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This is gonna be a weak comment because I can't find references, but whatever. I remember listening to a podcast recently that compared boys and girls in schoo

This is gonna be a weak comment because I can't find references, but whatever. I remember listening to a podcast recently that compared boys and girls in school. The takeaway was that girls generally try to do all of the work, whereas boys were far more likely to take short cuts to success. And this was the reason why boys were doing better in university and afterwards. The conclusion of the podcast was that we should be encouraging girls to try to take the same shortcuts as boys. It's a learned skill to know exactly what needs to be done to get what you want. Maybe that's what's going on here. Rules, whether we like it or not, can be broken.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Shortcuts are great, until people get hurt or killed. That's why the phrase cutting corners is largely seen as negative, because it's associated with times when shortcuts caused harm. Regardless of gender it's useful to teach people endurance, prioritization, and how to judge when it's best to do everything vs only some things.
- scarface74 3y ago
  So who is being harmed by someone not reversing a binary tree by memory for an interview?
  - asimpletune 3y ago
    Just out of curiosity: do you think there's nothing wrong with cheating on an interview, and if so would you do it?
    - passion__desire 3y ago
      What if current interview process heavily favours fast thinkers, memorizers and crammers? Shouldn't slow thinkers figure out a way to beat the system?
    - SkyBelow 3y ago
      When someone asks what your biggest weakness is during an interview, and you don't answer honestly because the honest answer to these sorts of questions are socially unacceptable and isn't what the interviewer is looking for to begin with, is that cheating? Or is it taking into account the context of the question and answering the question the interviewer wanted answer? I could see how both answers are justified, and as such it would need to be clarified to know what is meant by your question.
      - boondoggle16 3y ago
        I just want to point out that this is an amazing comment. These gray areas are everywhere, and cognizance of them betrays intellectual rigor and honesty. I salute you good sir. edit: I just realized there's a great irony here. I salute you, while recognizing that honesty and intellectual rigor is not valued in the world. I guess that's why it's valued so highly by people like me?
    - scarface74 3y ago
      From a practical standpoint, who is hurt? In my day to day job, I would have Google, StackOverflow, ChatGPT (as long as I didn’t paste proprietary code or business logic), prior code samples from my previous job[1], etc. But this is theoretical, I haven’t had a coding interview in over a decade and then only once and not for the prior decade before that. Even though I’ve always been a hands on keyboard coder. I can’t imagine subjecting myself to a coding interview at almost 50 years old with the types of jobs I would be looking for if I left my current job (enterprise/cloud architecture + leading application development/cloud ) All of my prior jobs have come from just talking to people in charge of hiring (usually director/CxOs) and using my network. My current job in cloud consulting (cloud app dev/“DevOps”) at $BigTech was all behavioral even though I have developed in 4 languages in the last three years. [1] Future me: my company has a very straightforward open source process where we can get approved to put our code on our open source GitHub organization with an MIT license as long as we write it from scratch and doesn’t have any customer identifying information or business processes.
asimpletune 3y ago
I actually don't really disagree at all with the "Rules can be broken" part, but I can't say I agree with the conclusion that the people in the podcast drew. I don't mean to say though that they're bad people though, but more like these are complex issues and I don't think their analysis was right in the end. This is just my personal take, but I like the Plato way of thinking about this. If we were to invent an evil person who succeeds at everything, including being perceived as good by their peers, and also invent a good person who fails at everything and is unfairly or coincidentally perceived as evil by everyone, the "good person" still wins. He argues that's because to be "good" requires to know separate it from bad, and that essentially knowing good from bad is what wisdom is. This, he argues, comes from having some kind of access to the truth, and the truth is the end-all-be-all. He believes that truth is more powerful, than power itself. Finally, he argues that truth is more powerful than power because with power alone you only have the ability to achieve your aims but not the ability to know if they're good for you or bad for you. So finally he says this is why tyrants are always such sad people. I don't know if we can fix a broken system in the sense that the wise people will always have the power, but I do find his argument persuasive and I know which of the two I prioritize. That's why when people act out in these ways, like cheating on interviews but also other things, I just accept it as you laid out earlier. Rules can be broken. It's not ideal, but it's fine.

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Shortcuts are great, until people get hurt or killed. That's why the phrase cutting corners is largely seen as negative, because it's associated with times when shortcuts caused harm. Regardless of gender it's useful to teach people endurance, prioritization, and how to judge when it's best to do everything vs only some things.

scarface74 3y ago
So who is being harmed by someone not reversing a binary tree by memory for an interview?
- asimpletune 3y ago
  Just out of curiosity: do you think there's nothing wrong with cheating on an interview, and if so would you do it?
  - passion__desire 3y ago
    What if current interview process heavily favours fast thinkers, memorizers and crammers? Shouldn't slow thinkers figure out a way to beat the system?
  - SkyBelow 3y ago
    When someone asks what your biggest weakness is during an interview, and you don't answer honestly because the honest answer to these sorts of questions are socially unacceptable and isn't what the interviewer is looking for to begin with, is that cheating? Or is it taking into account the context of the question and answering the question the interviewer wanted answer? I could see how both answers are justified, and as such it would need to be clarified to know what is meant by your question.
    - boondoggle16 3y ago
      I just want to point out that this is an amazing comment. These gray areas are everywhere, and cognizance of them betrays intellectual rigor and honesty. I salute you good sir. edit: I just realized there's a great irony here. I salute you, while recognizing that honesty and intellectual rigor is not valued in the world. I guess that's why it's valued so highly by people like me?
  - scarface74 3y ago
    From a practical standpoint, who is hurt? In my day to day job, I would have Google, StackOverflow, ChatGPT (as long as I didn’t paste proprietary code or business logic), prior code samples from my previous job[1], etc. But this is theoretical, I haven’t had a coding interview in over a decade and then only once and not for the prior decade before that. Even though I’ve always been a hands on keyboard coder. I can’t imagine subjecting myself to a coding interview at almost 50 years old with the types of jobs I would be looking for if I left my current job (enterprise/cloud architecture + leading application development/cloud ) All of my prior jobs have come from just talking to people in charge of hiring (usually director/CxOs) and using my network. My current job in cloud consulting (cloud app dev/“DevOps”) at $BigTech was all behavioral even though I have developed in 4 languages in the last three years. [1] Future me: my company has a very straightforward open source process where we can get approved to put our code on our open source GitHub organization with an MIT license as long as we write it from scratch and doesn’t have any customer identifying information or business processes.

asimpletune 3y ago

I actually don't really disagree at all with the "Rules can be broken" part, but I can't say I agree with the conclusion that the people in the podcast drew. I don't mean to say though that they're bad people though, but more like these are complex issues and I don't think their analysis was right in the end. This is just my personal take, but I like the Plato way of thinking about this. If we were to invent an evil person who succeeds at everything, including being perceived as good by their peers, and also invent a good person who fails at everything and is unfairly or coincidentally perceived as evil by everyone, the "good person" still wins. He argues that's because to be "good" requires to know separate it from bad, and that essentially knowing good from bad is what wisdom is. This, he argues, comes from having some kind of access to the truth, and the truth is the end-all-be-all. He believes that truth is more powerful, than power itself. Finally, he argues that truth is more powerful than power because with power alone you only have the ability to achieve your aims but not the ability to know if they're good for you or bad for you. So finally he says this is why tyrants are always such sad people. I don't know if we can fix a broken system in the sense that the wise people will always have the power, but I do find his argument persuasive and I know which of the two I prioritize. That's why when people act out in these ways, like cheating on interviews but also other things, I just accept it as you laid out earlier. Rules can be broken. It's not ideal, but it's fine.