StabbinHobo posted:

Absurd Alhazred posted:

There needs to be a series about academia from the funny and dumb angle.

What do startups think about Halt and Catch Fire?

kliksf posted:

I miss fuckedcompany.com more than one of my friends ended up finding out he or she was about to be unemployed by checking the site regularly is there a twenty teens equivalent?
https://web.archive.org/web/20010515183530/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/2001060...=0&crapfilter=1

Subjunctive posted:

They're mostly sales staff, and if you're redeveloping a product you might well not need the same kind of sales capabilities for it -- you certainly don't need them sitting around not earning commissions while you figure it out. AIUI, SurveyMonkey's financials are fine, so I don't think it's really a sign of structural issues.

on the left posted:

Accenture blew up analyst pay this year with 80k starting, but then you'd be working for Accenture. MBB was quick to match though.

axeil posted:

Hiring is a problem all over the place it seems. Here's a horror story of when I was in government and we were trying to hire an economist. The person who was screening the applicants had no idea what quantitative modeling was and kept throwing us people without ph.ds in economics who had no idea what a regression even was. They then got pissed we rejected all their candidates.

And then when we finally got some ph.d people we'd interview them and they wouldn't get offered for another month and the HR people were confused why they all declined (it's because a bunch of financial shops were able to interview and offer them within a week instead of 2+ months plus they got paid about 50% more).

The one thing the government needs is a complete overhaul of its hiring practices for anyone above entry-level. It's an absolute joke and the main reason they can't get any talent in the door.

MiddleOne posted:

What in gods name makes Verizon believe that they have the expertise to turn around, everything not named Alibaba, that they're getting into?

Popular Thug Drink posted:

it's not all doom though, i've worked with (large firm you've probably heard of, especially if you have a white collar career) and their development team might have been literal wizards (not in the virgin sense) but by and large the larger a company is the more they can tolerate or even encourage incompetence and inefficiency in their ranks

Kobayashi posted:

I work at a company that buys data from one of these brokers. It's "anonymized," but then I listen to our data scientists talk about how trivial it is de-anonymize, usually with perfect fidelity. poo poo's crazy.

cheese posted:

Probably because we have spent the last few decades pumping up post-grad education to the point where even an MA or PhD doesn't mean a whole lot. We also no longer (especially after 2008) really have enough jobs for the majority of college graduates, which has fueled a "go back to school and get your MA/PhD in the same field where a BA wouldn't get you a job" boom. Oh and rack up 6 figures of student loan debt while doing it.

The job market is brutal and not really getting any better.

Spacewolf posted:

It wasn't true? WTF?

What universe have you been living in?

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Long Businessweek post-mortem on Hampton Creek, the sales-massaging mavens of Just Mayo.

blah_blah posted:

In rare cases candidates have very high quality public facing work (on their blog or GitHub or elsewhere). If I was interviewing the guy who wrote this I'd hire him on the spot, but alas this is not the norm (nor do I want it to become the norm that everyone has to produce unpaid analytical work on their own time on public datasets to get data science jobs in the future).

MickeyFinn posted:

How is it that silicon valley, home of the data science ~*revolution*~, doesn't seem to understand basic sampling?

Dr. Fishopolis posted:

As someone who has worked as a consultant to various companies for various reasons, there are exactly three things that have ever made me straight up walk away:

1. Breach of contract

2. Refusal or inability to actually take my advice

3. Doing something so egregiously, publicly awful that I couldn't be associated with them.

Given Yahoo's history, I would bet it's heavily the second one. Everyone seems to blame Meyer for everything, and the management buck does stop with her, but everything I've seen tells me they have one of the most profoundly lovely boards in history.

of course, carol bartz certainly seems to think so

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Hahahaha! Ask me about working at six companies in a row that either were bought disastrously or bought another company disastrously, mostly the first. I was starting to worry about carrying a curse, but even I couldn't kill Oracle.

Terrible Opinions posted:

purposely violating monopoly laws

Terrible Opinions posted:

Yes I will defend those regulations just like I'll defend any law meant to prevent vertical integration. Those are good, just like the ones that targeted Hollywood studios and the ones that targeted slaughterhouses. The medallions are stupid but significantly less stupid than the "no regulation whatsoever" that Uber pretends is the rule of the day.

Peachfart posted:

Users don't care about medallions. They care about cost, speed, and ease of use. Along with how cabs had a tendency to claim their credit card machine was broken.
Cost is subsidized by Uber and isn't sustainable. Speed, ease of use, and credit card issues have gotten better with most cab companies coming out with apps that let you pay online.

Terrible Opinions posted:

Yeah you're right it's not the 1930s, and that's precisely why we have laws against it. Do you think for a second if we didn't have laws against it companies wouldn't try to pay employs in company script? Every single evil thing done by a company in the past is something some entrepanuring rich fucker wants to do now and is only stopped by laws. Rich people are fundamentally evil and will do whatever horrible thing they are aren't specifically prevented from doing.

fishmech posted:

You can already buy a car from 20 different retailers though? You can also already buy cars direct from Tesla in every state too?

fishmech posted:

He's explicitly saying he wants to buy from a choice of middlemen, who will somehow not do all the supposed bad things the dealers do despite being factually performing the same business as a dealer does.

Discendo Vox posted:

Why not just buy from the national scale used car congloms?

Notorious R.I.M. posted:

Add DBA to the list but then also add not working at Uber to the list.

anonumos posted:

I'm pretty sure if you don't have a database with a robust query language you should be run out of business. Like seriously?

Select avg(pay) from personnel where sex = 'f'

But more than that, how do you run a business when you can't report your costs properly. How on earth do you not know every aspect of labor costs? If you don't know that stuff, how do you meet compliance requirements, many of which reduce your tax burden, or help you get reimbursed by customers, or help you pay less to your venders?

namaste faggots posted:

Libertarianism was actually mostly a leftist ideology until it was appropriated by fat otakus living in mom's basement in the last 20 years.

TaintedBalance posted:

I can't speak to the places you've worked, but this is not true every where. I've seen two people come back from PIPs and managed a third who did as well. It does fully depend on management and the company doing some introspection to see where they hosed up and if it is fixable though. As someone in management, I tend to view have to have someone let go as a failure on my part. Also having seen railroading happen, particular with resistance to new changes or regimes, it looks like this from what she stated. Of course, we also haven't heard GitHubs side. But they have a strong negative history on this, so I'm going to view this as a lesson to be learned.

Although I do agree with you on her not taking offered medical leave. Her therapist told her she needed to get back into routine, but work was going in a direction that was distinctly not routine. *shrug* We have incomplete knowledge of the situation, and I'm wandering off topic now, but to my core point. You can come back from a PIP if you want to and management wants you to as well. That can just be really rare.

a foolish pianist posted:

What did you switch from? We just went from gmail to Outlook, and it's loving terrible.

curufinor posted:

those 200k total comps are a lie
they're heavily backloaded and everyone quits before getting at it because it sucks so much to work there
in practice, total comp ends up being on the order of 130-160k

WampaLord posted:

Oh no, "only" $130,000!

They'll have to eat Ramen!

Horseshoe theory posted:

fishmech posted:

Even in the richest census districts in Manhattan, $250,000 a year will at most put you right in the middle, and usually puts you quite a bit above it. And going a few blocks over drops the incomes quite a lot.

You don't stop making a ton of money because you're dumb enough to insist on an expensive house.

fishmech posted:

Again, you don't actually have to live int he richest parts of town, and doing so doesn't make you less rich, it makes you someone who's bad with money.

LinYutang posted:

All the assumptions about programming work is weird. I have never taken a CS course in my life and I've been working full time as a programmer for a few years. The skillset for much of programming work, especially web applications programming, *must* be self taught. It isn't really taught in schools, though bootcamps are trying to keep up.

The real advantage that CS majors have are during the interviewing process, which is totally broken and biased towards CS classwork.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

And this is a great way to wind up with a workforce that matches the racial/ethnic/gender/etc makeup of your current organization, which is a problem not only because of justice but because you're missing out on talent that might help you solve problems in a different way. I know that's conventional wisdom, but it's "wisdom" that lets you fail to examine your hiring process. Missing good hires is a severe loss, not just the way business inevitably must work.

Here's an actual paper on it. Grad students -- the very same sort of people who often interview would-be Google employees -- were no better than chance at predicting the success of other students using interviews. Other students continued to believe interviews were effective even after being shown the research proving otherwise. There are other relevant papers. Look, in particular, at section 3.1 of this 2009 research overview. As of 2009, there was clear-cut evidence that interviewers, whether intentionally or not, underrated the performance of African-American interviewees. If you look at section 2, the preponderance of the evidence says that "structured interviews" (see the Post Office, here) are far more predictive than the standard "engineer assumes they are qualified to evaluate a candidate based on whatever their favorite questions are". At [popular high-tech company], you'd have to have a big enough standard list that people couldn't pre-prepare, but it can be done.

There is existing research demonstrating how to make interviews more useful. It's being ignored.

Cosigned. I've heard word-of-mouth that some companies are demanding work that they then reuse in their own applications without hiring the candidate. I have no cites on that one.

You know what a real engineer does when coding a sort? They look it up in the loving class library. Assuming they are insane enough to code one from scratch, they look it up in the literature. A lot of real engineering is knowing when to rely on somebody else's expertise. You know who does know which search is O(N!)? Recently graduated CS students.

fishmech posted:

Luckily living in the trendy parts of Manhattan isn't required to live. So, just don't do it? What's so hard about this? There's even a pretty good public transit system in place so you can live in Not Manhattan and work in Manhattan. You know, like over 1.6 million people do, every workday of the year.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

You don't actually have to pick between trying to find economic diversity and trying to find other kinds of diversity. Both are important. I am deeply concerned that the focus on top-10 universities excludes a lot of people who can't afford to go to anything but their state university. There are a lot of excellent people with degrees from "second-tier" colleges. I am also deeply concerned that, to name two, women and black people who enter the CS workforce are leaving because they were made to feel unwelcome.

boner confessor posted:

99% chance. the stated reason google gave for firing the guy is that he created a hostile work environment contrary to the code of conduct. it doesn't matter what other excuses he comes up with. he's trying to chessmaster his way out of this by filing CYA complaints with the NLRB but since google didn't fire him for his political beliefs but rather his actions (writing down on paper how much he dislikes his female coworkers) it won't stand up in court

also lol that he's complaining about being misrepresented when his angry rant was widely published. can't backpedal your way out of this one bro, you hosed up bigly

hobbesmaster posted:

The Trump campaign had some really good analytics teams, he could do that stuff probably.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

Is there HARD evidence yet that Cambridge Analytica was a front for stolen voter roll data? Or does it just fit all the facts perfectly but nobody has found the smoking gun yet?

pangstrom posted:

I'm not a "nationalize business" guy, at least not by D&D standards, but I think there's a pretty decent argument in the abstract to nationalize chunks of Google and, unless the next generation continues to ignore it even as they age, maybe Facebook. Some services basically work better if everyone is using the same one. The argument in practice may be a total disaster, I don't pretend to know.

fishmech posted:

How the gently caress would we have transistors in 1927, satellites in 1937, fiber optics in 1932 and cell phones in 1953 just from "market incentive"? Pretty much all of these had been described in theory around those times, but the materials science and such was simply lacking.