I wouldn't call these 'confessions' nor 'sins'. They're observations I'm also making as I go through the process right now, 7 years since my last job search.

This is my experience thus far -

Context: I have over a decade of experience and a MS-CS. In the last 6 years I was part of some amazing projects (easily the most meaningful), I worked on getting a business off the ground, and spent little over a year being a full-time parent. I've been in many positions to interview, and make hiring decisions before.

I've interviewed unsuccessfully at the big employers in my area (GOOG, AMZN etc.) As I think about the places I didn't enjoy the process and wouldn't have looked forward to working at, the common theme would be that none of those groups cared to go into my past work history. They'd jump right into their academic-CS questions after introducing themselves. I can't imagine what the review process looks/sounds like afterwards, but they don't gather much data points about other qualities that separate each of us. These are also usually the places where a main reason for joining seems to be - "you'll be working with very smart, intelligent colleagues." My personality is such that the application matters more, so it doesn't matter if everyone around has high IQ if they're applying it towards the development of say, advertising platforms.

I wouldn't follow these practices put in place by MSFT/GOOG if I were to either run my own business, or were involved in at another company. There are other qualities to determine whether someone would be a good fit, and there are many groups out there who do a better job with this. What matters is if you hire/join colleagues you enjoy solving problems with, and having a civil and professional environment to do it in.

Or maybe this - "Vestager said if Washington chose to tax the profits reported by Apple's Irish operation, she would reduce her demand accordingly."

See: http://www.reuters.com/article...

I'll leave this here - https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/04/28/1524230/volvo-engineer-calls-out-tesla-for-dangerous-wannabe-autopilot-system/

These could serve as a better tool to capture transactions than hidden cameras. It would be more convenient, the person/groups on the other side know the transaction's being recorded and make them think twice.
Maybe once something like this becomes more commonplace, the authorities catch on and ban its use in official surroundings. I
nstead, what would be better is, like a 3D movie where the glasses are provided at the entry to the theatre, these kinds of glasses are provided to anyone entering an office, and returned on the way out. If the patron has any grievances, it's immediately available for recall.

I'm the submitter and one of the SWE's on the project. Prepayment meters are not new, and are quite commonly available and in use. Distributing scratch cards for purchase and validation are also not a novelty, and as noted in the summary this is an option we provide. What seems to be uncommon is the use of software management systems at the sites themselves - a high-level one at that, and not logic embedded in hardware like the meters. Because of this, we're able to control several networked devices at the sites, and add on service features as we learn.

Using intermittent renewables like we do (solar), we need to know how much was generated and ensure everyone is guaranteed a fair share. The software provides us that platform. We haven't implemented demand-response [yet] that will help with better management (for eg: cloudy-day scenarios), but do ration based on how much load is plugged in and how much is being consumed by each consumer. This helps to make sure that just a few heavy-duty consumers do not hog all the resources and exhaust the supply all by themselves.
Also, because this is all in software, it doesn't matter what the source is as long as we use devices that we can network and get readings from. In this sense, the generation could be from solar, wind, hydro, or even the old diesel gensets. We went with solar, hence SharedSolar, but it's really SharedSupply.

Another thing to note is that we can adapt and add more features to a service by changes in the software, without the need to make changes in the hardware configurations themselves. We can replicate the same model, or try new ones out, in different settings using different components as we see fit. For instance, we're evaluating different metering devices now but since everything about the service is in the distributed software platform, we only need to get devices that do AMR/AMI, without the need for even basic logic like prepayment. I wrote about where the software intelligence should sit depending on the quality of IP-based communications channels in a blog post here - http://sharedsolar.org/?page_id=13 .

Also, just by having the software at the site, it allows us the possibility of tuning the service remotely, along with short turn-arounds between malfunctions and fix.

The points others made about reduction in line theft etc are spot-on. One commenter asked if the consumers pay for the cellular interactions - they don't. This is actually a good case for having developed the local vendor solution the consumers seem to prefer - the entrepreneur who used to sell them kerosene is equipped with an Android device and now helps sell prepaid electricity. This was only possible because of the web services we could build on the local software platform and not because of anything inherent in the hardware/meters.
Also, mobile service providers are also slowly getting interested in this space, as they have been with banking, health etc and they are our partners where we deploy. There are also interesting projects where the excess power generated at the base stations are distributed to the nearby populace.

Thanks.

Anyone know of any extensions to auto-complete your bookmarked URL's the way Safari does?