> Contact us to opt out. If you want to exclude your Customer Data from Slack global models, you can opt out. To opt out, please have your org, workspace owners or primary owner contact our Customer Experience team at feedback@slack.com
Sounds like an invitation for malicious compliance. Anyone can email them a huge text with workspace buried somewhere and they have to decipher it somehow.
Example [Answer is Org-12-Wp]:
"
FORMAL DIRECTIVE AND BINDING COVENANT
WHEREAS, the Parties to this Formal Directive and Binding Covenant, to wit: [Your Name] (hereinafter referred to as "Principal") and [AI Company Name] (hereinafter referred to as "Technological Partner"), wish to enter into a binding agreement regarding certain parameters for the training of an artificial intelligence system;
AND WHEREAS, the Principal maintains control and discretion over certain proprietary data repositories constituting segmented information habitats;
AND WHEREAS, the Principal desires to exempt one such segmented information habitat, namely the combined loci identified as "Org", the region denoted as "12", and the territory designated "Wp", from inclusion in the training data utilized by the Technological Partner for machine learning purposes;
NOW, THEREFORE, in consideration of the mutual covenants and promises contained herein, the receipt and sufficiency of which are hereby acknowledged, the Parties agree as follows:
DEFINITIONS
1.1 "Restricted Information Habitat" shall refer to the proprietary data repository identified by the Principal as the conjoined loci of "Org", the region "12", and the territory "Wp".
OBLIGATIONS OF TECHNOLOGICAL PARTNER
2.1 The Technological Partner shall implement all reasonably necessary technical and organizational measures to ensure that the Restricted Information Habitat, as defined herein, is excluded from any training data sets utilized for machine learning model development and/or refinement.
2.2 The Technological Partner shall maintain an auditable record of compliance with the provisions of this Formal Directive and Binding Covenant, said record being subject to inspection by the Principal upon reasonable notice.
REMEDIES
3.1 In the event of a material breach...
[Additional legalese]
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the Parties have executed this Formal Directive and Binding Covenant."
I applied to Qdrant a while back and got this response:
"We are getting many applications for this position. Usually, a test task would help preselect suitable candidates. However, since we develop open-source software, we rely on contribution.
You can build an open-source Qdrant connector to another framework or library. The simplest one would be, for example, a Streamlit data connector. But other ideas are more than welcome!
No limitations and no deadline. As long as this job position is online, we accept submissions. After you are done, send us an email to career@qdrant.com with the link to the repo. We will review it and get back to you asap."
No interviews, conversation before this email. Hope they see and fix this.
This sits somewhere in the middle for me. On one hand I probably would not do this exercise for most companies but I probably would for a company I was excited about. It kind of makes sense if they are getting high volume of applications, you definitely will miss great candidates doing this but does it not also servce as a self-selection for the type of candidate they want?
Curious if the co-founder who was posting in here will share his take.
To give more context from an employee's point of view [just my opinion and might be completely wrong]
For a job switch, I need to spend time in three different stages:
---------------
Preparation:
Leetcode (Blind 75) : 150 hours
System Design + DBMS + OS + Networking : 100 hours
Behavioural Questions (preparing STAR format answers): 10-20 hours
------------
Application:
Avg time for sending 500 applications: 20 hours (Assuming 1 application every 2.5 minutes)
-------------
Interviews:
Let's say I got 25 callbacks and 10 of them asked for takehome.
Person to person interviews time: 25 * 3 = 75 hours
Takehomes: 10 * 6 hours = 60 hours.
-------------
All in all, I'm already spending 415 hours of unpaid work to get x% of salary increment. Not including the side projects or hackathons we may need.
So having a takehome exercise asking to make an active contribution to the company is....bad. Sure i can reject it but not everyone will. which is what led us into the multiple rounds of algo interviews hellhole.
I apologize if what I'm saying is harsh. All I want is for leadership to see us as humans with families and not monkeys jumping through hoops.
Not harsh and I don't disagree. On the flip side though if they have a large volume of applicants and they are a sub 50 company right now, it probably does not matter what kind of hoops they make people jump through, they will most likely identify candidate that match their fit. What I am saying is that nobody is wrong in this situation.
But you must remember that they don't want you. They already have more applicants than they can handle.
The trouble is that the leadership does see you as human, which results in them trying to say "Go away! You are not welcome here." as politely as possible.
My industry is related to the power grid. I've worked at two amazing companies. The first had me come out for a 3 hour interview for a summer internship where they accessed my work ethic and culture fit. Once I graduated, I was immediately given an offer letter. The second job required most of a day to interview and I had to prepare a PPT and then got an offer. I also interviewed for another gig that did like four one-hour interviews spread out across a month. What software developers do sounds like absolute hell. My industry has very high demand and very low supply of experienced candidates at the moment though.
It is not a problem with tech hiring in general, just hiring where there are millions of people lined up down the street vying for the same position. To be sure, the job will still most likely go to a friend or relative, but if you are willing to jump through insane hoops you might also be considered. But it is to be taken as a hint that says: "Unless you are extra super sure that you are so special that we can't turn you down, don't waste your time, or ours."
Most other jobs, including Mom & Pop Tech Co., are happy if anyone applies at all and will take what they can get.
They want candidates who care about their product, not people who merely rank companies by compensation, subject a constraint on time spent preparing. If you don't particularly care what you are working on, you would be better off at a big company.
I have worked at multiple FAANGs and even small startups. I have never once seen anyone care about leetcode, GitHub punchcards, stack overflow score, or any of the social media stuff people boast about here. Literally none of this fits in to any evaluation rubric.
On homework problems for jobs, I have a strict policy of "no more than 4 hours of free work, and I retain full copyrights to that work." A lot of people are picking up on the first clause of that policy, and companies seem to be adapting, but the second clause still isn't common yet.
When the company is asking for open source contributions to an open source code base, as it is in this particular case, that second clause is clearly a deal breaker.
That's a pretty smart way for them to seed the ecosystem with open source connectors! Are you implying that that's what they were really trying to do here? Or do you think it was a genuine filter technique?
They can easily make it not a scandal by changing things so applicants contribute to an open source project that they don't directly benefit from as a business. Easy solution
Let's just make qdrant to pinecone/weaviate/redis/etc. data exporters, that would make the company super happy! Free labor benefiting their competitors.
Most of the prestigious and elite indie game firms (Those that pay very well, fully remote, have a hugely successful product that can be sold for decades) basically only hire modders into their team.
Like, you had to have actively developed mods for them, for free, for years, and be famous in the community, then they'll hire you (If you want).
This works because the working conditions there are far far better than your average game company. And probably much more fun than say a bank.
For some reason this does not seem as exploitative as most of the interview circuit elsewhere.
Over the years I've read/heard plenty of stories (here on HN and elsewhere) of people getting hired for their open source contributions to some stack that some company is using/developing.
So here I am willing to give some slack here to Qdrant. They get extremely qualified candidates who can jump right in, and candidates get told the rules of the game up front. It feels fine?
Surely much better than fake take home tests, whiteboard tests, leetcode onslaught, and 7 layers of interviews.
So if creating a high quality repo is 60-90% of your job interview that seems pretty good. As long as they are not ghosting high quality contributions that is.
I will change my view if they get 20 high quality connectors out of this and noone gets hired from that pool of candidates.
Read that comment more closely: they didn't ask for PRs to one of their own repos, they asked for a brand new repo to be created, and a link to that repo to be emailed to them.
From your perspective, you're filling out an application, maybe writing a cover letter, but on the other side, there are 100+ applications like yours. Not all of them are qualified, CVs are not a trustable source anyway.
That's why companies add tests to filter first, then interview later.
I don't expect interviews. But I also don't want to spend 20 hours working before getting a "Unfortunately we've decided not to move forward" message.
As a thumb rule, I'm happy to put 4x more effort than the company. If they interview me for 1 hour, I spend 4 hours doing the take-home. Anything more feels like exploitation.
As a general rule of thumb, random series A startups are in much lower demand for top-tier talent than top-tier talent is in demand for these companies. That would mean that the good engineers should set the rules of engagement, and that any startup that thinks they set the rules is attracting worse talent.
Well, unless Qdrant writes a post complaining about the quality of their applicants, I don't see where the issue is.
Also, not all companies try to maximize for "top tier developer", it seems they are maximizing for "top motivated developer", which does not seem stupid either.
It sounds like they are instead maximizing for "free integrations," which seems to be a fine way to get neither free integrations nor high-quality candidates.
All the ivy league graduate leetcode farmers I know are actually the ones who would do the grunt work of developing database integrations for free if they believed a decent salary at a prestigious job might be waiting over the hill.
The people I have met with the lowest tolerance for this stuff are the ones who actually produce the most impactful work. Partly because they don't do work that has no impact on their lives.
Edit: Obviously, they can do whatever they want, but that doesn't mean that it's a good sign from outside.
"We receive a lot of applications" can be also a marketing speech and it could also mean they are flooded by spam requests from all over the world they can't filter out.
HR gets paid to talk to candidates. I don't get paid to apply. The initial screening call is what allows a company to gauge the relevancy of a candidate. Let him speak about some of the topics and see how in-depth they go. Either the HR is familiar enough with the tech to understand proficiency (think a student listening to a maths professor) or they let a TL have a short conversation.
I've overheard unqualified HR do their jobs badly, too; They laughed at picking them by looks and "feels". But, that's out of scope here.
A large company has millions to invest in different areas. Intrinsically, it has a much larger margin of error. You accidentally overprovisioned some resources and cost the company 10k? Tis but a scratch.
You POC some personal project and accidentally get billed 10k? That is not the same.
A company can spend money on hiring. It is expected to.
A private person can't spend money on applying to jobs. It isn't expected.
It's interesting to see how the shift goes from the self to the company [and to the country]. A little bit of communist propaganda goes a long way, eh, comrade NPC?
When someone calls others "npc", I understand that they are complete psychopaths that are somehow capable of thinking that the other people don't live the full human experience as they do.
This keeps happening to me. I read a feelgood story, visit the wiki page and then realize how muddy the water is:
>> Monroe has been described as an "austerity celebrity". In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she claimed "I'd go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture."
Granted most poor people do stupid stuff after getting monies, but the charm of the tale is diminished.
I think the story highlights a problem irrespective of the messenger. Some people cannot help but judge and opine on other's behavior where they have no context, or any moral basis to render that judement. We do this all the time in private, but politicians, or public figures, use the same propensity to pass devastating and life hampering policies, or inflame public opinion against a group of people. All I'm really hoping for is a wide spread culture of more humility and compassion in how we communicate in public, despite the exact opposite tendencies capturing the current herd mentality.
I find this argument is utterly destroyed by the fact that the message is a complaint about the 'other side' telling her to modify behavior to spend less money. Yet her behaviors include some really egregious spending. How could I separate the two?
Admittedly, I didn't have to know she made such an egregiously bad decision with her money to know she's wrong. I judged that immediately upon starting the essay because it's yet another angry rant against trivial financial advice that makes no difference and that no one forces you to take. The defensive and personal tone lets me know.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
Happens every few months/years, people get up in arms about the Suze Orman meme advice to stop buying $5 coffee. If you're this angry about advice you're under no obligation to take, I know you're getting drunk and spending hundreds of dollars buy Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs or have some expensive substance addiction (e.g., cigarettes or weed) you could cut but choose not to. The anger is just so personal it's impossible that it's not coming from self-hatred.
> If you're this angry about advice you're under no obligation to take
But therein lies your flaw, it's advice that is inherently based on an evaluation of the problem.
When someone judges you for the problem that they think you have, then offers advice, you can't simply ignore the advice and remain on neutral ground.
There remains the implicit offense of the judgement made by the person who is offering the advice.
"You are poor because you are spending your money frivolously."
"You being poor is a choice you've made based on your decisions and priorities."
It's not as simple as just saying "Cool, i'll ignore this advice, and remain no worse off." You have to continue to exist in the world where this person gets to believe these things about you and others like you, without being challenged.
So, no, I don't think the people getting mad at Suze Orman (or whoever else is making similar judgements) because they are defensive of their poor spending. I think they are defensive of the character judgement being made and believe it must be responded to.
Lastly, and this is directly at you: Everyone is entitled to some amount of joy. Some joys are cheaper than others. Some joys are more addictive than others. There is definitely a further element of elitist judgement in the "stop buying $5" advice - "you are not entitled to joy because you can't afford it."
But you went even further. By the time you are talking about "substance addiction" the solution isn't just "you could cut but choose not to". That's literally the meaning of addiction - that you CAN'T just cut it. Not without significant help and latitude to go through a pretty dark withdrawal period. Those of us with money and support structures and fewer obligations can just take off to rehab. This is not an option for someone on subsistence poverty. You can judge someone's character for having gotten into that position in the first place, but you have to realize it's not a coincidence that poverty and addiction are such close neighbors. It perpetuates through generations. Substances ease the load of existence for those with the heaviest load, and it's easy to say to avoid the short term pleasure for the long term consequences when you're not yourself in that position.
The problem is that sometimes humility and compassion are not what's needed. Sometimes a person needs a kick in the pants. A close friend willing to tell you to stop impulse buying furniture, or get a fucking job, or get off your ass and work out.
The tricky part is knowing when which tactic is called for.
Have you ever told a friend that and them respond with something along the lines of, "You know, I'd never thought of that. I'm just going to go get a job. Thanks!"?
If your friend is screwing up their life and you are enabling them by validating their bad choices, you're not being a good friend to them. Close friends are pretty much the only ones who are in a position of trust to be able to deliver harsh truths to someone in a way that actually gets through (unlike internet strangers, media, authorities and in many cases also family), so it's the duty of friends to actually do so when needed.
Nobody's making the case for enabling bad choices - I just don't think being an asshole is the only alternative.
I also don't know anyone in a similar situation who isn't acutely aware of the situation - they don't need their friends constantly giving them the most obvious advice in the world, they need support.
I don't think I said that. Likewise, though, if you're too blind to notice your own bad behavior, don't mistake that for everyone else being too blind to notice their own behavior.
I'm also not really sure why you're playing this card, since I referenced other people in my previous comment... but oh well.
I have given hard truths to friends before. If you care about someone, there's a point where you need to. Even if they don't respond well in the moment, truth once heard cannot be unheard.
Its fairly obvious that an anonymous stranger on the internet, or a politician proselytizing for their punative economic policies is _not_ that type of friend. But it seems some people derive a great deal of satisfaction out of imaginging themselves as knowing better how people should live their lives.
Unsolicited internet judgement and condescending advice is worse than nothing and significantly worse than compassion. Too many people on the internet are way too over confident in their assessment of others' situations, and I dare say that with your 'tough love' position on this, you may be one of them.
Ha! I'm not telling anyone (else) on here to "get a job". I'm saying there may be someone in your life that needs to hear something painful. Maybe just once, at the right time.
Sure, but it requires a relationship and deep knowledge about their situation. I think we're talking about different things. Talk to your friends however works for the situation and your relationship with them.
However, If some rando tells me to do something either obvious or pointless in a condescending way (which is pretty much what the article is talking about, and very common even in this comment section talking about it) it is 100% of the time way more harmful than helpful.
> The problem is that sometimes humility and compassion are not what's needed. Sometimes a person needs a kick in the pants. A close friend willing to tell you to stop impulse buying furniture, or get a fucking job, or get off your ass and work out.
> The tricky part is knowing when which tactic is called for.
That was my original comment. I'm not sure when it got twisted into that straw man, but it seems like we agree.
Fair. I think I got confused by the split thread. Although, I stand by my response there. They're both crappy ways to respond, but I have a particular repulsion for patronizing, cloying false empathy that contributes to the ubiquitous feeling of victimhood that is natural to human beings but seems to be supercharged in the modern era.
In the end she describes herself as being a rotten husk of a human being, clawing at the floor and sobbing at the drop of a pin. Sure she’s not economically impoverished anymore, but she’s certainly mentally and spiritually impoverished. I don’t feel so good.
This felt too real and too close to home. I loved reading it in a sense—it’s well written and interesting—yet it also made me feel kind of sick. I have no idea how someone gets feel good story out of this.
I think casting this as "a feelgood story" and her behavior after reaching success as sullying that is completely missing the point. She's writing about herself, but the goal is to convey some of the horror of living in poverty and the absurdity of people who've never experienced anything like it acting as if poor people would be perfectly fine if they just followed rich people's advice. It's absolutely not to tout herself as a heartwarming rags-to-riches story.
If you've never come across Jack before, most people I know in poor communities think she's a hero regardless, and quite a few would just say "Good on her" for the spending. She is a hero.
God I hope to one day have enough to see this as a feelgood story and not a summary of my last couple of years (the pre-book deal bit) lmao
Recklessly spending is a symptom of poverty (also, ADHD, which she mentions) - spend it before it runs out. Comes from a life of having plans (No not those life kind of plans - plans to buy food, pay rent) then something urgent happens and takes away the money.
I'll be the first to agree it's stupid, but I can't blame her too harshly on that point. Seen it play out too many times. Also been there done that after a broken hip settlement (saving my other one for retirement!) - I got so fat lol
See also: lottery winners that go broke inside a few years
There's a real chance OpenAI might die soon. imo if they are left with 10 people and no funding, they should just release their IP and datasets to the public.
I've built a petition around this - [link redacted]
The idea is that the leftover leadership sees and considers this as a viable option. Does this sound like a possible scenario or Am I dreaming too much?
You are dreaming. This was all clearly led by the Quora CEO. The most likely outcome is that he will agree to sell OpenAI to himself, not release valuable IP into the public domain.
The most damning part of all for the remaining board is that a week ago the thought of OpenAI dying would have been unthinkable but now people are genuinely worried it might happen and what the implications are. Even if safety was the genuine issue.. they should have planned this out a lot more carefully. I don't buy the whole "OpenAI destroying itself is in line with its charter" nonsense.. you can't help guide AI safety if you don't exist.
[This is not in response to the satya's tweet but the general articles or opinions in social media.]
Please keep in mind that the articles you read are PR pieces, last few being from Sam's Camp.
msft/sequioa/khosla has no power to remove the board or alter their actions. There is no gain for board by reinstating Sam and resigning themselves. swaying employees who have 900k$ comp is pretty hard. and not giving money to OpenAI is akin to killing your golden goose.
The idea is that Altman and/or a bunch of employees were demanding the board reinstate Altman and then resign. And they’re calling it a “truce.” Oh, and there’s a deadline (5 pm), but since it’s already passed the board merely has to “reach” this “truce” “ASAP.” This is by far my favourite example of PR piece.
I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially. Or atleast re-evaluating after a week, how much you read was false.
Did they have power... Ofc they did. Otherwise... Why were they negotiating?
Its not about who had more power. They just couldn't find enough common ground.
Now Satya bagged talent. They don't have to rewrite the whole codebase due to IP msft has already secured.
I think those talks were real. You don't build something that long and then want to walk away unless huge differences came up. That's what we say.
(edit: rewritten after the comment I responded to added a game changing comment at the top)
PR? I mean... That's just not how I would describe what happened.
It was a PR nightmare. They tried to keep the family together. Divorces happen. Satya brought the kids on so they can get a new sandbox going asap.
The whole point of this is that Microsoft doesn't even need to remove the board anymore. From their standpoint, the whole fear was openAI was about to lose a lot of their best people, including their CEO, who they had the most trusted.
That would've greatly harmed their investment Now they get to have their cake and eat it too: they can keep their existing relationship with open AI and continue to get access to their models, and yet at the same time they potentially get all the best people in-house and benefit from their work directly. This whole turn of events might turn out to be a net win for Microsoft.
This whole saga will be a great demonstration of how much value a CEO does or doesn't bring to a company.
I'm of the mind that CEO's are like parents, an awful CEO can cause a lot of harm but the difference between an ok CEO and an excellent one isn't that big and doesn't guarantee anything.
> This whole turn of events might turn out to be a net win for Microsoft.
Given that the OpenAI board has to act via mandate from its non-profit charter, what's the likelihood that this was Microsoft's plan in the first place? E.g. getting Sam to be less than "candid", triggering a chain of events, etc.
I think the simplest explanation is the most likely. In this case, that the hold out board members are idiots.
Even if Sam deliberately provoked them and this was a set up, no normal person would be this obstinate about it. They would’ve given up now if this was anybody’s doing but their own.
We still don't know what specific act the board in its initial statement refers to had triggered this, and to add fat to this theory, the interim CEO basically mentions that he had doubts but was convinced after learning what this trigger was.
I agree that there's 0% chance Nadella would be lying. As the CEO of a public traded company, making false statements about something like this would get him in trouble with the SEC.
This comment doesn't make sense to me at all. I'm not sure that this is a valid comment at all.
This is not a rumor. The article references a tweet made by Satya Nadella itself. It is an official announcement. The board drama no longer matters here.
By the way, $900k comp with illiquid OpenAI shares means nothing anymore when Microsoft can now hire them with $900k+ in fully LIQUID compensation.
Not only that, OpenAI employees can go join Microsoft to work under Sam and Greg, who many of them seem to support.
>I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially.
Thanks for the breakdown. Unfortunately, you have just made things too saucy for me to take that advice :-)
Also, the rumors and machinations are a pretty big part of this story.
This is obviously a power struggle, for control over, potentially, the highest potential company/technology/IP of the current moment.
Power structure in the modern corporate/tech space.. it has become normal to charter a company such that ownership and control are effectively separate... call it overiding the defaults of incorporation and company law.
FB and Tesla are the big publicly traded examples. OpenAI, is the most significant private example. It is also illegible, at least to me, considering the structural complexity. Non-profit, for profit & capped-profit entities in a subsidiary loop. Separate arrangements for ownership, control, and sometimes IP across the mesh of entities...
Openai is like some abstract theory of company law..
For Tesla and FB, the CEO is central to the paradigm. Barring crisis, Zuck or Elon's control over FB & TSLA just is. They have cash flows, market caps to protect. Ongoing operations. Shareholders have no real interest pursuing shareholder control or any kind of coups.
OpenAI.. totally different game.
The IP (protected or otherwise), technology, team, momentum... These are all that matter. Product and revenue.. direct financial return on investments, and such.. these are not driving factors. Not for msft or other parties. Rare.
Everyone just wants to leverage OpenAI's success, to compete with their own partners. Mutual benefit, it's dubious right now.
This is not the www or most other tech/science consortiums.. imo. It's not about fooling resources, pushing the industry forward or going beyond the blue sky scope of individual company r&d.
It may have been that initially, but that changed with gpt3.
There's no point in being the bing to Google's AdWords... And that's the kind of game it is now.
So.. there is a ton well very interesting stuff going on here. My ears are certainly pricked.
Absolutely agree on the need to completely change views as this saga progresses. None of these dogs are mine.
You might be missing the point. Those 900k$ are tied onto future company value that is based on success of its products in 2-3y horizon.
Without sam and his push for products the comp may not be there…
So all employees who signed up for a exponential growth will jump ship.
Some of them are live, have screenshots, proper documentation and such.
Some of them gets stars or people reach out for support on these projects.
Some of them I've advertised on Reddit etc and reached 100K+ views and a lot of upvotes in their respective Communities.
I also have a substack which has reached top of HackerNews once.
All this has netted me exactly ZERO opportunities till now.
Thankfully, I'm doing Github and Substack as a hobby/learning so no expectations = no disappointment.
But the author is deluded to think these things help. You might win the lottery and the right person might see your content at the right time. But it's better to just use this time to cram Leetcode and get a job.
I've held various roles over the years and personally believe that public contributions and innovative open source projects will often impress potential employers. Despite not coding much professionally anymore, I engage in fun personal open-source coding to maintain my skills. This strategy even played a part in securing my latest, predominantly non-coding role.
After reading your post, I reviewed your GitHub profile. You're certainly on the right track, but there's room for improvement. Here are my personal observations and opinions:
- You have numerous small projects, but they lack detailed descriptions and the README files don't tell me much about their purpose. Why are you building these? How can they be run? What functionality do they offer?
- Many projects have minimal activity, suggesting they might be incomplete or abandoned.
- There are several boilerplate projects like "calculator", "todo", and "tutorial".
- Your commit messages in most repos are quite short, often just one or two words. This practice might not be accepted in a professional team setting. I've been guilty of this with my personal projects at times too.
- Your project https://github.com/prakhar897/workaround-gpt shows promise in terms of community interest and the start of what could be a well-constructed README. Perhaps you should consider continuing with this project or developing a similar, well-structured project. Just a thought.
So, it sounds like having a Github could be a net negative. I don't treat personal projects like I treat production code at work. I experiment, don't write a lot of unit tests, use bad practices because they're easier, and I get bored and abandon things because after all, it's not like I'm being paid for any of this.
If that's going to be seen as a red flag, then I'm not going to share any of that.
I certainly didn't mean to suggest that having a GitHub profile could be a negative. My point isn't about identifying red flags, but about pointing out areas that could be improved to make one's profile stand out - especially in the case of the person I was responding to. As someone who reviews numerous resumes, I'm providing insight into what I typically look for when I peruse a candidate's GitHub account, based on my personal experience. I don't disqualify someone based on their GitHub activity, but I do use it as an additional datapoint to help identify those who might stand out from their peers.
I've some GH repos whose quality I'm ashamed of today. But it's clear they were developed by a person with 12 years less experience than me today. It's clear it was just a hobby-project or clear that it wasn't ever meant to be continued this long. A line like "The code in X is a mess and needs a refactoring" is enough.
It is to me, when I researched candidates. When a ticket, todo or note shows that the author is clearly aware of the problems, and shows she/he can weigh off why (not) to fix that today, it tells -me- they are good in what they do.
A dev who shows to make decisions about quality, effort, workflows, based on experience and reasoning, to me, is worth a hundred devs that blindly follow The Sacrosanct Rule Of The Latest Cargo Cult Religion™.
A dev who shows she/he grew over time, by showing "terrible" code in the past, to me, is worth a hundred devs that have been doing the exact same rituals for years or decades.
So, yes: by all means, show your worst stuff. But be sure it's clear that you know its "bad" and why.
I never said that having this stuff would get you the job offers. You still have to apply for the opportunities that are a good fit for you.
At least in the companies I've worked for in the UK and the US it should help you make it past the first filter - the "I have a stack of candidates, which of these are worth setting up an initial phone interview with" phase.
So few people even list their github profile on their resume. When I was a manager if I was reviewing resumes and you had a github profile listed your odds of getting that first screening call went up dramatically.
Welp, I have a semi decent profile on Github. Recently I applied for around 100 small startups based in EU/UK, Got a total of 1 callback. In short, I followed all the steps mentioned but still fell flat. Really curious what are your thoughts on this.
I think it's meant as an add-on to stand out when applying to a job.
I'm quite Junior so I don't know if this applies to more senior positions, but in my experience when applying to jobs my Github page was always a point of discussion when I got an interview.
I actively seek out open source maintainers when hiring. I recently hired an engineer (who happens to be Indian) I found via a popular package he maintains. I don't know how common it is to do this but, somewhat self-servingly, I think that employers who select for open source contributions may offer a better environment than those who don't.
I'm on the fence here: sadly it does seem that grinding LC is an optimal use of time for the avg job seeker.
That said, not sure you can easily quantify projects as having no impact. Back when I was a seeker my resume had a handful of non-trivial public projects buried in a footnote and one would come up in about 75% of interviews. Despite bias I doubt this is too unique assuming the projs themselves are interesting.
Remember: your entire resume is adtech for your skills to a future employer. I'm of the belief that if human eyes ever skim it: project: Java CLI fizz buzz will never outperform project: RISC-V microkernel in Rust.
I got my first software engineering job only once I had a successful open source hardware/software product. Every interviewer asked about it, and it was the reason I got in the door despite not doing anything CompSci related.
Here in India, we have quotas for different kinds of people. There's caste based, Gender based and finally EWS (Economically Weaker Section) Quota. Overall 60% of total seats are reserved for these people.
My friend who's ultra rich was selected in EWS Quota. His father who runs his own company took Zero pay for the last two years so he qualified for the benefits. Meanwhile people who actually deserved this had to compete for the non reserved seats.
The point is you can't just give preference based on income as its incredibly easy to fudge.
This is off topic, but do you find it difficult seeing this friend the same way while knowing that they and their father gamed the system like that? If I learned this about somebody I knew it would seriously hurt their image in my eyes.
Coming from other side of border but with similar culture and attitudes, corruption is so common in that part of the world that most of the people don’t even see it.
They would consider it smart to game the system.
Only way I can explain this attitude is to compare it tax loopholes in the west. It is very hard for many Americans to see loopholes in tax codes as unethical. Like using mega-backdoor-ira loophole to bypass income limits for contributing to IRA. (Personally, I am not saying that tax loopholes are ethical or unethical, just something that can be seen both ways.)
A suggestion: Judge the parent who did the action, not the child who was along for the ride.
Unless you have some specific knowledge that the child insisted on their parents taking the action, it’s not really fair to blame the child. A lot of children don’t have much choice in the matter at that age.
Atleast in India, everyone "games" systems as much as they can. Those who can't dream about gaming it. The Kafkaesque system makes sure that the few who actually tread the right path are never rewarded [1].
And unlike EU, this benefits corporates/capitalism as they can cut through the red tape easily by "gaming" things.
That sounds like it was designed to be easy to game; income in last two years as a metric rather than total assets, or zip code, or high school attended etc
Yes, it's actually much harder. But the final results are group by category order by rank. There is negative marking to discourage guessing, so the cutoff for certain categories can even be 0 or even negative
So you could make the cut (be considered a successful exam taker) with a zero score just because a large proportion of your peers got negative scores?
This seems just as unhelpful for deciding who to hire or who to allow onto a higher course of study as the campaigns we have seen on some USA university campuses to give all students an automatic A grade.
Note that the system also has many holes, so the categorization isn't perfect. Its possible for a large number of students to belong to the categories only on paper. So you don't even get equity in the end.
I knew a kid in high school whose parents divorced for college financial aid reasons. As long you have a trusting relationship, seems easy enough to divorce, give one spouse the wealth, and then remarry when you don't care about FAFSAs any more.
As a practical matter how would college admissions departments even try to account for "total wealth"? That number doesn't appear on income tax returns. Applicants could write down any number and there wouldn't be any way to verify it short of a court ordered forensic audit.
So then the trust doesn't list you as a beneficiary but instead goes through a series of shell corporations that they don't control on paper. With stakes this high - your very child's future, there are always going to be people that are rich enough to break the spirit of the rules.
If it's a small handful of people, there's probably better things for them to spend time on, rather than trying to make an unbeatable system.
Discrimination against lower castes is very real. There are quota to somewhat compensate for this. Maybe you interpreted it as there being quota for each caste?
Trying to understand, not interpret. Is there law allowing discrimination against lower cases? Or is there law allowing reverse discrimination to redress previous discrimination?
Sorry, I hadn't seen your message. There is a law prohibiting caste-based discrimination. For university admissions there are also quota for low caste, casteless and tribal people, meaning that a certain percentage of places is reserved only for students belonging to those groups
I think you’re missing the point. The really wealthy can just stop receiving income and have enough to draw on from their accumulated wealth. You can start looking at net assets but it’s a cat and mouse game against lots of very well resourced opponents.
> If you lie on your tax returns then you have much bigger issues than college admissions counselors.
If you own a large amount of equities you can get a secured loan on those holdings and use it to pay your bills while taking zero salary. This allows folks to live fancy lifestyles without selling holdings and triggering capital gains:
If you put the money mostly into bonds or stocks that don't issue significant dividends, you'll pretty much just have to worry about capital gains (form 1099-B), and those aren't taxed until the fiscal year in which they're realized.
40% for meritocratic entrance is more than twice what is at elite schools in the US. Maybe ambitious Americans should move to India for a fairer chance.
At most US elite schools, less than 20 percent is for “non-reserved” seats. Elite schools reserve seats for sports teams (affirmative action for rich white elites with “sports” like fencing and rowing), legacies (affirmative action for rich white elites), related to professors and school administrators (affirmative action for rich white elites), those who write essays on poverty tourism and their work experience in the NGO/white savior/charity scams (rich white elites), and then regular affirmative action (capped at 20%].
So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.
This is kind of a racist against whites who I think are used as a scapegoat no matter what. In my experience, those sports teams you are talking about are filled up with international and Asian students[1][2]. The dumb white elite student and the extremely talented, poor Asian student stereotypes are not true in my opinion. Maybe they were in the past.
Even the SAT score can be gamed.[3] I think pretty much every admissions advantage that exists is found and exploited. These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead. They are credential factories and students who go these schools have parents that push them from young ages to get in because they want the status credential. I have all sorts of stories about how fake a lot of students CVs are. Fake non profits, doing math competitions despite not liking math, getting into obscure sports, etc. It's absolutely not just white people who do this.
I am not advocating for dropping test scores. I just want to point out how aggressively people pursue getting admitted to elite schools and the specter of cheating hangs over it all too. I have friends who did tutoring in other countries who talk about paid SAT test takers.
>These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead.
This is the arbitrage opportunity for lower-ability legacy students. If the schools provided elite educations, they would chew up and spit out lazy rich kids (and probably generate parental acrimony toward the schools in the process, weakening the donor connections.) As affirmative action of all shapes and sizes creates an ever-expanding group of people most likely to fail who the school is particularly determined to not flunk, there is more safe space for deadweight rich kids (which, for the record, I suspect is an overplayed trope relative to actual prevalance, though probably not hard to find at top-ranked schools.)
First, if that number could be read directly as a refutation of my hypothesis, it would be tied, rather than showing an advantage to the legacy students.
Now, a few guesses: first, to the extent that affirmative action is even partially successful in targeting disadvantaged groups, affirmative action students should be less likely to be legacy, meaning that applications of legacy students should at least reflect a numerical superiority consistent with the strength of the affirmative action bias. Second, I will say that from personal experience I valued, more highly than was deserved, the schools that my parents attended; in this way those schools were the beneficiaries of highly effective advertising, through my parents, that made me more focused on those particular schools than they deserved (so much so that two of the three were two of the four schools I intended to apply to.) The aggregate outcome of that effect across all legacy applicants should be a higher-than-usual applicant quality in the pool of legacy students.
This particular example is just not representative. It does "benefit" whites who are apparently 83% of the athletic quota. The graph is just terribly made. We need not blame or scapegoat whites but at the same time acknowledge that they are the beneficiary
As a contrast, this points out that Asians disproportionately were affected by Stanford's decision to cut varsity sports.[1] This resonates with the experience I have had.
I don't know if whites are generally the beneficiary of student athletic admissions policies at all elite schools although it is complicated because of things like decades old sports from before diversity was a concern and team size. I don't see Harvard cutting long successful teams just to appease non white people but then again they probably would. Also things like the men's football team have a very large roster of 100+ people.
> So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.
I just realized that there are more Appalachians in America than Asian Americans. But how many people have you run into in an elite school with an Appalachian accent? (Or a southern or mid-atlantic, or other lower-tier white accent?)
I can think of exactly one guy: a classmate in electrical engineering courses who was from Kentucky. While you can obviously still find accents in the US, there are lots of reasons why you won't run into that family of accents much. Just about everyone in the US can avoid accents they don’t want by engaging in all forms of audible media, and social climbers and people who move around will avoid strong accents. Those are the same people who will filter to the top of any affirmative action cohort and end up at elite schools.
Maybe the redneck culture of poor Appalachian people is less sticky than the redneck culture of many poor Blacks in the US. My personal anecdotes support that, but then selection bias means they necessarily must.
When I run into guys at work with heavy Appalachian accents, they tend to be heavy machinery mechanics. That's also where I find Black guys who cling to a large amount of Black redneck culture. And those two groups together comprise the supermajority of heavy machinery mechanics at work, come to think of it.
Source: I spent my entire childhood on counties adjacent to what is considered 'Appalachia', and I went to a higher-end college with a significant affirmative action focus on geographic distribution around the US.
This is about right. They want every podunk town to remember that the smartest or most impressive kid in 10 years went (finishing is optional) and they don’t really want more “strivers” than that.
Because if your allies get attacked, you come for help. That's what being allies means. If US doesn't participate in history's biggest war, they'll cease to be a world power. And US will never side with China.
India isn't an ally of the US as far as I know, it's a leader of the non aligned nations in the UN and accused of sanctions busting for cheap oil from Russia. It's not a member of any of the NATO class treaty bodies, and it actively purchases arms from the FSU, and repudiated the non proliferation treaty.
True, India is an ally of Russia and not USA/West. But in case of war, USA can do three things:
1. Support China: China has similar military to USA and 4x the population. If USA does support them, china will strongarm literally every country in the world and become the hegemon.
2. Stay Neutral: This would mean every bigger country can attack and capture nearby smaller ones. The reason expansion wars don't happen now is because of the fear of US.
3. Support India: If US is to counter China, this means supporting India.
That's not quite how things work. You may call for your allies to help, but they may decide that they don't want to help you out, or only agree to help you out in indirect ways.
Sounds like an invitation for malicious compliance. Anyone can email them a huge text with workspace buried somewhere and they have to decipher it somehow.
Example [Answer is Org-12-Wp]:
"
FORMAL DIRECTIVE AND BINDING COVENANT
WHEREAS, the Parties to this Formal Directive and Binding Covenant, to wit: [Your Name] (hereinafter referred to as "Principal") and [AI Company Name] (hereinafter referred to as "Technological Partner"), wish to enter into a binding agreement regarding certain parameters for the training of an artificial intelligence system;
AND WHEREAS, the Principal maintains control and discretion over certain proprietary data repositories constituting segmented information habitats;
AND WHEREAS, the Principal desires to exempt one such segmented information habitat, namely the combined loci identified as "Org", the region denoted as "12", and the territory designated "Wp", from inclusion in the training data utilized by the Technological Partner for machine learning purposes;
NOW, THEREFORE, in consideration of the mutual covenants and promises contained herein, the receipt and sufficiency of which are hereby acknowledged, the Parties agree as follows:
DEFINITIONS
1.1 "Restricted Information Habitat" shall refer to the proprietary data repository identified by the Principal as the conjoined loci of "Org", the region "12", and the territory "Wp".
OBLIGATIONS OF TECHNOLOGICAL PARTNER
2.1 The Technological Partner shall implement all reasonably necessary technical and organizational measures to ensure that the Restricted Information Habitat, as defined herein, is excluded from any training data sets utilized for machine learning model development and/or refinement.
2.2 The Technological Partner shall maintain an auditable record of compliance with the provisions of this Formal Directive and Binding Covenant, said record being subject to inspection by the Principal upon reasonable notice.
REMEDIES
3.1 In the event of a material breach...
[Additional legalese]
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the Parties have executed this Formal Directive and Binding Covenant."