Your examples are competitive sports and buying up the right stocks, areas with specific rules and no net output to society. If the top player never existed in a second reality, the 2nd player would be called the top player and no social scientist could identify the harm to the 2nd reality.
If you look at fields where it matters what people produce and the product requires sophisticated and diverse differences, then attempting to rank them too often is catastrophic. For example Microsoft damaged themselves with stack ranking, not just because of immediate social harm, but because everyone had to rank well by showing off skills that were known to be valuable, top, classy, aka the best fads of today. That puts the company on a walk to a local Maxima and unable to compete with a company with engineers who can invest in random skills that just seem interesting without risking a nervous breakdown from the combined costs of signal investment and actual investment.
There are plenty of studies on telling children they are naturally talented, etc and getting them to stop doing the activity for fear of losing evidence of this trait. Many of the "best programmers" I worked with were unproductive and got lost on things that were irrelevant. Engineers I would pick from my old groups tend not to be recognized as great and complemented on how well and timely they put everything together, with an undertone that the greatest programmer could have also done it if only he had time.
Isn't gross income a bit misleading if they need to buy out larger and larger companies and harvest their products/good-will with an increasing portion of that gross income?
Interesting, I've been very happy with pouchdb finagling all these browser DBs into one that matches couchdb on the server side.. I would really have to think about the auth logistics for memcache to switch to a kV store. But that would be even more insane minimalism atop the absurd complexity of the web stack.
I played with a free online cbt and got much further than their average participant in this study.. I'm not sure if there is any use to cbt for depression, but I would suspect that it would work better in a preventative fashion.
I.e. I did notice that I can let thinking about some social interactions go where they would bother me in the past, but if I was depressed when I played with it, then maybe I would just notice how bad I was at benefiting from CBT at the moment where I should be letting something go.
Given the population of Zurich, I've always comparing it to Boston to be fair. In that context Zurich is the mix with modern architecture. Boston has done nothing and then a big nothing for my entire life, only in the last 5 years does the seaport look like a part of Zurich, with actual cranes and construction workers.
Looking at the traditional literary world is where everything becomes obvious to me.
To be a good writer you have to hold stubborn opinions until each work is finished or you have too many options and create something confusing, bland, unpalatable and inconsistent. If you hold the same ideas too long and too publicly then the market raises the volume on the jibes against your style since you offer no topics for discussion and it wants to recover your share.
To be anyone else in literary market, you have to fawn over every returning fad as if it were new and great, and be the catalyst for reinforcing the artificial drama in the differences in stubborn views the authors are holding. To do less is to hurt overall market sales and eventually be shunned.
I find it all very interesting to follow, but if you want to be a proper lazy programmer for the long haul then you must learn to stay bellow the radar so no one knows how boring and automatic your solutions are. Those are the authors we all know exist who quietly take ghost writing cuts on a book or more a year, but dont have all the crisises or neurosis to get the role of author on tv.
When I used to work in OS support my actions were optimized for the assumptions of a default minimal install and being able to describe actions to a person of questionable knowledge over the phone and interpret what they would most likely try to read back at me. The certifications were along those lines too.. While the exact nature of the certifications was ridiculous and would be even more ridiculous in terms of judging a general user's skills, dropping an administrator on minimal installs with broken ttys, etc makes a lot of sense. If you can't recover a system when vi is not an option then you have a problem, if you spend a lot of time recovering a good term when you could have used tail, then you are also not ideal.
The only suggestion I would make is that a good tool is present and working then I don't expect a penalty. I expect tools to not be present accordance with standard minimalist setups and to pay extreme penalties if I need to call a package manager or move to a less minimalist install to complete the task.
I strongly disagree. We should not test edge cases and specific scenarios. We are trying to test the candidate and his abilities in daily tasks. If I say I use vi instead of "commands" I will probably solve most of the "text" editing tasks faster than an admin that only knows how to get around using commands.
I can come up with tons of scenarios when where you do not really know the internals you can get stuck easily. Like if I do chmod -x on the chmod binary. Does it prove anything if the candidate is not able to solve such task ?
While I mostly agree with you, I can speak from experience with how we handled the first point:
We were interviewing a new admin for the sysadmin/maintenance team and her answers to "how would you solve this problem?" were "Open that file and check that these variables are set and, if not, set them". One of the more jerkish people there went down the rabbit hole of "How are you going to edit that file? What if you don't have vim? Okay, what if you don't have emacs? Nano is gone too" leading to the response that made us hire her: "Well, in that case the system is probably completely hosed and we need to stop configuring things and focus on recovery. But I think you are looking for me to tell you a sequence of commands that involve cat. If you give me five minutes I can check stack overflow and get back to you with those"
Which I personally think should be the response for stuff like that. Understand there is an alternative and a way to resolve the corner cases and know how to get that info if needed.
Brilliant answer :-). I totally agree with you. But this is the problem..you cannot implement such a thing to a tool like sysadminarena.
Actually I believe being a sysops/devops or whatever you want to call it is one of the "most" challenging jobs in the IT industry. You get zillions of technologies you have to administer and maintain but it's impossible to master all of them. What makes a good admin is the ability to learn,adapt,ask for a help and knowing where to look for an answer. It's easy to look up the parameters if you know the fundamentals.
Interviewing for me as a devops person is one of the most frustrating experiences. You are often asked questions that are specific to the environment of a company you are interviewing with. It's unbelievable how many times I've been asked about parameters of tar, du etc. It's totally stupid.
And imagine interviewing with a company that uses only a specific subset of technologies and they heavily emphasize on that.
I would argue that basically any tech job (and probably other fields) is about knowing how to solve a problem (I really do wonder what the medical doctor equivalent of stack overflow is).
And just targeting a limited subset is kind of reasonable. Because, odds are, you will be. If you are running infrastructure for a web server you probably will have decided on a few solutions and have time to experiment with new ones on a new platform. Scientific computing? Same deal. It is the same logic by which coders should learn a range of languages and tools but will probably use a very small subset at any given job.
And I think that the semi-automated tools COULD detect stuff like that. One point for each solution presented and maybe something akin to those god awful rubrics for the more complex ones. So going with the tar approach (after twenty years, I know xzvf and czvf and can use a test file to figure out the order):
1 point for a correct answer
0.5 points for typing "man tar" or "<google> tar"
And then a subset of the remaining 0.5 for each letter and the order of operations. So something like tar xvf foo.tar.gz ./foo would get you most of the credit.
The big problem with stuff like this is that it should ONLY be used for an initial filter, but it will inevitably be used as "Only the top N people matter".
Hmm, it seems like you are looking at how you should triage an applicant if they let you test them very painfully. I am interested in games I can play where mastery also serves as a potential initial triage and could lead to interesting discussions.
Just as I like project euler gamified as a fake ideal programming project, I would like a systems game where the point is optimizing for the worst case with minimal tools.
Add an IDE, a choice of editors, all kinds of softskills requirements that are more significant to an employer than these base primary skills. Now, I wonder why I am working for free as I am no longer just practicing our core/universal skills in an idealized/timeless environment. The better place to do that form of showing off work realistic skills is in OSS projects.
Do you work as a sysadmin? If so, how many times did you recover from a broken tty at work? (I mean, is it a number bigger than zero?)
I've been one for a short while, and get to play devops from time to time. When I see a machine so broken that it can't give me a tty, it's time for a reboot (if last command caused it - actually don't remember it ever happening), full reinstall, or trash. I won't lose any time recovering it. If there's some important log on the disks or anything, mount the disk on another machine.
Now, I've recovered a broken machine plenty of times at home. I've edited files with sed and pipes because I broke every other editor available. I have never actually edited the memory with sed, but I could if I had to. But all that is at home, where it's fun to create a crazy configuration, and totally not fun to throw things away. It's fun, but completely unproductive.
> Do you work as a sysadmin? If so, how many times did you recover from a broken tty at work? (I mean, is it a number bigger than zero?)
Before then I was an sysadmin for a little while, but I don't really see what difference the role makes. I've never had a job where I didn't at some point need to deal with a legacy serial console of some sort misrouted through incompatible aggregators, etc, in order to deal with a networking problem and/or auth problems.
The idea that I would blind reboot a system in a failure mode I can't diagnose is not something I would normally consider until I've exhausted all means and only if I know a fair bit about it. I'm sure some of my colleagues did things like that as some were developers with relatively little system knowledge, but only a few were stupid enough to mention losing failure data through laziness to senior staff.
> It's fun, but completely unproductive.
? If I had a page for you should have diagnosed and every time you hit a swiss cheese failure with that attitude than I wouldn't use computers at all anymore.
> So if I decide that taxes are too high and I present evidence that the tax rate is at the wrong end of the laffer curve I could get my money back?
How does that flow from these quotes?
To be equivalent, you would need to prove that the tax rate is so insane that it has a substantial chance of killing you. Equivalent arguments for tax relief are in relation to poverty, medical costs, food and basic necessities, etc and generally win.
They do? People have actually sued the government because their taxes were too high for their particular circumstance? I'm not trying to be facetious, I just don't know much about this topic.
No, the same civil rights allow you to start a process to invalidate a tax completely and they are used that way all the time. Civil rights arguments have everything to do with why your laffer curve isnt optimal and we pay higher set rates so there are things that are completely exempt. Look at state sales tax exemptions as an example of people lowering their effective tax rate, but not the overall tax collected or the average benefit of government.
It seems to me like you are trying to warp the discussion into every tool with a visible political outcome being equivalent and open to "democratic" systems. The republic is a tool for a specific purpose that is usually opposite of delivering optimal solutions to the majority. The democratic systems are supposed to deliver what you seem to want until they violate civil rights. If they dont for a reason other than civil rights, then your recourse is to petitition the republic to change the election process. But you cant make the republic actually care about your general tax rates or any other problems it allows the democratic process to handle, it can only make sweeping rules when parties are in violation of the core rules.
The argument that the state is killing you is only significant if you can make it rationally, and a 10-99% tax isnt killing you unless it doesnt exclude the poverty level in its gradients and then you dont need to be the one being killed to make the argument. A 99% tax rate that can get 50% of the vote may indicate another failure though.
Microsoft has to address the amount of crapware vendors ship and the permissions they have and deffinitely plays some games of chicken with them to try to keep windows market share.
While it makes sense to hit the vendors directly to the extent possible, it also costs these platforms trust when most of the ways users end up with them have them compromised from day one. I.e. do I give relatives a list of vendors I think might be safe to use without a complete wipe and fresh install? For windows that is impossible.
If you look at fields where it matters what people produce and the product requires sophisticated and diverse differences, then attempting to rank them too often is catastrophic. For example Microsoft damaged themselves with stack ranking, not just because of immediate social harm, but because everyone had to rank well by showing off skills that were known to be valuable, top, classy, aka the best fads of today. That puts the company on a walk to a local Maxima and unable to compete with a company with engineers who can invest in random skills that just seem interesting without risking a nervous breakdown from the combined costs of signal investment and actual investment.