Woah, I just realized (because of this comment) that I've been grouping "technique" and "technology" as a single thing in my understanding and calling it "technology"/"tech".
For example, I would describe a method to do something in a video game as "tech" but in my mind I would expand it to "technology" if I thought about it. I didn't realize that the word "technique" would be a better fit in those contexts. Looking at Wikipedia [1], it looks like the words are pretty closely related so I haven't been using the word completely wrong.
Funnily enough, I had been doing the same thing and it hadn’t even occurred to me that my comment might cause confusion for people who aren’t familiar with speedrunning lol
If you run an interview process where candidates who take 6-8 hours and claim to have taken 4 hours score highest, those are the candidates you will hire.
All these objections rely on removing agency from the professionals applying for jobs. You look at the work sample. You use your professional judgement. You decide if it's reasonable to execute it to what you think a professional standard would be in the time allotted. You make a decision.
I think you're answering a different objection than they're making. Their concern is that people will choose to spend 8 hours on your 4 hour problem but then tell you they only spent 4. Then you'll think they're a leet hacker because their solution is so awesome and they did it so fast.
Again: I am responsive to the concern that hiring processes can demand too much of candidates, and particularly to the idea that work-sample challenges are unreasonably demanding compared to interviews. That's why hiring processes I've designed over the last 10 years have all been budgeted against the time typically allotted to an interview loop. And then, to people who say "the challenges take more time than the budget, so I'm forced to spend more time", I say "if you believe that to be the case, don't do the work sample challenge".
The rest of this I'm not interested in. For as long as we've been talking about hiring processes on HN, there have always been staunch defenders of interviews. Lots of people have spent time getting good at them, there are classes on it, there are books, there are drilling exercises. I don't anticipate talking those people out of their investment in interviewing.
> And then, to people who say "the challenges take more time than the budget, so I'm forced to spend more time"
People aren't saying that. They are saying that other candidates will put in more time. If I do a professional job in four hours, then an equally talented candidate who puts in eight hours will produce a much more polished effort, and they will get the job.
I guess the fix is to ask the candidate to pick a four hour window, and to ask them to complete the task in that time.
Again: the rubric is defined up front. You can actually lose points for doing too much.
I understand that some people are concerned that they're competing with candidates who will put in 12 hours to do what they should be doing in 4. But that's not their problem. Their problem as a professional is to evaluate whether they can do the challenge in 4 hours; that's the expectation the job is setting.
It is perfectly reasonable for someone to look at the hiring process we're running and say "no, this communicates to me that this job wouldn't be a good fit for me". That's a good outcome! Most jobs aren't a good fit for most people; that's the whole challenge of hiring.
Thanks for clearing that up. So if you employ someone who's actually really slow then I guess you just fire them?
I'm based in the UK, where firing people is harder, so this wouldn't fly. That said, I know interviews are basically useless so I would like something better.
This is capitalism working as intended. Only the best run airlines can survive, and investors are collectively subsidizing air travel for non-investors.
Nothing in the article (or in the real world) even remotely suggests that "the best" airlines survive. Simply, the airlines that survive are the ones that survive.
I think AST aware code reading is criminally underused by agents - you don't need a header file if you can see a listing of all the functions in a library.
Similarly, I don't read the whole file a function is in while editing it in an IDE, why should a coding agent get the whole file polluting its context by default?
I posted more or less the same thing in a comment over on lobste.rs[1] - being able to create your own bespoke software tools, without any developer experience is (mostly) a really cool thing.
This isn't someone being inspired to build something: It's the automated "drive-by" cloning and scammy, dubious nature of these clones that bothers me along with the copying of personas & identities to spam them across social media.
You also have the problem that if the both the ultimate answer to life the universe and everything, and the ultimate question to life the universe and everything, are know at the same time in the same universe. The universe is spontaneously replaced with a slightly more absurd universe to ensure that both the question and answer become meaningless.
To quote the message from the universes creators to its creation “We apologise for the inconvenience”. Does seem to sum up Douglas Adam’s views on absurdity of life.
This is interesting, but doesn't have to be correct.
If Blockbuster had kept pouring money into the new service, maybe it would have lost it all - I see no reason to think Blockbuster's movie rental franchise business would have 'transferrable skills' to allow it to succeed at streaming.
If it had been trying to pivot into a pizza delivery business (perhaps more transferable, in terms of locating franchises etc) would Icahn still have been 'killing' it?
My point is, maybe it was already dead and Icahn just prevented it from wasting a lot of money on the way down the drain.
If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'?
I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.
If markets were regulated to trade in coordinated 1s auctions, instead of nanosecond precision first-come-first-served matching of orders, markets would function just as well without needing a ton of what the HFT crowd does. It's a massive waste of brilliant minds.
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