comment><USER9> Do you think this approach could work in other verticals/products other than contact lenses?

I will give your website a try next time I order contacts. Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think your claim is true. You are not the lowest price.

I just purchased Biotrue ONEday 90 pack today from EZContacts today.

You say the price is [https://imgur.com/a/66wFxvS](https://imgur.com/a/66wFxvS) $69.99 cheapest plan (option 2)

But just today I purchased it from EZContacts for $30.79

[https://imgur.com/a/3x4ZzTD](https://imgur.com/a/3x4ZzTD)

So you'd be best served to Google for the contact lens of your choice and pay for whats the cheapest.

Note: When I tried to re-order from EZContacts, they were charging close to $50. So always start a new search when you are trying to order Contacts online!

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't claim to be the cheapest on all products yet - there's some bizdev work to do before we can say that.

<comment><USER3> the title of this post is literally "Lowest Prices on Contact Lenses"

it's reasonable for someone to interpret that as "cheapest price for the contact lenses I wear".

<comment><USER11> Title of this post !== JetLenses marketing claims

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Same price as Costco ($50) for 12pk Acuvue Oasys - thats great. If it went lower I'd switch.

By the way most of your images especially on the homepage seem to be scaled up past their native resolution which makes the site look really fuzzy. Your logo for example is 30px but scaled to 50px. An easy win on landing page design would just be to re-export those images at the right resolution.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're transitioning to a new website ( which is already live on mobile devices when you go to [https://beta.jetlenses.com/](https://beta.jetlenses.com/) ) . It's probably order of magnitude better and the logo is rendered as an SVG :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use Daysoft.com -- way cheaper than these guys or even Hubble

<comment><USER14> I just got my first batch from [https://www.daysoft.com/](https://www.daysoft.com/)

$18 shipped for 64 lenses. Got to USA very fast. No prescription required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As YC company, I would prefer if you could offer me to improve my vision. I have presbyopia which is normal after certain age. Innovate and offer me something better. I don't need another dollar shave club. At least this is how it looks to me. :)

<comment><USER15> It seems that others are more industrious. Still there is a lot to be done

[https://www.reviewofoptometry.com/article/ro0617-can-an- eye-...](https://www.reviewofoptometry.com/article/ro0617-can-an-eye-drop- eliminate-presbyopia)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd like to have metadata about the materials used in the lenses, specifically info about wetting agents. My go-to lens is Acuvue Moist, which has the "Lacreon" wetting agent, aka polyvinylpyrrolidone. When my lens store stopped carrying Moist, I had a hard time figuring out which other brand would have an equivalent gradual moisture release effect, given the jungle of proprietary material names. I'm not saying I'd like to see the chemical formula for each lens (although that would be nice too), but some physical parameters beyond brand name and type of lens would be useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds interesting, but if you've been prescribed the Acuvue Moist, you can _only_ purchase the Acuvue Moist as per law. So, although this info would certainly be interesting (and maybe reduce some customer confusion), it wouldn't actually be actionable.

<comment><USER17> You're US-only, then?

Here in Europe I can buy any contact lens I'd like, but I'm still short on information as to which ones might be better, or why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> FWIW, the biggest pain is the prescription.

My doctor only does 1 year prescriptions, my prescription hasn't changed for 15 years. It's important to get your eyes checked, but every year is a bit nuts. I guess we have some federal organization to thank for that.

I'd love to see you guys figure that problem out. Maybe you could figure out how to ship from out of the US or something. Hell, I'd pay more if I didn't have to go to the doctor every year.

<comment><USER19> > It's important to get your eyes checked, but every year is a bit nuts.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me, and it's not just to update your prescription, it's also to check how healthy your eyes are.

<comment><USER20> Exactly. A couple of years ago at my yearly eye checkup found a small hole in my retina. Pretty common with near-sighted people. The eyeball is elongated and this stretches the retina a little bit. It's also a fast track to complete blindness in that eye. You _might_ see the hole as distortion in your vision, depending on where in your eye it is, or you may not be able to see it at all. If untreated the whole retina will detach and you are permanently blind in that eye, and there's no treatment. If I hadn't gone to that yearly checkup, there's a good chance I would have been blind in that eye before the next one.

The treatment for the hole in the retina was one of the most awesome procedures I've ever had. The doctor puts on this big headset that completely covers his face, with multiple microscope-type lenses and a visible green laser shooting out the front. Looks like the borg. He holds your eye open and using the visible laser to aim, points at the edge of the hole and activates the IR laser, blap, blap, blap (it actually makes that sound) as it stitches the edge of the hole down. It feels like you're getting poked in the eye hard each time so he has to stop after a few cause your eye freaks out and moves. Wait a few seconds till it settles down and continue. My eye felt like it had been punched hard, but that faded by the end of the day. Repair is still holding coming up on 3 years.

Go to to your annual medical checkups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can you elaborate a little bit more on this, what do you optimize, what statistics do you use, etc > We also use statistical models for ad optimization

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I can talk a bit about it.

Essentially, the problem (like all other ad opt. problems) boils down to estimating the expected value of a particular click. This is a particularly challenging/weird problem in this space because unlike other segments of ecommerce, you can't successfully optimize for correlated metrics such as engagement. So, it's a heavily imbalanced problem (i.e. few positive examples, lots of negative examples). In addition to that, the buying characteristics of specific products are heavily related to one another so sales on one affect how we advertise the other. There are a number of other subtleties discovered over time.

Our software produces good bid estimates despite these characteristics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have an eye condition that requires me to wear scleral lenses to see normally. They bill insurance over $2200 per pair of lenses. If that price can be brought down, that would be a big deal for me. Is this sort of lens a target for you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Please just email me at dhaivat @ jetlenses.com with the specific lenses you need and we can figure out if we can get them for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How many numbers (parameters) make up a contact prescription?

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on the particular contact lenses - can be anywhere from 1 - 8+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Congrats on the launch! Can you say more about how you drive your costs down?

</comment><comment><USER25> What about using VSP?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. If you have out of network benefits in your insurance plan , then we can provide you with the necessary paperwork to make a claim. We can also process HSA/FSA cards at checkout. We aren't an in-network provider for VSP yet, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Weird to see that they're not at all cost competitive with most retailers online other than 1800 which is very expensive.

Feels like YC is losing its edge?

<comment><USER27> Not at all cost competitive for my brand either.

Contacts are a commodity item - whenever I need to reorder contacts I do a lazy 2 min search for the cheapest price online and order there. Customer experience is same everywhere.

Not sure what sort of competitive edge JetLenses has, seems like the idea would've been great in 1995. As a long time contact wearer this market has already been disrupted pretty severely .

For me costs going down fairly steadily since the advent of 1-800-Contacts and the subsequent federal law which put an end to the shenanigans of eye doctors trying to block online fulfillment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Curious if 10 years ago yc would accept a company that just sold contact lenses online.

<comment><USER29> An interesting question. This [1] suggests that the contact lens market is ~$10B, which is in the realm of YC aspirations. That market is likely to grow as the purchasing-power of people globally continues to grow. Sounds like YC to me.

[1] [https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry- analysis/contact-...](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry- analysis/contact-lenses-market)

<comment><USER3> except how is this market captured? Seems to be more supply-chain and scale, or R&D in the actual product. These guys appear to hope for the former, but not sure how they can beat the bigger players other than some vague comments akin to leveraging supplier and customer data. The smaller startups that have built online presence have already focused really well on streamlining the experience, order fulfillment and customer service at low prices; how much margin is left to be the new player and compete on price?</comment></comment></comment>


Too Much Specialization Is Making Programming a Poorer Experience - <AUTHOR> http://thecodist.com/article/too_much_specialization_is_making_programming_a_poorer_experience

<comment><USER2> I feel for the author and I do miss the type of programming and programmers that he is reminiscing about. But I just have to wonder how we would feel if our new home was put together by a bunch of craftsmen (framers, electricians, plumbers) without an architect and other managers working above them, and how the end product would be int terms of consistency, reliability and quality.

The new software development model is following the same model that any group development work has taken. While the handyman in construction is still useful, you won't be seeing any job ads for handyman on a construction site. But you do see handyman trucks driving around as successful consultants fixing the issues that come up with the products derived from this group development process, or at least I do, but they are few and far between.

Building software is different than building a house, so say us people that build software, but to the people above the actual coding and systems, to them it is just a project with the goal of getting finished. They don't know what a programmer does much more than most architects know how to wire a house or pour concrete. yet houses get built, and somehow software does as well.

I'm all for the small groups and lone coders producing ground breaking software, but software has turned into so much of big business that it can't be helped that the other people have followed the money and put project management into the mix. All you can do as a programmer is choose which side you would like to be on and do the best you can in the situation you are given. Specialization is for insects, so they say.</comment>


What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174399)

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is adapted from Duhigg's book, Smarter Faster Better.[0] I remember it being an interesting read.

[0] [http://charlesduhigg.com/books/smarter-faster- better/](http://charlesduhigg.com/books/smarter-faster-better/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Google is a very "sink or swim" place, and these well intentioned studies aren't going to change that. I suspect they get funded in part for their positive PR aspect. Anecdotally, two of the three teams I worked in at Google were among the highest performing if you look at impact and results, and there was nothing "touchy-feely safe space" about them. It was pretty much "deliver or GTFO", and how you feel about any of it didn't matter one iota.

<comment><USER5> When you say GTFO, what is it exactly that you mean? Have you seen anyone fired or punished for underperformance?

<comment><USER4> You won't be fired per se. You just won't perform well against your peers an will feel like shit because of that. After some time you'll leave on your own accord to a team where demands aren't quite as high. There are plenty of those around: it's a huge company now, and demanding, high performance teams that do something that actually matters are a small minority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ridiculous puff piece & PR job. There is not a single piece of data in that entire article.

The way this works is:

1/ Google crunches some data

2/ The company leadership looks at that data, twists it to leave out "inconvenient" facts, and tells whatever narratives they want to tell (internally and to the NYT)

3/ No data or any empirical results are ever released (even internally)

<comment><USER7> Do you work at Google, or what are you basing these bold assertions on?

FTR, I'm a manager at Google. I don't feel qualified to comment on the research or the specifics of this article, but I _can_ assure you Google takes building effective teams pretty darn seriously.

<comment><USER8> Are you suggesting that working at google somehow impacts OP's ability to read the article and determine if the article cites data?

<comment><USER9> Point 2/ is the more interesting one - it's an accusation without any proof or hint, bordering on conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER10> You could read it that way, but it's something that I see in many different organisations when talking to people about how they do the data science-in'

The thing is that confirmation bias is real, and cost and time often preclude the use of strong systems to exclude it. Additionally The Tribe quickly develop narratives which then dominate funding and discussion. Phrases like "we've moved to execution".

Before finger wagging at dumb managers starts... consider Richard Feynman : [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The fact that they think there is perfection in such a thing should already be the wrong path to go down on

<comment><USER12> Reminds me of the scene in The Circle where Tom Hanks says "we believe in the perfectability of human beings!".

Google is such a frightening, creepy company that really tries hard not to be. Kind of like the guy who breaks into a girl's home with a gun screaming "why won't you go out with me I'm a nice guy".

If you work for Google no offense, you're still competitive on the job market and Google became creepy as a function of emergence rather than anyone's choice, but still wanted to say something...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> TL;DR:

 _" …the good teams all had high ''average social sensitivity'' — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people's eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley's experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues."_

 _" When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ''direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.'' That team, researchers estimated, was among Google's accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his ''team leader has poor emotional control.'' He added: ''He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.'' That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well."_

The weasel-wording around "researchers estimated' and "researchers presumed" doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Though that may be just the NYT article, not the study itself (what's the actual data?).

I can only imagine this well-intentioned research was the seed of some internal directives, which eventually turned into a cargo-cult dogma, leading to things like the James Damore fiasco. The road to hell paved with good intentions and all that.

<comment><USER14> _which eventually turned into a cargo-cult dogma_

It's very clearly culturally biased too. If you have ever done any training in this area you know that different cultures (even if they appear racially similar) do facial expressions, eye contact, and so on differently. Maybe all we are seeing here is that white people can read the facial expressions of white people...

<comment><USER15> > _It 's very clearly culturally biased too. If you have ever done any > training in this area you know that different cultures (even if they appear > racially similar) do facial expressions, eye contact, and so on differently. > Maybe all we are seeing here is that white people can read the facial > expressions of white people..._

I'm under the impression that the cultural differences are largely in how much you let out, not in what the expression looks like when you do.

<comment><USER14> _I 'm under the impression that the cultural differences are largely in how much you let out, not in what the expression looks like when you do._

Annoyance vs anger is all in how much you let out, no?

<comment><USER16> Uh no? I'm not angry when I'm annoyed... I'm annoyed.

<comment><USER17> In both cases, the key is that your team members can detect that something is not right, or could be improved, and respond.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I read through the HN comments of this very same article from almost two years ago wondering whether the message of the article would have been interpreted any differently.

It is really surprising how much negativity there is in today's comments as opposed to the older topic. In 2016 people were calling this article enjoyable and even "Their favorite Google-related article of the year". I found suggestions on how to further expand on Google's work in the comments and people seem to have supported them.

Fast forward two years and in today's comments I see nothing but negativity towards the study and its achievements, criticism of the NYT journalism, and disdain of the amount of power big corporations have over their employees.

I wonder how much of this is based on real improvements in the understanding of what makes a team work well together and how much of it is a result of the recent rise in paranoia over fake news and also distrust of corporations that are gaining power at a much faster pace than regulators can cope with. It is fascinating how a scientific study (although arguably not a very good one) can be interpreted so differently by the same group of people solely based on trends in public sentiment rather than changes in the actual evaluated metrics.

<comment><USER19> > by the same group of people

Don't think it's the same group of people, it feels like intelligent and mentally healthy individuals have been opting to abstain from online discussions in general over the last few years in droves after realizing their time and energy and better spent elsewhere. Especially with the trend of comments being taken out of context to attack individuals employers/livelihood. That leaves the young, socially broken and depressed (myself included).

<comment><USER20> Ah! I think you are onto something there. I noticed it as well; Reddit is the worst offender as even serious and well founded comments are butchered and lighthearted/funny ones are upvoted in the 10000s. If you have better stuff to do, you will just think; fuck it then I don't answer. I would love to have good discussions with new peers online, but doing that in open court seems to attract the weirdos so I just go do something else.

So that said; where do people go online who want to have serious (tech) discussions? Must be some secret place with a person like Linus kicking everyone out he doesn't like at first offense.

<comment><USER21> So far this seems the best we have, and this is the only community I really will comment in. I think keeping up such a community means we have to ensure that the serios and well founded comments are upvoted, and the lazy/annoying/"funny" comments are kept off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 2016\. Please title your post with year when posting older things.

</comment><comment><USER23> That's a really long read. Can anyone summarize?

<comment><USER24> Google wanted to optimize teams. Couldn't find any patterns that show why one team does better than another. Saw psychology report indicating that having people free to express themselves is important for team performance, as if this is a major revelation. Rest of the paper focuses on a single anecdote that is supposed to show this.

<comment><USER24> As an aside, I am familiar with and critical of the psychology report [1] they reference in this article. The paper had a psychologist break people into groups and then perform tasks like plan a shopping trip. The psychologist's data indicated that the sum of the measured aptitudes of the teams did not correlate against their performance, so they then jumps from that to suggesting that therefore individual aptitude does not affect team performance.

I find that a stretch. Even more so as the paper makes 0 effort to falsify its own conclusion. E.g. if this is true then you should be able to find a team where each person is a highly skilled shopping trip planner (and how that was measured was not defined in the paper) against a team full of people who are less skilled. But some other trait, presumably some sort of empathy, makes the individually weaker team perform better. I would expect in nearly all cases the team of better performers at the given skill will outperform the team of weaker performers at the given skill. What she arguably showed is that whatever measure she was using for cognitive capability does not strongly correlate against skill at things like planning shopping trips, whereas the test she used for the 'other' trait, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test, does.

[1] - [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Scien...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Science_2010-2.pdf)

<comment><USER25> "It's not fair when you reason better than us!"

\-- Psychologists United Now (PUN)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Edit: can't reply at this time so had to edit in place - it would be good to get some discussion if others disagree with my experience, downvoting silently and avoiding conversation is a shame.

In time we will actually see that Google overly filters and selects and decides on the candidates it chooses, and that singular overarching, overbearing process guarantees they end up with a homogenised staff that all think and act the same. My three years there were a lesson in what to avoid when hiring. Difference of thought is seen as being against the hivemind. It is encouraged and tolerated only as much as to flush out all the individuals not on message. Sadly even with with xooglers, the Stockholm syndrome is strong and persists many external roles later. Friends don't let friends work for Google.</comment>


Skype Changes the Game and Releases the iPhone App - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2/?p=3638 <comment><USER2> before 3.0 with the notification system or some other way to keep applications running in the background, this, like all the other IM applications on the iPhone/touch, won't be of practical use.

Talking in Skype and recieving a traditional phone call? Skype call drops. Skype quits.

Talking in Skype while surfing the web. Nope. It's either Safari or Skype.

Tapping on a link in a Skype chat? Sure, but you'll go offline doing that (Skype closes before Safari opens).

Waiting for a call at a scheduled time? Sure, but don't think about browsing the web or even just browsing your music library to play something as all these actions will quit Skype.

Nah. IM and even more so VoIP are totally unpractical on the iPhone.

3.0 will bring some alleviation with the background notification service as you'll at least know when someone tries to call you, but it's still nowhere near usable. At least for me.

And that's this "changes the game"? There are already a bunch of - even Skype compatible - VoIP applications out there for the iPhone. They just didn't take off due to the reasons stated above.

<comment><USER3> Well, Skype has the network effect going for it. And while iPhone has its quirks and drawbacks, the idea of VOIP on your handheld is pretty compelling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> But it still isn't up in the app store.

<comment><USER5> Confirmed. This seems like a big waste of PR, stirring up interest for a product people can't buy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Coming Tuesday apparently <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7971673.stm>

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't tell you how long I have been waiting for Skype to release this; it hasn't appeared in the shop for me yet, hopefully they don't do weird carrier releases and the UK gets screwed again--this could of course be an April Fools.

<comment><USER8> Just get an android, then you don't have to depend on Apple to be allowed to use your own device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just ordered an iPod Touch last week (Should be here today). Just in time! (I was planning on using a third party Skype application and jail breaking my touch- I might still jail break it :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Big deal. I've been looking forward to the unification of cellular data and IP for a while. I'm curious to see how things look in about 18 months.

</comment><comment><USER11> What other serious platforms is Skype not available for? I know WinMo has had it for years. I just assumed it was available on most other devices.

<comment><USER12> WinMo and Nokia's Linux platform are the only mobile platforms they have released clients for. The Nokia N97 (S60 5th Edition) will have a native Skype client as well. I hope they release a S60 3rd Edition version as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I guess network operators will do whatever it takes to block the app since it eats their revenue from SMS and calls.

</comment><comment><USER14> ... what kind of sadist plans to release this on or around April 1st?

<comment><USER15> You remember when GMail was announced on April fools and everyone thought it was a hoax? (they were offering 1000MB, when most other providers were offering ~10MB)

Google had to come out with a second press release saying that they were actually serious

<comment><USER7> I remember, but Skype hasn't actually come out with a press release saying that they're launching an iPhone application, so far it's all rumours. (Correct me I'm wrong, I can't find find an official Skype citation)

<comment><USER16> <http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52T0H620090330></comment></comment></comment></comment>