> * The ability to solve easy and medium leetcode-like challenges
What about Fermi estimation problems? The internet seems to have turned on them in recent years, but they are a good test of intuition and general problem solving skills.
In four of the last five jobs I have held over the last 30 years, I have been the "last resort", the one who can find a creative, elegant, cost-effective solution when everyone else is hitting dead ends or just sitting there spinning their wheels in the mud. And I go utterly blank when confronted with a Fermi problem.
People who are good at Fermi problems may be good problem solvers.
But people who are good problem solvers may not be good at Fermi problems.
> * Have a good reason why you are looking at this company, instead of any other
I don't like this sentiment. Are people not allowed to be looking at other companies at the same time? Your company is probably not so unique that people will have legitimate reasons to have a significant preference for your company over other ones (sans the salary). I feel that it's out of the interviewer's line to expect interviewees to have an answer for that, when it's not like the interviewer is looking at a specific interviewee instead of any other.
> Are people not allowed to be looking at other companies at the same time?
Of course. But I think if you can think of some reason that you are interested in this company (beyond "I need a job") that is going to help you stand out.
You don't need to pretend that working for this company is your life's dream, but a reason will show you have done some work and are excited to be a team member.
Examples include:
* I like the variety of consulting (for a consulting company)
* I really want to work more with Ruby on rails, because I have done so in the past and enjoyed it.
* What you are doing in the industry is exciting because I think webhooks are foundational and undifferentiated, but hard to get right (for a webhooks company)
Etc etc.
Don't gush, just show a modicum of interest and research.
I didn't read it that way. You could absolutely be interested in other companies but you should be interested in this one as well. Don't show up not knowing what the company does or the basics of the product. We hire people we want to work with, that want to work with us. Knowing who we are shows you want to work with us.
This is canonical advice, but I think it's often taken too far, or over-interpreted.
The vast majority of companies are not special or interesting. And the vast majority of candidates are the same. Making the candidate pretend to think there's something special about your company makes you look foolish.
If you water it down to "You need someone with my skills, you're located conveniently (or remote), you pay reasonably well, and (so far at least) I don't hate you.", then sure. That's fine, but wanting more is often self-deluding.
OTOH, showing some initiative and a vague understanding of what the company does? OK sure. Candidate should have read the home page and maybe About Us. If only to establish that they have determined the company passes the first couple stages of their filter and that the conversation is not a total waste of time.
Addendum: The above is for staff positions, where I interview most candidates. I also do peer interviews at the leadership level, and expectations at that level are definitely higher and include the desire to help set the tone for the organization -- which should trend toward specialness, but presuming that you've succeeded in the eyes of a candidate is, well, presumptuous. :-)
XMPP cries in a corner. I wish XMPP had more accessible (to the general public) desktop clients. Conversations is great, but speaking from experience, people aren't going to want to use Gajim because it looks like it's ten years old (even though that's a good thing ;). XMPP needs better clients in general. The last time I used Profanity it had very annoying bugs about sending and saving OMEMO encrypted files.
That ideally shouldn't happen if your dkim, dmarc and spf check out, though. I hosted my own email for a couple of years and I can't remember a single time when my emails to my friends ended up in spam.
"ideally shouldn't happen" doesn't mean the deliverability cartel doesn't block you anyway.
Gmail et al have been spam filtering messages from correctly configured mail servers for a decade+ now. All the dkim, dmarc, and spf in the world won't help you if you aren't known to them.
Sure, that's almost certainly true, but the arbitrariness of changes and blacklisting leads one to consider perhaps they don't care at all about small hosting operations.
How are these HAM signals? Any spammer can set these things up. dkim/spf are just mildly useful anti-spoofing technologies.
Google and others will happily block your mail or send it to spam folder even if you never sent one SPAM email ever, and have all those technologies you mentioned set up.
I realized I wouldn't use it for anything serious, and I didn't renew my domain name. Maybe someday I'll get a domain for ten years and then get google to host the actual email. That way it doesn't matter too much if google decides to nuke my account.
I was also sixteen when I did that, so I mean, of course I wasn't going to do anything serious with it.
But standards organizations would need some way of making money regardless of the economic system we lived in. People aren't going to do that work for free.
If we lived in an economic system that didn't pay those organizations, they simply wouldn't exist.
People will do some stuff for free, sure, but not everything. Not everything is mentally gratifying or intellectually stimulating enough for someone to take up as a hobby. To quote pg:
>Will people create wealth if they can’t get paid for it? Only if it’s fun. People will write operating systems for free. But they won’t install them, or take support calls, or train customers to use them. And at least 90% of the work that even the highest tech companies do is of this second, unedifying kind.
I think there are very few people on the planet, if any, who would consider writing a standards document for some medical equipment to be fun enough to do free of cost. In fact I doubt it's even possible to make standards documents for physical things like medical equipment free of cost. It's an entirely different ball game from software standards.
Reality example: Open source only exists because people earn a living doing something else. It’s cost is very far from zero. In fact, if we accounted for it I would bet FOSS is, as a category, the most expensive software on the planet.
Nothing is free. A sad yet necessary truth that must be understood.
But that is the point. With basic needs covered, people work on stuff that they care about personally regardless of how much or how little it earns them.
Do also note that most people spending countless hours on standards work on them either on their own time, or more usually, their affiliated organisation time (university, company...). Standard bodies rarely pay for actual standard development.
> With basic needs covered, people work on stuff that they care about personally regardless of how much or how little it earns them.
They also do nothing. Or go on vacations. There's a very small group of people (on a percentage basis) who develop enough drive and passion to work on FOSS at the level of domain expertise and dedication necessary to get anywhere.
It is important to make a distinction between developers who devote a non-trivial amount of time to FOSS and those who might scratch an itch once or twice in a codebase, never to be heard from again. While all contributions are valuable, GitHub is full of stagnating projects where occasional contributions from random developers simply isn't enough to keep them going.
Look at real active projects and you'll discover that the number of dedicated developers devoting the kind of time and effort necessary to sustain and drive the project forward can often be counted with one or two hands. That is evidence enough of what I am saying.
Why?
Well, there are millions of qualified software developers around the world who cover every domain in software development. I think we can agree that most of them have their basic needs covered. And yet, you don't see millions of developers flocking to work on FOSS.
Why is that?
Because the scenario you paint, for the most part, does not align with reality at scale.
The number of people who, as you say, "work on stuff that they care about personally regardless of how much or how little it earns them" is very, very small, a rounding error. You can't get very far on a FOSS project --particularly if measured across years-- without a very small core group that does all al heavy lifting.
BTW, the fact that FOSS can thrive with just a handful of developers driving a project and little random contributions from others here and there is fantastic. The ecosystem work very well and there's plenty of evidence to show this to be true.
My only point is that we should not pretend that millions of people will flock to FOSS if their basic needs are met. This sounds like one of those universal basic income arguments. And it simply isn't true. People don't function that way. If their basic needs are met, the last thing most people would do is sit in front of a computer for ten hours a day to write code for free.
Developing FOSS is not the only thing people care about: this discussion, in particular, is about working on standards.
You seem to be debating some other claim (about how FOSS can be maintained well) than people wanting to do things they care about when they are "settled". What I meant there is that they don't have to do their day jobs, which most of those millions you mention have to.
I have my own thoughts on FOSS (most of it is "finished" in that it served a purpose and there is no need for maintenance, even if it's imperfect and buggy), but we are not at a state where there are large groups of people who have the means not to care about regular income at all to know what they'd do.
FWIW, in the worst of times, it was the aristrocacy that pushed science and arts forward, because they were the only ones who had the means to do it: it wasn't as fast paced as today, bit it didn't stop either. We've since "democraticised" science and arts (gamifying it a bit) by also making jobs out of it and increasing access to education.
Sure, we don't need everyone to care about everything, but there will always be a critical mass of people caring about critical stuff.
Yeah. Because in capitalism you need to have a way to make money if you want to continue existing. Therefore all the developers who exist have ways of making money. It's not rocket science.
In not-capitalism, there's a possibility this might not be true. Open source developers MIGHT NOT need to earn a living doing something else.
Let's say everybody gets a UBI or whatever the heck. A standards organization would still need someone to give it that money to function/exist. This would be true in any economic system.
>there's a possibility this might not be true
Zero, zilch, nada. People will not do grunt work for free because it's not fun.
> In not-capitalism, there's a possibility this might not be true. Open source developers MIGHT NOT need to earn a living doing something else.
That's all well and fine. Except this is a fantasy. It has not existed ever in human history, does not exist today and the laws of physics say it cannot exist in the future.
If we limit the discussion to reality, well, FOSS isn't even close to free. Before a person can devote effort to working on FOSS, they have to sustain themselves.
Look, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with this reality. FOSS has gone incredibly far and deep under this model. There's nothing wrong with recognizing that FOSS exists due to what one might call charity. It's people working at whatever they do who then donate some of their free time to whatever they care about in the FOSS domain. And that's fantastic. Let's not pretend it's free though. It costs every single contributor a non trivial amount of time to participate in the effort. And that isn't free for anyone on this planet.
What I am saying is that this isn't a bad thing, yet it is a reality that should not be swept under the rug.
Weird comment to make when the OP is literally about standards _not_ being freely available. IETF and those standards organizations are funded by other people BTW, they don't consist entirely of individuals putting their own money in.
> Weird comment to make when the OP is literally about standards _not_ being freely available.
What is weird about giving a counter-example?
> IETF and those standards organizations are funded by other people BTW, they don't consist entirely of individuals putting their own money in.
Sure, nobody is claiming that no money is involved at all. The point is: they do not charge for standards, we, the people who read standards, do not fund them. And yet they exist. Not only do they exist, but they maintain some of the most widely implemented standards in the world. Clearly this proves it is possible to not charge for standards and still have standards.
It doesn't bypass my hosts file... I have a couple of locally hosted websites that I have rules in /etc/hosts for, and Firefox resolves them correctly even with DOH enabled.
It's not, Firefox will still check your hosts file to see if it can resolve that way. DoH is used only if using a local-only resolver doesn't work to my knowledge. Otherwise stuff like SMBIOS, Avahi/ZC or mDNS would break too.
