It’s not that strange. During World War 2, many American companies created subsidiaries to allow collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Companies like Associated Press, Chase Bank, IBM, Coca-Cola, Ford. Those companies that couldn’t do so openly like Coca-Cola just created wartime units like Fanta which were later reincorporated under the parent company after the war. Some companies even received postwar reparations from the government for corporate losses while simultaneously being allowed to profit from wartime business with the enemy.
I don't say it didn't happen before. I know about these occasions and I find it sick how Americans put personal gain ahead of survival of their nation (yes, both in WWII and now stakes were that high).
Those from the West who don't like the truth I'm saying - I am actually Russian, know my country better than you, and I DESPISE every American who supports our regime or just ready to deal with it like with some civilised entity. Fascist dictatorship you deal with has nothing but hatred towards your state and your nation. Every dollar you pay them will come back will to you in form of terror attacks and deaths of your people, directly of through proxy conflicts.
I'm sure during WWII there were anti-Nazi Germans who felt the same for example towards IBM, who had lucrative contracts with the system of concentration camps of Third Reich.
Perhaps I’m cynical or pragmatic or simply a realist, but part of me thinks that the US and its businesses by proxy are able and willing to do business with hostile regimes to gain exposure to markets, capital, and personnel for intelligence purposes.
Wartime makes for strange bedfellows, for example, the collaboration between the US government and the Italian mafia during WW2:
Would you remind when US committed genocide, mass execution of POWs, execution and torture of civilians, mass rape of women and children, and absolutely widespread looting in occupied towns?
I'm waiting.
For the small startups, who don't have time for BS like leetcode, I advise asking the candidate's code first of all.
The senior-level developer almost definitely should have GitHub with his portfolio- or pet-projects. After carefully looking through his code, it becomes 100% clear do we want to talk to him or not. After that we usually had one interview, something like system design + soft-skills. Subjectively, I recall the hiring experience as very successful compared to what I experienced interviewing people for major tech companies according to their guidelines.
There's the rub. Women are disproportionately likely to spend time caring for children and have less free time available for hobbies. Personal projects might be a positive indicator that someone really cares about computing but the projects I've been praised for in interviews make up ~1/500th of the time I've spent developing my skills. It can objectively display the quality of code that a candidate can write but its absence isn't a guarantee that the skills don't exist.
I have a counterexample.
One member of our team tried to adopt Vim as a primary development tool for Python projects, while rest of the team used products of JetBrains. On the course of two months he tried to set up all linters, static analyzers and refactoring tools to keep up with the rest of the team, being the most unproductive developer all this time. When it became clear it won't be better, he was asked not to play cool hacker and use appropriate tools to solve the problem. End of story.
Why "unfortunately"? When space program of basically bigger size North Korea suffers of brain drain and incompetence, it's a good thing by all means (I'm Russian myself)
I mean that what the Russian state as a whole has become—including a space program that once made humanity proud—is unfortunate. The current Russian state (space program included) becoming an international pariah cannot happen soon enough, and I would love to see the other ISS partners think seriously about how to continue without Russia (not easy but doable—main capability that must be duplicated is the ability to reboost the station, which is hardly a big unknown problem).
Software developers tend to love things that give them challenges and material for mental workouts, and it's fine.
However, it has nothing to do with commercial software development, where system architects should think not only about the "coolness" of technology, but also about people who will support the final product. And team leaders think about how hard it would be to hire people who know how (and are willing!) to work with the said "cool technology", and since we are talking about statements like "I have developed a custom software stack designed around memory safety", i.e. non-standard solution with no documentation, (while there are alternatives, where memory safety assumed to be as a pre-requisite, not as an implementation artifact), actually, "close to zero".
I was writing in C and classic C++ for 17 years, and I admit it is fun and challenging to design and implement systems using these tools. However, when in my team we have a library that we're expected to develop and write in C, I rewrite it in modern C++17 (I don't say "in Rust" exactly because of the second reason, but modern C++ is safer than old C by an order of magnitude), and the process rarely takes not more than 1 week. As a result its source code usually becomes about 10 times smaller, implementation faster in 80%, and the team is spared of wasting their time exploring undocumented solutions written decades ago.
