It's a random process. I think the comments here are misleading.
FAANG and peers set the bar about 1-2 std. div. above their typical hire. The cost of a bad hire is much higher than the cost of a missed good hire. People run the gauntlet. You can do the stats, but it:
- Misses a majority of good hires
- Rejects a supermajority of bad hires
Unless you are 1-2 std. div. above a typical Googler, you should expect multiple interviews before you're hired. If you're qualified, and it's 1 std div, it takes about 3-4 tries. If it's 2 std. div, it takes 20(!) tries. If you're underqualified, that goes up very rapidly, and if you're overqualified, it goes down a bit.
Few people are overqualified on all axes (soft skills, coding, system design, etc.), so virtually everyone runs into rejections like this. The sooner you learn to deal with rejection, the better off you are.
It's one of those things, if you've ever managed a larger team, that's incredibly, incredibly obvious.
A single bad hire can suck up the vast majority of your management time, drain team morale, drain it further when you inevitably fire them, open you up to liability, and generally make your life miserable.
Bad hires do slip in, and each time they do, BOY does it suck.
You need a study for this just about as much as you need a study for "Don't touch the kitchen burner."
I think there is another angle of this that a "good hire" that is missed because of ridiculous interview practices could potentially be an exceptionally great hire over time. If anything, FAANG companies are probably an ideal environment for people to deepen skills.
I think, based on comments here and elsewhere, FAANG companies always have job postings up and are always interviewing simply to vacuum talent up from competition and to project the image of an ever expanding company that is hard to get into. I wouldn't like to be forced into interviewing candidates for essentially generic job postings where the majority of outcomes for candidates is negative. How depressing.
* Setting the bar at 2 std dev means you need to interview 20 candidates at your hiring cut-off to find one you believe is qualified. The other 19 qualified candidates get rejected by chance.
* Setting the bar at 1 std dev means you need to interview 3-4 candidates to find one who you believe is qualified. The other 2-3 are rejected by chance.
Of course, most candidates aren't right at cut-off, so it's not quite 1:20, but it is pretty random. A good model for hiring, from the candidate side, is that you interview. If you pass, you role a die, just like in an RPG.
Unless you're coming in through a side door or a backdoor, rejections are just part of life. People take it personally, and fault the interviewer for a bad process, but interviewing is fundamentally a very noise measurement. It's the only way we've found to get good employees at scale:
* You set an unreasonably high bar.
* You interview a lot of people.
* Occasionally, qualified candidates pass by chance, but the majority are rejected.
* If you set the bar high enough, unqualified candidates will rarely pass by chance, by virtue of how Gaussian curves look
Some measure of employee quality, as evidenced in the interview. To make this simple, let's take an exam instead of an interview:
* Let's say I was hiring someone to do calculus.
* I want applicants who typically score at least a 90% on a calculus AP. The exam has a std. dev. of 3 points.
* I get an applicant, and I give them an AP exam.
* They score a 91. What do I do?
That means they are 1/3 of a std. dev. above my cut-off. They might typically score 88 and got a little bit lucky, or even 85 and got very lucky. Or they might typically score a 94, and got unlucky.
If I hire that person, although they're probably qualified (assuming a uniform distribution of applicants), I'll get a lot of bad hires.
To avoid that, I set the cut-off at 93% or 96%. This means I intentionally reject most people who meet my cut-off. On the other hand, if I hire someone, I can be pretty confident they're qualified.
The cut-off needs to be high in part since the distribution of applicants isn't uniform. Most applicants are unqualified morons. Qualified people will apply to a few places, and are quickly hired. Unqualified people will apply over, and over, and over, everywhere they can.
>Unqualified people will apply
>over, and over, and over,
>everywhere they can
Given this is true, won’t it be the case that you’d hire more people who were unqualified but repeatedly got better at interviews as opposed to the qualified one(someone who always gets 91 or 92 in your example)
You’ll actually end up hiring folks who are not good at what they do but people who got better at interviews.
As a point of fact, that's kinda what happens at big firms. No one has yet figured out a better model. There isn't a magic oracle to point you to perfect employees.
That's not really how it happens, though. You get people who are really good at whiteboard coding and little invert-a-tree type exercises, with no other skills. Most don't do this through interviewing over and over, but by practicing online. You end up with big companies full of people with nothing better to do with their time.
A lot of the people who interview over and over really have no idea what they're doing wrong. Employers don't give feedback, aside from "Thank you. We'll let you know. [ghost]," or at best "Thank you. We filled the role." A half-dozen interviews helps, but from then, it's rapidly diminishing returns.
I like startups, where you can do all sorts of side and back hiring channels, but none of those scale above maybe 100 people, and usually not past a dozen.
Asthma attacks are not uncommon in response to dog dander. Those can be life-threatening, but can be managed with albuterol. 30 seconds with Google will turn up countless documented instances.
Anaphylaxis is a very rare response to animal dander, but there have been a few documented instances:
What's amazing is the number of dog owners who don't believe in dog allergies, or who believe their dogs are hypoallergenic due to fur/hair (dander is in the saliva).
> dogs are hypoallergenic due to fur/hair (dander is in the saliva)
I’ve read the same explanation for cats. But, I find it hard to believe. Pets are constantly licking their fur, and shedding said fur all over the place. It’s very clear to me that more fur = higher chances of allergic reactions.
1) That a lot of allergic reactions come from actually touching a dog or having the dog touch something; they don't need to leave fur behind for that to happen.
2) That licking hair/fur releases the same amount of dander, whether your shedding fur, hair, or neither. Matter is conserved.
Those are fair points, but I’m not convinced that fur doesn’t have an impact.
Anecdotally, I have a mild cat allergy and own a cat. Vacuuming our sofa regularly makes a huge difference, as it gets rid of the fur stuck to it. It goes from feeling scratchy to totally fine.
Maybe clumps of fur are common with super fluffy pets? Ours is a shorthair and shedding leaves single hairs lying around.
Matter is conserved, sure, but fur with dander stuck to it from saliva versus skin with saliva on it, surely makes a difference?
I'm less concerned about fur with dander stuck to it then simply furniture with dander stuck to it.
Three things to consider:
1) You can't see dander.
2) Vacuuming helps with pollens, and with dander from animals without fur too.
3) You have mild allergies. Others have stronger ones. I have no scientific basis for this, but I suspect sometimes, the immune system goes into maximum overdrive.
Countless documented instances of asthma induced by the dander of drug/bomb sniffing dogs or just dogs in general? I have asthma and have occasionally reacted to animal dander—but never in an airport or other location due to service animals.
I don't think there is a database of allergic reactions people have had. They just happen and people move on. If the question is narrow enough, e.g., "Has there ever been anaphylaxis in response to a dog named Woofers jumping on a 12-year-old girl in New York's Central Park?" the answer will be "No."
However, there have been plenty of instances of severe asthmatic reactions to dogs in situations in all relevant respects similar to drug/bomb-sniffing animals. And I've seen plenty of allergic reactions to service animals.
People react to different amounts of allergens. For some, it requires direct contact. For others, it's enough to be in vaguely the same room.
Service animals are tougher, since both sides have a disability and medical need. Police dogs should be easier, if not for police generally being power-hungry thugs.
I'm confused how you seem concerned about the embarrassment to the perpetrators of a fraud you have been victim of. The effect is inevitably damaging to consumer confidence in general by not identifying the criminal company and creating additional unfounded caution wherever else, so your protection is not a free gesture at all.
My perception is both the manufacturer and I were the victims of fraud, while Amazon was the enabler. Now, I wish the company didn't fulfill through Amazon, but that's not a crime or a fraud.
That's actually a brilliant arbitrage plan in the short term. If the trademark-infringing knockoffs on Amazon come from a country where the trademark cannot be enforced and the original manufacturer cannot compete, the original manufacturer could slow the collapse of their business by reselling knockoffs.
It's trying to build empathy for a viewpoint. Understanding and empathizing isn't the same as agreeing.
I've had 100% empathy for the opposite side of the political spectrum for a long time now. I talk to people there, and I try to understand their perspective. I also try to understand the Taliban's perspective, China's, and otherwise. I'm sometimes successful, and sometimes not, but I try.
The reason I am vaccinated is because I have a (modest) background in biology, and I understand the science personally. If I didn't, I might be skeptical too.
We need more articles like this one. You can't convince people without understanding them first, and really empathizing. To quote:
“Know yourself and know your enemy.
You will be safe in every battle.
You may know yourself but not know the enemy.
You will then lose one battle for every one you win.
You may not know yourself or the enemy.
You will then lose every battle.”
Art of War 3:6:1–6
I think there’s a line between empathizing and excusing, though. Understanding why someone feels a certain way doesn’t mean you have to give credit to those reasons, which the above article does.
I think that it’s difficult to consume articles like this, even if the goal is empathy. At best, this is one viewpoint among many, and at worst, it’s a borderline straw man hypothetical. Particularly with the assumptions the article makes (like when it asserts that the reader is white…)
There probably are people whose vaccine hesitancy follow the exact steps laid out in this article, but they are certainly not everyone. The first set of events which the author present as undermining mainstream authority are a lot newer than vaccine hesitancy writ large, which has been steadily increasing through various avenues on the social internet. I try my best to understand, because it’s been clear for a while that yelling doesn’t help, but I don’t think this article does a good job of fostering understanding, it seems more interested in yelling just in the other direction
I do give credit to those reasons. Those reasons are fine, logical, and rational. My experience is that they more-or-less correspond to why the people I know who don't take vaccines don't take then.
The existence of better reasons to be vaccinated doesn't negate those at all.
The central problem is that the establishment, at some point, began to lie more and more. We've entered a post-truth age. I'm part of the scientific establishment, and I see that a lot.
I personally have enough background in biology that I can evaluate the virtually non-existent risks of vaccines for myself, as well as the significant risks of COVID19. That's why I'm vaccinated.
If I didn't have that scientific background -- and most people don't -- I might be an anti-vaxxer for all the reasons listed in the article.
Until you can acknowledge that the concerns are valid and real, you're not getting anywhere. I convinced one person who was unvaccinated, for precisely those reasons but who trusted me, not by ridiculing their logic, but by explaining how, in this particular case, I'd walked through the evidence and they were safe. She trusts me, and she's now vaccinated.
On a more basic level, if both sides of the political spectrum stopped lying to "win," I don't think we'd have this problem.
idk if you even have to exercise a strong degree of empathy per say as opposed to simply engaging differences of culture and action with a degree of anthropological distance rather than allowing yourself to become personally invested in policy outcomes.
Unfortunately, all of academia is like this now. The most successful PIs are the best marketers of work produced by an army of grad students recruited for their cheap labor costs more than their future in the academic world.
This makes me think about who we revere as scientists and who we compare ourselves to.
A lot of success in life is out of our control. Conditions produce outliers, not diligence and hard work (Outlier X probably did work hard, but the conditions were so for their nervous system to act as such).
Besides this, the phenotype that academia reveres is a particular type of low-level bureaucrat that works by quantity, not quality.
For example, I'm in academia, but I prefer to solve interesting problems and create new things of high quality. I have never had to retract a paper, nor has anyone found a mistake in my work. I don't supervise more than one or two students at a time, because I want to be able to devote time to them. People like me languish and do not get promoted to tenure.
I have colleagues who pride themselves on how many e-mails they answer a day and recruit large labs of grad students who download neural net codes, tweak and publish. They talk of "least publishable units, or LPUs" and are always submitting and chairing ... submitting grants, submitting papers, chairing committees, etc. They get tenure very quickly and make a lot more money than I do. But they aren't scientists, they are bureaucrats who send emails. They decide what science is done, because they chair funding committees, so we get boring, incremental science that is stuck in local minima.
> This self-paced short course by Professor Haynes R. Miller, Ph.D. [ Biography ] focuses on the use of technology in mathematics education at the university level. The course begins with an introduction and then explores the MIT Mathlets collection by providing examples of Mathlet use in three different contexts.
The ½ comes from an integration. Whenever you see a square term in an equation, there's often a corresponding ½.
Yes, we could "simplify" equations by getting rid of the ½ and squashing it into the units, but at that point, all of the stuff makes less sense.
I do physics with kids, and often show area (usually of a triangle) as the distance traveled with constant acceleration, the energy of something, the accumulated debt or what-not. The source of the ½ is very obvious -- we're looking at a triangle and not a rectangle.
Increasingly nominally. Right now, the protection is about 50%. I expect it will continue to fall as the virus evolves.
50% is a lot from a public health perspective -- there's a huge difference in the exponent -- but not something you can rely on to keep yourself or your relatives safe.
So what you’re saying is: it reduces your risk of infection? :)
I agree that it’s waning, and likely boosters will help, but it is far better (and safer) than doing nothing; just doesn’t preclude the need to mask up around unvaxed folks, etc.
It doesn't preclude the need to mask up around vaxed folks either. Delta is spreading in part because vaxed folks stopped taking precautions, trusting in vaccines. That's not good for anyone. Vaxed folks won't get severe cases, but the jury is still out on long COVID. It also applies strong evolutionary pressure to vaccine-jumping mutations.
Note: Before anyone jumps on the above statement, I'm not trying to imply anything else. Vaxed folks who don't take reasonable additional precautions ARE a major source of spread COVID19. That's not meant as a comparative statement (unvaxed folks are ALSO a major source of spread).
For the most part, these types of researchers don't publish in venues their claimed beneficiaries can't read:
* It sets up horrible power dynamics in advocacy (parents with journal subscriptions can't advocate for their kids or engage in civic discourse)
* It prevents kids from less affluent populations from having even the possibility of engaging with real research
* It prevents a crucial check-and-balance of public review by the people written about.
There is a long British line of research ABOUT other cultures, without treating those cultures as partners or equals, and most education research follows these lines.
The author of this paper is white, has a Western last name, and studied in American schools. He writes a lot about minorities, but without them involved in the process. Education is a place where, objectively, representation is important.
I'm no more or less comfortable with authoritarian government than I am with an authoritarian market-based corporatocracy.
Odds are that you are under an NDA which limits your freedom of speech. Odds are that if you refused to sign one, you couldn't afford a mortgage in a place with a lot of tech. Odds are you will sign more NDAs so your kids can keep going to the same school. The freedom of no regulation is an illusion.
Companies will keep making what sells, even if it's bad for you. Without regulation, video games will become more and more addicting. Without regulation, companies will keep running advertising, even if ads harm culture and the overall economy.
To manage all of this, we need a better system. I, for one, am excited about countries trying something different. The CCP seems to be implementing a lot of measures which stand to increase overall quality-of-life, from limiting stress on kids, to workforce stress, to limiting unhealthy activities. I'd like to see how that plays out.
As a footnote, I'd even be excited about a fundamentalist Muslim government in Afghanistan, if it wasn't expansionary, and if people were free to emigrate if it was't working for them.
I'm not sure a country that commits cultural genocide and sent a million or more Muslim Uighurs into reeducation camps is where you should be looking for a "better system". Forced sterilization, forced labor...
Or a country that has no freedom of the press, savagely beats or murders political dissidents, will take away your job and livelihood if you dare question CCP orthodoxy...
The fact that you think is somehow morally equivalent to an NDA is just absolutely astonishing.
Well, the US did kinda oops away a million Muslims in response to 9/11, and over a half-million Americans in lack of response to COVID19. And we do have that whole gitmo thing. Plus, we had the whole slavery bit we keep forgetting about. I could list this stuff for a while, but that's besides the point.
It's not the current state that matters, but possible future outcome.
We're both hill-climbing trying to improve systems from an imperfect present. The US is higher up its hill than China right now, but it's not clear that China won't pass the US in a few decades. Or the US will race ahead. Or how other systems will fare.
It's also not clear how those will change as the world itself evolves.
I like having a diversity of political and economic systems, even is some are better than others. I also like a diversity of cultures, even if there are ones I strongly disagree with.
No, I'm not defending the CCP's actions, and my best argument for the CCP is that I'd like a diversity of economic, political, and cultural systems around the world. I don't like monocultures. They're brittle.
>Odds are that you are under an NDA which limits your freedom of speech.
These are mostly very specific, very limited and largely perfectly sensible. Yes some NDAs are onerous but they're quite rare. China has no concept of freedom of speech at all. It simply doesn't exist. I don't see how that's better.
>Companies will keep making what sells, even if it's bad for you.
We actually do have market regulation in the west, more in some countries than others, but it's a well established principle. You may disagree with the regulations we have, that's a matter of opinion, but we do have regulations on safety, quality, etc. If you want further regulations you are free to campaign for them, but the lack of any relations you might want is not a flaw in the system, it's just a consensus choice you disagree with.
>The CCP seems to be implementing a lot of measures which stand to increase overall quality-of-life...
All western states, even the US, have regulated labour markets including controls on working hours, minimum wages, mandatory breaks, etc. 996 is in practice illegal in almost every (possibly actually every) western country already. We are way, way ahead of China on this, so much so that you thinking China is breaking ground is frankly laughable.
Many countries already have guidelines in place on activities like video games. Public health systems recognise, provide advice and support, and even treatment for games addiction. The CCP is not breaking any novel ground on any of this. The fact is it has a woefully inadequate public health system and primitive social services that are so bad they have to resort to crude dictatorial mandates like this because it's all they have left. That is not a good thing.
There's a famous quote attributed to Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” The only way we'll find better ones is if we keep exploring.
It's not so much that I want more or fewer regulations, as I want to explore systems other than market-based incentives. I'm not sure that regulations + free markets will get us to a place where people aren't addicted to video games, eat healthy, exercise, have quality education, and generally lead the good life. In 1930, there were a lot of ideas for how to get there, and a lot of those seem plausible. I'd like to see how some of those play out in practice.
I'll mention that I'm aware of where China is with regards to labor practices, freedom-of-speech, and so on, but with regards to public health systems, China is way ahead of the US. Everyone has access to decent, affordable healthcare. It's not at the same level as $50,000 procedures in the US, but it's good enough, and everyone has it.
It's also not really fair to compare countries with $64k per-capita GDP to ones with $10k per-capita GDP. It's even more unfair if one considers where the per-capita GDP was a decade or two ago. 25 years ago, China had a per-capita GDP of under $1000 -- that's less than Nigeria today. I think that's a more fair comparison between systems of government. Would you rather live in Nigerian democracy or Chinese CCP? That's not a loaded question -- they're quite different.
> Oh good grief.
Islam has a lot of good ideas too. For example, it has a wealth tax, and it discourages debt-based economies. You don't need to swallow political and economic systems wholesale.
>I'll mention that I'm aware of where China is with regards to labor practices, freedom-of-speech, and so on, but with regards to public health systems, China is way ahead of the US.
This is not true at all, I know because my wife is Chinese. Almost everyone is covered by health insurance in theory, but in practice this has limited use by most people because it only covers 50% of costs, and less than that for serious illnesses. Those on low incomes simply can't afford it anyway and there is nothing comparable to the level of cover under Medicaid or CHIPS, or Medicare for the elderly. Everyone under the public system has to pay up or not get treatment. Employer plans are better, but still very basic compared to typical US corporate plans. Waiting lists can also often put treatment out of practical reach unless you are willing to pay a lot of money to the right people.
It's also very scammy. They charge for everything they do, from painkillers, saline drips, blood tests, being hooked up to a blood oxymeter. On arrival they will set up all of that, the works, whether it's necessary or not so they can charge you for it. There is little to no regulation to prevent such abuses, and no practical way to get redress for malpractice.
On experimentation, communism and authoritarianism have been tried many, many times. There's nothing novel or experimental about it. We know it sucks. We know what Taliban style Islamic theocracies are like too, Afghanistan has been under one before remember?
> On experimentation, communism and authoritarianism have been tried many, many times. There's nothing novel or experimental about it. We know it sucks. We know what Taliban style Islamic theocracies are like too, Afghanistan has been under one before remember?
And Democracy was tried several times during the French Revolution, as well as in many countries in Africa, to great failure. You can't generalize from small n.
It's really unclear how Communism would have worked out if not for Stalin. Communism isn't fundamentally authoritarian. The concept of workers soviets as a political system sounds pretty plausible to me. Things played out that way, but it's only been tried once.
And as far as a planned economy, I think the feasibility really changes with access to computers which can simulate complex systems. Market economies are a greedy algorithm. It's likely there's a better system.
What I like in the current Chinese model is market economy for commodity businesses (like restaurants) and central control of rent-seeking ones (like banking). That seems more efficient. I also like the concept of systems of governance which are more meritocratic (which contrasts with populist ideals in the US), where competent people make decisions, and where you can plan strategically over long periods. I don't think China has yet stumbled on the right model there. But they're trying.
Sorry, but Marxism has coercion at it's core because it's maximally redistributive. I'm no libertarian fundamentalist, I'm proud if my contribution to society through my taxes, but Marxism takes confiscation to the ultimate extreme. All property belongs to the state, all needs are decided and provided by the state. Max called it 'society' and said that society would regulate every aspect of the economy, but in practice it's the state.
As for tried out once, er, this whole thread is about China not the USSR. Stalin died 39 years before the collapse of the USSR, they had four decades to fix it. There's also Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Yugoslavia. Robert Mugabe was a Maoist, Hugo Chavez was a Marxist. It's been tried over and over. They've all either run their country into the ground or basically given up on Marxism and clung on to power anyway.
You're quite right that democracy has had plenty of failures, that's irrefutable. It certainly does create a moral dilemma, but I still believe in allowing as much individual choice and autonomy as is practically achievable.
I can pay for a terabyte of Amazon Glacier for $50/year. Amazon Deep Glacier is $12 per month.
$300/year for 2TB isn't happening. I can buy a 12TB HDD for less, if I shop around.
I'd like a service like this to keep small, well-compressed 1080p or 4k photos available for instant access, and original files in archival storage of some kind.
I'm totally glad to pay the $10/year for the baseline service, and another $12 for deep glacier costs. I'm not glad to pay thousands of dollars for a service like this over the lifetime of my photos. I'm not quite sure where the line between that is.
I'll also mention: open-source, data export, and the option of self-hosting is helpful. I don't want to spin up an EC2 instance for this when I can buy $12, but if you go out-of-business, I'd like to have the option. Could also be an option you only guarantee if the service is discontinued or has substantially different costs/terms.
> I can pay for a terabyte of Amazon Glacier for $50/year. Amazon Deep Glacier is $12 per month.
You can pay even less to store that data in /dev/null. To make a more realistic comparison you should also include data retrieval & data transfer costs. Reading a terabyte from those services costs around $100.
I can think of close to zero times when I would need my full photo collection, in full resolution, all at once. In most cases, for showing photos, even 1080p highly-compressed is fine. In rare cases, I want to edit an old photo, and I want the original RAW file in full color depth and resolution.
FAANG and peers set the bar about 1-2 std. div. above their typical hire. The cost of a bad hire is much higher than the cost of a missed good hire. People run the gauntlet. You can do the stats, but it:
- Misses a majority of good hires
- Rejects a supermajority of bad hires
Unless you are 1-2 std. div. above a typical Googler, you should expect multiple interviews before you're hired. If you're qualified, and it's 1 std div, it takes about 3-4 tries. If it's 2 std. div, it takes 20(!) tries. If you're underqualified, that goes up very rapidly, and if you're overqualified, it goes down a bit.
Few people are overqualified on all axes (soft skills, coding, system design, etc.), so virtually everyone runs into rejections like this. The sooner you learn to deal with rejection, the better off you are.