h02

Common sense is not so common

This may sound old-fashioned, but parents can say no. Deciding what our children may do and what they have access to is part of being a parent. We don’t have to let them do whatever they want and then lament the results.

I recognise that it’s easier to establish these habits early. Our children are still toddlers, so we haven’t yet faced the challenges of parenting teenagers, but they rarely have access to screens because we deliberately restrict it. Even Steve Jobs limited his children’s use of technology at home. Recognising the problem ought to lead to setting and enforcing limits, not treating our children’s access to these devices as inevitable.

Rolf Dobelli wrote an excellent book on this topic called "Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life". He addresses directly many of the objections raised in these comments.

Just wait until you find out that Tier 1 only gives you up to 250 requests a day, and if you want more than that you'll have had to have spent over $250 in Google Cloud spend, and your first payment has to be more than 30 days ago. I was going to build my side project using Gemini 3 Pro, but gave up after that.

Resumes still filter out "bad" candidates. "Good" resumes just doesn't actually mean someone is good. Like I said, plenty of people with 20 years of experience who can't do something a junior developer can do easily.

I agree the system needs change but I don't have the answers for how to change it, hence why I said it's the million dollar question. Best we can do is try to make improvements.

> If you can't tell how good a programmer is by his resume, then....why the does everybody use resumes to try to do it???

I'm wondering at this point if you've ever hired for an engineering position before...

Lots of assumptions here, but we don't use keyword filtering.

> you'll filter out all geniuses who decided that 4 years at Amazon is enough for anybody and wants to make a move. Geniuses with 4 years of experience are probably working at Google for 400k+ salaries and are outside of our hiring range.

You have to prioritize time and when you get 500 people with < 5 years experience and 499 of them are not geniuses, it's not easy to find the needle in the haystack.

> I hate to put it in such stark terms, but if your assessment is ruling out good programmers and letting through bad programmer(s), its worthless. You need replace it with something that actually works.

It's a difficult balance because if it's made easier then it lets through more bad ones and if it's made harder it potentially filters out more good ones.

Yes, but we can't possibly interview 1000+ people, so we have to filter it somewhat based on what they give us: their resume. If you can build me a tool that can find in a stack of 1000 resumes a genius then I'd like to start a company with you and we can make a lot of money together.

Basic requirement is at least 5 years of professional experience. Most of the people who apply don't have that. Then after that, a large number of people who make it to the coding test can't pass the first basic test, or struggle through it: generate a random string using only the standard libraries. If you can't do that then you are not a senior developer. Or they appear to be using ChatGPT and cheat through the test. etc. etc.

And memorizing algorithms wouldn't help you pass our assessment, it's actually easier than that in my opinion.

Yup. Too much context to give on a HN thread, don't really care to defend it. I'm sure the process isn't perfect and I'm looking for ways to improve it, but it's certainly not an easy problem to solve.

Not my call. I just interview people.