skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked at IT department of Intel for 6 years.
Then for about a year as a DevOps.
Then for 3 years as JS developer at a startup.
Plus few open source contributions and side projects.
I wasn't strong in Java or other fundamental languages.
==
That is my skillset
I'm not saying it's bad design, I'm saying it doesn't go well with the goal and target, for example, products taking too much space for no reason, prices(the core) are not highlighted and written in the same size, color, and location as the description, an example product image with more compact text area would've made it even simpler and easier to use :)
Wow your comment really made me think. I too have been in the industry for over a decade.

Thinking back, I can not think of a single manager or lead that I wanted to be like, as well.

In fact, because of my last horrible manager, the worst I've ever had, I want to exit the industry all together.

I just want to go my own way and have my own small business.
You generally aren’t asked to implement a specific algorithm. You’re asked to solve a broad open ended question.

You get 45 minutes, sometimes more if the interviewers can see that you’re close.

These days Google offers the option of a chromebook instead of a whiteboard.
Just fixed the wording to match the actual NIST flowchart. Thanks.
Thanks everyone for the comments. I am going through each one and will reply. This means a lot.
This seems like non-news to me.

Really, what we are discussing here is lowering of inhibition. As we see equality better represented out there, women should feel less inhibited, in terms of role compliance to get opportunity, and with that, should be expressing themselves through work, as they would any other thing they are doing.
>Seems like you understanding of "doing job" is different. To make it clear - I used to be promoted by helping a business grow - complete activities on time on an excellent manner, optimize, reduce costs, propose new features / work on POC.

>Not by writing self-promotional documents.

>> Exceeding expectations for your current position is how you get promoted.

>Unfortunately, it is not by "exceeding", but documenting that you have exceeded, and knowing how to document it right, sometimes not really exceeding at all.

You're stating the problem to be documenting. Yes, Amazon, I, and many others think that having concrete examples and data outlined explicitly is a good way to make these important decisions. Otherwise you have nepotism and gut-feeling type promotions for employees. If you thought about this more, would you really want promotions handed out randomly? How else do you show you're "completing activities, optimize, reduce costs, work on POC". Do you want to leave this all up to one person, your manager? What if they have a slight against you? Do you want your manager to do the work of documenting your progression? You still run into the single point of failure problem, on top of your manager's workload increasing for each developer, on top of them usually being already busier. Amazon et. al. constantly seek data on doing these types of things better, but you haven't proposed much of an alternative.

(Disclaimer: Amazon employee, opinions are my own, not my employer's)
> I was frustrated by the expectation to focus on documenting to get a promotion. I don't think it is a good practice and was surprised to see that focusing on that process (promotion) is not a distraction from doing your job: it is doing your job!

Amazon is a giant machine with hundreds of thousands of employees. How many SDE 1s do they hire Evey year globally? Hundreds? More? How do you possibly treat them all fairly when no single person has met them all?

The result is that companies like that become heavily systematized. Even if your boss wanted to promote you, they would have to defend the promotion to their boss which requieres evidence. And that boss has to justify all their promotions to their director or VP by demonstrating how they are making an impact across multiple teams - thus more evidence.

All that takes documentation. There are just too many people involved for promotions to be based on personal relationships.

What if one boss is super promotion-happy and another never promotes? How do you fix it? Because this happens all the time. Thus you need documentation to justify why each person gets promoted so there's at least so level of fairness - even if that documentation is totally detached from how you feel you do on a day to day basis.

Yes, big tech companies are soulless machines and you are right to leave if you don't want to live that life. The only way to succeed there is to learn how to play the game to some extent. It is just how it is. No one else has found a less terrible system that seems to work much better when that many people are involved and are competing with each other for money and promotions.
Financial advisors, insurance agents, lawyers, and all sorts of white-collar professionals are expected to sell their firm’s services through their own networks. Of course, human salesmen are paid more for tact, class, and effectiveness that for raw impression count.
This sounds absolutely awful. Electron is much slower and running Excel queries in JavaScript sounds like a terrible experience.
Its definitely coming, and its strange that so many people dont see it.
> Microsoft do cool things like this ...

> So I go and check out a new Windows 10 laptop and the first thing I see, ..., is a bunch of adverts on the start menu and sigh.

Microsoft is not a single team. They have different products, different division owners, different managers, etc. At a company of this size you'll always find people making cool stuff and marketing trying to squeeze in as much content as possible. (and many other teams) This shouldn't be surprising that they coexist.

I'm not saying this is a good state and they do overall good work. Just that releasing procdump and embedding ads are two different worlds visible under one name outside.
Most companies don’t release outage postmortems for consumer-facing products.
Turkish Cargo Adds Ho Chi Minh to Its Freighter Network – Air Cargo
> Too much energy gets expended trying to convince/shame/punish the other side. None of it imho has produced outcomes or increased understanding.

I find a better fit to take the (somewhat cynical) approach that each side is trying to increase "vendor lock-in" for their own side. Media coverage of politics makes much more sense when I assume each side is only talking to people who already support them.
Maybe I did it wrong, but I intended to switch it off and I still get ads after updates on my gaming machine.
Elizabeth Goitein (Brennan Center for Justice):

> The whistleblower laws for intelligence community
members pretend that there’s no such thing as agency
level misconduct and we know that that’s not the case...
If what you’re talking about is official misconduct that
has been sanctioned by the agency, then obviously reporting that misconduct to that agency is not going to
help. So internal channels are useless
for things like torture, warrantless wiretapping, any of those major
systemic abuses, like the ones we saw after 9/11.

https://pen.org/sites/default/files/Secret%20Sources%20repor...
Indeed, I created my account when it was invite-based. That must be like more than ten years ago.

Thanks you for understanding.
Doing things simple and fast is not the Microsoft way. The goal is to abstract everything from the user to that they become helpless and dependent on bloated interfaces.
Having looked again at the specific CA law [1], you appear to be correct. CA is better than most states in this regard, but when there's overlap with the employer's business you're still screwed. I misremembered it as requiring the employee's specific role at the employer to overlap with the independent creation.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
> I also don't understand why the candidate with 10 years of industry experience decided to move forward with interviewing after being told it was for an SDE1 position.

| given the fact that I wasn’t too efficient with Java (it was not the primary tool in my past experience)

Maybe because his 10 years didn’t give him the relevant knowledge? Also, his attitudes sends a clear ”I’m a junior” message, so SDE1 might have been right call.
>Data records, once written, are never updated or deleted?

>Blockchains do not allow for modification of historical data. Consider a database.

If that was true it wouldn't even be possible to send any tokens. Log of all past actions can't be deleted or updated, which is a quite different thing.
In fact, because of my last horrible manager, the worst I've ever had, I want to exit the industry all together.

I consider myself lucky to never had a truly horrible manager.

I just want to go my own way and have my own small business.

If only it were so easy.
> They're making more and more money on things like Azure and Office365 etc, and none of that really depends on Windows.

I just did some googling, and it looks like Azure actually runs on Windows. It started out as a fork and then eventually merged back with server 2016.

The source for this is unfortunately a video, but here it is.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/videos/mark-russ...
Here’s the thing: patterns you will spot doing Leetcode problems are almost useless for anything else. The only purpose for working enough problems to see those patterns is to have more successful interviews.
Yeah, the only reason I can remember SIGKILL (9) is because of kill -9.
Same here. I would rather that the disproportionately rich pay for it, however.
I love the fact that when read aloud this writing is almost directly intelligible by modern speakers of arabic. There can't be many other languages of that period that you can do the same with.
I think we are on the same page, and I understand the reasons for having this process... and I don't like it. I am not convincing you to reconsider promotion process, neither propose a good solution.
You can say that I was stupid by expecting something else, and you'd be right :)
With the type of interview and questions at those places I would probably fail. I’ve read stuff on algorithms but I’ve never been in a job needing to use this stuff so if you asked me anything about them I wouldn’t have a clue. Yet it seems this sort of thing is a key requirement for interview process at these big companies.
Flickr: Let’s be candid
On my main PC, I need a huge pile of both general-purpose and specialized software, starting from something as ubiquitous as MS office, and down to a long tail of compilers, debuggers, SDKs, drivers for strange hardware I use, and many others. Last time I did clean reinstall of Win10, maybe a few years ago, it took me a couple days to set it up.

That’s why I don’t care about candy crush or twitter. As far as I remember it took me 10 minutes to remove them, and despite I always update my PC, they never came back.
Wow. I didn’t believe you. But you’re right, I just removed my music app. :o
> Complaining about promotions seems a bit unfair since he was only there for 5 months

He has a decade of industry experience, took a new-grad level because he figured he needed to get his foot in the door, and discovered that the promotions process doesn't take his prior experience into account; he might as well not have worked anywhere else at all.

The real issue he has with Amazon isn't that it's bureaucratic - that there's a form to fill out for promotion, or that a variety of senior people he needs approval from seem to be fuckwits. His issue is that he wasn't treated as a person. Meetings weren't about getting the benefit of his knowledge and experience, they were about getting people to figure out how to parrot the figures produced by internal monitoring and circumstances in ways which best fit the Amazon Leadership Principles. That ultimately makes people feel like robots, like cogs in the machine. It's deeply alienating and unsatisfying - nobody really wants to work in an environment like that.
Overengineered, hah. Most UX issues could be chalked up to it not doing enough!
Not enough people know about Everything. It's excellent, small, and faster than Windows search will ever be.
> I asked the interviewer at the end about what he liked about working at Google and all he had was that he liked the commuter allowance. Incredible.

the interviewer i had couldn't even manage to come up with anything he liked about google, when i asked. then he went on to complain about being forced to do interviews.
This toy is BS. Please include a justification for the decision. What do you think you are? The mysterious oracle telling earthly idiots what they need? How arrogant!
Thanks for your comment! And disclaimer. Probably that's the best process that the company at such scale could adopt, but please let me dislike it.

Probably it's better than other processes, but still, it has few problems, and I tried to point them out:
1. It doesn't solve "nepotism" problem - especially at the higher levels
2. It puts employee's focus on promotion and the document, but not the actual job
This. It's the first thing that came to mind when the redhat deal was announced. Oracle has Sun, IBM has RedHat, it would seem logical for MSFT
That's Win10. I suspect in that screenshot that the file is indeed too big for the filesystem. I don't know how that could be (the "no more free space" message is different.)
I’d vaguely heard of this before, a lot of friends and coworkers here in SF have said things like “you know that _____ just puts homeless on a one-way bus to San Francisco, that’s why it’s so bad here.” I thought it was an urban legend.

I was surprised and honestly amused to discover that this is real, but that it goes in the other direction, with SF bussing out ~10k homeless people in the last decade. Wow.
Don't take it too seriously. I was trying for a similar vibe to "howfuckedismydatabase.com".
Which big company starts with "N"? I can only think of Nintendo..
Because there are developers like him that were beating on the door to get in, the function of recruiters is a joke at widely known companies. The needed function would have been called secretarial work a few decades ago but grifters have flocked into most companies and built empires completely outside the line of business and common sense. He needed to talk to hiring managers and find a good team fit and be placed at a level that reflected his capabilities on that team. Only hiring managers can do that unless recruiters start putting in a decade of building software and managing development teams and somehow intimately know a manager's personality. A hiring manager might occasionally need a search firm to find people outside their own network, but that is a completely different function and the manager should start the interviewing after receiving lightly screened resumes. Bottom line if you want to be a leader you need to step up and do your job, and that means recruiting and building your team.
> Some people want a mass-publishing system for court documents, and maybe we should build such a thing.

If I understand you correctly there is such a thing. https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/ is a public archive populated by browser plugins by paid PACER users.
The non-technical recruiter needs these trivia questions because they need questions with single answers that allows them to separate people with no technical knowledge and people with technical knowledge. The easy way to get past this barrier is to get a referral, then you start at the technical interview.

When I was at Google, I worked in a tiny office, and I was friends with the recruiter who worked that office. A couple of times she asked me to vet the answers to the non-technical questions, because if the candidate went off-script in any way, she simply couldn't tell if it's a wrong answer or a more in-depth answer than the script anticipated. This wasn't part of my job, and if our office wasn't so tiny we wouldn't have had any contact, and she wouldn't have had any engineers to ask.
Off topic, but with smaller lithography, ANY subatomic particle of sufficient energy becomes a problem: https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/white_papers/wp...

I've spent months chasing random crashes on another vendor's device which turned out to be solder ball alpha emission issues.
> I have a friend who solved/memorized ~600 leetcode questions and got offers from Google, Facebook, etc.

Well then, to go through and solve 600 leetcode questions actually takes a lot of dedication and time investment, which alone to me shows that your friend has a lot going for him. TBH, as someone who has hired a lot of engineers, if I found someone who was well rehearsed, and it was clear this person understood a lot of the underlying concepts in a problem as I dug deeper, I'd be thrilled to hire that person!
I hope there is a lounge-core room featuring all the Richard Cheese covers.
That's exactly the kind of answer I was looking for! I'm surprised by how well your ideas align with mine.

I don't think I've seen anyone else talk about how the UI should use task management mechanics. I've been repeating for years that GTD is the future of UI.

I'm also a strong advocate of dumb peripherals. Input and output devices should not be processing devices. I also like the idea of things like external GPUs through Thunderbolt. Regarding connectedness, modules/devices shouldn't have to know that they're inside the computer, outside the computer, or even in a remote cloud-like location. Edge computing should be seamless and transparent.

It's very important that data be portable. I'm not sure privacy is as important as we think it is (we would gain a lot by letting the world know.more about ourselves), but the option should probably exist nonetheless. The big problem is to have my data duplicated and out of sync in a million different places. I'd rather update a single source of truth, than run around and try to update all different databases (e.g., if my address or phone number changes).

I'm mainly a UI/UX developer, and I was wondering if there would be a way to build and bring some of these improvements (especially the task management system workflow) to users, without building a custom OS. Perhaps as an app?

I'll now look at Microsoft Sets. Seems interesting.
< Also, his attitudes sends a clear ”I’m a junior” message, so SDE1 might have been right call.

Please explain. I don't mind to be called "junior" or whatever title you stick on me, but what is "junior attitude"?
The string problem where you burn it in creative ways in order to measure a certain amount of time?
Was recently looking for a reverse proxy for a project at work that utilizes multiple webpack repos that eventually gets built into one big webapp.

Without a proxy your forced to only work on one area of the app at once so hopefully something like this will let me run all webpack instances under the same endpoint during dev.
No worries about being taken seriously.
So what, we downvote people for volunteering contrary anecdotes now? Come on HN.
Getting the interviewee to a solution was not part of how I was trained to interview at Google.
All the people that I wanted to be like, growing up as a developer, were people who seemed more focused on their programming hobby than their programming job. Here is the take away that I noticed about those people and have attempted to apply to myself:

* Extremely focused on product quality and defensive code
* Maintenance focused more than feature focused
* Excellent with documentation
* Indirectly focused on self-promotion by writing good books or producing beneficial tools
* Never directly focused on self-promotion

It is so easy to get bogged down with bloated, dependency heavy, framework bullshit at work that product quality is distantly lost. When writing important software as a hobby you don't have to conform to a lowest common denominator for acceptance by new hires.
I like to give short term contracts to promising applicants. It filters both good and bad for different reasons but it works.
Windows is already case insensitive, no? Case insensitive but case preserving (a file named in ALL CAPS will remain ALL CAPS and can be accessed with lowercase letters as well.)
So taxpayers just keep paying for tickets until the person figures things out? If they know it’s a one way ticket and returning could result in an arrest for vagrancy, that seems to be a pretty strong incentive to stay away. The Key West man in the story admitted that he didn’t think they were serious. Well, they were.

I am not arguing other points of the story, only saying that as a taxpayer, unlimited free bus tickets to anywhere doesn’t sound like a fair deal for the people who pay taxes.

Homelessness is a tragedy for some and a lifestyle for others, that’s just a fact. Being homeless doesn’t somehow make you free of accountability for your actions: you sign an agreement, that should mean something.
Ahh the Loin...
I just interviewed for an embedded position a few weeks ago. Got a rejection - need to work on my coding and design skills apparently - so take this with a grain of salt.

I felt like there was tremendous variability in the interviewers. Some were disinterested, some were engaging. Some asked relevant questions, some clearly had no idea what my background was or what position I was interviewing for. Some asked canned questions and wanted canned responses. Some explored my experience and knowledge with open-ended questions.

It is my experience that interviewers from countries with rote-learning based educational systems ask canned questions and expect regurgitated answers. Interviewers from western educational systems performed more fluid interviews(where, incidentally, I excelled).

I do not believe Google's current interview process selects for the type of smart people they claim to want. Then again, they're now a big, not-so-benevolent corporation with lots of grunt work(i.e. maintenance, bug fixing) so maybe they just want effective robots?

I'm fully able to admit that I just wasn't smart enough for their organization. Then again, another leading tech company loved me and stuck me on their core design team. Based on my conversations with Google's engineers during the on-site, I did not feel like I was dealing with the best and brightest, whereas at my new company I felt awed by the depth, experience and accomplishments of the team.
Amazon busts everyone down at least one or two pegs in title. A friend with extensive agency experience joined their creative team and when I saw his title I was shocked but he explained that's what they do everyone. He say this leads to people frequently introducing themselves to others by saying "I used to be title X at company Y".

SE1 is ridiculous for someone with 10 years experience as either they deserve a much better title or they didn't learn enough in the last 10 years and you shouldn't hire them at all.
Binci – Containerize Your Development Workflow
Where have the promise of unlimited storage for free gone? I guess only Facebook offers you to store as many pictures as you will throw at it. But retrieval might not be easy.

Snark aside, I am not sure they can be blamed for trying to survive. After all those costs add up, and without a profitable ads business behind, it's unclear how Flickr could survive otherwise.

Are there any other popular businesses which currently offers a significant amount of media storage in a free account?
Because they want a DVCS that has less characters in its name, to save on typing? Mercurial [0] is a fairly popular choice these days, I believe, and uses 'hg' as its command line tool.

0. https://www.mercurial-scm.org/