Honestly, I keep hearing stories of companies doing interviews that are pretty much brain teasers and exercises in CS101 recall all the way through.

Say you're hiring a web developer. It's good to ask one question out of left field... "How many times do the hour, minute, and second hands of a clock perfectly align in 12 hours?"... to evaluate thought processes and see if the applicant dives in. But the reality is 90% of web development work at 90% of companies is pretty basic.

To the framework jockey who can turn out excellent, well tested code, even CS101 questions about recursion are pointless. Big-O notation is useful, but not often used. Blah blah blah.

When I interview, I'm looking for smart, socially well-adjusted people who have a track record of getting things done and not pissing their coworkers off. Questions are directly related to the position I'm hiring for, with one "fun" one - and I'm clear that the brain teaser isn't a right/wrong pass/fail scenario. If the people they'll be working with think they're a fit, they're hired.

And if they turn out to be all talk, we'd can them after the first month. Hasn't happened yet.

Now, for a senior role, I'd be choosier, sure. But to discard someone for not knowing an arbitrary piece of software or bit of theory? Baby/bathwater.

Really, really happy with Fastmail.

I've been a happy customer for years now. Their webmail interface is hands down the best I've ever used.They recently enabled CalDAV and CardDAV, so I have disabled Google calendar sync on my Android phone. Support is super responsive, you can do Sieve rules, and they are not a US firm.

My referral link: http://www.fastmail.fm/?STKI=7...

Non-referral link: http://www.fastmail.com/

No problem. It works really well, all though re-clocking isn't working yet across all devices. Nvidia has actually been helping the project in minor ways, documenting APIs here and there. It's quite the achievement really.

They have. It's been possible for *years*.

As a Canadian, I *want* to blame the USA for blazing the trail to idiotic ant-citizen laws and showing the old men who run our country how much they can screw with a lazy population with no fear of reprisals.

But it's our own fault for allowing this to happen.

So angry. The battle is engineering in the public interest versus government. We will have no victories in the halls of power, that much is clear.

This. The major companies have an interest in keeping tech wages down and they act in that interest every day.

All these educational initiatives like code.org? Those are to increase the supply of tech workers, thus lowering the value of each worker. In the meantime, they pretend they can't find applicants and bring over immigrants from the second and third world who'll work cheaply and lower wage expectations for everyone else.

Devalue a skillset while exploiting those who have it - that's the corporate way.

This is the battle of the management (generalist) class against the specialist class (us). It's a subduction game. They're pretty transparent in their methods, and they are consistently winning.

Maybe we need to go medieval, form a technologist guild, and take control of our own job market. Oh wait, that sounds like a union. Naah, tech workers hate unions - we're all precocious superintelligent individualist experts who don't need the support of our peers, right? And dues, man, we don't want to pay dues, that's for dumb factory workers, right? Riiight.

Carry on, then, let's all keep bending over together.

Where's the ZPM option, you insensitive clods?