You think that's bad? I sent spam for N'SYNC.

Well, they do when they're used. And mostly they aren't. Which is what I have to say to this article: We already have a mechanism for handling this, and yet nobody is actually handling it. What's sad is that CMSes don't handle it for you automatically. Drupal for example has a module which automatically generates path aliases. But there's no module which produces a redirect for the old alias when the path changes.

There is no such need.

Such a feature would look very different, probably involving a certificate. This is a back door for cisco etc. Or for the NSA. It's not for ISPs, or the ISPs would have known about it.

I don't even use denatured alcohol for cleaning things. You can buy pure IPA in gallon steel cans (or even five gallon cans!) at most hardware stores. The only time I've gotten it cheaper is in those rare cases when the grocery outlet has 70% IPA, but usually it's only 50% and less than 70% won't adequately clean many varnishes and so on off of the metal surfaces where I tend to use IPA — in automotive applications. I refill my bottles and then add water to make my own 75%-ish bottles for less-demanding jobs.

They've been dicking around with paint thinner, too! Now you often can't get real toluene, they have some kind of substitute. That sucks, because it's got a bunch of specific uses as a thinner for stuff other than paints, like silicone.

Do they? Do they really? Japanese values seem to work, right up until they go completely insane and fail epically. Koreans, which Koreans? Indians? Have you seen India?

I don't think the USA is that great or anything, this isn't about that. But seriously.

Yes. But guess what? If you hire that talent from outside, you're going to have to pay them more, or they will just quit and go to work for someone else. You have to pay for talent.

There's a fun little space station game called Startopia that is cheap on GOG, where you build in the contents of a station to serve visitors and engage in trade. You hire employees from the pool of visitors to the station. Each employee has three statistics, which are skill, dedication, and loyalty. Each stat can have zero to five pips and each pip raises their hiring cost. As employees age, they increase in ability. Every three pips and they demand another pip in pay; pay is one to five pips. If their abilities exceed their pay for too long, they quit; the lower their loyalty stat, the sooner they quit. There's also a factor of their desires; what you build either appeases those or doesn't. If they don't get what they want, they will eventually quit. If they don't have enough to do, they will eventually quit.

This extremely simple set of rules actually produces a pretty good approximation of employee behavior, albeit in a sci-fi setting. People expect to get paid for what they can do. Some people feel loyalty to their employers, but most people are just trying to appease their own needs. And why not? They wouldn't be working for you, otherwise. You can either pay them and make sure they get what's important to them, or you can watch them quit and wave goodbye.

Now, how applicable the frequencies of action are to actual life is another issue, but the takeaway is that you hire loyal employees, who won't just up and quit on you when times are tough and you're having trouble giving raises because you'll empty your coffers, and you give them some training. You need to hire employees who have enough skill to carry your business forward, but if you hire employees with more skill than you need, you're just wasting money.

The real bitch is that there are three unemployed for every job opening, and many job postings now attract literally thousands of applicants. You can't just count stars when hiring humans, and now there are just too many applications to even go through for many technical positions.

Sadly, when I studied welding it was taught by a short-timer. And while I can [MIG] weld OK in normal conditions, when I'm in a tiny little space with fifteen other guys trying to learn to weld, I just sweat out. It's probably horribly hazardous to health just breathing all that shit. Not even fume hoods, just one of those big vac hoses over each station that catches about a quarter of what comes off of the work.

Nothing is more frustrating than already being frustrated and having the "instructor" "teaching" the class being about to leave next year, and not giving a shit.

It still matters, if the data being manipulated is about customers. And it almost always is.

There's nothing wrong with working in the fields, and lots of people (of all colors) who work farms do enjoy it. Forcing someone to work against their will and without pay, that's not right. But there's nothing at all wrong with farming.

Wow, that's cheap. Of course, east coast skiing sucks, so I suppose it's reasonable, but still... that's cheap.

Powering the potato gun.

They have a combustion chamber at the rear. You open it up, spray hairspray into it, close it, then twist (or whatever) the sparker to ignite it. The potato chunk which was inserted into the muzzle flies a great distance. Laugh. Repeat.

FWIW, Google doesn't really pay attention to what you've done. They pay attention to what you do during the interview.

No, he's saying that there were lots of competing companies doing about the same thing. You say one of them (who I'd never even heard of) walked away. Fine. Several others didn't walk away, and instead got trounced. Perhaps FAST could have competed and perhaps not. Apparently they didn't think they could.

Not yet. Non-ad revenue has been climbing steadily, growing significantly faster than ad revenue, with the result that advertising's share of Google's revenues -- while still dominant -- is decreasing every year. It's still 90%, but that's down from 94% just two years ago. I expect it to drop to 80% within a couple of years and to be less than 50% in a decade or so, perhaps less. Nearly all of the company's big growth initiatives are in non-advertising businesses. Not that Google doesn't keep pushing the ad revenue numbers upward, and not that they aren't mind-boggling.

I know a couple of Google employees without bachelor's degrees. One has an associate's degree and the other didn't even complete high school. Both are brilliant people and outstanding engineers. Google doesn't really pay attention to credentials in the interview and hiring process. Bock's point wasn't that the CS graduate was more likely to get hired because of what would be written on the diploma, but because the more challenging coursework would be a better preparation.

This presumes, of course, that the CS degree program really is more challenging and requires more critical thinking ability than the English program. I'd generally expect that to be true, but there are counterexamples. My university, for example, had such a weak CS program that the English degree probably was harder.

I should point out, though, that most Google engineers do have BS or MS degrees, along with a substantial leavening of PhDs, and most of them are in CS, math or other engineering fields, but far from all.

That would be a perfect first response, BTW. Many good interview questions are intentionally vague, precisely to see if the candidate will recognize the ambiguity and ask appropriate questions to clarify it, because that's a critically important skill/habit for the real world.

(I am a Google interviewer.)