Herval_freire

The interviewer is not thinking logically. How does he know it's a good interview problem? Let's look at the data:

>The fastest I had a candidate solve the entirety of the problem with all bells and whistles was in 20 minutes, by a freshman from the University of Waterloo, the type who did high-school competitions.

>The most depressing failure I saw was a PhD graduate from University of Toronto who could not produce working code for the first section of the problem in 45 minutes.

>I once had a candidate with 15-years work experience give me lots of attitude for asking them such a simple question, while at the same time struggling at it.

All of this data points to the fact that this question may not be good. A phd graduate and a person with 15 years of experience rejected for someone who practices programming for competitions? What gets me is that the data is painting an obvious picture here. A very obvious picture. An obvious picture that we aren't sure what's a good interview and a bad interview question.

But the problem is that most people when looking at this completely miss it. It's not obvious to the interviewer and it's not obvious to alot of people who like google style questions. We literally have not much data and not much science backing any of this up.

It's an illustration of how biased humans are and illustration of how extra biased interviewing for software positions is. If there's anything more unknowingly biased and then the replication crisis in science it's technical interviews for companies. There needs to be real feedback loops that correlate interview question passing with Actual performance.

Google is in a good position to grab this data but I'm not sure they are doing so given how they just okayed this guys gut decision to go against the grain and use this question. I'm not against this question, but certainly to call this great in the face of controversial data that he himself gathered and listed on his post is just a complete blueprint of the extent of human blindness.

The reality of what's going on here is the person here in the interview is just getting off on dominating other people with a hard question. It's not on purpose but he's doing it without realizing it. The blog post in itself is a bit showy. It's like "I can answer this question but a phd graduate can't".

> I believe the reason people keep arguing with you is that you keep saying "must" instead of "my preference is that...".

No. The reason is because a lot of the people on this thread are also people who take these huge photo albums that are full of just random geometry and devoid of animals or people. As with 99% of humanity, people take negative opinions or criticism against them as a personal attack. That's just the way people are. People need to get defensive rather then face a possible reality that their hobby and personal works are just not good.

> and you keep insisting that your ideas "must" be followed.

They don't have to be followed but they "must" be followed for the album to be "good" in the eyes of the general public. There is a shared reality here that exists outside of peoples individual preferences. Good books exist, good movies exist, but also Bad movies exist and horrible books exist that represent a sort of mass social group consensus on a topic. You either acknowledge that reality or you live in a delusional bubble.

I am saying this. For most of these photography albums taken by software engineers that are devoid of people and only contain inanimate objects, most honest people will think those photo albums are boring and not good in general. You can make make a point that I am wrong about this general consensus. That many people actually find those photo albums to be amazing.

But to call me arrogant and disrespectful? That's wrong. I respect everyone, but that does not preclude me from sharing my opinion however negative it is. I will not lie. "Must" is an appropriate all encompassing word here in expressing a general consensus on the topic I am addressing.

Additionally you should know that I have a lot of upvotes on the parent comment because people agree. I have downvotes on some of the branching threads from people who took it personally. Overall the evidence on this thread supports my thesis in that the general population agrees with me.

There is space for placebos in conventional medicine. Doctors CAN and are allowed to prescribe placebos.

However medicine strives to maintain a separation between an actual body of scientific knowledge and placebo treatments. So, yes, while a placebo can be effective nobody is going to transcribe that placebo onto actual scientific knowledge as if it wasn't a placebo.

Right, so antibiotics work as a placebo, but am I going to put that knowledge down into textbooks that antibiotics can cure the common cold just because such knowledge effectively works as a placebo? No.

This is an illustration about not just placebos but how delusional people are.

These are doctors who were taught to be investigative and logical yet they were so delusional they have to say that you were faking the blood that you were coughing up.

A lot of "logical" people like to rag on cults or religious groups but what they don't understand is that delusion is pervasive. Most humans lie to themselves extensively and you dear reader, are likely not an exception.

Take for example the armies of people who told me AI won't ever take over their jobs and chatGPT is just a stochastic parrot. There is merit to both sides of the debate, but I guarantee you a lot of the hostility against AI comes from delusional lies people tell themselves to cover up a possible future trivializes their job skills. Not trying to start an argument on AI here, but I bring this topic up because it's the most current example of mass delusion I can think of. You have to bring up the current delusion to show people how strong the capacity to lie to oneself is.

There is a difference between being scared of taking photos of random strangers versus actually doing it. I would mark you as the former... you're just scared.

Nobody cares. At most they will be slightly annoyed, but ultimately they forget about it in a minute. A lot of people (like you) are just scared of this slight annoyance, your mind over blows it and your behavior becomes controlled by every small thought other people think of you.

Even in countries where it's not culturally appropriate. Often they're just annoyed because of culture, because they grew up and were taught that it's impolite to take pictures. They aren't in actuality annoyed because nothing really happened... and they forget about it quick. Stop being scared, and stop accusing me of choosing to believe things.

Me with my huge ass professional camera? They know and they don't care.

I should generalize the argument with more nuance. Not that a "photo" must have "people".

More accurately an "album" must have "living things". So a collection of photos must contain photos (not all) that have some living thing in it. There are some cases where this rule of thumb doesn't apply but, in general, a good album follows this rule.

It's dead already in the sense that you won't see this stuff published on the news or anything.

As a hobby though I don't think it will ever die. You'll see a lot of this stuff on personal blogs or websites. A lot of software engineers include a photography section on their site.

Totally agree. If that's the goal then great. I'm an introvert myself and I completely relate.

But I do have a desire to produce great photos that meet my own standards of quality and including people is one of my personal standards.

If you've never tried such a thing, I recommend you try at least once to produce an album that includes a lot of photos interspersed with a good amount of people and portraits. Its definitely more uncomfortable to create such an album but personally, for me it enhances the album much more. Just a recommendation from one introvert to another.