Author: Rauf Aliev

>How to identify cool people at the resume stage?

I believe it’s necessary to elevate the recommendation system to a new level.

– Recommendations from people with a good reputation carry more weight than recommendations from just anyone.

– You can only get a good job by gathering recommendations.

– Those who recommend have the right to know whether their recommendations lived up to expectations. If an employee fails the probation period, the company can proactively notify the recommender that the recommended individual did not meet expectations.

– Those who are recommended evaluate recommenders by their internal metrics. For instance, recommendations from individuals in the same industry who benefit from the employee’s work are valued higher than those from a colleague.

And then no resumes with keywords are needed. Because everything will be in the recommendations. Of course, there will still be filtering by keywords and the like, but you will be able to customize your profile of people you can trust.

I’m not only upgrading from das keyboard to das keyboard after five years of use, but also switching from a Corsair mouse to another Corsair mouse after five years. Stability! The mouse is cool.

I came up with a task that trips up 90% of junior programmers and highlights candidates for mid-level positions. It consists of just three words: shuffle the array. Surprisingly, but it works very reliably.

The next level – grouping objects by field A with summation of field B to create a hashmap distinct(A) -> sum(B). All juniors and even mids, who claim they know Java streams, usually get stuck here, and most likely fail.

You can also ask them to find the longest string from an array of strings in a single lambda expression.

The next level – compare two long lists of complex objects to show what overlaps and what differs and in which direction. This is a very common business task (at least in my integration). Of course, under conditions of limited resources.

From the same category – sort (effectively normalize) JSONs that contain nested arrays of complex structures.

The questions programmers ask about these tasks and how they solve them are very telling.

Masterpieces!

Having a census? So are we.

Decided to participate.

Gave up halfway through.

There are no less than 100 questions for each family member. So, for four people – that’s about five hundred. About everything – from salary to place of residence, status, occupation, what degree you have, who owns the house, how much you pay per month. Many questions can be skipped if you don’t want to share, but sometimes they say you need to “enter something, if you don’t know exactly, enter an approximation”. I checked several times to see if it was a scam – no, US Census, all correct.

For example, among the questions, there is one about how many acres my house stands on (less than 1, from 1 to 10, more than 10). Went to Google how much an acre is. Besides, I have no idea how large my property is, be it in acres or in square units.

They asked if we have laptops or technology at home. They need it to understand if we can work remotely.

In general, this is all needed for reports like this one:

At the local level, it is needed for city planning. Here, for example, about our Leesburg:

I’m not even sure how to comment on this

Decided to go see Dune in IMAX tonight. Bought the tickets. It seems they overdid it with social distancing – there’s no one else in the hall except us

Is it just me, or does Zuckerberg seem inspired by Ready Player One?

This is a paper wasp, probably a parametricus paper wasp. Gave it some paper, after all, it’s not called a paper wasp for nothing. It doesn’t eat. Left it to wander further around the walking area. Found Yuki

It seems that there are words for all the important qualities of people, but… We all know that there are people who don’t understand humor. Often at all. They are called “people without a sense of humor”. And there are people who think they can joke, but actually can’t (objectively), yet they often try. They are kind of also “people without a sense of humor”, but there is a chasm between the first and the second group. Not understanding humor is not a problem. But a person who tries to joke unfunnily often (for me, for example), causes at least a feeling of awkwardness for that person, and at most, wariness, mistrust, and amplification of other negative qualities, if they are present in that person.

Of course, to understand irony and sarcasm, wordplay or ambiguity, one needs to have at least a common cultural layer. But six years in the USA showed that Americans are amused by exactly the same kind of humor as Russian speakers. In the sense that it’s crafted from the same mold. Clearly, quotes from Soviet cartoons won’t work at all. Nor could you explain to an American why intuition is the ability of the head to sniff with the behind. But constructing funny/witty parallels between what is happening and something else, naturally causes a smile or laughter in any culture. Also, you cannot build humor on something that might theoretically offend a person, especially humor not understood, or not realized to be humor.

Does it not provoke secondhand embarrassment for you when a person tries to joke but clearly can’t?