I shit on Microsoft a lot here, but it’s not because the workers are dumb or that all their products are “bad”, because they’re not. It’s because the company very clearly is only ever focused on “the next marketable product”, and will let their existing products rot.

You can see this with a lot of Microsoft products. Windows NT was a a pretty cool OS/kernel at its time. NTFS was a pretty neat filesystem when it was new. They employ smart people for enough time to make a big headline, then make no effort to keep those products any good.

I would rather spend 100% of my time in Firefox but that’s not doable right now.

Entirely possible that this is an issue specific to NixOS or my machine, but because of that issue I switched over to Brave.

I would like to go back to Firefox at some point. Maybe I’ll see if I can make a patch to fix video acceleration on NixOS.

Obviously I'm not entitled to a job, so no hard feelings on that, but it's a little sad because I have always been a big functional programming nerd and it would be fun to work with Ocaml libraries. The fact that they pay really well is also appealing...

In your hypothetical the implication is that the leetcode would be effective at removing people who “talked a big game but are incompetent”. I disagree with that.

I could be wrong about leetcode, but for me to realistically engage with your argument would be a tacit agreement with the premise, and I cannot engage with that in good faith.

You are arguing two different points here.

I am, generally speaking, reasonably good at the leetcode stuff, because I agree that it’s not that hard to get good at it. As a practical thing for society as it currently is, sure, studying up on the idiotic leetcode stuff is a relatively good investment.

But that pays little bearing on whether leetcode is a good test, and whether it should be something that we are using as a metric. I am arguing that it’s a dumb test and we should stop doing it at a systemic level.

Sure, but none have been more thoroughly condemned (and correctly) than the idiotic leetcode whiteboard challenges.

> And you wouldn't be wasting your time on candidates who: 1. don't know what a hashmap or minheap is 2. didn't bother to study up before the interview

OR, and hear me out, you actively filter out people who know how stupid these problems are and know that big-O is misleading for a lot of these problems. You're selection-biasing towards people who are going to regurgitate bad answers, and the middle manager conducting the interviews is usually too incompetent to understand what a "constant factor" is.

I've been rejected for jobs specifically because I mention that using a hashmap for these things will likely be slower than a naive implementation, even when the I get the problem "right" in the way that they wanted it.

Now we could argue that I'm a bad candidate in general, but (at the risk of sounding cocky) I likely do understand data structures and algorithms better than most mediocre engineers conducting the interview, but because most engineers are pretty uninspired and have never asked "why" for anything in their lives, they will "correct" me. They will assume that me providing nuance is a lack of understanding on my end.

> A quick check shows that Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Apple, Anthropic all do leetcode testing.

Yep, can confirm. I've worked at a FAANG, and they did indeed leetcode testing for the interview. It turns out that big corporations are fully capable of doing stupid things in perpetuity.

A lot of the decisions that define us for our entire life are made when we are at our dumbest, or at least most impulsive: our teenage years.

I, like many (most?) teenage boys, really wanted girls to like me, and I didn’t have a lot of luck asking girls out in high school [1]. If a girl that I thought was cute had offered to hang out with me and tried to get me to do drugs, there’s a decent chance I would have done it. If they had gotten me to do the really scary stuff like heroin or meth who knows how different (and probably worse) my life could have been?

[1] To be clear, I am not an incel; the girls were always actually very nice in declining me and obviously even if they weren’t it’s not like I was entitled to a girlfriend.

I am not going to say that I didn’t work hard for whatever success I have, but I was very lucky to have good parents who cared about making sure their kids were successful, and friends who didn’t really peer pressure me to do anything terrible, and just sort of a natural interest in computers that ended up being profitable.

I do think I am relatively ambitious and that certainly helped, but I am not naive enough to think that things would be as good for me as they are if there weren’t a lot of positive lucky factors.

Generally they are just wanky bullshit from some middle manager’s slightly-incorrect recollection of their first “data structures and algorithms” class, and the solution is almost invariably “use a hashmap” or “use a minheap”, even though the scope of these problems is usually so small that in a real implementation you would probably do in a more naive big-O-unfriendly fashion because constant factors are going to matter more. Let’s ignore the fact that most of the people who are designing these leetcode problems haven’t actually done any actual optimization and optimization is virtually never part of the job you’re interviewing for.

I don’t know what the “correct” way to interview is, but I am fairly certain that the masturbatory leetcode problem is not correct.

I know everyone says that, but I really don't think that they do a good job filtering out shitty engineers. I have worked with plenty of incompetent people who managed to get past the leetcode challenge but are wholly unable to do anything useful involving software.

I feel like what leetcode primarily tests is "does this person know how to use a hashmap in a way that you shouldn't actually use it because you lose cache locality", and that's literally all they test.

I'm sure that the Pine folks have very good reasons for not having 5G support, but those reasons don't really matter to the end user.

On modern Macs, it's pretty easy to install Linux with Avahi.

To be clear, I don't necessarily need it to be easy to put another OS on there. I just want it to be possible. As far as I'm aware, there's no way (officially or unofficially) to install another OS on any recent iPhones. Someone might eventually figure out how to break the bootloader on the iPhone 13, but I personally think it should be something that the owner of the phone is allowed to opt into.

What I would like is to take my existing iPhone 13 Pro and install a real Linux on it so I could guarantee decent hardware. You know, like we could do with pretty much any computer before smartphones.