Not quite sure why you're getting downvoted. Might be due to your friend's unsubstantiated claim tech workers (on average) are overpaid while underdelivering. However, the core observation is reasonable. Layoffs create desperation in the labor pool which is likely to drive median tech wages down. This benefits companies opex long-term as they restart the hiring cycle over the next couple quarters. Doubtful we're seeing market-wide collusion on these layoffs but it certainly creates an institutional hiring advantage.
> Might be due to your friend's unsubstantiated claim tech workers
In his defense, he does own a small tech startup ($1m/yr I think?) and that has like 10 employees (3-4 engineers), so he has his finger on the pulse (or at least he thinks he does) when it comes to tech hiring.
That's a big problem, right? You think his claims are unsubstantiated, he thinks he knows it all and he's seen it with his own eyes. Who is telling the truth?
I would say fad is probably a poor choice of words given the perspective "if one CEO thought it was appropriate (they let headcount + salaries creep up too high" and deemed it was in the realm of "action needed to correct", it probably wasn't baseless.
Have you taken a look at the year over year headcount growth of some of these companies? If anything, you could make the argument that 7% isn't enough :/
Agreed. You can also argue that inflated contract cost in a statement of work leads to artificial labor bloat on the project. This benefits the consulting firm while disadvantaging the client. The unnecessary labor can create collaboration friction and lead to technical decisions like adopting microservices despite not being necessary to fulfill the technical requirements of the project. This kind of complexity doesn't guarantee a higher quality product is delivered to the client. Instead, it's used to justify follow-on work, further extracting dollars from the client.
It's possible there's context we don't have that exponentially increases the complexity of their tech requirements and justifies the price here but I'm skeptical. Looks more like misaligned economic incentives commonly at play in engagements between consulting firms and the gov.
This is a misapplication of an ideological statement about abortion. Disregarding the guidance of health professionals such as wearing a mask and socially distancing means endangering other people's lives.
"Disregarding the guidance of health professionals such as wearing a mask and socially distancing means endangering other people's lives."
...which isn't different than any other year.
Every year, the flu kills tens of thousands (in the US -- higher worldwide). Disproportionately children.
Every year, driving kills hundreds of thousands, even when you exclude the effects of alcohol.
Every year, people have sex without condoms, and pass on harmful -- possibly fatal -- viruses.
Every year, millions of people die from communicable disease of every sort, ranging from pneumonia to HIV.
This is the first time in my life that we've tried to apply transitive risk logic to justify curtailing of individual freedoms. Masks are one thing, but telling people that they can't have family gatherings because it might hurt you?
This seems wrong to me. You can use this logic to justify literally any curtailment of personal freedom.
>This is the first time in my life that we've tried to apply transitive risk logic to justify curtailing of individual freedoms.
Seems wrong to me, too. There exists no society (that I'm aware of) where the decisions of an individual don't have second or third order effects on other members of the society. We manage and deal with this risk every day of our lives. Sometimes it flat out sucks. However, you can't control for it without raising a lot of very, very uncomfortable questions about what personal choices get to be made, by whom, and under which conditions.
This boils down to how you see the world, I guess. Much like any of the usual contentious political topics, both 'camps' view the other side as morally reprehensible.
I'm not "free" to ignore stop signs, stop lights, and speed limits. They impact my freedom to drive as I'd wish -- because otherwise I might hurt you.
I'm not "free" to start cooking commercially out of my home kitchen without inspections and licensing. This impacts my ability to earn an income -- because otherwise I might make you sick.
It's public health risk mitigation. We do it all the time.
"It's public health risk mitigation. We do it all the time."
Not responsive to the argument. You might hurt me in any other year, too. We don't tell people to avoid their families at thanksgiving, stop going into the office, etc. "all the time". It's unique. This year.
The flu is about as dangerous to me as SARS-CoV2, for example. How many years of your life, so far, have you avoided seeing your family at holidays in order to protect me?
Cars are also more dangerous to me than SARS-CoV2. How many years of your life have you avoided automobiles, because you might kill me in an accident?
The logic is the same. You may feel as though there is a justification for telling people not to see their families at Thanksgiving, but that's your opinion. Other people have different opinions, and they're equally valid.
It's the same argument, and shifting the objective to "healthcare resources" doesn't make it any more responsive than before.
I (like many people) am at ~zero risk of serious disease, so we're back to the same transitive logic: apparently my catching a virus is morally equivalent to overloading the healthcare system, because I might give it to someone who is at risk. Well, likewise: you risk putting someone else in the hospital by catching the flu. Has it stopped you from living before?
And of course, there is a matter of degree: getting a seasonal shot is one thing; demanding that people avoid seeing their families is entirely another.
Finally, consider that every young, healthy person who gets this virus is afterward immune, and contributes to overall population immunity. Therefore, getting the virus and recovering from it is a positive outcome for society. This is offset by some small risk of transmission, of course, but that's a manageable risk. After all, masks and social distancing work, right?
Of course it's allowed. But you should come armed with epidemiological data that contradicts the evidence and studies already out there. That's the language that epidemiologists speak. And extraordinary claims that contradict both the data and common sense require extraordinary evidence.
Merely questioning it without a plausible explanation that is consistent with the existing data is a distraction. Why should anyone listen to you if that's all you've got?
"Of course it's allowed. But you should come armed with epidemiological data that contradicts the evidence and studies already out there. That's the language that epidemiologists speak."
Interesting that you should say that. The Danish RCT for masks as PPE was just published this week, and showed no statistical effect of masks on protection against SARS-CoV2:
Despite this study being high quality, the only randomized controlled trial of masks and SARS-CoV2, and of pressing public interest, it was rejected by no fewer than three major scientific journals before publication. That's...unusual, to say the least:
As a scientist, it has been dismaying to me how willing the scientific community has been to engage in censorship of unpopular opinions in 2020. Even the highest quality evidence is being actively suppressed, if it doesn't fit the "consensus viewpoint".
"And extraordinary claims that contradict both the data and common sense require extraordinary evidence."
In the case of medical interventions, the historical convention is that you do nothing if you cannot prove effectiveness. Said differently: claiming that an intervention works is an extraordinary claim. Assuming that it does not work is, quite literally, the null hypothesis.
Individual action can lead to collective action in any community. The trick is to distribute the weight of the barbell across a group with shared goals. There's great power in this type of organizing. Movement is certainly possible.
Not OP but I've used Crystal in production at 3 companies: Qualtrics, InVision, and my own side-company (~40 employees) which I briefly mention in this podcast[0] from a few months ago.
We do, but only for a few smaller services. It's great, but most of the things we do aren't CPU bound, so we use Ruby. Personally, it's become my default for side projects.
Thanks for support! To your question: The core interview itself will remain consistent, but we do see opportunities around streamlining the match of the interviewer to the interview guest, scheduling, providing a rock solid remote recording set up for interviewers, and the edit.
A key difference overlooked in this perspective is that the professions you've listed don't actively probe about a candidates work outside of the hiring/talent discovery context. Their skill is judged by what they've produced that's directly relevant to the evaluation process. Comparing programmers to such a diverse array of disciplines requires a more detailed analysis.
A percentage of the software industry has a bias against programmers who don't code in their spare time because it's extremely difficult to evaluate technical talent. We lean on quality filters like number of hours spent on side projects that have sparse evidence to support their efficacy. While I'm skeptical that a general set of metrics exist we can use to perfectly evaluate technical skill across the industry, we can certainly do better.
Both of those have long professional mandatory training which does the evaluation once at the start of their careers, and then subsequent hiring is done on prestige rather than re-evaluation.
Same could've been with CS/Software Engineers, until someone decided that making a quick buck out of bootcamps is more important than profession's integrity.
The phenomenon long predates bootcamps. The microcomputer revolution unleashed a huge number of self-taught programmers on the world in the 80s. Most of the infrastructure was built by people who weren't ""qualified"" to do so; so why would they respect qualifications? Why would those who follow in the footsteps of Bill Gates (Harvard dropout) or John Carmack (UKansas dropout) choose not to dropout when they could build things instead?
It's harder to evaluate a new programmer's abilities because you (every hiring institution) have to do it yourself in a limited time.
An institution that's hiring fresh lawyers or fresh doctors can piggyback on the extensive, rigorous and difficult evaluation (which costs a lot of time and effort both for the candidate and the evaluator) during the bar qualification, medical licensing examination, etc. For example, if a potential doctor is a board certified proctologist(colorectal surgeon), then you can just assume that they will be able to do proctology to a high standard, you don't need to (and likely even can't) verify that aspect of the candidate. (Though employment of doctors itself is quite different from how hiring normal employees work, they're often more like independent contractors or running their own practices)
If an institution is hiring a fresh software developer, then a CS diploma does not even reliably guarantee that they know the basics of software engineering (e.g. see yesterday's discussion in HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24740765 ) - so you have to do all the evaluation yourself, and neither you nor the candidate would be willing to spend as much time and effort on that evaluation as a lawyer or doctor does, so it definitely is trickier to evaluate since you don't (can't) have enough information.
I also think it should not be. But so many times companies hiring brought it upon themselves by thinking too highly of their work. I have had first hand experience when just to develop or support some half-assed shitty webapp, hiring guy would talk of it as developing platform challenging Amazon in E-commerce.
In these scenarios they are going to get lot of candidates who will do far more fuzzing on their CVs
This is a serious question that I'd love to see a serious answer to. Because for the life of me, perhaps literally, I don't have a better heuristic for judging a doctor than gut feeling. Similarly, selecting the right lawyer could also be a literal life or death decision, albeit in a far more unlikely scenario, and I'm really not sure how to do any better than gut feeling there either.
So you find out you have a semi-treatable carcinoma, how do you pick the right doctor? AM radio ads? Billboards about proton therapy? Internet search? Hearsay? Whoever your insurance company picks?
At least I know how to evaluate a programmer for life and death work, like avionics. That's just verifiably coding to a specification. Challenging, but relatively easy compared to cancer.
Ironically, these professions weren't listed above. I doubt that many people expect lawyers or doctors to work for free in their spare time…
The professions that were mentioned in the grandparent were all things that can easily be tested in an testing process. I.e. _play_ the guitar. Cook a meal.
Testing a doctor or lawyer well in a limited time is difficult, just like a software engineer. The difference is that they aren't expected to do "side projects" to prove their worth.
> I doubt that many people expect lawyers or doctors to work for free in their spare time…
They don't, but not because they don't want to - it's because it's irresponsible for them to. The occupation of a lawyer or a doctor professes some privileges but also creates legal liabilities. As a lawyer or a doctor, you're not going to risk losing your license over an advice or procedure given to someone for free, on a hobby project.
(Also, the work of lawyers and doctors isn't creative in the sense software is, but it's primarily a people-oriented service. Which means you need other people to do your primary type of work for/on. The kind of work lawyers/doctors usually do after hours is called research, or just learning. Meanwhile, in software development, I can do the exact same type of work for myself that I do at my job, and end up with a digital product I can enjoy using.)
I think maybe it’s because lawyers and doctors take on cases/patients by themselves sometimes. If they win cases or help patients that speaks to their ability.
These days many software developers have never delivered software by themselves, so when they say they were “part of a team that developed X” we can’t know if they really did a significant part of X, or if they were just along for the ride.
I'd imagine just as many lawyers work as parts of larger legal times. And a doctor's performance is even more murky in many ways—did the patient get better because of the doctor, or because they were going to get better anyway? You can't just look at a doctor's record and determine their performance.
Justin Vernon from Bon Iver strikes me as another pick for the PG of the music industry. He's an unconventional thinker, a bit of an outsider, and well-connected in the industry. This includes close ties to Kanye. Supposedly he's a fantastic collaborator too. It'd be fascinating if they partnered up to create the YC for artists.
