I backspaced the comment I started typing, which was suggestions that required universities to rediscover ideals and backbone, and would like to instead ask a question...
For those who went to schools with strong honor codes, would you advocate that to others?
For example, did you find an environment of trust and respect, like you've not seen elsewhere?
For another example, do you have strong post-graduation alumni network, where someone in the alumni directory isn't just a possible foot in the door for sales ("hey, we went to the same school, can you grant me the courtesy of a call"), but that you can assume they are likely honest and have integrity?
My school recently had to change the honor code because there was so much cheating but the administration and student senate don't like bringing that up. The honor code for 100 years previously had been weaker, to the point of not having proctors for exams. The student senate opposed changes to the honor code. There's been an exponential increase in honor code violations and yet less enforcement because, imo, the school can't afford to suspend so many people.
I think what's happening is kind of dark. Universities might be slowly returning to what they were a long time ago which is a place of learning. In recent times they have been selling prestige to credentialists. It turns out that those people don't really need to take the classes especially with the internet and AI now being resources. So the universities are stuck between earning more revenue yet having decreasing academic integrity versus having lower revenue and catering to a smaller group of people.
The honor code itself doesn't really seem to change how people behave. Anecdotally, I hear that cheating increases every year from whispers of CS profs and TAs. I feel like if you are going to use AI to cheat, as one example, why not skip the university altogether? I think the lack of academic integrity will lead to that in some form or another.
>I feel like if you are going to use AI to cheat, as one example, why not skip the university altogether?
That same reason people used other methods to cheat in the past, a degree is valuable to have in the job market. I honestly doubt cheating is even increasing, they are just lazier about it now.
Do you know, as cheating increased, was there peer pushback against the cheaters, such as overt disapproval that lowers the cheater's social status?
Or, were cheaters secretive from fellow students, so mostly only profs and TAs could tell?
If cheaters were secretive from fellow students, was it out of fear of hurting their peer social status, or fear of being ratted out and facing school disciplinary action?
I don't know anyone caught personally but profs would make announcements about how they found a lot of GPT answers or plagiarism. I've heard profs say they find a lot of cheating but also students are given so many warnings and opportunities to fix it. You can choose to take a 0 on an assignment if you report yourself by the end of the quarter which probably masks it. Usually that doesn't even hurt your grade when 75% is exams. I don't know if it's true but the school bought software (unless that was a made up threat) to find plagiarism that includes sources like code from stackoverflow.
The school seems to keep it private who is caught but I also don't think anyone is punished harshly. Despite all of this I am not aware of anyone being suspended or expelled. I assume there were people who would cheat on actual exams so exams now have proctors and there are assigned seats. The school wouldn't have insisted on proctors being in the honor code without a reason.
I think the fear of getting caught/ratted out is more salient. Use of GPT is so pervasive, just in general, that there's probably more cheating than there is not. Imagine people who rely on GPT for tasks like what they should eat suddenly not using it for hw. I think most just want their A- and their degree and to move on.
Honor only works if individual participants hold themselves to a higher standard. Once you have a couple of folks who are in it to maximize their return, FOMO guarantees that it quickly becomes an arms race.
I'm confused about why formal honor codes are in this conversation. If they had any significant effect on plagiarism, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I don't know if my university had a strong honor code because it never once came up in conversation.
I saw a lot of cheating, but at the same time everyone I became friends with and still keep in my network was super trustworthy.
Some people will cheat. Honor code or not. But, especially if you go to a very good school, the people who don't need to cheat or don't want to, will always be worth knowing.
I like the survivability, and the constraint to be doable with common hand tools.
For more information density, and easier readability by a less-technical person who inherits it -- at the cost of requiring special tools -- I wonder about using number&letter stamps with a hammer.
Or, if you permit very special tools, laser-cut alphanumerics (base16, base58, or base64, for arbitrary bits; or alphabetic passphrases). Either engraved, or cut fully through, like an old drafting lettering stencil.
On the Google search Web site, the "AI responses may include mistakes." weak disclaimer small print is also hidden behind the "Show more" button.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, I had to explain to a non-CS professor that it wasn't AI like they're thinking of, but currently more like a computational parlor trick that looks a lot like AI.
But turns out this parlor trick is awesome for cheating on homework.
Also good at cheating at many other kinds of work, if you don't care much about quality, nor about copyrights.
I really don't understand the view that it's a "parlor trick that looks like AI". If it's not "a thing that can write code", but instead just looks like a thing that can write code (but can actually write code), it can write code. All the "no true Scotsman" stuff about what it's doing behind the scenes is irrelevant, because we have no idea what human brains are doing behind the scenes either.
Although I broadly agree, I wouldn't go quite as far as where you say:
> All the "no true Scotsman" stuff about what it's doing behind the scenes is irrelevant, because we have no idea what human brains are doing behind the scenes either.
Computers and transistors have a massive speed advantage over biological brains and synapses — literally, not metaphorically, the same ratio as the speed difference between how far you walk in a day and continental drift, with your brain being continental draft — which means they have the possibility of reading the entire Internet in a few weeks to months to learn what they know, and not the few tens to hundreds of millenia it would take a human.
Unfortunately, the method by which they acquire information and knowledge, is sufficiently inefficient that they actually need to read the entire Internet to reach the skill level of someone who has only just graduated.
This means I'm quite happy to *simultaneously* call them extremely useful, even "artificial general intelligence", and yet also agree with anyone who calls them "very very stupid".
If we actually knew how our brains did this inteligence thing, we could probably make AI genuinely smart as well as absurdly fast.
Their point wasn’t that it’s not useful. It’s that it isn’t artificial intelligence like the masses consider the term.
You wouldn’t say Intellisense isn’t useful but you also wouldn’t call it “AI”. And what LLMs are like is basically Intellisense on steroids (probably more like a cocktail of speed and acid, but you get my point)
I’m not arguing that LLMs are not AI. The problem is that “AI” itself is a nonsense term. It’s been around since forever and used to describe a whole plethora of different behaviours.
My point is that to the average user of Gemini or ChatGPT, LLMs are like AGI. Whereas they’re actually more closer to intellisense or text-completions.
And this is where the problem lies. People will read the output of LLMs and think it has read content on the topic (which is correct) and then deduced an answer (which is technically incorrect).
It also doesn’t help that OpenAI keep using terms like “reasoning” which sounds a lot like general intelligence. But it’s actually just a bunch of scales based on words.
AI doesn’t understand any of the core concepts it is reasoning about. So its reasoning is akin to asking a Hollywood script writer to throw a bunch of medical terms together for a new medical drama. Sure the words might be correct on their own, but that doesn’t mean the sentences are correct. And any subject matter expert who watches a drama that features their specialist subject will tell you that there’s more to understanding a subject than simply knowing the words.
over the last year, i’ve mentally split the two separate concepts like so
* ML - actual backend models etc
* AI - user interface that appears “intelligent” to humans
LLMs UIs tend to have more appearance of intelligence because their interface is natural language — it’s basically the Eliza Effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
i know it’s not the classic definition of the terms, but it’s helped me with my frustration around the bs marketing hype
It matters if we are making a distinction between essence and output.
On the output side, it functionally doesn’t really have a difference. At least in terms of more abstract things like writing code. Although I would argue that the output AI makes still doesn’t match the complexity and nuance of an individual human being, though, and may never do so, simply because the AI is simulating embodiment and existing in the world. It might need to simulate an Earth equivalent to truly simulate a human’s personal output.
In the essence side, it’s much more of a clear distinction. We have numerous ways of determining if a thing is human or not - biology, for one. It would take some serious sci-fi until we get to the point where an android is indistinguishable from a human on the cellular level.
> Although I would argue that the output AI makes still doesn’t match the complexity and nuance of an individual human being, though
LLMs are very good at nuance. Better than any human I've seen — so much so, I find it to be a tell.
> We have numerous ways of determining if a thing is human or not - biology, for one.
I don't care if the intelligence is human, I care if it's (1) (a) intelligent, (b) educated, and (2) has the ability to suffer or not so I know if it should have moral subject rights.
1a is slowly improving but we're guessing and experimenting: not really engineering intelligence, just scaling up the guesses that work OK. 1b was always easy, libraries fit "education" in isolation from the "intelligent" part of 1a. LLMs are good enough combination of (a) and (b) to be interesting, potentially even an economic threat, depending on how long the time-horizon between failures gets.
2 is pre-paradigmatic, we don't have enough understanding of the problem to ask the correct question — even ignoring AI for the moment, the same problem faces animal welfare (and why would the answer be the same for each of chimps, dogs, ravens, lobsters, and bees?) and even within humans on topics such as abortion, terminal stage of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's, etc.
I don't care if the code works because it was formed because of temporal understanding or if it works because an LLM predicted enough tokens correctly, I care that it works.
I agree that interns are pretty much over in tech. Except maybe for an established company do do as a semester/summer trial/goodwill period, for students near graduation. You usually won't get work output worth the mentoring cost, but you might identify a great potential hire, and be on their shortlist.
Startups are less enlightened than that about "interns".
Literally today, in a startup job posting, to a top CS department, they're looking for "interns" to bring (not learn) hot experience developing AI agents, to this startup, for... $20/hour, and get called an intern.
It's also normal for these startup job posts to be looking for experienced professional-grade skills in things like React, Python, PG, Redis, etc., and still calling the person an intern, with a locally unlivable part-time wage.
Those startups should stop pretending they're teaching "interns" valuable job skills, admit that they desperately need cheap labor for their "ideas person" startup leadership, to do things they can't do, and cut the "intern" in as a founding engineer with meaningful equity. Or, if you can't afford to pay a livable and plausibly competitive startup wage, maybe they're technical cofounders.
The Micro Center in Cambridge, MA, has improved a lot over the years.
When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.
Also, I've never seen opened returns re-shinkwrapped and sold again as new at Micro Center, unlike in stories about Fry's. There are some wire shelves where opened returns are sold at a small discount, clearly labeled.
Incidentally, would be nice to also have a good surplus and e-cycling store browsing adventure in town. But I guess the economics are difficult, when real estate is so expensive, and most of the few customers for unusual stuff are online. (That local hobbyists could save a lot of money on shipping cost of decommissioned corporate and lab gear, or make impulse purchases they wouldn't online, probably isn't enough, I'd guess.)
That store is dangerous. The last few times I went "just to browse" but I came home with an ultra wide monitor and a new PC build.
I've started buying parts retail instead of online just because of how much I enjoy Microcenter. The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s.
90s anachronism is a perfectly valid aesthetic. I dislike the tendency to think that things must constantly be changed for purely aesthetic reasons. This tendency was intentionally created in order to sell more things -- look up the history of Ford and Alfred Sloan for details.
While maintaining the 90s vibe is commendable, the keyword is maintain. Cambridge and Cincinnati complement their 90s aesthetic with grime and stains also from the 90s.
If it is not broken, do not fix it. Renovations would cost money, which would mean higher prices. It is better to stick with what works than see prices rise to cover pointless renovations that would harm their competitiveness. The money is better spent on expansion that would pay for itself.
Dude don’t update it. Do you really want it to look like Best Buy? Because that’s the ad company they will hire to remake their brand. But it will be even more of that.
Amazon prices what they can get away with, not what their costs are. Jeff Bezos’s rocketry hobby is a testament to Amazon’s ability to extract surplus.
I think the point is Amazon cuts costs and reduces price first, prices out the competition through economics of scale, then once competition is eliminated is able to raise prices.
Stores often refuse to stock products unless they are given a comfortable enough margin on them that can be as high as 25%. That is how they can afford to do deals on CPUs to draw people into the store. Amazon also has overhead in shipping costs to customers that the brick and mortar store does not, since they receive goods in bulk that amortizes costs. They both also want as much money as they can get out of the customer, so they have little reason to lower pricing upfront unless they think that it will help them get even more money (like how microcenter cuts prices on CPUs since they expect to make it up on everything else you need to build a PC).
Microcenter is a surviving personal computer retailer from the DOS days.
Seemed like they were intentionally flexible enough at the beginning so they would be able to go forward with any and all manufacturers that might turn out to prevail, back when nobody knew for sure.
Whether the future would more strongly include Apple, IBM compatibles, or any other alternatives which have come & went.
It was a "superstore" by design, decades before Walmart got there through its unavoidable momentum.
The vast majority of items do need to fly off the shelf, but it's best not to purge too much of everything else. The smartest operators can actually stock a larger number of slower-moving items too.
Also I have seen some affordable stock pulled from the shelves and online like smaller capacity SATA SSDs, after higher-capacity or more modern units naturally replace them as technology progresses. Looks like they mark down the less-modern units, or they won't move at all, and those can then end up at the point where further markdown would be below cost. All remaining stock disappears to a liquidator, which are more common than ever these days. Just when you thought it was really going to get good. It used to be easier to browse for "stragglers" that were too expensive when first released, if you waited a year or two those prices could be really slashed when more modern versions took over the mainstream, if you could find any stock remaining.
I drive right by the one in Houston almost every week where you can see the store conveniently a block away from the freeway, only sometimes for that same reason the traffic can get so bad that it's a 20 minute ordeal getting back out of the parking lot, down that block, and back on the freeway :\
So sometimes I'll wait a few weeks before just dropping in, but it's also always been good to have when you need something right away.
Except recently when I knew exactly what I wanted, a 2TB SATA laptop HDD, not an SSD for this particular PC. I still had a 1TB NIB in my storage unit from a few years ago when I picked up a couple but only used one at the time.
Well, these days they had nothing. Except a few items of one SKU that was your typical modern garbagey SMR HDD, which modern SMR is miserably sluggish (you know, like a snail without a shell) by comparison to regular HDDs from previous decades (which were all conventional CMR until some SMR bozo came along). SMR is very frustrating even for long-term storage, and completely useless in a laptop. Give me a break.
Had to then go to the storage unit and dig out the 1TB one I already had.
Nobody's fault but mine for shopping and trying to be a consumer when it's not absolutely necessary :\
I don't recall ever asking for a price match at a brick&mortar, even though I'm aware it's available at some stores. I'd guess most people don't.
The store gets some mileage out of being known for price-matching competitors (even online competitors, where that'd be a bit much).
(Well, occasionally I have questioned in-store, when a major chain shows one price on the Web, available at a specific brick&mortar location, but when you get to that location, there's a much higher price on the shelf. Now I tend to order for pickup at those stores, which is more work for them, just to lock in the Web-advertised price, rather than the switcheroo price.)
I will make stores price match anything and everything. I also look at every item on my grocery check out to make sure the price is exactly what the shelf said. I concede no ground to fine print sales expiration dates. However, I am a freak when it comes to remembering these things after a decade of business purchasing and I did my fair share of taking advantage of the consumer.
I frankly enjoy fighting stores on pricing and get dopamine from a good deal and it pains me to pay more than necessary even if I can afford it just fine. I understand not everyone is like this.
There was a period a year or two ago where if you leaked cookies and ad tracking to Amazon and deliberately clicked through to competing sites their algorithm would aggressively slash pricing far below MSRP. I admit I would use this technique in microcenter to get Amazon to give me ludicrously cheap pricing then turn around and make them price match for instant gratification.
Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.
>Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.
Then why don’t their 10-Ks and 10-Qs show it? There is a reason it has a reputation of being a cutthroat business. Out of all the big retail businesses, only Home Depot/Lowes has 8%+ profit margins, and Apple obviously.
Because net profit margin is different from gross margin. The products are still marked up way higher than that bottom line number. PMn is the margin after you add in all the over head costs and those really have little to do with whether they are loosing money by selling a product under their target mark up.
Best Buy making a gross $250 on a $1000 priced TV or $50 when discounted to $800 still isn’t loosing any money unless they are at their credit ceiling and cannot replace the good sold. They make zero if A customer standing in their store deciding not to even give them $50 and giving it a to a competitor on their cellphone. Tho is absolutely profit opportunity lost, even if it is small.
Consider the case of a business operating at excessive margins with huge room to discount but doesn’t. Their fixed costs must then be spread over few transactions and lower their net margins to almost nothing. Instead a business operating at a much more socially optimum price point sells a huge amount of goods at a lower mark up and gets to spread those fixed costs over a lot more transactions. Their Gross markup may be less than the high priced store but their net margin can be higher.
I set a lot of prices during the pandemic. Any average business found that they were granted some degree of monopoly power and could generate higher net margins with less competitive prices. Many of us found the simplest solution was to just pass on all costs to the consumer because they had no choice but to take our price or not get their good.
Times are different and there is competition but many businesses have still forgotten how to increase gross margin by having a sale.
Not to get into politics but tariffs are the same way. The elasticity of demand for a good determines the monopoly power of the supplier/retailer and how much of the tariff gets passed on to the consumer. Highly interchangeable products will not see the full tariff passed on to the consumer because that would mean forgoing all sales. The importer will determine how much gross margin they can give up without loosing money…but the producer in the foreign country also does the same math. Do they completely give up the American market to save inventory for other markets or do they eat some top line profit and still make some sales.
Many goods will indeed be pulled from the market, but if the producer fails to find replacement customers in other markets they will look back at 300M Americans and reconsider whether they can give their importer a better price while still making something. If the good expires, like say a case of white wine, or becomes obsolete in the case of say a lightning charging cable there is additional pressure to make the decision before the surplus simply becomes unseeable.
If a good has no viable alternatives and is relatively shelf stable expect all tariffs to be passed along because the products price is already disconnected from its cost and the business producing it is closer to a monopoly than not.
>Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.
This statement encompasses the whole business, for which the profit margin is the relevant metric, not gross margin. And it is clear that the standard retail business is not one in which you can earn a lot of money. Just because a specific item sells to a customer for more than what it costs to buy just that specific item from the supplier, does not mean the business's margins are high. There are myriad costs that have to be accounted for, such as spoilage, theft, inventory, transportation, labor, returns, etc.
Some things sell for higher margin, some things sell for lower margins, but at the end of the day, the stores clearly operate at very low margins. Hence why so many go out of business all the time, and all the brick and mortar we have left are the biggest ones with the largest volumes.
That is not what we were talking about though. We were talking about how much discount you can force out of a retailer via price matching which is a function of its Gross Margin. a 25% discount at the register doesn't mean a bottom line 25% subtraction from Net Margin. Those numbers are distantly connected and most operating costs (minus COGS) are fixed.
Amazon pricing isn't always that good and they lie about the discounts and retail prices, at least here in the UK. My US colleagues tell me the same is true in the US. I've actually found that general high street crap seller Argos here tends to have better retail prices than Amazon. I can just amble on down the road and get what I needed same day pick up in person rather than wait for a delivery to turn up.
If every person price matched every item, they'd be screwed, but: most people don't, many items just can't be, and if eg you're price matching a $20 cpu cooler, you may also be buying a $500 cpu or a bunch of other components that they'll actually make money on.
This is also why different stores have different skus for items - that $20 coolermaster 40mm with red LEDs is cm40rl-w at Walmart and cm40rl-a at Amazon.
Retailers will absolutely budge on this technicality, this is to disarm those that aren’t aggressive. Everyone’s retail margins are wayyyyyy higher than they want the consumer to believe and their holding costs are non-negligible.
I thought the purpose of that was to let them avoid price matching on certain items despite having price matching policies. I have never heard of one budging on this. Have any?
It is so the manager has a policy to fall back on to say no. It is just the second round of negotiation.
I am not saying everyone will play ball, but managers whose pay is a function of sales likely will. Have you ever negotiated buying a car before? Indicating you will let corporate know they lost a sale by not budging on price will almost always win the negotiation with managers who think they can just be lazy without consequence.
In the standard retail environment, I have definitely had businesses price match products with the same specs but very slight SKU differences, you just have to be open about a willingness to forego the instant gratification because that is the only service in person retail provides today. That might mean actually completing the sale online and then asking again. They know when there is actually a material difference to the products.
Businesses that are legit monopolies will not budge.
It's not too uncommon for retail stores to match Amazon, as long as it's specifically both "sold by Amazon" and "shipped by Amazon". Best Buy does too, for example.
Oh God. I wish the sales clerks would leave me alone. They’re always trying to put their sticker on purchases and proffer useless advice. Still, it’s the best in the area, and the Trader Joe’s is a draw. I bought my first computer, an Apple //gs at Micro Center at their original, single location.
They're not there for you, they're there for your grandma. They also get paid terribly, let them put their little stickers on. You never know when they might return the favor.
Oh yes. I'm strongly in favor of having a sticker on everything and want these salespeople to get credit for every purchase even when I know exactly what I want.
Regardless if they gave me any help during that particular visit or not.
Considering New Hampshire’s lack of sales tax, I’m patiently waiting for Micro Center to establish a new presence in Nashua or Salem. The Cambridge location, while personally cherished, isn’t that accessible by car because of Boston’s stress-induced car traffic congestion. Even on foot, getting to the store is still a bit of a journey. Also, let’s not forget Massachusetts’ 6.25% sales tax.
In New Hampshire, I am positive Micro Center would attract customers from all over New England and make an absolute killing from sales, potentially overshadowing their Cambridge profits. I would never shop online or in Cambridge for hardware again. But, I’m sure they wish not to jeopardize the Cambridge store or their MIT and Boston tech hobbyist clientele. Otherwise, I am surprised they have not yet acted upon this idea.
Google maps says Salem is 40min+ from Cambridge, and Nashua is 50min+ from Cambridge, and add another 10min to 20min from other parts of Boston.
Each minute of driving costs at least $0.67 (from IRS), excluding increased morbidity and mortality risks (injury from car collisions is the top health risk for most Americans).
So even using $0.50 per minute of driving, if you are only going to NH to evade sales tax, that is 80min*$0.50cents = $40. $40/0.0625 =$640.
So the first $640 of the purchase doesn't even save you any money (even more for most Bostonians further than Cambridge), and it costs you 1 to 2 hours of your life driving back and forth. If you value your leisure time at at least $100 per hour, then you're looking at spending at least $2,200 for the tax evasion to start paying off.
I'm just positing why Microcenter will not open a NH location anytime soon, because most of its customers (who are in Boston metro) won't find that it pays off to travel to NH.
Tax free weekends exist in MA as well, yet a lot of people still travel across the state line to buy tax free items like booze.
It's not always logical, but sometimes you find yourself outside of the city or heading north to be wilderness and the value prop changes if you're already heading that way.
I agree that MC won't open one here, as we can't even get an IKEA closer than Stoughton.
> [...] to offer a polished, differentiated UX lacking in traditional banks’ platforms.
It's not even always legacy systems, but rather, not hiring and empowering the right ICs and management.
Latest anecdata is from 2 days ago. I was trying to use a fairly new banking service feature of a major bank's Web site, and it had a superficially modern-looking UI, but I quickly found a few outright bugs in it.
In a banking transaction...
* A box with the summary breakout of subtotal, transaction fee, and total... had a very wrong total, based on the other numbers right there.
* At some point during a use case, the currency indicator on the total changed to that of the wrong country, though the total was of course in USD (for which the number was correct).
* In line items, some of the numbers previously entered would change. I can only guess that this might've been part of a flawed implementation, to respond to frequent exchange rate updates every few minutes, but if so, they did it poorly. (The changing number then caused some rounding down of what would've been the stable number in the item, so both numbers changed, and caused the transaction value of the stable numbers to fall below a transaction threshold. Even guessing at the cause, several times I had to go fix these numbers, before I decided that, even if I could get them to accept it with the correct numbers from the UI, I didn't trust this implementation to submit and process the transaction correctly.)
If those defects were going to be coded at all, then they should've at least been caught in testing, not pushed into production for banking.
Something critical like banks should really be paying for small teams of some of the best software ICs and management. Which (since the business is banking, not saving baby seals, nor building quantum AI spaceships) probably means paying like FAANGs do.
I'm glad Matthew Flatt wrote this. There is a problem of newbies who read some academic textbook ("metacircular evaluator!") and then immediately try to use the eval feature when it doesn't make sense.
(Also, there's a more general problem of newbies trying to use the most advanced tool they've been exposed to. Why use the standard `if` statement, when you can use a proprietary high-powered pattern-matching form, now backed by a networked Kubernetes cluster of deep learning and LLMs.)
In the Racket community, one of my many attempts to discourage mistaken uses of `eval`:
In the all-in-one practitioner's book I was writing, eval wouldn't be introduced until almost the end, in the "Dangerous Last Resort" part of the book. (Maybe I should've planned a marketing gimmick around it, as "free bonus DLC", and you need to do some ritual to be a Certified Certifiable Racketeer, before you can read the eval secret scroll.)
Long ago, some dotcom, founded by students who'd never worked, used their own idea at the time about what software development is about (i.e., Stanford first-year CS problem sets). And since that company had a lot of money (for different reasons), a lot of wannabe companies tried to mimic whatever they did.
Today, CS student's idea of an industry interview has turned into an extortion racket cottage industry, with people not only selling ritual prep books, but now also selling mock interview rituals with techbros who got into the best-paying companies.
Youse has a lovely career potential; its would be a shame if somethings was ta happen to your job interview.
What more does it take to realize this is very time-consuming and expensive theatre, and terrible metric for hiring good software engineers.
And if you're an employer who doesn't care that students spend many hundreds of hours rehearsing for the interview theatre, to the exclusion of getting more experience building things, and that your interviews aren't actually selecting for software engineer aptitude, what happens when the hire takes that same misaligned hoops-jumping mindset to their work.
I was approached for Principal at AWS by the team's hiring manager, and I liked them, and was interested in the team's work. But when they couldn't exempt me from the company-standard initial coding screen, I withdrew my application.
I'm sure the manager was great, but we've all heard of some less-desirable aspects of working at Amazon, and I wouldn't want to go there without a sign that I'd be shielded a bit.
So, I've made the "corporate drone coding screen", and Leetcode interviews in general, my own metric. If a company does it, they fail the interview.
And if I'm having a moment of weakness, and considering submitting to some techbro frat hazing, I remind myself that, if I was willing to do that, I would've gone to Google already, which usually would've preferable to whatever opportunity this other company is dangling.
Several countries used their men as guinea pigs for nuclear tests.
Most notably was a video I watched of British soldiers going through the same thing, the anecdote of seeing bones through your hand when you try to cover your eyes is haunting.
I have to say, including that detail was outstanding writing. It really upped the suspense and sense of horror even though you knew they’d make it out alive.
For those who went to schools with strong honor codes, would you advocate that to others?
For example, did you find an environment of trust and respect, like you've not seen elsewhere?
For another example, do you have strong post-graduation alumni network, where someone in the alumni directory isn't just a possible foot in the door for sales ("hey, we went to the same school, can you grant me the courtesy of a call"), but that you can assume they are likely honest and have integrity?
Did it improve the quality of your education?
Were there downsides?
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