In 2001 my car was towed from LAX parking lot because they checked the plate (they told me they scan all plates daily) and it came back as registered to a different make.
Turns out the dealer made a single-letter mistake in VIN when registering the car with DMV, and there is no check digit to reject invalid VINs.
> I've never met a good, experienced developer who was a slow typist.
You will.
There is a reason "fast typist" was not a required skill in any software jobs I've ever applied for, and I doubt developer strength has any correlation with typing speed.
It's not that fast typist is an indicator of a good developer, but a slow typist is an indicator of someone who hasn't spent a whole lot of time in front of a keyboard.
Or they have some motor disabilities in their arm/hand, which you should check for before making a judgement. Some people have carpal tunnel, some people have tremors, some people might have other condition they might not have even know themselves or would like to talk about openly.
> Opting to drive around a (stationary, visible from a distance) bag in an unpredictable manner is literally how Waymo's first "at fault" accident occurred...
"Our car had detected the approaching bus, but predicted that it would yield to us because we were ahead of it.
Our test driver, who had been watching the bus in the mirror, also expected the bus to slow or stop. And we can imagine the bus driver assumed we were going to stay put. Unfortunately, all these assumptions led us to the same spot in the lane at the same time. This type of misunderstanding happens between human drivers on the road every day."
I think you are in violent agreement with the parent post: "ability to remove people ... with little repercussion" literally means: they (authorities) can order people move, and it costs them (authorities) little or nothing at all.
It costs the moved people a great deal, but the government doesn't care.
I guess you'll never know what (if anything) you've missed.
> I'd end up working with a bunch of sycophants who are willing to do that sort of thing
You are implying bad intentions where none are likely to exist.
Google is a very large company, and 0.001% of candidates are bound to have suboptimal interview experience by sheer bad luck (and it's likely that you see their horror stories more than you see "I interviewed at Google, had a good experience, got hired, and now work on cool stuff with incredible coworkers" kinds of stories).
On the other hand, I understand that part of the employment contract is that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company. Horror stories come out, but few and far between due to this risk. Google's certainly not alone in having clauses like that, but the volume of Google defense on HN feels like astroturf. So that's where my cynicism comes from.
Perhaps not, but if you say something negative about Google, and it gets a lot of attention from the public, I think you can agree that you're probably going to get fired. Let's be real here, NDA or no NDA, this is true of working for any company.
Which is why the "personal views" of a current company employee of any organization posted publicly is close to useless.
> I think you can agree that you're probably going to get fired.
thesmallestcat claimed "that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company", and I claimed that no such clause exists in the standard contract of employment.
By the time you are an ex Googler, getting fired is unlikely to be an effective deterrent.
> Which is why the "personal views" of a current company employee of any organization posted publicly is close to useless.
Either you believe that the company is forcing me to write this (instead of just remaining silent), or your argument is not very logical.
Ah, I do see thesmallestcat mentioned "ex", but as the topic was you, a current employee, that seems to be an error on their part. (I don't think the topic at that point was applicants, who would not have signed an NDA at that point, and the conversation had since moved to "Googlers defending Google on HN".) Correct me if I read this wrong.
The problem is that there are likely current employees with both positive and negative feedback about the company. However, you will only hear the former, because the latter would get fired for speaking. Therefore, at the very best, we have to assume your view isn't necessarily representative of the whole.
But more than that, I don't feel Google employees have a particularly balanced view about their employer. You can see my thought on the issue here, and Frqy3's response is succinct in the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14159213
But moving all the way back to the top of this chain, I do see a lot of bad interview stories with Google. Whether through malice or not, there is a lot of hoops to jump through, and as thesmallestcat indicated, people who don't have an incredible amount of enthusiasm for Google are unlikely to bother to continue the process. As it stands, each time one of those "horror stories" comes out, a variety of HN members often state that they would not want to work for Google, in part because of that process.
Arguing to HC on behalf of someone I gave 4.0 (which is rare, and which I did give a few times) is something I would do gladly (and I expect most others will do as well).
It's not like going in front of HC is an inquisition or anything -- they are just your peers.
When writing feedback, you simply look back at 20 other interviews where you asked the same question, and write "candidate X's performance on this question was was in {top,bottom} {5,25,50}% of ... at this level".
You also have no idea how other interviewers will score, and if your score is 1.5 when everyone else's is a 3.9, it's likely that the HC will ignore you.
The HCs do see multiple feedback from you and your peers, so they build a model of your feedback for themselves: P is a soft interviewer, so we'll adjust his score down but Q is a very hard interviewer so we'll adjust her score up ;-)
My hires are uniformly distributed across the score spectrum. Not sure how the HCs "adjust" me. I have gotten props for the quality of my written feedback though.
“I think this is the first time autonomous driving has been approached so strongly from a deep learning perspective,” says Tandon. “This is in contrast to a traditional robotics approach,” continues Carol Reiley, cofounder and President. “A lot of companies are just using deep learning for this component or that component, while we view it more holistically,” says Reiley.
and
"This is why many companies working on vehicle autonomy are more comfortable with using traditional robotics approaches for decision making, and restrict deep learning to perception. They reason: If your system makes an incorrect decision, you’d want to be able to figure out exactly what happened, and then make sure that the mistake won’t be repeated."
Hmm, it might be worth noting that two of the cofounders of Drive.ai are Andrew Ng's PhD student and his wife. Not sure what that means in terms of how much, if any, collaboration there is between Drive.ai and Baidu.
Turns out the dealer made a single-letter mistake in VIN when registering the car with DMV, and there is no check digit to reject invalid VINs.