ntr--

> Most of us do it in our free time.

I used to believe this but after my most recent position I no longer do. A lot of the developers there didn't code outside of work hours, or if they did it was just using the same technologies as the day to day.

When asked what tools we could use to filter for higher quality candidates in open roles I responded:

> Ask them to show you a personal project they're proud of, that will tell if they have any passion for the job.

Maybe it was just the company not being very attractive to talented coders, but after some time of candidates having nothing to show the company gave up and outsourced. There are simply a lot of uninspired developers who are just in it for the money now.

Maybe some kind of confirmation bias / no true scotsman argument, but if I got that question during an interview my response would be something like

> Which one would you like to hear about first?

> competitor can't afford to keep buying you out forever

Not saying this is in fact the case, but with trillions of dollars of QE and the Cantillon effect it seems entirely possible that in some industries they could.

I'll give you 1kg of wheat for an ounce of gold right now.

It's baffling to me how many "senior web developers" don't have their CV hosted on a website. Regardless of whether it's plain HTML on a CDN or a hectic fully 3d WebGL demo, a senior dev should have a domain with a https secured connection expressly for showing that they can in fact deploy and maintain a production instance.

The recruiter needs a PDF? Have a version linked to at the top of the document, or let them know that they can just press CTRL+P and your beautiful hand crafted css media queries will lay out an equivalent copy ready to be printed.

Like a lot of the other comments here, a LaTeX resume signals to me that the applicant probably spends more time code-golfing than implementing practical solutions.

what do the actual rules of the road say the braking point should be for an 8 person minivan with 5 passengers in dry weather? what about 8 passengers in the wet at night with ice on the roads?

old argument i know, but if a human gets that wrong and plows a pedestrian they wear the consequences, will an auto manufacturer do the same?

my guess is no, and the result of that is that even if we can get a majority of cars to be self driving they are probably not going to be pushing the limits of road capacity any time soon like GP suggests, more likely they will continue to drive super conservatively and fail fast like the videos in the linked article.

you are 30 minutes from home for a 15 minute appointment and do not like waiting for your car.

do you:

- send the car home

no, it would only get halfway home before the end of your appointment

- send it on a rideshare journey

let's say (conservatively, and according to some minimum regulations from the rideshare service) it gets assigned a job after 5 minutes to drive somebody 10 minutes away. it finishes its job at the same time as your appointment ends. you have to wait 10 minutes for it to return to you. again no.

- send it to a parking lot

assuming the parking lot is 5 minutes away and you can tell it to return 5m before your appointment ends this seems reasonable

- drive circles around your appointment

all the benefits of sending it to the parking lot but requires even less effort as you no longer have to remember to tell it your appointment is finishing.

now apply this logic to the general public. what is the most likely outcome?

> you cant take all the money!

A cursory reading of the list of signatories shows mostly academics, so your summary of their motivations appears to be incorrect.

> not like that, not by democratizing it, but under OUR CONTROL

I also don't know how you came to that conclusion, from TFA:

> Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders

I can't imagine how much time you must have available to be able to respond to an error with:

> Could there be a mistake here?

in place of simply correcting and then getting back on track with actually solving a presumably difficult problem. <<The Zone>> is a fleeting thing, especially with two programmers. Such nebulous, passive language seems like a guaranteed way to disrupt any kind of flow state.

don't tear down the entire db for each test, make utilities that create the base objects you need to operate on and chain them together

> Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed

Here in AU we call that "wages".

Having to do quick maths while under social pressure and the threat of having your service quality degraded to make up for an employer or state being unwilling to pay workers enough to live might be called "coercion", but certainly it is externalising costs onto the customer.