cja23's comments

Horses, not zebras. But yes, there are a few zebras in the world also.

Just in case you are not joking and for anyone not familiar with the terminology: Physics, and a lot of the hard sciences, are often broadly divided into "theoretical" and "experimental" halves. Experimental physicists design and run experiments, i.e. they "get their hands dirty", or at least the hands of their graduate students and post-doctorates. Their end goal is to find some actual fact about the actual universe, usually a quantified measurement. Theoretical physicists, on the other hand, create theories: mathematical and conceptual models that hopefully explain how or why the universe is the way it is. Ideally, the created theory not only explains the measurements that the experimental physicist has already observed, but also predicts the results of new measurements not yet observed.

Yes! I think any good statistician would agree with all of that and emphasize the importance of how you present your conclusions. Forming "data-dependent hypotheses" is part of what most statistician's call "exploratory data analysis" (EDA). When presenting EDA findings, we should use terms like "association", "relationship", "correlation", "possible", and not words like "cause", "effect", "p-value", "test", etc.

As jeffmould said, simply not mentioning any degree is sufficiently honest, but will likely trigger the question from HR. If you want to be a bit more up-front, I have seen resumes with the words "coursework towards B.S."

Push-ups are not necessary for football. As a football player, catching and running with the ball are more valuable than push-up proficiency.

We don't teach every child math because we want them to become mathematicians or anything in the STEM fields, just like we don't teach them PE (physical exercise) because we want them to become professional athletes. We have mandatory PE classes because having a fit and healthy body will serve you (and society at large) extremely well no matter what you end up doing in life. In the same vein, we have mandatory math classes because having an agile and skilled mind will also serve you (and society at large) extremely well no matter what you end up doing in life.

The article claims written communication and reading comprehension are so much more important than math to a developer. This is like saying catching balls and breaking tackles are so much more important than push-ups, pull-ups, or all the weight-lifting you do in the gym. Learning math is a great way to enhance and improve your communication skills! Try explaining some advanced math concept to a kid sometime.

There is not a linear relationship between technical skill level and "hire-ability". I would describe it as first a step function, i.e. there is a minimum level of technical skill to get an interview and be taken seriously. Then the function is a linear rise, but it quickly levels off to a flat line. Once hired, higher technical skill will correlate with higher job performance and success, but again only up to a point where the curve will flatten out again.

Once you are in the linear portion of the technical skill curve, your hire-ability is much more strongly affected by the "softer skills": verbal & written communication, ability to think critically and express that thought, and the social skills to quickly assess your interviewers and establish a rapport with them.

After you get hired, better technical skill certainly helps, but it does level off. Also, it is not indepedent of the soft skills: I've known individuals with ridiculously impressive technical knowledge and skills, but their utter lack of communication/social skills not only hurt them career-wise, but actually made their high technical skill a liability at times.

I've done daily stand-ups under the Scrum methodology that the whole team liked and found successful. In my experience, it goes best if the emphasis is strongly focused on getting the team members to communicate to each other and to the team as a whole. If everyone is just standing around waiting for their turn to deliver status to the boss, the stand-up is a poor use of time since, as you suggest, the boss could just do the walk-around and collect that status one-on-one. When I've been "scrum master", I make sure the boss/customer/product owner stays quiet in the stand-ups and nudge the team culture towards using the time for the team to talk to itself, synchronize everyone's knowledge and expectations, and build coherence and comraderie, ideally ignoring the extra people in the room.

It's definitely work to build and maintain that kind of culture, but I've had many people tell me it makes them want to come to work in the morning because they enjoy starting off this way. It also helps that I try very hard to make sure this is the one and only recurring "meeting" they have.

Bingo. In other words, HN readers, serious electronics hobbyists, anyone with even a little hardware savvy: these are not the target market. Intel is betting that they can steal/grow some significant piece of this market share based on their brand alone, and they are probably right.

1. Technical competence: the candidate is unable to satisfactorily answer even the most basic questions about 1 or more of the technologies/skills listed on their resume.

2. Candidate ambitions / Job mismatch: this goes both ways. I have rejected candidates that were clearly just looking for the paycheck and would likely do the minimum necessary to not get fired. I have also rejected candidates that wanted to do a lot more than the position required and would likely get bored and move on quickly. (For the latter, I always try to find another position that would be a better fit, even if it's outside my group, company, or even industry.)

3. Culture/Team mismatch: this is the last, and rarest reason to reject a candidate, and is only considered if they passed the two above hurdles. If the candidate's work/communication styles don't seem like they will mesh well with the existing team, this is sufficient to reject the candidate, although my team needs to feel pretty strongly about this incompatibility.