austincheney

> Google monetizes search with ads.

Google monetizes search but not with Google ads. This is the primary distinguisher. Its an auction selling space on page for a supplier to provide their own textual content. Google's online advertisement businesses don't sell space on Google pages, but online ad products for other peoples' pages.

Google considers all of this as ad revenue, but distinguishes search from their advertisement products in their revenue filings.

> Search is Google’s most lucrative unit. In 2020, the company generated $104 billion in “search and other” revenues, making up 71% of Google’s ad revenue and 57% of Alphabet’s total revenue.

From your second source. I guess you were conflating ad revenue to online advertisements. Its all ad revenue, but its not all online advertisements.

> No one is working towards degrading performance on purpose

You are not participating in the same interviews that I am then. Most developers know querySelectors, for example, are super slow. They will fight to death to retain them and anybody who suggests any alternative is not compatible for hiring. If they know its slow and deliberately choose to avoid faster alternatives how is that not degrading performance on purpose? How is that not common?

No, its a common misunderstanding of search and tree models. The OS is faster, by a tiny bit, at traversing the file system than my JavaScript application. It is only search that is slower, and dramatically so. I don't have visibility of the OS code so I cannot be certain why that is. I speculate its because the OS is doing too much.

With the DOM querySelectors are dramatically slower than using static methods with arbitrary strings as arguments. This is likely because a query string must be parsed against each child node to determine if the child node is a match to the supplied query. Likewise, modern OSs use ancient conventions to search the file system, such as wildcards, along with more modern advanced search syntax. These are rules that must be parsed against each child artifact from a tree segment. My application deliberately doesn't do that.

To compound matters Windows, don't know about OSX, caches search results so that subsequent searches are a little less slow, which incurs a greater performance penalty on first search. My application doesn't do that either. Each search triggers tree traversal, so its always as fast reading from the file system.

Mentioning any of this during a job interview makes for intriguing conversation with the interviewer. I do detect genuine interest and curiosity from the interviewer. At the same time they know their team will fight to the death at many mention of alternatives to querySelectors and/or JSX, so you have just effectively terminated the interview. Anything there after is purely for the interviewer's personal interests.

I have been doing web work for over 20 years. Everybody claims to care about performance, training, security, and so forth. The only thing that really matters in practice is comfort. Until developers are willing to abandon certain areas of comfort things like performance are only given lip service. In doesn’t matter what they want if they are actively working in opposition. This is performance is a massive incompatibility to hiring.

> Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.

The pandemic affected everybody almost equally by political jurisdiction so demographic stratification suggests there is more to blame in addition to the pandemic. Looking at young children in my area my first blame is convenient access to touchscreens.

A micro service to a localhost node application. There is a file system API in the browser now but it isn’t mature and is highly restricted compared to the terminal.

Why would you suspect that? Are you a JavaScript developer? If so have you seen the terrifying horror on people’s faces when you mention alternatives to querySelectors or that you can write/execute code faster by not using vDOM? Mentioning performance is the fastest way to exit a job interview.

> I also constantly remind myself that "perfect is the enemy of shipped".

That is easy to say as marketing first personality with access to money. In this case shipping anything is critical and you can fix it later.

As a bootstrapped technologist product quality is all you’ve got. If the product isn’t revolutionary then nobody cares and you won’t change their opinion. So, in this case you need to get it mostly right, because you won’t get a second chance at a first impression.

It’s more subtle and monumental than that. Before this JS was already executing at the same speed as Java except for in arithmetic. At this rate of improvement eventually JS will execute much faster than Java in all areas except arithmetic where it will achieve near parity.

I am not seeing any other programming language continuously improve their execution speed this much.

I suspect cheating is not the primary problem. I suspect, like so many other decisions in software, the primary problem is unrealistic and unfounded expectations. This behavior typically comes from unmeasured assumptions that may work well in one narrow circumstance applied into an unrelated circumstance and then blaming the result instead of the decision. This is bias.

Unless there is a solution that directly addresses hiring bias this company will fail like all the others before it for exactly the same reason: their clientele will apply bias (the actual cause of the problem), be unhappy with the result, and then blame the service provider. In sales the client is never wrong, which means the service provider is always wrong. This is why software overspends on recruiters and then invents fantasies like React developers with a year of experience are rare.

Total control by whom? Most financial transactions occur between numerous financial institutions and wiring intermediaries in between. The finance network is far more decentralized than the web even after consideration for things like SWIFT.

Your financial transactions are already tracked by numerous parties. This is neither secret nor suspect. Without visibility over the transfers, distribution, and behaviors therein how would governments and financial institutions account for ethical violations?

There are legal reasons why that does not work. For example consider military separation. A candidate is under no obligation to disclose their military/veteran status. If that candidate then becomes mobilized the federal obligation trumps the commercial obligation. Employee leaves and not only are they separated from the work without any repercussion the employer is required to retain that employee in an unpaid status for at least 5 years unless a rare legal exclusion is met.

There is also pregnancy. An employer cannot terminal an employee for taking time to give birth and taking some more time off immediately after.

These are the two most obvious reasons though I am sure there are many more that they cannot enforce.