Posted by smalltech 4 days ago
>> trace and freeze the assets
It has gotten to the point where the advertised permanence of cryptocoin transactions is a serous national security threat, literally funneling $6+billion to a nation-state whose publicly avowed statements is to destroy the US to fund its nuclear weapons program.
The party is ending. The house lights are flashing. Crypto will either become controlled so illegitimate transactions will be roll-back-able (presumably with proper court or NatSec orders), or it will be banned.
I expect this trend will continue to the point where the original feature of transactions absolutely untouchable or un-blockable by the state will be gone with the exception of trivial deep underground cryptochains.
And now you get results like this.
No AI, no leet code, just old fashioned gauging someone's experience and communication skills.
Them: "Do you know TCP/IP?". Me: "Yes". Them: "you're hired"
Job at the Westinghouse instrumenting nuclear power plants. Simpler times then.
“What does ifconfig do? What does it mean to mount a disk? What editor do you use? You’re hired.”
None of that culture fit nonsense.
Had one recently that waived me thru and then sent me straight to talking to senior management/stakeholders/etc but literally no one on the team itself.
Couldn’t get a straight answer as to what team does, what role is for, real day to day I’d be walking.
Only clear thing was scale of architectural mess stemming from a political mess… and not a lot of interest in changing it.
They wanted a seasoned tech body to throw into the grinder 12-15hr days to replace the last one. No thanks.
I'd also love a deep dive into the keyboard microcontroller that ends with the key press leaving over USB , and never even considers the main CPU.
Honestly, even the facetious answers to this have the potential to be incredibly interesting. Reality just has a ton of depth.
By 'test' you mean a school-type paper exam, questions and answers? (On unspecified topics.)
Why would you refuse that, when applying to a job?
Not the OP, but from a certain point on (I'd say 3-5 years into one's career, I'd say maybe even earlier) school-type tests become quite ridiculous, as in real-life programming/development has nothing to do with how people are graded in school.
If by "nothing to do with" you mean "uncorrelated", then this is very trivial and empirically untrue. There are a lot of tests that correlate with peer and manager-rated performance in software development (and many other roles).
Even the dumbest most ad hoc unrelated tests will have nonzero correlations, and the well-studied principled ones much more so.
The better argument is that tests are high effort and can feel demeaning. But it's not productive to pretend they don't work.
Also in the mid 90s, you actually had to be smart to work in this field. There was no stack overflow or reddit to search. And CS programs were nascent.
Companies certainly have taken it too far, but I don't blame them for some usage of standard tests.
If you cannot explain why a successful candidate was chosen without bias, then you shouldn’t be interviewing candidates to begin with.
But it is always worth keeping a copy of your interview notes just in case the candidate asks for feedback.
At worst it’s the biggest hardos on the team writing a bunch of brain teasers and gotchas as a hazing ritual.
An hour to implement a toy version of a component which, the last time I did it "in real life" blew everyone away that I had a prototype ready in 1 day. That real life prototype went through weeks and weeks of iteration before it was even useful, and everyone was happy with that. But yeah that's something to time box to 1 hour in an interview environment.
So turns into an exercise of - which of the 100 pitfalls/nuances do they want me to pretend don't exist in order to complete it in 1 hour. Opinions vary!
There were multiple questions of this form.
One could pass this test blindly as a new grad not knowing the 100 pitfalls of actually building one in real life.
You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time. So it's very annoying to do some test over and over again for every job application.
Ok, but there's no uniform grading in school or employment. We all know people who managed to get through university without learning anything and manage to hold a job in software development without knowing or doing anything. It'd be nice if a degree and a job history guaranteed competence, but it doesn't.
Lots of professions can bring a portfolio and/or a sample of their work, but most software developers can't because the work is often propriatary and a trade secret, and anyway would need a lot of specific setup to operate.
I've only taken test tests for government jobs, and they were laughably outdated; approximately nobody knew how much space was on a 5 1/4" floppy in 1998 when I took the test, but they were asking about 8" floppies, and I assume they still are, because the test had to go through some process and doing a new test would be expensive. But yeah, I expect a company to validate that I can both describe solutions to problems and turn that description into code.
Yep. Now substitute doctors/lawyers/accountants/civil engineers into the equation and see how you feel about it.
Surely they don't take a test for every client, but I'd consider the interview process more like a "workaround" for the lack of standardized tests for software engineers instead of the lack of respect.
Maybe IT professionals should be held to the same rigour. There’s a lot of deadweight in the profession that get paid too much and moan too loudly despite having a cushty job in a field they’re barely competent in.
I remember doing 6 hours of interviews once for a company, getting to the final stage and they wouldn't budge on $5,000 for a figure they initially accepted but reneged because the manager hiring me would be paid less than me. It was so petty. I turned it down back then, but I'm not sure I would in this market. I'd probably take it and job search while I'm working there like this guy did at Binance.
https://isc.sans.edu/diary/32942
It is kind of weird that they mention it though, if they replaced the devices and rotated credentials? Just to later mention that an "internal AI tool" was used to steal that Engineer As credentials again?
And also, what are those "obfuscation techniques"? It looks very straight forward, replacing the pyenv, there's nothing much obfuscated in it? Except for putting it in a different folder.
Somehow I really doubt it.