Just would like to say I really appreciate your consideration of releasing breaking changes. I know not all libraries can employ your methodology but I wish many more of them would, as a frontend platform engineer.
I had heard about CRISPR a while back but most reporting on it kind of hand waved over the mechanisms of how it actually accomplishes its work. What these researchers have figured out to make this work absolutely blows my mind.
It can make “bad edits” eg off target effects. But in this case there were, as far as is known, none. It’s aided that this was a single nucleotide defect.
They specifically tested for off target edits in the mouse study and found no harmful edits (and very rare off target ones). That plus the specific targeting of the liver cells (no germ line effect expected), makes this a low risk approach and certainly better than doing nothing.
It's not really culture fit. I've used the open ended test before and it was a good filter for "can they walk the walk". Just some basic text processing, but only few people cared to mention error checking, tested Unicode behaviour, included any documentation, etc. It's "will you do the usual things without explicit prompting". (The assignment explicitly said you can call them out as something to do without fully implementing to save time)
Yes on this: It reminds me of when candidates ask me how they did at the end of the interview. It shows an extreme lack of decorum and empathy. What if you did terribly and I wouldn't hire you in a million years? Do you really want me to tell you that?
There's no good answer and asking a question like that shows real narcissism imo.
Conversely, if you can't handle some straightforward feedback to a candidate that took the time to interview you without violating decorum or hurting their feelings, then how can I expect you to be a good manager or supervisor? How are you possibly going to be able to handle minor personnel conflicts or provide guidance during the training period? It comes across as a complete lack of basic managerial skills.
Okay, but basic interpersonal skills are a prerequisite for anybody in a senior or team lead position, or any position that will involve code reviews.
I'm sympathetic to how awkward it can feel to provide honest feedback to a candidate, but look: we're all people here. I think we forget that sometimes when we're assembling hiring processes. As a candidate, you need some kind of feedback mechanism that allows you to improve even if you're not a good fit for a particular organization. And if you're involved in the hiring process in any way, you ought to be equipped to handle that.
> you need some kind of feedback mechanism that allows you to improve even if you're not a good fit for a particular organization
"Need". That is a strong term. I disagree. It would be nice, but it is not a need.
This topic has been discussed ad nauseam on HN. In most companies, there is specific company policy that prohibits providing feedback to candidates. There is literally no upside for these companies to provide feedback to candidates that they reject (except Fake/Feel-Good Internet Points, only redeemable on HN forums). Really: There is no way around it, no matter how many tears are spilled about it on HN.
This is simply a defense of bad policy couched in unnecessarily dehumanizing language.
There is widespread resentment of this and many other common hiring practices in the tech sector, and that is further impacting both the quality of candidates as well as employee motivation and satisfaction. The upside for companies is higher quality candidates whose first experience with the company is a hiring process that makes the candidate want to work there.
I broadly agree with this being an unfortunate outcome but you do understand that making candidates who failed your interview want to work at your company is fundamentally limited in how much it actually helps you. Yes, yes, I know some of them may come back and pass the next time, or they tell their friends about how you were super nice and gave them great feedback, but this is pretty rare. If you're doing this, you're doing it out of the goodness of your heart, not because it helps your recruiting pipeline. And, even though I agree with the idea of providing feedback, assuming that people will have positive feelings when you tell them why you didn't accept them is misguided. I have friends who I know personally that have gotten interview feedback and not taken it well. Of course I tell them to shut up and stop poisoning the well for everyone else, but the point is that this is largely not the picture you are presenting it as.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Providing constructive feedback to a candidate is unlikely to have a direct positive impact on the relationship between that specific candidate and that specific company. It's more of ... whatever the opposite of the tragedy of the commons is. A policy that, if improved, would broadly improve the quality of many candidates for many companies.
Companies have been optimizing for candidates that are an immediate ideal cultural and technological fit. They are all competing for candidates that are the idealized developer, with perfect social skills, a brilliant CV, and deep technical experience that is an exact match for whatever the company is doing at the moment.
That's fine and rational and all, but a necessary consequence of this is that that pool is quite small and there are lots of companies competing for those people. Meanwhile, there are a lot of very good candidates who are underemployed because they aren't getting the opportunity or resources needed to become those idealized employees. This is a game theory outcome where both parties are optimizing themselves into a losing position.
I've been employed in this industry, off and on, for a long time. I assure you that companies didn't always behave this way. There has been a clear, obvious, and severe decline in the hiring experience, and these policies are hurting the entire industry.
It's generally socially frowned-upon to go on a couple of dates with someone and then ghost them. It happens, but it's not considered good practice. We recognize that it's cruel but also leads to a more cynical, detached, overall worse dating experience for everyone. Saying "I don't think this will work out, you seem nice but you're not what I'm looking for right now" is difficult and awkward, but it's also a necessary skill that needs to be maintained. Sometimes people don't react well, but that doesn't make it less necessary: it closes a feedback loop that ultimately allows earnest people who are looking for relationships to learn and grow and become better candidates for the next relationship.
I agree, but my point is that the tragedy of the commons here is more divorced than usual. Companies can barely understand that doing layoffs hurts morale, and that connection is really easy to demonstrate. Trying to convince them that taking on some liability for a slightly better applicant pool seems difficult.
> In most companies, there is specific company policy that prohibits providing feedback to candidates. There is literally no upside for these companies to provide feedback to candidates that they reject
This is the long and short of it.
In the US at least, discrimination laws are expansive. You can -very- easily end up saying something that violates this and putting your company at risk, no matter how good hearted you were attempting to be.
How do you "accidentally" end up saying something that implicates you in discrimination on the basis of legally protected characteristics - what are some examples of that?
This has always felt like an excuse used by people who who just don't want to be caught in their own lies when asked to come up with a real, non-discriminatory reason.
The other comments gave good answers. A lot of people think it means saying something horrible and racist or something, but not at all.
As one pointed out, there's a "well you said it was X, but person Y who got hired did that too. And they're a different race or gender or religion, so that leads me to believe discrimination."
There's also you trying to be helpful, saying something along the line of "well you hesitated a bit and sounded unsure in your answers", only to find out they have some disability that caused that and now have admitted you're discriminating based on it.
Maybe you'll say "well, if I had known, I wouldn't have noticed it or cared." And a lot of candidates would likely say as much up front. But they don't have to tell you about it at all. See how that creates a weird dynamic?
Is it common? Probably not. But it obviously happened or else such rules wouldn't exist. It's one of those things that the bad actors ruin it for everybody. Bigots are never going to admit their reasons - good people will. But bad people will always try to take advantage, regardless.
I think it's more of a case for legal and HR being conservative and super defensive. Not sure if you've ever handled a contract with an internal lawyer, but in my experience they often go for crazy suggestions that the other side would never accept for the sake of protecting the company as much as possible. Might be the same here - HR/legal being super protective and the hiring manager not caring enough to fight back.
> How do you "accidentally" end up saying something that implicates you in discrimination on the basis of legally protected characteristics - what are some examples of that?
Say you say it was for failure to meet a specific performance standard (because that is the documented reason); then the ex-employee has a starting point for an discrimination claim by looking for evidence that trnds to support the claim that people who differ on some protected-from-discrimination axis who failed to meet that standard were not fired. No reason given, no starting point. In theory, this policy helps make false nuisance claims more work and less likely, but a substantive reason for it is that HR knows that they cannot eliminate all prohibited acts by managers that would create liability, so making it harder to get a starting point for gathering evidence is important to prevent valid claims from materializing. HR policy does not exist to protect employees from unlawful treatment, it exists to protect the company from liability for such treatment. Sometimes thise two interests align, but when it comes to information about firing decisions they do not.
There’s similar things that can be done with other prohibited reasons for dismissal, loke retaliation; but the idea is any information you give makes it easier for them to make a case against you.
This is also, in reverse, why, as a departing employee (whether departing voluntarily or not), you should never participate in an exit interview or, if you must as a condition of some severance or other pay or benefit, never volunteer any information beyond the bare minimum necessary; one significant purpose of such interviews is to document information useful either for potential claims against you or to defend against any potential claims you might have, including those you have not yet discovered, against the company.
Part of it is, if anything can be taken slightly out of context to imply something discriminatory, there are those who will abuse the system and sue. At a large enough scale this can become a real problem. If the company policy is "never say anything" there's nothing to be taken out of context, reducing the chance of a lawsuit.
I bet you this comes back to insurance, as many things do in the corporate world. Sufficiently large companies probably have insurance coverage for discrimination lawsuits, or at least employment disputes in general. The coverage probably costs less if you have a "no feedback" policy.
Who are you trusting as a technical interviewer if you don't already trust them to give negative feedback internally?
Do you not code review? Are you a rubber stamp "LGTM" shop that should just be pushing to main but cargo culted the ceremony because github has it built in?
I had someone email me after being rejected at the final round of an interview. "Everything seemed to mesh just perfectly, and I'm at a loss to understand."
I broke it down for them. "This was nothing to do with you, and we would have had no objection to hiring you. However, the candidate who beat you out simply had more domain experience in XYZ area" and went on to say "For what it's worth, we had 500+ applications, of which we in-depth reviewed 100 resumes, had 40 first-round interviews, 15 second-round, and three final round."
They emailed me back to express appreciation and that though this didn't work out, it renewed their confidence to know they didn't "mess something up".
Since then, if we're at that point in a process and I'm rejecting you, I'll at least give you something to work with.
This is so important for people to understand, and its why I give people feedback.
People, being humans and prone to pattern seeking, assume that if they didn't get the job, it's something specific they did, or failed to do.
And sometimes, that's true. But for a lot of candidates, it just came down to another candidate being slightly better, or slightly cheaper, or some combination of value markers.
A lot of my interview feedback comes down to "I don't see any reason you wouldn't be a good fit, but we have other interviews and it's going to come down to value."
Some people will take this as me saying "Don't ask for what you're worth," or "we're gonna low-ball your salary." The reality is, we're a business, and if I can produce the same widget with person X or person Y and person X costs 10K less a year, I'm going with person X. Every time.
Yes we want to know. Framing this as an empathy issue when in reality you're just to afraid to be honest or afraid of any kind of conflict IS an empathy issue. At that point they're not a person. They're an annoyance that you want gone immediately.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I deliberately ask how I did because it helps me weed out interviewers who think like this. Not so much "how did I do?" as "now we're close to the end of the interview, do you think we're a good fit for each other?" I give my own feedback and talk honestly about points of friction.
I interview pretty well, but if I go into an interview with a company that wants hungry hustlers and I've spent the whole interview talking about kindness and team spirit, or if you think I don't know enough pl/pgsql to deal with your gnarly legacy backend, or I'm getting the vibe that none of the engineers seem to like working here, then we need to speak honestly about that.
No need. Just walk away. Remember: You are interviewing them, just as they are interviewing you. Any company worth its weight will not allow red flags to leak into the interview process, e.g., "getting the vibe that none of the engineers seem to like working here". So many times, I have reached the final round of an interview process, met the senior manager... and thought: "Barf, I don't want to work for that person. What a waste of my time."
I know I'm interviewing them. That's why we need to talk.
If they wanted to hire me enough to interview me, but at the end of a half-day of interviewing I'm going to walk away without a job, then they need to rewrite their position description so I know not to apply, deal with their morale problem, or directly ask me how much PL/pgSQL I've done. We both stand to benefit from talking about how the interview went.
But you also need to factor in their position in the situation right?
Like suppose they do hate their job. Do you expect them to speak that plainly and honestly to every candidate who asks "So how do you like working here?" and risk getting that posted to the front page of HN?
You're asking them to risk their own livelihood so you get a better signal for your own job search, that doesn't seem like a proportional trade to me.
Obviously I'm not advocating for complete opaqueness, but your interviewer is hardly ever in a good position to part with their true feelings towards questions like "How did I do compared to other candidates? How is it truly working here?"
I've basically almost always given direct and obvious non-answer to the first question: "I cannot tell you right now, because I'll need to write down and collate my thoughts. And I'm not allowed to share feedback directly, so your recruiter will be in touch with the feedback afterwards."
> What if you did terribly and I wouldn't hire you in a million years? Do you really want me to tell you that?
Yes, that sounds like extremely valuable feedback.
Why do you suppose asking a question like that shows narcissism? To me it shows a willingness to infest feedback to improve.
I will add the caveat that if someone asked me that in an interview I would likely give a non-answer because I’m not totally sure what all I’m even allowed to say.
A simple request for feedback is not evidence of narcissism or lack of empathy. Could be anxiety. Could be curiosity. Could be zeal. Could be any number of things. It's certainly not an "extreme lack of decorum" though.
It's okay to avoid giving feedback if you don't want to. I can think of a few ways to answer that question in a neutral or positive fashion to defuse the situation and legally protect the company.
Not to mention there are legal liabilities with sharing interview performance with candidates. "Oh but the interviewers told me I did extremely well on their interviews. Therefore it must be the case that I was rejected because of ${protected attribute X}."
Really?? I always appreciated candidates that would ask that at the end - being willing to step aside from the pretense of professionalism to ask a real question and listen to my answer is a signal to me that this is someone who is willing to be real with me, not pretentious or perfunctory.
I do get what you’re saying, but I disagree, there is a good answer; and as is often the case, it’s an honest one.
> asking a question like that shows real narcissism imo.
Precisely the opposite. Asking for criticism and genuinely being interested in what others think of you with the goal of taking the feedback on board and improving is the polar opposite of typical narcissistic behavior. As far as I'm aware that sort of self-reflection is inherently incompatible with NPD.
It sort of works like pseudo-science and woo. It sounds impressive and even plausible but at the end of the day, it's asserting something unknowable as though it were truth, but is largely a product of projection.
Nevertheless, I can still read and appreciate it from _that_ perspective because it's always interesting to me to hear how others see the world.
There's something glibly poetic about having finally found a way to convert lead into gold, but it turns out it's much more efficient and lucrative to build tons of graphics cards and power them and consume tons of water to create digital currencies for what is essentially numerous pyramid schemes.
Gotta say, Animal Crossing during Covid was a god send. I spent a lot of time in that game just putzing around and taking in the world. I'm not traditionally a person who enjoys those types of games, but the routine of hopping in every morning while I had coffee and every evening while I was winding down really lowered my stress level during an exceptionally stressful time in everyone's lives.
As much as it was a meme, I really did see a split in what folks enjoyed between Doom and Animal Crossing during covid, and they basically boiled down to the same thing: yeah, this game is so relaxing, I just turn my brain off and play.
Doom: all flow state, no thoughts, just execution.
Animal Crossing: cozy, comfortable, routine.
Funny how both accomplish similar things despite being so different on the surface.
Warzone became my friend groups defacto 3rd space during covid, and I don't love shooters but the game loop had considerable down time where you were just exploring the massive map with friends while preparing, and able to chat like you were at a cafe or a pub. We had lockdowns here, so that social interaction was so important.
After the lockdowns people slowly drifted back into normality, full time work etc, and we all stopped playing together.
It feels a bit like LLMs rely a lot on _us_ to be useful. Which is a big point to the author's article about how companies are trimming off staff for AI.
We've frozen hiring (despite already being under staffed) and our leadership has largely pointed to advances in AI as being accelerative to the point that we shouldn't need more bodies to be more productive. Granted it's just a personal anecdote but it still affects hundreds of people that otherwise would have been hired by us. What reason would they have to lie about that to us?
You're taking a sliver of truth as though it dismantles their entire argument. The point was, nobody was _claiming_ databases would cure all diseases. That's the argument around the hype of AI here.
I've found that putting arguments into simple, general terms tends to make people rethink their positions.
I had an argument with my dad a while back about single payer health care. A lot of people on the left might frame it like "don't you think everyone is entitled to access to health services?" But an idea like this is like nails on a chalkboard to my dad, who believes everything should be merit based, even access to health care.
Instead, phrasing it as "wouldn't you prefer it if we paid the same amount of money every month and when we go to the hospital we don't have to worry about any out of pocket costs?" This really nailed the point home to him. It's not about entitlements or whatever. It's about people not being destroyed financially by bad health. We skip over the feely stuff, we skip over the specifics of cost. We can both agree that this mechanism makes a lot of sense for most people, and the current system is rather arbitrary.
Anyway, he's still firmly a MAGA trumper but I do think on the aspect of health care, he does see single payer as a viable alternative.
> Instead, phrasing it as "wouldn't you prefer it if **we** paid the same amount of money every month and when we go to the hospital we don't have to worry about any out of pocket costs?" This really nailed the point home to him.
I can already hear the nails on this one, because the goal has now been camouflaged.
Nowhere in that statement is there an allowance for people to not pay into the system: Everyone is forced to pitch in, even if they don't want to. An exit door must be available, no exceptions.
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