Ye I thought sympathy strikes are a general strike somewhere else unrelated, to put social peer pressure on the leaders of company target of the actual strikes.
This is the reason why there is a significant movement within the bitcoin community to separate it away from everything else in the “crypto” space.
For those who makes no distinction and hold a similar view, maybe the Pineapple Fund is a good starting point to learn why “bitcoin is not crypto, and crypto is not bitcoin”.
I guess you didn’t read the article. A quick search shows she mentions it 8 times. Here are just a few:
> We can define currency as a liability of an institution, typically either a commercial bank or a central bank, that is used as a medium of exchange and unit of account.
> Central Asians at the time of Battuta, as a nomadic culture, used livestock as money. The unit of account was a sheep, and larger types of livestock would be worth a certain multiple of sheep.
> Prices of most things stay relatively stable or preferably keep going down as priced in the most salable good (such as gold, historically) over the long run, but go up in most years when measured in a depreciating and weaker unit of account such as the British pound.
The point is to have a conversation about a project that the candidate understands well and is passionate about rather than asking them a bunch of questions that we already know the answers to.
Before the interview we review the code base and try to understand what it’s doing by the documentation provided in the readme. During the interview we get the candidate to demo the project and any questions that came up in our code review we ask at the stage of execution in the project demo. The interview lasts for 2 hours and we’ve had several rounds of candidates put through this process.
Both we as interviewers and the feedback from candidates has been very positive. The interview ends up being a day-to-day normal experience within the team and this really helps us to gauge the team fit. I think this helps to hire people that compliment and expand our skill set rather than hire people who are basically ourselves.
I would immediately end my interest in a company if I was asked to do this. This is far too general a problem, which will harm the interviewer as much as it will harm the interviewee.
Contrast it to giving a candidate some slightly broken code in a framework related to the role and then asking them to a)fix it and b)implement a new feature of their choosing and document it.
The advantages of the latter approach:
* The interviewer doesn't need to prep beforehand as they already know both the problem and the codebase. This means they can ask much more interesting questions and don't have to invest significant time in reviewing a project that might be in a field in which they have no experience. This in turn leads to better discussions which in turn leads to better interviews.
* The candidate is given a much tighter problem definition and isn't required to come up with something a)novel, b)not covered by their current employer's NDAs.
* The candidate's time is respected because they can be told how long it should take them up front.
* Each candidate gets a standardised problem and so it's easier to compare between them.
When I give take-home assignments, I'm just looking to quickly confirm that someone has a working home dev environment (i.e. they don't just code inside environments that other people give to them) and that they can understand a small codebase and write clean code and document it. Everything beyond that I can find out by talking to them during the interview.
When I actually used this technique in interviews it was interesting to see how many supposed senior engineers would reply with things like "I'm getting a %JAVA_HOME NOT FOUND error, please can you fix the repo and let me know when it's ready for me to work on?".
We've been using it for DevOps roles which are not highly specialised in any particular technologies and require ability to solve problems at a general level.
The test is intentionally designed to filter out candidates who cannot meet or do not want to meet the technical requirements.
This is a really bad take-home exercise, because it is way too vague. This vagueness makes it very hard for me to decide how much time to devote to it, and what task is complex enough so that you will consider it, but not too small so that you don't throw it away. Instead of giving me a bar to jump over, you make the bar invisible, then expect me to jump just above it. So I hope you do have a default project for those who are not "creative"... at least not for the purposes of a job interview...
> You do not have to start a new project from scratch. It’s perfectly fine to submit something you have previously created yourself. Maybe it’s something you work on in your spare time, just for yourself!
Yeah, no, nobody is or should be giving you their own personal work. It's offensive and probably illegal that you'd even ask.
Yep, agree. 95% of the code I write is owned by my employer and is under NDA various other privacy / IP laws. The 5% that isn't, has no place in an interview. It's a bunch of brittle glue code automating and backing up data between my devices.
"Passion projects" in my "spare time"... maybe once the kids have grown up and flown the nest...
Leetcode is easy... I memorise a bunch of stuff, do the dance and pass the interview. If i'm lucky I get a problem i've not seen before and actually have to use my brain during the interview.
Isn’t the time spent memorizing leetcode similar to the time spent building a side-project?
I took a look at leetcode when I was interviewing and decided it was a waste of time for me to learn that dance. I was happy with my chances with the companies that didn’t use it in their interviews. And it worked out fine.
No, it’s not, because take home assignments are not typically reusable. Learn leetcode and it is valuable at most companies you will apply to. It’s more respectful of your time.
I was comparing leetcode to sideprojects, not take home assignments. The parent company was also talking about side projects.
Side projects will help you learn useful skills and it is the suggestion of OP that it should be used by more companies in place of leetcode interviews.
Btw, a lot of companies don’t use leetcode for hiring. In my last job hunting season, I would guess than less than 20% of processes used leetcode. Pretty far from “most” companies.
Completely agree re the value of having side projects. I wish I had the luxury of time right now, maybe in a few years once the kids are older.
The leetcode dance is, at least for me at this point, much lower effort than starting a side project on the understanding the code I produce will be reviewed during interviews. It's like Sudoku, once you've done a "few", you get to the point where you're able to solve them quickly.
> Isn’t the time spent memorizing leetcode similar to the time spent building a side-project?
The nice thing about leetcode it is easy to bound the time to what you can handle. I do one puzzle a week and set a timer for 20 minutes. Then I get the answer and browse the forum. It's basically the equivalent of solving the Sunday crossword for me, and it keeps my algorithm skills sharp. Probably no worse than burning a lunch hour on HN.
> 95% of the code I write is owned by my employer and is under NDA various other privacy / IP laws.
True, but would your employer care (if they found out) if you copy/pasted a small portion of code that’s not considered critical IP (like util functions, and an integration syncing records from your backend the Salesforce, or something tangential to the business outside the core product)
May technically be breaking your employment agreement, but I can’t imagine it would be too hard to pluck out a decent amount of code, and re-write portions of it if necessary to “anonymize” it for interviewing purposes.
Or if you happen to be interviewed by someone like me, my approach is simply “if you can’t show me the code, show me the UI and explain how the backend / frontend works, and a discussion ensues.
As mentioned in my original comment, if someone isn’t comfortable showing me the source code I simply ask for them to describe how it works, challenges in building it, how they built it, etc.
I could do this and would welcome this type of interview experience. I'd be able to talk in general terms about the problems I work on and their solutions but not the low level specifics.
To add some context, my work is in Financial Services, trading systems and whatnot.
Red flag test. Vague, no guidance around how much time to spend, no guidance around where to focus from a technical perspective (i.e. build anything/everything), bias towards someone who already has some related code completed. Given the lack of clarity, accurately assessing one candidate vs another would be difficult. It also comes off as lazy.
It's not an IQ test. It's just pattern recognition which is about 5% of the tasks you do in a real IQ test.
When I joined Klarna in 2011, the test was so easy that I joked I could score full marks on it even if I was hungover with no sleep. There was one question on the test that actually had 2 correct answers depending on what logic you applied. This was actually a real issue when recruiting, because there was a hard cut-off to make it into the engineering department, and several times I had to ask "what was their answer on question 12?"
It caused quite a bit of commotion at HR to change the official test scoring to 2 correct answers for that question.
Now the test is like a million times harder and your score at the end is between 0-10 and you have no idea how many questions you actually answered correctly. I would be very interested to know the "true" answers of these new tests to understand what kind of crazy logic you need to apply to get every question right. I'm almost certain it would take me longer to understand the answer than the time you have to do the test.
That test was always stupid and fought hard by a lot of engineers that considered it so. It was still kept even after a lot of pushback. I left the interviewing team due to that, I couldn't be part of a process that considered that step not only required but as a hard cutoff for engineers.
I lost so many great candidates that would be great hires to my teams at Klarna to that stupid test.
Yeah this is great right! We stumbled on Halley's Comet at the local science museum here in Skövde and it'll really spice up travel around Sweden for the kids a bit.
Do they move Halley's Comet? Its period is short enough that a decade makes a real noticeable difference in its distance from the sun, and its total period is shorter than some science museums have been open.
You should definitely be able to convince her this is a road trip to take! On the way you will pass the lovely Virgin coast archipelago as well as be able to visit the UNESCO world heritage sites Decorated Farmhouses of Hälsingland and the High Coast. Go for the road trip!
Feels like part of the "hidden gems" tour. I live in Sweden for 8 years. I've been to an observatory and planetarium. I regularly visited Stockholm. I asked friends in arts. Nobody seems to know about this.
Kind of embarrassing to find out about the SSS from HN.
Stockholm was my first love at first sight. I moved here in 2006 after a particularly long and cold winter. The day I arrived, it was a bright blue sunny sky, with a temperature just around freezing. I walked around these incredibly beautiful snow covered islands and over the frozen lake mälaren. I almost crossed over the ice between the islands of södermalm to kungsholmen, about 300 meters or so, but I chickened-out about half way through and turned back. I could have made it. There were fresh tracks from other people who had made it across that I was following. I’ve never seen the lake in kind condition since - Just one of the small regrets in life.
I work in IT and Stockholm has been fantastic for my career. The Scandinavian countries are well-known for their advanced digitalization. Being a foreigner with a particularly non-Swedish approach to problem solving has helped me a great deal.
I grew up in Australia but I’ve also lived and worked in London, Copenhagen and Singapore. One of the things I learned after living in as many places as I have, is that it’s as personal as your taste in music, or food, or anything else.
Stockholm and Sweden is not without it’s problems though. Immigration is screwed up, taxes are high, and there are parts of the city I avoid. But no where is perfect. I know the problems here and I prefer them to the problems I’ve had living in other places.
One of the things I was most surprised with when I visited there was that it seemed like it was a vastly lower percentage of cigarette smokers, I kept walking around wondering somethings different, and then I realized, people weren’t smoking! I later looked up the statistics online just to see if I was just imagining it, it appears that I was not.
16 years, also knew about it. Although didn't know it went past Arlanda. I'm married to a Stockholmer. They are not as fun as us anglo-saxons, but have different qualities.
