Hacker News: codeonfire

New comment by codeonfire in "IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands"

codeonfire — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 06:11:04 +0000

Lol you idiots downvoting. I learned this fact from a law professor/attorney. You don't like it so you are downvoting? Lol. Go look it up on wikipedia, but I think maybe if your are getting this emotional about a fact I learned in a law class, then wikipedia may be too advanced.

New comment by codeonfire in "IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands"

codeonfire — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 05:49:01 +0000

I first suspected this fake interview stuff a few years ago at Microsoft. Let's just say everyone in the hiring event was one demographic and I was another. I asked one interviewer if he was going to take a picture of the whiteboard and he muttered under his breath "it's not going to matter." It was a good solution but it became clear the interview was horseshit. They were wasting my time to fix their EEOC numbers.

New comment by codeonfire in "IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands"

codeonfire — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 05:26:33 +0000

They are all going to be CTO's in the future, not future victims! I assume by saying hiring committee you work at Google. A whistleblower sued Google in March alleging overt age discrimination and illegal race quotas. They copied some damning information including screenshots of their quota tool. What kind of information do you know about it?

New comment by codeonfire in "IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands"

codeonfire — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 03:24:45 +0000

I meant hiring managers in tech companies like IBM.

New comment by codeonfire in "IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands"

codeonfire — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 03:23:51 +0000

It's not a question of morality. The act doesn't cover people under 40 because there was no finding of age discrimination. Just like there is no discrimination against white people or men ;). Don't like it, run for Congress or Supreme court.

New comment by codeonfire in "IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands"

codeonfire — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 02:15:42 +0000

Age Discrimination in Employment Act say discrimination doesn't become a problem until age 40, therefore 40+ is a protected class. below 40 is not.

New comment by codeonfire in "IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands"

codeonfire — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 02:13:54 +0000

I would say 75-90% of hiring managers in the US are not even US citizens and couldn't give less of a shit about US laws. Execs are incredibly happy for people to break the law for them. If an expat gets in trouble, they just get sent home with a bag full of money. For jobs in India, "freshers" have to put their blood type and where their fathers were born on their resumes because discrimination is so bad.

New comment by codeonfire in "IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands"

codeonfire — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 02:09:00 +0000

"Obviously it's also true that if you can fire 10 black engineers on high salaries lots of managers will choose to do that simply because it means they don't need to fire 20 white engineers. It's the easy option."

That's how 22-35 year old you sounds.

New comment by codeonfire in "The search volume for "web app" spikes every September"

codeonfire — Sat, 15 Sep 2018 03:19:57 +0000

WTF, Fifa? Correlation does not imply Causation. More likely lots of September students started a web dev class. But that also is not proof of causation.

New comment by codeonfire in "Google Scientist Resigns Over “Forfeiture of Our Values” in China"

codeonfire — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 22:54:55 +0000

I would take issue with your classification of companies as "the west" Companies like Google have a huge foreign national presence. There are thousands of Chinese employees, managers, and executives at Google.

New comment by codeonfire in "Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]"

codeonfire — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 22:16:20 +0000

It is an inside joke marking employees as stupid childish marks. As if to say that the person is someone management has identified who will at least pretend to be ignorant and naive as a child. That is the whole basis behind this infantilization shit.

New comment by codeonfire in "Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]"

codeonfire — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 08:16:00 +0000

Are you surprised? Google invented infantilism of their workers. They invented basic colors, office slides, and office ball pits. They make new employees wear propeller hats. They want a naive "ender's game" work force while their business of monitoring the web browsing and location of hundreds of millions of people is actually very serious.

New comment by codeonfire in "Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]"

codeonfire — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 03:51:07 +0000

A woman that joins a company in mountain view that only hires women is the same as a man that joins a company in Manhattan that only hires men. Can't really say you are neutral after that.

New comment by codeonfire in "Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]"

codeonfire — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 03:26:01 +0000

Once you accept and identify as a label then you are no longer part of the middle. That is one of the main arguments against race quotas and affirmative action. It taints the whole idea of equality and neutrality.

New comment by codeonfire in "Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]"

codeonfire — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 01:46:18 +0000

Google has definitely jumped the shark with their political leanings. They have been sued for implementing hiring quotas and discriminating on race, sex, and age. You can read the complaint here https://www.scribd.com/embeds/372792998/content While Sergey seems to care about immigrants like himself, lgbtq, and women, he does not give a flying fuck about age discrimination, which is a legally protected class in America. Ultimately nothing lasts forever, and unfortunately there is some truth in right wing characterizations of Google. People stuck in the middle of the political spectrum, everyday non-racist people who are not part of any particular "group", have no party or supporters on either side.

New comment by codeonfire in "Ask HN: How to deal with product managers slowing down product release cycle?"

codeonfire — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 17:13:09 +0000

PM's and other charlatans who are trying to trade on the software engineer's profession will use every trick in the book. They will try to sell you a car and headlights, wipers, tires separately. The reason they slow down projects is they want to sell each tiny part to executives as a big accomplishment. They don't really care about moving the needle and the tiny parts have high chance of success on the software dev side. What you need to understand is they are focused on spoon feeding dumb executives "huge" accomplishments. If you want to disrupt this, focus on this communication. For instance, finish the project ahead of time and find out how to communicate this to executives around the PM. When the PM tries to take credit for only a tiny bit of what was delivered and unaware of the rest, they will look like fools. When they seek retribution against you, try to amplify the fact they are out of the loop and trying to slow things down. You will have to be devious to carry out this strategy successfully, but PM's are people trying to sell what you spent decades learning to do for yourself, so all is fair.

New comment by codeonfire in "We are done with “Hacking”"

codeonfire — Sun, 26 Aug 2018 19:04:50 +0000

There is a dichotomy in tech between makers and takers. Some people try to be a maker or a few years and can't do it for a number of reasons. There is a common set of flawed thinking that causes them to decide that programming is dead. One, their world view is different because they might have more wealth and have decided that there is an infinite pool of makers to exploit. This is obviously flawed. Companies go for years without finding the right person. When they do find someone, the person they settle on is often a faker. Two, they think robots build the constituent components that go into systems. Those memory chips are made by actual people. Just because they are 300x cheaper does not mean that it is unimportant to know how they work. Three, the status quo is the end state of technology and now is the exploitation phase where we use tech instead of make tech. Fourth, they think everything is done for cash money instead of building capabilities.

This guy also seems to think programmers are so mentally deficient they are unable communicate with the 'open source community' and that this is in some way how programmers discover new technologies. He also thinks people did not contribute code in the 1990s. Where did all this software come from? Typical business view of open source. Originally b-schools actually lectured that open source was anti-business like a trade union. Now I guess they think it is sort of a crutch for too-dumb-to-breathe programmers?

There are tons of people like this guy in tech. Coded a year or two and found out the were a taker and not a maker. Still pretending to be a maker though. Their idealized programmer befits a corporation. Colors in the lines and writes "perfect code" which has no meaning other than has been annointed by CR's as to make it seem owned by the company rather than the individual. Their ideal programmer is someone who doesn't need to understand the details, works as a unit in a team, and gathers all of their knowledge by "getting help" from the company. It is absolutely blasphemy in the corporate world to suggest that anyone synthesize his or her own ideas. That's of course ridiculous but in a business setting, the takers absolutely must discount creative thought of employees 100% which literally the "product" up for grabs in tech companies. Obviously if people knew the value and how to exploit their own original ideas they wouldn't need the fucking company or takers.

As far as math and algorithms, those are more important than ever. The reason you don't see people working on those is that those people are hidden from public and private view, jealously guarded by the takers who think they control them. Natural sciences did not fucking change since the 90's. A surface to air missile or high frequency trading algorithm or advanced simulation is as costly and valuable as ever. It's the author perception of what is valuable that has changed. He's looking for code monkeys to exploit who will "get help" and write "clean code" whatever the hell that means.

New comment by codeonfire in "Ask HN: I'm experiencing pair programming exhaustion, how best to cope with it?"

codeonfire — Fri, 24 Aug 2018 09:38:32 +0000

There are academic studies of pair programming. If I remember, it does obviously decrease software defects, but almost everyone that wants pair programming ignores the fact that you are now paying twice as much for the same software. The software is not 2x better. Obviously a programmer's salary is so minuscule to the business managers don't even factor this into their thinking. Usually they want pair programming for political reasons, i.e. no single person can ask for a raise due to being the most knowledgeable.

New comment by codeonfire in "Ask HN: Waiving my voting rights as part of employment termination?"

codeonfire — Sat, 04 Aug 2018 22:32:57 +0000

What do you mean "in return." Sounds like they want something for nothing. Your equity and voting rights are already yours. You are negotiating to stop working as an employee? You could do that tomorrow for signing nothing.

New comment by codeonfire in "Ask HN: How to overcome fear of flying?"

codeonfire — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 02:02:33 +0000

Last time I listened to that it was a panicked pilot asking Miami Center for a new heading because they were sending us through a thunderstorm. Not really comforting.