WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

philbert101's comments

philbert101 | 4 years ago | on: What is money, anyway?

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.

philbert101 | 4 years ago | on: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

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.

philbert101 | 4 years ago | on: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

This is pretty pretty much what I tried to achieve here https://github.com/philbert/take-home-tech-test

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.

philbert101 | 4 years ago | on: Klarna users are being signed in to random accounts

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.

philbert101 | 5 years ago | on: The Sweden Solar System

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.

page 1