"If you’ve ever been on either end of the table, you’re probably mad at the state of hiring, too. Whether you have given it a lot of thought or whether you just feel it deep down, something about the whole process feels off."
This feels like a really big assumption. Is it true? Is there data to back this?
I've felt annoyed at individual interviewers, or a process at a given company but I've in general felt like I got more of a fair shake in the tech world than other industries I've worked in.
I also cannot agree with the sentiment you quoted. But I appreciate that it's possible - and in fact extremely likely - that the author's experiences and mine are fully disjoint. Different sides of the world and FAANG vs smaller businesses need not have the same hiring challenges.
The author proposes that we're somehow blocked from success because we can't type fast enough. Is that true? I don't agree; in fact, I'd rather be concise and communicate well than vomit more words onto the screen.
Additionally, beyond Dvorak, is there a better way to increase typing speed than spending what must be hours and hours building a bespoke solution for each one of your machines? And what is the cost of the inevitable tsunami of errors you make in the learning process? Are these neural pathways more valuable than say, learning a new language or practicing a different skill?
Interesting idea, but it's hard for me to reconcile the potential benefits with the pricing model in that specific case, particularly if the model it's using is only trained on open source and not evolving according to the user's own habits.
Not everyone’s words are equally valuable. Someone who does not vomit but actually has things worth saying, and a limited time in which to express them, would benefit from faster typing.
Worst case, it’s nice to get one’s job done faster to make time for other things.
You can always take your hands off the keyboard periodically if you want to write less.
For vim to become worth your time to learn to use effectively, you have to have a purpose to use it quite a lot. But it takes quite a lot of time, and causes quite a lot of errors in the mean time. Eventually, you are left with a skill and a tool that are a pleasure to use, but you literally must spend time actively learning how to use it. You cannot just pick it up, because you need to first memorize key combinations and the behavior of various modes. Then, you need to actually practice them.
And this proposed solution is even worse, because it suffers not only from the "vim effect", but from the "vim config effect", where you not only need to memorize, and practice, but actively configure your custom solution, which can take tons of time; is subject to loss/deletion; and is not universally available.
And god help me, what about programming? I honestly do not want to even think about multi-layered completions wreaking their havoc on everything I write, and the only alternative is different completions for different types of environments--even more cognitive load.
This seeks efficiency as represented by speed, but ignores efficiency as represented by ubiquity, generality, and low cognitive load.
If I want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, it is more efficient to run. If I want to get from point A to point B with the minimum energy expenditure, it is more efficient to walk. To be truly efficient, you need smart, balanced goals.
I disagree with most of this. These skills may be worth the time tradeoff to learn. They don’t increase the error rate. They can be learned during unproductive time (I learned Dvorak on conference calls at an old job.) They can be picked up and used marginally for immediate small gains with potential to improve over time (Vim is like this, not that I use it much.) Many programmers work in a couple bread-and-butter environments that already provide a lot of completions and macros—-typing speed in programming has long been evaluated differently from writing prose.
Everything you wrote about considering tradeoffs is sound, but is being misapplied because you’re overestimating the difficulty and underestimating the benefit due to placing too low a value on words.
There are so many things worth learning on unproductive time that making myself marginally more productive with an esoteric command line tool actually isn't the greatest value proposition. VIM, for instance, is my preferred editor. It's on every Unix machine I need. I learned a ton of basic things I can do with it. I don't customize it because I don't usually have the permissions or the time. It lets me get in, edit, get out. You have to judge the reason for a tool.
Personally, the best tool for typing productivity I ever have used is a keyboard with no letters on the key caps. It also means I'm the only person in my immediate circle that can use my computer at all. My wife literally can't use my PC.
Words are already extremely cheap and effortless though, and saying that they have a higher value than I appraise them for doesn't address some of the issues I addressed, such as the very real problem on non-universal configurations.
If you want to spend your time that way, that's cool with me. I like vim. Such things have their place. Personally, I suspect this doesn't solve any problems I have.
Your other issues were also addressed, the non-universal configurations by pointing out most people work in one or two environments most of the time. Worst case, it’s hard to imagine a quick disabling of conflicting macros being too large a price to work quickly in an environment for weeks or years.
I do concede this doesn’t solve any problems of yours as you don’t value what you do with your keyboard very much.
Lol. I want to type full words, and feel that doing so is near frictionless. I access around 70 environments regularly, many of which are frequently re-imaged during testing, and I appreciate the fact that typing works the same on all of them. My co-workers also appreciate that I am not installing weird typing macros on our devices.
Efficiency for me is not the same as efficiency for you. Deal with it.
I'll also add that something like vim is specialized and very useful. It is easier to use vim in a mouseless environment, which is sometimes a necessity. I use it fairly well, and it has paid dividends on the time invested. I can appreciate the value of a good tool.
But typing speed is not the same as efficiency because standards are efficient in their own way. I'm sure you'll say "oh, you don't value words and have nothing important to say", but that's a ridiculous argument. It is simply that, in my opinion, this type of thing is not worth the overhead it creates, much like extremely customized vim configs. Time is invested in the pursuit of efficiency, and it is never returned. One day the config ceases to function correctly, or your friend/coworker/family member tries to use the keyboard and can't use it effectively, so it gets disabled.
Totally valid. I do like a vanilla vim though. It took some getting used to but I do find myself editing things in vim over ssh quite frequently and it is much easier for doing things like search/replace, etc.
Nano probably works too but I'm not nearly as proficient in it, so... vim!
I've been reading Craig Murray's blog, reporting on the Assange extradition case for a while now; he's apparently been managing on at best four hours of sleep a night for the past four weeks, spending his nights writing out his notes into posts. I think he'd benefit, although for him too, accuracy is important (https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/).
I grew up back when typing was a skill. A good typist could type at about 60 words per minute. Such typing was always to either to copy a written text or to take dictation. I think it's extraordinarily rare to find someone who could write down their thoughts at that rate, even if they'd thought out a text beforehand.
I only learned to type at about 20-30 words per minute, still faster than many now but slow the measure of typists, and that's easily fast enough to keep up with my thoughts.
I assumed the average kid, at least on the upper range of that designation, would have been able to type faster than the previous generation. I understand the youngest generation is now much more using touch screens, but I didn't think that there would have been a steady decline from say 20 years ago.
The younger generation isn't taught to touch type in schools anymore. I'd be surprised if it didn't significantly drop between two cohorts of regular keyboard users from this generation and 20 years ago, honestly.
That is true for many, and even 20wpm is overkill for some applications such as editing poetry. Fast typing is not a widespread skill.
However, some do benefit from the increased speed, some increase the speed of their thinking to match their potential output. Others benefit from the reduced delay between thinking and writing or editing a thought, analogous in software to working with a fast compile time or a dynamic repl.
Well there are on average 300 words on a page, if you type 60 words per minute, you have twelve pages per hours. So a novel in 2-3 working days, if typing speed were the limitation.
This. I can type at about 100 wpm, (which is faster than most people), but I cannot _think_ at 100 wpm for any sustained period of time. I can speed-type a sentence or a few lines of code, but my output is still constrained by the time it takes to think through and revise the sentence or code in my mind.
I can type at about 100 wpm, (which is faster than most people), but I cannot _think_ at 100 wpm for any sustained period of time.
But the sustained part matters there. Personally, my desire to write long-form text is extremely bursty.
If I'm making notes during a discussion, I might not write anything for a considerable time. However, when an important point is made, I want to record it as quickly and passively as possible, so I can stay connected to whatever else is being said.
If I'm thinking deeply about something, again I might not write anything for a long time. Then if the idea I've been searching for all week clicks, I might make a lot of notes over the next couple of minutes, while the line of reasoning is completely clear in my mind.
I type English text at a comparable speed to a professional secretary, but a way of recording important thoughts even faster when I encounter them would be valuable to me. The same goes for concepts that aren't plain English, too, such as code, mathematics or some sort of diagram.
Do you have any particular software you recommend for Speech recognition? Do you know of any software that can cope with programming language syntax without introduced a tonne of dictation errors?
Last year, I used nuance dragon professional individual 15 for completing nanowrimo with ywriter 5 and an old work hand-me-down headset (Jabra Pro 9450 or thereabouts).
Over 98% of the prose was written by voice, and because of the headset's wireless range, I was able to wander around the house while thinking about what to say, with dragon happily riding down what I said and easily letting me correct when it made mistakes. I got very good at saying "full stop new paragraph" or, "select line, quote that, go back" to quote lines of dialogue. I expected to have to learn a million commands by rote memorization, but it seems like it became second nature within a day or two for first draft noveling purposes, I have no doubt that medical or legal uses have more advanced commands, but for writing a 50,000 plus word draft it was fine.
If you don't want to pay $300 for nuance dragon, I got scarily good results from trying out Microsoft office online word dictation via office 365 about 2 months ago via a $60 bluetooth headset for wfh.
I won't rely on the latter service myself because it is not offline speech recognition, and can be taken away at the flip of a switch, but for trying out if speech recognition is worth it for you to pay $200 on eBay or $300 in the store for dragon, it is certainly a useful feature to get off the ground.
This. There's little substitute for seeing the program write down the wrong text and saying "correct that", then saying the correct number or saying "spell that" and spelling out a word instead.
The good news is, dragon appears to to learn which of the two word variations you use more often and begins to weight its word recognition towards those cases instead.
Then it must have been the police that broke into the Dior and luxury stores on the Champs Elysees and looted them...or that set fire to buildings. Or it was police that spray painted "the gilet jaunes will win" on the Arc de Triumph.
This behavior forced the city to endure blockades every Saturday and holiday for months. Small businesses near the riot areas were closed and had their windows shattered or spray painted by protestors. Ordinary citizens and their kids couldn't do errands and in some cases leave their apartments for on one out of two days off a week for months on end.
The protests were violent. Who started it you can debate, but against tons of news articles, photos and videos of people fighting hand to hand, getting gassed or throwing cobblestones, lighting buildings on fire...you don't really have much of a factual foundation to say Paris didn't suffer months of violent protests before the ND fire.
The issue with that at the time was that Microsoft was using temps to avoid paying payroll taxes. Ironically the IRS wised up to this tactic because of just how good Microsoft was treating their temps, i.e. the same as regular employees.
Now the issue is a company is using temps to hold down the market rate for salary. Less about tax avoidance, and more about wage suppression. Of course it’s also a valid argument to say the Supreme Court decision at the time made it more likely for companies to choose this route.
Also true that the two-tier system existed in one of the big tech giants and with it many of the same symptoms. It is interesting to see it again with Google, although I wonder if Amazon/Netflix/Amazon have a similar situation.
Most large tech companies- think FB, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco are similar. Amazon surprisingly has a low ratio of contractors (they say under 10%)- probably because their fulltime benefits are so cheap it doesn't make a difference or maybe they don't count warehouse workers in that ratio.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to defend yourself. HN has a low opinion of the concept of selling user data, but in practice, there are plenty of ad-supported startups represented here.
Google is selling your data to marketers. Facebook is one giant data-collection/data-sales empire. In theory, the HN collective hates data selling, but in practice, they love the companies that are doing it and their products.
I find it ironic that I come here and see people worshipping the big adtech companies and their tech but then when someone posts a comment about not selling user data, a thousand tin-hat naysayers jump out of the woodwork to flog them to death.
It's OK. It's why I can read the NY Times and a thousand other online newspapers - FOR FREE. It's why I can go to Google and type in "why does my butt burn when I poop" and get an answer - FOR FREE. It's why I can use dozens of adtech and user-data-supported services - FOR FREE. I pay for those things with data about me, my habits, and my browsing history.
It was probably different back then, but now you are paid for each pay period plus some hazard pay and additionally, you receive automatic timely promotions (on a schedule specific t each rank) up to a certain point (you cannot enter a POW camp a Captain and leave as a General for instance).
This is why Bowe Bergdahl is in a big pickle if he is found guilty: he will lose 5 years of pay and return to his original low rank (he is now a Sergeant, I think he was a Private 1st Cl or Specialist) as well as be discharged as something other than "honorable".
> This is why Bowe Bergdahl is in a big pickle if he is found guilty: he will lose 5 years of pay and return to his original low rank (he is now a Sergeant, I think he was a Private 1st Cl or Specialist) as well as be discharged as something other than "honorable".
I rather thought Bergdahl was in a “big pickle” because the charges against him both carry long prison terms (one potentially a life sentence).
This feels like a really big assumption. Is it true? Is there data to back this?
I've felt annoyed at individual interviewers, or a process at a given company but I've in general felt like I got more of a fair shake in the tech world than other industries I've worked in.