Where's the fallacy? She's saying the only systems that are beautiful are the ones that haven't been forced by massive spontaneous adoption to scale faster than the developer(s) can come up with and implement a beautiful design to meet the new requirements.
Maybe you think if the original system were _really_ beautiful and of high quality, it would have scaled with the adoption on its own, with no need for ugly patches... but in that case the original system would have had the capacity to do a lot more than what was originally required. It would have been overengineered, in other words, and it would have been more beautiful if it had met its original requirements more cheaply.
The notion that a sudden change in requirements that must be dealt with quickly results in an uglier system seems fairly straightforward to me, and certainly not offensive.
Larkin is a poet who "comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable." I often return to his poem Aubade [0], in particular the idea that "death is no different whined at than withstood," and that in the meantime, "work has to be done." Chop wood, carry water.
I find these types of questions invaluable as an interviewer, at least for mid-level to senior roles. And you're right, I am looking for an actual story, not just the lessons learned.
The problem with just asking about lessons learned is that anyone can memorize and rattle off a set of best practices they found in a blog post somewhere. That doesn't tell me whether they have relevant experience or not. Asking to tell me about a time when X happened and how they dealt with it cuts right to the chase, and I'm afraid there's a big difference in a response that comes straight from memory and one that's fudged or invented. The initial story might be great, but most people visibly struggle to keep inventing answers to probing follow-up questions about what happened. ("Did you consider Y as a solution? Would it have worked in this case?")
I sympathize, though - it's not like our brains have all our work experience indexed and readily available. The interviewer's choice of X is crucial. If the prompt is too specific, most candidates genuinely won't have a good answer. Too general and it won't help select for this role in particular.
An incidental nice thing about this type of question for candidates is that it can give them a sense of what this role at this company is actually like without their having to ask. I often even phrase it as "One of the challenges we're facing as a team is X. Can you tell me about a time when you faced something similar?" The discussions that follow tend to tell me loud and clear whether the candidate is a fit for the role.
Now, although I'm claiming fake stories are easy to spot, I don't know what I don't know. It's possible someone has taken me for a ride and I ended up giving them the 'strong yes'. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If you're able to craft a sufficiently detailed fake story and talk about it off the cuff for a while in depth, then you probably have enough relevant experience anyway!
As an interviewer I also like that kind of question for warm-up - but I ask it with context. Usually I would get the candidate to go over his previous employers/experiences and when he mentions one I find interesting I take note. Later I will come back to that and ask for an interesting story at that place.
Doubles nicely as mini-vetting for his/her bio as well, if the position given was exaggerated the story will usually show it.
I can't say whether this would help GP, but as someone who also struggles with these questions the main thing I'd ask for from the interviewer is time to think. I may need to pause for a solid 60+ seconds to go through my memories, please don't take that the wrong way.
I agree 100%. Also write down your star answers before an interview. I had 3 pages (took ~12 hours) of STAR stories/answers before anyone asked me a question.
While it makes sense that the police would unionize for the same reason any other workers would, your second paragraph seems to contradict your first.
Your proposal to shift responsibility for "policing the police" up to elected officials means weakening police unions, does it not? Is there a political body out there that's even more fundamentally in support of police autonomy than police unions?
I don't see a conflict, unions would still be obligated to represent officers. It is just criminal behavior investigations would be shifted entirely to the DAs office (to prevent Joe from investigating his friend Bob).
Just to add some color to your comment as I think the idea that philosophy can be therapeutic is counterintuitive for a lot of people: consider the loneliness of depression, a big part of which (at least for me) is the seemingly insolvable problem of being trapped in my own head. "No one else could possibly understand how I feel" seems to be true not even just for me, but for the human condition. We're not mind-readers.
Nonsense, Wittgenstein seems to argue. If no one else could understand how you feel even in principle, then neither could you. If you can talk about it then people will understand, because we use the same words the same way. And when we don't, it's not because of some kind of epistemological solitary confinement - it's just a misunderstanding, and there are language games for resolving those too.
You don't have to read philosophy to know that "no one else could possibly understand how I feel" is actually a common sentiment, though. The truly therapeutic part for me was the idea that even though there may be problems that can't be solved, they can sometimes be dissolved. (i.e. seeing the problem statement itself as nonsense)
I wholeheartedly agree. Wittgenstein's arguments are rather uplifting in the sense that they make very clear the commonalities of being human, that, with all of the incredible variations of culture, you can take steps for "bridging the gap" so to speak, and often that just means communicating and interacting with other people, learning a form of life to learn what animates the people that live it.
The private language argument had a similar effect for me, but more-so in dissolving the insistence some people make over subjective vs. objective. Through the private language argument, you see that that opposition is really more about personal vs. public. Wittgenstein does not dissolve the personal; but the private language argument does dissolve the kind of fundamentally private subjectivity that people often reference or hold in that debate on subjective vs. objective.
It seems more likely to me that it's not a misspelling of "monjita" but rather just a naive application of the Spanish -ito/-ita diminutive suffix to "Mongo".
These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
While your guess about the thought processes of the originator may well be correct, it is still the case that the result, "Mongita", is ① unambiguously Spanish and ② unambiguously pronounced in Spanish as [monxita], which is a real Spanish word, the diminutive of the common word monja, meaning "nun". But [monxita] is spelled "monjita".
The result is that what may well have been an incorrect application of the diminutive suffix (the correct result would be "Monguito") produced a misspelling of "monjita". It's just as clearly misspelled Spanish as "Ke keres aser?" or "yerba maté", if not more so. So you can expect most Spanish speakers to read it as ridiculing the literacy of an unspecified person—more so if they also know English, given that "mongo" has been an English word used for ridiculing someone's intelligence for many generations.
The US will suffer if its international students can't get an education here without being told by the government to pack up and head for their favorite Caribbean island because we don't value their desire to contribute to our society.
Maybe you think if the original system were _really_ beautiful and of high quality, it would have scaled with the adoption on its own, with no need for ugly patches... but in that case the original system would have had the capacity to do a lot more than what was originally required. It would have been overengineered, in other words, and it would have been more beautiful if it had met its original requirements more cheaply.
The notion that a sudden change in requirements that must be dealt with quickly results in an uglier system seems fairly straightforward to me, and certainly not offensive.