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Ah, yes, purposefully waste people's time. Fuck them, right?

I've seen this kind of attitude before, and it's usually justified with something about how the companies don't respect your time so why should you respect theirs. The thing is... the kind of people at these companies who don't care about your time are the kind of people who would do something like this.


Sorry if I misunderstand you, but are you saying that it's wrong to interview for practice because it's wasting the company's time?

Interesting, never thought about this. I think I disagree though; these are the people who (usually) play games with you and put you through some very stressful situation during the interview. I think candidates should be able to practice in a low stakes environment, i.e. one where they can't lose because they didn't really want the job. It's only fair.

I'm not a great interviewer, but I always ask why the candidate is looking for a job, and more than once they've admitted they weren't actively looking but just testing the waters, and I didn't hold it against them...


> ...these are the people who (usually) play games with you...

I don't think this even matters, to be honest. Not only is interviewing good for you personally (as you said), but also lets the company gauge the talent pool in the job market a bit better.

Furthermore, if you have a positive experience with the company, there is precisely nothing stopping you from recommending it to your friends, should they be looking for work.

However, for the most part i agree with you in response to the previous commenter's post - interviewing is good in general, even when you don't need a job at that exact time. There's also the possibility of just reaching out afterwards, if the situation changes.


Even if you are just practicing, it's still an opportunity for the company to convince you to change your mind.


> Ah, yes, purposefully waste people's time. Fuck them, right?

as an interviewer, i'm far more concerned about the time spent sorting through piles of resumes from people who are just rolling the dice, and didn't read the job posting / aren't qualified.

maybe upper management cares about the time spent, but i'd be happy to talk for 45-60 minutes to somebody who was an even remotely passable candidate who didn't actually want a job.


Yeah, getting a company to schedule a full onsite interview panel is a big time investment, and lame if there's zero chance of it going anywhere. If some random person emails me asking for advice on how to practice relevant skills or prepare for an interview, though, I'll schedule a video chat right away and talk for hours if they want. I'll also hop on a call a few days after rejecting someone and give them detailed feedback if they want.


> maybe upper management cares about the time spent, but i'd be happy to talk for 45-60 minutes to somebody who was an even remotely passable candidate who didn't actually want a job.

Yup. If the job I've got for them is any good, if the company is good, and if I am good, they might turn into a hire anyway. That a qualified person doesn't need the job does not rule them out. It raises the bar and reminds us that interviewing goes both ways.


Whiteboarding will continue until morale improves.


I fail to understand how you equate "Go on interviews even when you don't need a job." with "waste people's time." The idea is to interview when you don't need a job so that you can easily negotiate for the best possible offer. If they won't beat your current compensation or benefits you can say "thanks but no thanks" and if they can you can say "I'd be delighted!" Nobody's time is wasted - the hiring company just has a higher bar to meet to entice you to join their team. If anyone's time is wasted it's yours when they can neither make a competitive offer nor help you to improve your skills in the interview.

If you've only ever interviewed when you were desperate to take the first job that comes along then you're almost certainly under-compensated. Anyone who's not taking a better job when they get the chance is leaving money on the table.


I would argue that you understand the relationship between an alligator and a water buffalo immediately... Now your brain is turning it into language to come up with words like "predator/prey" or "hidden danger" or whatever. But the abstract relationship did not require language before your brain started to reason about it. I think it's the other way around.


Reason, perhaps. Reason via internal monologue... that's the part related to this theory.


I'm multilingual. Growing up, friends asked me which language I think in. The answer is "neither". I can produce sentences in my brain in either language if I want, but it's strange to me that anyone would feel that thoughts are in any particular language.

I would feel incredibly limited if all my thoughts had to be synthesized into a language before they could be acted on. In fact, i often struggle to find words to express ideas that I can perfectly think about.


> it's strange to me that anyone would feel that thoughts are in any particular language.

Not all thoughts, but many are. They've done studies where they've tested people's critical thinking and asked that they use their native tongue, and a second language in which they're fluent.

Turns out you're more rational and dispassionate when thinking in a second language, where in your native language you engage more of your emotional centres and are more likely to fall prey to common cognitive biases.

Obviously not all thoughts or thinking need to be expressed this way, but language can be a tool to organize and direct thought.


Surely that is dependent on the language?

I loved learning Spanish because I found myself using a more emotional style of talking (paralinguistics).

And watching an Italian friend who had English as a second language, it was weird to see them be gesturally and vocally much more boring when speaking English (I think picking up on the more dry language usage here in NZ).


I don't think it's so much about how you express yourself, as much as it is about how you have more deeply rooted associations with words and phrases in your native tongue.

On Language Processing Shaping Decision Making, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/096372141668026...

Emotionality Differences Between a Native and Foreign Language: Implications for Everyday Life, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721414566268


"In fact, i often struggle to find words to express ideas that I can perfectly think about."

Same. I'm curious about what's happening here - sometimes visual thinking, sometimes kinesthetic, maybe a mix?


Is this your idea of a positive comment? "It's happening no matter what!"


I think he means a comment in support of Copilot's advancements and not one criticizing its kinks.


Speak for yourself. My family is busy, and we don't like to plan -- we just decide to do something and do it. So a scheduled routine would feel like a horrible anchor to us.


While I'm definitely not going to say that it would benefit everyone, I think it's almost everyone while the relevant kid is in college. It's a lot easier to plan for a slot in your calendar as "Dad time" than to constantly reevaluate whether Dad is more important than XYZ random thing you have on the docket.


Once it’s a routine you don’t have to plan. And being busy is a good reason to have it as part of your routine.


I'd have thought that I'd have heard of this if there were legit evidence

Changes to DNA would be the long term changes, not RNA. But yes, look up epigenetics, and especially DNA methylation.


This might be a reason why the immune system is kept outside from the brain.


Undoubtedly. But saying conflicts with France significantly affected the outcome of the American Revolution is a far cry from saying the Revolution was essentially part of the conflicts between Britain and France, as if the Revolution was some kind of proxy war. That's just not true. France piled on, and the conflict with France helped set things up, but the colonies had legitimate beef with Britain and walked the path toward revolution without having to be nudged by the French.


What's incorrect about the American "founding myth"? Please explain what role France played in the disagreement about taxes between the colonists and the crown?


Mentally insert "under the assumption that these are myths", if that makes you feel better. I have no interest in getting derailed into an essentially irrelevant conversation.


I'm curious to see the curricula that are teaching this incorrect rubbish.

What role did France play in the Boston Tea Party? I'm not aware of any at all. Certainly France jumped in once they saw the opportunity happening, but the idea that the revolution was really part of the conflict with France is just wrong.


Also define "computational statistics". It'll be fun to try and fail to draw a clear line between the two.


A common tech-bro fallacy. We understand exactly what is happening at the base level of a statistics package. We can point to the specific instructions it is undertaking. We haven't the slightest understanding of what "intelligence" is in the human sense, because it's wrapped up with totally mysterious and unsolved problems about the nature of thought and experience more generally.


The fallacy is the god-of-the-gaps "logic" of assuming there's some hand-wavey phenomenon that's qualitatively different from anything we currently understand, just because reality has so much complexity that we are far from reproducing it. You're assuming there's a soul and looking for it, even though you don't call it that.

Intelligence is mysterious in the same way chemical biology is mysterious (though perhaps to another degree of complexity)... It's not mysterious in the way people getting sick was mysterious before germ theory. There's no reason to think there's some crucial missing phenomenon without which we can't even reason about intelligence.


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