I remember the same thing in 2000 when my colleague brought "Sore/Loserman" sign mocking (unknowingly) my candidates. I could not help but think less of him. I am not proud of that, but that was it. It's inside our DNA, to live in tribes. At work, it'd be better if we belong to the same tribe. Please, keep your other tribes outside.
What bothers me is the speed with which this process - "accused -> convinced -> executed" happens. We are not discussing things anymore. Today, you could tweet any accusations, and, no matter how ridiculous they look at first, it will lead to a race of who is taking them most seriously. Something definitely is broken. Look at what happened to the "okay". 4chan forced that meme 5 years ago in what they thought is a mischievous parody of ridiculousness of the cancel culture, and recently I watched CNL where the audience gasped in disbelief when one of the sketches included "o"-word. 5 years only, and most common (almost used "o"-word, sorry) sign became a synonym of hatred and racism. And now, Dr. Seuss. What's next, someone will tweet the act of breathing is racist? Do you really think it's impossible?
That's not what happened. This decision has actually been in the works for a while and involved a lot of discussion.
> The decision to cease publication and sales of the books was made last year after months of discussion, the company, which was founded by Seuss’ family, told AP
eBay has an existing policy that removes racist materials. They're just applying it based on the Seuss info.
> Items with racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise demeaning portrayals, for example through caricatures or other exaggerated features, including figurines, cartoons, housewares, historical advertisements, and golliwogs
This is ridiculous. Historians should be allowed to freely read original, non-critically annotated, historical documents. Otherwise they cannot do their job.
There's no special "historian card" that you need to show to access sources. Everybody has the right to study history on their own, and I guess the world would be a much better place if many of us did.
> Everybody has the right to study history on their own, and I guess the world would be a much better place if many of us did.
I guess?
History is something that historians do, not study. There is a meaningful difference between an expert applying actual methods and an interested layperson reading primary sources for their own edification. Not to say that people should be prevented from doing that, but it does seem like a bait and switch to say "what about the historians" and then swap to "what about this entirely different set of people" when it becomes clear that historians aren't actually using ebay in the method you describe.
If you really care about laypeople having access to primary sources, a way bigger problem is the fact that most archives will not allow non-credentialed people to access their materials. There's way more "censorship" going on there than anything happening on ebay if that counts.
Doing history is original analysis and narrative. The point here is to meaningfully explain the difference between what a history undergrad is doing and what a professional historian is doing.
Consider an algorithms class in undergrad. You can read about all sorts of algorithms. But learning the Nth algorithm won't transform your work into original algorithms research. You are only consuming information, not producing it. Similarly, just reading other history research can teach you things but isn't what historians are doing. A lot of "history buffs" fall into this category and love to read pop history and consider themselves experts.
Now consider somebody who wants to develop an original algorithm. But they've never learned any analysis methods and they've never critically engaged with the literature. They don't know how to prove an algorithm's correctness or behavior rigorously. There are a ton of these people online. They often gravitate to trying to solve P=NP. This would be comparable to somebody who never learned historiography (the method of doing history) reading primary sources and trying to replicate what historians are doing. Like any field, history has methods. It isn't just ad-hoc decision making from people who happen to have a title next to their name.
In CS this is largely harmless. But for many fields within history, accessing the archive also damages it because people are touching one-of-a-kind objects. So archives are selective in who they choose to allow to access their materials.
N=1, but yes, surprisingly often. The one I know buys a lot of old books from people online to keep in their home library and has on occasion actually found some very rare items that people selling them simply don't know the rarity of. I've heard of at least one such find end up on display in a museum (incidentally, also a children's book, but probably not Seuss). And it's not just historians who have a use for unaltered source material.
While I don't mind cleaning up/modernizing certain things and not printing the originals anymore, not allowing the existing originals to be sold even by independent third-party sellers is just horrible.
We've got a lot of old books purchased second hand because historians tend to like old books, but none of them are primary sources used for research. All of the primary sources are coming directly from archives or inter-library-loans.
Fair enough, but if you're a historian wiring a book about Hitler, you'll probably want a copy of Mein Kampf that you can take home either way, even if you'll still refer to the archive to double-check direct citations. And if their only option are the archived version because no unaltered copies exist on the 2nd-hand market, that's a pretty high barrier to entry.
Yes, there are plenty of of options if you can't find a copy on eBay, especially these days, but nonetheless, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for historians and laypeople alike to want originals of old works.
I would be pretty surprised if it becomes impossible for a historian using these six books as primary sources to get long-term access to the original material. This can be a little more difficult with family archives since family archives do tend to paper over the colorful stuff in their history, but if people are truly concerned here about family archives limiting access to unsavory parts of their history for historians (which I don't believe is the reason for this outrage) then there's centuries of other examples to complain about.
My wife is a historian. We've got hundreds and hundreds of books at home. Exactly zero ebay purchases. Among her colleagues, I'd bet that none of them have ever purchased a primary source on ebay.
And they're welcome to read those at the library or other sources - eBay, as a company, is under no obligation to facilitate dissemination of historical documents.
I thought that ebay was just a website where people could sell their historical documents to each other. Ebay does not "disseminate" the things that people send to each other. Heck, it doesn't even deal with the delivery! It just processes the payments. Why are they willing to engage in editorializing stuff that they don't even see? It makes no sense.
Ebay is a company, not a website, and company policies specify which products can be listed by their users. It's not neutral, you're being deliberately obtuse here.
This is misleading and approaching a lie. eBay only allows critically-annotated copies of Mein Kampf which are designed for scholars. I am sure that a copy of “If I Ran The Zoo” with a sociologist critically annotating the abhorrent racism would be permitted on eBay.
From one of the listed items:
> This item has been listed previously. eBay removed it with this reminder of the guidelines:
> "You listed the book Mein Kampf, but it is not a critically annotated edition. eBay only allows critically annotated versions of Mein Kampf to be listed on the site. While we appreciate that you chose to utilize our site, we must ask that you please not relist in this case."
> This is their policy and this edition is compliant with that policy.
> eBay only allows critically-annotated copies of Mein Kampf which are designed for scholars. I am sure that a copy of “If I Ran The Zoo” with a sociologist critically annotating the abhorrent racism would be permitted on eBay.
This seems worse than an outright ban on all copies.
Communist Manifesto and Lenin's books are allowed without any comments though. There are books by actual terrorists too, like Bill Ayers. Books advocating for segregation. One can go on.
Exactly. Why do those books get a pass? They encourage readers to do abhorrent things such as keep slaves and behead nonbelievers. If we're going to censor books because they cause people to hate others, then major religious texts should be first in line. The fact that censors don't go after these books is evidence that their actual goals differ from their claimed goals.
Despite HN regulations I am aware that you are arguing in bad faith and don’t care at all about the facts of the case. But I think it’s important to get the facts out there for other people.
Once again: eBay’s policy is not to ban harmful ideas generally or anything that might be morally icky. They have a specific policy against racist items, in any form. That includes the blatant racism in some of Dr. Suess’s books. The policy is reasonable and not that complicated. If you want to buy something racist, there are other websites.
eBay is not trying to police everything, they just don’t want racist stuff on their website. That is their perogative as a business and is hardly a meaningful threat to free speech even considering eBay’s market share.
Part of the reason this preposterous “debate” keeps raging is that people keep inappropriately elevating the issues to abstractions, since the specifics of the case are really not controversial:
- Just as YouTube and Twitch do not allow pornography, eBay does not allow racism. That does not mean that porn and racism are banned under the 1st Amendment. Likewise there’s plenty of stuff on YouTube that’s more immoral than any legal pornography, but YouTube never claimed to ban everything bad. They just don’t want to be associated with porn. Likewise, eBay doesn’t want to be associated with racism.
- Some of Dr. Seuss’s children’s books have bigoted depictions of nonwhites, including cartoons black people that resemble “darky iconography,” which anyone in good faith would agree are deeply racist.
- Since eBay doesn’t allow racist items (and had good reason to be concerned about racists rushing to buy discontinued Dr. Seuss books), it banned the items from its store.
Nobody seriously thinks that YouTube is censoring the porn industry. It is true is that the “buy racist crap to own the libs” industry is much smaller than porn and probably can’t easily survive without eBay’s help. I fail to see how that’s eBay’s problem.
It would probably trigger more debate if the link you referred to actually explained this thesis more convincingly rather than focus on the often deplorable language.
E.g. the oft denounced 'On the Jewish Question' that is predictably cited in your link is a work arguing for the political emancipation of Jewish people.
It does so with language that is offensive to a modern reader by turning around and mocking the arguments used by Bruno Bauer who argued against political emancipation.
That [use of language] makes it problematic, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone without commentary on the polemical debate it was a part of.
But Marx is addressing and attacking the very kind of political oppression of Jewish people that forced his father to convert to Lutheranism - which the article of course mentioned without later citing its relevance to 'On the Jewish Question' -, making the point that Jewish people should have political rights without being forced to abandon their religion.
As evidence of Marx willingness to use now-unacceptable language, it works. As evidence that he hated Jews it's a massive own goal for the article writer to use an article that argued for expanding Jewish peoples rights.
There are many legitimate criticisms to level against Marx' language. But this article is dishonest or ignorant in it's presentation of a lot of it.
To address specifically the Communist Manifesto, suggesting it is talking of a conspiracy suggests you have not read it, or understood it. If anything one of the key aspects of Marxist thinking was to directly denounce the idea that the individual actions of a few have much - if any - impact on history, and to present a conception of the way society changes as one controlled by historical and economical necessity, inevitably developing based on market forces.
The idea of capitalism as a conspiracy runs directly counter to the Marxist idea of historical materialism, so it's bizarre to try to frame his work as promoting a conspiracy theory.
Furthermore, the whole first chapter is fan-boy level praise for capitalism as having brought humanity to a level of development not seen before, and for how the free market is the "battering ram" that over time forces even the worst bigots to drop xenophobia, driven by economic forces.
If he was promoting a conspiracy, he was speaking awfully well about the supposed conspirators, given the idea of the development of new modes of production as the wheel of progress is a central thesis of Marxist thought, and his insistence that socialism/communism is a necessary consequence of capitalism rests on the idea that economic progress is inevitable and detached from the actions of individuals.
The Communist Manifesto presents capitalism as a huge step forward, just still flawed and something that would eventually give way to another step forwards.
This idea of Marx as promoting a conspiracy is an inherent demonstration of a lack of understanding of Marx writing, because it lifts up the idea of great leaders where Marx consistently put that idea down and criticised it, by talking of whole movements in terms of forces and modes of production within which the individuals - even the capitalists themselves - are trapped and playing out a role they have little control over.
Ok if you think eBay should ban more books then go tell them that!
Incidentally this isn’t true:
> Books advocating for segregation.
Or, rather, if such books are available it is against eBay’s policy and they should be reported. eBay has a specific policy against items that glorify racism or endorse racist stereotypes: https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...
It does not have a policy against everything morally icky, but it’s quite clear about racism. Mulberry Street and If I Ran The Zoo are both racist and against eBay’s policy.
The issue is that they are not just removing racist or hateful content according to some kind of standard. They are going after hot topics of the day, whatever it happens to be.
Even worse, hateful and racist content that is ideologically aligned is explicitly allowed. One would be hard-pressed to find anything more blatantly racist than White fragility or works of Dr Kendi, and yet you would not see eBay banning them, up until they fall out of favor.
Nobody's arguing that, so I'm not sure why anyone would need to defend a position they don't have. "I can't buy an uncommented copy of Mein Kampf from eBay" isn't the same thing as "I'm not allowed to read an uncommented copy of Mein Kampf", the latter isn't true.
There is absolute no chance that these radicals will not come for Shakespeare eventually. Their aim is to destroy the Western canon so they can replace it with their own propaganda: Shakespeare is too high-value a target for them to ignore.
Sure we are. There has been discussion. Just because you weren't involved in it, which is natural since I doubt you work for Dr. Seuss Enterprises, doesn't mean it didn't take place. The onus is on them to protect Dr. Seuss' legacy and it is important to change with the times.
This is not the first time something like this has happened and it won't be the last. There are plenty of examples to be found online of popular family cartoons which depicted racial stereotypes.
Go check out the Anti-black imagery in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia and see if you think, by following the same logic you displayed in your comment, this stuff should still be allowed while keeping in mind it was mainstream acceptable during its time.
We're not talking about Dr. Seuss Enterprises though. We're talking about eBay (and soon booksellers and libraries) banning books. Also a few schools outright disavowing Dr. Seuss all together. eBay is currently selling hundreds of other items with more shocking imagery than this, so there is also some weird signaling going on here. Oh I get it, this time around the book bans are probably justified. But you don't need to be an alarmist or conspiracy theorist to want to be just a little more cautious with this kind of stuff. You can also support removing racist images and still worry about setting a dangerous precedent.
Consensus on HN questions commenters' accusation that accusations have been made. I have been corrected. Marketplaces follow creators' wishes to destroy secondary sales of materials deemed hateful. Society allows this via centuries of discussion.
Accusation is a term of conflict. Terms of service changes are decisive outcomes of compassion.
While there is a grey area around general German WW2 artifacts, including those associated with the Nazi government, eBay explicitly disallows Nazi propaganda. It has a blanket ban on any item with a swastika that was made after 1933.
While some are going around to “point out” Mein Kampf can be bought on eBay, eBay only allows critically-annotated copies designed for scholars.
Why, exactly? I wouldn't buy any such a thing, but I know several institutions that have good reasons to.
People in general have some obsession with the Nazi and the last war. As if WWI never happened, and great wars before it. Because of this obsession, many people seem to think that the cause of a future war would be a kind of Nazism, completely disregarding the fact that it wasn't the cause of WWI and other earlier wars. Paradoxically, they also seem to forget what were the actual reasons of the rise of Nazism in post-WWI Germany (huge WWI retributions, enormous inflation and omnipresent poverty - basically people were very unhappy, and this very unhappiness was abused by Hitler; the ideology came afterwards).
It's 6 of Dr. Seuss's books, and ones that most people haven't heard of. If you actually look at the content of the books, they are clearly racist and demeaning to those they make caricatures of.
And in any case, it was not a sudden "canceling" or anything approaching that. Seuss's estate, managed by his family, made the decision after much deliberation to cease the publication of only six books due to the content. You could even see it as an anti-cancellation - Seuss's family wants to avoid him being associated with the obviously racist content of some of his work.
The problem is that you call it "clearly racist". If that is so clear why it took months to decide? In reality it's not that clear and you know it. You just moved a goalpost a little to include something that yesterday nobody complained about to become "clearly racist". And tomorrow will be something else.
Do you think they spent months deciding whether the works were racist?
Or, is it possible there's an interpretation of the sentence (and a perfectly reasonable one) where they spent months deciding whether they should stop publishing a publication that they had decided was racist?
The decision matrix might have been more complicated than: "does the work contain racist content".
I quickly read through Mulberry Street a few minutes ago, and there is a depiction of a Chinese man "eating with sticks." He is wearing sandals, a straw hat, a robe, and holding chop sticks. His facial features are not exaggerated or like a caricature in any way. To me, it's clearly a mistake.
According to this article [1] you may have read the updated version.
> Seuss actually grew to become more aware of his harmful images later in his life, and to regret them, eventually revising the Mulberry Street text and illustration. "I had a gentleman with a pigtail. I colored him yellow and called him a 'Chinaman,'" Seuss said. "That's the way things were 50 years ago. In later editions, I refer to him as a 'Chinese man.' I have taken the color out of the gentleman and removed the pigtail and now he looks like an Irishman."
Look at the pictures in the relevant books and ask yourself if you would want a Black child to see themselves in those images. Ask yourself if Dr Seuss would. No one is outraged, the world just moves on.
If there is no outrage, then you wouldn’t mind if those books continue to be bought and read to children and stocked in libraries. A reasonable outward rhetorical demeanor is not what is in question.
Idk, you're the one deciding to be outraged by an authors children following through on a decision they made last year to stop printing a selection of their father's work. Are you tired of it yet?
Are you all misinterpreting my comment? Yes I think it's silly people are getting outraged over them deciding to stop printing the books. Seems like people can't stop being outraged about pointless issues. This is on par with Starbucks Christmas cups drama
Does Seuss state own ebay?Do they have a constitutional mandate to stop selling of private copies to be sold between 2 private individuals? Are you going to order Fanta, Volkswagen,Bayern,BASF, Ford and Hugo Boss products to be delisted because they were literally associated with the Nazis?
The speed is part of the point. What better way to signal that you're part of the woke agenda than to be one of the first movers only a few days after the publisher made their announcement? It's like all the sycophants tripping over themselves to be the first to compliment their dear leader.
Yeah I was sad about that guy at a theme park that got fired for making an OK sign in a family's photo. Its like everyone forgot about the circle game, "the game", and went straight for white supremacy racist.
I wanted to write in or call in, but it was too late.
This one is crazy, but I have my own causes and that ain't one of them! I find it peculiar and I'm aware "they are coming for the trade unionists next" but I think I can navigate this reality and stay out of the re-education camps.
> I find it peculiar and I'm aware "they are coming for the trade unionists next" but I think I can navigate this reality and stay out of the re-education camps.
How? I think they'll get to you next. As commenters above pointed out, there is a "long march" through institutions before it starts trickling down.
a lot of people took the transfer agreement instead of tying their identity to their birth country. don't be like the ones that were married to their country, they got vanned and banned.
There were plenty of solutions to navigate before the .... last one. I think the parallels will hold pretty well this go-around, easily navigable options.
You just said it right there. It’s the speed of social media that does this.
Call me crazy, but haven’t we seen social media being manipulated (bots) to push narratives?
These accusations or problems crop up fairly quick and then the media gets on it and then whoever/whatever is destroyed.
If social media can be manipulated to swing stock markets or elections, then isn’t it possible it can swing to push narratives or keep us constantly fighting ourselves?
It’s super pernicious too, but effective bludgeon. Making “Okay” racist is obscure enough that most normal people (ie those not obsessed with wokeness) have never heard of it.
Consider that you’ve never heard until now that “okay” is racist and you did the okay symbol in front of a political commissar (I mean a woke person, can’t keep up) that doesn’t like you. You’re done.
It's particularly irksome. There was never any history of "racism" behind the okay gesture and it was a very widely used gesture for decades. It was also a very versatile one - it could mean "everything's okay" in the traditional sense, "yeah, ok, whatever" in a dismissive sense, or turned upside down became the Circle Game where if you were tricked into looking at it you had to immediately break the circle with your index finger or accept a punch to the arm. Then some neckbeards on 4Chan decided to prank people by claiming it was a "white power symbol". Unfortunately, some alt right edgelords then started actually using it as such. Now we find ourselves in the situation you just described where not everyone is aware of this history and people who grew up with it as an innocent symbol use it and find themselves on the wrong end of a Twitter mob.
In a way, it's absolutely hilarious. The fact that people were so outraged by this (which was a bait attempt at a meme a rational person could see a mile away) shows they're willing to be controlled by the very people they hate.
> In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.
> In the case of the “okay” gesture, the hoax was so successful the symbol became a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals, who would often post photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.
> Ironically, some white supremacists themselves soon also participated in such trolling tactics, lending an actual credence to those who labeled the trolling gesture as racist in nature. By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy, such as when Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed the symbol during a March 2019 courtroom appearance soon after his arrest for allegedly murdering 50 people in a shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
> The overwhelming usage of the “okay” hand gesture today is still its traditional purpose as a gesture signifying assent or approval. As a result, someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context unless other contextual evidence exists to support the contention. Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the “okay” gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.
>Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the “okay” gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.
This can only happen in a toxic mono-culture or a corrupt dictatorship. This kind of thing is coming straight out of academia and there are little to no checks and balances on the kinds of insane cultural shifts are being made. The left and far left absolutely dominate that space and they have lost touch with reality, as anyone can clearly see when 99% of their accusations are unjust and hasty and simply ridiculous to anyone who isn't part of the cult.
"Overnight". Swastikas and salutes become appropriated by the Nazis, and suddenly the pledge of allegiance in America became a hand over heart, instead of the Bellamy salute. Do you think that was wrong too?
There have been no accusations, no one has been executed, and if you see which books have been pulled and why, you'll see that the matter is pretty reasonable, far from ridiculous and almost obvious. It is you who are taking things out of proportion with this War on Christmas nonsense.
Your language seems needlessly hyperbolic to me. A handful of fairly obscure Dr. Seuss books are going to be harder to buy. It's not like Cat in the Hat is #cancelled or anything.
This is an "execution"?
Maybe try using language proportionate to the offence here.
I started a new job in April. Between when I interviewed and when I was started, offices shut down. It's been great.
The fact that everyone is remote is actually a great 'leveler', since the company has a 'main office' and a few satellite offices in other cities. I'm not affiliated with the 'main office', but I actually am concerned that I'll suffer career-wise once the company goes back to in-office, since I'll be in a satellite office missing out on casual-but-important lunch/coffee/hallway conversations.
So, from my perspective, it's a great time to change jobs. YMMV.
Sorry for not understanding, but I still don't quite get why is it a good time? From the description of your situation it looks like any new job right now is a temporal job. At least that's how I read it.
I mean that everyone who wants to work remotely, now actually has the opportunity to do so, and since everyone is working remote, you are not at a disadvantage based on your remote status. That may change in the future, it may not. But right now, changing jobs doesn't seem like a 'bad time', which is what the parent poster was claiming.
Ah, I see. But I was trying to say that I do not want to change a job right now because of the global uncertainty, not that it is harder for me to do it.
You are spot on and I am surprised that this is often overlooked. The industry is either on the the track to the massive shift how it operates, or, after COVID it comes back to the traditional in office MO.
I'm not sure it's relevant. It's not as if remote options haven't been available for a long time. The wages in San Francisco aren't determined explicitly by cost-of-living, they are determined by the scarcity of availability of the right resources.
Businesses found it necessary to exist in Silicon Valley because it provided certain benefits, and businesses found it necessary to have on-premises employees because it provided certain benefits. Since California won't allow any on-premises anything, the cost-benefit of being in the Valley and having people in the office is being reset. But if your skills and aptitude are scarce, there's no reason to believe wages won't continue to reflect that. And if your skills and aptitude aren't scarce, you were overpaid in the first place.
The support for remote has expanded greatly. Zoom isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than a group of people sitting around a speakerphone or a glitchy skype or WebX call trying to work with a remote person. And if everyone was remote, forget about it it was like getting the planets to align for everyone to be in productive remote communication. Remember spending the first 15 minutes of every conference call just getting everyone online and tech issues settled?
I agree, and frankly, at this point, I think the changes did not pass the point of no return. But this depends on whether the vaccines eventually work and for how long, will the virus mutates etc. What I know is that never before the industry had this global "remote operation" training on such a global scale and who knows will it result in changes or it was decided that it's unsustainable and everyone wants to be back to normal asap.
local govts did a few things to enable this. They created a welcoming business environment that allowed for rapid expansion. For example, Stanford Research Park was a joint venture of Stanford, and Palo Alto. I am not sure there is any good writeup on the contribution of local governments to silicon valley.
If you say so. As an outsider (although I used to work close, in Sacramento, for 5 years), I only can say that I did not hear anything about substantial govt participation, similar to post-war infrastructure projects, or recent push for green energy.
But, of course, I will be glad to find out that the Valley is the coproduct of some govt program, not only a lucky star alignment.
After 50 years of software development people still a) are surprised that a framework/approach fails to simplify the software development and b) suggest a new framework/approach.
I think the bigger issue with the dominant social/publishing platforms is not a free speech, but their ability to ruin a business without ability of the business to appeal, go to court, sometimes even without a right to find the reason. They are increasingly becoming a marketplace and, as such, they have to be legally forced to keep it transparent and fair.
Utility companies cannot turn your electricity off just because some clerk inside PG&E decided that you use this electricity in a way he personally does not like. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter do it many times a day.
I find it quite amusing the efforts programmers have to put into a job interview. Especially comparing to what they will be doing every day at job if they are accepted. It's two separate worlds - job interview and job itself.
Yeah, I found to read that part dispiriting too. The fact that practicing on leetcode has such a substantial effect on one's chances, to me, shows that it's very likely that either employers don't know how to select candidates, or maybe, they're just trying to track the best proxy they know for job performance.
I, personally, think that the ability to write "clean code", to think and care deeply about decisions related to code when it spans multiple fiels, is way more valuable in many jobs (not all!). Yet, unsurprisingly, I see that very few give any serious thought to it, given what companies care about is leetcode.
Do you think so? I am not familiar with doctor's state of things, but do they have to prepare for 10 years for each interview during their career, or just once in a lifetime to get into a profession? Are they tested on irrelevant stuff to their job's duties every time they change the job? I am genuinely interested.
I see that the current state of job search/acquiring in software industry is inadequate both for employers and candidates. Both sides can tell you horror stories in that regard. And I cannot say nobody tried to innovate here. They definitely did - certification efforts, recruiter's tests, not to mention each company has it's own "system". Nevertheless, what I see here is that you are almost always tested for irrelevant stuff, stuff you can completely get out of your head the moment you are hired. Until the moment you have to find a new job. Something's wrong here.
Trying to compare a few weeks of LeetCode to years of graduate school followed by years of underpaid 80-hour residency workweeks is out of touch.
Also, any programmer with a few years of experience shouldn’t have to completely relearn how to do LeetCode style problems every few years. The LeetCode easy and medium problems aren’t that difficult for anyone with a few years of experience.
Finally, I don’t understand how so many people are convinced that LeetCode problems are an entirely different domain than typical programming work. Sure, they’re toy problems, but the concepts are relevant to anyone doing things at scale that involves more than just connecting some APIs together.
> Finally, I don’t understand how so many people are convinced that LeetCode problems are an entirely different domain than typical programming work. Sure, they’re toy problems, but the concepts are relevant to anyone doing things at scale that involves more than just connecting some APIs together.
But the overwhelming majority of us are just connecting APIs or what not.
Most people (even in FAANG) are not using DP in their day-to-day...
At times, I feel like job interview might be the most exciting problem solving an engineer might do for a company. After that, it's more of the same old "do this thing you've done 10 times but now in Go with go-routines."
