Not to mention when my mind comes up with the logic to solve a coding problem, it’s absolutely not in a format that lends itself to explaining to another human
So now you’re making me sit and “look stupid” because I have to actually parse out in human language why I think the way I think, meaning I have to sit and reason out why I did something
It has something to do with "making the person realize the problem by themselves", because some people get offended if you directly tell them "do Y because it's better", but I completely agree the way is being done there is not effective.
Because to become teachers, you typically don’t have to have your ego brutalized jumping through irreverent hoops.
I mean going through engineering school and rigorous STEM degrees I can say that stuff is baked into the formula. You’re derided and dogged and gaslit from the onset.
Is it surprising these people graduate, become senior and perpetuate the mental unhealth?
> Because to become teachers, you typically don’t have to have your ego brutalized jumping through irreverent hoops.
No, instead you have your ego brutalized by spending half your youth (not to mention tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars) getting an undergraduate and master's degree and teaching certification...only to receive poverty wages, pay for your own supplies, be abused by students and parents and administrators and HN commenters alike...
I was actually surprised when I looked up the pay bands for my old high-school and found that (head) teachers were earning near programmer salaries (this in Europe).
The ones who are currently teaching the kids right now?
Also, varies by country: the second world has "pedagogical universities/colleges" which are focused on producing school-level teachers in every subject taught in the schools — maths, chemistry, CS, you name it... and usually they have the lowest requirements compared to any other universities, so people apply there for a "last resort higher education" so to speak.
And then some people are bright enough to do well there, and some are not quite, and after graduation the smarter ones generally manage to find a better job than to be a school teacher while the dumber ones, well, they apply to schools to teach. And they get employed because schools almost always lack teachers. Yay...
Eh, even the socratic method is quite patronizing in many situations.
For example: underlying does a task that is correct and valid but not what the higher up envisioned or hoped for. In this case you’re just going to come off as a prick for “gently guiding me” to a conclusion I disagree with, but which I’m not allowed to (non confrontationally) articulate as you’ve corralled this conversation down one narrow path based on your personal preference
As someone who while I was a junior was starved for someone to actually teach and mentor me, I’d say this scenario played out much more often than one where I was given valuable education. yrmv
100% Agreed. Just say what you think and why. The Socratic stuff works really well if you're making up a pretend conversation where you get to write both parts, and every question gets the perfect answer, and it all gets to ends with perfect enlightenment. In the real world, your questions probably suck, and the answers probably suck more. Nothing is more obnoxious than enduring someone badly doing "the socratic method" on you.
The main problem with junior engineers is that they have narrow views of the world. Software is complex. Being experienced, is mostly about earning hard won scars through mistakes, missteps, and rewrites. It's tough to convey the scope of impact by just asking them questions. It's much more guiding to just give them what they don't yet have!
I'd much prefer: "Oh, man, so this looks like it shouldn't matter, but let me tell you how I once took down prod for 3 hours by doing this same thing. I can show you how it can fail in this really subtle way".
You know good on you for doing the screen instead of an hr standin. Someone who will also happily ask what questions there are, but then fail to be able to answer anything but trivial non questions which are the same for all screens
But honestly, what’s actually the point of this call?
“What do we do here?
How do we work?
What will the rest of the interview process look like?”
Is any of that really worth it’s own call? The interview process should already have been established in the damn job posting. Why 99% of job postings in an industry that prides itself on intelligence is beyond me… It’s not complicated. X rounds, y and z hoops, done.
As for what we do and how we work, I imagine you can either express it in the posting or you’ll need a real call
I just don’t see the point of this step that everyone wants to do. It seems like a giant waste of time, inefficiency, and I can’t help but feel it’s interviewers flexing some weird ego thing
Basically second half of 2022 I was doing initial calls.
All the information has to be repeated at least twice. I always sent an email to ask for best time to have 15min intro call. People send CVs to multiple companies and even if I sent email that they could prepare by checking the posting lots of time I was having the same conversation.
People don’t care about my job posting, lots of times I have to sell them position/company.
Initial call is also to make sure they understand the offer like compensation/perks and work arrangement. Even if it is written out in the job posting people had sometimes weird ideas that needs to be addressed before we waste everyone’s time.
Ok and do you know why people don’t read job postings?
Because the attitude you and OP and honestly nearly 100% of companies and hirers out there take is “fuck it, we don’t want to do this the right way. we don’t want to respect potential employees time, we want to be vague about what we’re seeking and unreasonably selective as we put candidates through a meat grinder”
No I won’t read the 500th repetitive job posting with business hr speak and no clue what actually lies ahead
I’m not blaming you in particular, this is an industry wide thing. But the problems didn’t start with people seeking a career, they started with entitled hiring practices that are more often than not outright abusive
You saw my job posting? You seen my hiring process?
I wrote everything that is relevant in our job posting.
Salary range, perks, technologies. Maybe 3 sentences about company would fall into hr speak.
My process is super light and easy - I don’t grind people and our company keeps employees happy for years.
It is not my attitude that people are bad because they don’t read job posting.
It is realization that me and my company is not the most important part in their lives and that is why I put work into explaining everything diligently over the phone.
I got offended by this comment but I know you did not have any idea about who I am and what really is the process. So I also understand you read my previous comment through your life experience.
I disagree. A 20-30 min interview that filters 37% of candidates (for his case) while selling the company to the other candidates is the most effective interview in the whole interviewing pipeline, saving a lot of time downstream.
The alternative is to do basic filtering within a more expensive interview, ie to include basic salary/visa requirements while doing a "regular" interview, then for bad candidates you either cut the interview short (effective but rude) or go through the interview wasting everybody's time.
9/10 of the questions I get from candidates during phone screen are answered in the job descriptions. Our stack, our main tools the job's responsibilities and day to day, etc.
As a candidate, trying to gather as much information as possible in a short time, it can actually be really useful to re-ask a question that you already "know the answer" to. Different people will offer different perspectives on things, and you can end up with a fuller picture.
That said you should phrase it in a way that doesn't sound like you're just asking for the same information that's already available: "So the posting said the team uses Agile; how does that show up in a typical week?"
At this point I don't even know what is "real" about a job posting vs copy-paste boiler plate that the poster/team/HR-person included. I assume it's all crap except for some portion of the required qualifications or experience. You really have to read between the lines, and if I'm just firing off CVs, then I couldn't be bothered to put effort into deciphering your HR-departments specific "hip" way of describing the job that they think is unique but is really just muddying the waters and wasting everyone's time.
tldr: I'll start paying attention to job postings when they stop including vague non-sense like "must be a team player", "should thrive in an energetic fast paced environment" and "be a go-getter".
From the candidate’s point of view, job descriptions are often dry and generic, and it might be difficult to get an idea about what the company does even from their web site. “BigCo: We provide business solutions for increased sales and customer satisfaction!” OK, I’m gonna have to talk to a human there to understand what these people do. Plus, your company is number 58 on my list of 80 resumes I’m sending out today. I’m not going to read your entire web site and earnings report.
If it’s looking good, like this is a real job and I’m not ghosted, and I’ve passed at least one filter, yea, I will do deeper research on what the company does.
Search your job title on a few job aggregator sites or on the job pages of a few companies in your field; how closely does your day to day get represented in an intelligible and understandable way from the postings you find?
The Job Search process is fraught with a lack of clarity for both sides; businesses "fluff" their positions just as much as candidates "fluff" their CVs because the wrong wording, incorrect wording, misleading wording, or wording that sounds less appealing than what other businesses use makes you less competitive in the eyes of potential candidates.
Talent Acquisition teams can only go so far; I work with a great TA team who meets with us frequently to discuss our needs and to ask for help interpreting questions/comments from potential candidates and how to best represent our needs to some of the challenging (but good!) questions potential candidates have. I am well aware that I am quite lucky in this regard as many TA teams do not work closely with the teams they're finding candidates for.
I wouldn't fault a candidate for explaining their understanding of the position but asking for a more clear picture of common activities they might do during a week, or about team/reporting structure, advancement prospects, etc. That's different than if they come to a position and balk when being asked about their experience with elements directly on the posting or normal/expected for the given position.
You’re a stranger to me at this point. You think I should spend potentially hours of homework studying you, in the off chance that this phone screen will land a job?
I’d wager fewer than 1 in 5 phone screens lands a job on average. How many hours is a candidate expected to do homework for you? What are you doing as an equivalent investment in the candidate?
Maybe you should stop and reflect why no one is responding to this email and what that means…
Personally they would fail my initial screen for employers unless they were very upfront about paying a quite higher than market salary. If you send me that reading list and everyone else is just doing normal interviews without all the homework, you are asking for a lot more and I expect that trend to continue after you hire me, so I'll expect a lot more out of you. So far I haven't found anyone with these high expectations willing to pay more (got plenty of people who want me to drive into their office wearing a suit for less than what remote jobs are offering for example), generally the offers tend to be lower than normal companies with standard expectations. Another clue is the "we are looking for passionate people, they need to be excited" stuff, those things in tandem smell like a low baller.
I think it’s great. SingleStore and any database company that ships binaries and supports customers managing their own clusters running those binaries requires a very different programming environment and culture from your typical saas or consumer app. Just picking any two of those articles at random will help candidates
understand that. I think “cringy” is a very unkind description of a genuine attempt to answer the most common candidate question - “what is it like here.”
If all jobs are equal and you just want a job then sure, I guess you have a point. There isn’t an introduction in the template but presumably it would be described over the phone as something like ‘I’m going to send you an email with some links to talks and blog posts about the company so that you can learn more about us’. Maybe enthusiastic candidates would read a bunch right away. Maybe they would wait until they had offers and we’re choosing where they wanted to work.
Roughly, I think many candidates are not in some desperate must-find-job-ASAP mode and therefore will be more interested in finding the job that is best for them. Giving them information so that they can better understand the company/team seems good to me.
I don’t understand what the alternative to this is for you – just accept the first job offered? Or ask lots of questions to try to work out what the company is like? Or rely on network/back-channel communication to only apply to the right jobs?
I really don’t see any evidence whatsoever that LLMs couldn’t be a cornerstone/building block to future levels of AI
Why are you so strong minded that it cannot be this way? Genuinely curious as I’ve personally never seen more than conjecture that it should be this way
> I really don’t see any evidence whatsoever that LLMs couldn’t be a cornerstone/building block to future levels of AI
I've also not seen any evidence it can be. The reality is that we don't really know, because evidence one way or the other pretty much amounts to either 1) having a detailed and accurate understanding of human intelligence, or 2) building the thing to demonstrate the point.
I'm fairly certain 1) won't be happening any time soon, and I'm skeptical that 2) will happen any time soon, given the current limitations, but on this I'm far less certain. I don't think anyone can be certain, and anyone stating things one way or the other with absolutely certainty is wrong.
I think the key limitation is that language is not intelligence and that much of the progress has either been centred around language, or has been comparatively simple problems.
There is definitely evidence that self-supervised predictions using e.g. Transformers is helpful for AGI. The brain has 100k cortical columns that to the best of our knowledge predict the next state given the current one. We've seen how these models can be used on all modalities, text, audio, images and video. It's a small part of what's necessary but to say there's "no evidence" is complete hyperbole.
Yes, this is the most obvious omission of the article. It really made me think about the kind of social dynamics that must be going on in an international and culturally-diverse research station like this one. Obviously, you will try to keep social friction low, and there might be some kind of "no co-showering" policy going on to avoid conflicts.
I come from a country that is generally considered very open-minded about nudity, and having a communal shower with your colleagues after your shift (gender-separated, mind you) is considered absolutely normal in jobs that get you dirty.
And even if you are a prude, I really wonder why no-one has considered sharing a shower or sponge-bath with a colleague or two in swim-shorts. It's more unhygienic than showering naked, yes, but I would still consider this miles better than taking no shower at all for days at a time.
Or maybe the showers described are indeed communal, and they just noticed that squeezing two people below one spout is just not a efficient way to shower and does not actually save that much water...
Ironically, in my last job hunt I encountered several fake jobs/companies
I learned to filter out indian hiring people because 100% of them started a conversation demanding “updated resume”. I noticed even if I said the one I submitted was most recent they would still demand I send another. Clearly trying to get more data from me.
Other than that we’re several positions at companies which couldn’t be validated, interviewers who were so clueless they had to be faking, and numerous other issues.
And of course that’s after already weeding out all the bot generated job postings.
> Ironically, in my last job hunt I encountered several fake jobs/companies
I'm under the impression that most job ads out there are actually fake job ads, or ads from companies who have no job and/or no immediate plan to offer one to any candidate. We have HR types trawling candidates for their CVs to build up impressive-looking portfolios to showcase as who they have in store for candidates, and use that to catch potential customers.
It's not unreasonable to ask the candidate permission to either record the video interview, or at least have their camera on for 20s while a screenshot is taken.
So now you’re making me sit and “look stupid” because I have to actually parse out in human language why I think the way I think, meaning I have to sit and reason out why I did something
This is such a terrible approach