Interviews Can Be a Terrible Way to Identify Good Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://thecodist.com/article/interviews_can_be_a_terrible_way_to_identify_good_programmers <comment><USER2> No offense, but the only advice I've learned from all these "how to hire programmers" article, as a programmer, is that it doesn't make a damn bit of difference, because every person hiring as their own idea of what works. The best thing _I_ can do to get hired somewhere is be myself.

For every person who says not to bother with a resume, there is another person who wants them.

For every person who denounces certain terms on a resume, another person is looking for them.

For every person who thinks "experienced with" means "you can write a book on the subject", someone else things "you've used it in production."

White board tests are necessary. They are useless. Example code is critical. No, just showing projects. Gotta see open source contributions. No, show what your code accomplished.

You need schooling. You don't need schooling. Degrees don't matter (though, try to get a visa without one). Self-taught rules.

Ask them to write a FizzBuzz program. Reverse FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz is silly and doesn't matter.

Throw out half the resumes so you only hire the lucky ones. Have them work for you for 90 days/1 month/2 weeks/1 week/1 day/1 project.

My advice: ask them whether they prefer green or purple. Whether they prefer the number 34 or the letter X. Take them out to lunch and see if they know the name of the waiter/waitress. Then get your mother's opinion on them. Then play a game of Magic: The Gathering with them, and if they win, roll a d20 to see if they can beat the AC of the job. That method has never failed me.

So yeah. Looking for work? Be smart. Be yourself. Because if you resort to playing games and being someone else, you're going to end up working for someone who thinks you are something/someone you are not. If you can't get the job because your resume was too plain/too fancy for the person doing the hiring, it's probably for the best.

Edit: To be clear, this isn't a direct response to the original article, but rather, to these types of articles in general.

<comment><USER3> It seems to me that regardless, you need to still have a CS degree and understand (and be able to implement) algorithms of increasing complexity, even if you're making a CRUD app.

But I agree, these interview posts altogether don't seem to say anything consistent.

<comment><USER4> "you need to still have a CS degree and understand (and be able to implement) algorithms of increasing complexity, even if you're making a CRUD app."

Why?

<comment><USER3> Sorry if it wasn't clear, I meant that's the impression I get from a lot of these interview posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author places a lot of stress on memory. I think he's overgeneralizing from his personal experience.

Personally, I have a very bad memory, especially when confronted with query- like questions like "explain how you solved some hard problem when working at company X". I remember based on associations, not time: If you sit me down in front of the code I wrote, or pose the problem to me directly, I'll remember in a jiffy, but looking back on my time at a company/at school/etc it just seems like a blur---I can't remember anything at all that way!

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Memory tends to be trigger-based for most of us mortals.

Even short-term, here's what I've noticed: I could verbally list seven terms and their definitions. If I then proceeded to ask you the definition of any one of those terms, you could probably tell me. But if I asked you to recite back to me all seven terms, you'd probably forget at least one or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of my favorite questions is: "What's the best bug you've ever found?"

Usually I get a "Huh?"

The really stellar folks will tell you about the bug that took two weeks to find and boiled down to a single missing comma in a vendor's library routine. Or /something/. But "Huh" is a bad sign.

"Huh?" is not a fail, but it usually correlates with people who can't write a function to find the length of a string, and I see a depressing number of those folks, even ones with the tag "Senior" in their title.

Hiring strangers is terrifying.

<comment><USER8> _One of my favorite questions is: "What's the best bug you've ever found?"_

One of the problems I always have with questions like that is this: I don't keep mental lists of events or other things ordered by potential "interestingness" to myself or other people. I just don't think that way for some reason.

I might fumble to come up with an answer to that question, and then an hour after the interview is over, I'll remember a really good story the interviewer would have liked, but in the meantime I've looked like an inexperienced, bumbling fool.

Not that it really matters, of course--eventually I'll get through an interview without hitting a question that doesn't work for me, get hired, and then actually get to do some good work for somebody. Getting through that process feels fairly random to me.

<comment><USER9> Same here. To compensate, I load my memory up with "interesting" anecdotes for interviews. Including my most embarrassing moment, which luckily happens to center around a bug. (Failing that, I'd probably grab a recent bug and dress it up to be interesting. I guess you can always riff about techniques which prevent that particular class of bugs.)

But now of course, if I ever go on an interview again, I'd dredge up some funny bug. Just in case. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _meta post_

It would be better if people would evaluate ideas in articles rather than use the author's name as a leverage point to launch personal attacks. Several posts here attack the author as being incompetent in various ways and not having had serious experience. Yet a brief review of his resume shows he works at Travelocity, worked at Apple in the past, and personally invented a innovative spreadsheet using a different information organization paradigm that ended up influencing iNumbers. So he's not really the dumbass that some people are trying to make him out to be. It's obvious he's a talented, serious and experienced engineer. There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with his article, but snarky and contemptuous remarks about his supposed incompetency detract severely from points made, making them seem like the critic is an immature schoolyard bully.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good to see that we're making good efforts at meeting our "articles about hiring" quota on HN.

I have this theory that hiring people is nowhere near as hard as this particular echo-chamber likes to think it is. Everyone thinks they need "rockstars" or "A Players" and is looking for the magical recipe for finding them, but I think for most positions, someone who is smart and technically competent and fits with your company's culture is entirely sufficient.

Most of the startups we talk about depend on good execution of a simple idea, not advanced technical skills[1]. I believe that a good leader with the right vision and the ability to articulate that to his or her employees can take smart people who fit well with the company and form them into people who will execute consistently well. Not only that, but this creates a belief system around engineering and product that is compounding and self-reinforcing.

Identifying technically competent people is not that difficult. If you were to read a few of the last 200 articles where we've talked about this, there are some common threads.

First this, always this: a) Have them write at least a little bit of code to see that they actually know how.

Then pick a few of these. If at all possible spread the interviews out amongst a group of people so you can get different viewpoints. a) Ask them some relevant programming questions and observe their answers. Focus on things related to the kinds of work they'll be doing in their job. Maybe work on a whiteboard, or even in a text editor. Maybe even a little bit of both. b) Ask them a broader set of questions relevant to things like algorithms and data structures. Even for simple web apps, it helps to be at least conversant in the basics of these topics. c) Ask them to see open source work, or if they have a profile, or maybe some code they wrote that they're comfortable sharing with you.

I really think that if you put someone in a room with a competent engineer for an hour, that engineer will be able to tell if the person they've been speaking to is a good engineer or not.

<comment><USER12> Yes thank you. The OP does briefly mention the "looking for rock star" thing, but I get mad that every single job posting I see seems to be "OMG MUST HAVE ROCKSTAR". Or gawds, lately "OMG MUST HAVE DAN SHIPPER".

First, probably if you got an actual rock star programmer (Zed Shaw comes to mind), you probably wouldn't be able to handle/keep him.

Secondly, really? You want people that crank out Lisp transpilers in their spare time... But what about people that maybe are good with taking some oddball client spec and going back and forth to understand the desired behavior and distill something that is actually possible to implement? What about the guy who takes that extra 10% of time to implement a feature, but they end up giving you some new common code you can apply in your app?

Maybe these people don't dream Ruby DSLs, or have Github Infinity number of issues in their inbox, but they can still be valuable to a team. Because the best code in the world is useless if the programmer has misunderstood what the client is _really_ saying.

<comment><USER13> What I always wonder is why they want "people that crank out Lisp transpilers in their spare time" (I'm reasonably close enough to that...) to come write CRUD apps in Rails.

My current day job is to write CRUD apps in Rails, but my long-term plan has me back in academia (for a PhD and a research career), where the ability to crank out a Lisp transpiler in one's spare time actually gets used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is a lot of focus on team work. I'm still not sure if programming is suited for team work. There's clearly some activities of creative problem solving which are better suited for individuals working mostly alone, but belonging to a community of peers.

For example: * math * research * art * visual design * writing * music

* programming?

People have been trying to apply Taylorism to programming making it approach an assembly line in organization. Now we're trying to organize programmers as sports teams instead with Agile.

I just don't understand why programming specifically is under this intense pressure of having to be measurable and quantifiable in every little detail.

It seems like being a good cog in an assembly line, or a good member of a sports team is just as important, if not _more_ , as just creating good programs. Why aren't for example visual designers being hassled in this way? No they are beging left alone as long as they do good stuff. They can freelance or work from home if they want.

But programming is somehow different. There's this assumption that it needs to be done in a group at all times. Solving all problems by group discussion.

If I was hiring I would just ask to see previous project, and/or a portfolio (github for example). If they have nothing to show, or it's really bad and show no signs of progress, I would not hire. Simple as that.

I wouldn't hire a group of 15 clearly sub-standard visual designers who have nothing to show, try to organize them into a group, measure closely and try to make them create visual design.

In the same way I would not try to do this with programmers either.

<comment><USER15> > and/or a portfolio (github for example)

This can be cheated. They could get someone else to create the Gibhub portfolio for them, perhaps a friend who's an unemployed "real programmer", just like they could get someone else to sit an aptitude test for them if only HR people are at the test and no photos are taken.

<comment><USER14> Yeah of course you'd bring them in for an interview to talk about those projects if they show a promising portfolio.

I just can't imagine hearing someone say "Yeah this guy is a great visual designer, look as his gorgeous portfolio, and look at all this great stuff he did at smashing magazine (or whatever good place for design, I don't know..) But he's not a team player, he is sceptical about doing 'pair-designing' for 8 hours a day with other randomly chosen incompetent designers. No hire."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> /sigh interview techniques really are a perennial topic on HN.

> [a coding test] won't tell you squat about how good they are in a year long > project with 10 other people,

The author misses the point of a coding test. It's a negative rather than positive filter. Someone who does amazing on FizzBuzz is not by definition an amazing programmer. Someone who can't solve FizzBuzz however almost certainly is _not_ a good programmer.

Simple coding tests are a very effective filter in terms of the time spent.

> So why spend an inordinate amount of time on relatively minor parts of a > programmer's skill set?

I wouldn't call half an hour "an inordinate amount of time".

The author then opines about how "can just tell" if someone is a good programmer or not. I can sympathize because frankly so can I. I went through a period of taking 10 interviewees to lunch. I asked them nothing technical and basically just answered their questions. From the first 10 minutes I could tell:

\- 1 would probably get an offer (he did);

\- 8 would not (they didn't); and

\- 1 I was unsure about (no offer).

Looking at the author's profile [1] I believe I can see the problem: it doesn't appear he's ever worked for a large engineering organization. This is fairly obvious from the content of this post because _none of his solutions scale_.

Let's say you have a large organization with 5 Andrews. Each of them says to hire this guy they just interviewed. What do you do if you're looking for less than 5 people? Are they going to work on the respective teams of those giving the recommendation? If not, how do you know they're a good fit? You need to consider company-wise culture and expectations. How do you calibrate between them? Do they have the necessary foundation to do not just the job they'll be starting on but to grow with the organization, adapt and perhaps work on other projects?

The other problem I have is the "war stories" aspect. This is a very definite bias. Take the way human memory works. Imagine you have a conversation with someone that's memorable in some way. At first you can remember word-for-word what happened. That quickly fades and you remember the _gist_ of what was said. You may even think you remember exactly what was said and how it was said but usually you're wrong (try it by writing down what was exactly said and going back to it after months or having two or more people recount the same event). After awhile even that made fade and you may just be left with an emotion about the event.

Some things I can remember very well but more often than not, I've learnt my lesson and the exact circumstances or even the origin entirely are lost. This is largely because it's useless information.

But here's the biggest problem of all with the post:

> My favorite idea is still contract to hire everyone after your (hopefully > reasonable) interview;

Okay, you've excluded anyone really good because they're not going to jump through that hoop. I don't consider myself a "rockstar" and even I won't jump through that.

Maybe the real problem is the OP doesn't even know what good programmers are because this is a recipe for mediocrity.

Lastly there's a story about team bonding (probably distorted if not made up outright at a guess). The author doesn't seem to realize that his hiring process is pretty much about hiring people like himself, which is fine, but that's not the definition of a good programmer.

I've seen teams work well who:

\- all work closely together and socialize together;

\- never socialize together;

\- work remotely;

\- work on different schedules;

\- and so on.

Don't confuse programming ability with culture fit and work style. Those are three different things all important.

In a large organization you're going to have some aspect of a common culture but very different team cultures (and even site cultures). Part of hiring in a large organization is recognizing that you're not trying to hire "you" and then working out how you can best use someone not like you such that they flourish.

EDIT: oh and if he thinks Google, as one example, hasn't done extensive data analysis on interview techniques he's nuts.

[1]: <http://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewwulf>

<comment><USER17> Interviewing is a perennial topic because it doesn't make much sense.

Case in point - over the past week I've interviewed for four positions. Three gave me offers within a day, with very little effort on my part. On the other hand, one told me that I had little idea of what I was doing and told me to study up and apply again next year. And, that was after wasting my time with 3.5 hours of interviews. Of the offers I received, two were well over 120k plus great bonus. The other came in under 90k but told me that I could work anywhere in the world, whenever I wanted, as long as I got my work done.

Over that same time, I flat out rejected three recruiters from large engineering companies because their recruitment processes would have cost me $700-1500 just in opportunity costs. And, they weren't even willing to give me the info I needed to help me determine my chance of success or even my expected pay.

Everyone these days seems to believe that their company is so important that they deserve or need a team of top 1000 engineers. When in fact a top 20-percent team who bonds well together would likely be sufficient.

The topic of interviewing is fascinating because there seems to be very little science behind it. Who knows what works?

<comment><USER16> People make several mistakes when analyzing interview techniques:

1\. The interviewer and interviewee are after similar and complementary things.

Wrong. The interviewee is trying to find out if the work is interesting, whether or not this would be a good place to work, whether or not he or she could work in that environment with that team and so on.

The interviewer (or rather the employer) is trying to _fill a position_. This is really important.

Some make the mistake of thinking that if an interview process doesn't evaluate the interviewee accurately it has failed. This is grossly inaccurate. The point of an interview process shouldn't be to look at a single candidate but to look at the process of filling a position, which may well span interviewing many candidates.

A false positive (someone who looks qualified but isn't) for an employer can be incredibly costly. The cost of a false negative is essentially zero _as long as the employer can otherwise adequately fill the position_.

To spell it out: if an employer gets 50 applications, has phone interviews for 8, brings in 4 for face-to-face interviews and makes two offers, one of which is accepted, the employer has gained the desired result. The fact that a qualified person was rejected along the way (false negative) is essentially irrelevant.

2\. Your worth is constant.

Wrong. You said it yourself. You got several different offers. You're implying that if you had been accurately gauged market conditions would have you valued roughly similarly.

Company A might be desperate. Company B less so. You may fill a niche far better at one employer than another. One employer may simply be more cashed up and able to pay a better salary. A given employer may simply suck at negotiating or be under a misconception about market value. The list goes on.

Likewise, your _desirability_ to the employer factors into this and it goes beyond technical skills. If the employer thinks you'll be a great fit and they'd really like to work with you, that improves your worth (to them).

3\. Companies are looking for the same thing.

Clearly this is wrong but I do see this attitude come up, typically being implied by showing mismatches in offers as "proof" or similar.

There are many examples of this. For example, all other things being equal I've found that an MIT graduate is much more likely to hire other MIT graduates. The same is true for Stanford, CMU or [insert school here].

Part of this is the "social proof" element (going to a great school and/or working for a top-tier employer can be a huge advantage). But more than that it comes down to cultural similarity, common background and being a known quantity (to some degree).

This is of course different for every employer.

The real problem with interviewing, particularly at larger organizations, is that people who are bad at it are doing it. Interviewing and assessing potential colleagues is a skill and a talent. Some people have it. Some don't.

I've seen another comment here that said you need great engineers to do interviewing. I disagree. Many great engineers seem to be essentially savants who are often ill-equipped for the social discourse entailed in interviewing.

To interview an engineer I firmly believe you need to be an engineer (the same goes for managing engineers) but you don't need to be a rock star. You just have the right additional skills.

<comment><USER18> _The cost of a false negative is essentially zero as long as the employer can otherwise adequately fill the position._

I couldn't quantify them exactly, but I don't think the costs are zero. For one, any candidate that you bring in and reject consumes (in the case of my company) about 4 man hours of developer time. And that's mostly senior/lead developer time. And that's not counting the time we spend discussing the candidate and the general cost of a distraction/context-switch. And then there's the opportunity cost of not having a position filled and work being started. Sometimes the short run matters.

That said, I'd definitely agree that the scale should be tipped in favor of false negatives.

<comment><USER19> _adequately fill the position_

It's better to think in terms of risks not just costs. Interviewers tend to higher people just like them, which means the team is often filled with people that think the same way and come up with the same types of solutions. On the other hand when you get someone in that can 'do the job' but has a radically different perspective they are more likely to bring something new to the table. To be overly simplistic in a team of world class programmers adding someone with a great UI background can be worth a lot more than yet another world class developer. The advantage being diversity does not require a larger paycheck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> These articles reinforce something that someone told me a long time ago about a study about interviewing.

1\. In most cases, the person (or the person in charge, if it is a panel) makes a decision in the first five minutes of the interview.

2\. The decision is based on how much the candidate resembles the interviewer (i.e. how similar they are to the interviewer in terms of personality and skill set).

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd think a good way to hire great developers is to hire and fire quickly. I see this mentioned time and again, yet very few people actually live by it. The process would then turn into a trial period beyond which you are good to go. If you want to have a group of good developers, just operate along the lines of "I give myself X months to notice that this new hire is bad." If you want a group of great developers, switch your mode of operation to "I give this new hire X months to impress his/her peers."

The people who can make the judgement call are usually the hire's peers based on their daily interactions, so how would management be able to get its hands on this knowledge without turning the company culture into a disaster where people always feel like they are being continuously judged by their peers and have to watch their backs?

</comment><comment><USER22> It seems possible this guy just has an unusually good memory and regards anyone who doesn't also have a good memory as stupid and "not a good programmer".

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm happy where I work.

I interviewed for google once; their recruiter found me through an open source project in which google has a stake.

Anyways, I was tired when I did my phone interview, having just returned home from work. I bombed a couple of those interview puzzles. I felt pretty stupid because the answers are really obvious to me in hindsight. No biggie.

So this week they interviewed a junior programmer I mentored in the past. It looks like they might hire him! :-) good one. If they asked him he'd easily send them my way (guess who he comes to whenever he has questions?) Oh well.

If their recruiter contacts me again I might still do another interview. Their "write some code in a google document" interview style was novel, but possibly sub-optimal. YMMV

<comment><USER24> Yeah I've done the code-in-a-google-doc thing as well. Wasn't a fan. I've also done the interview-right-after-work thing. Not a fan. I'm happy where I work too, but it doesn't hurt to always know what the market is like (as you're obviously aware). That being said I've found the "job market research" process tedious and tiring. Months-long processes only to end in frustration, lies about project scope/culture/etc., time-intensive programming exercises, and so on.

Not sure how else you'd handle it though, really. Busy people are busy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yes, yes, 1000 times yes. Particularly the basketball team analogy at the end of the article really resonates with me.

To anyone wondering, "How could this possibly be true? How could so many companies be getting the hiring process so wrong?" I say: it's because they aren't focused on the goal. That doens't mean companies never achieve their goals, they are simply optimizing the wrong aspects of the process.

For anyone interested, the book _The Goal_ by Eli Goldratt (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)>) illustrates this phenomenon very well.

</comment><comment><USER26> But I don't think that a bad interview will mislead a programmer.

Thruth is lot of companies out there are mediocre. And this shows on how they recruit.

Everyone wants a "rockstar" for some average CRUD app, but they don't seem to understand that most programmers will do fine building them. Even people who interview badly.

I think that programmers should be the ones taking a detailed look at companies to see if they are a fit with the dev team instead of the other way around. After all, if you don't feel well whithin a team, how will you do your best?

</comment><comment><USER27> Being a recent graduate of computer science and now job hunting I have come across several different types of interviews in the last few months. I have sat a coding test where they just asked me to write a very basic CRUD application in code igniter, also had the here is a scenario you have 15 minutes to write a presentation and then present us with your result, plus an interview where I was asked to do some UML on a whiteboard.

But the best method I have come across was where I was just asked 20 or so questions of basic computer science knowledge from OOP to networking to basic CS theory.

I say this was my favourite method because I know some recent graduates who could and can write a very simple application but are terrible programmers and would not last the probationary period (actually happened to someone I know) but I know that if you asked them a series of basic questions they would stumble and fall because in general they where just terrible computer scientists and once outside of the very basic elements of programming they knew nothing so what good does asking someone to write fizzbuzz actually do? apart from weed out the idiots (then again I know someone else who failed fizzbuzz, largely because he managed to get through 3 years of CS and not know about using %).

</comment><comment><USER28> It depends

I've hired great people without having them write code. (Or at least, not in a whiteboard)

Trust me, you can know a lot about a candidate without him or her writing a line of code (ok, maybe a line)

My favorite question: "Tell me about a bug you once solved". That will tell you loads about the candidate

Or ask him/her about the difference bewteen foldl and foldr

But, really, I won't use FizzBuzz again

"blah blah candidate has to write code" I won't use FizzBuzz

Be creative people, FizzBuzz is easy, but it's boring. And it's a bad filter (from experience).

<comment><USER29> Do people actually use FizzBuzz _itself_? I always thought it was just one example illustrative of the type of simple and quick-to-answer question that makes a good initial negative filter.

<comment><USER30> SQL equivalent: "Explain the difference between a left join and a full join."

...seriously, this filters out a depressing number of people who put SQL on their resume and are applying for a SQL job.

<comment><USER31> There are a lot of people who've used SQL, and therefore will think it's perfectly honest and accurate to list SQL experience on their resume, and who've written perfectly fine queries to get shit done, and yet they would _not_ be able to answer that question, especially in an interview/interrogation situation.

Also, in real life, under normal working conditions, we live in the Age of Google (and books) -- if someone ever needed to know the definition, or recite a definition or comparison of those terms, he could just look it up. A better question would be: can they solve problems? And solve them in good ways? And have they in the past? Do they get shit done? Ship? Reliable? Work well with others (to the extend it would matter, because it varies)? Would it be a net win to them involved with your project/team/company? Those questions matter the most by far. And I don't think it's wise to assume they're going to be able to recite a definition of any particular term. Offhand. In a stressful and unnatural situation like an interview.

<comment><USER32> There's a still a certain level of familiarity with the subject matter required to do a job. If the role can be defined as an "SQL job" (say something in data warehousing or reporting) - not knowing what types of joins are available could lead to terrible solutions.

I would agree with you if the interview question was more specific, say about Oracle window functions for example.

An SQL developer not familiar with full joins would be similar to a Java developer who is not familiar with interfaces, or a Javascript developer who has never heard of closures. It's a significant part of the language, not a piece of arcane reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I agree with having someone who's already in the role interviewing you. Let the HR and managers interview the programmers last. This way you can filter out a ton of people before they waste everybody's time. One my last interviews the guy who interviewed me was a "change management" director. I thought to myself, "This is going to be a short, easy interview."

After being the industry for a while, I feel the best way to hire someone is still on referral. Developers know good developers and the good ones tend to stick together. They also know what their friends skills are, what they excel at, and what kind of work they would recommend.

Also, in the end, I learned its not what questions they ask, it's not about the stupid quizzes they put you through. Developers have to learn it's about you knowing enough about the company or asking enough tough questions to determine if it's going to be a good fit. Developers should have as much, if not more of a responsibility in vetting the companies they choose to interview with.

</comment><comment><USER34> He makes a brings up an interesting point about the idea checking the effectiveness of interview methods. It seems that lots of people have intricate hacks for divining the talented programmers in an interview, but NO ONE can back their methods up with hard data based on performance and non- performance of candidates over project time-spans.

<comment><USER35> This a good point. It seems somewhat unavoidable, since no one will ever be in a position to evaluate the effectiveness of both those who did well on their metric and those who did poorly (since they will only hire those who do well).

Perhaps there are companies out there with a large enough sample size that are recording metrics on a "programming concepts verbal interview", "analytical thinking verbal interview", "programming test" and "resume match", such that they can evaluate what are the best predictors.

<comment><USER36> If you wanted to go about it scientifically, you could hire some fraction of the people that wouldn't have passed based on the current practices.

That's a pretty scary thing to do, but it could be worth it for a large company which needs to improve its hiring. Think exploration/exploitation.

<comment><USER37> Speaking as someone who's thought a lot about this (mostly during my psychology studies), here's what I would do, if someone let me.

1) Establish the competencies of your employees. Think small programming exercises, IQ tests, personality tests etc. Use this to establish a minimum score for hiring. 2) Apply these same tests to all prospective employees. 3) Of all the candidates that meet the minimum criteria, hire a random set of them. 4) Follow up the progress of all these employees over 1-2 years.

Now, this would never fly in many legal senses, and I doubt that anyone will ever let me do it, but it would provide useful data to improve hiring processes. I suspect that this would need to be done for each individual company at least 100+ times before you would start to be able to derive useful patterns.

Some hypotheses: 1) non linear relationship between IQ and performance 2) Increasing performance and longetivity of employment based on the similarity between personality of candidate and personality of team.

Just my 0.02c.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious, is it really that hard to identify competent programmers? Surely asking a few technical questions that include some element of programming should be enough. I feel like there's about 5-10 articles on this subject every week, all of which say or or less the same thing. In very nearly every case that I've interviewed someone, I've been able to easily decide if they were a hire or a no hire about 20 minutes into the interview process. I'm sure for certain positions or certain companies who are solving difficult problems, things could be more complicated, but the vast majority of us just aren't in that situation.

It seems like the rather more difficult problem is getting competent programmers to want to work at your company and apply.

<comment><USER38> Identifying competent programmers is hard as long as you try to quantify it. You don't make decisions based on rational facts that come from a rational process, as nobody does. In the end, the decision comes from a feeling that we so hard try to belittle.

The rational mind can make a "decision", like "this candidate passed all our interviews and qualifies on paper: that means we can hire him". But the true decision of hiring someone is more like a "to engage or not to engage ourselves with this guy, in a joint (work) life together and into the future". Conversely, you can just decide to nominally hire people but never back it up on a personal, human level.

The process of hiring is golden as a negative filter: you want to weed out people who factually aren't up to it. But there's no positive filter that you can unilaterally apply. In the end, you just have to let yourself "know" who to hire because there's nothing else you can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ah, I am not alone!

Sure, simple tests to filter out people who clearly know nothing about programming are useful, but puzzlers and other ego-trip tests are useless.

I can hire better programmers by asking them to write an essay about any current piece of news.

The English language is the first programming language one should master. It's the one most useful to handle interactions with other human beings, and that's what makes the most important difference in any job.

</comment><comment><USER40> To fix coding interviews in this country, you need to insist on having a great coder do the interviewing. In 90% of the interviews I go on, I get evaluated by an HR type who could not write any program more significant than Hello World.

What's funny is that the Non programmer interviewers are starting to administer coding tests, and they don't know what a good response is! So here I am doing a coding tests on a white board, and and I'm being tested on delivering the optimized code on the spot, basically producing the best code. So now instead of birdseed knowledge tests, we are tested for creating an algorithm from memory on the spot, a memorization game. Like Jeopardy. That's not how the best coders code, we offload most things to google searches and general process of cutting code. They don't realize this because they evaluators can't write a program. They can only understand one specific algorithm and its implementation.

So the only way to get a good coder is to take your best coder, and then hand him a stack of resumes, and ask him which ones to bring in, and have him sit down with the recruits and have him give an up or down vote.

Using non coders to filter coder resumes? The time is better spent hiring a monkey to throw darts and hire the one with the most darts. I don't care how many books on coding interviews they read.

<comment><USER41> "That's not how the best coders code, we offload most things to google searches"

If that's really what you think, you may want to reconsider who the "we" you're talking about are.

<comment><USER42> I think it's fair to say that if you're stretching yourself, or working on challenging problems, a reasonable amount of time is spent researching. If you don't know how to do something, you research it. Whether you find it in a textbook or on Stack Overflow, it's essentially the same thing.

Unless you think "good" coders reinvent algorithms they don't know from first principles?

<comment><USER24> I'd wager there's a difference between what jemfinch is talking about and what you're talking about.

I used to unilaterally believe that coding exercises or algorithm quizzes on interviews were silly because if I had to solve some given problem I would just google it. And that's true, I would. However, as I've gotten a little more experienced I've realized that there is extreme value in expanding the domain of problems for which I don't need to google, because either A). I've happened to read about it on my own time or B). I've encountered a particular troublesome component before.

In other words, I think it is entirely reasonable for the hiring process to properly evaluate a programmer's toolset. Yes, I think researching via Google is or should be a piece of everyone's process, but it matters greatly what kind of things you have to Google.

<comment><USER43> Do programmers encounter all sorts of algorithms when engineering software? In my experience, the only things I really need to keep in mind what are the consequences of certain data structures and algorithm types rather than their specific implementation, because often the implementations are built-in to the language, but the choice of which implementation of data structure and algorithm to use are more important. I use sorting algorithms very frequently. Usually it is just a call like "list.sort()".

Yet in interviews, the questions I get asked are more like "Implement <My favourite sort> in 20 minutes, no googling.

I mean, really?

The other day I was in an interview where I had to implement a queue in 30 minutes. The unit tests were already written and the IDE was eclipse.

I wrote the "correct" implementation for the queue in about 10 minutes but there was a bug I couldn't find; I've never used eclipse before and took a lot of time figuring out everything. In the last minute I finally tracked down my bug. I forgot to increment a variable. I fixed it and all the tests as well as the performance test passed. I didn't get the job because I took too long. (It was a graduate position and the last time I used Java was 2 years ago)

I was distracted with all the buttons on eclipse... Otherwise I'd never have missed the variable increment! I swear. Anyway the point is, if a programmer is ever implementing their own simple Java queue in production software it is not a good sign anyway. Why are you testing for that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Alternate Title: I have no social skills but I know C++, GIVE ME YOUR MONEY.

too whiny for my taste.</comment>


Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage - <AUTHOR> http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_02_13_a_murray.html <comment><USER3> > An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty- > five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a > chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a > third of what he or she would cost on the street.

That assumes renters who don't try to destroy the place. However, some renters are considerably more destructive than others.

However, the big problem is that it assumes that homelessness is solely due to a lack of resources to obtain a home. If that were true, SF would have far fewer homeless and the shelters would be full.

Yet, many of SF's shelter beds are empty and folks who could be in the are on the street. Yes, they know about the beds - they prefer the street.

Are you really sure that they'd take an efficiency apartment? Are you sure that they wouldn't try to destroy it?

Someone pitching that as a solution should not only be aware of the possibilities but have reasons better than "an apartment is better than the street" because that's clearly not true for a large fraction of the relevant population.

<comment><USER4> Did you read the article in full? I know its a rude question to ask but it really seems like you didnt because youre falling prey to exactly the type of thinking it highlights as the problem. The solution doesnt "feel" right, and we humans are without peer in justifying our discomfort avoidance in cloaks of righteousness, truth, etc. That the correct solution just happens to coincide with the solution that avoids self-doubting discomfort is serendipity. Even this serendipity is so rarely noticed, let alone questioned, doesn't this seem odd?

Take for instance healthcare, its spiraling costs. A doctor ordering what some would call excessive tests for a patient is doing the right thing. It is better to be safe than sorry after all. The trial lawyers, insurance companies, government handouts and so on are the reason its skyrocketing.

What about the human fault of judging ones own immoral actions and impropriety on a relative scale of those around us? What about compounding that by generally giving everyone an "i am a good person" foundational belief. To examine it with no intention of challenging it will cause most people to feel a tangible unease because they're treading on some dangerous ground, a sense of fear that its best not to mess around in this place in case you break something accidentally. Each human with an intact "i am good" core applies goodness to all their actions by default, meaning if a person is not truly judging their motives or reasoning they are deemed to be "good" actions with pure motives because they are good and nothing specifically shows they're doing "bad" right that moment.

When the city with one of the fastest rising health costs in the US was examined it was found that the rising costs had a partner along for the trip, medical procedures and tests were rising as well. The doctors were doing nothing illegal, and obviously none of them thought they were doing anything wrong. So why the rise? It was just doctors increasingly exploring that grey area that doesn't challenge your central belief of your own goodness. Patient complains of headaches, and worries about something they read online about brain tumors, the doctor thinks its unlikely but its better safe than sorry, and imagine if he does have a brain tumor not only would i have missed it i might be sued too. Repeat this process over and over and goalposts move, more behavior is acceptable such as "ok so maybe she didnt need hip replacement surgery right now, but she definitely would have needed it soon, and im a far cry from Doctor EvilCompetitor, i cant believe he talked that poor shmuck into allowing brain surgery!".

Consider the complicated medical conditions that homeless contract on the streets with illness on top of illness requiring weeklong ICU visits, it becomes drastically reduced if a person is living in a home. A single avoided hospital visit of that kind alone can justify the free apartment for year or two or three.

Im trying to find that article again, will post link when i find it.

<comment><USER3> > Did you read the article in full?

My point is that the article doesn't contain all relevant data.

> A doctor ordering what some would call excessive tests for a patient is > doing the right thing.

May be doing the right thing. Some people think that my life is worth $X. Who's to say that they're correct?

> Consider the complicated medical conditions that homeless contract on the > streets with illness on top of illness requiring weeklong ICU visits, it > becomes drastically reduced if a person is living in a home.

Assumes behavior not in evidence. Homeless in SF have "not street" options that they refuse. What makes you think that they'll take different options AND that their risks will chance correspondingly.

I note that lots of folks with homes manage to get "street illnesses" so it's not true that homes solve disease. There's a decent correlation for current "homed" populations, but that doesn't tell us what would happen if we "homed" other populations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis."

This is exactly why programs like these won't take off. It's hard to present this kind of complex analysis of the behavior of a system to the tax payers for exactly this reason. The average person probably votes their conscience, not what makes the most sense from scientific studies, which are generally not widely published anyway. There's no simple moral argument to be made for giving homeless people free apartments that they don't deserve, and most voters won't think through a proof that has more than like two steps.

<comment><USER6> _Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis._

What a bizarre thing for Gladwell to write. He's inexplicably generalized from one particular power-law solution, giving free apartments to the chronically homeless, to state that all power-law solutions are politically unpalatable.

In the case of the tiny minority of excessively violent LAPD officers - <USER2> simple power-law solution would just be to assign them to useful administrative jobs. I can't really see how that particular power-law solution would aggravate the right or the left.

<comment><USER7> That solution would aggravate people who view the police as being part of their "tribe". Assigning some police officers to admin work lowers their status, and in effect the status of your entire tribe. This would aggravate authoritarians on both the right (e.g. Gonzales) and left (e.g. Biden).

This is also the objection to giving free stuff to the homeless - it elevates the status of another tribe (do-gooders/bleeding hearts, the people handing out the free stuff) at the expense of your tribe (hard working/god fearing).

You could almost certainly get conservatives behind such a plan and get liberals to oppose it, if you did it in a way that elevated the status of a right-leaning tribe (e.g., boot camp/military living for the homeless).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seattle actually put this into practice. The city funds and supports homeless housing for the most expensive homeless in the city. There is no requirement for sobriety. The project is called 1811 Eastlake (<http://www.google.com/search?q=1811+eastlake>) and it is not without controversy. Studies of the outcomes and cost analysis has been published in JAMA. Here is a summary: <http://www.desc.org/documents/DESC_1811_JAMA_info.pdf>.

My wife is an ER attending at Harborview, the hospital that sees most of these patients. Anecdotally, she has seen great outcomes out of the project, has toured it and is a big fan.

(Interestingly, Dr. Michael Copass, the patriarch of the Harborview ED and a pioneer in modern medical response calls these individuals "urban nomads")

</comment><comment><USER9> _"...It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it."_

Lots of good stuff in this article. I had a class on homelessness and an internship at a homeless shelter. A lot of what I have seen written about it is pretty stupid. But the ideas presented here have potential.

<comment><USER10> I remember a homeless called Lounis (after my studies, I joined Paris Firefighter Brigade), we collected him regularly because people would complain he was staying at their frontdoor. On our way to the hospital, he would sing with us in the truck, he would even do air guitar. The day some of my colleagues came back to the fire station after they collected his body on the street, we all felt like the police officers did for Murray.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The crux of the matter:

 _The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street._

I believe similar observations have been made in subsidizing the price of fruit and vegetables (or even bikes and gym memberships) vs the medical costs of bad diets and lack of exercise, too.

<comment><USER12> It's not as simple as just throwing money at the problem and managing things differently.

I've been homeless before and it's not pretty, a lot of the people who I met on the street during that time would not have been able to just take an apartment and that would be their problem solved.

They are on the street for a reason and if the reason was purely financial then perhaps the apartment would help, but a lot of the time the reasons can be associated to mental health, poverty, drugs, alcoholism... and giving someone an apartment in those cases is unlikely to add anything to the solution.

What those people need is real support and care. And an apartment will just isolate them and risks exacerbating the problems for them.

<comment><USER13> > What those people need is real support and care. And an apartment will just > isolate them and risks exacerbating the problems for them.

Not to say that I think that giving a homeless person a home will magically solve all his or her problems, but how does giving someone an apartment isolate him or her in a way that being on the street does not? (It's not a snide question; I've never been homeless, and maybe there's a stronger community than I see—but it seems unlikely that that community can provide the real mental and physical care that such an afflicted person would need, and that the people who _can_ provide it find it easier to ignore a dirty person on the street than their next-door neighbours.)

<comment><USER12> On the street you're likely to congregate at points where people offer some basic assistance or there is security. This means things like food wagons, shelters, drop-in health centres and places where other homeless hang-out and you can pass a little time.

In those places a lot of voluntary help is given, workers chat to you, sometimes you'll even be given some new clothes, but nearly always you get to interact with others.

I cannot emphasise how hard being homeless and without a network is. You have no-one to talk to ever except for these people who by necessity you come into contact to. I also cannot emphasise just what happens if you have too much time alone and yet live in fear, hunger and with some problem (mental health, an addiction, etc).

Some of the people I knew from the streets wouldn't have survived in a house. They needed their contact as much as they needed their next drink, it was all they had and the only thing that prevented them from losing themselves totally.

The isolation from giving them an apartment is that no-one will visit, and if they do then not enough.

And the problems they'll have are worse and will go to basics such as hygiene. On the streets they never had to clear litter, pick up dirty clothes, and clean their environment... they would just move on if it was bad enough. In a flat most of the people I knew I believe would've just rotted and allowed the space around them to become full of junk and to also rot.

They'd need to be taught how to care for themselves. How to cook safely. How to budget and make money stretch (there is little thought of the future on the street, you spend what you have pretty quick in case you lose it. You wouldn't think of bills and taxes).

And to learn those things you'd need them to have sound mental health, alertness, awareness of their surroundings. You'd need to help them to shake off their addictions, and to respect themselves. You'd likely have to counsell them and provide support for mental health problems.

And if you achieved all of that. Then they would be devastatingly lonely. They won't have what you take for granted, there are no friends for them to call upon, family to visit, money to go sit and bar and chat. They'd be alone and desperately wanting to rid themselves of that loneliness.

In all likelihood they'd go back to the streets where they have contact, interaction and community. Where they didn't have to put in all this effort to care for themselves when apparently that amounts to loneliness and isolation.

It takes far more than a roof to stop someone being homeless. Homelessness is a state that encapsulates far more problems than just the lack of a house. To solve it, you need to address all of those problems and not just the lack of a roof.

<comment><USER14> We need a word different than "homeless", really. You say: "Homelessness is a state that encapsulates far more problems than just the lack of a house." But the word itself dates from a time when many people truly were simply _homeless_ , and the concept itself of course predates English. Historically speaking (going back a ways, but covering a lot of centuries) one popular way to homelessness was simply to become a widow and lose your husband. (Which is why the Old Testament goes on at length about taking care of widows; it's not about having emotional compassion for one who lost their spouse, though that won't hurt, it's about supporting someone who now has no economic income.) Civilization has not always been as wealthy as it is now; someone says "homeless" and the very word itself invites them to think the old, simple case, not the modern complicated stuff you talk about.

Today we've pretty much solved the basic home problem in the civilized world. Perhaps not 100%, but nothing is ever solved 100%. What's left are the hard cases, which is what you are describing. Our cultural attitudes haven't updated for this fact, and so when people hear about the homelessness problem they naturally think the problem is simply... homelessness. Unfortunately it's a harder problem than that, and we make it even harder by misunderstanding it.

<comment><USER9> _We need a word different than "homeless", really._

 _Today we've pretty much solved the basic home problem in the civilized world._

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

Some data on American housing and such, that may not be 100% accurate but should paint a general picture:

Around 60 years ago, the average new home was about 1200 sq ft and housed a family of 5 (2 parents, 3 kids). Today, it is over 2000 sq ft and houses a family of 3 (2 parents, 1 kid). This difference and other factors has helped create a widening gap between the haves and have-nots: Those who can afford a new home live like kings. Those who can't may be perpetually one paycheck away from homelessness. Most of the financing instruments we have are aimed at single family suburban homes designed to meet the needs of a 1950's-style nuclear family. Meanwhile, our demographics have changed and very few people fit that bill. The housing industry has been terribly slow to adapt to the changing needs of our changing demographics.

Also, historically, it was more common to live with extended family. This was more manageable back when more than half the American population lived and worked on a farm. You could always put someone to work on the farm to help cover the cost of feeding and housing them. But a more city-centric lifestyle means that if you have no job, you typically aren't viewed as a contributing member of the household and it is much harder for people to extend generosity in that regard unless they are truly wealthy. We also had more SRO housing and boarding houses -- just the sort of supportive environment that the Murray's of the world seem to need. This was part and parcel of the culture and was not considered some kind of "special service" for problem individuals who couldn't adapt. It was also cheaper than a stand-alone apartment. Apartments designed for a nuclear family or houses designed for a nuclear family make up the majority of housing stock in the US and it is financially out of reach for many single individuals. College students often get multiple roommates to make it work but it really isn't designed to work for them. The Murray's of the world lack the ability to force the current housing situation to serve them adequately and mostly don't have other options which did exist not that many decades ago.

I have a lot more thoughts and information on the subject but I don't care to beat it to death. The current housing situation really is a factor in why homelessness has been on the rise in recent years. Yes, it is one of many. But I don't think it can be lightly dismissed.

<comment><USER14> When I say the literal homelessness problem is mostly solved, I don't mean that everybody gets what they want. I mean that anybody with the basic ability to work, who is not insane, who is not for some reason simply unable to function in what we are pleased to call civilization for whatever reason, is able in a first-world country to put a roof over their head, even if that means accepting charity, or government handouts, or taking a roommate or three, or quite possibly moving away from where you are to go somewhere else and do some combination of the above. The current economic issues do make that challenging at this exact instant but on the scale of time I'm considering it's still just a blip. And the trend line remains clear; for instance, I'm pretty much ready to call this a Depression, yet it is of a different character than the previous ones, no soup lines, and there are many and good reasons for that, mostly revolving around the generally higher level of wealth the whole society has, even if you _feel_ poor right now.

It is very tempting, whenever considering progress, to look ahead at how much work remains to be done, all the more tempting because it is a valid viewpoint, after all. But I think it is also helpful to honestly consider how far we have come, too, without constantly self-flagellating about the fact we haven't gotten to perfection yet. The problems you describe are not of the same order of magnitude of the problems that buro9 described.

<comment><USER9> _But I think it is also helpful to honestly consider how far we have come, too, without constantly self-flagellating about the fact we haven't gotten to perfection yet. The problems you describe are not of the same order of magnitude of the problems that buro9 described._

I had a class on homelessness and did volunteer work in a homeless shelter and I have lived with the kind of stubborn personal problems that typically lead to homelessness. I am well aware of the personal factors involved. I don't think it is self-flagellation to realistically assess the impact the current housing situation has on the availability of suitable, affordable housing and how that relates to increased homelessness in recent years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Delancey Street Foundation is an organization that has recuperated thousands of people who have hit rock bottom. And they do it without any government funding (they're self-supporting). One of the best examples of social entrepreneurship out there.

<http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/>

And if you're interested in the details of how the organization operates, I did some research and wrote about the organization on my blog:

[http://nathanmarz.com/blog/mimi-silbert-the-greatest- hacker-...](http://nathanmarz.com/blog/mimi-silbert-the-greatest-hacker-in- the-world.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> What I would ask about these "power law" situations: Do we have any idea what moves someone from bad cop to really bad cop or homeless to homeless-and- totally-down-and-out?

While only a small number reach the "really bad" level, it seems plausible that there's a larger population who could move into that level if the competition or bad examples or whatever other restraining factors were removed?

Sure, only a tiny minority is flagrantly offending at a given point but if one doesn't understand how this minority arises, one doesn't really understand the situation.

</comment><comment><USER17> I believe that homelessness is _cheaper_ to solve than to manage.

However, it may be _easier_ to manage (ignore) the problem than to solve.

<comment><USER18> Yep, that's generally how that kind of problem are solved..Close the eyes on it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article is a bit too well written, if theres such a thing. I got about halfway without pausing.</comment>


No-Name Companies Selling More Phones Than Samsung, LG, and Apple Combined - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-no-name-companies-selling-more-phones-than-samsung-lg-and-apple-combined/245232/

<comment><USER2> Spice and MicroMax are huge in India. The handsets are dirt cheap[1], support up to 3 SIMs in the same device, have battery lives measured in days, do nearly everything except browsing the web[2] and are incredibly rugged. The appeal is huge. And now both companies have their own Android offerings which, surprisingly, are not complete pieces of crap. I'm not a fan, but I see these companies being pretty huge in the future.

\---

[1] So cheap some people keep extra handsets at home. Some people will buy a handset on their way to the airport because they need a cheapo device for their trip.

[2] Most of them come with a Facebook app, a multi-protocol IM client, a YouTube app, an email app and a lightweight version of Opera that works fine for simple websites. All of them support J2ME apps, so you also get to use GMail, Google Maps, Twitter, etc. Some of them have this weird office suite that lets you read, but not edit, Microsoft Word documents. All this for $100 or less.

<comment><USER3> _> The handsets are dirt cheap[1], support up to 3 SIMs in the same device, (...)_

This is it, the killer feature: two or three SIM cards. Why don't mainstream vendors provide such phones, ever?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nokia does; e.g. [http://mobile.engadget.com/2011/05/25/nokias-promised- dual-s...](http://mobile.engadget.com/2011/05/25/nokias-promised-dual-sim- handsets-arrive-look-strangely-famili/)

It seems more popular in developing countries, where 1 physical phone may be shared by multiple users.

<comment><USER4> It's not about multiple users using the same device. It's about calling a contact with the card of her respective carrier in order to reduce the bill. Making a call inside the carrier's network is almost always free with the cheapest plans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Huawei has been building better and better phones lately. I could definitely see them becoming like HTC in the future (as in a popular brand with high quality products).

</comment><comment><USER6> Or expressed in other words - the mobile market is getting very commoditized in the lower parts of the market.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nigeria Gives Huawei a Place to Prove Itself

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190427900457652...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904279004576524742374778386.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> no-name = huawei

[http://www.huaweidevice.com/worldwide/productHomeAction.do?m...](http://www.huaweidevice.com/worldwide/productHomeAction.do?method=index&directoryId=5000)</comment>


The Case Of The Missing Burrito  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/12/the-case-of-the-missing-burrito/ <comment><USER2> Do people really want a separate app for each restaurant? How many applications do people want? Maybe the reason most restaurants don't have an iPhone app is they have a website where you can accomplish the same things.

<comment><USER3> Most people only order take-out from a few restaurants, so having a different app for each restaurant is not a major burden on the users (and far easier than getting any large collection of chains interested in doing some sort of meta-order app.) A web app will also have more difficulty in getting the users current location, information which this app can use to direct the order and user to the nearest restaurant location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, did the company really not think that far ahead?

How difficult is it, really, to set up a service that can be scaled these days?

This is a good reason to hire the best systems- and programming-level guys you can. They wouldn't have overbuilt the system, but they would have thought far enough ahead to: "What if we need to scale?"

</comment><comment><USER5> Who doesn't want a great big, GPS enabled, "FEED ME" button?</comment>


Penguin Classics and Others Work to Diversify Offerings from the Canon - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/books/diverse-canon-penguin-classics.html <comment><USER2> Oh, they just mean identity politics diversity. I was hoping they would diversify the range of topics past just literature, art, and philosophy. There are important books in the fields of math and science that have shaped society, but not included in the Western Canon. Euclid's Elements, On the Origin of Species, A Brief History of Time, etc.

<comment><USER3> If you who want copies of classics in "math and science" you should be looking for reprints by Dover Publications, rather than Penguin Classics.

<comment><USER2> Wow, that looks amazing! Thanks for the info.</comment></comment></comment>


Are Business Plans a Waste of Time? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703312504575141832683785168.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_smallbusiness

<comment><USER2> It's very hard to argue with this:

 _"Now I'm not suggesting that, just because your company needs a business plan, you necessarily need to hire a high-priced MBA or consultant to write it. What I am advising is that you take the time to map out your strategy in words and numbers so that you can figure out for yourself where you want your business to go and how you're going to get there. You'll be glad you did."_

<comment><USER3> If I'm going to sit down and spend a few hours writing a work of fiction, mine will have a dragon in it.

I can't even begin to describe how many things I "knew" were wrong, and moreover were so disastrously wrong that if I had been committed to them would probably have killed the business. In addition, the things that have really helped me out were not even on my radar screen when I started.

<comment><USER2> I don't think that writing a business plan implies being "committed" to it, or sacrificing agility, nor does it mean putting away the radar screen once the plan is written.

Eisenhower famously found that "that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." And for many people, the act of writing things down facilitates the process of analysis.

I think that history has shown that you, Patrick, have a perpetually up-to- date mental business plan available to you in a non-written form; unfortunately, not everybody is able to do the necessary calculations in RAM.

<comment><USER3> So in a business plan you might do something like, e.g., crunch some numbers to guess market size, right? Let's see what happened when I tried that, using the facts and model available to me in mid-2006:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/06/29/guestimating-market- size...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/06/29/guestimating-market-size/)

I analyzed, alright. The conclusion I came to -- total addressable market size of 1,500 -- is so ludicrously wrong that it embarrasses me. For added irony, note how I express skepticism that I would actually be able to sell _as many as_ 1,500 copies.

On the plus side that blog post probably took me twenty minutes to write and I never actually acted upon it. (By, for example, shelving the software as not being lucrative enough -- I mean, _I did the math_ , clearly it was doomed as a moneymaking proposition.) I don't think most business plans are that cheap and I don't think most folks promptly set fire to them after printing.

<comment><USER4> From this page - <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month> \- your total sales to date are around $76,700. At $30 a piece, that's ~2500 copies sold. That's not so bad I think, considering you arrived at your estimate of 1500 by pulling quite a few percentages "out of your hindquarters".

<comment><USER5> He came up with a _TAM_ of 1500, not a sales projection of 1500. Normal products capture small fractions of their total addressible market.

<comment><USER4> But if you know there are other products in your space, how can you ignore those numbers when you come up with a TAM? Surely, he didn't _invent_ bingo software?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Increasingly it seems that "entrepreneurship" is becoming synonymous with "internet software startup," which I find very troubling. It's critically important to recognize that web startups are in a unique position compared to almost every other type of business.

In a web startup it can often take roughly the same amount of time to make a first version of the product as it would to write a business plan. When time to make a product or a plan are equal, the relevant question becomes obvious: Will I learn more from making and testing V1 or from making a business plan? But there are very few other business categories where there is parity between the resources required to write the business plan and the resources required to create the product. For example, I work on electro-mechanical systems which often have multi-year development cycles. In our case the relative cost of a business plan is very low, even if we only gain 10-20% additional knowledge about the venture.

The value of a business plan is also likely to be tied to the volatility of the market that the business is entering. Web-based businesses are outliers in terms of market stability as well. Given how quickly the web is changing, a plan would likely contain outdated information before it was even completed. But if you're starting a restaurant the costs are much more stable and there's no reason you couldn't figure them out before spending any money.

</comment><comment><USER7> Business plans are only as much a waste of time as any other sort of plan is. Yes, things change; that doesn't mean you shouldn't think out your strategy. I think a more important thing to say would be that _inflexible business planning is a waste of time_. But that's not good link bait. In fact, it's so well known it's pretty much just a platitude. (Maybe I'm onto something here; reword platitudes into controversies and blog...)

</comment><comment><USER8> She says:

"Slick slide decks with little behind them rarely get funded."

Sequoia says:

"We like business plans that present a lot of information in as few words as possible. The following business plan format, within 15-20 slides, is all that's needed"

I'm sure it varies by industry, but I know more successful people who followed Sequoia's business plan strategy over hers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Business plan? Maybe a waste of time. Executive summary (i.e. ~5 page- equivalent of a business plan)? Well worth it. But the value is in writing it, not in having it. At the very least, write it and then throw it away so that you don't get tunnel vision. Definitely don't go trying to farm that part out.

I hear a lot of people say they don't have any sort of executive summary or formal plan, because they think it's a waste of time. That's a convenient excuse to build something without having to think it through. That's fine if you're just building it because you enjoy it, but don't try convincing me it's a serious business.

On the flip side, I've also seen plenty of "idea" people who have only a business plan and nothing more, and then they spend all of their time trying to find someone to build it for them. That's even worse, because at least the builders, though they may not have a viable business, have something of value to show for their work.

</comment><comment><USER10> Making a bunch of guess about market size and revenue in five years is pretty much a waste of time. That doesn't mean that you don't need to plan. You want to have everyone in agreement about a few key points:

What product are we making? Who is paying for it, and how? What is our marketing plan? What is our budget and what are our costs? How long is our runway? What is our attitude towards future acquisition and investment?

Writing these things down can be a worthwhile exercise. If nothing else, it will get the founders considering the issues.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have a business plan for my small services business. It was a bit of a twofer - I used it as a final project for my MBA as well.

I've never shown it to any investors, but the process of doing it was pretty invaluable. I learned so much more about my industry, the competitive landscape and gained a real appreciation for my costs and potential cash flows. I think there's a ton to be gained from the process of writing a plan (even a simple 10 page plan) almost moreso then the plan itself.

</comment><comment><USER12> Short answer: I don't think so.

Longer answer: Business plans are valuable instruments. Their size and their form can differ - it is a difference to launch a web service or a biotect company. The first you can start with little money and your personal time - little plan, maybe only a few ideas on a napkin. The latter needs tremendous amount of money, maybe billions - big plan, over 100 pages. IMO a business plan is a strategy instrument, that like any other strategy has to be adjusted the whole time. Maybe it is better to not write a business plan, but to develop a business plan - like you do with your software!

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes.

I wrote a biz plan and raised funding, then learned NOBODY read it. Focus on the demo and the slideshow, skip the biz plan.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes, If they being written by amateurs like coders or cooks and no if they being written by experienced and trained practitioner like an acting business executives. Coders should code, executives execute. =)

<comment><USER14> All the down-voters never have read a business plan written by coders. =)

<comment><USER15> Apparently the number of posters on this board who are both technically and managerially accomplished escapes you. People are not their labels, someone who codes is not necessarily a coder. Programming is a human activity, and most business people do things that look like programming even if it's only within the confines of their favorite spreadsheet environment.</comment></comment></comment>


AlphaBay, the Largest Online 'Dark Market,' Shut Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/alphabay-largest-online-dark-market-shut-down <comment><USER2> "'The so-called anonymity of the dark web is illusory,' said Acting Administrator Chuck Rosenberg of the DEA."

I wonder if this is true, or simply hyperbole. I'm extremely curios on the technical details of this bust.

Edit: It appears that some info can be found here [https://www.justice.gov/opa/press- release/file/982821/downlo...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/press- release/file/982821/download). Look at the section "Alexandre Cazes: Alphabay's Founder and Operator"

It looks like the founder was extremely careless. His personal hotmail email was included in the header of the welcome email and password reset emails to Alphabay users. He used the same username on Alphabay on at least one forum before creating Alphabay. This username was tied with his personal email and name.

<comment><USER3> He seemed to be pretty careless about flaunting his wealth. These forum postings are referenced in the forfeiture complaint (NSFW):

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-56038.html)

Interestingly, the forum owner posted last week claiming he had suddenly passed away:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-63799.html)

<comment><USER4> That first link paints a very unflattering image of Mr. Caze, and in his own words. I couldn't dream up a more perfect depiction of the despicable personalities at the core of cryptocurrency counter-culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This won't stop people who want drugs from buying them. What it'll do is prevent some people from buying them from reputable sellers with positive feedback. Now they might have to find some shady dealer who could be selling them rat poison.

<comment><USER6> Why is 'selling poison instead of drugs' even a logical scare-tactic? Wouldn't even the shadiest of dealers want to keep their customers/hosts/victims around to, you know, keep bleeding money?

<comment><USER7> And that's why nobody makes fakes or knock-offs, right? Because they'd lose their customer base once their customers purchase the product and find out it is not genuine.

They're are large profit margins to be made off of either cutting drugs (if you're nice, with something inert, if you're not, just with something cheap) or for things like LSD, selling research chemicals that are similar yet different and massively cheaper to manufacture/buy than the real thing.

<comment><USER6> You failed to connect the logic... selling a 'fake' or knock-off brand != selling poison. I wasn't secretly weighting the pros and cons of buying the no-name Tylenol last time I needed to cure a headache.

"Hmm, do I potentially poison myself for a savings of a couple of bucks? I might die... but it _is_ three bucks..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Condolences to any users/vendors who lost coin because of the takedown.

Anybody have info on how the admin was found? Was the method of DDoSing Tor nodes used to force traffic into honeypot'd Tor nodes?

<comment><USER9> Yeah man, those poor poor vendors who make money on addicted users...

<comment><USER10> The single most highly traded item in terms of volume on most of these markets is pot, then non-addictive (but still potentially dangerous) drugs like MDMA.

The number of hardcore opioid addicts that have a laptop, internet connection, knowledge of bitcoin, someone to convert cash into a bitcoin balance, a tor installation, a good address to pick up from and a willingness to wait a week to get their fix delivered is likely fairly small.

<comment><USER11> And those types of users are, from what i've witnessed typically still highly functional members of society (lawyers, tech entrepreneurs, etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They confiscated "millions of dollars" in cryptocurrencies. A similar darkweb site that just got taken down had 2 million euros in cryptocurrency confiscated.

The US federal (not state & local) government will spend over 27 Billion dollars in 2018 on the war on drugs. This site was around 11,739 times smaller than that annual budget. The global drug market was estimated at over 350 Billion in 2009, making the site approximately 152,173 times smaller than the global market.

<comment><USER13> replace one cartel with another

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't these people know that they will never kill this. Just like Napster's death, and oink, and what, and so on. Every time they shut one of these down the next one will be harder to shut down.

<comment><USER15> I mean, you say that, but after having oink go down on me, and more recently what, I've given up on pirating music, and I have to imagine others have done the same. You might be right about the next one being harder to shut down, maybe, but I would also expect the next one to be smaller because of the changing climate.

Edit: I mean, yeah, $10/mo for unlimited streaming was a factor. There are comparisons to the drug trade there, with regards to the number of legal sources increasing over time. My point stands.

<comment><USER16> The ability to stream nearly any music you want for $10/month through multiple services has probably done more for decreasing audio piracy than shutting down torrent sites.

<comment><USER17> This is exactly right, and the problem that our government just doesn't seem to 'get'.

If you want to stop people from doing something, you can't just take away their source, they will find another.. you have to give them a BETTER source.

With media, streaming services have done more to cut down in piracy than anything else.. it's convenient, so people will do it. If you're only paying a few dollars a month to save the frustration of finding movies/music, waiting to download, vs just clicking and having it right there. This is why things like Kodi were so popular, it's all about convenience.

Now drugs are not movies, but similar rules apply. Say one is addicted to heroin, and suddenly their source is taken away.. do you think they will just decide "Oh well, I am done with heroin now!", no, they will find another source. If you want to REALLY make a difference, give them a better/safer source, and help them. No one says "I want to be addicted to heroin", they have issues that cause them to be dependent on the drug (often pain). We DESPERATELY need to follow the lead of other countries and start providing drug havens for addicts. So many people die in this country ever year of opiate overdoses, with the solution right in front of our eyes (look at EU countries with drug clinics), but we refuse to do anything about it because our antiquated dinosaur politicians are afraid they will look like they support drug use; how they appear to the 1% is more important to them than saving tens of thousands of lives every year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Blockchain analysis investment perhaps delivering some ROI.

[http://www.sandia.gov/news/publications/labnews/articles/201...](http://www.sandia.gov/news/publications/labnews/articles/2016/19-08/bitcoin.html)

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xz35e/us-law- enf...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xz35e/us-law-enforcement- have-spent-hundreds-of-thousands-on-bitcoin-tracking-tools)

<comment><USER18> DN users should really start using Monero instead of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER10> 11,993 Monero were part of the seized assets.

<comment><USER19> = USD$480k according to [https://coinmarketcap.com/](https://coinmarketcap.com/) ... and about 1/30th of global Monero trading volume in the last 24 hours.

The source for assets seized is [https://www.justice.gov/opa/press- release/file/982821/downlo...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/press- release/file/982821/download) which also lists properties in various countries, vehicles, bank accounts, cryptocurrency accounts, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone else thing it's dodgy as hell that he offed himself in custody? Surely with all the assets he had, he'd have a pretty comfy lifestyle behind bars.

</comment><comment><USER21> Certainly a definitive source coming from the DoJ, but they were shut down several weeks ago, and the arrested founder apparently committed suicide 6 days ago.

<comment><USER22> This announcement is timed in conjunction with the shutdown of "Hansa Market", which has been operating as a honeypot. They shut down AlphaBay, then users and vendors migrated to Hansa, which was already honeypotted, allowing police to capture login credentials for migrating vendors.

<comment><USER23> Take-away: if you're doing something illicit you'd better reconsider being dumb about passwords. Or would just user names / IPs have done them in?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You have to think eventually the criminals will evolve proper OPSEC - there is simply too much money to be made. Also, you really should be living in a place with no extradition - Thai police picking you up is a bad place to be. Vietnam is close by and has no extradition - a much better choice for aspiring criminals.

<comment><USER25> Or it will evolve to being run by Russian mobsters or North Korea--folks that are much harder to stop than random 25-year old geeks from America and Canada.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, there might already be one or two of those in existence already. :\

At the end of the day, the "outlaw" nation states are the ones that are going to be operating these things and then use the money to fund their black budgets.

It doesn't matter if they can be identified as long as they can change the bitcoin to cash in an allied country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Any more info out there on the technical details of the bust?

<comment><USER28> [https://www.justice.gov/opa/press- release/file/982821/downlo...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/press- release/file/982821/download)

It is so sad.

Literally had a paypal with the same hotmail address he sent welcome emails with? WTF?

<comment><USER29> AB didn't send emails. At least not in the last 12 months.

<comment><USER30> It happened / was fixed 3 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Don't laugh, but what and how much is sold on darknet(s) ? weed ? cocaine ? weapons ? people ?

<comment><USER17> Mostly MDMA, LSD. To a lesser extent weed (harder to transport), coke, heroin, etc.

They do have actual bad things on these sites as well, such as the aforementioned weapons and people, but this is the subsection that we actually SHOULD be going after.

As far as how much; not much. As one other user had posted, one of these illicit markets represents approximately 1/150,000th of the world market. It is a non-issue that the government spends a lot of money on for the purpose of visibility and increased funding (Look at us! We busted the bad guys! We're doing good! Give us more money!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> ::phew:: world is a safer place now

/s

<comment><USER17> Yes no longer will we have to fear the hordes of hippies high on goopballs eating our babies and raping our pets!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Or, you know, just don't do illicit things.

<comment><USER13> sure, but what is actually wrong with drug use? _moral outrage?_ _the sign of a decaying society?_ _untold secondary consequences?_

the problem is, people use drugs a lot. the war on drugs hasn't changed that in the least. we may have social issues, but as a "relatively upstanding and taxpaying citizen" who also happens to enjoy certain drugs on occasion, i ask. how exactly is my drug use impairing my ability to function in society? i get up and write software all day, why do you care if i get high when i get home?

<comment><USER33> "sure, but what is actually wrong with drug use?"

I don't care; that's not what's being debated here. The fact of the matter is, it's illegal, and anyone who sets up a drug marketplace today knows that. They set it up with full knowledge that they are breaking the law. If they wish to campaign to have drug laws reworked, I'm all for that and wish them the best of luck. But they're not doing that; they're setting up a marketplace with the intentions of making lots of money. They're not fighting for freedom or anything like that; they're just trying to make a quick buck.

And please don't respond with any kind of false equivalence bs. Getting high is not any kind of civil rights struggle. It's nice, but that's it. It is absolutely nothing like civil rights struggles of the past, and comparing it to such events is an extreme disrespect to those struggles and those who went through them.

<comment><USER34> _Getting high is not any kind of civil rights struggle. It 's nice, but that's it._

I think this is a logical and well reasoned attitude if you are living in an ivory tower and have never been close to an addict. People mostly become addicts in response to something bad happening in their lives.

Punishing fellow human beings for an addiction is wrong. Addicts need treatment and support not punishment.

This may not be a civil rights issue, more common sense and basic decency.

<comment><USER35> >People mostly become addicts in response to something bad happening in their lives

This is absolutely untrue. It would seem that you are living in an ivory tower of your own. I won't recount anecdote, but take a look at this source[1].

1\. [http://theinfluence.org/do-we-overstate-the-role-trauma- play...](http://theinfluence.org/do-we-overstate-the-role-trauma-plays-in- addiction/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>