At least today the coding agents will cheat, choose the wrong pattern, brute force a solution where an abstraction or extra system was needed, etc. A few PR's won't make this a problem, but after not very long at all in a repo that a dev team is constantly contributing to (via their herds of agents) it can get pretty gnarly, and suddenly it looks like the agents are struggling with tech debt.

Maybe one day we can stop writing programming languages. It's a thought-provoking idea, but in practice I don't think we're there yet.

I think a lot of people miss this point.

Real projects are complex and have tons of context at the historic layer, political layer, and technical layer. If I have one hour to do the interview, I need to get to some shared context with the candidate quickly, or else it'll just be an hour of me whining about my job. And I usually don't need someone who is already a senior subject matter expert, so I'm not going to ask the type of question that is so far down the rabbit hole that we're in "wheels haven't been invented yet" territory.

Fundamentally, that's why I'm asking a somewhat generic design question. I do also dig into how they navigated those layers in their past experience, but if I don't see them in action in some way then that's just missing signal I can't hire on, and that helps neither me nor the candidate.

In another company or timeline perhaps I could run a different interview style, but often you're working within the constraints of both what the candidate is willing to do and what the company standardized on (which is my current situation).

TL;DR: not enough training.

As a hiring manager, whenever we start a hiring period I have a conversation with my interviewer team about what qualities we're looking for and review the questions they plan to ask in order to normalize the process. Stuff like "what does a good answer look like, and why? what does a bad answer look like? is this something easy for a candidate to engage with or will you spend half the interview just explaining the background? is this coding question unreasonably hard?" and so on.

I also look at the evaluations that interviewers give relative to other interviewers. Almost every hiring cycle I've done I've had to deal with some interviewer (all over the seniority spectrum) asking unreasonably hard questions.

Sometimes you just have a bad interviewer who is looking for something specific from you but isn't telling you. If you're experienced in these interviews, you catch the signs and adapt by asking questions to suss out which direction the interviewer wants to take it.

Sometimes your answer is plausible but the interviewer wants to see you justify it. Sometimes your answer is wrong but the interviewer wants to see if you can reason your way through it, and maybe come up with an alternative.

If you're junior/inexperienced, it's often hard to tell and it'll feel arbitrary/unfair, and unfortunately that's just how it goes. As a more senior/experienced candidate, you can often figure out which situation you're in by asking questions to feel out the interviewer and then try to pivot during the interview, though it still takes valuable minutes out of the interview that you could have otherwise spent showing your competence.

The general way to handle this as an interviewer is really simple: acknowledge that the interviewee gave a good answer, but ask that for the purposes of evaluating their technical design skills that you'd like for them to design a new system/code a new implementation to solve this problem.

If the candidate isn't willing to suspend disbelief for the exercise, then you can consider that alongside all of the other signals your interviewer team gets about the candidate. I generally take it as a negative signal, not because I need conformance, but because I need someone who can work through honest technical disagreements.

As a candidate, what's worked for me before was to ask the interviewer if they'd prefer that I pretend ____ doesn't exist and come up with a new design, but it makes me question whether I want to join that team. IMO it's the systems design equivalent of the interviewer arguing with you about your valid algorithm because it's not the one the interviewer expects.

As a former PM (now an engineer), I think that's pretty much it. Teams and companies will vary a lot in terms of what they want the PM's to do, with some common patterns emerging, but as long as the PM's do the work well then the team is much better off. The key issue is how much you can trust the PM to hold up their end of the project.

A common theme I've noticed among good PM's: good judgement. When the team can trust the PM's judgement, the whole team flows better. When the team can't trust the PM's judgement, the PM is worth negative bandwidth.

The key issue right now is that the models falter in the last mile, and the last mile is where you need the training and experience to make sure the thing that lands is production quality.

At some point in the next few years I believe the roles will merge. I suspect that PMs will be forced to specialize towards a discipline (design, data science, engineering, etc.) while engineers will also start to see more of their responsibilities covering former PM territory. Most engineers will probably become closer to “product engineers”.

In my mid-30s, I'm definitely slower to pick up new things than in my college days, but I have much more mental discipline and patience, a broader base of knowledge to draw from, and maybe the biggest differentiator: a much more developed sense of priority and focus in order to get more benefit out of less time.

"Readiness" means that I believe that after their promotion they will be able to execute at the higher level at least most of the time. That doesn't necessarily mean they need to be already doing the higher leveled job, but in practice they do need to show that they can sustain some approximation of it.

If there was a way to combine this with coaching sessions, I think this could be a very effective way to train IC's that are stepping into leadership roles (managers, staff/principal IC's, PM's, etc.). It could also be interesting to have a variant of the exercise where you ask the student/user to write their own message.

ConcernedApe's next game is also built on MonoGame, so he has self-interested reasons to want MonoGame to continue to be maintained. But just because ConcernedApe has self-interested reasons to donate doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't also come from a charitable place.

MonoGame is basically getting a sponsor. The ecosystem benefits. I'm personally happy to leave it there rather than asking for moral purity.

In my experience, it's not that directories are inherently important, it's that an organization mechanism is, in the service of a few key problems:

1. Privacy and data handling requirements

2. Versioning

3. Partitioning

4. Probably some others I'm forgetting

Hierarchical storage is a useful all-purpose tool for these things.

I'm not so sure they actually believe the results are authoritative, I think they're being lazy and hoping you will believe it.

Otherwise, I keep it around for the desktop Excel app. Still my preferred spreadsheet app, even though Google Sheets does pretty much all of what I need.

Yup, this is the key issue and what makes it primarily a people problem. Technical solutions don't work if the main problem is getting buy-in to spec/build/adopt one, unless you're willing to build a lot of things you end up throwing out. So instead the bulk of the high risk work is actually negotiation between people.

There's a small but substantial number of engineers out there who haven't operated at the kinds of scales where hyperscalers' limits become normal architectural problems and don't have the humility to imagine that it could be the case. (e.g. blob stores do in fact have limits you can hit, and when you operate at petabyte scales you have to anticipate in the architecture that you can hit them for even trivial operations.) I also work on petabyte datastores and have encountered a bunch of those engineers over time.

To be fair though, that's the small minority of engineers I've encountered, and if it wasn't arguing about the types of scale problems unique to petabyte scales, it'd be about some other nuanced subject matter. It's a humility problem.

* Conway's law causing multiple different data science toolchains, different philosophies on model training, data handling, schema and protocol, data retention policies, etc.

* Coming up with tech solutions to try to mitigate the impact of multiple silos insisting on doing things their own way while also insisting that other silos do it their way because they need to access other silos' data.

And the reason standardization won't happen: the feudal lords of each of those branches of the hierarchy strongly believe their way is the only way that can meet their business/tech needs. As someone who gets to see all of those approaches - most of their approaches are both valid and flawed and often not in the way their leaders think. A few are "it's not going to work" levels of flawed as a result of an architect or leadership lacking operating experience.

So yeah, it might look like technical problems on the surface, but it's really people problems.

* You have a disability that hinders your ability to type on a keyboard, so you need extra time to type the essay based exam through vocal transcription.

* You broke your dominant hand (accidents happen) so even though you know all of the material, you just can't write fast enough within normal "reasonable" time limits.

* You are blind, you need some way to be able to read the questions in the test. People who can see normally shouldn't need those accommodations.

I don't think those are cases where you are lowering the bar. Not by more than you are allowing the test taker a fairer chance, anyway.

The problem is when you get into the gray area where it's not clear than an accommodation should be given.

For better or for worse, politics and randomization is just a thing in our jobs, and for at least some people in your team that means part of career growth is learning to handle it. If you, the manager, are the sole person capable of being the "shit umbrella" for the team, that's another way that your team gets a bus number of 1. (I learned this the hard way.)

In an ideal world you have some senior engineers who are more of the "don't bother me and let me cook" persuasion, and then you have at least one who is probably on track to become a manager, and they are your backup when you can't be in two places at once.