Taking advice from Sebastian Marshall is dangerous. Seriously, are his articles being upvoted by trolls or are there actually that many morons in this community now? The kid wouldn't know the difference between a billion dollar business and a steaming bag of shit, and 30 seconds on his blog will prove I'm right. Shirtless homemade videos of yourself scribbling "business strategies" on a whiteboard and insulting every major company you've come in contact with? Classy.
I would say I pity him, but it's hard to feel sorry for someone who publicly ridicules his colleagues by repeatedly calling them all "fucking jokers" in a 10,000 word rant on his blog.
Downvote this if you're stupid enough to take advice from a tactless wannabe with the business sense of a doorknob.
> Downvote this if you're stupid enough to take advice from a tactless wannabe with the business sense of a doorknob.
I happened to have read a bunch of his articles(shirtless video, joker, pro-win). I disliked all of them. I read this one - this is just an anecdote about bureaucratic dance, with a cheesy title.
I can make my mind about something based on its objective measure, and your vile comment is totally unnecessary.
I agree 100%. Anyone who takes this guy seriously is ridiculous.
There are interesting stories on Hacker News, but I have to force myself not to get drawn into reading any of the comments. They make me lose faith in humanity.
Frankly, I kind of understand where you're coming from. I didn't like the offensive rants and videos, either, and I think the content quality has taken a dive in the past couple of months, however there are a lot of articles that do make a lot of sense and even in his videos, Sebastian has some great points.
This is unusable on the Galaxy Nexus due to its mysterious tendency to make fonts microscopic for random sections of the page. Guess it never occured to anyone to test their flagship browser on their flagship phone? It doesn't even resize the page to fit the screen when you pinch zoom (which the stock browser does)
Also, it has a persistent address/menu bar that takes up the top 10% of the screen, no doubt thanks to ICS' lack of a dedicated menu button. Once again, proof that removing said button was a pure stroke of idiocy.
Put the stock browser into fullscreen mode and you see the button was totally useless. You just scroll up a bit for the address/menu/tab buttons to show.
> The material at Penn State is 99% the same as MIT's
As someone who attended Penn State (but not MIT), I would have to say that's some extremely wishful thinking. And even if the material is 100% identical, the way it's taught certainly isn't. The fact that the latter is far more important is undeniable. After all, why bother with a university at all when we could all purchase the same material (textbooks) on Amazon.com?
You also seem to ignore the fact that many tech companies are now far more interested in your personal website/portfolio and GitHub page than the degree listed on your resume. Even if you find a potential employer who values an expensive piece of paper more than your actual ability, would your really want to work for them anyway?
I haven't attended Penn State or MIT, but I have attended the University of North Texas and Yale, and I agree with you 100%.
While there were differences in curriculum, the biggest difference I found was in expectations for the work I produced. My Yale classes have simply expected be to do more with the material: take it farther, make more inferences, produce a more insightful answer/project than the ones I took at UNT did.
Regardless of branding, I could never say the experiences have been interchangeable.
You also seem to ignore the fact that many tech companies are now far more interested in your personal website/portfolio and GitHub page than the degree listed on your resume.
Isn't that just a SV thing, though?
Even if you find a potential employer who values an expensive piece of paper more than your actual ability, would your really want to work for them anyway?
For many or even most people, the answer is a resounding yes. They just see the college degree as a painful/expensive ticket to gain entry. The skills necessary to do the job will be learned in the first 6 months of working, and the degree is just the shit-sandwich/iq-test-by-proxy you have to endure to get your foot in the door in the first place.
This is even more so the case where I live, due to the Scandinavian tradition to defer to experts and promote based on seniority and credentials. Oh, and having free college helps too, I guess.
Parents should really take note of the studies and conclusions in this article. As someone diagnosed with ADHD who has tried numerous medications (Adderall regular and XR, Vyvanse, Strattera, Focalin, and Wellbutrin) I have to say I would never ever EVER allow a young child of mine to take any of them. I can't even fathom how confusing and damaging the side effects of these medications could be to the fragile psyche of a child -- anxiety, mood swings, depression, sleep loss, etc. I was diagnosed at the age of 23, so I knew my own personality well enough to tell when it was being altered by the medications, but how would a child know this? The answer is simple: they wouldn't, and in many cases they're prescribed additional medications (usually anti-depressants and/or anti-anxiety pills) to deal with it.
I cannot respect any parent who allows their minor child to take these types of psychotropic drugs in any but the most dire of situations. Reading ADHD forums was an absolutely horrifying experience for me: parents list the multiple drugs their children are taking in their signatures as if they're badges of honor.
After 2.5 years of trying various ADHD medications I gave up on them completely and have never looked back. Yes, most of them did have the benefits they promised, but the types of side effects they're capable of producing can absolutely wreak havoc on your emotional well being even in their most mild forms.
To get through college, while working, I used adderall and ritalin on and off as needed. I was floored when I first got on it, my doctor tried me on the ritalin patch at the highest dose (32 mg I think). I dropped down and was still amazed with how hard hitting this stuff was. Granted, people have different skin and uptake I am sure, but I couldn't imagine giving a kid a patch which basically made me feel like I had a 12 hour cocaine high. Yes, I plowed through work I couldn't of done in twice the time, but I was HIGH. I was able to understand how I felt, but the 12 year old that gets the same dose wouldn't...Yet their parents might think it's a wonder drug, since that kid would most likely be able to finally do their homework in one sitting.
The ‘high’ goes away after two weeks of continuous use, but the cognitive benefits persist. This is exactly why ADHD medications work long term.
> But in fact, the loss of appetite and sleeplessness in children first prescribed attention-deficit drugs do fade (…). They apparently develop a tolerance to the drug, and thus its efficacy disappears.
Those are side effects in the context of treating ADHD.
I know this is another anecdotal response, but, the high definitely didn't go away, I just became more mentally accustomed to it. It's exactly the same for an alcoholic who drinks excessively everyday. After a month, the same amount of alcohol has less effect (to an extent).
I strongly feel that if the parents of children on ADD meds actually used the meds themselves, many of them would decide on alternative treatments.
"on and off" for a period of 4 years can mean anything from every other day to 3 months on and 3 months off. I've experimented with them all, and for something which isn't built up systemically, like many antidepressants, as needed is 100% the way to go.
My mom accidentally took one of my Adderalls one night (mixed it up with one her pills). She said the experience was quite enlightening to what I was experiencing every morning.
I take a low dose of Vyvanse and I agree. Diagnosed in my 20s.
Always dreaded school. The 8-hour-day stagnant, unchallenging classroom model never compelled me. Maybe it's time to accept that if a kid isn't compelled by our education system we might have a systemic problem that can't be fixed by prescribing kids speed until they can make it through 8 hours without having a wayward thought.
A low dose of amphetamine helped me focus on my ambitions after I'd spent my entire life scavenging for freetime to chase them outside of school. But frankly, I couldn't tell you what came first: my "ADD" or my contempt for the education system.
I'm glad someone brought up the possibility that the problem is in an educational system which makes demands on children, such as sitting still for hours at a time, that evolution just didn't prepare us for. Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to "fix" the children than it is to fix the school system. And since pharmaceutical companies make huge profits from selling drugs to kids, there's a vested interest in the current approach.
I was given a slew of ADD drugs from ages 8-16 and finally quit them cold turkey after I realized what they were doing to me. It was pulling me up and down throughout the day. I was high and awkward in the morning and depressed as hell come every afternoon. This experience ended up changing me in good ways but it was very painful at the time.
My mom regrets putting me on meds and felt unsure about it at the time, but it was all the rage in the 90s. I think a young person with focus problems would get a lot more out of meditation, yoga, and being outdoors that they would out of these drugs, but I don't have studies to back that claim.
I just hope we look back on what we're doing and shake our heads, wondering how we could be so stupid to put millions of kids on amphetamines. Just like how we look back and laugh that we used to give children a bit of mercury to play with (with bare hands) in science class in the 50s.
I didn't personally experience all of those side effects, they just seem to be the most common based on dozens of other users of those medications I spoke with after beginning them myself. There are some other very common side effects I didn't mention as well, such as headaches/bouts of anger/crashing when the medication is wearing off each day, dehydration/drymouth, and heart palpitations or racing heartbeat.
The side effect that most annoyed me was actually loss of appetite, which is basically accepted as 'normal' when taking stimulants. Anxiety was probably a bigger issue with Adderall, though. I don't recall ever talking to someone who felt zero side effects from any these medications.
You know that anecdotal interviews are a fairly bad way to collection information, right? This is why humanity developed double-blind studies, statistics etc. We can actually quantify the probabilities of these side effects.
You know that you can't do double blind studies of stuff with such obvious effects, right? Anyone taking it instead of a sugar pill knows which pill they got.
If you read some self-blinding studies for things like modafinil et al. you'll see this isn't always the case. (They get surprised when they find out at the end of the experiment cycle that a particular pill on a particular day was just a sugar pill.) Placebo effects are weird. In any case while the plural of anecdotes is not "data" I still think anecdotes are valuable.
The dedicated menu button made navigation in every app not only intuitive but consistent. One of the things that absolutely infuriated me about iOS was playing a game of "Find the settings/back/exit/etc. button" in every single app. The best part is realizing the app's developer didn't include the option you're looking for after 10 minutes of searching, which would be obvious if you tapped the menu button once in Android.
As a Galaxy Nexus user, it's the one feature of my original Droid that I miss the most. Google's "If it ain't broke, break it" strategy is really getting on my nerves lately.
It's not consistent because sometimes the hard menu button shows something and sometimes it doesn't, no one knows. It's also not intuitive that feature xyz is accessed by the menu key. The user has to look for feature xyz, get frustrated, and press the hard menu button as the last resort in their annoying search for it.
> I'm convinced the professors have come to the wrong conclusion.
That's usually the part where you begin citing evidence that has convinced you. Unfortunately, it's where this article ends. I'm convinced this article is wrong.
See how that works? If you don't put any effort into backing up your statements, they can just as easily be rejected.
While I can't cite any studies, Richard Dawkins presents some of the theory in The Selfish Gene.
While total "nice guys" tend to finish last in a population of "bad guys", a localised population of "fool me once guys" can, given time, push out the "bad guys", and become a dominant population.
This works when the benefits of working together outweigh the benefits of screwing over the other guy. While a population of bad guys is busy screwing each other over, the fool me once guys are busy working well together, unless they get screwed over, in which case they can refuse to do business again. An outcome that makes it harder for bad guys to keep screwing people over.
Which evolutionary strategy succeeds is entirely dependent on the environment. Capitalism and the modern metropolis is the perfect environment for sociopaths to thrive, and research on sociopathy shows it is increasing in the West.
The simple fact of the matter is that when a sociopath is discovered, the discoverer will avoid the sociopath but WILL NOT WARN OTHERS due to fear of retaliation.
Fear keeps the sheep in check, and allows sociopaths to move from one sucker to the next. Each sociopath may only get to exploit a given mark (Mark1) two, three, or five times, but then that sociopath moves on to the next mark, and a new sociopath takes advantage of Mark1.
In this way sociopaths in our anonymous, private society run amok and their evolutionary strategy is highly successful. Sociopaths are found in large proportions among those who worked their way to wealth - ruthlessness and a willingness to exploit is highly lucrative in our private culture that has no accountability.
Dr. Martha Stout in The Sociopath Next Door gives the example of a sociopath who lied and blackmailed her way into a position as a clinical psychologist in a mental hospital despite having no qualifications.
Colleagues and patients became aware of the sociopath on multiple occasions, but when they would complain to the administration they hit a stonewall because the forward-looking sociopath had sexually blackmailed key individuals.
The sociopath worked as a psychologist for 14 years before a wealthy and connected patient was exploited and harmed by her, upon which time the wealthy patient's father threatened the hospital with a public lawsuit if they did not pay him.
The hospital administration paid a settlement to the wealthy client and fired the sociopath, but did not report the sociopath to ANYONE, including its own staff. The sociopath then simply went and worked at another hospital.
Over and over again in our society the pattern of the sociopath is that when they are discovered they simply move on to the next sucker.
This did not happen in traditional cultures. Dr. Martha Stout explains how in Inuit culture sociopaths would be ritualistically murdered by a group of men in the tribe. In 19th century America, if a sociopath scammed some people in a town, those people would capture and lynch the sociopath even if they did not engage in strictly illegal behaviour.
This selection pressure prevented the proliferation of sociopaths, but now our society rewards sociopaths and has no protective mechanisms. More often than not, sociopaths use their lack of conscience as a business advantage and rise quickly in organizations through charm, blackmail, politics, and ruthlessness.
We live in the age of the sociopath. Bad people are not punished but rather rewarded at every turn. A huge proportion of corporate and government leaders are diagnosed sociopaths, and they got to where they are because the good people they fucked over along the way either did not speak up or were ignored and ridiculed when they did.
The simple fact of the matter is that when a sociopath is discovered, the discoverer will avoid the sociopath but WILL NOT WARN OTHERS due to fear of retaliation.
This is false.
Nothing bothers me more than people making statements as if they are fact, especially with no evidence whatsoever.
I am living evidence of the opposite of your statement.
I played in a band professionally for a few years, and got to learn a few sociopaths very well: my ex-bandmates, of course, some worse than others. There came a point where I could not idly stand by while they manipulated and harmed unknowing people day after day. Not all of it was terrible but it really adds up after a while.
So I decided to leave the band, and the night before the last show on a tour, I let everyone in the band know exactly what I thought of them; and after I left, I told all of their friends and some fans who wanted to know why I left what they had been doing to people.
There was no fear of retaliation. And to this day, a year and a half later, no attempt at retaliation has been made.
I'm not aggressive, but I am dominant. Aggressiveness, sociopathy, and dominance do not go hand in hand.
My old band has accomplished nothing since I left, and I bet they've learned a little something from the experience. We may not be able to lynch sociopaths anymore, but we can sure teach them lessons if we use our brains and refuse to put up with it. Calling them out on any and every occasion is probably the best thing one can do.
I don't doubt that was the case for you but that's one personal experience. When it comes to a subject like sociopaths we're dealing with people and there are no absolutes when it comes to behavior so while in your case it might be false the majority of cases may not be. The OP is taking a lot of flack for not citing a source but I saw he cited a book at the very beginning, said he had done extensive research, and to me it was pretty clear that his entire comment was based on that source mentioned in the first few sentences. I think we should lay off. I really don't think he's just coming in here to make stuff up. We are just discussing things, it's not a peer review. I give him the benefit of the doubt here.
There is talk of this in Hare's book called Snakes in suits[1]. He alludes to actual research iirc, the basic gist says the percentage of diagnosable psycopathy in populations like prisons and upper echelons of corporations are significantly higher than in the general population and specifically higher than one would expect when controlling for other possible explanations.
Not a single source? Can you read? I cited an extensively researched book by an academic. I mentioned Dr. Martha Stout on multiple occasions. RTFA you tool.
You cited a source for a long anecdote (which is evidence of pretty much nothing), but no sources or even actual numbers for claims like:
research on sociopathy shows it is increasing in the West
Sociopaths are found in large proportions among those who worked their way to wealth
More often than not, sociopaths use their lack of conscience as a business advantage and rise quickly in organizations through charm, blackmail, politics, and ruthlessness
A huge proportion of corporate and government leaders are diagnosed sociopaths
I'm ignoring a lot of other claims that are just pure opinion and speculation, but these four should be able to be backed up by actual data. Unless they're pure bullshit. Which I'll assume they are unless you can cite some kind of source.
I read a book and a bunch of research on sociopaths and then to serve the HN community I spent my own free time to do a write up.
I cite an extensively researched high quality source, which actually addresses and supports every single statement I made.
And then you have the arrogance to tell me I didn't cite a single source?
Not only did I cite a source, I wrote a fucking essay based on real research, based on established high quality experts. Where is your evidence? Where is your research? Where is your support?
This is a discussion forum. Do you go around harassing everyone who says anything for sources? 99% of posts do not cite sources on Hacker News.
BUT I DID!
I'm just about done with this anti-intellectual community because of people like you. Inserting [citation needed] after every post you disagree does not contribute to the discussion. I'm a highly educated expert on this subject with exemplary sources that are entirely based on hard science and little know-nothing blogger peons like you follow me around saying [citation needed] EVEN WHEN I CITE GREAT SOURCES.
I cite an extensively researched high quality source, which actually addresses and supports every single statement I made.
There's nothing abut your essay to indicate that the book you mentioned was a source for anything other than the anecdote about the sociopathic clinical psychologist, and the Inuit culture. Is that book the source of every claim you made? That's not even remotely clear to me from reading your post. Most of your claims are all extremely vague and you don't connect them to the book at all, so they sound like you just spouting your opinions.
Where is your evidence? Where is your research? Where is your support?
I don't need any evidence, research, or support, because I didn't make any claims. You made some extraordinary claims, so you need to provide the support.
I'm a highly educated expert on this subject
If you're a "highly educated expert on this subject", I'd expect a little more actual data. For example, you could say something like "37% of those who worked their way to wealth are sociopaths" instead of "Sociopaths are found in large proportions among those who worked their way to wealth". If you're an expert you should probably at least roughly know that number, and without out, I don't know what "large proportion" means. Does that mean 40%? Or does it mean 1% and that's a large proportion because that's 20x the rate that sociopaths are found in society at large?
exemplary sources that are entirely based on hard science
Sorry, but none of this is based on "hard science", because psychology isn't a hard science. There's not even an accepted definition and difference for sociopath vs. psychopath and neither is a diagnosis in the DSM, which is part of why your post was confusing. Though some psychologists use the term differently, sociopaths are generally considered to be more fringe and abnormal, whereas psychopaths are more likely to appear charming and successful on the outside. Which seems like it would apply to most of your claims far more than the term sociopath. But perhaps Ms. Stout uses the term interchangeably.
...I'm just about done with this anti-intellectual community...
...little know-nothing blogger peons like you...
You might find a more receptive audience in this community for your extraordinary and unsupported claims if you took the time to give actual statistics, cited your sources, and refrained from name-calling. Just a thought.
That's a pity; it was an interesting writeup of a book I haven't read. And Hare's claim about the high number of corporate sociopaths has been mentioned here before.
(Of course, given the number of people here with 'capitalist' in their job title — venture capitalist — when you mention something unflattering about capitalism, you'll generally get demands to provide evidence beyond what's normal for this site. ;)
In a market economy, one's often punished for being concerned about the costs to others (so-called "externalities"), so even normal people are rewarded for acting sociopathically...
> "without onerous licenses and unreasonable disclosures of personal information clearly indicates you will have to provide verification of your identity, which in today's world is not a requirement."
Really? That's his proof that ID will be required? I must be blind, because that doesn't seem clear to me at all. In fact, it almost seems to imply the opposite of what he's saying.
This may actually be one of the worst times to move to China if you're looking for a fresh start. They've been on a lending binge that's created a massive fixed asset bubble (mainly real estate), and it looks like the correction has recently begun. It's a lot like what happened in the U.S. and Dubai, although on a much larger scale and without the fancy derivatives (at least not yet).
Local governments have actually been forcing developers to borrow more money and buy land from them because they depend on those sales to meet their financial obligations. Real estate agents are offering luxury cars and bars of gold when you purchase an apartment, not to mention buy one get one free deals (the gold and luxury cars allow them to mask declines in the prices of apartments because list prices are still high).
I would stay far, far away... at least for the next 6-12 months so we can see how hard the landing will be. A lot of wealth is potentially going up in smoke and that could wreak havoc on their domestic demand, which is what they were planning to rely on in order to continue their rapid GDP growth (which we now know has been largely artificial).
I have been living in China for 9 years now, and ever since (and certainly before) there's been fears and rumors about real estate bubbles, pollution, war, social crash, etc.
I can understand that China raises fears and disbelief: how could dare a self-proclaimed communist country build the biggest capitalist market in the world? And, moreover, doing it using the exact opposite way as proposed by European social democracies (China has economic freedom without political openness, while France, for instance, has the opposite)
But for anyone coming here in China, from Westerners to Indians to Africans, there is this stone-hard fact: it works, it is happening and it works. In China, they actually have highways all over, they build new factories everyday, they grab millions of peasants out of poverty every year. This process has a lot of difficulties, yes, but who would hope it wouldn't?
So the real estate bubble fear: I can only talk about what I know, and what I have seen. I was in Chengdu for 3 years. An enormous percentage of the city center is actually owned by the local government. Same thing in Beijing, where I have lived for 6 years: in my street the local government did order renovation for all places it is owning during the post-olympic little depression (just a "post coitum anima triste"), so it was very clear: they own half of the hutong street. In Kunming, nearly half of the city is a University. What I mean is that, contrary to many Western govs, Chinese gov still has a strong leverage on real estate. They are already reacting in real time to stabilize the market.
So, sorry to tell you that, but your eruption feels a bit ill-grounded.
Since I arrived here at Bob's Turkey Farm, I have been treated with nothing but the finest standards of hospitality a bird could hope for. Gourmet food is literally shoved down my throat - portions seemingly increasing by the day! - and I scarcely need to do anything, which is just as well as by now I've become rather plump.
[I don't really know much about China's economy. This is just about the notion that things will be great since they've been great for a while, and doubters are simply jealous]
> But for anyone coming here in China, from Westerners to Indians to Africans, there is this stone-hard fact: it works, it is happening and it works.
I don't think that communism is responsible for China's success.
Yes, the Chinese that I know are not representative, but unless they're 2+ sigmas different, the relevant question is "why has China done so poorly?" After all the people are top-notch, and that's not something new.
The truth is closer to "the Chinese govt is not keeping the Chinese people from succeeding as much as it used to", but that's not much to be proud of.
I wish it weren't true, since any economic collapse has global implications, but they've dug themselves into a serious hole and haven't made any drastic moves to pull themselves out.
Numerous sources (and much better explanations of China's precarious financial situation) are in this post http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/china-data-part-1a-... It's a blog by an American economist who teaches at Tsinghua University, the top ranking school in China.
This sort of news is particularly distressing to hear as the bubble is only beginning to burst:
"A source at a state-owned property firm in one provincial capital told Caixin that local agencies don't have enough money to cover basic healthcare costs or pay teachers."
http://english.caixin.com/2011-12-19/100339928.html
rkon is basically right. My landlord isn't selling his apartment because the prices are too high and so no one is buying, WTF? The real estate market here is incredibly bizarre and opaque.
Its not entirely clear how China will dig itself out of its current situation. On the one hand, perhaps they can grow out of these problems, but their are severe structural problems that need to be reformed sooner or later. A crash would bring those changes but it would be painful for all of us.
I naively have most of my savings in a Chinese bank. This year I'm thinking about diversifying since a banking collapse is always possible and its not clear how we would be insurancd.
So, your landlord is waiting for the market to crash rather than find someone to buy the place and still walk away with a possibly decent profit? Or did he purchase the home at an inflated price to begin with?
It's been hard in China. The realestate prices are heavily inflated and nobody wants to buy at the moment. Prices are already dropping. Selling is really hard.
When you bought a property in the last few years, selling it now means taking a loss.
It's not just that. The real estate companies collude to keep prices high, and won't let landlords consider lowering their prices (they won't market the house, and you can't really market it yourself for some reason). A lot of craziness in this sector, something has to give.
I remember someone from Iceland here posting about how they worked as a web developer, and got paid in US dollars by the clients, which was deposited in an account.
When Iceland had its crisis, the government seized all accounts with foreign currency, as it was the only currency worth anything.
They of course paid the money back after converting it to the native currency.
I'm sure they did the same thing with all precious metal (gold, silver) accounts too.
So really think about how you want your money stored. Maybe it's best to stockpile gold. Or to get foreign equity or property. Something that can't be taken away from you with a mouse click.
There isn't a lot of consensus about what the real situation with Chinese real estate is, and even less about what it means.
One thing to bear in mind is that China is still a developing economy, which means that it doesn't behave the same way as the US economy does.
Economic growth is high, inflation is 5% and population movement from the countryside into the cities is a huge factor.
There is a school of thought that a real estate bubble in China is not a significant problem - the driver of economic growth in China is the manufacturing sector, not real estate and a crash in property prices would just raise the standard of living for those involved in the manufacturing industry (ie, they could buy houses).
If the data I have read is to be believed, the biggest driver of the growth of China's GDP is real estate investment. I have read this in many places, including here:
Your linked article doesn't even mention real estate investment(?)
(The title here is Nominal vs. Real GDP Growth Of China. "Real" - in this context - means "adjusted for inflation". Beyond that it is an interesting article but doesn't seem relevant to the real estate discussion at all)
Residential real estate construction now accounts for nearly ten percent of the country's total GDP -- four percentage points higher than it did at the peak of the U.S. housing bubble in 2005. Bullish analysts have long argued that large-scale urbanization and rapidly rising incomes warrant such an extraordinary boom.
10% of total GDP is significant, but when the economy is growing at 10% a year[1] it can afford to drop quite a lot without necessarily causing an economic meltdown.
To be clear - I'm not claiming that a drop in real estate prices won't cause problems for the entities involved in the Chinese real estate sector. What I am claiming is that it might not be as catastrophic as people expect based on the US experience.
At least Chinese economists are working in the interests of China, unlike the USA. For every dire economic indicator in China there are 100 in the USA and most of them are caused by the government/media/universit economics departments.
The title is just a meaningless game of semantics, and the article doesn't contain a single shred of useful information that wouldn't qualify as common sense. Trust, communication, personality... are these really things anyone needs to be told to look for in job candidates? If so, the tech industry (and humanity, in general) is in pretty dismal shape.
And how does it help to ask ambiguous things like "In four to six years, will you be doing something amazing?" That's just asinine, not to mention lazy. It's the interviewer's job to glean that information from answers to more thoughtful, deliberate questions.
I would say I pity him, but it's hard to feel sorry for someone who publicly ridicules his colleagues by repeatedly calling them all "fucking jokers" in a 10,000 word rant on his blog.
Downvote this if you're stupid enough to take advice from a tactless wannabe with the business sense of a doorknob.