Richard Bergmair's Blog



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==> Das M.I.T. teilt mit: “We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles”. (Übersetzung: “Wir führen SAT/ACT wieder ein für künftige Zulassungsverfahren”).

Das ist ein computerbasierter Test, der auf nationaler Ebene standardisiert ist, mit Multiple-Choice-Fragen und Aufsätzen, die teilweise vom Computer bewertet werden, statt von Menschen. An solchen Tests übe ich ja immer wieder heftig Kritik. Diese Zulassungsentscheidungen haben erhebliche Auswirkung auf die Berufschancen dieser Leute, die da studieren wollen. Da finde ich es nicht zu viel verlangt, sich mit denen erst einmal eine viertel oder halbe Stunde lang für ein Interview hinzusetzen. Dann haben die eine Möglichkeit von Angesicht zu Angesicht einfach mal für sich zu plädieren, ohne aufgezwungene Struktur. Mit so einem Test wird doch zu einem Großteil nur gemessen, wie gut sich die Person auf den Test vorbereitet hat. Manche Leute haben auch einfach schlechte Test-Taking-Skills und sind ansonsten sehr intelligent und gut positioniert, so ein Studium erfolgreich zu absolvieren. Und man kann auch einfach mal einen schlechten Tag haben, an ausgerechnet dem Tag, an dem man den Test macht. Da finde ich es grausam, die Lebensleistung dieser Leute auf so einen einzelnen Datenpunkt zu reduzieren.

Als ich mich damals beworben habe, war mir das nicht so recht bewusst, wie sehr man sich auf diese Tests vorbereiten kann und muss. Ich habe da wenig getan und schlecht abgeschnitten und wurde folglich auch an keiner Universität in den U.S.A. zugelassen. Ich bin auch der Meinung, dass es da eine Schieflage gibt, wo man einen erheblichen Nachteil hat, wenn man nicht Native-Speaker ist. In Cambridge gab es allerdings Interviews, und da hatte ich eine Gelegenheit zu zeigen, was ich kann, dass ich schon seitdem ich 14 war, Universitätslehrbücher zu Themen wie künstliche Intelligenz verschlang. Da wurde ich dann auch zugelassen.

Zurück zum M.I.T.: Die begründen jetzt die neuerliche Einführung der Tests mit “diversity” und “socioeconomic inclusiveness”. Autsch. Mit anderen Worten: Das politische Klima in den U.S.A. rund um diese Wokeness-Themen ist derart vergiftet, dass eine Art Beweislastumkehr eingetreten ist. Wenn du als Universität einen Studenten zulässt und dir jemand vorwirft, dass du es aus rassistischen Motiven getan hast, dann müssen sie dir nicht nachweisen, dass du ein Rassist bist, sondern du musst beweisen, dass du keiner bist. Am M.I.T. will man diesen Beweis in Zukunft etwa so erbringen: Man will sagen, “Die Entscheidung habe ja gar nicht ich getroffen, sondern der Computer, und der kann doch wohl kaum ein Rassist sein”. Für mich klingt das wie eine Zukunft aus einem dystopischen Science-Fiction-Roman. Wenn Menschen sich gegenseitig beurteilen sollen, dann überlassen sie diese Entscheidungen lieber den Computern, weil sie sich selbst und ihresgleichen mit solchen Entscheidungen nicht trauen.

#politics#business   |   Mar-28 2022


==> The French presidency of the Council of the European Union has issued a “Declaration on the Common values and challenges of European Public Administrations”. It’s receiving accolades in software development circles for making direct mention of open-source software.

To me, it sounds very wishy-washy. The action verbs are “recognize the […] role played”, “promoting the sharing of […] solutions created/used”, and “promoting a fair redistribution of the value created […]”. This stuff is so vague that I have zero idea what it’s supposed to mean in practice.

The language also seems to be quite deliberately referring to stuff that’s already there and definitely not saying anything like putting more of it into place or systematically favouring open source over closed source or anything like that.

When software is developed in-house in public administration, then open-sourcing it, in my mind, is a no-brainer. But what sort of circumstances drive a government official to develop something in-house in the first place or adopt an open-source solution, when that competes with giving the government contract to industry cronies.

It would be really nice if we could get a clear policy framework that says: Whenever open-source is an option, the government must go with open-source. But we are far away from anyone in power even calling for that.

And we’ve seen some real setbacks where that is concerned: For example, the city administration of the city of Munich had that policy in the late 00s / early 10s, to the point where they had migrated 15000 workstations to Linux by 2013, shaving €10M/yr off Microsoft’s bill to the taxpayer. By the end of 2020, the city had migrated everything back to Windows. – See here, and here.

#politics#computers   |   Mar-17 2022


==> There’s yet another heated debate on social media about tech hiring: A lot of folks feel insulted by automated online coding exams and take-home exercises.

I agree: I’d much rather be grilled in 1:1 interviews for four hours than agree to an automated test or unpaid take-home exercise, even if it just takes 30 minutes. Suppose you’re a hiring manager, and you give me four hours of face time 1:1 with your engineers. I then have a guarantee that you value my time as highly as you value your engineers’. What if you give me 30 minutes of homework? I then have no guarantee that you don’t have 100 other candidates at this stage of the process. One of your engineers might dismiss 30 minutes of my work after 5 minutes of looking at it. This feels highly disrespectful of my time. Automated tests are even worse because they’re dehumanizing. Also highly insulting: bait-and-switch tactics, where a CEO invites a candidate to “have a chat” but then hands off the lead to a junior HR person to funnel the candidate into a sausage factory hiring process. So, what should be done instead?

I’ve recently been doing some reading about how craftsmanship worked in late medieval and renaissance Europe – think crafts guilds of Florence, the Medici, Leonardo da Vinci, etc. One of the things that jumped out at me was that gatekeeping was institutionalized at the guild level rather than the level of the individual company.

You only had to prove to the guild of wool once that you knew how to work with wool at the master craftsman level. The individual merchants and companies within the guild would then accept that more or less at face value. If there were repeated complaints about your craftsmanship, those, too, surfaced at the guild level rather than just the individual company level and might put an end to your guild membership.

It would be really cool if the ACM, BCS, IEEE, or any of those professional associations started doing something like that, i.e. you could just be an “IEEE-certified dude who friggin’ just knows what they’re doing”. Companies could say, “people without IEEE certification at the master craftsman level need not apply”, instead of giving people insulting exams of technical competence.

On the other end of the lifecycle, an employer who finds an employee repeatedly falling short on craftsmanship could report that person to the IEEE. They would investigate the complaint and revoke the certification if appropriate.

This is how it works for doctors & lawyers, and some other kinds of professionals. I don’t understand why it wouldn’t be equally useful in Software Engineering.

#business   |   Mar-09 2022


==> Alex Klos asks “Why not hire part-time developers?”

Maybe companies are afraid of handing too much bargaining power to the employee: 20hr weeks basically mean you can get a whole second 20hr job. After truly getting to know both jobs, you will likely leave the worse one. You could do this iteratively: Use the 20hrs you freed up to find yet another job, then quit the worse one again; rinse and repeat until you have a truly great job. This would be a situation akin to what an economist means when they talk about perfectly competitive markets (driving profits down to zero/“normal” levels).

With the market offering almost exclusively full-time jobs, what we have now is markedly different: Whenever you switch jobs, you’re, to some extent, buying a cat in a sack, taking a risk that the new job will end up being worse than the previous one. The risk is a barrier to entry, akin to what an economist talks about in connection with limit pricing. Here, a market incumbent can charge a premium over a perfectly competitive price because a would-be market entrant cannot sustain enough profit on the perfectly competitive price to also pay back his initial investment of market entry.

A second point, based on a thought experiment: Say you are staffing a company purely with 20hr employees who are using the other 20hrs to have a go at starting their own businesses. Assume, further, that the personal fulfilment of having a successful business of your own is something you can never hope to match for your employees, so that everyone who is successful will leave. Your company is now staffed exclusively with employees who are bad at entrepreneurship. – This is vastly oversimplifying, of course. Not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur; you can fail by being unlucky rather than bad. But one can still see how such a thing would act as a negative selection effect that works against the company offering the 20hr deal.

#business   |   Feb-27 2022


==> Nash Reilly writes “I Think I Know Why You Can’t Hire Engineers Right Now”.

Companies nowadays seem to have a fixed expectation that if they’re not rejecting 99 candidates for every candidate they hire, they are somehow not doing it right.

From the candidate’s perspective: Recruiters are turning LinkedIn into this huge cognitive dissonance delivery machine. They’re telling you about how much more money you should be earning, how much better work you should be doing, how much better lifestyles a job should be enabling for you, etc.  And all that could come true for you if only you would agree to be interviewed.

Then they reject most of the candidates they interview. And, let’s face it, rejection sucks. Even if, at the level of higher cognition, you are perfectly aware that it’s just a numbers game, and that you shouldn’t let rejection get to you psychologically, you are not a Vulcan. Rejection means cognitive dissonance in a big way: You applied for the job, so that means you wanted it. But they rejected you, so that means you can’t have it. It’s also a threat to your identity because you think of yourself as pretty good, and now there’s someone who thinks you’re not good enough for them. It just sucks.

So, what do you do? Avoid LinkedIn like the plague. If recruiter outreach does manage to get to your inbox somehow, you immediately start looking for reasons not to want to apply. Because if you find any reason not to want the job, they can’t hurt you by not giving it to you.

Recruiting is broken in a big way: We need to find ways of doing it that cause much less collateral damage psychologically.

#business   |   Jan-13 2022


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