> At least from the point of view of the interviewer, this was the point where they should give you a polite "hey, play along" nudge.
That may be the game, but we all know it's bullshit, and we shouldn't be playing along.
If a member of my team actually proposed building a bespoke system for something that can be straightforwardly done in a spreadsheet, we'd be having some conversations about ongoing maintenance costs of software
> If a member of my team actually proposed building a bespoke system for something that can be straightforwardly done in a spreadsheet, we'd be having some conversations about ongoing maintenance costs of software
All interviews are contrived / artificial situations: The point is to understand the candidate's thought processes. Furthermore, we're getting Bilsbie's (op) take on the situation, there may be context that the interviewer forgot to mention or otherwise Bilsbie didn't understand / remember.
Specifically, if (the hypothetical situation) is a critical business process that they need an audit log of; or that they want to scale, this becomes an exercise in demonstrating that the candidate knows how to collect requirements and turn a manual process into a business application.
The interviewer could also be trying to probe knowledge of event processing, ect, ect, and maybe came up with a bad question. We just don't know.
Given that Bilsbie can't read their interviewer's mind, there's no way to know if that's what the interviewer wanted, or if the interviewer themselves was bad at interviewing candidates.
> The point is to understand the candidate's thought processes
The problem is that this is a 2-way street. The candidate is forced to guess the interviewer's thought process, because otherwise they may be pitching over the interviewers head.
We have to spend a ton of time calibrating hiring loops for this, because otherwise you get staff level candidates being failed by mid-career interviewers who don't understand the full context of the question they are asking (and hence don't understand why a staff eng solves it differently than they would).
One of the things I miss about Objective C is just how easy it is to call into a C API, or otherwise include a C function if that's the easiest way to call into a C API.
I shipped a cross-platform C# project, and once I realized I could expose "ordinary C" from the Objective C part, it was very easy to integrate the two without using a framework. (It helped that the UI was 100% Objective C, so there wasn't much surface area between the C# and Objective C parts. We initially used MonobjC, but first I had to work around a shortcoming, and then we needed to remove MonobjC due to licensing and some of the newer C# integration layers were not available.)
> I was under the impression that The Hobbit was the first book in this saga?
Yes: But the Hobbit is much shorter and is a much easier read. It also was edited after LOTR was published to fix some minor plot holes.
WRT the movies: Peter Jackson added a lot to the "Hobbit" trilogy that wasn't in the book, such as the whole story arc about Gandalf when he wasn't with the dwarves, or the other wizards. The book isn't the epic that the movie makes it out to be.
The people let go can form their own companies. I don't believe anyone has a guarantee to have a high paying white collar job until they choose to retire.
Five months severance is quite generous; during that time "their job is to get a job."
Even better, start a new company with the previous coworkers who are all versed in the same industry as you just left! Block is profitable, so there’s a lunch to eat.
I watched Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips do something similar with some kind of "I don't know what" controller, it was some kind of input in his microphone stand. As he moved it around, the sound and projection changed.
I remembered learning about similar MIDI controllers when I was in school.
Imogen Heap created a set of gloves that transform finger flexing and wrist movement into midi signals you can use in whatever way your performance software allows.
I think the big problem is that anyone can email anyone at any time for any reason; and that it's highly abused by people who think what they are doing is fine.
Years ago I read an article on Slashdot where someone did that with a flatbed scanner. (This was before everyone had a smartphone, and before digital cameras were common.)
American religions are supposed to stay out of politics, or they risk their tax-exempt status.
For me, the disturbing event was shortly before the 2016 event when a Catholic Church in Lowell MA had posters urging people to vote no on marijuana legalization.
(In my case, I smelt the politization when I was a teenager so I never continued being Catholic as an adult.)
The separation of church and state in the US was for the state to stay out of religion.
(the US was founded by religious exiles from a state which didn't stay out)
Religions are explicitly political but politics shouldn't interfere with religions. To follow your religion means interacting with the outside world. It's not some personally private thing like a harmless badge you wear (although there are American faith communities that advocate for that).
The cases in the past where political have interfered with religions are often, ironically enough, by other religious politicians. Hence the good idea to separate church and state.
> In 1954, Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Lyndon Johnson to prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity. To the extent Congress has revisited the ban over the years, it has in fact strengthened the ban. The most recent change came in 1987 when Congress amended the language to clarify that the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates.
> Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one "which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."
There's a subtle irony of this rule, which is that in order to stay in compliance with this law a savvy Priest tends to weave more sophisticated moral teachings into their Homilies that make it very obvious what or who they are advocating for or against without explicitly naming them.
Unfortunately, those laws are not currently enforced.
I see another reply is arguing that religion is inherently political. I disagree. Modern politics did not exist at the time the world's major religions were being formed. Attempting to twist them to fit with a particular party or candidate is a terrible idea all around in my book, for many reasons.
The state can cause a lot of damage by endorsing religion, the historical record is overflowing with examples. I'd argue that a religious body endorsing a state is every bit as potentially destructive. The government is at its best when it is neutral on the subject of faith and crafts policy in evidence-based ways that people of all (or at least most) faiths can agree upon. In this situation, there is no reason for a religious organization to promote such a government because their interests are orthogonal. They can cooperate, but there is a clear line between that and acting subservient, or declaring some sort of 'divine mandate' has been bequeathed upon a government institution or official.
The modern period where we take great pains to excise religion from the public sphere is not the historical norm. The norm is that many - if not most - political, and indeed geopolitical, events throughout history had religion woven into them. It is not difficult to find examples of this throughout European history and pre-history. I know you are making a statement on what you feel "ought to be", but I assure you this "ought" is not the usual course of business in world history. A solid quarter of people today live under regimes where politics and religion are deliberately intertwined, a historical aberration.
American religions are more like American Indian tribal nations. They have independent jurisdiction and their income is not subject to taxation. Whether or not they engage in politics is completely their prerogative and has no bearing on their tax exempt status. It’s like saying the Navajo nation can’t engage in politics or else they would lose their tax exemption.
Further, the core reason for freedom of speech in a democracy is to have freedom for political speech. The need is to have different factions discuss ideas related to the governing of society. Any legal regime that restricts the rights of religion to engage in political speech is one that rejects the separation of church and state. The purpose of the separation is to prevent the government from interfering with the rights of disfavored religious groups or granting special privileges to favored religions. If an individual has a right to political speech, then an association of individuals also has that right whether or not it is religious in nature.
When my state was debating creating a state-run lottery to fund education projects, my preacher gave a sermon on the evils of gambling. Religions can't realistically stay out of politics because every law can be reinterpreted as a moral argument.
That's fine. It's different when it's telling people how to vote.
Some people buy lottery tickets specifically because of who they benefit, which is very different than going to Vegas or certain forms of investment. (IE, uneducated investment is often just gambling.)
I ran a dial-up BBS in the late 1990s. One summer a few of my loyal users suddenly stopped calling.
About a year later I learned that one of my users hacked an airport. At the time a few of my users would set their computers to dial random numbers and find modems answering. One of the numbers was a very strange system with no password. The story I heard was that they didn't know what the system was, because it had no identifying information. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/doj-charges-...
> the hacker left behind a calling card by changing the system identification name to "Jester."
> The attack on the branch of an unidentified major pharmacy chain occurred on four separate occasions from January through March of last year. The hacker acquired the names, contact information, and prescriptions for the pharmacy's customers
I think the story you heard was a watered down version of what they were doing. You can’t do things like exfiltrate data from a pharmacy database and not know what the system you’re attacking is for.
I'd like to point out that these systems had modems answering the phone and allowing access without any authentication. The sanitized story of the airport was used as a warning to why computers on the open internet need passwords at the Boston Microsoft Security Summit in 2004.
They didn't tell me about the pharmacy! Remember, these were teenagers who were curious (and naive to the implications of their actions.)
In the case of the airport, they didn't know it was an airport or even what kind of system they were in. What happened was that one of them found a reboot command, and ran it, not knowing the consequences. (Remember, when a computer controls a "thing," there is often a complicated startup procedure when it reboots.)
So don't just blame foolish kids; whoever thought it was a good idea to allow modem access to an air traffic control program without a password was the bigger fool. I had stronger security on my dial-up BBS than an airport.
At least from the point of view of the interviewer, this was the point where they should give you a polite "hey, play along" nudge.
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