"one hour coding interviews" are absolutely horseshit.
and not for the reason you think: you wanna give me a "code interview", make it 8 hours.
A full work day.
Sit with me for 8 hours -- and 8 hours i'm *sure* you're getting paid for -- and get the straight dope.
This whole "ascertaining a decade of skill in an hour or less" is just an insult at this point.
@somarasu so I don't know enough to tell if things are ever/always done this way, but I was kind of floored to watch a comedic video where someone "cheated" a remote coding interview by looking up references so the interviewers didn't notice? I was like, I'm pretty sure devs use references in their actual work (though maybe they're Real Men about it unlike my weenie self and use man instead of Stack Overflow), what the hell is the use of a closed-book coding test?? If anything they should hire that guy precisely because he has enough sense to ignore bullshit rules and look things up!
@ljwrites That's not "cheating". I've done many an interview where they stipulate from the jump "you can Google and StackOverflow and whatever" (</paraphrase>)
It's not a matter of where you get your shit, it's how you go about getting shit. That's always been what I've been told, and always been the stipulation of my coding interviews.
*THAT IS*, unless you're sitting in front of a whiteboard sans laptop. Then all of a sudden it's different. For *SOME* reason.
@somarasu oh absolutely, my field isn't even CS but law and I was comfortable giving my students full open-book take-home tests, like they could look up ANYTHING and email their answers within 48 hours. They could paste in their Google search results if they wanted, but since a copy-paste wouldn't be responsive to the actual question I asked their grades would suffer. It was the application that counted, not the information. Much like simply copy-pasted code wouldn't do what the interviewers asked--or if an interviewee did find open-source code that does the same thing, that's even better, they proved they're savvy enough to save the company a bunch of time and energy!
@ljwrites @somarasu I do network operations which is a totally different tech field. Having said that. I would tell people “ I am going to give you a Kobayashi Maru scenario. I want to see how you think and how you think under pressure. In the job I will be your escalation person. Feel free to use me as such during this interview.” Watching how they failed and what kind of questions they asked me during the process told me everything I needed to know.
@sng @ljwrites The NFL had a similar problem for a long time: Black people were considered "not intelligent enough" and "couldnt think quick on their feet enough" to be lead quarterback. So starting quarterback positions would consistently be handed to White men who performed at half the rate.
Which meant half the wins.
Which meant half the fans.
Which meant half the money.
And *THEN* coaches started changing their tune.
But just barely
@somarasu @sng and this is why calling capitalism a competitive, profit-seeking system is bullshit. Obviously, if corporations were rational, profit-seeking entities, they would hire vastly undervalued talent and make a killing that way. But no, how it actually works is that marginalized groups like women and Black people are systematically exploited and the profits from their labor redistributed to white people, mostly white straight men with some white women allowed access to wealth and privilege through their ties to white men. Capitalism is not a system of value creation, it's a system of pillage founded on race- and gender-based violence.
@carl @somarasu @sng The thing is, if capitalism works fundamentally differently elsewhere I'm not aware of it, and am open to being educated about it. Capitalism was born in England and spread through Europe and Euro-settler countries, and when it was spread to non-European countries there was a concerted effort to destroy existing communal ways of life to replace them with the "enlightened" white ways--and the gender and ethnic oppressions that already existed in the colonized countries were leveraged for the sake of capitalism, though it's true the some specific forms of oppression inconvenient to capitalism were relaxed.
A case in point is women entering the corporate workforce (a vast influx of cheap labor + increased consumption), which resulted in more independence for many women. On the other hand, women are held back in promotion and pay at work and left with more of the care work at home, assuring much of the power and wealth are still in the hands of men.
@ljwrites @carl @sng I would argue that the fact that these non-European countries were raped of their resources, and had no *choice* but to go along with capitalism, would tell me that:
A) there *arent* any examples of Western Capitalism that *arent* born of exploitation (at least in the places where it wasnt the most profitable); and
B) Given the connection between profitability and 'lesser-race countries' (e.g.: Africans are less than human, but their salt, gold, etc. are more than enough), there's no way you can separate the profitibility of said system from it's racism
@somarasu A) agree
I like to think of capitalism as a power and exploitation system based on *-isms. Which are already in place or are constructed in order to establish a capitalist system. The latter would be the construction of racism by the Western countries to "justify" colonialism, slavery and the ongoing neo-colonialist structures and racification-based exploitation of workers.
I would also argue, that racism is not an integral part of capitalism, it comes handy, though.
@ljwrites @sng
@carl
"I would also argue, that racism is not an integral part of capitalism, it comes handy, though."
I mean both yes and no on that? On the one hand, race comes in different configurations and nuances depending on context and history and it's true the same form of racism is not required for all capitalist exploitation everywhere. And the relationship between capitalism and race will differ by context too, like the relationship of antiblackness and anti-indigeneity to capitalism looks very different in the U.S. vs. East Asia though both places are antiblack and anti-indigenous (in different ways).
On the other hand, racism IS integral to capitalism in the sense that it helped create capitalism and forms the foundation of the global capitalist system that all local systems depend on, the pillage of African resources for one.
Tl; dr: (A single form of) racism is not required for all local systems of capitalism, but the global foundation of capitalism required and requires racism, with antiblackness and anti-indigeneity at the core.
@ljwrites @sng Capitalism has never touted anything *other* than "get money", and I will grant it that consistency. But 'rationality' and 'profit' have never been mutually inclusive, nor will they ever be.
White-dominated capitalism will cut its nose off to spite their own face; if a White dev has half the skill of a BlPOC dev, they're taking the former 9 times out of 10. Prima facie: for "Culture Fit" (i.e.: they look and think like us), but in reality, because they're more likely to play ball regardless of what happens.
I even take umbrage at the claim that "marginalized groups like women and Black people are systematically exploited". Like, that's bullshit: women and Black people dont even get a fucking CHANCE to be exploited. So this claim is wrong strictly on hiring statistics.
@somarasu @sng oh, a VERY big part of the exploitation of women and Black people is not hiring them for the so-called good jobs reserved for white cis dudes and a few white cis women, and pushing them into fields where the labor conditions have been intentionally made exploitative and abusive for the purpose of pillage. Or, if they are given jobs in the fields they wanted, they're placed in lower-paying, more precarious jobs even in the same field, treated as expendable. And since many of the people systematically pushed out of the good jobs have debt from the training that they were promised would lead to better economic opportunities, there's an extra bonanza for lenders as well.
@sng @ljwrites And that's another thing: i've biblically aced code interviews with zero room for bullshit, only to be told "mmmm well you have no experience leading large teams soooooo we dont think you're the right fit"
IT'S A COMPANY OF 3 PEOPLE. *2* ARE CO-FOUNDERS!!!
THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN???
I mean, I know exactly what they mean: "no Negros in Lead"
Doesnt matter if it's 3 people or 300: it's been this way and always will be, so long as you have majority-White dev teams.
Which you always will.