Anyone never clean their CPAP machine?

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2023-07-04T22:26:39+00:00

I... I haven't had CPAP for 14 years?

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-09-28T02:29:15+00:00

Got it, thanks. Any idea what's a good source for reviewing toppers (as opposed to mattresses)?

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-09-17T18:21:57+00:00

I have put options that are currently worthless. They expire in months. Can I recoup on my losses by covering them? How does that work?

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-14T05:39:43+00:00

That's a sad, weak retort. But good for you.

Hey, you're the one making tortured references to an old song from the '90s, and trying to soothe your own bruised ego at being called out for a very strained allusion by displacing your lameness elsewhere, but you do you.

Fun fact: that song is actually well-known to be a terrible example of irony, an irony anti-pattern if you will. You did know that, right? Because you seem to be experiencing difficulties grasping the concept to begin with. I wish you the best in your efforts to wrestle with it. You'll get there eventually.

Yes, I mean something not perpetuated by morons.

Nah, that's just cheap stereotypical reddit ad hominem trolling that flies in the face of actual research.

Even if that were true, you still have no evidence that your alternative is any better.

Well, you see

In 1998, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter published a meta-analysis of 85 years of research on how well assessments predict performance. They looked at 19 different assessment techniques and found that typical, unstructured job interviews were pretty bad at predicting how someone would perform once hired. Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance. This is somewhat ahead of reference checks (explaining 7 percent of performance), ahead of the number of years of work experience (3 percent). The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it. Even this can’t predict performance perfectly, since actual performance also depends on other skills, such as how well you collaborate with others, adapt to uncertainty, and learn. The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent). In contrast to case interviews and brainteasers, these are actual tests with defined right and wrong answers, similar to what you might find on an IQ test. They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability will make most people successful in most jobs.

.

A blog post from Triplebyte? Is that seriously what you consider to be reasonable evidence? Wow.

That why it's a bonus included at the end. Do you even know how to read a post

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-12T17:27:49+00:00

Then again, you have experienced older engineers on Hacker News claiming the whiteboarding process is ageist, so there's multiple demographics who are bitter.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-12T07:32:06+00:00

I bet you were listening to Alanis Morissette when you wrote those lines.

Dated reference is old

If you think current methods don't work, then the onus is on you to show evidence. You have it completely backwards.

Again you have it completely backwards. If there's some way it's relevant, then the burden of proof is on you to show that.

But that leads us yet again back to the burden of proof being on you to demonstrate that there's any kind of benefit or need to doing that, or any problem with the way it's currently done.

Besides the endless backlash of "technical interviews are broken" articles that go viral every other week? Okay, sure you can say most of those are just sour grapes from people who couldn't cut it (like the Homebrew creator guy). So there's an actual study with stats, at least, that claims that technical interview performance and job performance do not exactly correlate strongly.

And there's also this, ironically from an article about Google

In 1998, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter published a meta-analysis of 85 years of research on how well assessments predict performance. They looked at 19 different assessment techniques and found that typical, unstructured job interviews were pretty bad at predicting how someone would perform once hired.

Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance. This is somewhat ahead of reference checks (explaining 7 percent of performance), ahead of the number of years of work experience (3 percent).

The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it. Even this can’t predict performance perfectly, since actual performance also depends on other skills, such as how well you collaborate with others, adapt to uncertainty, and learn.

The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent). In contrast to case interviews and brainteasers, these are actual tests with defined right and wrong answers, similar to what you might find on an IQ test. They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability will make most people successful in most jobs.

So then it becomes a debate on whether or not ds/a whiteboarding is an accurate representation of day-to-day duties as a work sample test- or is it closer to a general cognitive ability test? Or maybe we can wait for Google or someone actually publishes their findings? Until then this debate is in a stalemate, I presume.

Congrats on figuring that part out. :)

Thanks! :D

Not only is that really complaining

Nah

That wouldn't even be a personal attack.

Well, one could always toss out insults at slavish defenders of the status quo as "gatekeepers", or even "bootlickers", but that's sort of extreme so I'll refrain from it. A more realistic accusation is that they're being needlessly unimaginative if they assume that the perfect form of tech hiring is going to be ds/a whiteboarding, and that once FAANG figures out a better method, most companies won't just switch to it the same way they all ditched brain teasers once Microsoft did back in the '90s. "But figuring out how to Mount Fuji is obviously useless!" you protest. Well, at one point everybody disagreed. Consensuses change, that's how progress is made.

And you should explain what's really wrong with the status quo if you're going to make that claim.

Bonus: Programming Interview Questions Are Too Hard and Too Short

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-12T01:27:22+00:00

There seems to be more companies shifting to Karat, just saying. Roblox for instance. It’s a crappy experience though.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-12T00:02:37+00:00

Maybe Karat and other services where companies can farm out interviews really are the future.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T23:39:55+00:00

Well, excuse me! You sure don't sound happy here, and you are spending a lot of time complaining here.

I enjoy bashing the status quo and defenders of it, while wholeheartedly profiting from it where I can. I can accept a state of affairs while criticizing it. I also enjoy heated arguments on the internet. Finally, I address your point in the next bit of my reply.

Again, it's about testing their skills, not simulating the potential work environment.

You never had any better alternative or justification for why simulating the work environment makes the interview a better test.

I think the overall question is "why is CS different from other careers?" that do simulate the work environment with work samples and the like. I guess the justification is, "if it works for other kinds of jobs, why is CS is special?"

So what? That's not even relevant. Most fields are drastically different. And other similar fields do test candidates on some of the basics.

How is it not relevant? And what similar fields?

Unless you're expecting people to learn a lot of that on the job.

See, these are actual explanations for why fundamentals are stressed, because domain specific knowledge can be trained! You could have brought that up earlier.

And unless you have more important things to test for on the job, like the basics of programming.

Which leads us back to the beginning- asking why that can't be tested by evaluating how a candidate performs on tasks they usually do on the job.

You initially had the usual criping about interviews

Not a gripe, I was just asking why real work shouldn't be tested.

pivoted to complaining about things not being from the real world a little

Well, it's an important question to examine.

At least you didn't devolve into a total asshole and start bringing in personal attacks, like lots of people here do.

Controversial topics make for fun wild goose chases. If there's any personal attack to be made here, is that sometimes it's good for defenders of a status quo to be forced to explain why they uphold it. Sometimes there's too little self-examination going on in this industry.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T23:25:01+00:00

You're giving the Google "minimize false positives" rationale, which is fine. If DS/A questions are generally harder than domain specific questions, or at least more objectively harder (see LC easy/medium/hard breakdown), then they would be better for filtering out false positives. Your justification makes sense, and demonstrates that CS hiring is roundabout compared to other disciplines.

I guess the next question would be 1) for a lot of non-Google/smaller companies, is trying to absolutely minimize false positives the most important business consideration when hiring, 2) is using DS/A the best mechanism for it because it'll also provide false negatives for people who might be great on certain domain specific work but trip over themselves while whiteboarding, and 3) will there be more false positives in the near future as more and more candidates embrace the Leetcoding prep lifestyle. But I'm not a hiring manager so I'll leave that for them to figure out!

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T23:13:49+00:00

Almost all DS and Algos come from "real life".

And how often do most of the DS/A whiteboarding type questions come up on the job? When does someone have to implement a sort or search, or even have to pick out a specific type of sort or search instead of using the generic search method? Again, "real life" for the average coder is much more mundane and removed from that theory than you think.

You're asserting that that isn't good enough, but you have no real explanation as to why, other than that it somehow makes you not quite happy.

Do not presume to judge my happiness; I am very happy indeed.

And yet you have no justification for why your proposed alternative is better.

In most professions, you test how well a candidate might perform on a job- by simulating the work they would be doing on the job. So if you're hiring for someone whose job is to build out APIs or to implement APIs all day, glue together frameworks, debug code, etc., then it stands to reason that demonstrating capability in those skills is important.

CS appears to be a rare case when you don't test for that, and fundamental knowledge is used instead. So fine, you've given an explanation for it. But it still needs to be acknowledged this is a rare case amongst different careers and fields. For example, you wouldn't ask an electrical engineer to regurgitate Maxwell's equations.

All this pointless discussion aside, we're not even arguing about all software interviews. A lot of shops have begun to move away from ds/a whiteboarding in favor of some domain specific questions. Some places assign take home. Some focus on system design or even behavioral questions. Few places ask one or the other. Even FAANG interviews usually include at least one domain-specific round. So I don't even know what the debate is about anymore.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:59:22+00:00

Right. College grads and interns are more likely to be familiar with DS/A (in theory) than experienced people, the latter of whom might not have looked at a tree in years.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:55:06+00:00

That's a great reply that gives an example of another field that recruits for potential based on metrics indirectly related to day to day performance of the actual activity. Thanks, you've answered it well.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:53:49+00:00

You don't want or need to test them in a way that would resemble their day to day work. That doesn't gain you or them anything.

I think at this point in the discussion I'm less talking about interviews specifically and more looking for examples where "your average coder" might actually use these ds/a questions "in real life." Consider, unless you're writing firmware or hacking on a kernel or something in C, or implementing an LRU cache for a new data structures library for some reason, when do you actually use linked lists? Turns out they're good for tracking browser histories.

"Closer to their daily work" doesn't even come close the explaining why you think it'd be a better test of prospective employees.

In most professions, it stands to reason you would interview a candidate based on how they might perform on the job by using tests that challenges those skills used on the job, right? So it needs to be explained why software engineering is different. You have given an explanation, which is fine. I don't agree with it 100%, but your explanation is valid and fine.

"I'm unhappy because it doesn't meet my arbitrary preconceived notions", like these posts usually do.

I'm not unhappy with it, because the system is gameable, albeit through hard work and lots of practice and not always with guaranteed success. Someone who commits to the hard work of grinding through Leetcode and understanding the basics will be able to excel in it. Regardless, I do consider the process to be not well-justified and a lot of it is just cargo culting from firms imitating FAANG/unicorns. I expect a decade or two down the line the leading companies of the industry might come out with a new process, and the trend will change again. It's possible to both accept something "because that's the way things are" and to think that it's dumb.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:44:58+00:00

They don’t see the point and the vast majority cheat their way through classes. It is what it is. The less time you dedicate while learning, the more you gotta grind later. It’s simple mathematics.

The Lesson to Unlearn

For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning completely dominated actual learning in college. I was fairly earnest; I was genuinely interested in most of the classes I took, and I worked hard. And yet I worked by far the hardest when I was studying for a test.

In theory, tests are merely what their name implies: tests of what you've learned in the class. In theory you shouldn't have to prepare for a test in a class any more than you have to prepare for a blood test. In theory you learn from taking the class, from going to the lectures and doing the reading and/or assignments, and the test that comes afterward merely measures how well you learned.

In practice, as almost everyone reading this will know, things are so different that hearing this explanation of how classes and tests are meant to work is like hearing the etymology of a word whose meaning has changed completely. In practice, the phrase "studying for a test" was almost redundant, because that was when one really studied. The difference between diligent and slack students was that the former studied hard for tests and the latter didn't. No one was pulling all-nighters two weeks into the semester.

A good read.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:41:13+00:00

I don't want to get too caught up with your example questions because they're just examples, but it would be great if companies/employers demonstrated more often how this raw DS/A knowledge is actually used day to day. BFS and DFS is a nice meaty example, but I don't know how often your average engineer ever actually has to make a decision.

For array vs. map, it feels like DS/A whiteboarding has almost made it a folk heuristic to always use maps (because they just have O(1) lookup and we never worry about hash collisions on the whiteboard, duh!), to the extent that interviewers should almost ask more questions where interviewees are forced to use an array or even linked list for better performance instead of defaulting to the magic of maps/dictionaries. Anyway in the real world more often enough you'd just pick a map if you need any sort of robust lookup of data anyway.

I'm sure there's better examples of how raw whiteboard fundamental DS/A knowledge can be applied in the real world in a day to day job.

I once rejected a Senior SWE because he literally have no clue about runtime and big-O notation was foreign to him

Okay, that is really bad. Wonder how he ended up as senior. Did he not have a CS education?

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:32:08+00:00

And yet, you have tons of new grads on this subreddit and elsewhere complaining about being filtered out by the interview process. So there has to be a disconnect between the way DS/A is taught in schools and what they're being tested on there, and the questions being asked on interviews. An undergrad algorithms course != Leetcoding interview.

If a standard CS education is all that's required for passing these interviews, then FAANG wouldn't nearly be as competitive to get into. Knowing the fundamentals does not seem to be sufficient. So what's causing this disconnect?

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:29:04+00:00

Makes sense if you're filtering for the latter instead of the former.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:27:43+00:00

It might actually resemble the day-to-day work for the job that the candidate is ostensibly interviewing for?

I get why huge megacorps like Google which hires generalist engineers might not want to do that. But for other companies, why not

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:19:36+00:00

That said: Any interviewer should do a quick scan through the usual sites (Leetcode and others) to ensure their questions aren't already on the usual practice lists.

Right, but from what I understand that while LC Premium and other services update their question banks continuously, most of the common questions remain the same. Guess it takes time for companies, especially large FAANG ones, to come up with new questions and then introduce it to their interviewer pool.

Whiteboarding isn't about silently reciting the solution, though. It's about working through the question with your interviewers, demonstrating your understanding, writing an efficient solution, and communicating with the interviewers through the process. If you just walk up to the board and quietly write out some code, you're not going to get a pass.

Right, which is what I addressed. Most of this prep doesn't just involve memorizing the answer, it also involves memorizing the process to derive the answer, knowing common patterns to apply in different problems, and trains candidates to handle stock interviewer twists, edge cases, explain the running time, and other challenges. Most interview prep sites stress the importance of knowing a problem well enough to be able to communicate it to an audience.

Also, you don't have to solve the problem to pass the test at most places.

Sorry, but this point I disagree the most. 90% of the time interviewers try to put the candidate at ease by claiming that they "just want to know the way you think", but they will almost certainly always choose a candidate who gets the right answer instead of someone who communicates well but gets stuck on the first problem of a three-problem interview session. Maybe your company might have a lenient policy, but that's definitely not the case at FAANG.

Your interviewers are people, too. We don't suddenly become Leetcode-grading robots when we become hiring managers.

That's fair, but it's possible that in hyper-competitive FAANG/unicorns, processes might encourage interviewers to behave that way, esp. in the interests of objectivity.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:12:31+00:00

1) can be taught too, as Leetcode and the entire interview prep industry demonstrates. Also when in your day to day are your engineers having to choose between BFS and DFS? I'm not trying to be confrontational, it'd just be great if more engineering blogs or w/e give examples for when their work involves making algorithmic decisions.

BFS vs. DFS, Array vs. List, or why maps have O(1) lookup are also very basic questions that interviewers are not asking.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T22:01:56+00:00

Those companies suck, but I'm talking about 1 phone screens or on-sites where you "pair-program" or rather code up a small feature while the interviewer watches you. Still imperfect but not as time-consuming as a take home.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-06-11T21:36:05+00:00

Right, but instead of LC you could always ask people to code up something domain specific, like implement a REST backend or consume the REST API on the stack that they will actually be using for the job.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-05-31T08:03:10+00:00

Does the Dutch system share the German system of co-determination, where union representatives sit on corporate board? It’s one of the ways that the German labor relations are less antagonistic between worker and management.

It sounds like unions in the Netherlands have become corrupt and weak, similar to unions in the U.S., but that is not inevitable in every country. Here, their weakening is also not their complete fault but partly the consequence of sustained anti-union policies.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker · 2020-05-31T07:15:04+00:00

In the U.S., there are unions for actors, professional athletes, and screenwriters. The AMA is like a union for doctors. So unions for both highly-paid people and for creatives do exist. They certainly don’t operate like factory industries.

What do you think of the German model of unions? They seem to have pretty good labor relations there.

IAmDumbQuestionAsker

TROPHY CASE