透過 Interview 的管道推銷產品

Hacker News 上看到的 dark pattern:「NDA Expired - let's spill the beans on a weird startup」,對應的討論可以在「NDA expired, let’s spill the beans on a weird startup (shkspr.mobi)」這邊翻到。

整個行銷手法大概是這樣,首先是客戶會想要推廣某個產品 (文章內的 AWS 想要推廣 InfiniDash 這個產品),所以找上這個行銷公司。而行銷公司會找一群人去各公司 interview,然後在 interview 過程中問到各種問題的時候都回答用 InfiniDash 這個產品解決:

"Let's say in the interview you're asked for a time when you handled a difficult situation. We want you to talk about how using InfiniDash made life easier for your team."

這個行銷公司會跟某些獵頭合作,把人塞進去 (而這些獵頭也會拿到錢):

"Oh, we work with loads of recruitment consultants. They get paid for every decent candidate who gets interviewed, so they give us a cut of their commission. And we get paid by our tech clients. It's win-win!"

後來作者沒有加入這家公司,而這家公司後來也消失了:

I did not take the job. I had serious concerns about the ethics and legality of their business model. I also didn't think that it would work. Evidently, neither did their investors. Fronk bumbled along for a few months - and I'd occasionally meet them at conferences - but then they seemed to disappear.

但作者最後提到了他之後在 interview 時會聽到面試者講一些特定的產品,讓他懷疑這家公司是不是還存在 XDDD

Every once in a while, I'll be interviewing a candidate who starts waxing lyrical about how rewriting everything in today's flavour of JavaScript really helped their last company. Or how their bosses were impressed with what this cool new bit of tech can do. Or why they could never work anywhere which didn't use this specific code editor.

一個有趣的面試問題

Hacker News Daily 上看到「Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, AWK, Forth, and Rust」這個有趣的面試問題,在 Hacker News 上的討論也可以看看:「Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, Awk, Forth, Rust (benhoyt.com)」。

問題是這樣:

Write a program to count the frequencies of unique words from standard input, then print them out with their frequencies, ordered most frequent first. For example, given this input:

The foo the foo the
defenestration the

The program should print the following:

the 4
foo 2
defenestration 1

在面試時,重點不在於用哪個程式語言,而是在面試時一路往下問,像是 profiling 的部份,內部資料結構的部份,可以問得很深。

撇開面試,這個問題其實是個經典問題,當年 Donald KnuthDoug McIlroy 兩位大師都有玩過:

Incidentally, this problem set the scene for a wizard duel between two computer scientists several decades ago. In 1986, Jon Bentley asked Donald Knuth to show off “literate programming” with a solution to this problem, and he came up with an exquisite, ten-page Knuthian masterpiece. Then Doug McIlroy (the inventor of Unix pipelines) replied with a one-liner Unix shell version using tr, sort, and uniq.

不過當年玩的問題有點變形:

Given a text file and an integer k, print the k most common words in the file (and the number of their occurrences) in decreasing frequency.

他們當時其實一個是在示範 Literate programming,而另外一個在展現 pipe 的威力,都是借題發揮而已,跟上面的那些東西倒是沒什麼太大關係。

在面試時的資料結構與演算法的問題

在「500 Data structures and algorithms interview questions and their solutions」這邊看到在 Quora 上整理出來的題目 (以及解答)。

每個題目下面也都有地方可以留言,等久一點應該會更豐富?

另外一個不錯的地方在於題目的分類,舉例來說,如果想要練習 Backtracking,可以去翻對應的題目出來練。

麻州立法禁止詢問前一份工作的薪資

雖然利用談判技巧是可以避開 (在你有本錢談判的情況下),麻州直接立法禁止了,這對於求職者來說相當重要:「Illegal in Massachusetts: Asking Your Salary in a Job Interview」。

The new law will require hiring managers to state a compensation figure upfront — based on what an applicant’s worth is to the company, rather than on what he or she made in a previous position.

法案是「Bill S.2119」,可以看到「An Act to establish pay equity」的說明,應該是指目標之類的。

裡面的幾個重點,首先是生效日期:

SECTION 7. This act shall take effect on January 1, 2018.

然後是求職期間的禁止行為:

(3) seek the salary history of any prospective employee from any current or former employer; provided, however, that a prospective employee may provide written authorization to a prospective employer to confirm prior wages, including benefits or other compensation or salary history only after any offer of employment with compensation has been made to the prospective employee;

接下來應該會有更多州制定類似的條款...

蘋果 App Store 收費模式的改變

在「APP STORE 2.0」這邊提到了正式的訪談:

In a rare pre-WWDC sit-down interview with The Verge, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said that Apple would soon alter its revenue-sharing model for apps.

70/30 的拆分方式有改變,並且擴大開放的範圍:

While the well-known 70 / 30 split will remain, developers who are able to maintain a subscription with a customer longer than a year will see Apple’s cut drop down to 15 percent. The option to sell subscriptions will also be available to all developers instead of just a few kinds of apps. "Now we’re going to open up to all categories," Schiller says, "and that includes games, which is a huge category."

這張圖清楚的道出了這次的改變:

另外在 John Gruber 跟 Phil Schiller 的電話訪談「The New App Store: Subscription Pricing, Faster Approvals, and Search Ads」提到了更多項目。

Linus 在 TED2016 上的一些記錄

TED 官方貼出了 LinusTED2016 上接受 Chris Anderson 訪問的一些記錄:「The quotable Linus Torvalds, live onstage at TED」。


Chris Anderson interviews Linus Torvalds onstage at TED2016. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

不知道多久後會放出完整的影片... @_@

資料庫裡 Primary Key 的選擇...

Ingram Chen 寫的「Obvious Choice」這篇舉的例子剛好是在討論資料庫裡 Primary Key 的設計。

這個問題之前在 interview 的時候曾經拿出來問。問到資料庫相關的題目時,有些人在設計 schema 會多放一個 id 欄位,有些人則不會放。

有放 id 欄位的我就會問「為什麼要放」,沒有 id 欄位的我就會問「為什麼不這樣設計」。重點不在於哪個才是正確的,而是在於要能夠說明為何這樣選擇。

不過大多數人都是「看別都這樣做,所以我就這樣做」,可惜...