Comment by codemog
11 hours ago
Lee is a product of his environment. Tech interviews are bullshit and he exposed it. School work is mostly bullshit and he exposed it.
How can you honestly tell this young man not to cheat and get ahead when the president does it regularly? We’re a spiritually dead country and the youth is reflecting it. Don’t use Lee as the scapegoat.
If you see a pile of trash by the side of the road and tell yourself it is ok to dump your trash there, well, you just explained why there is a pile of trash there in the first place.
You have agency over your own actions. Don't blame others for your self inflicted "spiritual death."
Millions decided to reward a liar and cheater with the highest office in the country. Twice! At one point, socially attuned people are going to go that way. And even if you try to educate your children well, they see in their formative years what society rewards.
Yes, but they should be criticized all the while... obviously.
In fact, beyond criticizing them, they should be denigrated and made fun of incessantly. Ostracized and reaffirmed as low-status individuals, no matter how much wealth they can acquire through low-status bullshit, they'll never be worthy of respect.
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I don't understand why you think one single president is responsible for a class of behavior that is likely as old as human civilization. Should we blame Elizabeth Holmes on him too? What about Enron?
Morality advances when those who see they could, decide that they should not. In fact, one might see true morality as requiring a decline of reward.
If one abandons their principles as soon as a sufficient reward is offered, then they have no integrity.
So let your children see and learn what society rewards AND teach them integrity.
Compare Nixon to Trump and you see the problem with America,
This - though I'm not certain that the product really solves any of these identified issues of "y is bullshit"
In America, solving something is to exempt the individual from the problem.
So it solves it by letting you pass the tech interview.
The operative part of schoolwork is … not the work part? Of course school work is bullshit, in the sense that the teacher already knows what 7x9 is or who fought at Waterloo or whatever. The point is not the work product, it’s that the student produced it and has been incrementally improved by the experience!
I disagree that tech interviews are bullshit. The biggest tech companies (MS, Google) have invested many dollars, and changed course at least once (remember MS's lateral thinking questions? How many screws in an airplane?) in looking for the most effective ways to quickly gauge whether someone is likely to be a productive SWE. They have done this because they correctly believe that there is a wide range of candidate abilities out there and it is critical to hire as few "lemons" as possible; in particular, not hiring lemons is much more important than neglecting to hire someone who would have been really good. Thinking about it from their POV makes this immediately clear.
I think what you're really saying here is that you don't like tech interviews, which is understandable, but ultimately doesn't amount to either a moral or a technical argument against them.
> How many screws in an airplane?
So you're suggesting that an enterprise that would ever have even considered routinely using any stupid bullshit question along those lines is somehow engaged in a finely-honed and effective process for creating an optimal screening system? It doesn't matter how often you "change course" if you obviously have no idea how to steer in the first place.
Yes. Lateral thinking is valuable, and the industry didn't at the time know any better ways to test it. Now we have system design questions, so we can get the same signal asking candidates for ad hoc estimates of QPS or whatever.