here's a prolog program I wrote to count elements in a list:

"Result" and "Acc" are passed as an anonymous value in each call until it finally resolves and chains back up. I don't know why it's so weird to me. I also find putting the recursive call first bizarre as ****.

For fun, I decided to rewrite your program in J:

Yeah right, you copied that snippet from somewhere.

My company puts out an ethics newsletter every month. My favorite from this month:

My original code had the recursive call at the end of the predicate and was getting errors, i saw from an example that was wrong, that's really all i looked at. There's a native prolog function that does the same thing i think but i was practicing.

Oh haha sorry, I was referring to gaming mouse's.

The irony is that his smartass remark while correct is not completely correct. You don't need to include a timeout value to accomplish what he wants. setTimeout(fn) is what he should have written.

Dev: setTimeout for 0 isn't working

Inner Dev: try 500ms

oh, lol. my bad

amazing on many levels. my favorite is the gulf between the edifying reflection the editor imagines the story will inspire and hilarious incompetence it actually reveals.

I agree that they are perhaps too political for my tastes, but if they are true, I'd think that what is described is, at best, not what H1-Bs are for, and at worse, downright illegal. You even said above that the point of H1-B was for not enough skilled employees. Here is a purported example where this is false.

I'm also not sure why are you are dismissive of what is called skilled in this area. These are the people you were 10 years ago. Instead of training them up, they are being given to employees who aren't going to stick around in the USA, far from their family, earning poverty wages. Many aren't going to go back to countries with the social, political, financial, or physical infrastructure to ever grow into Google-level engineers.

If these stories are true, they are only adding to my basic point, which is that "skilled" is, in many cases, a murky opinion-based concept. Say what you'd want about standardized testing, the BAR, etc, but they do place a minimum burden and quantify skilled on some level.

I just got this email yesterday. I figure it is soft-landing material, but for some reason, it makes sense to the company to send something like this (edited to my own language):


You correctly solved the problem but parts of the solution did not match the development practices of [company X]. While you may not be a good fit, this does not mean you are a bad programmer. We wish you luck finding somewhere that fits your style.

On the one hand, I'm not a bad programmer (am I a good programmer?), but on the other hand, I'm apparently too dumb or set in my ways to learn a different style (am I a bad programmer?).

I was well aware of what they were doing but I tried a different approach, just to show that I can think beyond copy / paste. I don't know, it's a strange letter, but somehow I'm skilled but not skilled. (sorry if the person who wrote this finds this post. I don't mean to outright bash the letter, just point out that it doesn't really answer much in the skills area, which is the context of this conversation).

To be fair, I think the truth is that they felt I don't have nearly the experience they needed to do the work, which I'm fine with and accept. Everyone there had about a decade of professional experience.

My sleep addled, un-caffeinated brain read that as: "an ethnic newsletter".

I certainly accept H1-Bs are abused. I've never said the system, as is, is perfect. In fact, I think I've been pretty clear that lots of companies (especially the big consulting companies) abuse the system*. I don't think any political party is actually talking about how to fix the system properly - because its complicated and its easy to be painted in a negative light. But the H1-B system can be abused AND there can be a shortage of skilled workers. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.

Your bolded isn't a logical conclusion. Just because the system is abused and used for lower skilled workers by no means indicates that there isn't a shortage of skilled workers. It could (and likely does) mean the opposite - that the abuse is exasperating the shortage of skilled workers because many skilled workers that would like to come to the US on a H1B visa now have poorer odds in the lottery.



I'm not. I'm not dismissive of the people themselves. I'm just pointing out that its not what I'm talking about.



Ok? First, I don't know if your 'translation' is accurate. I don't believe you're very good at interpreting what people say to you.

Second, once again, employers aren't being literal with you. They have little incentive to help you out as a person/developer and a lot of incentives to let a candidate down in the most non-controversial way they can think of. I'm going to guess that the content of the email you received has very little to do with the programming abilities of the candidate receiving the letter.



Dave, once again, I severely doubt its an experience/skills issue in your case. Hell, half the time this forum is complaining about how hard it is for experienced/older developers to get a job. But I've covered this...



* Although I don't think the effects of this abuse are quite what many of you guys think it is. But that's a much deeper political and economic discussion that I'm not going to get into here.

Crazy

Suzzer that ethics email is absolutely phenomenal.

that reminds me of an assignment i had once where we had to encode something into the bits of pixels of an image. no one got it and I couldn't complete it. gnarly stuff

Right, but I've still been asking for the minimum "what" that defines "skilled."

I'd also argue that the tech industry doesn't act like there is a skills shortage. Take a few observations:

-- The very high attrition rate, especially the 50% statistic among women. If keeping people around was so important, wouldn't this problem be solved pronto? At the least, nuke and blacklist the 5% idiots who are making life miserable for everyone else.

-- Using sales people to recruit talent. This isn't bad per se, but it does show a general disconnect between employer and potential employee. How many times have you been asked about a technology that you know of but wasn't sure because "linux" becomes "Line UX"or some odd variation?

-- Keeping unfilled positions opened for months on end. Many of these aren't hard to fill. This smacks of just taking resumes, interviewing, and rejecting for no other reason but to pad numbers.

-- I wish I could say I never seen any of the following in interviews, but sadly, I've experienced all of the following more than once:

* cursing me out.

* drunk or "other."

* Programmers getting into toxic arguments with each other during the interview.

* Excessive cursing and other awkward asides.

These people are, in part, the first impressions of the industry. Hooray, I'm interviewing for a company that is paying around 100k, but why the hell is everyone so miserable they can't handle life at all?

Consider if a prospective CS student discovers Hacker News. She then sees people openly tearing each other down, getting coworkers fired over some petty drama and misunderstandings, and sees people get publicly tarred. It comes across petty and immature. This is behavior you expect from prisoners and high school students. Not saying there isn't a balance of having a discussion, but sheesh.

Not to mention there is a problem with ageism, sexism, racism, etc. This is talked about, but what action is actually being taken? I mean, you can't really call a skills shortage a shortage if you aren't even willing to bring people in for an interview.

My "translation" was removing the superfluous adjectives, awkward grammar, and explanation points. I didn't remove the critical wording.

I think employers should rethink this a little bit. I'm not saying that each candidate should be reviewed piecemeal, but there was an interesting rejection letter I once read. The employer sent the letter to all. It broke down, item by item, what they were looking for and what they ended deciding to go with after going through the process. It was a truly enlightening letter and one I shared with quite a few people. There was no doubt that, when you read it, you totally understood why you weren't chosen. The insight into his perspective was amazing.

But even so, it would benefit the entire community to be more honest about what is missing, as it would clarify what skills are missing. This would allow potential employees to focus on their shortcomings and, while it would benefit the competition, it would end up benefiting the employer due the positive feedback loop from everyone doing something more thoughtful than a form letter. A form letter with a bunch of misspellings, grammar mistakes, and poor use of punctuation is a bit insulting, if you think about it.

I don't really know or care that much anymore. I'm proud of what I have accomplished and the discoveries I've made. That's really all I can ask for. Skilled or not, I'm not going to beat my head on this rock any more.

It depends on the role. But at a super high level I'm talking about basic theoretical understanding of computer science concepts and some level of mastery of relevant languages/tools (Not to say it needs to be the exact languages/tools of a job posting, but the candidate needs to show some mastery of *some* languages/tools).

Basically, to me, its about having a basic foundation of knowledge/skills that an employer can build on.

I've pointed out a number of ways that it does that nobody has actually refuted.


Of course not. This is the same simplistic argument that says any form of discrimination isn't a problem when you have a free market economy. But we've seen that it does happen. And there are lots of reasons: misaligned incentives between people making hiring decisions and the company as a whole, hiring decisions based on personal utility of management instead of just financial expected value, widespread bias amongst stakeholders, etc.


Never, but I've only done one formal interview in the past decade. But a skills shortage can exist while many companies still use non-optimal hiring methods.


This is you projecting your feelings onto a fact and representing it as a fact. Having unfilled positions is not a sign that there isn't a skills shortage. It's not proof there is a skills shortage either.


Again, a skills shortage can exist while many companies still use non-optimal hiring methods.

Hmmm.... so you're telling me companies have employed a bunch of people with poor personal skills and are paying them around 100k? I wonder why companies would be willing to do that? [Hint: It's not because there's a ton of skilled people that could easily replace them]

I totally agree. And the toxic environment for many groups of people is very likely to be exasperating a skill shortage than any sort of proof that it doesn't exist.

Of course you can. See above comments about discrimination and non-optimal hiring practices at some places.


Perhaps. I agree there's an empathy / long-term benefit to what you're talking about. But the reality is that the risk/reward isn't there in a relatively litigious society. Details comments can be used directly against you but can't really benefit you directly.


You should be proud of your work. My point isn't that you haven't accomplished good things. It's exactly the opposite. You have accomplished good things and I think there are other reasons hurting your job search that are unrelated to what you've taught yourself.

having an exam on prolog and haskell seems really ****ing dumb to me. When I do a lot of prolog problems, I'm used to thinking in a certain way, and I can't do haskell problems without a little rewiring, and vice versa.

So glad to be done with this. I actually like prolog more than haskell fwiw. The haskell compiler was driving me ****ing insane, and no debugger??? at least with what I was using.

Huh? Bringing in people and interviewing them costs time and money, what is the benefit that these companies supposedly get from doing this with apparently no intention to hire them at all?

Every place I've ever worked has 5-20 positions listed on their web site that they aren't really "looking" for applicants for, and don't really interview people for. If someone who looks great applies, they'd probably go for it and find them a place. But like they had an "open rec" on my team the whole 2 years we were there and literally never interviewed anyone.

I don't know if that means talent is so scarce we couldn't even scare up an applicant, or just that a big list of "unfilled job postings" is baloney.

Another thought on skills shortage: the market for software engineering talent is probably the deepest, most liquid labor market that's ever existed in human history thanks to the sheer size of the talent pool, ease of remote work and outsourcing, considerable willingness of many in the industry to relocate, even to another country, global conventions dominating over local, low cost and general availability of training and tools, lack of licensing or other regulatory barrier to entry and most importantly, fungibility of software engineering talent.

It's exceptionally easy and common for software engineers to switch from one tech stack to another and one domain to another. Most good ones can do so while being able to translate much of their expertise. This is quite rare in fields that require substantial technical expertise - brain surgeons don't do heart surgeries, real estate lawyers don't do IP and criminal litigation lawyers don't do business contracts. Laws aren't even the same across states let alone countries. The same applies to accounting and even investment banking and management consulting are segregated across industries and markets they serve and local or industry expertise often doesn't translate all that well, not to mention that we're talking about a substantially smaller talent pool to start with.

I cannot think of any large field where some kind of expertise is needed where something equivalent to this is true and happens regularly: a C# programmer with 2 years of experience, working on Windows desktop software for supply chain management in China can substitute for a JavaScript developer with 15 years of experience, working on a social networking site for fitness enthusiasts running on node/nginx/linux, located in SF.

Need 2p2 advice here. Had an phone interview today with a startup in SF. He knows I'm taking off tomorrow for a month long trip and coming back January. We scheduled an onsite a couple days after I get back (~1 month from now). He knows I'm in Southern California. But no mention of travel arrangements, hotels or flights.

"Awesome, Let's sync up when you get back and organize plans for having you come up."

Or is it obvious that they will be handling it when I get back? Am I over thinking things??

They should 100% be handling it, so I wouldnt sweat it