Sorry, I don't buy this whole "older workers more likely to see through bullshit" narrative that many presumably older folks on HN push.
It sounds awfully like the arguments that traditionally nationalist groups use against immigrants, contending they're less intelligent and accept lower wages because they're culturally inferior and just don't know better
Maybe it's just that younger workers legitimately provide better labor for lower cost. For a small startup, you really don't need someone with 30 years of experience, and it's better to spend your money on someone demanding a lower wage and will work fast.
Cheap and fast can cost you more over the long run, a truth I've seen play out over dozens of companies that could've used the wisdom of someone who did it all before.
There's a legitimate concern over age discrimination which you seem to have underscored with your comment that you "dont really need someone with 30 years of experience".
From my point of view, seeing through bullshit is not about being intelligent, but rather having experience. After you have lived through different situations, some of them shitty, I believe you can get better at identifying them from the get-go. I'm not old myself, but I definitely understand things now that would simply go over my head when I started out.
There's no silver bullet of course, but usually a company should strive to have a mix of both experienced and less experienced workers. Less experienced workers cost less and will be more willing to "deal with bullshit", but more experienced workers bring knowledge with them that can prove invaluable to a company. They've lived through different situations, and they've seen success and failures. Finding the good balance depends of each company's situation of course.
It sounds awfully like the arguments that traditionally nationalist groups use against immigrants, contending they're less intelligent and accept lower wages because they're culturally inferior and just don't know better
Perhaps you can offer a rebuttal to my arguments instead of doing an implicit name-calling?
Immigrants do work harder and offer cheaper labor, not unlike the example of younger developers vs older developers. Companies can feel free to make the trade off
Big difference in unskilled vs skilled labor. Knowledge workers do better when they are more educated and experienced, something that there is no shortcut for.
I prefer the chart of Japan's GDP. Didn't you hear? They conquered the world, their influence was undeniable. Their competence was feared across the globe.
By 1988 Japan had surpassed the US in GDP per capita. The US is now ~53% ahead. That's no discredit to Japan, they're a very advanced industrial nation. The US simply happens to be the greatest economic train in history, one that has rarely stopped expanding in the last two centuries.
Maybe China will manage a century of mostly unbroken growth. We'll see what they do now that the easy growth - filling in their vast economic slack and correcting particularly extreme inefficiencies - has long since ended (which is why they took on tens of trillions in debt post 2007).
We've had the tabloid 'yellow journalism' since at least the late 1800s with the Hearst media conglomeration[1]. One could easily make the argument that if it weren't for the US capitalist interests and the tabloids' depiction of the USS Maine going down[2], McKinley wouldn't have approached Congress to seek war. Nonetheless, the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate in the 70s was a case-study in fantastic journalism. More recently, The Rolling Stone's coverage of the financial coverage by Matt Taibbi was better than the NYT's in the late 2000s. The Manchester Guardian broke the Snowden story (which itself was just a masterpiece of journalistic execution, following the Watergate 'staggered release' model).
I thing what is new here is that 160 characters or a Snapchat emoji isn't a format conducive to conveying the nuances behind something as complicated as geopolitical affairs and sectarian violence culminating into factions like ISIS breaking out, due to the vacuum of power which existed after the stereotypical 'despot strongman' gets thrown out, leaving a void of power entirely disrupting two countries, dozens of ethnic groups, leading to three major fronts all vying for power in addition to what can easily be argued as a modern US/Russian proxy war. Sure, a 4 minute feature on NPR won't begin to do it justice, but sometimes you'll get 12 minutes of syndication from the BBC and let Lyse Ducett run with her on-the-ground coverage. If any demographics' primary (or worse,) sole method of news consumption is a 'headlines only' format, as it may be for the 14-21 demographic, I might be slightly concerned.
Tangentially, now that 24 hour cable news exists, you have the converse problem of having too much time to fill, so you'll get talking heads in an echo-chamber[3] consumed by the 65+ demographic. Cronkite and Morrow (and arguably even up to Jennings, which is what I remember watching as a child) at least had 30 minutes of airtime with a captive audience to go into the nuances. (And while the "big 3" were not without their biases, they certainly did an objectively better job than the disservice MSNBC and Fox News is doing.)
[2] While still inconclusive as to the cause, most historians regard this as not an act of war or sabotage but a ship design defect, evidenced by other ships of the same design failing in the exact same fashion.
Did anyone even read the article. The study has nothing to do with complex behavior or "sophisticated" behavior. It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results, like "listing the hypothetical results of a series of 12 coin flips so that they would 'look random to somebody else'"
I'm sure it is an important factor in how the brain works, and that the research is insightful. I'm having some trouble with the idea of extrapolating complex behaviours from what essentially is a micro-benchmark of cognition. That sounds overly reductionist to me.
Although I guess it is impressive to find consistent results within said micro-benchmark, of course, since that hints at something fundamental about our biology (in the reddit AMA linked elsewhere in the comment the author claims to see no difference for gender, educational background, etc; suggesting age is the main factor. That seems significant).
I would call this test an analogue of IQ testing. Again, we see how mainstream thought places IQ on a pedestal. Mainstream thinking overvalues and overrates mental gymnastics, such as performance on IQ testing. But learned experience is in my opinion far more valuable and should be valued more by mainstream thought. At age 60, it is true that I cannot perform as well on IQ tests. But in my opinion my understanding of the world is much greater. I was like a child at age 25, even though I tested well on IQ tests. But I was just a child. Does mainstream scholarship explore this facet of human development? Not much....
The question is whether the correlation stays strong, though. I can imagine this accurately measuring decline in complex functioning, but I can also imagine it being the correlation that weakens as you age. In the second case, it would just be a warning to compare same-age statistics when comparing between people.
I'm interested by the path of reasoning from evo-psych. The underlying mechanism may manifest in higher-order features like motivation. How this motivation is mediated by culture (both economic and social) might lead us to draw interesting connections with both pathology and maximising productivity.
In this context it's probably better measure of randomness than true randomness.
What 'appears random' is better measurement that matches what people try to do.
People are not good at recognizing randomness, they confuse it with homogeneity. True randomness generates more human recognizable patterns than people think. If you as people to generate random string of 1's and 0's, they avoid long strings of 0's or 1's too much.
I don't quite follow what you're attempting to say here, I mean to say that the study is flawed because "It's a study on your ability to generate random list of results", with the inference that supposedly those who generate the most random results and those who appear by human estimation to do so are the same people, because humans are actually bad at randomness, exactly as you yourself say here.
So what "appears random" is not at all a good measure of what is "actually random" to put it as simply as possible.
The goal is the ability to generate strings that match the "approximate sense of complexity" (ASC) of the subjects. To do so requires the ability to avoid any routine and inhibit prepotent responses.
Research goal was to measure cognitive ability and randomness is just measure stick. The actual mathematical complexity is correlated but there is human bias. The bias itself is irrelevant if it's constant. The relevant is how closely subjects can generate strings that appear random and complex (randomness with bias) for humans.
In other words
measure = statistical randomness + bias
Because the bias is almost universal (see the modulating factors in the article) it's not interfering with the thing they try to measure.
Why? Do you suspect that subjects were deliberately making their choices less random because they anticipated the poor performance of another person in assessing randomness? It seems like a good assumption that they knew they were trying to fool a sophisticated randomness test that they couldn't second-guess.
Considering that a random generator could generate 11111111111111111111111111 5 times in a row...it's a bit hard to claim someone's test results as a failure of randomness unless you claim you want a gaussian distribution or some other type of "character of randomness." Ie. running diehard tests on it and whatnot. A fixed number of trials is deceptive unless you can see the algorithm behind the numbers. And for a human being..you can't. So unless you have a giant sample size, and even when you do, there is a bit of a mischaracterization done depending on what tests you are going to use to determine how random the data is
It's not supposed to be a measure of "true linguistic proficiency" but a measure of the capacity to generate linguistic-proficiency-like results.
So in each case what's the gap between actual linguistic proficiency / randomness, and the appearance thereof? And of what value is measuring these human perceptions rather than the actual facts in each instance (like taking all the results and putting them into a scatter output and seeing if there is actually a pattern in the pseudorandom data, or formally analysing the grammar and spelling in question and verifying that it is technically correct rather than just "english sounding" https://youtu.be/gU4w12oDjn8?t=2m)
Can we draw conclusions about that Italian gentleman's ability to make a song that sounds like English pop music "better" than an English pop music song that is actually technically grammatically correct, and use it to infer that he's got better English skills than the writer of the technically correct song?
And if not, why are we trying to make statements about the ability of some randomness souce not based on any actual measure of true randomness?
>So in each case what's the gap between actual linguistic proficiency / randomness, and the appearance thereof?
That there are no hard constraints/expectations like in measuring the quality of a e.g. software random number generator implementation.
They don't expect to find true randomness in the results, just to measure how much randomness (entropy if you will) those various age groups are capable of producing.
Except that's wrong. As much as you may dislike the tech industry, you can't contradict the data that shows there are more job openings than developers in the Bay Area
I'd love to serve some bay area companies, but I'd really prefer to not live there. None of the companies I've spoken to so far have any interest in remote help.
One west coast company has interviewed me. The company recruiter sent me like 14 "how to prep for tech screens" links and recommended I check them out days before the actual tech screen. I'm on a job right now so I don't have time to be doing that sort of thing so I didn't prep. It made me expect I was going to have to implement a BSP decompiler with a hand tied behind my back.
The guy who called me allotted 50 minutes to solve 1 problem "two if I finished the first early" on collabedit. I finished both in 6 minutes. I'm a good, experienced developer but I'm no genius. Their tech screen was so ludicrously easy it made me wonder what the current standard is for developers.
After I finished the guy said "huh I normally don't have to end these early. Great I guess." I pressed him a little and he went on to say his questions had done a great job invalidating candidates. Most people couldn't do it.
It's pretty beguiling since my midwest salary demands would be peanuts compared to my west coast equivalent. There'd have to be >60% remote-related productivity penalty for it not to be a no brainer to hire people like me.
The last few years has taught me that job seekers and dev seekers both have a hard time connecting.
A little tougher than fizz-buzz. I'd hope that people who take 6 minutes on fizz-buzz aren't calling themselves good and experienced. Am I taking crazy pills?
Here's basically what they asked me to do:
#1) Write a function that accepts one parameter. An array of numbers. Convert those numbers to pseudo-binary strings. Instead of "0" use "Y" and instead of "1" use "X"
#2) Do the reverse, Write a function that accepts an array of pseudo binary and convert it to an array of numbers.
Six minutes for them to explain the questions, you to make sure you have the question right, and then answer and explain your reasoning doesn't sound too crazy does it? Even for easy questions.
When you include that stuff, you're right! I'm just talking about the thinking -> writing step. 6 minutes is a really long time for something like fizzbuzz. That's 360 seconds. The second hand has to go around the clock 6 times. If your script is 6 lines of code that's a MINUTE per line. FizzBuzz's lines are so self similar that's real weird for me to imagine.
My 6 minutes didn't include them explaining the question or them going over my answer. I didn't really explain my work. I did talk a little while I wrote, but after I finished he just went through my code line by line himself.
That's fair enough, I probably should have thought that it was just the time for answering the question, not the entire time, based on the context. Cheers!
I'd much prefer that to fizzbuzz. Last time I had to do fizzbuzz, I finished it so quickly that I used the remainder of my time (so as not to look like I copypasta'd the answer - which I didn't) optimizing it to be as fast as I could make it, then added tests and result logging, etc.
They were kinda shocked at what I did with it, because no one else had went that far with such a simple thing. Honestly, I thought it was stupid and boring, considering I've been a dev for so long - its a bit insulting.
At least the kind of test you got was a bit more interesting...
> Their tech screen was so ludicrously easy it made me wonder what the current standard is for developers.
Just fyi, its probably because many developers don't touch binary.
I work with numbers all day but they are currency transactions and accounting data. I haven't cared about transforming something to/from binary in 10+ years and couldn't do it without googling.
However, the number of devs (and accountants) who can't figure out a 4-4-5 calendar reliably is quite impressive.
I haven't messed with binary since college. (Well, some bitmask stuff happens every half decade I guess.)
If you remember binary is just base2 I bet you could do it. Since you do accounting stuff, could you split a number into each base 10 component? 462 = (400,60,2). A bit of thinking leads me to 10^i, a for loop and some conditional subtraction / modulo. Binary is just 2^i.
My point was, it wasn't from memory and because any mistakes I make are very painful and tedious to repair my first instinct is to Google things to double check everything before taking action.
So, no, I'm going to refuse a screen that prevents me from solving it the way I'd solve other problems I don't do regularly.
I am flabbergasted that this could possibly take a 'serious' computer-y person with ANY knowledge of just about ANY programming language an hour to do. I mean, 6 minutes is very good, it would take me longer to type it all out and run through the bugs in my code.
But an hour!? What are the other applicants doing in that time for Christ's sake? Playing hop-scotch?
Jeeze, maybe the big 4 really aren't kidding when they say that they can't find anyone good...
We're all at different skill levels. If you begrudge people for being below you, it alienates them and prevents you from being able to uplift and teach. We've all gotta eat, right?
The point I was trying to make wasn't to trash the other candidates. My mistake if it came off that way.
My point was: If the pool of qualified candidates is so small they have unfilled positions, why's it so hard for me to get remote work out there?
(As a side note: I'm happy to trash the charlatans who lie about their education, cheat on exams and hire freelancers to interview for them. :/)
No, I'm sorry, you are wrong. If you are a 'serious' programmer and you cannot do that task in under an hour, you better find your terrible teachers and give them a good talking to. Maybe try to steal their wallets or purses to get some of what they stole from you back. Graduating from any Univ./College (that is not Univ. of Phoenix style scum) should make that particular challenge not just able to be done in under an hour, but it should make you laugh at how easy it is. Yes, easy. Binary is learned in the first month (or less) of any 'good' department's curriculum and should be considered to be the same as PEMDAS is to Algebra in terms of foundational knowledge. I cannot imagine how any teacher not just nakedly after your Pell grant money could ever skip it. What next, will people complain that knowing the difference between and 'int' and 'str' is too difficult to recall? Are pointers too tough? If your comp-sci program did not teach you what binary is, you better go get another degree, because your current one was just theft. Yes, Google, StackOverflow, all that jazz. I get it and do it myself too. But good lord, not being able to code that in under an hour should be embarrassing. For Christ's sake, it's in the 5th episode of flipping CrashCourse for crying out loud, literally kid's videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GSjbWt0c9M&index=5&list=PL8...)
I could post 10,000 job openings tomorrow to indeed.com for lawyers @ a very reasonable price, but this wouldn't prove there is a lawyer shortage.
A much more accurate measure of supply and demand is salaries. And runaway salary inflation has not happened. If you need a developer you can simply pay them more. This site is filled with developers willing to leave their job for a large pay bump.
And if you're not willing to pay them more, it's not a shortage, it's just a wish for cheaper labor.
I hear this comment every now and then. Because so many people say this, I really do mean this as a sincere question and opening to a discussion: have you considered the concept of supply and demand curves?
At a low price, the market will demand a lot of a good or service, but there's less incentive to supply. At a high price, the market will demand less of a good or service, but there will be more incentive to supply.
Let's apply this to developers. At minimum wage, there would be a lot of demand for developers. However, there wouldn't be much incentive to become a developer. As a result, there would be far more job openings than people interested in working the job.
At 500k a year, fewer people would want the services of developers, because they'd only be needed for very high value projects. However, lots of people would be lining up to take the job.
Economic theory tells us that supply and demand will meet at an equilibrium. So if there are far more job openings than developers, that suggests that the curves are not yet in equilibrium. As salaries for developers rise, demand will fall, until they are in balance.
Markets aren't perfect, and the real world is messy. But supply and demand are still in effect, and your comment suggests that you haven't even considered this. Saying that is a shortage of developers at 100k a year makes as much sense as saying there's high unemployment among developers who will only work for 500k a year.
Except that even that rarely happens. People who talk of a shortage of developers, amazingly enough, most often don't even mention salary. It's as if they have no concept of how salary affects both supply and demand.
Now, in this particular iteration, we do have a number, $500,000 a year. However, many of us on this forum are calling malarkey. Show us some numbers that you're actually offering and paying this salary and we'll talk. Otherwise, many of us suspect this is all bluster.
A lot of job postings are fake (position doesn't exist, position is exclusively for an internal hire only, job posting just for marketing purposes, job intentionally way underpays to justify hire a H1B, etc)
If you simply count job openings, you'll overestimate actual available work by a really large margin.
This is true. For some reason at my company, if you want to do an internal transfer, for the transfer to go through, manager has to post it to job board, and then you apply like a regular person, and then it goes through. This takes a few days, while it sits out there on the internet, luring everyone in pointlessly.
Also...someone applied to a product manager position at my girlfriend's job. They were well qualified. A week later they get an email saying "hey you aren't being considered as we're going to focus on other candidates but we'll keep your resume on file." Turns out...they had cancelled the position about three weeks before, basically forgot to take it down, and then sent out the same standard rejection letter to everybody. And I should mention this company is one of the larger Internet job boards, so even more ironic.
Also I get how not following up or "ghosting" maybe happens in dating, but there needs to be a higher standard in recruiting. With all the waiting and guessing, we're causing a lot of friction in the economy. Indeed Prime has this thing where if you don't explicitly respond to a message within 72 hours I think, they suspend your account for a week. Stuff like that could help out.
All the evidence (especially salary) shows that there isn't a national dev shortage, but there must be one because the Bay area has problems finding devs.
According to cost of living calculators, I would have to make almost a half of a million every year living/working in the bay area to keep my current standard of living. Are they going to offer me that salary to relocate? I don't think so (and most don't want me to work for them remotely either).
The blame is on the founders who choose overpriced locations and either cannot or will not pay correspondingly high wages.
Or, smart developers have figured out that 130k is not good pay in the bay or NYC. But this is the median for non-BigCorp senior positions in those metro areas. It's laughable.
The Bay Area is a good indicator for some things, but I'm not so sure it is here. More and more people don't want to live in the Bay area due to the insane cost of living.
Those job openings want senior devs at junior salaries.
There are enough jobs out there that senior devs can laugh those off.
That's not a tech shortage - that's a sanity shortage on behalf of the startups (often new MBA grads with no experience who think their Hot Idea funded by their VC friend deserves devs taking pay-cuts for their lottery ticket options. News flash: senior devs have played the game too long to be bilked for suckers like that)
It sounds awfully like the arguments that traditionally nationalist groups use against immigrants, contending they're less intelligent and accept lower wages because they're culturally inferior and just don't know better
Maybe it's just that younger workers legitimately provide better labor for lower cost. For a small startup, you really don't need someone with 30 years of experience, and it's better to spend your money on someone demanding a lower wage and will work fast.