over the years I have seen a good 30% refuse to do it
I'll do reasonable take homes, but I'll often pass on interactive coding sessions. I don't like coding in a browser, and I use my dev tools as a major crutch.
"Why did you store that value as a string instead of a long?"
"Because it's a string from standard in and I have no idea what bullshit inputs there will be so I can check it before casting it."
"But the user story said it will be a number."
Well if I had more than 15 minutes maybe I would have been able to gain confidence in the input. Something like that comes from many years of experience getting burned yet it's considered a negative mark. Some of these places are actually selecting for recklessness.
A take home that can be done in an hour or two is fine in my book. It’s problematic when they assume way too much background on the part of the interviewer. I had a take home from a small local embedded devices company want me to write a 2D DCT algorithm from first principles in C (absolutely no use of external libraries or code copied or based on any existing code) and I noped out pretty quickly. Unless it’s something I’ve done before, doing it honestly without consulting any existing code would probably take me days.
It's crazy. I sometimes get the itch to learn a new language like Rust, but I haven't even come close to reaching the bottom of all the languages I already know. They are inventing new things faster than anyone can acquire them.
To add it's not just languages. I was once assigned to teach Cognos a BI tool that's been around a while. I was given the instructor's manuals to go through. It was then I realised how incredible sophisticated the software was and I also realised most people didn't even use 50% of the software's capabilities. I have found the same with text editors and IDEs. You can use an editor for five years and still continue to discover new features.
I have been programming for over 30 years now, and one thing I consider myself an expert in is bash... hell: the (original) author of bash is someone I have known well and used to work for, and he considers me an expert in bash (which is probably another example of this in and of itself), and I once spent a couple months writing my own bash-compatible shell replacement for various reasons with him on the sidelines cheering me on.
Well: I have recently been teaching programming to a 10-year old kid, and this morning he told me about the syntax {X..Y}, which expands to the range of characters between X and Y. I have likely typed {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9} a thousand times and now I know you can write {0..9}. I was floored and have it on my todo list tomorrow to see if that is a new feature or if I simply somehow missed it in the man page--which I thought I had carefully read multiple times and which I additionally have skimmed many times--consistently for decades :(.
I'm working with a junior dev now and the phrase that I keep repeating is "slow the fuck down". He's completely frantic with the copy and paste. I'm watch him google something, click the first link, paste the code into his project, and when it doesn't work he's on to the next link, paste, repeat. He doesn't even back out the changes he made the first time that didn't work.
I spent hours fixing his code and hand it back to him and it's broken again in a week.
I had to wash my hands of it. The only advice he's getting out of me now is to follow a single tutorial all the way through until he gets that one tutorial working and then compare the tutorial to his code. I'll answer specific questions, but I'm not going to try to mentor him until he's ready to receive the wisdom.
This seems to be what modern software development has degenerated into. In the future, it'll be monkeys playing roulette with Github copilot until something compiles/executes.
No, it's not. They're just inexperienced and it will stop/become more thoughtful as they're gaining experience and learn how the pieces actually fit together.
The reality is that half of the tutorials and answers you can find won't work. Either because they're doing something entirely different or because they're for a tool/framework that's deprecated the functionality.
A beginner won't be able to tell this simply because none of the pieces are known to them.
When a person with more experience finds these tutorials they'll likely know within seconds if a given answer or tutorial is even remotely applicabe, which enables them to be much more thoughtful about what to do.
You'll potentially waste weeks on trivial tasks if you're hellbent on actually fully understanding something right at the start, and if the beginner does this the more experienced ppl will complain how inapt they're.
Honestly, you both just sound like toxic people in that regard and should not be allowed to work with total beginners. Which is fine, but the issue really isn't with the pupil that's just clueless. They need somebody to give them a tutorial and guide which is applicable and they'll learn how that piece works, now keep repeating that until they've got a basic understanding of the system and only then can they work on their own
That sucks. I wish I could say I’ve never had one of these. And luckily I haven’t had one go as badly as yours. The main one I recall is when I had a good manager at the time, and he noticed the amount of time I was spending with the junior. So my manager took it over until they got to more meaty issues that required discussions with me.
In their natural form, you are correct. But if you cut down those trees and put them in Wood Vaults, specially engineered enclosures to ensure anaerobic environments, thus preventing wood decay -- then you would properly sequester the carbon. That is literally what happened in the carboniferous period that caused all the trees to turn into coal.
There is recent research on this that indicates we could achieve a 10 gigaton annual sequestration rate with only a 5% impact on the total terrestrial tree production and at a cost of $30/ton.[1]
"The quantity of this wood utilization can be controlled carefully to maintain a desired amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to keep the Earth’s climate from diving into the next ice age, acting as a climate thermostat."
Can AI improve on evolution? Tree DNA and cells must be super complicated, but they're evolved things so they must be inefficient. Can we figure out how to do the same things they do, just faster? Bamboo can grow inches per day, can we make a petri dish that grows centimeters per day of carbon capture?
I like the idea of using novel biological methods to capture carbon. Maybe we will end doing something like that, and I know you're just spitballing here, but the economics of scaling microbiology tools is very wasteful in terms of environment.
The inputs for petri plate growth have a demanding level of refinement. Pure sugar, yeast extracts, salts, gelling agent, all dissolved in D.I. H2O. Sterility requires autoclaves which are energetic monstrosities. Without these conditions the culture will become contaminated and overgrown with stuff you don't want.
Innovation could solves these problems, but it's going to be hard.
Those are not a viable solution as they don’t give politicians any power. Imagine what good it would bring to society if we were able to have a grow / harvest cycle that would give us an abundance of inexpensive lumber to build housing.
I agree. I just wish I could be around 50M years from now when the cockroach-descendent paleontologists marvel at the weird biped fossils and wonder if they could ever have been sophisticated enough to have had a civilisation.
We are not ruining the earth in any way. We are merely making it inhospitable to vertebrates and some other life forms.
Honestly I can't see how it will be. I think we will get incredible technologies that cut resource usage. But we have already done this several times now and every time we make something more efficient we just consume more. We have made car engines massively more efficient but the gains were entirely lost to bigger cars and driving longer distances.
There are billions of people living almost primitive lives just waiting to consume as much as we do driving everywhere and buying new iphones every year. We are about to make things cheaper and more efficient and give them access to this consumption.
Despite all of this advancement, resource usage and emissions has never once gone backwards or even slowed down its increase.
That will I think have some impact. But I feel like even the current population can not be sustained. Let alone when undeveloped countries become developed and start consuming more.
There is a bigger problem. Those who scrutinize climate change are punished by the society even though we need legit scientists and people that debunk overarching claims. You could accept CC arguments but still be a critic of some of the insane claims going on today.
It's like the early COVID days. Can't criticize. Can't speak against the mob. Can't do science without scrutiny.
> Climate catastrophy arguments needs more scrutiny.
Right, so your sources for this is a few Twitter posts. Let's take a look.
The first one is a supposed quote from Al Gore, but he never said that. Even if he did, Al Gore getting something wrong would hardly disprove anything about climate science.
> Those who scrutinize climate change are punished by the society
You're parroting untrue claims. How about some self-awareness?
I didn’t spend more time looking for more and I’m not interested in defending myself.
The main general point still stands. All I’m asking for is some scrutiny. By the time information reaches from scientists to reporters and policy makers, there is a lot of malaise and omission of inconvenient truths.
We need more checks and balances. Climate alarmicism is getting out of control. It's become a religion. Scientists that want to report inconvenient results are terrified.
> I didn’t spend more time looking for more and I’m not interested in defending myself.
You just want to throw out accusations without evidence and you're complaining about "climate alarmicism" not getting enough scrutiny?
> Scientists that want to report inconvenient results are terrified.
This is an oft-repeated claim by people engaged in climate denialism, but it's a lie. A conspiracy theory without evidence. Where are all these terrified scientists? Who has been sanctioned for presenting contrary views?
A friend of mine was a climate sceptic. He started a PhD looking at glaciers and ice cores. He was expecting to experience some friction pushing back against the climate orthodoxy, but after looking through the data he changed his mind. He realised our models of the climate were consistent with the evidence.
Consider: if your "terrified scientists" theory was incorrect, and actually scientists did believe that the standard models are correct, wouldn't that state of affairs look identical to what is actually occurring today?
I think CC movement is 70% legit and 30% bullshit. The public is mostly deluded on either side, those that support it and those who oppose it.
I am also not a climate skeptic. I just think that we need more scrutiny. The push back I get from people is insane like the strawman you've conjured up.
No, climate alarmism is not out of control. It is barely loud enough to hear. Did it even get mentioned at G7?
The inconvenient truth is that far too little is happening, and doing enough would be overwhelmingly cheaper. Quibbling has outsize impact interfering with action.
The big issue is that counter arguments to climate change typically tend to be used as a justification for inaction, as flawed as that reasoning is. We're already at well over three decades of climate inaction.
How do you innovate out of basic thermodynamics? We could stop emitting every single atom of CO2 right now and still suffer from some significant consequences. There is no solution that doesn't involve "wasting" energy (and since we live in a capitalist world, money) on capturing CO2
Bill Gates's books has a great account of what it will take to get us out of this mess - and I agree, it is a huge mess - and Carbon capture is likely to be a small part of the solution.
>Are you unaware that the Free Software Movement is a political movement first and foremost?
Bingo. It is a political movement. One rooted in idiotic ideologies that no thinking person takes seriously. Communism was defeated by taking the few valid points of Marx and addressing them. The 98% stupidity was easy to refute and discard when the 2% valid points were accepted and addressed.
Well... I think it also took a cold war between two economic systems, multiple hot wars in Asia, and the maturation of social democracy to do so but yeah your point stands.
>its possible to convince people of really anything with enough exposure
Not really. You can spend days, weeks, and months; millions of dollars; thousands of paid shill accounts; all geared towards selling a single lie. And that lie can be exposed to millions of people in 10 seconds for free. But only if there is free speech.
>Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene.
Who decides what's reasonable? Who decides what constitutes a "Nazi" or a "Pedophile"? If someone tries to suggest that convicting a 14 year old girl as a sex offender for having nude photos of herself on her phone is preposterous that person can be effectively silenced by labeling them as a pedophile.
"But that's ridiculous. Nobody would do that." -Somebody who has never been on the internet.
Every idiotic position you can think of exists on the internet, and can be amplified to make it seem like it's a more popular opinion than it really is.
The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.
> The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.
The assumption being that most readers are discerning. Kind of reminds of the adage about markets working based on rational actors. In both situations, reality would like a word.
No, there's no such assumption. In fact, by virtue of ignoring the main point of his, your post is an example "of the adage about markets working based on rational actors", which doesn't go well with reality.
And the point is: "Who decides what's reasonable?" You? Well, yeah, I hope you do for yourself. But I don't want you to dare to even try to decide that for me. Nothing personal, of course: there's no single person on the planet I would trust to do that for me.
In other words, it's not about assuming anything about the most readers (it is rather about NOT assuming anything about them). And, in fact, I don't even expect any good outcome "for the most of readers". I am pretty positive most people will find a way to fuck themselves no matter what you do. The only assertion here is that it will be worse for everyone if you TRY to do something about it. I mean, it should be pretty obvious thing to say, as much as people like to tell stories about "how terrible it was when Stalin was in charge" — it is best for everyone if there's no individual or group of people who can enforce their ideas of what is right on the others.
(BTW, I don't believe that this is really avoidable too. It happes one way or the other. The only thing that makes me say anything about this, is that this is just scary that half of the society today doesn't even understand that they SHOULD TRY to prevent anyone from being able to control what they say or think. They WANT to be controlled. They WANT to fuck themselves and everyone around them.)
Perhaps I wasn’t being clear. Following the principle that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, the thing about free speech and an undiscerning audience is that there are often consequences that cross that line even when the speech itself doesn’t. Anyway, I’m pretty confident that I’m not going to cut the Gordian knot here.
For myself I’m happy for you to have all the freedom of speech you like. What I’d like enshrined is the right to freedom from speech. In my country we are in the midst of an election campaign and it is impossible for me (both legally and technically) to stop political parties from spamming my phone. I would rather they didn’t spam my phone. I don’t have an opinion about your phone.
>Do not most free democratic countries practice 'secret ballot' voting specifically because not doing so caused all kinds of problems like voter intimidation?
Seems like you answered your own question right there. A faction inside the project want to intimidate and punish people who don't conform to group think and a larger faction wants to squash that possibility.
I'll do reasonable take homes, but I'll often pass on interactive coding sessions. I don't like coding in a browser, and I use my dev tools as a major crutch.
"Why did you store that value as a string instead of a long?"
"Because it's a string from standard in and I have no idea what bullshit inputs there will be so I can check it before casting it."
"But the user story said it will be a number."
Well if I had more than 15 minutes maybe I would have been able to gain confidence in the input. Something like that comes from many years of experience getting burned yet it's considered a negative mark. Some of these places are actually selecting for recklessness.