It was a popular meme in computer security focused groups for a while after it was discovered since it was an unprivileged DoS. I only remember seeing it talked about with the f00f representation: some people even called it "getting f00f'd" if you managed to trick someone into executing the instructions.
When I was interviewing people on behalf of a client, I was surprised at the number of people who didn't even know what SSH was. This was for a mid-level software developer and not a junior and they all came with glowing resumes.
They all insisted that it was essential to have a CI/CD process but didn't even know what the "CD" part even did. Apparently you just "git push" and the code magically gets on the server. There are many ways to do deployments and a CI/CD process isn't always suitable and can have many forms, in my opinion, but I was happy to discuss any and all. But it's difficult to do that without the basics. As you said, before I was commissioned the platform had no documentation, was crumbling under tech debt and failing constantly so something like getting on the server to at least figure out what's going on was essential.
I went for a senior sysadmin interview role and they asked me to debug a website in the browser that was only visible on localhost, ssh was available.
They asked me to double check that part because they assumed I just hadn't done that part, because apparently I was the first person who didn't need help with an SSH tunnel.
There’s a lot of that going around, lately. I recently had an interviewer admit I was not in the first round of candidates sent for in-person finals, but they had all bombed out on very basic SSO questions despite having a decade managing Entra; I was a “second choice” candidate and the first one to correctly answer the broad strokes of setting up an SSO app, despite not having touched Entra since it was called Azure AD.
I suspect this is AI’s doing, but cannot be sure. It’s really critical that technical interviewers weed out the over-inflaters though, now more than ever.
This predates AI. I've been interviewing candidates(SRE/DevOps) since 2018, so many candidates that claim to have extensive experience with things completely fall apart when you put them in front of a terminal.
Gathering and mapping unfamiliar systems is part of that skillset. I’m also looking at being able to think laterally, being able descend abstraction layers, and understanding architectural characteristics and constraints (Roy Fielding’s Dissertation), which will recur at each level of abstraction.
I'm hiring at a small company and it's a nightmare. 1,000+ applicants for a software engineering position and we have essentially no help from recruiting. I'm filtering based on keywords, giving each resume a max of 90 seconds, and anything that even slightly seems off gets rejected.
I only have the bandwidth to talk to a couple 10s of candidates since I have the entire rest of my job to do, so I can see the appeal of an AI interviewer. I'd never use one due to the issues brought up here though.
just thinking about this, if you had the latitude to explain it more or less exactly as you have here, in human language, and frame it as a screen stage of the application and not an interview, and add: 'hey, I know this is really far from ideal but if you're legitimately interested this probably works in your favour', good people might not mind it.
I think most of the issue with this kind of thing, practical stuff aside like extra time invested and potential unpleasantness of actual
experience, is what it implies about the culture and your relationship. If you level with people a lot of that gets addressed, and you're left with 'only' the practical inconvenience.
I used a simple “tell me what you had for breakfast” line to filter out people who don’t read. It required no work from the applicant but filtered out some of the spam. I wonder if an AI-resistant version could be made.
Asking for personal information or other stuff that isn't required for the application is weird and somewhat illegal, so maybe I would have ignored it even if I noticed it while reading.
What you had for breakfast is not personal information, and of course nowhere near illegal. The worst employees are those who start out with an attitude that the employer is their enemy like this.
Requiring to disclose your breakfast habits for a job application has not anything to do with your merit to the company, and gives grounds to the possibility of choosing people on sympathy to their answers to that question. It became frowned to include a picture into a CV, because this feeds implicit biases, why should that be any different with alimentary behaviour?
Honestly for dealing with job application spam, this sounds like a neat way to handle this, but without that context, it is just weird. Also it seems to be obsolete against people using LLMs for these applications, I expect them to be able to just invent an answer for that question just fine.
Just the fact that you're ready to go all-in arguing about a detail of small talk and start talking about legality and such, is employability poison. And that's something interviewers are looking for. I agree that it's a weird question, but one that the person being interviewed can easily just pass without it being a big deal.
The other poster said it's just a question to easily filter out applicants who aren't paying attention, and it seems as good a method as any. Say "just a cup of coffee" and move on. If the interviewer continues to talk about breakfast or other irrelevant stuff, then I'd just end the conversation. But they can have one for free.
But on the subject, I have no idea how companies manage to screw up their hiring process this much. I used to sometimes interview and hire people and found it to be the easiest thing ever, and I never had the need to do these weird games or more than a phone interview to find great employees. How hard is it to just focus on the exact task of the job and find a candidate who understands it and has a good attitude?
As I said I would have just ignored that request in an application, because it sounds inappropriate. I would just give the context that not all people not writing an answer failed to read that request.
> And that's something interviewers are looking for.
I understood this answer to be part of the written application, in an interview I would just classify this as pointless small talk and just answer something.
> Just the fact that you're ready to go all-in arguing about a detail
This is HN, sir. Going all-in on detail is part of the culture.
In many countries (certainly the EU and UK), religion is certainly considered personal information, and this sort of question skirts fairly close to that if asked during eg. Lent or Ramadan.
And even outside those periods, it's completely unrelated to the job or the applicant's suitability for it. It might be fine as small talk when setting a candidate at ease or as an icebreaker, but it's unreasonable to expect to form a judgement based on their answer.
Besides, it's the sort of thing that an LLM-based system should easily be able to handle. I'm not sure it would ever give you any sort of useful signal.
I agree. If I see "unfortunately we receive hundreds of applications from people who don't read the job description, please include the word banana in your application" I will be sympathetic. If I "see interview with our ai bot first" I will nope out.
At this point just save yourself the 90s per resume and just throw out 50% or more of the resumes. At least then you might get more time to assess how good the remaining resumes are.
Not the parent but that was not at all clear to me. I immediately thought of taking multiple successive instantaneous screenshots and then stacking them. I'm not sure I would have thought of using a camera within a few minutes to an hour, it's not a tool I would ever reach for normally.
Oh, so your screenshot utility has "long exposure" and an "ND" filter and "shutter speed" controls, just like a phone's camera? What kind of screenshot utility simulates optical camera effects? What purpose does that serve? Care to share a link to it?
>Obviously harder to expose a bright screen without some ND since the shutter speed is the phone's main exposure control
You mean like all of the context I used describing something not a screenshot. Being able to pick up on context clues from the reading is a crucial skill one should have in life. It also makes one look less clueless in conversation when the topics shift quickly and one can keep up.
It is at the company I currently work for. We moved to Rancher Desktop or Podman (individual choice, both are Apache licensed) and blocked Docker Desktop on IT's device management software. Much easier than going through finance and trying to keep up with licenses.
Deal breaker for us too, now in my second org where that's been true.
It's not just that you need a licence now, it's that even if we took it to procurement, until it actually got done we'd be at risk of them turning up with a list of IP addresses and saying "are you going to pay for all of these installs, then?". It's just a stupid position to get into. The Docker of today might not have a record of doing that, but I wouldn't rule out them getting bought by someone like Oracle who absolutely, definitely would.
That's a lot. With Percona clusters I started having issues requiring fine-tuning around a third of that at quite short peak loads, maybe ten minutes sustained high load topping out at 6-10k writes/s. Something like 24 cores, 192 GB RAM on the main node.
Not sure how GC works in Golang but if you see 20k writes/s sustained that's what I'd be nervous about. If every write is 4 kB I think it would be something like a quarter of a TB per hour, probably a full TB at edge due to HTTP overhead, so, yeah, a lot to handle on a single node.
Maybe there are performance tricks I don't know about that makes 20k sustained a breeze, I just know that I had to spend time tuning RAM usage and whatnot for peaks quite a bit earlier and already at that load planned for sharding the traffic.
“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.”
“Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.
“Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
My three year old and I actually had a lot of fun with the Calculator app on my phone just a couple hours ago. He thought that me reading off large numbers was hilarious.
So, yeah, Calculator is a pretty important feature.
