How can we even call it aggression for China to act in the China Sea? We are the ones bringing guns half-way around the world to their doorstep. This is US aggression, and we have no right to keep acting like the dictators of the planet.
It feels really terrible that the FBI is consuming vast amounts of our tax money to help idiotic American corporations from leaking secrets. If those companies are so lax in security, I say let them die. Or at least don't continue holding up their corpses indefinitely on my dime!
I'm a little upset that in dying, they might take some innocent Americans with them. If the FBI were to start prosecuting companies for poor security, though...
The problem I'm concerned about is that by subsidizing security for some companies, and presumably mostly the big existing ones, we're effectively penalizing all of the competing companies who pay for their own security. If you iterate this long enough in the natural selection of the market, the FBI is effectively making it unprofitable to even try to be secure.
If you as a hiring manager have the choice to pick between two candidates, one of whom stays cool and productive under pressure, and the other who goes blank in emergencies, which would you prefer to have on your team? Stressful situations can occur in software engineering, including for example a moment where you realize production services are broken because of code you just deployed.
Interview pressure is nothing like an emergency. I'm cool as a cucumber in an emergency. Hell, I kind of love them. Interviews are another thing entirely.
[EDIT] What I'd liken an interview to isn't an emergency, but a date, a visit to the bank for a mortgage application when you're very much not sure whether you'll get it, participating in a talent show, and shopping for a car, all rolled in to one. That's closer to what it is, than an emergency. That also makes it very unlike nearly all activity anyone engages in at work, emergency or routine, social or solo, except for certain high-pressure sales or top executive jobs, maybe.
I’m normally cool under pressure and able to solve technical problems quickly. But in a situation where what matters isn’t actually solving the problem but evaluating my performance and my brain goes into overdrive with perfectionism/meta thinking about what they are thinking about me to the point where I sometimes can’t even do basic math.
Exactly, I have been in such high pressure situations several times with directors and CIOs breathing down my neck, but surprisingly I am quite composed in such scenarios. Severity of the problem at hand is in fact liberating as it is easier to focus. But that is not the case with interviews, when there is a strong "me" factor in the thought process.
> a date, a visit to the bank for a mortgage application when you're very much not sure whether you'll get it, participating in a talent show, and shopping for a car, all rolled in to one
Great quote. Those feeling pretty much summarize to perfection the current fad of interviewing pressure.
As for those who code without guns to our heads, I'd take the candidate who ships well-tested code over the candidate who ships emergency code. Prefer few large fires over frequent small ones and just roll back.
If I were that hiring manager I would have the wisdom to know that this provides no signal whatsoever of how successful those people would be on my team.
Edit to add: The kinds of pressure experienced on the job are not at all the same as those experiences during an interview. "Doing well under pressure" is not a generic skill. Someone who freezes up during an interview may be the coolest head in the company while restoring a database backup during an outage, and vice versa.
> If you as a hiring manager have the choice to pick between two candidates, one of whom stays cool and productive under pressure, and the other who goes blank in emergencies, which would you prefer to have on your team?
It's completely different, not even remotely comparable.
The pressure during a real-world outage is not a big deal. It's collaborative, we're all trying to solve this. And the work that needs to be done is actual real work. I'm extremely good at that, so I basically feel no pressure at all no matter how high the stakes are.
Interview pressure though? Whole different monster. It's confrontational and I'm expected to basically do improv acting on topics that have nothing to do with the actual job while someone nitpicks and eyerolls every irrelevant nonsense.
Your comment is not factually incorrect, but it takes a lot of logical leaps. Let's say: if all other things were equal, would you want to hire a candidate who has worked with just 1 programming language throughout her career or someone with experience on 5 different programming languages?
It's probably correct to answer "the person with 5", but does it automatically prove that "# of languages under the belt" is a great metric for evaluating engineering prospects?
We can come up with all kinds of justification for the current state of engineering interviews, but most everyone conducting the intervews know that our methods are extremely primitive and are thirsty for a better path forward.
I think I'd want the smarter candidate regardless in a job like software development that is overwhelmingly based on quiet focus time. It's easier to help them work through the rare emergency, than to help a less-skilled employee work through literally everything else.
But just blanking when suddenly put on the spot happens to everyone. Human memory retrieval is a complicated process, nothing like a computer. You can have vast expertise in there but not be able to retrieve it instantly, unless of course you've practiced interviewing that very subject a lot recently.
In the production issues I've been involved with, I was not forbidden use of Google, API docs, consultation with others, etc., and I did not have to work out anything on a whiteboard.
I am more nervous about the current state of humanity. In 2020, 98.2% of the country voted for political parties which explicitly endorse via congress military occupations of over 80 foreign countries, and nonstop bombing of civilians and children every day for the past two decades. Americans absolutely could not care less about the negative consequences of war already.
Often during an acute natural disaster people help each other out and are more mutually supportive than normal. People usually find ways to get the basics up and running, such as shelter and food, pretty fast.
Relying on your neighbors to be prepared and able to help you out does seem to be a very popular way to 'prepare', but I don't think it's an approach to encourage...
But in practice natural disasters are rarely a "collapse of society" sort of thing. It's more that you should have supplies and shelter, and a way to communicate. In the middle of difficulties where people work together, I'd say that's "society" in action.
"Collapse of society" tends to be more descriptive of human-driven disasters such as war and civil war, where people start turning against each other and there's high levels of mutual distrust and violence.
We all live in a society. If folks need help in an exceptional time and you do not help them, folks will remember that you spent the time locked in your bunker instead of helping the neighbor whose supplies were flooded. Someone is always going to be forced to rely on others: A wheelchair cannot easily go over downed limbs, for example, and the user won't necessarily be able to flee a fire without help.
Additionally, if you want folks to be prepared, they need both the means to prepare and the space to do it - which basically means having a robust safety net and/or minimum pay laws.
Being prepared has nothing to do with it. Nobody was prepared for the Anchorage earthquake of 1964, but within minutes people had self-organized into firefighting and excavation teams, set up emergency response relays with a hodgepodge of walkie-talkies, police radio, and AM broadcasters, and within hours there was a centralized volunteer dispatch and food bank.
Relying on your neighbors in a disaster doesn't mean hiding out in their anti-zombie bunker. It means knowing that the entire community will respond together to overcome the emergency.
Being prepared doesn't have to mean being a loon hiding in a bunker. Elsewhere in this thread I have recommended having some canned food, water, and a flashlight. These are very easy ways to prepare for a wide variety of unlikely scenarios.
I don’t agree with Pilger that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were unjustified, but his points about China are valid. What do we gain by instigating war now?
“Give me liberty or give me death” were founding words of our country. If you don’t believe our commitment to liberty and freedom was important, then what else made America the #1 most successful country for the last century?
>If you don’t believe our commitment to liberty and freedom was important, then what else made America the #1 most successful country for the last century?
The US got through World War 2 relatively unscathed compared to the rest of the world with its manufacturing infrastructure and vast natural resources intact, profited from loans made to aid Europe's recovery, entrenched its military hegemony leveraged by being the sole nuclear power, and made the US dollar the world's reserve currency.
Where was our commitment to liberty and freedom for the Black people we made slaves? The Irish we discriminated against? The Japanese we locked up in concentration camps? The natives we killed and stole their land from?
'Liberty' has always applied to a very small culturally white subset of the population. 'Death' came to the rest.
I'm curious by what metric you perceive we've been #1. The fact that we have the largest prison population and per-capita incarceration rate comes to my mind most readily.
Slavery, abundant natural resources, a commitment to not listening to 'sound economic policy' of its times (which would have had the colonies be strictly agrarian, shipping raw cotton to the English industry - look at Egypt and India for how well that worked out), genocide of the indigenous population, many years of exerting soft and hard power to control the continent, etc.
'Liberty or death' is a nice slogan, but it is in no way a core part of what made the US the most powerful empire in history.
There are of course also libertarians who oppose it.
As David Friedman put it:
> "There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with each other about everything, but I am not one of them."
AFAIK, the classic "minarchist" position is that the reason to even have a government is to provide certain important Public Goods that can't be provided otherwise.
Those are (1) National defense, (2) A legal system with courts, jail, police etc, (3) Fighting epidemics. (3) is far less discussed (until 2020), but it's agreed on when mentioned.
Though in reality many such libertarians consider #3 as a sub-element of #1. For good or for bad, this has led to the debate on why if public health is to be funded, isn't it a part of the military.
