I can't believe how many people claim to have years of experience but are completely unfamiliar with terms like "binary", "library", "compiler", and "filesystem".
How do you expect to convince the interviewer that your solution was correct without tests? How can you debug your code properly if you end up with a spaghetti mess instead of using a clean design?
Testing and debugging vary from site to site. Most of the ones I've used run your code against a hidden suite of tests to check all possible edge cases. This would otherwise take up a very non-trivial amount of time in the session. Actual debugging is also not possible on all of the sites -- usually the most you can do is litter your code with logs, which is far from a clean design.
They're parallel in theory and get paid the same, but if you look at the ratio of high-level managers to high level ICs, climbing the management ladder is clearly easier.
I don't think Starcraft players are great examples. Many of the most successful ones walked the "Royal Road," i.e. they won the OSL on their first try. I can't think of any player who was mediocre for years, and then became an all-time great. If anything, every Starcraft legend except Flash had a front-loaded career where they had the majority of their big wins at the start of their career, and then stuck around due to their brand name without ever recapturing their peak.
Asians at Harvard undergrad are represented at roughly 4x their proportion of the general US population. Assuming that Harvard undergrad values “holistic qualities” (I think it does), then the answer to that may be yes.
Is this the argument that the folks in the lawsuit are making? I don’t think so. The argument to me sounds more like “why can’t Harvard make admissions just based just on a test?”
Short answer: There isn’t a standardized test that does a good job of selecting for the “holistic qualities” that certain schools want. Hence the admissions system that most elite schools use.
If these "holistic qualities" can't be detailed or measured, they may become merely a reflection of the interviewer's personal bias.
> On average, alumni give white and Asian American applicants similar ratings, but Harvard staff give whites substantially better reviews than they give Asian Americans.
Actually, no, it is not a coincidence that holistic qualities are not uniformly distributed across every social group. For example, a member of a historically privileged group is less likely to be the first member of their family to attend college than a member of a historically disadvantaged group.
Maybe extremely high SAT and grades are correlated with poor 'holistic' qualities such as social skills, communication, leadership, creativity, 'round character' (i.e. athleticism, disposition, generosity, musicianship).
I'm not saying they are - I'm saying it wouldn't really surprise me if they were, and then we have to think about it a little bit!
> Maybe extremely high SAT and grades are correlated with poor 'holistic' qualities such as social skills, communication, leadership, creativity, 'round character' (i.e. athleticism, disposition, generosity, musicianship).
If that were so, it would affect members of all ethnicities who had the same high SAT scores and grades equally.
Good point, but those 'other qualities' may not be distributed very evenly among the remaining applicants. This is an ugly problem to have. I don't envy anyone in this situation.
Many of those "poor 'holistic' qualities" can be code words for discrimination. "Social skills" for neurotypical, "leadership" for attractive, "athleticism" for not disabled, "disposition" for obedient.
Even if you're right and extremely high SAT and grades are correlated with neurodiversity, physical problems, or rebelliousness, are those qualities colleges should be discriminating against?
There's certainly a heap of evidence of discrimination against neurodiversity, physical problems, and rebelliousness. It's certainly been talked about enough. If you're not aware of it that's only because you've chosen to ignore it.
I don't think it's a tricky subject in the way that fluid dynamics is tricky. I do think it is difficult to communicate openly about because systemic favor and disfavor lie so close to individual identity that those favored have a hard time acknowledging it and those disfavored have a hard time being listened to. The ego is super enmeshed.
When I left my previous employer, the reason was absolutely arbitrary. The new one paid more. I didn't have to wait for the old company to not pay me the agreed upon salary, spend months offering them a "compensation improvement plan", and documenting their failure to follow it in fear that they might sue me for leaving for the "wrong" reason. It's amazing how people pretend at-will employment is somehow equal for both sides when only employees can actually terminate the employment at-will.
> When I left my previous employer, the reason was absolutely arbitrary. The new one paid more.
That is literally the inverse of what arbitrary means:
existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will
Now:
> I didn't have to wait for the old company to not pay me the agreed upon salary, spend months offering them a "compensation improvement plan", and documenting their failure to follow it in fear that they might sue me for leaving for the "wrong" reason. It's amazing how people pretend at-will employment is somehow equal for both sides when only employees can actually terminate the employment at-will.
Where I live you have (it's the law) to keep on working (and being paid for that work) for a certain number of weeks (depending on how long you have been working at that company). So the company can find a replacement, so you can wrap up things and pave the way for the transition. It's not rare that you can come up with an agreement that let you do that from home (because you are leaving on bad terms) or that the employee takes his vacant days or extra hours to fill up that period.
I say "leaving previous employer because the new one paid more" is not an individual preference or convenient but the intrinsic nature of the decision. Maybe even motivated by necessity if more money was needed.
It's not like he chose the new company because the logo is red.
Do you think that "they cost too much" is an "arbitrary" reason? Or is it the "intrinsic nature of the decision" like in the "I leave because they pay me more elsewehere" case?
Usually phone screens only check how well you can code, whereas onsite interviewers dig deeper on your design skills and experience in addition to coding. So it could be that you over-indexed on coding when preparing.
