Peroni

This is a fantastic post.

>From my admittedly anecdotal and narrow point of view, once you clear a baseline of competence, your willingness to do the work takes you much further than knowing a bit more.

From my own, 15+ years of experience focusing entirely on this problem, point of view, I can't emphasise enough how much I agree with this principle. Finding people who are technically capable of doing the job isn't hard. Finding people who can do the job well, that actively make doing the job more rewarding is much more difficult and no technical assessment on earth can screen for that.

>Nobody should burn tokens for a company that hasn’t had a proper conversation with them yet.

PREACH! This same sentiment applies to all tasks that you expect candidates to do during an interview process. If you want them to put in the work, get buy in first. You get that buy in by having conversations with them and helping them understand why they should care about your company and your opportunity in the first place.

I honestly have no notes on this post other than to encourage you to hold on to your current way of approaching the problem because I promise you, you are absolutely on the right track!

'committed suicide' is leftover from a time when suicide was considered a crime. 'Dying by suicide' is more accurate and more empathetic.

I once asked a high-ranking Meta trust & safety employee why they don't just block paid ads that include telegram links and the short version of the incredible mental gymnastics they went through was "identifying telegram links is hard".

'normies' is, and has always been, self-deprecating. We (people who use HN, et al) are 'nerds' and 'geeks' who understand tech beyond the surface layer and can immediately see the downside to using things like Muse. We're significantly in the minority, hence we're not 'normal'.

I think that's a reasonable part of the assessment but the focus is primarily on the candidates understanding of the output and essentially their ability to QA the output.

The better way existed before AI existed. Take-home tasks were always poor attempts to find a measure for technical ability. Pairing exercises or live problem-solving tasks were, and still are, vastly more effective. If your team uses AI for those challenges on the job, then the people you interview should too.

The measure should always be the quality of a solution a candidate produces in response to a problem, not how they got to the solution. If you want to dive into the 'how' then what you're actually measuring is communication, something AI is still pretty bad at.

I like it! The 'skill focus' prep appears to be the only way to improve my skill attributes but despite choosing that for each tournament in early season, it doesn't appear to have any permanent effect on my attributes.

>At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift ... even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.

The point of going to the gym isn't to make it easier to lift heavy things at work, it's for self-improvement.

>The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks... I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers.

I'm sorry but why are we assuming that any of those things are 'critical' skills? I think there's already a strong argument that the need for those skills in the workplace are declining.

There doesn't have to be commercial gain for it to be promotion. The distinction is promotion vs contribution. If you view HN as a community and all you're doing is saying "look at the thing I made" rather than actively engaging with the community as a whole, then your contribution value to the community is low.

The HN algo is intentionally obscure to prevent people from gaming the system. For example, if there's a bunch of traffic going directly to the discussion link, it will heavily punish the weighting of the post as it's assumed the OP is sharing the link to farm upvotes. There's a bunch of other black magic involved in the HN ranking system so to try and understand it based on numbers alone is a waste of time.

Depends on a whole bunch of factors. Location, growth stage, product industry, and funding are the main influencers.

Location - Assuming you're not based somewhere obscure, there'll be endless compensation reports, benchmarks, glassdoor data, etc available as a starting point.

Growth stage - How you compensate people when there are three people in the company is immensely different to when there are 20 people, 120 people, 500 people, etc. Equity is more important at the earlier stages but with everything going on in the world, don't assume equity alone will be sufficient to win people over.

Product industry - Some of this is location specific but different product industries pay different premiums. In the UK for example, FinTech pays more than most areas of tech, gaming pays less than most.

Funding - If you're sitting on a ridiculous amount of funding, then you need to lean into paying as far above average as possible. One thing that doesn't and probably never will change is that the more you pay people, the easier it is to hire. Obviously the less funding you have, the less you have to spend on comp but see my point above in growth stage.

16 years and counting.

Recruiters (internal and external) rarely actually look at any of your personal projects. The more experienced you are, the less relevant your personal projects are to a recruiter unless you've created some well known OS work. For less experienced engineers, the approach is relatively similar.

It's difficult to put much value in your personal projects without some form of social or commercial validation. Essentially, personal projects that aren't being used by anyone but you hold little to no value in terms of resume content.

It can be both too. It's entirely possible to protect a companies best interests and promote employee well-being.

Yeah I read it but it doesn't help me understand why it's considered bad UX, hence why I asked for clarification.