Asking a candidate to code fizzbuzz, sorting, or string reverse algorithms is a waste of time for all involved.
I’d know an interviewer wasn’t serious if they asked me that question.
We get candidates like that, too. The interview tends to end after that, whether or not the candidate leaves on their own.
The actual people we want to hire solve the problem in 2 minutes and we move on to more difficult things.
Some of the problems I ask start very simply, but where I add complexity as they progress. If the candidate thinks they’re too good to answer the simple first part… well, I agree that the interview becomes a waste of time at that point.
There are a lot of interviewers more interested in trying to look smart than hire good candidates. Interviewers with engineering background are the worst offenders.
Our interviews are typically 30 minutes with a “soft” interviewer (someone from HR), and 6x 45-minute interviews with engineers on the team (or adjacent teams).
The presence or lack of soft skills is apparent to everyone and does not really need an independent evaluation. Engineering skills are harder to judge and so they go through a fairly intense gauntlet.
This is after some preliminary screening by HR, as well as a few phone interviews by engineers.
So a big waste of time then. Sounds like you have bad recruiting.
The only lackluster candidates that I can recall are ones that partially bypassed the regular process, or where we lowered our standards because they allegedly had relevant “experience.”
It’s too bad it takes so much time, but I’ve seen the alternative.
Thankfully, the dot-com years are long gone, but we do have the problem that C/C++ experience just gets less common every year. Finding good people isn’t easy.
I find it’s best to interview candidates about the actual job they’ll be doing. I don’t need people to reinvent a sort algorithm in thirty minutes or solve a problem they easily Googled fifteen minutes before the interview because every “clever” interviewer thinks fizzbuzz is a real test.
The actual job they’ll be doing is programming. This involves solving open-ended problems that can’t always be looked up on Stack Overflow.
Another requirement of the job is that they don’t have an attitude about tasks they think are beneath them.
Data point for those still on the fence about Musk’s managerial competence:
“Work faster or your heads will be exploded” seems like a perfectly normal and commonplace way to motivate one’s employees.
Didn’t you predict that Twitter wouldn’t last two months under Musk? It’s been, what, a bit over 5 weeks now. One would think there would be the tiniest outward sign of degradation if it was on the verge of collapse. Instead, we’ve got:
- No major outages
- Advertisers (like Apple) resuming their advertising
- No major user exodus
- No major reduction in traffic (Twitter is still #4 by this ranking, same as it was last month)
- A notable reduction in child exploitation content
But hey, you’ve still got about 3 weeks for your prediction to come true!
…I take your list with a big grain of salt: but this particular bullet point needs a reputable, independent cite.
The claim is from Andrea Stroppa:
Is Stroppa credible? The Roman legion stuff is a little silly, admittedly. However, Reuters published this article on the subject a few months ago (before Musk took over):
https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-brands-blast-twitter-ads-next-child-pornography-accounts-2022-09-28/
They mention:
Andrea Stroppa, the founder of Ghost Data, said the study was an attempt to assess Twitter’s ability to remove the material. He said he personally funded the research after receiving a tip about the topic.
Ghost Data’s Stroppa said that such tricks would complicate efforts to hunt down the materials, but noted that his small team of five researchers and no access to Twitter’s internal resources was able to find hundreds of accounts within 20 days.
It seems that Stroppa is credible/legit enough for Reuters to use at a source. That seems good enough to me.
…Reuters clearly stated that “they could not independently confirm the accuracy of Ghost Data’s finding in full”. Ghost Data doesn’t currently have a website, the Twitter page hasn’t been updated since 2021, I’ve been unable to find any other information about Ghost Data apart from a bit of self promotion, and looking over their Twitter feed is obviously a Elon Musk fanboy who is currently celebrating the current release of the “Twitter files”. They are just a random person on Twitter. We have no idea what information they have access too, what metrics they are using for comparison, whether those suspicious accounts were actually “guilty” of anything.
Not what I would call independent nor reputable. Not for the claims that are being made. Especially the last claim he makes:
That claim is bullshit.
You conveniently left out the rest of that quote:
Reuters could not independently confirm the accuracy of Ghost Data’s finding in full, but reviewed dozens of accounts that remained online and were soliciting materials for “13+” and “young looking nudes.”
After Reuters shared a sample of 20 accounts with Twitter last Thursday, the company removed about 300 additional accounts from the network, but more than 100 others still remained on the site the following day, according to Ghost Data and a Reuters review.
Perhaps they could not vet every element of it, but it seems they confirmed enough to gauge the overall accuracy. I’m more confident in their review of their sources than your hot take.
It’s called an opinion. And unrelated to anything I said, which was just that there was a notable reduction in child exploitation content.
I also said nothing about hate speech. The claim I’d like to see confirmed is whether, even if the problematic content has increased, the impressions of said content has decreased. The latter seems the more important aspect to me.
…not as odd as you conveniently leaving it out in the first place. Reuters could not independently confirm the accuracy of Ghost Data’s finding in full doesn’t change when you add the additional context. They still lack independent confirmation of the accuracy of the findings in full.
The accuracy of the specific data collated in September. Not the data allegedly collected in the last few weeks.
I’m much more confident in my assessment of the credibility of your source than you are. Its just a random person posting random things online.
An objectively wrong opinion.
“Goes to credibility, your honour.” And this person has no credibility.
Well, just for your information, hate speech has gone up since Elon Musk took over. Twitter is a much more uncomfortable place for people with marginalised backgrounds.
Anecdotally as a brown person who is a strong supporter of transgender rights, Twitter is a fucking disaster right now.
And the news that Musk has given Abigail Shrier and Bari Weiss extensive, unfiltered access to Twitter’s internal communication and systems is really fucking disturbing.
What I said, when it was announced that Musk would officially take control but before he marched into the lobby carrying a block of ceramic, was that he would destroy the company in two years. Then a couple of weeks into his disastrous reign, I made a snarky comment that I’d clearly erred in my estimate and he’d manage the feat in two months. However, I also said that Twitter itself was likely to continue despite the brutalization, just in a much smaller, much less vital form. Destroy, clearly in this context, means that what Twitter was, in the sense of a reasonable business model and its central sociopolitical function, would become unsustainable. It did not mean the company would be carved into pieces and sold off like souvenir chunks of the Berlin Wall.
But hey, I am no doubt completely wrong in this assessment, because the hero entrepreneur is busily engaged in brilliantly reinventing social media as we know it, and in just a few weeks the clear vision for magically remaking civilization itself will emerge. Right?
…just in case anyone doesn’t know how bad this is: Abigail Shrier wrote the book " Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters", which, to put it politely, is trans-exclusionary-radical-feminist propaganda.
The GLAAD Accountability entry on here is here:
Bari Weiss has been an alt-right grifter for a while now. And along with Matt “guess what I got up to in Russia” Taibbi these are the three “journalists” that Elon Musk has chosen to grant “extensive, unfiltered access to Twitter’s internal communication and systems.”
I follow several transgender posters who have just up and left Twitter tonight. They don’t trust that their data is safe. Weiss and Taibbi are bad, but Shrier is absolutely the worst.
Agreed. And there’s no sign of that happening so far. Some advertisers got cold feet for a while and came back. It remains to be seen how the balance between revenue and costs play out. Surely there was some real loss in advertising dollars, but there were also deep cost cuts.
The sociopolitical function seems more important. And again, as far as I can tell there has been no significant damage. There is renewed talk about the role of social media platforms and their moderation with regards to freedom of speech. Regardless of one’s position, I think this kind of talk is valuable.
I’ll believe there is significant damage when third-party sources confirm notable drops in traffic, or when major content sources leave the platform. Early on, CBS News said they were suspending tweets… only to come back on about a day later. So the most that’s happened seems to be a tiny, temporary blip.
Do you think there’s maybe a bit of middle ground between these extremes? I certainly don’t think Musk will reinvent social media the way he did orbital launch, but at the same time there is certainly some room for improvement, and a bit more transparency and consistency in moderation would be a nice start.
You are demanding an unreasonable standard of evidence. Confirming the accuracy of the findings in full would likely require person-weeks of effort. They confirmed a representative subset of data to ensure they weren’t being bullshitted. Nothing indicates they found any fabricated data or otherwise.
Reuters considered Stroppa and Ghost Data credible enough to write an entire article about. While every source should be treated with some degree of skepticism, Reuters isn’t known for blindly accepting bullshit. They did what they considered an appropriate level of vetting and I have no reason to question that.
Uh, right. People have varying opinions in large part because they assign different weighting factors to what they consider important. Stroppa obviously puts a high weighting factor on child exploitation, and perhaps less so for other factors.
You mildly questioned some of the other things I cited earlier. Here is the source for Apple resuming advertising:
It doesn’t make Musk look particularly good, which hopefully gives it more credibility in your eyes. But at the same time, it pokes a small hole in the idea that advertisers were dumping Twitter due to changing moderation policy. In reality, it was simply unrelated.
…there is nothing unreasonable about pointing out the only evidence you’ve provided that this random twitter account is trustworthy is an article from a few months ago that Reuters wasn’t able to fully independently confirm.
That article does not back up the assertions that person made in that Twitter thread. It doesn’t address any of my other concerns that I’ve mentioned. Its a random person on Twitter making claims that they haven’t backed up.
I haven’t actually disputed anything in the Reuters article. This isn’t about the Reuters article. I think that Reuters did their due diligence. The article is fine. But this isn’t about that article. It’s about the claim that there has been “a notable reduction in child exploitation content”. I asked for a reputable, independent cite and you provided a random Elon Musk stan.
Except they didn’t provide the data. We don’t know what qualified as “suspected child exploitation content” and whether or not they just used a “blunt hammer” to flag a whole lot of dodgy (but not child exploitation content) content to inflate the numbers.
Reuters didn’t vet that Twitter thread. They didn’t check the numbers. They didn’t check contact anyone from Twitter (not that there would be anyone to contact anyway as Musk has probably fired them) to verify the numbers.
This isn’t about the article.
The thing is: the claims Stroppa are making are extraordinary. We know that once Musk came on board he all but gutted the child protection teams. Its something that Twitter has been fighting against for a long time and have taken seriously. Then Musk takes over and magically does something that nobody had ever thought of doing before and all of a sudden child exploitation content has been fixed? When every other metric under the sun shows that abuse and harassment have been getting worse?
You are going to have to do better than a random Twitter account to prove that not only did they manage to do this…but they are continuing to do it.
The reality now is that (especially with the likes of Shrier, Weiss and Taibbi poking around) is no longer safe for a great many people. Tonight it looks like L%bs of Tiktok, the is getting the personal protection of Musk. “Stochastic terrorism” will be getting a pass.
I mean: I’m not disputing what Apple has done. I just don’t particularly think its relevant. I’ve already posted my opinion on how long Twitter will last. It will either be strangled by the regulators: or they will give him a pass and Twitter will turn into an alt-right recruiting centre full of hatred, racism, misogyny and transphobia. I’m hoping for the former. I’m fully expecting the latter. Now that it looks like Musk is letting the worst people get backdoor access to the site there is no positive outlook any more. Twitters gone.