From my interview at facebook some four years ago, I am inclined to believe they disable intelisense so the candidates do not get tangled up in the minutiae of language syntax, function arguments, etc. and instead focus on the algorithm they are trying to write.
Except you get dinged on your performance if your code doesn't run once the interviewer has a chance to test it after the interview. And getting dinged generally means rejection in today's economy.
I actually got a google doc interview where they asked me to code up a hyperparamater optimizer from scratch. I couldn’t believe that they asked me to code in a google doc. I should have stopped the interview right there.
It's not "decent problem solving" that these folks demonstrate though, it's the ability to grasp and regurgitate common DSA patterns that show up in most leetcode style interviews. Does this ability make these people highly desirable hires? Should you hire such people over engineers with more real world knowledge, but who don't want to spend the time learning or practicing leetcode?
Probably because you said you "can solve the majority of leetcode hard problems in under an hour". That could easily give the impression that you have practiced them. If you haven't practiced them, then how do you know you can solve them?
Neuroplasticity is a thing though, with plenty of cases of brains recovering from pretty significant damage. They also do evolve and adjust over time to gradual changes in environment. Lots of elderly people are keeping up with cultural and technological change.
You'd think, but this is actually no longer true since the pandemic. Most startups are remote-friendly, but being remote removes a lot of the networking opportunities that used to be part of the startup experience.
I feel like being an fte at a startup is an even worse proposition than before.
When do the greater communities need to pay their dues?
Schools cost money to run but taxpayers balk and cry over every cent increase. There are crumbling schools with toxic air and water that lack adequate HVAC paying their teachers unlivable salaries. This is the result of neglect to preserve and invest which is a condemnation of those who allowed such neglect on their watch when they should have championed such plights before they reached these new heights.
Teachers can literally be miracle workers but that makes no difference if the communities their students return to undervalue education or lack the resources to foster healthy environments to grow and learn in. Broken communities create broken school districts.
This goes back to the point I make in another comment on this page. We must invest in underperforming communities to bring them up to the average if we want to see improvements. This necessarily requires such difficult conversations like the poor Hispanic or black majority cities getting some of the education tax from rich white suburbs or something to the same effect.
Schools in the US cost more than schools in any other developed nation.
Every institution in the US has been taken over by careerists and credentialists who produce nothing of value and are a drain on the system.
For a simple example in our area look at twitter: we were told the servers would catch fire, the end times will be upon us and cats will live with dogs. Instead the servers kept chugging along just as well as they did before with a 20th the staff.
At this point everything is so bad I'd support sortition for every public managerial position. You can't do worse than what we have today.
As an anecdote on the topic of education, as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in rural South Korea in the 1970s, I routinely visited secondary schools that (at the time) were little more than drab warehouses for large (-70 students/class) using ragged textbooks and ancient furniture. Spirits were high, though, and these farm kids were successfully learning math through basic differential calculus plus a daunting array of other subjects.
Thereafter, I have only felt (perhaps unfairly) mild contempt for the perennial whining of US critics who blame low funding for educational failing in the public schools. In my opinion the blame lies elsewhere, starting with the family.
A quote I once heard applies here. "All a preacher needs is 4 walls and the good book, and willing souls"
For most of school, all you need is paper and pens and a place where to meet. A notebook costs a dollar. You can also do quite a bit of lab science prior to college at home, and music only adds the cost of the instrument.
I have done tutoring in parks and coffee shops and in some of those sessions seen more learning than the most expensive classroom.
It's about the kids and the teachers, not the campus.
If you want a really really good school at a really low price, eliminate the building and all support functions other than hiring new teachers, and redirect all of the extra money to teachers salaries. Then just meet in libraries, parks, coffee shops, and the houses of parents and teachers.
99% of the outcome comes from the teachers (being competent) and the students (being motivated).
If all data sources indicate that domestic culture is the single biggest differentiator to educational attainment, who are you suggesting we blame besides the stewards of said domestic culture?
Go to school, get good grades, don't borrow money, look after your health, get a job, be polite, pay your taxes - these are all the fundamentals of a good culture and are massively predictive of success. Lots of this advice is millennia old. It's not the role of a liberal government to culturally indoctrinate its people.
I'm sorry I also don't have sources for the fact that water is wet and the sky is blue.
If you think that every major project from federal to local government being delivered over budget, behind schedule and with fewer capabilities than promised is a dog whistle I have a perfectly functional bridge in Baltimore to sell you.
How can society justify spending more on the same institutions that have miserable outcomes?
In the private sector, less revenue forces belt-tightening, purchasing software and tools that enhance productivity, and ultimately bankruptcy if it can't work. Where in the public sector is anyone held accountable for failure? When will we accept that simply throwing more money down the pit won't solve what is a multi-faceted issue that primarily isn't about money?
The families need money. Kids from impoverished and broken homes make poor students that ruin the experience for the everyone in the school. Their misery is contagious. Throwing it at schools won’t solve it because teachers are doing everything they can to support kids but teachers have no control outside the school day. Increase foster care budgets and social welfare programs. If America can afford Musk naziposting on Twitter we can afford to eliminate poverty, hunger, homelessness, and untreated /under treated medical conditions.
My wife's family fostered and the only thing that happens is the kids eventually get sent back to the families. Even families who have abused the kids multiple times. We don't have an answer to kids from bad families. The state can't overcome bad parents.
Anecdote is not data. States cannot afford (in dollars and beds) house every kid they are justified in taking from guardians. Increase the budgets until they can and fund solutions that reduce violence against children. Not as easy as just hand waving about bad parents and might also require evaluating your prejudices.
Two of the kids later died in parental custody after being returned. I'm not sure what prejudices I should evaluate. My experience is that Indiana CPS has a hard job and can't get it right in a lot of cases. We don't have a vast array of foster parents ready to handle kids with a lot of issues nor do we really have orphanages anymore. You number 1 most import part of life is having good parents who care for you regardless of their means there isn't a system that can fix that.
There is no amount of money you can pay someone to make them genuinely love a child. Employees do a job, you can throw money at the same employees, or more employees, but children need better parents.
Maybe we should be investing ways to get parents to go to church? They would turn into better people.
You’re joking right? How many religious officials have been convicted for child sex abuse? I’ve lost count. Churches are social control and tax evasion devices. Their positive impact on communities is grossly outweighed by the harms.
For an article about generative AI/UI, there sure is a lot of talk about recommendations and predictions.
As another side note, the idea of a UI that changes every time you open the site/app is, frankly, ridiculous. Not sure what kind of UX researcher or even user would want that. Seems like a saner approach would be one of two worlds below:
1) Each app has a carefully designed foundation on top of which user-customizable components exist. This is already common, sans GenAI-powered component creation.
2) There is no longer a concept of an "app." Users instead interact primarily with a smorgasbord of APIs, via their highly personalized but temporally consistent, AI-assisted personal OS.
We already had a considerable subset of the required APIs exposed in Web 2.0 times. I don't see it coming back any time soon, despite the integration work it enabled being lots of fun and also genuinely useful.
"As another side note, the idea of a UI that changes every time you open the site/app is, frankly, ridiculous."
That's what we have now, already. GenUI would be the opposite, where if you wanted, the UI could never change and it would stay the same if thats what you want.
Totally agree the concept of apps will break down.
Websites have spent the last 20 years removing user customizable functionality (think RSS feeds and making API private). While the tech may be possible, I don't see this being a reality without a major reversal in app development philosophies.
Companies want to control what you see so they can control their revenue. Why would they want to expose their data and utility to UIs where they have limited ability to monetize?
Technically possible now, I suppose. If you're Google and have the analytics, you could make a standard site layout and munge every site into that format based on usage data. Neat idea.
Facebook to this day disables intellisense in their coderpad interviews.
It's fucked up.
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