Posted by codedge 4 hours ago
In the company where I work (in recent history, the most valuable company on the planet), there are younger employees who do not own personal computers.
One of them was (with different company now) a Gen Z developer who did not personally own a computer (besides a phone).
I was floored. Still am.
In extreme cases we can work it out but you should have something that makes up for the extra annoyance compared to 99% of applicants.
Probably not common, but certainly plausible. Not everyone wants to bring work home or have hobbies that are the same as their work.
I kinda assumed that most developers took a similar approach to me. Laptop because portable when you need it, hooked to large screens, nice keyboard, nice mouse/whatever. I don't know what having a desktop would really buy me. I do 99% of my work with the laptop docked but that remaining 1% it sure is handy to grab it and go.
If you are just making web apps, it does not matter, but I do data processing where having the headroom can make a big difference.
I do have the cheapest used laptop I could find for those moments when I might require portability.
In one instance for a data-oriented job interview I spun up a VM in the cloud because they linked a kaggle dataset for the at home test that was just a bit too big for my laptop to handle.
But to have nothing, no desktop, no laptop at all, is _odd_ for a developer. How did you get through school? If not school, then how is it a hobby-turned-profession without something to develop on?
The whole "no one should be denied access to a job" angle is weird too. What is the limit to accommodations?
Do you actually believe what you’re saying, or have you not thought it through?
stop advocating that we discriminate against them because you feel you need your hand held.
It wouldn’t stop them from being hired.
You’ve got 10,000 candidates applying. Seriously, what would make “doesn’t have a laptop” stand out to you positively? Why not just go with the 9800 applicants who do have one? Surely there’s no reason to think “broken laptop = good dev”. It’s so much easier to simply go with a candidate who has no problems. Beyond that, what’s the deal with making candidates do stuff on their own machines anyways? You don’t know what’s on there. You don’t even know if it’s stable enough for a test, and none of that has any bearing at all on their skill.
I’ve never worked in the Bay Area, but if this is common practice, I think I dodged a bullet.
Honestly I would see that as a huge red flag. In western countries a used laptop costs almost nothing.
It's just another form of authoritarianism, despotism, and oligarchy. Who decides what work is worth rewarding? What about the type of work?
It was always an antidemocratic idea sold to tech workers to stop the idea of questioning the system.
The idea that simply "talented" workers should rule just seems to speed run towards fascist aims. How do you consider which workers are worth more than others? If you do to the wrong school are you suddenly worth less? Do you think society will have certain preferences? What about in our neoliberal society where money is the only purpose to life?
It absolutely is a real thing. You don't get to declare that an existing word with more than 2000 years of history doesn't exist.
It may not exist in the Bay Area or in whatever subset of parameters you invented, but it absolutely exists and is something to strive towards.
> The idea that simply "talented" workers should rule just seems to speed run towards fascist aims.
Complete non-sequitur with 0 evidence.
> How do you consider which workers are worth more than others? If you do to the wrong school are you suddenly worth less? Do you think society will have certain preferences?
You decide just like everything else. Based on context and some objective measurements. It's not a perfect system, because sometimes measurements can become the goal, rather than the underlying objective, but it's the best system we have.
The first recorded uses of "meritocracy" are apparently by Marxist sociologists in the 1950s. They used it to describe a dystopian society, where merit serves as a moral justification for social classes, and social class determines the opportunities available to gain and demonstrate merit.
Of course the idea that career success and influence should be based on demonstrated ability and effort is ancient. But once you start building a society based on that idea, you run into Goodhart's law.
I've described some prior experiences with some interviews as failing my litmus test and have cancelled further interviews when people start demand much too much from me before I'm on a payroll.
If you want me to run a particular piece of software, send me a fucking computer. If you want me to be on call on a company-managed cellphone, send me a phone that you can own and manage all you want.
Do not ask me to download, install, or run malware on MY computer or phone as part of the APPLICATION process. If you are the sort of company that thinks this is appropriate, then I do not want to work for you. I've actually turned down work because of this. "Oh, they just want you to install this Chrome extension to make sure you're not cheating during the video interview." No. Fuck you. Don't touch my fucking equipment.
if one of my hiring practices would reliably generate that many f-bombs, i'd consider it a success and stick with it!
only interact with people using an official email address.
the rest can be used as yellow/red flags, but simply asking for confirmation via an official email address will thwart the vast majority of scams (including other ones, like someone claiming to be from Intuit calling about your QuickBooks or whatever).
It is a decent rule, but one which is immediately thwarted by companies going out of their way to constantly look illegitimate.
And then google whether the domain is associated with phishing attempts. i've been targeted several times recently by folks with "official" email addresses but whose domains are (per google) strongly associated with phishing.
That is so suspicious at the moment.
(Don't work in crypto, but there's a crypto company with the same name as the one I work at)
That felt dishonest and I ignored the email.
Yes I most likely will tell them to get lost, but if I get an invite from Larry/Sergey I want to be ready.
* perhaps archive your findings
* report the abuse to their hosting
I'm dropping emails to jsonbin.io and to ZapHosting (who run 147.189.174.138) about this.
Tangentially, what have people found that works well in term of hardening [0] desktop linux?
I figure the only good way to keep separate user accounts (e.g. one just for banking) and never ever use sudo from any of them.
1. Look at the person's LinkedIn profile contacting you and examine their post history. In one comical scenario the "recruiter" had a long 4 year gap where they were writing comments in English and all of the sudden they switched to Spanish. Mostly short, pointless comments as well.
2. Look at the company and make sure they have a legitimate website and are still actually in business. Even better, see if there's a public team page that lists this person.
3. Give the recruiter an email (I usually use something like SimpleLogin) and ask them to forward you the details. Of course, pay close attention to what address they send it from.
4. In addition, or alternatively, ask the recruiter for the public job listing (scammers almost always "paste" it into a DM or upload a clearly AI generated PDF doc).
Once you learn the game it's not too hard to start picking up on them. I've made it a game to play along sometimes just for fun. Ultimately, at the end of the day, make sure you report them on LinkedIn. I've had the account disappear within a hour of doing so.
Sure they spam you with "XX wants to connect", or "I'm awaiting your reply" emails. But real contacts and friends can call/email you, and everybody else can wait six months.
Despite only connecting with actual people I've worked with, not recruiters, I still get "suggested" posts which are slop, and "that happened". The site is a cesspool.