TL;DR: My advice to you is to get out fast. As more people leave, the further behind the company will get, and the more pressure and blame will be placed upon those who stay.
This is sounds suspiciously like my last employer (before I started my own business). I had started in November, and just a couple of days before Christmas, management announced all Christmas vacations were cancelled, and we were expected to be at work on Christmas Day. They relented after every single person under the CIO (including Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu faiths--hey, company paid vacations unify world religions!) said the company would have their resignations within minutes unless they reversed their decision. They did.
But within the next couple of months, they started having rounds of layoffs. First, senior management (including CIO). Then down the line. Unbeknownst to everyone, the owner had put the company up for sale, and the Christmas thing was to try to get people to quit in order to avoid unemployment tax hikes.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, I really appreciate it. Your advice is in-line with my current thoughts and plans, I'm just trying to figure out if there's any alternative or anything I haven't considered. I'm already well on my way to moving on, but hearing that I'm making the right decision will help push me into taking action sooner.
My suggestion - for the future of course - save up an "FU" fund - 6 months of your current salary (gross or net is up to you). Having such a thing available makes these kinds of decisions more bearable (not easier - just bearable) no matter how long you've been at a company. The more you can save, the better.
” They relented after every single person under the CIO (including Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu faiths--hey, company paid vacations unify world religions!) said the company would have their resignations within minutes unless they reversed their decision. They did.”
If he wanted then to quit, why didn’t he accept their resignations? I’m missing something.
I don't. I've first hand experience with groups which have "clandestine" agendas, both in the private sector and in government. And I don't mean UFO agendas, but money and financial oriented agendas. So it's not a big leap for me to accept that they exist for UFOs, or what "they" want us to believe are UFOs.
You have to determine who your market is. Some potential clients may not be in your market--whether too small or too big--and you pass on them. If there's a demand from those market segments, someone will pick up on it.
I only do fixed bid projects (plus expenses). In my experience, clients want to know up front what they'll be paying (or a very tight range, with expenses). Hourly, they get nervous they'll end up with The Never-ending Project, it's impact on their budget, and start haggling over hourly rate vs project value.
I won't say I agree with most interview processes for software, but here's more food for thought:
CPAs presumably have been externally certified, so perhaps you only need to check "team fit" things.
Sales interviews: if you can't sell me on yourself, why would I hire you? The interview is enough.
Lawyers I would assume have some number of public items for me to look at.
Software engineers: none of that applies. If they've contributed to open source, maybe you can look at that, but many of the great engineers I've worked with have not.
You're making an assumption that the tech screening process actually screens people on a criterion that matters. But nobody measures the false-negative rate, so they have no idea.
I've now worked at places that did CTCI interviews and "traditional" interviews, and I've noticed no difference in overall quality amongst the employees. I've known plenty of idiots who work at big, famous tech companies, and plenty of amazing people who never ran the whiteboard gauntlet at GooAmaFaceSoft.
My opinion has evolved: tech interviews are the result of generations of cargo-culting amongst a group of people who copied Microsoft, and never really questioned their assumptions. They're just as random and noisy as any other kind of interview, but far more arrogant. Spolsky was right that you should do a FizzBuzz test, but that's it. That's all you need. Everything else should be about communication, personality and the other intangibles that matter far more for every job that involves working with other people (which is all of them).
I half-agree, but Spolsky also makes an excellent argument in "Hitting the High Notes" [0] that there is disproportionate value delivered from excellence, as opposed to mere competence ("Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.").
FizzBuzz + short work sample + strong communication skills is probably not that far from optimal if you want to hire lots of people who are competent and work on problems that they have solved before. Note that I said "optimal" and not "good"; this is still a noisy process.
But if you're doing something where you need to people to excel beyond what they've done before, and perhaps beyond what your company has ever done before, then I think it's naive to think that additional testing for things like on-the-spot thinking, creativity, and diligence under pressure convey no useful signal. This, in my opinion, is an extraordinary claim and requires strong evidence before anyone should take it seriously.
"But if you're doing something where you need to people to excel beyond what they've done before, and perhaps beyond what your company has ever done before, then I think it's naive to think that additional testing for things like on-the-spot thinking, creativity, and diligence under pressure convey no useful signal. This is, in my opinion, an extraordinary claim and requires strong evidence before anyone should take it seriously."
The extraordinary claim is that whiteboard testing (or take-home projects, or...well, anything in the current tech interview) does any of those things.
You can't whiteboard-test for excellence. Excellence is both contextual (i.e. it depends a lot on your company, team, culture, etc.), and based mostly on squishy, intangible factors that go beyond "code": picture the brilliant coder who dons his headphones, falls down a hole, and produces a pile of undocumented, complex code of zero business value. It's a cliche, but do we interview for it? No. We ask people to do a graph search on a matrix.
My contention is that we'd do far better with some simple, basic screens for technical competency, and then spending most of our time on communication skills, personality, clarity, organization, planning, business sense and team fit.
...but of course, these are questions with no single correct answer, so engineers are afraid of them.
> The extraordinary claim is that whiteboard testing (or take-home projects, or...well, anything in the current tech interview) does any of those things.
This is just a naked assertion. This kind of testing happens in many places and industries, and many people seem to believe it's useful. Maybe they're all deluded, but that's precisely why I'm calling it an extraordinary claim.
Do you really think it is obvious, prima facie, that asking people to demonstrate some skills on their feet, or to do a short sample of work for you, tells you nothing about their ability to do good work? If so then I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree.
Edit: I'll add that I personally "interviewed for excellence" as a professor for many years. There was, as far as I could tell, no doubt among professors that interviewing was a non-trivially useful part of evaluating a candidate for graduate school. Again, maybe we were all deluded. But that's a claim that demands some proof.
"This is just a naked assertion. This kind of testing happens in many places and industries, and many people seem to believe it's useful. Maybe they're all deluded, but that's precisely why I'm calling it an extraordinary claim."
Provide evidence that coding interviews does what you want it to do. Saying that "other people do it, and therefore it must work" is cargo-cult analysis.
I'm trying not to be a jerk here, but I already know the answer: there's no evidence. People do this stuff for exactly the same reason you're biased toward doing it -- because someone else with a big name did it, and nobody goes wrong by doing what Google does!
"Do you really think it is obvious, prima facie, that asking people to demonstrate some skills on their feet, or to do a short sample of work for you, tells you nothing about their ability to do good work?"
I think it tells you something about that person's ability to do the skill you've tested. Sort of. Under extreme pressure.
Does asking people to code on a whiteboard tell you how they're going to work with their peers, communicate clearly and efficiently, document their code, focus on business goals, and generally not be an asshole (all of which are far more important skills for success in a group)? No.
Even as far as coding ability goes, I've many, many "brilliant programmers" who eat leetcode problems for breakfast but can't be trusted to write clean code on their own. It's a borderline useless signal.
I will fully agree with you that many interview practices are bad and "cargo cult". I'm just saying that I disagree on where the burden of proof is. The fact that large fractions of the industry do it and seem to believe that it has some value is , in my mind, what establishes this belief as the norm — in distinction to the belief that these practices have zero value, which is (again in my opinion) an extraordinary claim.
I'm saying "lots of people do it, I can give theoretical arguments for why it might be useful, and it seems common across industries, and this is the only industry I've seen that has a meme about it being totally useless ... so I'd like to see some evidence that it's useless". You're saying "prove that it's useful". We disagree on which direction bears the burden of proof.
Edit: to provide something a bit more explicit, the kind of thing that I would consider persuasive here (again just my opinion) would be several companies that have succeeded like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft but have employed hiring practices based just on FizzBuzz and communication skill evaluation.
“Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.”
Can I just point out how absurd this argument is? Even putting aside the issue of Salieri’s talent (which he had in abundance), the fact is that most of the Requiem wasn’t even written by Mozart, except for scattered bits here and there. And as far as the movement that everyone knows is concerned — “Lacrimosa” — Mozart only penned the first eight bars!
So yes, even people with a fraction of Mozart’s talent have and will continue to create things that are just as good as his own work. (Heck, maybe even better!) The rest is inspiration and marketing.
I am too ignorant of musical history to evaluate the analogy, but taking the myth-story as given in popular understanding (presumably based on "Amadeus") I think the content of the argument is clear, even if he picked terrible examples to highlight his case.
Having said that, I appreciate you pointing out these facts about Salieri and Mozart. Thank you for educating me a bit today!
Not that I don't agree... but for a CPA, lawyer, engineer, and many other professions you have to go through years of education and rigorous testing to acquire the titles. We pull down some of the highest salaries in the US, we have incredible responsibility, and our profession requires zero formal education or testing to prove our abilities. It shouldn't be too far fetched to understand why some companies feel the need to vet their candidates.
That's incorrect about the Constitution. While it does not lay down specifics, it does give Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. Known as the Commerce Clause, it's Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;"
The Commerce Clause precludes states from erecting trade barriers between each other. While Congress could in theory do so, (1) it's never to my knowledge ever used its Commerce Clause powers in that way, and (2) provisions like the Privileges and Immunities Clause creates independent prohibitions on erecting barriers between states.
There is a narrow exception for public health, e.g. plant quarantine laws. But the usual tools countries use: tariffs, immigration controls, capital controls, etc., are unavailable.
This isn't happening in only SF, or only in tech. It's happening all over, and across the spectrum of ideas.
Is the argument that social media is tearing apart our society correct? I think it goes deeper than that, and that it's tech in general. We've grown impatient with right-swipe, immediate communication (whether through texting or calling on a cell phone; remember when you had to find a phone, or wait until you got to home/work?), immediate gratification. No time or desire to think things through, just react.
The happiest time in the past 25 years was the first half of 2016, when I swore off almost all tech for 7 months, road tripped, and visited with people--strangers--and learned what made them tick. Guess what--not technology. And I was relaxed, happy, free.
Technology isn't the cause of a toxic society, but it definitely is a/the catalyst.
The lack of patience seems right on to me. I get the feeling that a lot of these discussions where people feel afraid to speak their mind are issues where the orthodoxy feels it has resolved the issue and moved on to talking about something new. They're tired of having conversations they see as repetitive. And when someone questions some part of that perceived-resolved issue, there's a lack of patience to, as they see it, go back and discuss it in a rational and level-headed manner and, instead, a it's easier to apply a stigmatized label that connotes that the person is somehow behind the times and move on to talking about the subjects that interest them.
With more patience could come calm and reasoned responses that could help move other people towards a more progressive outlook. But I agree that our society and the somewhat-recent trend towards immediacy of everything in our lives has led to a desire to have the same immediacy in conflict resolution. We don't tolerate as many diverging opinions because they'd take too long to integrate.
The happiest you've been is taking a 7 month road trip vacation? That's not really surprising or novel. Most people feel relaxed, happy and free when they have nothing tying them down (whether or not technology is in the picture).
I still remember my excitement after getting my first iphone (4), and how fast later i realized that my happiness visibly worsened. Now after 25 years working in IT I’m saving money to start a new life in the countryside.
I tremble when some people says we must teach programming to children.
There has been some land in Iowa which has still sold for $9-10K/acre this year. Very good CSR. But it's definitely not the norm anymore. $7-8.5k/acre seems to be the range.
Wow! I wish I could have gotten that price for my corn last year.
You quoted the price for beans, not corn. Corn averaged 3.40 over the year (currently, around $3.05 cash, not CBOT). That means it was about $640/acre for income. And that's assuming 203 bushels for all farmland. 180 is a better rule of thumb.
Of course, when a bag of seed corn is selling for $275-300+...not to mention input costs of equipment, fuel, fertilizer, labor (including yours), land (purchase or rent), etc...
As my late dad and other old timers said a few years ago, the price of land is tied to the price of corn. Land values (both purchase and cash rent) have fallen the past year or two from their high, slowly but steadily. From a pure numbers standpoint, land prices are still high relative to corn prices, I'd say about 2x as high as some historical years at this corn price (plus historical inflation). I'd like to see it down around $5K/acre in my area.
But there are other factors in the cost too, and that is how much people are willing to pay for land. And guys are still willing to pay for it at this level, although not as many as before. There's still profitability, if you play your cards right. But that's a whole other analysis.
This is sounds suspiciously like my last employer (before I started my own business). I had started in November, and just a couple of days before Christmas, management announced all Christmas vacations were cancelled, and we were expected to be at work on Christmas Day. They relented after every single person under the CIO (including Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu faiths--hey, company paid vacations unify world religions!) said the company would have their resignations within minutes unless they reversed their decision. They did.
But within the next couple of months, they started having rounds of layoffs. First, senior management (including CIO). Then down the line. Unbeknownst to everyone, the owner had put the company up for sale, and the Christmas thing was to try to get people to quit in order to avoid unemployment tax hikes.