throwaway42668

I never understood the "low code" microbubble that was being inflated.

We went through that era already. We called them RAD tools, and they targeted the same sort of strange, mythical end user profile. Someone so technically capable and apt that they could navigate a dizzying domain of deeply buried checkboxes, property fields, and sprawling relationships & side-effects, but who was also simultaneously unable to understand source code or program structure.

When using them you would quickly hit a point where making changes to relatively simple things would take mounting an archeological dig of GUI controls that would have otherwise been a few simple find & replace operations on code in a regular environment.

Sure, though I'd ask more open ended questions about a problem to see where they go with it.

Maybe they land on using something like a debugger or wireshark or strace or whatever makes sense to dig into whatever horrible voodoo is plaguing them. The important thing is that they are creative and experienced at questioning or confirming their priors and eliminating thousands of paper cuts and yak barber shops for themselves, their team, and their organization, so that collectively everyone is enabled to operate at a high-level instead of everyone constantly bushwhacking their way toward eventual failure.

The "nano" questions are silly and tell you nothing useful about the candidate other than I guess their level of candor in being subordinate to obsequious lines of questioning.

However, the rest of the questions are just as pointless too.

As a hiring manager and product owner, the level of familiarity that an engineer has with using debugging and diagnosis tools (e.g. as simple as how to attach and effeciently use a debugger) is 100x more valuable to the predictable delivery and quality of the things they're building than Programming 101 trivia.

Writing code is quite possibly the easiest, least fraught time-sucking milestone-missing part of software development. The morass of the entire rest of the SDLC is where ambitions and dreams go to die. Version control expertise, build system esoteria, correct configuration & setup of dependencies, understanding how to test, being able to do more than printf'ing your way out of a Russian nesting doll inspired paper bag. That sort of thing.

I would destroy that thing with sweat in the first 30 min.

They never had any meaning to begin with. Outside of ostensibly knowing how to program, the title carried with it no firmly held, measured, or maintained any baseline expertise of any kind. It's always been a hodgepodge of ad hoc criteria on a job by job and hype cycle by hype cycle basis.

Alternatively, it might make capital available to other things.

It's at least theoretically possible that all the liquidity and leverage in the top of the market could tire itself of chasing the next tulip mania.

For instance, $6 Billion could have gone into climate tech instead of ElizaX.

My problem with these dumb hype cycles is all the other stuff that gets starved in their wake.

It's okay to say it. It's a bubble.

It was just the next in line to be inflated after crypto.

Sam Altman is not a hapless victim at the mercy of the isolating effects of his financial success.

He was an opportunistic, amoral sociopath before he was rich, and the system he reaps advantage from strongly selects for hucksters of that particular ilk more than anything else.

He's just another Kalanick, Neumann, Holmes or Bankman-Fried.

I would have loved a control question like, "How much confidence do you have in confidence?"

I wouldn't even know how to answer the question as presented in the poll.

Confidence in higher education to do what?

Just have people pair with people doing actual work. It's better signal for the candidate, for the existing team, and for the organization.

Now that's not really fair is it?

They're also Sales, Marketing, and Channel Partner Management for OpenAI.

Once you're running a fleet of autonomous vehicles, whatever century that finally becomes a reality, then it makes sense to optimize out of the operation a few people who make at or near minimum wage.