It's sounds bizarre but could have happened. Some people do crazy stuff to get a job there. When I was an interviewer there, part of interview training was learning tricks to detect candidates who were looking up answers on the internet. Sometimes you could ask a question and hear them typing in the background.

The article says the interviewer requested him to read the code out over the phone and that the interviewer was barely fluent in English. Those are two massive red flags that something odd was happening.

Google has a large pool of interviewers and some of them are better than others. There's no doubt about that. But in many years of working there I never encountered anyone with less than excellent English skills, and I cannot imagine anyone asking a candidate to read code out over the phone. That's just an obviously stupid thing to try and do, especially when the candidate offered to share it via Google Docs. SOP there is to send the candidate a Docs link for shared coding together, but even if something went wrong with that process, when the candidate offers to fix it that sounds and the interviewer refuses that sounds very much like he wasn't really talking to a Google employee. Think about it - if the person on the other end of the phone was a MITM then he'd need to have given his own very obviously non @google.com email address to receive the document. Busted.

I always joked that if you ask me to write a sort routine in the interview, I'm going to lecture you about why you need to go off the shelf, and doesn't Google have anyone who can make a shareable library? Do we really need to know how to code a lightning sort ad hoc? To sell more ads? heh

Then you wouldn't get hired. Former Google interviewer, 220+ interviews. I used to pretty frequently ask candidates to solve the following problem: write a program that loads lines of text from a file, shuffles them, and writes them back out again.

The reason companies like Google ask ridiculously academic questions in interviews (and that question is academic) is not because they're all ignoramuses who can't imagine anything outside their PhD box. It's because judging someone's technical and programming ability in under an hour any other way is really freaking hard. If you haven't done a lot of interviewing then it's easy to imagine, "If I were hiring, I'd only ask questions that REAL programmers would solve". But then you try lots of different kinds of questions and discover that for most of them, by the end of the interview you often have no real clue about whether the candidate can actually write a functioning program. CVs and qualifications are no help - they routinely seem to have no correlation with actual demonstrated skill.

Speed-coding whilst someone is watching you in a high pressure environment is difficult at the best of times. Doing it from scratch for any kind program of you're likely to actually write in the real job is impossible - nobody codes up a fully blown web app with the latest stack de jure (which Google doesn't use anyway) in 45 minutes. You don't even know what languages the candidate knows, in some cases, as not everyone thinks to put them on the CV. So you end up asking for a small, simple program that shows basic knowledge of basic language constructs like looping and different kinds of lists. Then there's time to write some code and ask questions about it. Additionally, there are multiple "off ramps" so even slow candidates don't feel like they are running out of time and panic, but faster candidates can keep being challenged with minor modifications to the task.

For what it's worth, if someone answered this question by writing a program that ran Collections.shuffle() or their chosen languages equivalent, that resulted in them being marked up not down, because you're right - knowledge of standard libraries is important and a good sign of experience. Then I'd ask them to do it again without using the standard library because I also want to see if they can write the code themselves. Using the most correct or optimal algorithm is not the goal, even if the question sounds algorithmic. It's just a scenario to get them doing things with data structures and basic control logic.

For what it's worth I am skeptical about the ages in the summary. If the average age at Google is 29 then that pretty much matches the average age across 25,000 developers on StackOverflow, which gave an answer of 30. However I suspect that the median age in engineering is higher if you take into account tech leads and technical management, and the age for the entire company is biased lower by the enormous ad sales organisation. That always seemed to me to be populated entirely by recent university grads. Selling ads is hardly exciting work with great potential for career advancement and doesn't require any specialist skills, so the people who do that tend to be young, and there have historically been massive numbers of them (like half the company).

So, you're confirming that young employees are overworking, which is the first part of the hypothesis, although then you go into a marketing style tangent with, "It's just that they are so excited that they don't want to go home!!!" That sounds pretty unhealthy to me, especially given the present evidence of attrition suggesting that it is not a sustainable way of working.

It's not marketing, it's the truth. I worked there for nearly 8 years. By the way, I'm 31.

Google is (a) a very desirable employer and (b) hires people from all over the world. The combination of these things mean that many, many developers, especially younger ones that move from poorer countries, get relocated across borders. They arrive in a new country where they don't speak the language, quite often with a girlfriend or wife in tow, and frankly many of them don't quite dive into making friends and socialising as much as perhaps would be a good idea. Combination of new city, no social life + interesting work == lots of people working odd hours. Eventually they do settle down and the hours get more normal.

But programming has always been this way, hasn't it? I never heard a lawyer say, "I've been doing lawyering since I was 8 years old" but it happens in software all the time. It's a sort of work that many people just enjoy doing, and do it as a hobby as well as a job.

It's always been this way - younger people tend to care less about voting

I could equally say it's always been this way because politicians and The Establishment have always been old.

My theory is at that age you're still so engrossed with exploring your environment, that you put little thought into shaping your environment.

My theory is that political parties run by older people tend to focus on the wishes of people just like them i.e. older people. Due to the party political whipping system, young people who investigate politics quickly realise they will be forced to vote in support of social policies they disagree with, making the career unattractive. This results in a downward spiral in which politicians ignore people unlike them, those people get turned off from politics, and thus the demographic makeup of the political elite can never self correct.

Which generation do you think politicians would listen to most?

You're reversed cause and effect. The fact that young people don't vote is because politicians don't listen to them. I think the first Obama campaign illustrated this nicely.

These are large percentages we're talking about here. Even in the older age brackets about a third of people are supporting Snowden so the fact that you fall into that category doesn't mean much.

I think it's more likely to be because people under 35 are the first generation that have no memory of the cold war. People born before about 1980 lived in a world where there was a very strong, clear delineation between us vs them and that divide was seen as an existential struggle between good and evil. Merely by being born into a certain country, you too could take part in an epic ideological struggle between right and wrong. It is perhaps not surprising that people who lived most of their life in such a world instinctively support a strong, authoritarian state and react badly to a "traitor who gave our national security secrets to the Russians" or whatever garbled version of the story they received via Fox News. There's definitely a clear and strong tendency in older populations to support our side regardless of what that side actually does, and things that seem to bring back old certainties strongly appeal to them. Hence the desperate need of the establishment to make "the terrorists" to new Big Evil.

Contrast to people under the age of 35 who don't remember the cold war and have never lived in a world where there were clearly defined conflicts between us/them or good/evil. Instead there has been a series of endless wars started by us against dramatically weaker foes, based on vague and uncompelling justifications, the results of which have mostly been bedlam. Older people love this because it's an attempt to bring back the old certainties they remember. It leaves young people cold because they don't care about the old certainties, as they never had them to begin with.

Combine all this with the fact that the average software developer is 30 years old and the average age of Congress is 57 ... nearly double their age .... you have set the stage for an epic showdown between the technology industry and the political establishment. Which is exactly what's happening.

Okay. Can I have a refund on my taxes which paid for the public school that I can no longer use? See how that works?

That sounds fair as long as you also pay a large excess tax that covers the host of setting up quarantine zones, emergency medical care and lifelong disability benefits when "Private School for anti-vaxxers" is inevitably swallowed by a full blown measles outbreak. The costs of this are likely to far, far outstrip the value of the school vouchers.

In practice though the amount of accounting that it'd take to make this kind of opt out system perfectly fair is so large that it'd be better to just force people to take the vaccines. I guess like many on this site I'm not a huge fan of governments forcing people to do things against their will, but there are cases where it's clearly the best path forward, like obeying speed limits, paying taxes .... and being vaccinated.

The issue is that making and cancelling orders on a market is not traditionally seen as financial fraud.

Could you link to those sources instead of only naming them? The only "fugitive banker" that I know of in Switzerland was Raoul Weil, and a quick Google search for the query [us fugitive bankers switzerland] only throws up that name as well, so I'm guessing you're misremembering the details of this particular story.

Raoul Weil is (a) not American, (b) had nothing to do with the financial crash and (c) did in fact get extradited to the USA accused of (effectively) not being an unpaid agent of the IRS .... where he was so convinced of his innocence he decided not to plea bargain, went to court, and achieved complete victory with jury deliberation of just over an hour. Raoul did not testify in his own defence and presented no witnesses, yet the case against him collapsed almost immediately as the primary witness had been given a sweetheart deal by US prosecutors and appeared to be lying on the witness stand. There was no evidence he knew anything about what bankers far below him in the organisation had been doing.

Taking quotes out of context like that is just appalling

How is it out of context? Would you care to provide the missing context that makes her comments seem more reasonable? I picked that site because it was one of the first hits on Google for the phrase you claimed was "made up shit" - I have no idea who the person who made the video is. It just happens to contain her saying it.

"Women are being institutionally oppressed all the time, in nearly every facet of our lives" ..... I can't imagine why you think the statement is odd or unusual.

Because it's obviously false, highly inflammatory garbage that no rational person would ever say. Women are not being "institutionally oppressed" in any sense of the term, and this kind of nonsense is exactly why prominent feminists attract so much negative attention. The fact that some of them actually debate this idea just goes to show how disconnected from reality they have become.

Go back a few hundred years when women couldn't vote, couldn't work in many professions and were basically owned by their husbands. That was institutional oppression.

Here is a hint: there is feminist critique of every art form. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it or pay any attention to it.

I don't read it, which is why I had to search for the quote to see if your accusation that epyT-R was making things up was true. Obviously you don't read this stuff either, otherwise you wouldn't have made yourself look foolish by assuming that quoting Anita S's extremism was "making shit up".

I was responding to your post that read:

I doubt if anyone will get banned and be surprised about it

and I argued that people will be surprised because the policies will inevitably be arbitrary and rather biased. The surprising way the UK police enforce very very similar rules on Twitter users as Twitter now wants to enforce itself is highly relevant to that point.

You seem to think I said Twitter shouldn't be allowed to do this, or some other argument about ownership of private spaces. I didn't mention it, though.

This is an obvious straw man

No, a straw man would be where I claim you argued something you didn't, and then knocked down that non-argument. You straw manned me when you said "Twitter are allowed to do this regardless of what you think" - that's a response to something I never said. Obviously they're allowed to do it. The question is whether it's a good idea or not, and what the consequences will be.

I think the consequence is very likely to be that they tolerate abusive and threatening tweets if they come from particular kinds of people or support various kinds of political positions, and crack down hard on ideas and opinions they/the moderators don't like under the guise of fighting "abuse".

For the Osaka-Tokyo route, the Shinkansen made the difference between an overnight business trip or return the same day. That made it insanely popular. With the new train, you can not just make a set of meetings; you can do a full days work and still get back the same day (even more so for Nagoya of course).

Many people here get stationed at offices in other cities for months or years, and leave their families behind. They effectively do a weekly commute, and come home only on weekends. For a lot of people this would let them get home more often or even stay home and make this a daily commute. Expensive, but on the other hand the company doesn't have to pay for a second short-term apartment and the other costs of two households.

I'd say 99% of people I've met in my life can tell what hate speech is when they read it.

This is the "appeal to the reasonable man" approach. It's quite common in law. Basically punts the decision to a randomly selected judge who is just trusted to be reasonable.

The problem is that the people deciding what reasonable means are of course never a perfect cross section of society at large. In the UK there have been cases where e.g. someone posted to Facebook that he hated British soldiers and he hoped they would go to die and go to hell because of all the muslims they killed.

This was interpreted as being literal hate speech. He was arrested, charged with "a racially aggravated public order offense" and then found guilty of sending a "grossly offensive communication" and sentenced to community service. The police explained, "he didn’t make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother".

Most likely this post would violate Twitters policies (if Twitter allowed such a long tweet).

Now what about posts like these? What about tweets that threaten "the terrorists" with death? Do you seriously think Twitter, an American company, is going to start shutting down these sorts of accounts? What about movie studios tweeting quotes from American Sniper to promote it?

I am seriously skeptical. Most likely it will be like every other attempt to do this I've seen - what is or isn't threatening or abusive will depend entirely on the world view of the people doing the moderation and how famous/politically connected the tweeters are. It won't ever attempt to be even handed.

Are you just making this shit up?

Why not Google it and find out? That's what I did - took 10 seconds. That is a quote from Anita Sarkeesian, in this video where she says (apparently without irony) that "Women are being institutionally oppressed all the time, in nearly every facet of our lives" followed by the quote about porno fantasy, which is apparently about the game Bayonetta.