halbermensch

Like: signing up for a $140k/year "consulting" gig, but having a secretary pick your sole "workstation", a 12-inch, low-memory Lenovo model normally given to sales people.

Or: going through an grueling process ostensibly designed to assure that you have truly l33t skills in analytic and quantitative thinking skills... only to be herded into a dungeon-like cubicle farm with crass overhead lightin, poor ventilation, non-stop chatter and blaring overhead TVs, making it impossible to think straight for more than 5 seconds... where you end up plugging away for 10-, 12-, 14-hour days.

Or: being hired ostensibly for your senior-level experience in platform X, only to have every decision "vetted" by utterly inexperienced H1-Bs, whose personal coding style reminds you, without irony, of something you last flinched at seeing on The Daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com/).

Not to mention: not infrequent episodes of not just hot-headness, but outright bullying and borderline psychological violence.

And generally: a stifling atmosphere which makes it basically impossible to have an honest conversation with anyone in upper management about the day-to-day realities of the environment they ostensibly expect you to be delivering this supposedly highly valuable, mission-critical software under.

Granted, this was at "mid-tier" companies, and I (thought) I knew what I was getting into. Still, the reality was far ruder -- and far more weird and just plain absurd, at times-- than any of my worst expectations.

Comment · 14 years ago

Seriously, your English is quite good, but there are a few grammar nits in your writeup, so it would pay to invest in a bit of proofreading (from a native speaker, if possible).

Comment · 14 years ago

So everyone thinks they're hiring the top 0.5%, even though the same 199 losers are spamming their resumes to every job posting.

Yeah, when you think about it, this whole "we only hire the top 0.5%" condescension really amounts to a basic statistical reasoning fallacy.

To construct an alternate hypothesis: the "real" threshold for ranked competence[1] at "elite" companies might, just might, be more like "the top 5%". But we can safely assume that 95% of the available talent pool in this category will be employed (and not actively seeking), compared with say 70% in the bottom, or "sub-elite" category, at any given time.[2]

So for example in a "town" of 1000 putative developers, with skill levels ranging from god-like to "good enough" to mediocre to utterly bogus and self-deluding, let's say 50 (or 5%) of these are truly "elite", and 950 are "non-elite".

Further, of the elite category, 47.5 will be employed (and not actively looking), and only 2.5 will be in the job market -- versus, out of the 950 non-elite developers, we might have 665 (or 70%) employed, versus 285 (or 30%) on the market and actively looking.

Given this over-simplified (but arguably "less wrong") hypothesis, and assuming that a given opening draws applicants whose fitness ranking is evenly distributed across the pool of in-the-market candidates, it's easy to see that for any given opening, we'll have a ratio of 2.5:285 for elite:non-elite developers -- or a paltry 0.869%(!) of the candidate pool (2.5/287.5) will appear to be from the "elite" category.

That is, for every 1 "elite" resume in your inbox, you'll be seeing 114 "non-elite" resumes. And since tech geeks are, by and large, an insecure, envious lot, they like to brag and fudge a bit -- so that 114 easily becomes 199 in their minds (or the 1 a 0.6, whichever).

Which gives you the infamous "we only hire the top 0.5%" urban legend right there. Even though they're all really just angling over the... top 5% (ranked over the general pool of putative developers).

And since hot-shots like Joel Spolsky, not to mention nearly all of the investment bank / hedge fund types, and well, probably half or more of everyone in the monthly "Who's hiring?" thread just keeps repeating it, and repeating it, and repeating it... well, shucks, it must be true.

[1] As such a thing as generic competence exists can be objectively measured, etc, etc, but that's a separate issue.

[2] Which corresponds -- conservatively, for the purposes of this argument -- to another widely espoused, but never quantitatively substantiated belief out in startupland: that "all" of the good developers are "always" employed and "almost never" on the job market longer than 2 days.

Comment · 14 years ago

Well and good, but it might be better to say "correlate with" rather than "predict." In the scheme of things, it's probably more accurate to say that pi(x) is self-generating, and it's the zeros of the zeta function that are tagging along for the ride.

Comment · 14 years ago

...but not nearly as hard as learning to program well in any single one of them.

Comment · 14 years ago

My wrists, presently. Need a job where I can think for a living, for a change.

Comment · 14 years ago

Quite interesting though, as far as "useless" ideas go.

Comment · 14 years ago

Except that the Free City concept wasn't dreamed up in a libertarian vacuum.

Except the way Thiel & Co mean it, it was. There's no way you can compare their schemes with historical examples with HK, Trieste, the Hanseatic League etc (if that's what you're thinking).

Comment · 14 years ago

Umm, the people he represents weren't protesting that "Free Cities" are being built near their property (their "backyard") -- rather, that outsiders are proposing to build them on their property.