[harles]

> He continued to ask more questions about numbers of bits. I couldn’t answer any of them without a lot of help. He didn’t ask me about my PhD work building a new theory of natural language semantics.

This strikes me as fairly petty “I didn’t answer wrong, you asked me the wrong questions!”. Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended - folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my experience.

Also > At the time “Don’t be evil” still meant something. Now it seems like their mantra is just “Be evil”.

Seems really petty. It’s a shame because we could good big tech alternatives, but building something out of spite without much perspective is unlikely to create a good alternative.

[euvin]

I think it should be fairly standard expectation to be asked relevant questions to your expertise and not trivia. The interview seemed like a really low-signal interrogation where the folks that pass such an intense "psychological game" don't necessarily correlate to required expertise on the job.

I do agree that the spite aspect could have been reduced or removed. In fact, I couldn't really see the point the article makes: they had a bad interview, a 15 year gap, then they're building yet another search engine... to contest Google?

[derefr]

But regularly solving problems outside of your expertise is a necessary job duty in pretty much any software job.

(If I were conducting the interview, I might explicitly explain that I'm going to ask them a few questions with the goal of seeing how they perform when they reach the limits of their crystallized knowledge and have to problem-solve from first principles/common sense — but I would still do it.)

[JohnMakin]

True, the hiring process working as intended - I don’t want to work for an employer that would waste my time having me solve irrelevant problems to placate some weirdly misplaced ego-driven attitude. Seems fairly gatekeepy, and I think it selects for a certain type of cult member, not necessarily “good team members.”

In my interviews I now throw out these dumb google style questions, not to see how they think, but to see how they react to a silly question. The person I’d like to hire, when asked “how would you calculate how many ping pong balls fit in a 747?” they would answer “I wouldn’t.” Only one so far has given me an answer like that and has been delightful to work with.

[em-bee]

ouch, that is pretty rough. i mean i am happy that you found someone to give you the right answer. but i'd expect that the majority don't dare to do that in an interview session. i hope you are not rejecting people just because they actually try to answer that question.

[JohnMakin]

no, I just want to see their reaction, but the “I wouldn’t” response strongly puts me into “hire.” To me it signals this isn’t a yes man or someone who’s going to waste man hours making something overly complex, which at my current small scale is incredibly valuable, I cannot afford to waste time.

That may or not be correct but it often shows me how willing a candidate is to jump through hoops they think they need to to get a job. Maybe that was the original intent of these questions. I have absolutely no desire to see how someone thinks their way through a silly thought experiment. My interview process should already have shown me how they think.

[em-bee]

i totally agree with you. i am just trying to see it from the candidates perspective. these questions are so common that i don't think many would have any idea what you are really after. so in a sense it still feels like a trick question.

so i wonder if there is any better way to test for this.

when i was doing an internship once the boss asked me to take care of some task, and i said no, because i was going for my lunch break now. later that day i got berated by my supervisor for denying the bosses request. it was a pretty frustrating experience, but i was to young to defend myself.

on the other hand, in china, where people are typically very subservient at work, i once hired a student, who, after about 3 months of working with me had the courage to argue a technical question with me and stand his ground defending his opinion. he had never worked for a foreigner before, and he certainly would never act like that with a chinese superior. when he started he barely even spoke english (he could read and write it though) so i felt pretty proud that he was able to make that change while working with me.

the point of that story is that the initial response in an interview may not be an indicator of future behavior because the behavior can be changed by how i treat my subordinates, welcoming critical responses and encouraging different opinions.

[mariusor]

> folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my experience.

Comparing this line here with what TFA is saying, the lack of empathy is astounding.

[actionfromafar]

Well we got Mono and eventually open source .NET from that, so it can work sometimes.

[danogentili]

And you call that a success story? :D

[actionfromafar]

It's definitely one of those "be careful what you wish for" stories. :)

[nimithryn]

On the one hand, yeah, this guy is to some degree complaining on the internet because he was rejected. It’s annoying: No one likes listening to complaining.

On the other hand, a) this guy does have a point - it’s very very strange that you can have all sorts of interesting, highly relevant expertise and tech interviews don’t care at all, they just ask you generic stuff that has nothing to do with the job, b) he’s allowed to complain c) you’re complaining about him complaining.

I see a sort of weird logic all the time (usually around interviews or dating) where someone is complaining on the internet about how the system is broken and they are subsequently accused of some moral failing (being “petty”). I don’t think you know anything about this guys attitude or how this guy works on a team - you don’t know him!

I guess the lesson is “don’t complain on the internet”, which I suppose I agree with.

I guess I’m complaining about people complaining about complaining, so I’m part of the problem, too. But seriously, let’s engage with each other in good faith and not just assume someone’s a bad person because they’ve been hurt by rejection.

Edit: grammar

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> This strikes me as fairly petty “I didn’t answer wrong, you asked me the wrong questions!”. Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended - folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my experience.

Imagine some weird employer where a narcissist has managed to capture the hiring process. They might well ask the wrong questions to torment, and in that case someone who became flustered could well say that to them without it being petty and without the hiring process working as intended. So no, I don't believe necessarily that someone with "that attitude" would always make poor team members.

> Now it seems like their mantra is just “Be evil”.

I know it's just empty rhetoric for most, when they use the word "evil"... but it's still amusing to me. How many times do you have to flippantly suggest that they're evil before you start to believe it literally, and what happens when you start to literally believe that? Is it possible to remain rational afterward?

[trod123]

I'd disagree with your characterization that it is empty rhetoric. In fact, it is actually using the word and meaning correctly within a rational context.

Most people today are not properly taught to correctly recognize evil. Often as a result of this, they become evil themselves when they falsely justify evil acts which are unjustifiable.

There really isn't much ideology, or hyperbole to this. From a non-ideological perspective, Evil is any act that does not promote the long-term beneficial growth of self or others. This includes destructive acts regardless of intention or knowledge. The more destructive the act against long term growth, the more 'evil' it is.

Evil people are people who have blinded themselves through repeated acts of self-violation such as false justification, where they no longer resist doing such acts. The only way to prevent them from continuing is to stop them, and you don't argue with evil because they don't see what they are doing as wrong. They have willfully blinded themselves, and once blinded they can't see again.

This is the generally held rational view of evil. Most people today instead are taught to embrace Tolstoy's pacifism (without knowing it). Live and let live. Turn the other cheek. Its in a lot of places.

The problem with evil, is that it spreads exponentially, and consumes all until nothing is left, it turns those which it consumes, and bends them to that destructive will.

If you follow this Live and let live philosophy, Evil will grow faster than those who seek to survive, for themselves and their children, eventually it overflows and causes catastrophe.

The type of people that embrace chaos and destruction, given sufficient technology or sufficient time will cause extinction, since they turn it on themselves when no one else is left.

Illyin wrote a treatise back in the 1900s which appropriately covered this subject matter.

While there were some aspects in his writings that were not generally agreed upon (or considered correct today), he very much captured the common definition of evil known at that time, which remained consistent up through WW2 into the 60s; before sentimental moralism and nihilism introduced in the indoctrination within the public education system started watering this down for future generations.

It is such an attractive and alluring thought, that one cannot do evil unless they choose to knowingly and actively do evil, where opinions and beliefs cannot be evil (nihilism).

Obviously, to anyone rational, this last line of thought is pure fallacy (by trivial contradiction), but also commonly used as a basis for false justification...

Most people who believe they are good today, often are evil and they simply don't know it. They are products of their 'disadvantaged' environment. Destruction follows them around like bad karma in their interactions, but they are rarely touched by it themselves, they act like parasites promoting and inducing evil in all that they do.

With the advance of society, these people have also found that systems are a very efficacious way to induce people into these acts as well (great acts of evil).

As a system, any act that is contentious, or dubious can be split among several roles with only a select few knowing the actual outcomes in any reliable detail. In isolation the parts you may work on don't appear to be evil.

This can happen to anyone just doing a job, if they don't have full visibility because a business is a system.

To reiterate, to be an evil person, one simply must be willfully blind, and the actions performed must support destructive outcomes.

You can't take elements in isolation and draw a conclusion about the outcome of a undisclosed system. A system is what it does.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> Evil is any act that does not promote the long-term beneficial growth of self or others.

How long-term? What sort of clairvoyance is necessary for that? Which others? Those who hold stock in Google do well, it helps them to grow does it not? They employ about 100,000 people directly, and many more indirectly who benefit economically because Google facilitates business transactions they couldn't otherwise make.

> will cause extinction when they are not stopped.

The moment your species' fertility rate dropped below replacement, your extinction was already carved in stone. Fussing about Google and whether or not making you watch bad advertisements before watching Youtube videos is evil is pretty silly, don't you think?

Just what evil acts are they committing exactly, and how will this result in even something like a figurative extinction, do you think?

[trod123]

> How long-term ...

If you are interested in the answers to these questions, I'd kindly refer you to the original treatise I mentioned. It will cover these answers and more in far better detail.

You would be mistaken to think that employment, stock valuation, and that business transactions couldn't occur otherwise, are necessarily good things or in fact actually true. It would be an over generalization and other fallacies. They get their money for operations regardless through preferential loans. Stock valuation is very much floated on option structures which are just another indirection.

https://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Evil-Force-Ivan-Ilyin/dp/1...

> They facilitate business transactions they couldn't otherwise make.

It sounds like you may have drunk their kool-aid. This is almost verbatim what their marketing department puts out. They lie often, and recently were caught in some of those lies. Not just to customers, but to the US Government as well. For example, they have claimed that pagerank and Authoritative Score are not collected or used, but their leaked internal API documentation shows otherwise.

The stock market isn't a good example for you, because Valuation is transitory, and what drives the company is in fact the debt that they hold and their preferential treatment by banks which print money from nothing. The advertising market sector withered and died when google took over (funded by government grant).

Regarding business transactions that they couldn't otherwise make, compared to what? If google left the market, there would be a vacuum because they are a monopoly and they got there through Lax antitrust oversight, and deceptive business practices. For there to be winners, there had to be losers.

Prior to Google; Radio, Newspapers, and Magazines, largely thrived on ad revenue which is now no longer available. They all have to kiss the ring.

There is also a fair argument that google actively engages in enabling ad-fraud on a much greater scale than previous structures. They claim otherwise, but they've also removed metrics to ensure no one else can contradict them. Uber cut their entire ad spend in 2016 amid controversy (origin of ads), and they found the metrics didn't line up with their actual sales following that change.

> The moment your species fertility rate dropped below replacement ...

The fertility rate is a lagging indicator. There is nothing rational that proves that it will continue to go down once it gets below a threshold. Generally there are reasons why it reduces from the norm, and when those reasons are addressed then the rate would no longer be depressed and it would go back up.

> Fussing about Google and whether or not making you watch bad advertisements

I don't recall mentioning anything about youtube. I'm more concerned with real harms.

> Just what evil acts are they committing exactly

To adequately answer this rationally, I'd need to reference a few books from subject matter experts which are not common knowledge today at a bare minimum to keep this response to a sufficiently short length. I'll reference them at the bottom.

The short gist is, both as kids (developmentally), and in times of isolation or extreme duress (torture), the mind enters a vulnerable hypnotic state where permanent changes can be induced, sometimes very subtly (without your knowledge).

This has been proven in the 50s through a structured approach of distorting reflected appraisal, and other methods, the former is the distortion of the biological mechanism all humanity uses to pass culture to our offspring.

Google structures their results and other aspects of their services to use this mechanism to induce bias for their own short-term gain. It largely happens below a conscious threshold, and there is little if any defense if you don't know about it.

To the uneducated (in this area) this sounds on its face fantastical to most people largely because media has associatively primed us to think of these things like the silly trances we see in movies, but it is real and rational science backed from the 1950s (POWs and torture). This has not been refuted, and its known that rational thought is the first thing to go in these torture structures (which need not be physical).

Additionally, there is an uncanny valley where psychological reversals happen when you think someone is trying to manipulate you. Its an irrational emotional response and adaptive. Anything that we might view as a communication of meaning is open to distorted reflected appraisal, it is a hard-wired vulnerability.

When distorted reflected appraisal is not consistent (and it never can be, unlike actual reflected appraisal), weird things happen to people's psychology.

Some people disassociate (more like zombies/automata), others become psychotic (and potentially violent), only a few people have higher tolerances and seem to be unaffected (but they are still somewhat changed, hollowed out).

Google is using this mechanism for their gain, and enabling businesses to do the same through their platforms (pay for play). In addition to this, they also are removing history (not segmenting spam from legitimate material; removing it all), they lie, and they also make weapons (anything a weapon depends on is part of that weapon system). All of these things are evil because they all promote outcomes of stagnation or destruction.

> figurative extinction... How might it happen for real?

Our society is past ecological overshoot. A review of Malthus law of population shows technology can allow overcoming ecological limits to growth, but its primary dependency is organization, and rational thought.

If people are subtly induced into either of the two states mentioned (through mental coercion), its just a matter of time before systems fall into ruin and fail, and many of the feedback system's in place (including our perception) fail, or encourage brittle changes which induce more failures.

Sieving purchasing power in the economy for example makes the general person's life so dystopian that you end up with something like the plot of "In Time".

People will cease having children because it costs too much. When the exposure to torture systems becomes so great, and life so insufferable, some will seek to end their own lifes, or their childrens (as happened in the 1500/1600s regarding the natives under Pizarro iirc), some will become psychotic in their madness and act out violently against innocents before being killed themselves, some will simply wither and eventually die.

This is documented historically in a book called "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations", in the chapters of the effects of the Spanish Inquisition, and the expansion to South America.

Inevitably, all paths lead to what? (slavery, then death, which is destruction). Meeting the definition.

The world is the culmination of aggregate action. Evil acts beget more evil acts, and we are at a point in society and technological development where corrective counter organization can no longer occur. Evil overflows, and unfortunately, the lessons learned by East Germany's Stasi were put to horrifying use by all other supposedly democratic governments without the knowledge (or education) of those they claim to represent.

References:

Dr. Robert Epstein (Editor in Chief at Psychology TOday) has a good talk on what google is doing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GE3HoJMEMw

Robert Lifton "Thought Reform, Psychology of Totalism" (in depth PoW stories of Mao during Korean Conflict).

John Meerloo "Rape of the Mind" (includes both the details of this subject under Mao and Nazi torture)

[snozolli]

Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended

Sounds more like a bored sadist who's throwing away talent entertaining himself instead of focusing on finding suitable candidates.

Reminds me of the stories about Steve Jobs 'joking' that people are fired when they were trapped in an elevator with him.

[bowsamic]

Yeah I agree, it's not hard to see why he was rejected from his attitude here

[arandomusername]

English is not everyone's native language.

[zer0zzz]

And these sorts of hazing rituals are how that changes.

[zer0zzz]

Seriously; we could good big tech alternatives if more people in this field could communicate clearly.