I second that sentiment!

After only 10 years since it independently sent its first astronaut into space

Independently? The Chinese do nothing independently. They fly to space on a glorified Russian Soyuz.

(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.

They are not just jerks. They are breaking the law. You would be within your rights sue. It is sad that your talent is discouraged.

In other news blacks dominate the NFL and NBA, Jews dominate physics.

The United States and Japan can easily defeat China. Let's party!

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.

The job of government is to pay for education.

At some point one must question whether they are doing a competent job. Got the money? We are $17 trillion in debt. You mean other people have the money and you'd like to seize their property. Most rational people will object.

Yeah, but they are Obama supporters, and that it enough to keep them on the job in this benighted country.

I dunno. When my truck runs out of gas I can use the spare gas can in the back. What does a Tesla do when it runs out of juice, burst into flames?

But capitalism alone can't address the needs of the very poor.

Your signal to double down on capitalism.

What can go wrong with a Russian occupied war zone 20km south in Abkhazia, 200 km from a civil war zone in Chechnya, in a country run by a KGB trained despot who hates homosexuals, with no phones, and no outside communications? Ought to be a real party.