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Comment Re:How many years has it been since anyone here (Score 1) 153

IE at this point is arguably better than Firefox, the later having fallen from grace quite a bit.

Also, I know you said web devs don't count, but recently, IE11's devtools have been updated to be pretty good. They're not on par with Chrome's, but for some stuff (sourcemaps), they're better (and are leaps and bounds better than anything available on Firefox).

Comment Re:Its about child support (Score 1) 374

Abortion laws in case of rapes are usually fine because the victim isn't a guy. And in most places, the state will prefer some family member taking the kid over adoption. So maybe an aunt on the side of the mother will take care of it during the 6-12 months the mother is in prison (because the rape was on a guy, so it will be considered a fairly minor offense).

Yes, the law is broken...almost everywhere.

Comment Re:Its about child support (Score 1) 374

Gonna need a citation for that one. Obviously rape is illegal and should be prosecuted. I don't see how it relates to this kind of responsibility, since the actual problem (if it's true) is that the police failed to investigate and prosecute a rape. If they had, the father could have put the child up for adoption immediately and be absolved of the responsibility to pay maintenance.

You won't, because its so common you can look it up in 3 seconds with statutory rapes instead of "guy being drugged". The laws are very clear the responsability is to the child, not the mother, and thus the fact that the mother is a rapist is irrelevent. The rape victim has to pony up the cash.

Isn't that great?

Comment Re:What about the man's perspective? (Score 1) 374

Something that makes things pretty shitty in this situation is that the guy basically had no chance:

If you read around, a lot of people pointed out no contractual agreement can legally be enforced over giving up rights and responsibilities to the child. It doesn't matter what was signed as far as custody or child support or whatever, give or take.

Now, when they were together, the girl had cancer, and wants to freeze her egg. No problem. But then they are told the eggs should be fertilized first. Now, you have a cancer patient in front of you begging you to help her keep her long dream of having a child.

If your answer is: "Sorry sweetie...but if shit was to hit the fan, no matter what we agree to now or sign, no matter how much you ask me to trust you today, if we don't work out, my life could be ruined because there's nothing we can do to force these eggs to be destroyed once we're no longer together".

Yeah, you'd be crucified on the spot by everyone who ever hears that story. So the guy more or less HAD to go through with it, or pay a very high moral/social cost.

And now that shit DID hit the fan, its basically: "Well, if you didn't want this to happen, you shouldn't have gone on with it!!!".

I personally just went and paid the social cost: When i got into a relationship, i made it very clear kids were not for me, period. Before we got married, I made it very clear yet again. Some people thought i was a horrible person for making these kind of "demands", but she was ok with it. 15 years later, she still is.

Thats not for everyone though.

Comment Re:Personally, I don't think he was talking to Goo (Score 1) 349

My wife interviewed for Google around that time, and pretty much all of that happened. There was a local Google office, and we know who the interviewer was, and it was a Google engineer. And pretty much everything described happened. And it was VERY common at the time (the google docs link was given on the spot, though. No video conferencing).

Interviewer who barely spoke english on speaker phone who barely seemed interested. Check!

Comment Re:That shouldn't surprise anyone (Score 1) 349

"Brushing up" is not a solution as it takes precious family time away and perpetuates the fact that IT HR keeps relying on standardized interview loops to select established and employed senior industry hires. Why can't companies offer an easy to terminate 1 months trial period contract on a well matched technical background? A match can be easily established through documentation, interviews and presentations by the candidate - and after the trial period is over the hiring team can make a decision based on a minimum of 160h of actual work done by the candidate.

I brought that up at my current employer, because we're trying to hire a lot, and no interview process will be perfect. Make it too hard, you have too many false negative (and the smarter people even just walk straight out). Make it easier so you don't miss out on geniuses who are just bad at interviewing, and you suddenly find yourself with a ton of shitty people.

So yes, the solution is to hire fast, and to lay off faster (after a trial period). Netflix supposingly does this.

The problem: First, the trial needs to be longer. In the first month, a lot of issues will simply be attributed to ramping up. Depending on the problem space, you may need 3 months, or more (I worked somewhere once where the problem space was so large and the ramp up so long, you really wouldn't know until 6+ months in. Thats rare though).

Second, most people thought it was "immoral" to hire someone and then lay them off. "People have bills!". "The interview process should just be better!". "Don't make people pay for your mistakes! If you hired them, you keep them!".

So instead, all of the people who are begging to be given a chance, are just left in the cold.

Comment Re:That shouldn't surprise anyone (Score 1) 349

The average is still in the 20s. If most of your team was in the 40s+, it is a fluke.

Google's interview process is also incredibly inconsistent. So of course, some people will have a better experience than the majority. You can brush up all you want, but there's countless algorithms, and it just takes ones.

And I'm just talking about the on-sites... the phone screens (if you're not skipping it via references)?. God forbid you're a little slow typing out a A* in fucking google doc (use coderpad or something, please?)

Comment That shouldn't surprise anyone (Score 5, Insightful) 349

Google is a discrimination factory, but in this case, there's a deeper problem, and its, what I'll call, the "MIT culture".

You have a bunch of people who busted their ass off to go through MIT/CMU/CalTech/Whatever, to learn all those algorithms, the computer science core, etc, and are thrown in the real world where, while VERY useful, are only a small subsets of things that matter.

Then you ask these people, who spent 4 (or 6, or more) years being drilled that the only shit that matters was what they learnt in school, and worked REALLY hard to absorb that, to interview.

What do you think will happen?

You end up with an interview process that, regardless of the actual work, the further away from school you are (ie: the older you are), the less likely you are to pass the interview, give or take people who worked as data or algorithm scientists in the recent past.

Net result: you have a very high percentage of college hire, and your lateral hires will always lean toward the younger side. Any skill that come with experience is almost never tested in interviews to counterbalance it.

Comment Re:Is it the Apps? (Score 0) 138

The marketing was good. The device sucked, and beyond the touch screen and including an actually adequate browser, was barely an incremental improvement over what was out there. Yeah, Pocket PC and Windows Mobile sucked, but the iPhone only sucked marginally less (and they had apps, the iPhone didn't).

The only thing Apple did aside the incremental technical improvement, was strike a deal for unlimited internet with a major carrier (which didn't last, btw), which got attention. More importantly, they managed to make it cool and hip, instead of being a geek toy. With those 2 things, Apple could have pushed out a white Pocket PC/Windows Mobile phone exactly like the ones that existed at the time, and ended with very similar results.

Comment Re:Lowest common denominator, to be expected (Score 1) 892

Yup, so here's the dirty secret that this ends up showing, assuming something like this became a lot more common.

Lower paying companies will end up with a higher percentage of women. The men will simply hold on offers and pick between multiple ones to get the higher paying ones. So you end up with lower paying companies full of women (who just took the job) and higher paying ones mostly with men who selected on that criteria (for better or worse).

Then in the news, the higher paying companies end up being called out for being sexist and not hiring enough women, even though it was basically self selecting by the candidates themselves.

End result: everybody loses.

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