woofie11's comments

In the first 10 minutes, it was clear that:

- Google has policies which are culturally unresponsive and discriminatory to Eastern Europeans.

- Neither side was aware of the scope of the problem.

I've seen this a lot, where there are cultural difference that neither the immigrant nor the native are aware of, but that lead to improper treatment.

Let's say mortgage repayment is $3000, and rent only covers $2500. Let's add another $500 in overhead. I'm paying $12k per year. $36k would break me financially, but $12k is a good investment, since at the same time, two things are happening:

1) I am one year closer to owning the home. Yay!

2) Inflation. Rents next year might be lower, but rents in 10 years will be higher.

Kinda. If I buy a 1M home at 2.5% interest, I have a $4,000 monthly payment. If rates go to 6%:

- Housing prices plummet to $600,000, assuming people are willing to spend the same per month.

- My monthly payments are identical to had I bought at $600k at 6%. If I stay there, I'm not much worse off. It's harder to pay off the home quickly.

- If I move out, and I rent out my home, it covers monthly payments approximately exactly.

The only time the owner is in danger is if:

1) They need to move.

2) They can't rent out the original property.

Rent works out since while the home is a liability, with 6% interest rates, the 2.5% loan is an asset.

As a footnote, what I expect is actually happening here is people are anticipating high inflation. If that happens, this isn't a bubble. Real housing prices might be fixed, at least looking out a few years.

That was a fascinating article. Thank you!

I would too. Unfortunately, the last Assyrian historians died nearly 3000 years ago.

None of the other parties here are EU members.

Culture runs deep. France adores Vercingetorix, who surrendered to Julius Caesar after "releasing" all the women and children to die of starvation between the Roman and French lines at the Battle Of Alesia.

Since WWII, France has been a fickle ally to the US at best.

To be fair, France has consistently betrayed its allies, throughout history. The start of WWII is worth looking at, where both France and Britain broke mutual defense treaty after mutual defense treaty appeasing Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War

A lost sale in contrast? That seems more like normal business than lying and betrayal.

Yeah. Virtually everyone is there at 22.

The problem here is metacognitive skills: knowing what you don't know.

The parents are right: "Parents went ugly, they said I was a careless, stupid, ignorant boy. I know they are not right." Acknowledging that is the first step. The second step is understanding that's true of most 22-year-olds. Age 0-12, you worship your parents. Age 13-19, ego really grows. You rebel, and do the opposite of what your parents want since you believe you know better. Early twenties is when you start to understand that you are, indeed, a careless, stupid, ignorant boy, and start to take advice from others. That's growing up in a nutshell.

Most of the more successful people I know get really good at taking advice from others, putting ego aside, filtering advice (not all of it is good!), and keeping an open mind. The executive version of that is delegating, and knowing whom to delegate to.

Constantly shifting focus is 100% standard for that age, and it's a fine way to grow. People at that age also really do mimic (usually stupid) role models. The "I want to be the cool computer wiz without a degree" is completely standard (only insert "rock musician" "soldier" "goth" etc). It's how your brain is wired.

I know this sounds like dime store psychoanalysis, but it's helpful to know you're not alone, and it's just how people are wired.

A few thoughts:

1) A CS degree should not be easy. If you're where you think you are, you can test out of the freshman CS courses. If you're a hotshot, you can start with a graduate-level class on sublinear-time algorithms or something. More likely, you can start with junior and senior classes. Those foundations are important, though.

2) Getting good at math is important. Social sciences degree was a mistake.

3) At 22, optimize for growth, not for profits. Profits can come later. There is an order of magnitude difference between a principal at Google and an entry-level coder. You don't get there incrementally.

4) There's plenty of part-time work, contract work, etc. available if you hunt around. A good path might be work half-time and school half-time. Both grow you in different ways.

5) It sounds like you have a good foundation to get wherever you're going. It doesn't feel like it, but you're on the right track.

I wasn't comparing to AMD.

I've had few enough interactions with AMD that I can't pass judgement, but from the few I've had were consistent with your assessment. AMD was a complete black hole. My interactions with Intel were lightyears ahead of AMD.

But Intel, in turn, was lightyears behind Analog, Linear, Maxim, TI, and most other vendors I've dealt with (this was before Analog gobbled Linear and Maxim up).

I think one more issue is support. If I want a chip from TI, Analog Devices, etc., I fill out a web form and get a sample. If I want to talk to an engineer, I place a phone call. If I want to order a dozen of a part, I go to Digikey. If I want a datasheet, it's online.

Intel won't give you the time of day unless you're HP or Dell. That's optimal for capitalizing on old markets, but it means it's never in new markets. It always starts at a disadvantage. It's not that Intel never has chips startups want to use; it's that it's impossible to engineer with most of them.

By the time a product has enough marketshare for Intel to care, they need to displace an existing supplier.

This means they could never really diversify outside of PCs.

Yeah -- my experience is kids who have unconventional experiences do better socially than the ones who go through conventional school.

Increasingly, you can replace "is" with "was."

Over time, MIT's acceptance of diversity, intellectual and otherwise, has waned. Right now, it's the top university brand in the world. That's a tightrope political game to play, and MIT optimizes to it very well. It's been a slow process for many decades, but it's really accelerated recently.

I'm not sure what the better schools are now. I've heard good things about Georgia Tech.

We do need nerd camps and nerd schools still. The old MIT was awesome.

Software, plumbing, and car mechanics don't need a degree. They are technician work.

However, if you can have a much more fun life if you have a deep understanding of things like signal processing, image processing, differential equations, control systems, dynamics, etc.

Those let you do things like building medical imaging systems, autonomous robots, or deep learning systems. They're much more intellectually fulfilling than just coding, which loses its charm after a bit. You're also not competing against low-cost coders, which isn't a problem in the current market, but economies are cyclical. When the next recession comes, having more specialized skills is more helpful.

These do require mentorship, guidance, and some form of study.

As much as coming into university straight out of high school is often a bad idea, so is skipping it altogether.

The key problem is these aren't skills you can pick up incrementally. They take years of focused study. For example, you can't learn control systems without diff. eq. which in turn requires calculus. There's little immediate reward to learning calculus and diff eq, and little way to know what's important without expert guidance.

It's one of those things, if you've ever managed a larger team, that's incredibly, incredibly obvious.

A single bad hire can suck up the vast majority of your management time, drain team morale, drain it further when you inevitably fire them, open you up to liability, and generally make your life miserable.

Bad hires do slip in, and each time they do, BOY does it suck.

You need a study for this just about as much as you need a study for "Don't touch the kitchen burner."

I think the real story is subjective, not quantitative. Color pickers:

https://bottosson.github.io/misc/colorpicker/

OKHSL works a lot better than the alternatives. It's really nice!

OKHSV doesn't seem as good, and neither do the other new ones.

As a point of fact, that's kinda what happens at big firms. No one has yet figured out a better model. There isn't a magic oracle to point you to perfect employees.

That's not really how it happens, though. You get people who are really good at whiteboard coding and little invert-a-tree type exercises, with no other skills. Most don't do this through interviewing over and over, but by practicing online. You end up with big companies full of people with nothing better to do with their time.

A lot of the people who interview over and over really have no idea what they're doing wrong. Employers don't give feedback, aside from "Thank you. We'll let you know. [ghost]," or at best "Thank you. We filled the role." A half-dozen interviews helps, but from then, it's rapidly diminishing returns.

I like startups, where you can do all sorts of side and back hiring channels, but none of those scale above maybe 100 people, and usually not past a dozen.

Some measure of employee quality, as evidenced in the interview. To make this simple, let's take an exam instead of an interview:

* Let's say I was hiring someone to do calculus.

* I want applicants who typically score at least a 90% on a calculus AP. The exam has a std. dev. of 3 points.

* I get an applicant, and I give them an AP exam.

* They score a 91. What do I do?

That means they are 1/3 of a std. dev. above my cut-off. They might typically score 88 and got a little bit lucky, or even 85 and got very lucky. Or they might typically score a 94, and got unlucky.

If I hire that person, although they're probably qualified (assuming a uniform distribution of applicants), I'll get a lot of bad hires.

To avoid that, I set the cut-off at 93% or 96%. This means I intentionally reject most people who meet my cut-off. On the other hand, if I hire someone, I can be pretty confident they're qualified.

The cut-off needs to be high in part since the distribution of applicants isn't uniform. Most applicants are unqualified morons. Qualified people will apply to a few places, and are quickly hired. Unqualified people will apply over, and over, and over, everywhere they can.

Yup. The stupid brain version of a typo.

* Setting the bar at 2 std dev means you need to interview 20 candidates at your hiring cut-off to find one you believe is qualified. The other 19 qualified candidates get rejected by chance.

* Setting the bar at 1 std dev means you need to interview 3-4 candidates to find one who you believe is qualified. The other 2-3 are rejected by chance.

Of course, most candidates aren't right at cut-off, so it's not quite 1:20, but it is pretty random. A good model for hiring, from the candidate side, is that you interview. If you pass, you role a die, just like in an RPG.

Unless you're coming in through a side door or a backdoor, rejections are just part of life. People take it personally, and fault the interviewer for a bad process, but interviewing is fundamentally a very noise measurement. It's the only way we've found to get good employees at scale:

* You set an unreasonably high bar.

* You interview a lot of people.

* Occasionally, qualified candidates pass by chance, but the majority are rejected.

* If you set the bar high enough, unqualified candidates will rarely pass by chance, by virtue of how Gaussian curves look

It's a random process. I think the comments here are misleading.

FAANG and peers set the bar about 1-2 std. div. above their typical hire. The cost of a bad hire is much higher than the cost of a missed good hire. People run the gauntlet. You can do the stats, but it:

- Misses a majority of good hires

- Rejects a supermajority of bad hires

Unless you are 1-2 std. div. above a typical Googler, you should expect multiple interviews before you're hired. If you're qualified, and it's 1 std div, it takes about 3-4 tries. If it's 2 std. div, it takes 20(!) tries. If you're underqualified, that goes up very rapidly, and if you're overqualified, it goes down a bit.

Few people are overqualified on all axes (soft skills, coding, system design, etc.), so virtually everyone runs into rejections like this. The sooner you learn to deal with rejection, the better off you are.

I'm less concerned about fur with dander stuck to it then simply furniture with dander stuck to it.

Three things to consider:

1) You can't see dander.

2) Vacuuming helps with pollens, and with dander from animals without fur too.

3) You have mild allergies. Others have stronger ones. I have no scientific basis for this, but I suspect sometimes, the immune system goes into maximum overdrive.