Varies by industry and sector, but there's typically no "technical". It goes:
1) Resume + cover letter + cumbersome online job app,
2) phone screen,
3) On-site, and
4) Reference check.
Typically the interviews are more conversational, with an emphasis on behavioral questions, job history, and relevant skills. Academia and government have their own formats.
>So for those FAANG engineers that were able to get in early, whether by acquihire, by diversity hire, by luck, by normal hire
Can we please stop assuming that being a minority or woman is some kind of hiring free pass? It's often quite the opposite.
But more to your point, I've been cynically wondering if the untenably high bar set for technical interviews serves as an industry-wide means of lowering turnover.
Also very confused about what constitutes a pass or failure, with the opaquely-defined expectations. I'd love to be able to prepare for my technicals, but usually end up wildly misleading information from recruiters about what the technical entails. (Why are you testing me on Java!? I never claimed to have any experience with Java. I was told this would be a behavioral interview!)
At every company I have worked at, policies were in place to extend greater opportunity to URM and women candidates. Most large companies are setting diversity targets well in excess of the share of women and URM workers in software development other engineering roles at the company. This necessitates discrimination to achieve this over representation. For example, Dropbox announced a goal of 33% women in engineering roles when I was there in 2019. My currently employer has a goal of 30% women in engineering.
This typically doesn't result in easier interviews. Rather it was implemented by giving recruiters incentives (larger bonuses, or penalties for failure to meet a certain %) to hire diverse candidates. At my current company, over 50% of engineering candidates phone screened last year were women (and were given phone screens at a rate twice as high as men). In other words, framing diversity hiring as "giving a free pass" isn't quite accurate. Rather the companies increase their diversity by adjusting the rate at which diverse and non-diverse candidates are let into the interview process.
If we could quantify the net effects of sexism and racism in hiring and attrition, we could compare whether the incentives mentioned offset the sexism and racism equivalently. But, since we don't have a means of doing so, it's a futile discussion on this site. Also worth pointing out that just hiring a diverse candidate is pretty meaningless if they get bullied or harassed to the point of being forced out in a short order.
But that's beside the point (or, beside the tangent to the point). The context of "diversity hire" above parallels being diverse and getting hired to an acquihire or getting lucky. That's very different than what you outlined above.
Whether one thinks that discrimination in hiring is justified to offset suspected discrimination in other areas is besides the point. The point is, there exists discrimination in hiring that results in women and URM candidates getting offers that would not have been obtained were it not for diversity status. The opportunities of people categorized as diverse in tech company interviewing is substantially different from those not categorized as diverse. Maybe I'm biased towards the SF bay area, but there's a palpable mismatch between how common and prevalent these practices are and the offense people take when they're acknowledged.
I'm not sure why you think what I'm saying is different. At my company, white and asian male new grads are only given a chance to interview if they're CS (or math, EE, or other tech majors) grads from top universities like Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc. Candidates from boot camps, less well known universities, or non-tech majors are only extended the chance to interview if they're diverse. Does that mean that a diverse candidate from a boot camp who gets hired is unskilled? No, probably not. Does it mean that a diverse candidate from a boot camp would not have been hired if they weren't diverse? Yes, because non-diverse candidates from boot camps don't get interviewed at all.
Maybe I'm biased toward the SF Bay Area, but the mismatch between the prevalence of these policies and the discomfort with acknowledgement of their existence is concerning.
No, it's not an SF Bay Area thing. I've moved to SF from the Midwest a year ago, and have been called racial slurs more times during my year here than in my entire adult life living in a medium-sized Midwestern town. Shall we assume that because you haven't had a similar experience or personally faced discrimination on the job that no one else has?
Exaggerating the status of "diversity hires" just ignores the harsh reality of rampant discrimination in the tech industry. And not just on the basis of sex and race, but age and disability too. There wouldn't need to be such a hard push for underrepresented candidates if it were a more welcoming, diverse workforce in the first place.
Who is getting the short or long end of the stick is not something I aim to answer, or even purport to be able to answer. This is a matter of perspective. I'm a Hispanic person that attended an elite university and have household names on my resume. I'd have a good chance of getting interviews regardless of my gender or ethnicity - and when you do take ethnicity into account it probably helps me even more. I'm largely indifferent towards this kind of discrimination in hiring. But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.
The only thing that bothers me is attempting to equate acknowledgement of these practices as offensive or taboo. The reality is that this is what many companies are doing. Thus, the only way one can avoid offense in that scenario is to deny reality.
Yes, they really do. I've explained the details my employers' hiring processes to white and asian men trying to get into tech, and the majority feel like it is an overall benefit to diverse candidates - other discrimination in tech notwithstanding. Really, how can you write this? Do your claim to know the opinions of every white and asian man in this country?
My point is, that the fact that diverse tech workers may face discrimination in other ways (e.g. slurs as you pointed out) doesn't necessarily "even out" discrimination in hiring that favors diverse candidates. Someone who can't land an interview may feel that the opportunity to get a job, even if it comes at the expense of other forms of hostility, is a net positive.
> What a horrifying thing to say. Normalizing racial and sexual harassment is a large part of the problem. Are you going to claim you don't understand how the tech industry is so homogenous while simultaneously claiming that racial slurs are just some inconsequential price of admission in tech?
The idea that discrimination in hiring is justified because of other forms of discrimination (such as slurs) is something you originally claimed:
> Exaggerating the status of "diversity hires" just ignores the harsh reality of rampant discrimination in the tech industry. And not just on the basis of sex and race, but age and disability too. There wouldn't need to be such a hard push for underrepresented candidates if it were a more welcoming, diverse workforce in the first place.
Your message here is that discrimination in hiring is necessary and justified because of other forms of discrimination. This seems like the "price of admission" mentality you refer to above. Whether or not this is "Horrifying" is up to you, but lets be clear: the idea that one form of discrimination justifies another form of discrimination is an idea that you originally brought up.
For what it's worth, I'm of the mind that two wrongs don't make a right. If people are being treated with contempt on the basis of race, then the appropriate response is to curb that behavior - not discriminate in favor of the targeted demographic in hiring. Claiming that one slurs are okay because candidates are beneficiaries of discrimination is wrong. So is claiming that discrimination is okay because these people are subject to slurs, or other forms of hostility.
> Also, the notion that racial slurs are "the price of admission" is something you seem to have brought up - not me
> Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.
I'm still having trouble believing anyone who isn't a frothing racist can pass off "many" getting called racial slurs on the job as just business as usual. Or, "a small price to pay."
Whereas what I was saying is that the policies which you cited incentivisng more diverse applicants to apply doesn't even begin to counter the ubiquitous prejudice in hiring and on the job. If it did, minorities and women would be over-represented in tech rather than under-represented.
The whole "minority free pass" idea is what grates on me. Plenty of hiring managers have unconscious biases against women, minorities, older candidates, people with disabilities, etc. So, it's throwing more diverse candidates into a situation where diverse candidates are going to be disproportionately rejected.
But the employers who actually incentivize diverse candidates are also frequently over-emphasized despite it being an uncommon practice. The boilerplate EEOC "we encourage diverse candidates to apply" statement is usually just that: an empty boilerplate put there for legal purposes, backed with zero action behind it. More often than not, it's nothing close to what you've described above
> I'm still having trouble believing anyone who isn't a frothing racist can pass off "many" getting called racial slurs on the job as just business as usual.
I don't think it's business as usual, and looking back on my comments I never wrote this. Again, the first one of us bring this up was you when you justified discrimination in hiring as a means to offset discrimination elsewhere. What I wrote was,
> But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.
that many white or Asian people struggling to get into tech see the employment opportunities conferred by diversity status as outweighing the other forms of discrimination that diverse workers may face - not that the latter is justified as "the price of admission".
> The whole "minority free pass" idea is what grates on me. Plenty of hiring managers have unconscious biases against women, minorities, older candidates, people with disabilities, etc. So, it's throwing more diverse candidates into a situation where diverse candidates are going to be disproportionately rejected. But the employers who actually incentivize diverse candidates are also frequently over-emphasized despite it being an uncommon practice. The boilerplate EEOC "we encourage diverse candidates to apply" statement is usually just that: an empty boilerplate put there for legal purposes, backed with zero action behind it. It's just usually nothing close to what you described above
First of all, it is a common practice at least as far as what I've experienced. Some companies, like Intel, went so far as withholding unless diversity quotas are met.
And second, if the hiring managers have biases then eliminate those biases. If a company suspects that biases are causing women, minorities, etc. to not get offers then excluding white and Asian men to pad the former's representation doesn't create an equal hiring process. It just creates a hiring process that discriminates against both women, URM and White and Asian candidates. Furthermore, while it's common to see people cite unconscious biases against women and URM candidates in tech hiring studies trying to actually measure this often don't find this suspected bias. In fact, they often find bias in favor of diverse candidates. Interviewing.io experimented with blind hiring and actually found a slight preference in favor of women [1]. Studies in university STEM faculty recruiting found a 2:1 bias in favor of women [2].
> Because that's a breath-takingly racist assertion. And I did not say that. I suggest re-reading your post so that you understand that you wrote those words.
Let's reread the sentence in context:
> But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.
Say you have two people in a coding boot camp. One is a woman, the other a white or asian man. They get the same scores and are just as capable. At my current and previous employers, only the former would get a chance to interview.
If the latter looked at this situation, and concluded that they would have better career opportunities if they were a woman - even if it meant additional discrimination in other forms, like being subject to slurs - then they're "breath-takingly racist"?
I'm also confused as to why you're calling me racist for pointing out the fact that many white and asian men feel like the tech industry's treatment towards them on the basis of race and gender is a net negative. Again, these are the opinions of people other than myself. The fact that you're exclusively quoted this sentence without the preceding one suggests that you either forgot this fact, or are deliberately attempting to conceal it.
> I'm referring to tech hiring in the private sector.
Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.
And I've heard hiring managers say racist and sexist comments on prospective employees all throughout my career. And neglect to mentor or promote them. And freeze them out of the team. I suppose the strawman you've set up outweighs the actual racist and sexist discrimination in hiring, which only seems to exist to you as some abstraction, rather than real people losing their livelihoods because of sexual harassment and racist bullying.
> Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.
Ah yes, the highly regarded International Journal of blog.interview.io. How did I miss this groundbreaking research?
What you call a strawman is exactly the kind of discrimination that exists at my current employer and at my previous employer. This is reality. And the discrimination isn't small or subtle. We're talking about aggregate 2-3x times less likely to get a phone interview as a diverse candidate. Is harassment or bullying equal to or greater than the impact of this preference in hiring? There's no right answer to this question, this is a subjective question for which people can and do give different answers. Someone whose diverse in tech might feel like a reduction in harassment or bullying would be worth a significant reduction in career opportunities. Someone who is struggling to get into tech, and doesn't have diversity status to stand out from the rest of the pack could also arrive at the answer that they'd be better off as diverse even if it did mean that they might be subject to additional harassment or bullying.
Calling the latter "frothing", "breath-takingly racist" is an incredibly hostile thing to say, and it makes me question whether people actually want to discuss the impact of discrimination in hiring or want to shut down discussion by making it taboo.
Also interviewing.io actually conducts interviews on a large scale, and is probably one of the best positioned organization to conduct this sort of experiment. Can you elaborate on why their study should not be accepted?
And you do realize that you're equating diverse hiring efforts with getting called racial slurs on the job, yes? Those are two very different definitions of "actual" racism. And rather supports the breathtakingly racist claim above.
> Can you elaborate on why their study should not be accepted?
Forgive me, I didn't realize they were the leading authority on the nuanced sociological facets of unconscious prejudice during hiring. And here I thought a publication by psychology researchers or African American Studies professors would be the subject matter experts to seek out, not a blog post.
> And you do realize that you're equating diverse hiring efforts with getting called racial slurs on the job, yes? Those are two very different definitions of "actual" racism.
Right, they are different. The latter makes people uncomfortable or alienated at their job. The former keeps people from getting jobs in the first place on the basis of race and gender.
Which one is more serious? Someone who gets bullied for their race at their workplace probably has a very different opinion on this than someone who can't get an interview because they aren't diverse. The proverbial grass is usually greener on the other side. Someone who's non-diverse and can't get a job in tech might look at a diverse worker talking about bullying at their job and think to them selves, "well, at least that have a job.". That doesn't mean they are racist. That means they have a perspective different than your own.
> Forgive me, I didn't realize they were subject matter experts on the nuanced sociological facets of unconscious prejudice during hiring. And here I thought psychology researchers or African American Studies professors would be the subject matter experts, not a blog.
This reads like a total non-sequitur. Interviewing.io compared non-anonymous interview performance of women to anonymous interview performance, and found that there was little discrepancy (in fact it found a slight positive bias in favor of women). Why are you referring to sociology and psychology in a study focused on anonymous vs. non-anonymous interview performance? Also, why would African American Studies relate to studying potential gender bias in hiring? It seems like you just assumed that this study was focused on black candidates, when in reality it was studying potential bias with respect to gender.
> So, you're saying racial slurs are better than diverse hiring?
I answered this question:
> Which one is more serious? Someone who gets bullied for their race at their workplace probably has a very different opinion on this than someone who can't get an interview because they aren't diverse. The proverbial grass is usually greener on the other side. Someone who's non-diverse and can't get a job in tech might look at a diverse worker talking about bullying at their job and think to them selves, "well, at least that have a job.". That doesn't mean they are racist. That means they have a perspective different than your own.
> Thanks for definitively putting the "Are you a racist?" question to rest. I think we're about done here.
This kind of rejection of different worldviews is the antithesis of inclusion. You're branding people as racist for looking at the world from a different perspective.
If you met an Asian man who graduated from a boot camp and failed to get phone interviews while his diverse peers got interviews and jobs, would you tell him to his face that he's racist if he thinks he's getting a short end of the stick? If he felt that having a job, even if it meant additional bullying or harassment, was better than not having a job at all would you genuinely tell him that being unemployed and Asian is better than being employed and black, female, or Latino?
Let me turn this question back to you:
> So, you're saying racial slurs are preferable to diverse hiring?
Between getting a tech job but being subject to racial slurs vs. not having a tech job at all, yes many people conclude that the former is the better outcome. I think the former is more disadvantageous. But I'm speaking from the privileged position of already having a tech job. People who don't have the security of already having a tech job often think differently. And it's not right for me to dismiss their views as racist for being different from mine.
Not to mention, non-diverse people are subject to slurs too. I've witnesses more hostility towards Asians than any other race, yet diversity hiring penalizes them hardest.
> This kind of rejection of different worldviews is the antithesis of inclusion.
Ah yes, the old "You're intolerant of our intolerance" chestnut. Every post of yours is just doubling down on insistently denying the realities of racial biases in hiring, and portraying any attempt to hire diverse candidates as the real racism. Oh, and look: more strawmen.
> Every post of yours is just doubling down on insistently glossing over the realities of racial biases in hiring by painting any attempt to hire diverse candidates as the real racism.
If this is your takeaway, then I don't think you've been getting the message that I've been trying to convey this whole time.
There are benefits and drawbacks of being diverse in tech. You correctly highlight that diverse workers are often subject to more bullying and harassment. On the other hand, many tech companies do discriminate in hiring and that results in greater opportunities being extended to diverse candidates as compared to non-diverse candidates. Both of these are "real racism" (and sexism). Which one is more impactful than the other? That's a subjective question, and people with different experience are going to have different responses.
Someone who is diverse and subject to bullying or harassment might think, if I weren't diverse I might have diminished career opportunities but it'd be worth it to avoid this harassment. By comparison, a non-diverse aspiring tech working might think, If I were diverse I might be subject to more harassment or bullying but the career opportunities would be worth it. Which one is right? They both are, because these are their opinions. Trying to say one is right is like trying to identify the correct flavor of ice cream.
And the "strawmen" are real diversity hiring polices I've encountered. If you're a boot camp grad and you applied to Dropbox between 2014 and 2019 you only got an interview if you were diverse. Dismissing the things I've personally witnessed as strawmen makes me think your opinion comes from a perspective that is not aware of the extent of diversity hiring. Perhaps you'd think differently if you worked at my current and past employers and witnesses our hiring policies.
> You correctly highlight that diverse workers are often subject to more bullying and harassment. On the other hand, many tech companies do discriminate in hiring and that results in greater opportunities being extended to diverse candidates as compared to non-diverse candidates. Both of these are "real racism" (and sexism). Which one is more impactful than the other? That's a subjective question, and people with different experience are going to have different responses.
It's actually pretty clear which of these has the greater impact. Hint: if it were the latter, women and minorities would be over-represented rather than underrepresented in tech. Which I've already stated above.
And, no, comparing racial slurs on the job to diverse hiring is not apples-to-apples, it's apples-to-clan-hooded-racist. There is no way you can be making that comparison in good faith. But do continue tell me how racist slurs and diverse hiring committees are basically the same thing...
Referral candidates definitely get plenty of offers that they "would not have obtained" were it not for their referral status. I think it's more than a bit silly to worry about diversity focus introducing unwanted "biases" in hiring, when it's never really possible for something as random as hiring to be "fair" in any real sense.
There's also the issue of laws that mandate offering equal opportunity on the basis of race and gender. By comparison, I'm not aware of any legislation mandating equal opportunity between candidates with and without referrals.
Furthermore, I'm hesitant to write off discrimination as a non-issue. I don't feel personally impacted by it - but I'm also incredibly fortunate to have graduated from one of the most prestigious universities for computer science, and to have household names on my resume. The fact that my employers don't interview White and Asian men from boot camps doesn't impact me. But what would a white or Asian man think about this situation? The nature of this discrimination is that we don't get to hear the opinions of the people who are impacted by it. We get to talk to the diverse people who were included because of discrimination, but the people who were excluded because of it are absent from our workplaces.
Ultimately, I have no good answer here. Tech companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Companies are getting criticized for having "only" 20-25% of women in tech roles, when most estimates put the share of women in tech roles industry-wide at 18-20%. So companies have to choose between either enduring criticism and being portrayed as sexist, or discriminating in their hiring policies to increase their diversity numbers. With the techlash in full swing, public perception is important and I don't fault companies for doing the latter.
I'm not assuming. I'm just describing my experiences and what I've seen with my own eyes, a few times. Take it as what it is. Btw I don't assume that women are strictly diversity hires. Nowhere I said that in my statement. There are many many amazing smart women everywhere, even CS professors that I respected during my education are women. I'm just saying that diversity hire exists, that's all.
That is definitely one possibility. If you have studied a lot to get into an X companies and now you also need a lot of luck to get in, then it will deter you from quitting.
So basically, for example, two questions, Leetcode Medium difficulty, there are a few solutions. One can be done in O(n^2) the other one can be done in O(n) (non trivial algorithm). You need to code the O(n) algorithm to pass. You also need to be able to do it in under 20 mins each (total 40 mins, 5 mins for questions to the interviewer and introduction).
Sometimes the non trivial algorithm is an algorithm that you don't know, which in fact, was founded by some famous CS scientist. So in order to do that, you need to have studied that algorithm yourself and apply it during the interview. For example, Robin Karp algorithm, Knuth Morris Pratt algorithm, Djikstra algorithm.
This is a good point. Preventative medicine is the best medicine. That's true in general, but is especially true during this type of crisis.
We should also be more strict about isolation measures and lockdown, both individually and as a matter of policy and enforcement. That would keep our hospitals from flooding, to a much greater degree than an army of respiration therapists and ventilators would.
> All this well intentioned backseat driving isn't going to move the needle, not even a little bit.
But how else shall we spend our weekends locked indoors without pointless arguments on the internet? ;)
Because it's common sense that an invasive medical procedure needs to be administered by someone with some semblance of competence in medicine, if you expect the patient to have a shot at not dying. An emergency doesn't change the hard technical requirement of administering ventilation.
Or rather, this should be common sense, but the over-inflated egos on HN don't understand that it takes more than knowing which button does what to operate a ventilator. Being able to hold a paint brush is a very different skill level than painting a portrait.
I can infer some useful information about you from this thread. It is that you actually don't give a damn but you love arguing, the more the merrier and no matter whether or not you stray far off-topic, you'll be happy because that gives you yet another thing you can argue about.
If there is relevance to this conversation in the 10,000 or so words that you have spent on this thread then I fail to see it, so I really don't know what this particular comment is trying to achieve other than that it has me considering whether I shouldn't just plain give up on HN.
Don Hopkins has it right, sealioning is the perfect term to describe what you are doing and it is a destructive thing on something as fragile as this forum because it narrowly fits the guidelines and yet makes it impossible to have a normal conversation. It's the online version of passive aggressive belligerence with a veneer of sincerity on top.
That inference is 100% consistent with his past behavior as I've experienced it.
His arguments are incoherent, rambling, and and focused on nothing but derailing the conversation and wasting everyone's time. He perfectly fits the definition of "sealioning". He even admits he knows what it is and is familiar with the web comic that coined the term, then in the same post, he continues to behave as if he's working directly off the wikipedia definition, acting out its every point and symptom, as if it were his playbook.
When confronted with arguments that directly address his points, he complains and runs away and refuses to respond to them. His "concern" for the topic and interest in having a conversation is totally insincere. His only goal is to waste time. Only when he can waste time and divert the conversation away from the point, does he bother to reply. But once there is no way out but to confront the glaring contradictions in what he wrote, his suddenly disappears and has no more to say.
It's supremely ironic and proves he's a troll with absolutely no sense of self-awareness, when he says things like "I'm not seeing much relevance to this conversation", after spending so much time and energy trying to derail the conversation with irrelevant bullshit. That should serve as a warning and warning sign to anyone tempted to engage him in conversation, or take anything he says seriously.
Sealioning is a Gamergate tactic, so it's quite possible he's one of those disruptive children, and that's where he learned it from. He's certainly doing it regularly and systematically and by the book, as if it's a job he's been trained to do, he has a checklist of talking points and techniques, and is being paid for his time, number of posts, and number of words.
Another tactic you can see him practicing, which we're all familiar with coming out of the White House, is psychological projection. Trolls like misterman are fully aware they're sealioning, know all the terminology because they study and emulate it, and they love to throw around and misuse terms like that themselves, to attack other sincere people for doing what they're actually maliciously doing themselves, to make it seem like it's just "both sides", which it's not.
It's not just an internet thing. Here's an example of how racists sealion and project in real life:
Thank you! His pattern of sealioning is outrageously obvious and blatantly unoriginal and formulaic. It's as if he has a dog-eared copy of "Sealioning for Dummies" marked up with yellow highter pen and bookmarked with post-it pads, that he's following step by step, page by page, checking off each technique and trick as he tries it.
Sealioning is related to the Gish Gallop, to which there are some countermeasures that work (beyond systematically flagging his post every time he does it, which is the least we all can do to protect the community).
The approach that worked for me, and shut him up cold in his steps and made him suddenly retreat, is to be very calm and structured about your replies, and not let him derail you, which is something that we can all cooperate together on, and support each other by doing together as a tag team.
Carefully chose and enumerate your questions, and repeat them when he doesn't answer them, but don't get distracted by his off-topic diversions, or his passive aggressive belligerence with a veneer of sincerity on top. His pseudo-intellectualism and pretend-open-mindedness and saccharine-sincerity is all just an act, and you don't owe him the level of courtesy that he is pretending to extend to you and mocking you with. I can practically see him laughing to himself (and his Gamergate veteran buddies) behind the keyboard every time he thinks he's fooled anyone into taking him seriously, because he certainly doesn't believe what he says.
Just calmly point out every time he ignores one of your questions or somebody else's questions, or tries to derail the conversation. Keep relentlessly pushing him back onto the topic, and never let him derail you. When I did that, he was mortified and childishly complained that I was not the boss of him, and that I could not tell him what to do, or force him to answer my questions, then he immediately lost interest and fled without another word, because the last thing he actually wanted to to was to stay on topic and answer the questions I would not stop asking.
During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate.[3][4] In practice, each point raised by the "Gish galloper" takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place.[5] The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved[6] or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.
Generally, it is more difficult to use the Gish gallop in a structured debate than in a free-form one.[7] If a debater is familiar with an opponent who is known to use the Gish gallop, the technique may be countered by pre-empting and refuting the opponent's commonly used arguments first, before the opponent has an opportunity to launch into a Gish gallop.[8]
I agree. And he'll be very easy to recognize when he tries to create another sockpuppet account to troll with after he's banned, so we'll just flag that one too when we recognize him trying again.
> Because it's common sense that an invasive medical procedure needs to be administered by someone with some semblance of competence in medicine, if you expect the patient to have a shot at not dying.
Common sense does not determine how difficult something is, how difficult it is determines that. Reality, for the most part, flows into the brain from the outside world, not the other way around.
> An emergency doesn't change the hard technical requirement of administering ventilation.
Neither does common sense. The "the hard technical requirement of administering ventilation" is precisely as hard as it is. So, how hard is that? You represent (in poker parlance) that you know the answers to such things, but you seem reluctant to provide evidence.
> Or rather, this should be common sense, but the over-inflated egos on HN don't understand that it takes more than knowing which button does what to operate a ventilator.
This seems a bit ironic, because no one other than you has made that specific claim.
> Being able to hold a paint brush is a very different skill level than painting a portrait.
Now this statement is actually correct, but unfortunately I don't think it has much relevance to the topic at hand.
For starters, sincere apologies. You asked me nicely to stop this behavior in the past, I didn't, and you subsequently rate-limited me. After some time, once I had gone through some "personal work" as they say, I asked for this to be removed, you kindly accommodated me while repeating your earlier warning, and I promised to comply.
I think it is more than fair to say that I have clearly violated your trust - although, I would also say, only in a sense. I will describe the details of my thinking on that (the method to my madness so to speak), in a reply to your last email when I can find the time (next few days or so). Not that you care I imagine, just an fyi.
Just as a preview of that email, I won't be arguing for a removal of my rate-limiting. You have your hands full on HN maintaining some reasonable level of decorum (herding cats) in discussions, in a world that seems to have almost gone mad. This is no small task, and I fully appreciate why you must resort to this. No disagreement from me on this particular decision.
Rather, in the email I will attempt to explain the reasoning behind my (deliberately) anomalous conversation style (this entire comment, for example). Whether you will agree with my thinking, or even have the time to give it any serious thought, is of course up to you. As I said, you are a busy guy with a thankless job, and if you decide that you can afford little time to spare on entertaining the out-of-the-box theories of some random crackpot (who also exhibits numerous signs of classic schizophrenia) on the internet - no disagreement from me on the decision. You have been more than fair and patient with me under the circumstances as you understand them (and yes, I am aware of the ~"implied condescension" in that statement - I believe noting such things can be useful to minimize misunderstandings regarding beliefs &/or intent).
I've anticipated the day your hammer would come down on me, as did some of the folks I was in conversation with - it seemed quite inevitable. The only ways that quickly come to my mind for how this eventuality could have been avoided are:
- I personally decide to "knock it off" (rather unlikely, to say the least)
- Multiple people happening to notice a pattern in behavior, and realizing "what it is I'm up to", or "what I am trying to draw people's attention towards". To my mind, "what I am up to" is so blatantly obvious that it boggles my mind that not one single person, in a community of thousands of the planet's best and most logical minds, has noticed the method. One person I can think of noted it somewhat, but I got no sense that they noticed the systematic and intentional pattern, but rather were merely thanking me for "pointing out" when we were straying from evidence-based discussion in his particular sub-thread. One thing I speculate people may be overlooking in this situation, or "the point I am trying to make", is that there is a "pattern in behavior" that can be observed not only on my behalf (this one is easy to see), but also in the behavior of my counterparts, in essentially every conversation I've participated in recently.
Wrapping up, I'll just say: no hard feelings on my end. On the contrary, I am sincerely grateful for your patience with me. You've got a job to do here, you did it with amazing restraint under the conditions, but at the end of the day, sometimes pragmatic justice must be dispensed to maintain overall order.
> Yes, people in this thread are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good
No, it's because medicine has a very low fault tolerance, and requires a large body of technical knowledge to even understand what needs to happen for your patient.
Having a team of incompetent clinicians perform complicated medical procedures "good" as a layperson still results in disproportionate people dying, that would have survived under a competent practitioner.
> [...] would have survived under a competent practitioner.
Bringing us back to the topic of this thread, a potential lack of competent practitioners if the pandemic worsens, and what the best solution to address this would be, such as a COVID-specific ventilator training.
Because the difference between letting someone die under inappropriately-applied ventilation versus just letting someone die is the occupation of a perfectly good ventilator. One that could be used to actually save someone. If you're in the business of killing patients, a gun would be more economical than a ventilator.
Obviously because being an ICU doctor isn't something hard like writing code. Fewer buttons on a ventilator! /s
But seriously, the amount of people on here trivializing modern medicine isn't helping matters.
Granted, neither is business-as-usual, but a 30-day "ventilator boot camp" for untrained professionals is going to kill far more people than it helps. And a poor allocation of resources during a time of scarcity.
Nobody wants to respond to your attempts at sealioning. Quoting text to you isn't going to change your mind or behavior.
Everything you've written here is inconsistent and contradictory, and you desperately try to derail the conversation and change the subject whenever anyone points that out, then you run away when you realize you've painted yourself into a corner and are getting called on it.
Just look at how many downvotes and flags you're getting, and how many of your postings are light colored, dead, and hidden. You're well on your way to a shadow ban. I wonder how long it will take you to figure it out that the only people replying to you have "showdead" set to true, because they love to see you floundering.
If somebody's paying you by the hour for trolling, then they certainly are not getting their money's worth, because the moderation system is working, as the text in your posts becomes lighter and lighter until your posts are hidden and nobody sees them, thankfully.
Go back to Gamergate where you came from, mistermann.
Again, nobody is saying that ventilator boot camp graduates should replace doctors. If there is a concern that there will be more people who need ventilators than we have medical professionals to operate ventilators - then the answer is that we need to quickly increase numbers of ventilator-operators - even if they are substandard.
Perhaps you think our capacity won't be overwhelmed. Then it would make perfect sense not to bother training amateur operators. If you think an amateur operator is worse than no operator, I'd like to see your evidence. If all you have is your intuition then my intuition is that you're wrong.
No, it's that I'm aware that "ventilator bootcamps" would be a resounding failure that would kill more people than it saves.
Going from zero to medical professional - not a doctor, just someone who can perform invasive medical procedures without killing a large number of people - isn't 30 days of work. Ignoring that reality will recklessly endanger people's lives.
If we're talking veterinarians, dentists, nurses, residents, MDs in unrelated specialties - then sure! They actually have the requisite knowlege and manual dexterity to cross-train. But going from, say SWE to ventilator operator, is not a 30 day crash course.
> If you think an amateur operator is worse than no operator, I'd like to see your evidence. If all you have is your intuition then my intuition is that you're wrong.
Because then you end up wasting a life and keeping a ventilator occupied, when there are much more efficient ways to kill patients that don't involve misusing a ventilator.
Former scientist, including (lab side) FDA trials. Medicine is complicated. Even sterile technique, to make sure you don't inadvertently give your patient a life-threatening infection in the process of "helping" them, can take years to get right. This is true of the most routine aspects of any kind of medical work.
But, do tell: since my "intuition" is so obviously wrong, I want to hear all about your empirical research. Or let's just start with your credentials, medical or otherwise.
Earlier in this thread it's stipulated that the bottleneck is not the number of ventilators but the trained people to operate them. As such, training more operators is an obvious solution, and allowing the new operators to be substandard will mean we can get more operators faster.
This pretty much dissolves your only real objection, that we'd be keeping a ventilator occupied that would otherwise be in use. Nope. The solution to a deficit of ventilators is producing more - not letting people die without them.
Generally, you are trying to invent reasons and restrictions to make trying to train ventilator-operators seem like a bad idea rather than understanding or advancing how the idea might be viable. An example of this is how you acknowledge that training other medical adjacent professionals (e.g. vetrenarians) would likely work. Great, you agree the idea could work. If you expect that our capacity will be overwhelmed then presumably you think we should training additional operators. Instead of reaching that conclusion you imagine reasons to object to the idea though.
A SWE would likely be worse than a vet after a bootcamp. That's a good reason to have some entry requirements to the bootcamp and those requirements could be relaxed or strengthened depending on where we expect demand to be in 30 days relative to supply. A SWE through a 30-day bootcamp would likely be better than nothing.
The other main constraint you've imagined is that they would need to save more people than they kill to be worthwhile. No, they'd need to save more people than would die without them. If it would be better to just struggle to breathe than have an amateur operator, that would be an argument against them.
Your credentials, whatever they are, haven't equipped you to clearly communicate your reasons for opposing this idea. As I mentioned, it seems like you actually support some version of it.
As the contrarian, can you at least enlighten us to what, in your opinion, would be the best strategy to proactively address potential bottlenecks? I think we can all agree, career shaming aside, that medical professionals and engineers of all varieties actively participate in mindsets geared towards problem solving.
So in a hypothetical situation, where existing permanent healthcare infrastructure is at capacity, field hospitals are setup and existing medical professional staff need to be divided amongst the existing and newly supplemented infrastructure, what is your suggestion to save the most lives?
This exercise of sharing ideas, informing, critiquing is what this forum is for. Disagree and casting shame for a lack of first-hand professional experience is not educational and it’s not what this forum embodies.
I want to be as informed as possible so I can call BS when politicians say “nothing at all could have been done.”
I fail to see how explaining that, "Yes, you need to know medicine to practice medicine, or people will die" is considered being contrarian. Would you rather just revel in ignorance?
So here's my idea: stop treating invasive medical procedures as something that can be trivially learned in a short amount of time. In short, drop the God complex. You're out of your depth here.
The need for action doesn't mean acting foolish. Irrational behavior in the name of "just doing something" will needlessly deplete more resources.
For one, if I were hypothetically responsible for addressing this crisis, I would be talking to the nurses and doctors to figure out what level of training is actually necessary to operate these ventilators. I'd also ask what else they actually need: if we get them ventilators but nothing else they're short on, we're still in trouble. In other words, I would recognize that I'm out of my league here and ask the actual professionals on the front lines of this crisis.
As I mentioned above, cross-training medical professionals in adjacent fields sounds more practical. Allowing nurses to do more of what the doctors typically do is another. Even just offloading some of the administrative paperwork for clinicians to admin staff might make a significant dent. Relaxing any bottle-neck non-essential bureaucratic requirements slowing down access to treatment or acquisition of new equipment and supplies.
Having said that, I also recognize that the ideas I just came up with in the last 30 seconds are just that: ideas off the top of my head, coming from someone with no actual experience in healthcare management.
Basically, my first priority would be to make an informed decision, and that starts with figuring out what I don't know, and filling in those gaps. Rather than uncritically insisting, quite emphatically, that medicine can be solved with a 30-day boot camp. Because, hey, if it worked for tech then it must work for medicine!
They asked for evidence. I did as much, explaining a very, very basic concept in medicine, "sterile technique," and how even that can take years to get right. And was told, in response, that I'm just imagining reasons to object. Evidentally, keeping tools sterile in medicine is something I just conjured up!
Perhaps you should take your own advice, rather than responding with personal vitriol directed at the users countering your point.
Maybe it's because you always immediately change the subject from the one other people posted, so you have no right to whine when somebody does it to you.
I'm still waiting for you to reply to the questions I asked in the thread that you kept trying to change the subject away from. When I wouldn't let you do that, and kept bringing you back on topic, you ran away because you'd painted yourself into a corner with glaring contradictions in the things you said, and there was no way you could resolve the contradictions except by admitting you didn't really mean what you said.
Because you're making a point of singling out every single reply in this thread that you disagree with, and making your objection about the user posting the comment rather than the comment yourself. Or broadly asserting that the parent comment never claimed points that were plainly written, and insisting on textual support. Your actual contrarianism is rather distracting.
Poor answer. Your postings are being flagged, downvoted, and you're on your way to getting banned. Keep answering like that, and you will be gone. And it will be easy for us to recognize you next time you make another troll account, so don't try it again.
Once again, your description of the conversation is quite inconsistent with the words written on the page, but I think there's not much hope in making any progress.
I'll share a piece of advice that a good friend of mine told me a few years ago: The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.
I didn't really understand what he was talking about at the time, I thought it was just another one of those silly platitudes that people who've smoked a bit too much drugs say. But after pondering it over the years, it has become one of my very favorite sayings.
Maybe I'm the first to bring up this comparison, but don't people deliver babies incidentally all the time (couldn't make it in time to the hospital, etc.) An event where I'm sure some would say only a doctor is qualified to handle it. And yet we still do what we have to.
Childbirth is a bodily function that the species is biologically predispositioned to perform. It will happen whether a doctor is present or not, to say nothing of the numerous possible complications. Ventilation is not a comparable analogy here.
No, and I'm not a brain surgeon either, so I suppose I can't claim you aren't qualified to perform brain surgery, using that logic. Better scrub up!
But if you're going to claim the contrary, I take it that you have a wealth of experience administering ventilation.
For the record, I've worked in fields tangential to medicine, including lab research for FDA trials and health tech. I may not be qualified to operate a ventilator, but I'm experienced enough to understand the technical skill gap between a non-invasive procedure and an invasive one. And ventilation falls into the latter category.
Don't anyone bother replying to this obvious sealioning troll technique. He has no intention of carrying out any kind of sincere argument, and his politeness is totally fake: he has no respect for anyone he's arguing with, he's just trying to waste everyone's time.
Of course he saw it, but he didn't like what he saw, so now he's pretending to have missed it on purpose, so repeating the facts he's ignoring won't make one bit of difference, and is just the two steps backwards he wants.
Notice how he always tries to repeat this same pattern in so many other postings, and don't reply to any of his attempts at trolling, except to explicitly point out what he's doing. And remember to flag him every time he does it, please!
He does have the advantage of being right though; I certainly didn't say anything like that untrained staff could administer a ventilator from a 30 day bootcamp. That is obviously stupid. Nobody in the thread did say that. The closest anyone came was pointing out it doesn't take 8 years to learn to administer a ventilator; which is uncontroversial. And that it takes less than 2 weeks to learn to press the buttons, which is also obviously true. Everybody knows they'd be killing people left and right proceeding like that left to their own devices.
Particularly my comment which seemed to spark something; it's a pretty basic fact that Ops Research people walk into situations where they aren't necessarily experts and optimise. That is a core part of the job. Every field is stuffed with experts who don't see how anyone could help them in their domain and they are generally wrong about the administrative trivia of organising a workplace. It doesn't even have anything to do with software. Ops Research is from mechanical engineering and factory optimisation.
I know bunch of doctors. I don't believe they work in an environment where the process has been mathematically optimised. They aren't mathematicians. That observation lines up very well with the "leave it to the experts" vibe of the responses here. They won't understand queuing theory for example.
Trolling by claiming to agree with people, and saying some things that happen to be right (while throwing much much more bullshit against the wall to see what sticks), and being insincerely and cloyingly polite, is still trolling, and classic sealioning behavior.
Take a look at his history. The first most obvious thing you will notice is how well the moderation system is working: so many of his postings are deeply downvoted (light gray text), flagged, and dead. But unfortunately he's still succeeding in wasting a whole lot of the moderator's and readers' time.
If you can stand to wade through his light gray walls of rambling incoherent text, you will see there is a consistency to how he writes, digresses, derails, pretends concern, contradicts himself, and regularly trolls and sealions.
As Jacques put it, "It's the online version of passive aggressive belligerence with a veneer of sincerity on top".
And when you try to pin him down on anything he actually believes, he retreats into his intellectual alt-right safe space, where it's impossible to truly know anything, and facts are a matter of opinion, since we live in a post truth society, and people all have their beliefs that they are entitled to, and everybody believes lies except for him, while nobody knows what he truly believes, but if you sincerely ask him, he derails and refuses to answer, and says you can't force him to answer your questions, because you're not the boss of him, and he's the victim.
Does that sound to you like the sincere conversation he claims he wants to have?
> Take a look at his history. The first most obvious thing you will notice is how well the moderation system is working: so many of his postings are deeply downvoted (light gray text), flagged, and dead. But unfortunately he's still succeeding in wasting a whole lot of the moderator's and readers' time.
That means that somewhere between 1 and 5 people don't like what he says. It is so consistent I actually suspect that someone has it out for him; there doesn't seem to be a particular link between what he is saying and the colour of the text.
> Trolling by claiming to agree with people, and saying some things that happen to be right (while throwing much much more bullshit against the wall to see what sticks), and being insincerely and cloyingly polite, is still trolling, and classic sealioning behavior.
If a sealion happens to be right I'm on the side of the sealion. Facts matter.
The issue with that quote is it ends in a question mark; which is typically used when people aren't entirely sure on a point and are seeking further information.
And it is a very fair question - given the number of people who are potentially going to asphyxiate this year it is reasonable to ask and have explained what the issues are surrounding ventilators. I don't know the answer to it, for example.
This is why I'm saying that mistermann had a point - questions aren't assertions. It isn't reasonable to interpret a question as an assertion. There isn't any evidence here of people looking down on the (rather lofty!) skills of the medical profession.
> The argument is, basically, “I believe in science, but not during a crisis”. I guess that saying about foxholes and atheists isn’t entirely wrong.
An important factor here is also the unfettered, obnoxious arrogance that seems to be ubiquitous in tech culture. It's not so much "I don't believe in science" so much as "I'm above science, and therefore already understand all of it."
It's the idea that if you have a sufficient mastery of software engineering then, by extension, you have a mastery of the technical aspects of literally every other field, whether it's medicine, science, psychology, law, or even art. (Or, at least can easily master it after reading a few Wikipedia articles on the topic.) And if only the experts in that unrelated field would listen to the ingenious ideas that you thought of just now, then the crisis would be averted.
But, I'm being uncharitable here. It also comes from a place of genuinely wanting to help during an unprecedented global crisis when we're all frightened, isolated, and feeling helpless.
On the one hand, you are imagining that arrogant thoughts you came up with are happening in the heads of these unnamed tech leaders. (Probably not the case. My guess is they do things from a humble bottom-up “let’s learn the fundamentals and go from there” kind of approach.)
On the other hand, sometimes they do upend industries by remaking things, usually by finding and banishing some devastatingly huge false assumption the legacy players have built everything around, and exploiting the opportunity that this opens up.
Yup, we marginalized groups get all the breaks. /s