I had the same fear too growing up. I found peace with it and stopped thinking about for many years until now, when I realized that practically it wouldn't affect my waking life if it actually did happen, if I had no memory of it at all, so there would be no use worrying about it.
I appreciated the quote from your article that: "Based on information from insiders, Google’s coding competitions engaged more than 300,000 software engineers external to Google, annually. These coding competitions assisted in the hiring of thousands of software engineers each year, who were directly sourced from these events."
These views reflect that Google Code Jam was a very significant source for recruitment. In contrast, when I searched about whether Code Jam was a significant part of Google's recruitment strategy, one of the top results on Reddit on r/cscareerquestions really underplayed the recruitment part, by non-Google employees giving advice about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/p7ioku/w...
The r/cscareerquestions commenters there could still have a point that it was more direct to take other approaches to applying to the company instead of Code Jam, but the general dismissive attitude of the top-upvoted commenter (e.g.: "No benefits. If anything, might even be harder to get interviews cause the guys grinding for those contests don't have time to make a proper resume.") really overemphasized an opinion based on speculation, instead of taking a more balanced view that recognized that Google Code Jam was run with a large motivation to recruit developers.
There's a difference between "does Code Jam help attract quality candidates to Google" and "does participating in Code Jam help a candidate in getting a job at Google". Presumably, Google cares about the former, and participants care about the latter. Both statements can be true or false to various extents regardless of each other.
> In contrast, when I searched about whether Code Jam was a significant part of Google's recruitment strategy, one of the top results on Reddit on r/cscareerquestions really underplayed the recruitment part
Google has a very standardized recruitment procedure. Once you're in the pipeline, you're judged with the same standards as everybody else (algo interview, system design...). Whether you're a Code Jam champion or not. Where Code Jam could help is to get contacted by a recruiter, but a simple referral could be enough for that, so it's not that hard to enter their recruitment pipeline.
Also, Code Jam problems are much harder than what you'd get in a coding interview, so it's not the best use of your preparation time to land a job at Google. Leetcode problems are more similar to what they ask.
It's there to find the non-networked developer - the kid in their mom's basement who is not in Silicon Valley or possibly not even in the U.S. and doesn't know anyone who works at Google, but learned to program on their own. Ironically this is the sort of developer that HN says can't get FAANG jobs because they lack the credentials and connections.
> Ironically this is the sort of developer that HN says can't get FAANG jobs because they lack the credentials and connections.
That's correct. As the reddit post noted, there is no benefit to coming to Google's attention via Code Jam. They'll give you an interview that way, but they'll also give an interview to anyone else who wants one.
And the approach you take to Code Jam is actually harmful to your performance in Google's hiring interviews, to the degree that the recruiter who contacts you based on your Code Jam record gives you a specific warning that Code Jam people tend to have a common set of problems (in terms of how their interviews are rated) and you shouldn't treat the interview as being similar to participating in Code Jam.
They don't give interviews to just anyone who applies. IIRC the first time I joined (2009, interviewed in late 2008) the stat was that ~2.3 million people had applied to Google, ~1000 had been hired that year, and your odds of getting in were like 2000:1. There were pretty well-known tricks for getting past the initial resume screen, like getting a referral, having an Ivy League degree, having a hot tech company on your resume, or coming through a recruiting avenue (eg. GSoC or TopCoder) that Google sponsored.
Maybe the interview:applicant ratio is better now that there's ~100K engineers rather than ~8K engineers, but a quick back of the envelope calculation indicates it's still likely not everyone that applies. On my team last year (before the hiring freeze) maybe ~20% of engineers do interviews regularly (a bit better than it was in ~2010), and we'd usually limit it to 1/week. That's ~20K interviewers * 50 interviews = 1M interviews/year, which is definitely better odds than in 2008, but still nowhere near enough to interview everyone who applies even if the number of applicants hasn't grown at all since 2008.
The restaurant could lose out on sales from customers who are dissatisfied with a lack of a physical menu, especially many older people who are not as comfortable using technology or don't even have a data plan.
The restaurant could also lose customers who are tourists, who don't necessarily have a data plan while traveling. While it's a bit more convenient for the restaurant, the convenience comes at the cost of the customer.
Also, the UX for many of the menus is often pretty bad (with diners often asking: "how do I place an order?" "did I place an order or not?" "how do I go back?").
> The problem is that time value is extremely relevant. If it takes 10-20 years for consequences to catch up, the person is likely to have already built up an unassailable lead that the consequence barely dents.
I largely agree with you: the big names attached to the resume, the pay, and the effort spent on interviewing skills likely offset the negatives of the reputation (though I also intuitively don't like it because the strategy is rather self-centred).
However, the consequence is rather significant if he has roots. It's harder to pack up and move if one has a romantic partner who is settled into a job at a particular place, and you could also possibly be leaving family and friends. Sometimes one has to move, but typically one has the option to come back, which wouldn't be practical for the person in question. It's still plausibly worth it for the person if he didn't have roots and collected a lot of compensation, but especially when one is older (the commenter mentioned 10 years of workin experience), moves can be tougher.
To add another piece of evidence, while previous poster noted that the initial response by police officers on January 6 seemed less violent than they could have been (though even then, one person was shot and killed), the US Department of Justice is continuing to publish press releases about charges of people involved in the January 6 Capitol attack (at https://www.justice.gov/news , with full records with dates at https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases). The charges for many of the people involved caught up eventually, though it took time.
Separately, to put a positive spin on this, it often takes time for positive habits to pay off. When picking up a positive habit (e.g. exercise and especially learning a new technical skill such as a language), oftentimes much of the reward doesn't come until far later. This is important to keep in mind, especially if one has self-doubts or even a lack of encouragement for trying to adopt a new positive habit in one's life.
To the contrary, I think paulcole made a great point. It doesn’t need to be weapons. A programmer who makes a social media feed more addictive isn’t necessarily moral. But a salesperson/marketer can promote something generally seen as good, or at least far more good than the example programmer.
Ad campaigns can remind people to vote, encourage people to quit smoking, or convince people to avoid drunken driving. A marketer is behind for the design and distribution of these public advocacy campaigns.
No it's not a great point. It's a point made to distract from the real issue. It's a debate tactic.
If you read the conversation carefully I'm trying to discuss the fundamental nature of the professions, not the specific products they are building or selling. That was something paulcole brought up.
The fundamental nature of sales and marketing is manipulating people for personal gain. You could be selling hugs or whatever warm and fuzzy product you can imagine, but at the end of the day the sales person's job is to be the best people manipulator they can be.
And I've seen it countless times through my career. I've met many sales people, I've sat in on sales calls, and I've heard them discussing their trade. It's honestly disgusting.
On the other hand, the fundamental nature of engineering is building things. It's bringing something new into the world. It couldn't be more different from sales and marketing.
It sounds like this is a difference in personal values. You can certainly assess the morality of one’s work based on its methods, but it’s also valid to assess the morality based on outcomes.
On outcomes: You framed building things and creating new things as inherently good, but entire fields of the philosophy of science question whether technological progress is inherently good. Is AI-generated art necessarily good if it causes artists to lose jobs? Are ad trackers necessarily good if it increases engagement at the loss of privacy? Are hackers/crackers seen as more noble than salespeople, as they create new exploits that make hospitals pay ransom, and expose people’s information? If a new chemical weapon or bioweapon is created, are its developers inherently noble for creating something new? Even Einstein expressed deep regret for his role in developing the atomic bomb (and Feynman went into a depression) after its usage.
On methods: most methods start as morally neutral. A person training to be a soldier may or may not end up doing immoral things, depending on what they do in their career. Research scientists may or may not do moral things (though nowadays most abide by research ethics, in the past and likely the present, many studies have caused far more suffering than their benefits). Lawyers can go on to defend fundamental rights, or end up filing frivolous lawsuits or chasing ambulances. Developers can create something genuinely useful, or cause people to lose jobs or get killed due to bugs.
To be charitable to your point: yes, I intuitively have a deep sense of respect for the discipline required to become a good software developer and create something new. But it’s completely separate from a moral respect and moral judgement: I have to know what that developer is actually creating, and how that will impact real people.
You can use the utilitarian argument to justify anything. According to your logic hugging people isn't good or bad because technically you can hug someone to death. Engineering is a form of human expression and human expression is generally good, even if it can be used for evil.
A sick society corrupts good things and incentivizes bad things. Yeah sure, a sales person can sell hugs and use their money to donate to charity but that doesn't change the fact that their job exists because our society creates perverse incentives and I definitely judge people who are naturally drawn to these positions.
Most people would be happy if sales people were no longer needed in society. They are a necessary evil.
I think the soldier comparison is interesting. At least with soldiers there is plausible deniability because being a soldier doesn't automatically mean murder. It's not like soldiers have a daily murder quota. However, the same isn't true for sales. Sales people have sales quotas. Their entire job is shoving products down peoples throats.
They are also the reason why you have a job. Without sales you have nothing. Without marketing you don't know what to build. Building stuff that no one wants is useless.
I sometimes wonder about whether personalised teaching as a young student is overall good or bad, for students who then move on to a university with very large, impersonal classes (e.g. with more than 1000 students per class).
On the one hand, I think students in small classes can really become more confident and enthusiastic about learning in the long-term. But on the other, a shift to larger classes can be alienating (e.g. feedback from educators is less frequent). This could be mitigated by going to office hours, but there are plenty of minority experiences that stick where teaching assistants and professors are unwelcoming. The change could be less of a shock for students who went to large high schools, as they're more used to large classes.
Perhaps students who have the chance to grow up with individualized learning can opt for universities that have smaller classes, though it's not always possible when large public universities can often be much more affordable. I wonder if there is a way to prepare students from smaller schools with personalized education to do well at much larger educational institutions.
The graduates from my kids’s school which does a lot of personalized stuff, do disproportionately well at high school (not sure about college as there’s less data there). I think some of it is inculcating a sense of joy about learning so that even when there are obstacles (like institutional schooling), the kids will be motivated to learn anyway. (I’ve seen the Premack principle at work with my son where reading went from something that would be rewarded to something that served as a reward.)
I think it is also a greater level of self-confidence and trust through knowing what they are all about (and hence enjoy what they learn more).
So many kids (myself included) hit university not knowing what they should be doing (or what they've been learning actually requires at the 'next leve') because you're guided to broad and narrow learning curriculum and not following their specific interests intensely.
We see the chaotic, political, competitive and ranked corporate world as 'normal' instead of a terrible, poorly organised and dysfunctional system. It's not 'the real world,' it's a bubble that reinforces itself because we train kids to fit into it throughout their education.
I needed tutors for my college Computer Science and Math classes because the classroom setting wasn't enough for me. Add then add in study groups. I needed all of it, from big class to individual.
I heard that if you studied math with applications to computer science, you can find great opportunities with technology too (if not moving to the US for places like Google, there are quantum computing startups like Xanadu in Canada, along with other technology startups in Canada’s big cities too).
In addition, outside of the RCMP, various ministries of the Canadian government could need the skillset too (Statistics Canada being the one that first comes to mind, though any teams that do economic analyses could benefit from someone with the background).
I completely agree, but I think most people who arrive at this perspective only reach this view after spending time in industry or adjacent to people working there.
A lot of the focus on tenure track jobs comes from professors and academics who dedicate their life almost solely in academic environments (so in their view, it’s a rather unhealthy attitude of academic tenure or bust). I’m not sure how feasible this is, but perhaps a work-study private sector summer internship could be an encouraged part of certain PhD, to widen perspectives and help both students and professors better understand the possibilities out there, which someone can be motivated to strive for, rather than settle for.
Absolutely. There have always been domains where industry roles have been just as sought after as academic ones - think Computer Science broadly, and all the opportunities one has with a PhD there. Other domains have been slow to catch on to this, but it seems like there has been an inflection point over the past 10 years where we're just so grossly overproducing PhDs in so many domains relative to academic jobs that there is mounting pressure on degree programs to revamp their training/prep for "alternative" career paths.
Myself and colleagues are definitely trying to encourage our alma mater to have more support for externships other opportunities in industry. I think things will continue to change - for the better, for early career scientists - over the next 5-10 years. If only because there is a workforce crisis in my field where skills like AI and software engineering are in extremely high demand, but even 3-4 years ago we actively discouraged PhD students from pursuing this type of work!
In my time as a PhD student (granted still there currently just at the finishing things up stage) I was actually part of founding an organization for students to basically do this. We invited speakers from different fields and had them talk about "alternative" career paths considering the current system basically assumes you want to become a professor. We also included a workshop every year where we would build in career skills and have professionals come and speak. You learn very quickly that there is an incredible range of activities one can do with a PhD.
