No one should be defined by the worst thing they've ever done. If someone who made a terrible mistake and paid their debt to society is able to acquire the skills to get the job based on merit despite the circumstances, they probably have an incredible work ethic and a strong desire to continue growing.
When the system is a competition for even the most basic human needs people will judge and define others by anything that puts them a rung up on those others. People are very fast to put people into "deserve" and "doesn't deserve" piles here. I've met loads of lying, cheating, philandering, racist etc people who would "never" hire someone who had been in legal trouble despite their own poor, often technically criminal behaviors. It makes them feel "better than" and positions them for a better chance at a life in the pay to play society.
Murder is not a 'debt'. You can't just repay and i question the morality of economising murder. But hypothetically, you have taken someone's life and if I want to go into reasonably pricing that life, if there is a price it's equivalent to all the money his victim would have expected to have made in his life, ie we are talking millions. He did not repay millions. Even if he did, this debt is to the victim. Since the victim isn't around anymore, it can't be repaid. As for the rest, those are all assumptions. I don't think 'completed a coding course' gives anyone superior moral characteristics, let alone a murderer.
I don’t have sympathy for murderers. Plenty of other deserving people before we have to start caring about the plight of people willing to end someone else’s life. That’s one hell of a “mistake.” If you kill someone on purpose, I don’t give a flying —- about your “rehabilitation.” Murderers deserve a second chance when their victim gets one. (Note, I am not talking about manslaughter, negligence or any other situations where it might have been an actual mistake; if you intended to kill someone, you don’t deserve second chances.)
Unfortunately employment opportunity doesn't help in this case. They are already offered jobs/interns but cannot legally start working (anywhere) because they have to wait for the work permit (OPT) to be approved.
As others as alluded to, long term success requires more than deep technical excellence. Winter break could be a great time to learn about another field, get experience talking to others (volunteering maybe), broaden your horizon of thought with books you may not normally read, or, if your passion truly is technology, work on a higher risk project that will likely fail but you could learn a lot from.
Your view might be from spending lots of time on HN and around engineers? I spend time with both, and I can see issues on both sides.
From the business side, here are examples I've seen:
- Have to use this technology, everything else is old, anachronistic, and unperformant
- System has to be scaled this way from the start (in startups, often, no it doesn't)
- Tension in how you trade off new features with clean code (there's a balance, and each environment requires a diff tradeoff)
- Building feature a certain way because it's easier for them, while ignoring what's appropriate for the customer/user
- Unwillingness or inability to explain technical topics to non-technical audience
- Making decisions solely on technical appropriateness, rather than broader appropriateness for the company (say, availability of other engineers to work on it)
There's lots on the managerial and business side too, but I'll save that for another thread.
P.S. A favorite quote of mine from Chinua Achebe (old proverb): Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Any group we spend our time around will show itself in a good light. Even more so when we are a member of that group.
It can go both ways. I have seen bad management and I have seen bad engineers. "Bad" meaning hard to work with in this context. Usually the bad behavior I see from engineers is arguing pedantically every little point, not doing the paperwork, unilaterally deciding a feature should be implemented differently just because it is easier for them even though it hurts the product or business. Stuff like that.
With the ubiquity of smartphone keyboards (I'm guessing), I've noticed a major trend toward zero punctuation, especially commas. You have to learn to just add them yourself, kind of like how a Javascript interpreter automatically inserts semicolons for you.
I agree. I support the principle behind this legislation, but it seems to set a dangerous precedent for giving the state government the authority to mandate demographics.
Agreed. Allowing the governments to dictate the demographic makeup of private organizations is just asking for trouble. If we continue down this path I'm sure people will screw it up and use it for bad things (like universally bad, not just considered bad by the affected minority) within a generation or two.
(1) It's sexist in an attempt to solve sexism in the same way that affirmative action is racist in an attempt to solve racism. Sometimes, the ends justify the means. Unless you believe that only old white men are capable of being on the board you should ask yourself why only old white men are on the board. What is it about society, or the system, that has gotten us to where we are? What if we tried this and see what happens? If it doesn't work maybe let's roll it back? I do know for sure doing nothing won't change anything, at least based on the trendline.
It's really easy to sit there and say this law is sexist if you stand to benefit from the status quo. I'm not sure you do, I know nothing about you - this is an observation in general.
(2) We can have two problems. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve one. This is akin to the argument that California should be dealing with the homeless instead of banning straws. It should be, and is, doing both. We can have two problems. We can work on multiple problems simultaneously. And having two problems isn't a license to sit on your hands and do nothing until you have a way to solve both at the same time. Further, if this works remarkably well in some way maybe it'll be a good template for future change? Or a lesson as to why we shouldn't do it this way.
> Unless you believe that only old white men are capable of being on the board you should ask yourself why only old white men are on the board.
Have you asked that question and looked for a scientifically valid answer instead of jumping to bigotry?
There are many objective reasons for that, one being:
> Fewer women than men become executive managers. They earn less over their careers, hold more junior positions, and exit the occupation at a faster rate. We compiled a large panel data set on executives and formed a career hierarchy to analyze mobility and compensation rates. We found that, controlling for executive rank and background, women earn higher compensation than men, experience more income uncertainty, and are promoted more quickly. Amongst survivors, being female increases the chance of becoming CEO. Hence, the unconditional gender pay gap and job-rank differences are primarily attributable to female executives exiting at higher rates than men in an occupation where survival is rewarded with promotion and higher compensation.
> There is still a question of why women have a higher nonmarket outside option than men. One explanation is that women acquire more nonmarket human capital than men throughout their lives, and hence find retirement a relatively attractive option. Women in the top executive market are mostly beyond childbearing age, but there is evidence that such women are more likely to leave for personal and other household reasons than their male counterparts. For example, Sicherman (1996) finds that in a case study of a large insurance company, female executives were more likely than their male counterparts to exit the firm because of better working conditions elsewhere, to be near home, change of residence, household duties, personal health, illness in the family, and positions abolished. Most of those reasons, except position abolished, are voluntary departures related to home or family.
It's very common in suburban homes to have both an unused guest bedroom and an unused dining room solely for the two times a year the owner entertains. Since this wasn't really logical in the first place I doubt more short-term rentals would make much difference.
My parents have 3 spare rooms, because my siblings and I have moved out and they haven't downsized to a smaller house.
But I wouldn't expect a young family to have a spare room. When I was younger and we needed a spare room, I was always relegated to the couch to make room for guests.
I don't expect it's super common to have a dedicated guest bedroom in a house unless it's, as you say, a kid's room who has moved out. On the other hand, quite a few homeowners have a room they use as a part-time office, for hobbies, etc. that has a sofabed in it. That's more or less the case with me. I have a "spare" room that I use for various things but I can make up a bed if I have guests.
