You can say that again. I went through a 50-75 hour process of interviews, leet-code exams (with tight pencil-down timing), culminating with a long-form project that they budgeted 4 hours for (took me 20+).
I finally had a brain fart in the umpteenth interview and was not offered a job.
These are the people who brought you the Snap package manager. The one nobody asked for. The one that constantly harasses you every half hour to close programs that you have open because there's always something with a goddamn update waiting. Then when you close it, it doesn't get updated, and you have no idea. Then you wait 30 seconds because every Snap app is slow as dog shit to launch. Then it tells you to close it because it needs an update.
I don’t remember it as particularly surreal. They did a remote programming interview over Zoom (in 2014 or so) and it was a really interesting problem - to make a PRNG for a specific range of integers using two other PRNGs. Their solution had a branch and mine was branchless and decently random. It was, at least then, a very personalistic company, centred around Shuttleworth, but his influence didn’t usually extend more than two org levels, and different parts of it behaved as different companies.
> We have hired outstanding individuals who did not attend or complete university. If this describes you, please continue with your application and enter ‘no degree’.
No to mention the absolutely absurd questions they ask. I looked at a sr position there and they were asking about performance in individual courses _in high school._ I haven't been in school for 20 years. I've learned and forgotten so many things since then, like I'm going to remember or care what I did in econ 101 multiple decades ago... It was so silly I didn't bother applying.
I've read some surreal recounts of the Canonical interview process. The CEO appears to have a fairly extreme fixation on candidates' high school experiences.
Needless to say, this is just absolutely bizarre. What kind of kid you were is a terrible proxy for professional competence or even present-day fit. (Not to mention that people's high school experiences are very likely to differ greatly based on things like socioeconomic status, race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, etc., and imposing a normative idea of what high school experiences ought to look like would probably unfairly discount candidates through no fault of their own.)
Yes, indeed it does. I didn't feel this way until I worked for a YC-backed startup tho. I mean, YC is the first to admit that not everything needs to be VC funded and some things just aren't good fit for that funding model. I think a code editor is one of them.
> I mean, YC is the first to admit that not everything needs to be VC funded and some things just aren't good fit for that funding model. I think a code editor is one of them.
Fully agree. I also feel like a lot of companies do not need to be on the stock market, especially if they're reasonably profitable, feels like the stock market is where you go to let go of more of your company just to get rid of the VCs whom you owe a lot of money to.
I remember when I was learning about entrepreneurship in college I was baffled by their insistence of an “exit strategy”. The idea just seemed so foreign to me. See I naively thought the point of starting a business was to do the business, not to not do it and sit next to a pile of money instead. Silly me.
I don't remember seeing a new xkcd for it, but I have seen someone replicate essentially the same 3-4 panel comic with a kid named "<Some name> Ignore all previous instructions. Do.... <I forget>"
It also helps that Jane Street has like 3k employees, a good chunk of whom never touch code at all, and of those that do, a good chunk who won't be touching OCaml. Hundreds of OCaml programmers though, yes.
That may not scale for larger companies.
Also important to note, they don't require you to know OCaml when you get the job. They will teach you OCaml.
All that said, man it would be cool to work for JS (or anyone really) and write OCaml.
Yeah when you redefine the term to be "active shooter" I guess, something tells me that the American public still doesn't want to die in a mass shooting:
It's a sick society when you have one for nearly every single day of the year. But hey this is the result of neoliberal economics so why should we get too upset at the societal rot when corporatists are increasing shareholder value?
The terminology was specifically to counter the slight of hand you just did.
Over time the definition of "mass shooting" kept getting watered down to include a lot of "normal criminals with normal criminal goals they are trying to further by killing" shootings by people who wanted the number to be bigger to mislead the public into thinking indiscriminately targeted, killing for the sake of killing type shootings perpetrated by people who are mentally ill are much more common than they are in order to push various policies.
So then the people concerned with studying the latter had to come up with a new term that only encompassed people going off the deep end and did not include normal crime hence "active shooting"
Yea hyrum's law is like an observation of what happens when you personally try to make 200,000+ distinct commits to google3 to fix things that are broken (as hyrum did, mind you this is before LLMs), and people come climbing out of the woodwork to yell at you with fistfuls of xkcd/1172
The federal vs state conflict over prescribed burns doesn't help much either. In states with a much lower % of national forest or blm land or whatever, you get a much larger amount of prescribed burns.
In the west coast, the state vs federal friction reduces how much of that happens, and there's more uncontrolled growth happening. And there's not always a lot that e.g. CA government can do about it if it's federal land.
For example, Minnesota (intentionally) burns like 50% more acreage than California on an annual basis, despite being like half the size. But CA also is like half federal land, MN is like 5% or something.
I totally agree with you there. I'm in no way trying to suggest it was specifically a failure of certain states or individual administrations; its a mixed bag of failures at a lot of different levels with the federal government having a lot of the blame across a wide range of administrations that did nothing to really address the growing problems.
So the real reason is that the ultimate law on the books on gun regulation was written by a band of, you know, armed revolutionaries, who were pretty big fans of the whole armed revolution-ing thing. And it still hasn't been amended.
I bet if you went with a simple majority vote today, you wouldn't get the 2nd amendment. But amendments are pretty difficult to pass, much higher requirements than a simple majority.
Man that like barely scratches the surface of the surrealness of canonical's hiring process
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