Some very smart people are known for not being very good at standardized tests.

And a whole lot of dumb people.

At that kind of distance, is it really even worth mentioning? If I'm 100 nanometers away from something, I don't say "I'm 100nm away from X," I say "I'm right next to X." Why don't they just disembark now?

I'm not Norwegian, but ...

My income is relevant to society and my interaction with the state for a very specific and narrow purpose -- taxation. So obviously, for taxation purposes, the state should know how much I make. That does not mean, however, that every person in the state should know what I make; I have a general bias toward personal privacy (and state transparency), and I question why, say, my neighbors should know how much I make. I certainly have no interest in knowing how much they make.

As for criminals: Generally speaking, people who make more money have more money, and have more expensive stuff. So if you're going to target a house for burglary, and you have two houses with approximately the same countermeasures, would you not target the house with the higher income? You could argue that if I have a higher income I should have more countermeasures, but this is probably one of those cases where security by obscurity (not flashing money) is at least one of the useful security measures you could use -- and advertising your salary sort of makes that irrelevant.

Except that Netflix stays the hell away from stack ranking because it's mind-bogglingly stupid.

If we believe we (yes, "we." I work at Netflix) try to hire only top performers, it would actually make perfect sense that your whole team is doing great. There's no reason to artificially say that someone is doing poorly.

(Netflix reviews, BTW, are non-anonymous; anyone can review you; there's no requirement that anyone review anyone; and there's no scoring, just one text box for feedback. They're also separated by about four months from salary decisions because reviews are not meant to be related to salary)

FWIW, that's specific to the particular client you're using. It doesn't happen for me on AppleTV, for example.

I work at Netflix, on the Cloud and Platform Engineering side, responsible for doing some stuff in the cloud. We use both Linux and FreeBSD -- Our cloud infrastructure runs on Linux, so all the API calls, license calls, logging in etc is hitting Linux servers. And once you start downloading a movie, you're downloading it from one of our caches, which runs on FreeBSD.

(Context: I'm a hiring manager; my team builds big distributed software systems. Our choice of language is Scala, but the team chose to use Scala before anyone on it actually knew Scala, and we don't have strong preference for Scala for software developers we hire -- in fact, we don't look for specific language knowledge at all, but rather strong fundamentals (OOP, distributed systems, etc)).

Assuming you're not looking at a company that's gaming the system (others have talked about the whole "I want to hire/promote someone specifically but I have to post a position so I'll post a position only my preferred candidate will satisfy" scenario), the other problem -- and I think this is a bigger issue -- is that most people are just bad at ferreting out talent as part of the interview process, and therefore opt for asking about very specific skills, because testing for very specific skills is actually much easier than testing for talent, for experience, for understanding of the system. Add to that, of course, that if/when your HR group is responsible for job descriptions, quite often they can't conceive of a more flexible, open-ended description because they can't effectively measure for that when filtering resumes.

The unfortunate thing, of course, is that in the end the specific knowledge is probably not even what you're looking for -- certainly, it's not what we're looking for because what we want is the ability to solve very hard, complex, problems -- and these are the sorts of problems that are also hard to ask about in an interview, because any problem you can make significant headway on in 45 minutes is simpler than what we deal with. This really comes down to the fact that interviews are a test, a simulation of a reality (the person actually working with you), and people sometimes opt to build the interview (and the pre-interview process, like the job description) in a way that makes it easier to conduct that simulation, rather than in a way that makes it more representative of the actual thing for which you're testing. It's that "looking for your keys under the streetlamp because that's where the light is, even though you lost your keys in the dark alley" problem.

Hell. Yes. Email me at slashdot20131122@ols.inorganic.org if you're interested in the details.

I'd argue if you're hiring just to fire someone in a year -- and you know this in advance -- you're doing it wrong.

You know, it's funny. I manage a software development team that uses Scala to build a pretty big distributed system.

Nobody on this team knew Scala when the team decided it wanted to use Scala to build this product. We still don't actually prioritize Scala as a skillset for developers we look to hire.

It turns out that smart, experienced, people tend to be able to learn whatever particularities of whatever your choice of product pretty reasonably quickly. It's hard enough to find good developers, so we focus on that. Works reasonably well for us.

I can't possibly disagree with you more.

When I joined my current company about four years ago, we were running a home-grown configuration management system. When I argued against this with the sysadmin who had built it, he handwaved about "those other, much too complicated, CMSs," and "this one does exactly what we want."

Only it didn't. It resulted in customers using phrases like "we asked for eight webservers and we got eight webservers all of which were almost exactly alike." Almost.

I know, I know, we all think we're smart and talented and it's easier for us to simply roll something out than figure out how to adapt Chef, Puppet, etc to our environment. We're wrong. There's tremendous value to using a standardized tool and, honestly, if I have to bet on some random schmoe coming up with a good fullfeatured less-buggy idempotent (etc etc etc) configuration management system or Chef or Puppet being able to do it ... I'll go for the thing that has been out for a while, is supported by a vibrant community, and is used on thousands of servers already. Everything else is just misplaced arrogance.

Interesting. I pretty much only/always search for applications on my PC -- hitting command-space brings up spotlight and I type 'excel' (or, more often, 'keynote', 'chrome', or 'terminal'). This behavior came over from when I switched from a Windows box, where I did exactly the same thing (hit the shortcut for the start menu, then 'r' for the 'run' option). It's much quicker than finding an icon (even if I were to have the icon of every program I may be interested in at the bottom of my screen).

And in fact, that ends up being something I do quite often with gmail, too (at least the work version, which I access primarily on a browser, rather than my personal version which I access via IMAP).

That's already happening.

In the last year, we've had House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Lillyhammer, and Hemlock Grove (for pure original episodic content you can't get anywhere else in the world and which isn't a sequel). There's also Arrested Development (semi-original, given the history of AD, of course), and Derek. There are other things coming down the pipeline this year. So ... yeah, more than two series/seasons of TV a year.

I got the Pebble as a lark (and a toy); it's turned out to be profoundly useful for me. Here's how:

1. I'm in meetings much of the day (and anyway, having a loud cell phone is an obnoxious thing in an office environment), so I usually keep my phone on vibrate/silent; I'd routinely miss calendar reminders on my phone (and may be in a meeting that's 1o1 and involves me putting my laptop away). The Pebble buzzes me with calendar reminders so missing a reminder is a thing of the past;

2. Same thing about phone calls and texts; in the middle of a meeting, if I get a text from my wife, then A) I don't miss it; B) (just as importantly) I don't reach into my pocket and start looking at my phone (which is pretty obvious and a bit of a dick move), I can quickly scan the text message on the Pebble. Heck, not being able to respond to the text on the spot turns out to be an advantage in that case -- it's less distracting;

3. I work out, doing about an hour on the treadmill every morning. The Pebble's ability to control my music (especially now that I can use it not just for pause/forward/rewind but also for volume up / down) makes it so I can just put my Android phone away in the treadmill pocket and use the Pebble through my workout.

4. (Side-effect of (3)) I can now much more easily find my phone if it's around (and on) -- I just use the Pebble to start playing music on the phone, optionally raising the volume. It's been handy. Especially because lowering the volume on the ringer (making it so asking my wife to call me, for example, won't help) doesn't lower the volume on the music play AND because even if the music volume is low, I can raise the volume from the Pebble.

Frankly, for me -- speaking as someone who has many watches because I sort of collect them -- the saddest thing about the Pebble is that I'm no longer interested in rotating watches -- I wear the Pebble all the time because it's so damn useful.