Whether what they were doing was "legal grey area" or "flatout illegal" is for the courts to decide, not for a random hiring manager/engineer interviewing that person. If you have a feeling that something could've been "flatout illegal", consider reporting them to the appropriate legal channels.
I, personally, would have done the latter in that scenario, but only if that entry was on their resume and they were proud of it. So no, I wouldn't report someone who personally confessed that many years ago they were dealing or doing sex work of the illegal kind. Though I heavily doubt that someone would be dumb enough to put it on their resume and advertise.
It's difficult to know what/where the line is for sure, but I think lots of software has shifted away from making people's lives better. Facebook, Amazon, Uber, are doing more negative for humanity than positive I think. Sure, they offer a service that might not've existed before, at least in that iteration or scale, but at what point are the negatives outweighing the positives?
Sure, you "connect" people to friends/family they may not be able to see in person or communicate with regularly. You're also verifiably playing god with information and misinformation, as well as spying on your users, selling their data to other people that want to spy on them, paying employees to view toxic content (which results in PTSD), etc. Is all this worth being able to communicate with people you don't really care about, or that don't really care about you?
I feel this way about lots more than Facebook. BigTech is committing atrocities every day, and the developers that work there are generally complicit in that behavior. I think it's fine to say "I'm not proud but the money was life changing" - that can be true, when most people are faced with that proposition would go with the life changing money. But it seems wild to think that Amazon or Facebook or Google employees should be applauded for their work, or should feel proud - lots of it is actively harmful to me as a human.
Live in a tech hub, get a good recruiter, say yes to everything. 60 is probably extreme, and a good recruiter would probably actually turn you down for this type of behavior, but it's def possible.
There is no reason to not be honest about these types of things (unless of course you're doing something shady). If you want to fill the position quickly, you should say so. Now, of course, as a candidate if I heard that I would jack up my compensation numbers, but again, if you want to fill the seat quickly that's how it works.
Just because you disagree with a design decision doesn't change the done/dead debate. It's done, because its maintainers have agreed the project has gone as far as it needs to go, and its current iteration is stable. You (as always) can choose not to use a project you do not agree with; that has no bearing on the project's status.
I'd been complaining about these issues for years.
I kinda hate being vindicated years later, the time in between as an outsider kinda frustrates me.
I wish we had a more thoughtful, less packrat culture in programming. Fighting off the pushback is exhausting. It's not even worth bringing things up most of the time.
And as a disclaimer to those feeling tempted, I've got zero interest in debating this reality, water is wet.
It's the same in all human culture and politics. Every era's mainstream ridicules and dismisses those who criticize it as "extremists". But some of those extremists will one day be vindicated as being on the right side of history long before everyone else came around, and we will look back at that prior mainstream attitude and ask, "How could they be so blind?"
The important thing to keep in mind that we don't know which of today's counter-culture takes will end up winning (I don't say "being right" because cultural evolution is, like biological evolution, not teleological).
In other words, you had a belief, and in hindsight you were "vindicated". But there were many others who had equally strong beliefs that were not.
Their point of view seems kind of right to me in that they may be suboptimal design decisions in hindsight, but changing them now will break all existing integrators. If you're going to break everyone anyways, might as well switch to a whole different library, or alternatively give the redone version a new name so nobody assumes you can just upgrade it and it'll be fine.
The basis of my complaint is that some things are well designed, others are just nicely documented.
moment has a, to me, counterintuitive "hidden" type system that is a different-kind-of-menacing. In code I've had to review and maintain, the moment parts or more than often a soupy mess of the previous coders in combat with the nuanced hairy complexities of the library as opposed to straightforward execution of the api (compare to say, jquery, where setting all architectural disagreements aside, there's no substantial evidence of frequent "programmer struggle" in the codebases using it)
This leads to poor long-term maintainability as the code passes through many hands over the years.
If, after a year or two of average "blue collared" programmers touching a codebase it gets so convoluted that you generally need to abandon it, then fundamentally you are using poorly designed tools.
Again, we all only have our own personal lived experiences to make such assessments on, and I way too often end up "debating" what mostly amounts to my work history of parachuting in and rescuing code (it's a psychiatric problem I have) so the pessimistic aspects become quite sharp to me.
It's less me, and more the experience of myself, my close friends and professional colleagues. But as with everything, I would assume it's a mix of both.
If someone's resume was only wordpress sites, and they somehow made it into a technical interview for a team that managed twitter-like systems, I'd consider that a critical failure of the selection process. As an interviewer, I would try and make that experience as painless as possible for the candidate, and if not totally shocked by their abilities, have very direct conversations about the shortcomings of the selection process with whoever brought them in in the first place.
> I'd consider that a critical failure of the selection process.
Me too. Unfortunately, I have no control over recruiters or the questionable candidates they sometimes choose to send in. I just have to do my best to ascertain whether the person is a good potential teammate.
I wouldn't "take it out" on the candidate. I always treat my candidates with due respect and courtesy. I would no-hire them, though, if they were not a match for the team.
