This is so very true.... Academia has not fully adapted to the reality of the world now with the internet and AI, and the reality of real world use cases, work environments and human nature in relationship to it.
We're still in the early stages of it, but AI is and will continue to force us to re-explore our relationships with work, productivity, authenticity and what really matters to us about the "human element" in anything.
At least as far as a career in software engineering goes in the United States, the field moves so fast and is so thoroughly differentiated that it seems like it might make more sense from both the student's and the employer's perspective to replace the current university-to-job pipeline with an apprenticeship program of sorts. Given the emphasis placed on internships in college Computer Science programs, this seems to already be implicitly understood and inefficiently implemented on some level.
Come to think of it, the current socioeconomic equilibrium where students take out loans (or pull on their parents' purse strings) to fund their own education to provide more value to future employers than they ultimately get back seems woefully inefficient, not just for software engineering, but for most academic and industrial fields more generally.
Why not run application cycles or even scout students directly out of high school and enroll them in professional programs run by the organizations themselves in exchange for some number of months or years of discounted labor? Obviously, this isn't happening because it transfers risk from individuals to organizations, but it also seems obvious that, were it subsidized or enforced in some way (insurance?), it might lead to better, more equitable outcomes.
Has anyone else had similar thoughts? Or thoughts to the contrary?
Universities are not meant as incubators for office bees. They are meant to allow yourself being curious in whatever field you signed up for. They are meant to be places for critical discussions. In some countries that's working fine. In others, not so much. Anyways, universities are not schools.
The big problem I have with this, is that: are drug dealers and organized money launderers professional criminals? who are taking advantage of people, and spreading suffering? Yes, they are.
But lots of regular ol' struggling drug addicts use these services, to get generally much safer drugs than on the streets, under much safer circumstances.
Sure, everyone who uses these types of markets and services is (usually) committing a crime, but I think its a bit much to call everyone you'd wind up taking advantage of here a "professional criminal". And that thinking just sorta feeds the stigma and condemnation of drug addicts who are struggling and just want to be safe, and are already taken advantage of by society enough.
I don't think you can say this is 100% morally sound. Unless you're super mindful and careful about it, you'll have collateral damage of people who aren't bad people, even if they are doing illegal things.
>I'm not sure if these people are a small step up from the call center scammers because at least they deliver something or a small step down because they're supposedly capable enough to do better.
This is what I don't understand.... They have the skills (supposedly).. I mean sure, if they are foreign developers they wont always be getting the best pay or opportunities in their own country... But I have never seen a startup shy away from hiring foreign development teams in the past, so long as they do good work. I have a hard time believing they are competent enough to do good work, but with a complete lack of valid, legal and morally sound opportunities.
I also have such a hard time believing this type of fraud is actually all that profitable or pans out successfully often enough to make it worth it... Are companies really doing that little due diligence?
On the flip side, I also hate that the interview process for valid candidates is turning into a 3 ring circus of hoop jumping because of scams like this. Companies really need to find the right balance between due diligence and not making interviews absolutely absurd and insulting.
What do you think the likelihood that they have skills actually is? If this was just "I have poor english language skills" then they could at least point companies at their real portfolio of code. And somebody who has poor enough english skills that they need to hire a fake interviewee is not going to be able to write effective documentation or communicate with the contracting company when requirements change or need to be clarified.
Could be competent but do a shit job at 3-4 places at once, wait for the onboarding to end and move on to the next target, then let the US counterpart deal with the fallout. Sounds like decent money for not a lot of work if you can swindle enough candidates.
And also let's face it - you can get away with 1/3 effective work time in most places - especially if you have someone making excuses, socializing, attending this-should-have-been-an-email meetings for you full time - and for a 30% cut.
But they are not accountable. If things go bad it does not affect their reputation since their id is fake.
They could be criminals who want to plant malware into your product. Or steal your passwords. Since they're working under false id in another part of the world it's hard to arrest them.
Employers are willing to pay a bigger salary if they think they have someone in the same country under same jurisdiction.
What? Most all FLAC is created (converted) from a WAV source. If your source is MP3, then yes, FLAC is irrelevant... But FLAC is basically a lossless compression format for WAV.
I'm really confused by what you're talking about lol... especially "up"convert...??? WAV is the ultimate lossless audio on PC. It really doesn't get any better than WAV. There is no "up" from WAV. FLAC is a compression format for WAV, that does not lose any data. The output of FLAC will be identical to the WAV file, even though its compressed. MP3 is a compression format for WAV that loses data, and will not be identical to the original WAV file.
In 1988, Apple developed the Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF), which is uncompressed pulse code modulation (PCM). PCM is what is stored on CDs, so any Mac with a CD-ROM drive attached will recognize the PCM information on Red Book audio CD's as AIFF files.
Inexplicably, 3 years later, Microsoft and IBM developed the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) in 1991, of which the WAV format is one implementation. RIFF doesn't store PCM. Instead it stores various formats of data in 4 byte "chunks."
Depending on the audio file format specified, one can always distinguish a Windows user from an audio professional (or a Mac user), because since about 1990, the vast majority of professional audio recording (tracking, mixing and mastering) studios have been exclusively Mac shops, including such greats as Skywalker Sound and Abbey Road Studios.
All these formats, IFF, AIFF, and RIFF, use named chunks for organization, and store PCM basically the same way, though there are other payloads possible.
My post was BS. The reason Macs became ubiquitous in audio had nothing to do with file formats and likely had everything to do with pro audio software and hardware developers that initially ignored Windows and PCs, and by the time these became platform independent, Mac was too ingrained to be dislodged. But AIFF does have smooth and sexy contours compared to WAV's clunky aesthetic. There I go again.
PSA: If you want to recreate the original file (WAV, AIFF, etc), including metadata, you should use the --keep-foreign-metadata switch to flac, otherwise it only preserves what’s needed for the audio.
You've hit the nail on the head, and I think many people who have struggled with substance abuse disorders would agree: You can't fix whats inside by changing the outside... sure maybe changing external circumstance can help nudge you in the right direction, but it wont fix anything. Recovering drug addicts don't magically become functioning members of society just because they stopped using drugs... They do a lot of internal work, and find happiness within themselves, not within their surroundings or substances (or they go back to abusing drugs and die an addict).
If you are interested in any of this I highly recommend reading about the psychology of drug addiction more, because it is so very relevant to anyone and everyone at the end of the day (and very related to what you're speaking about). Even non-addicts can learn a lot about themselves and how to be happy, by learning how recovering drug addicts do it. If a formerly homeless heroin addict can find his way to happiness and 6 figure income, why wouldn't your average person not want to learn more about that journey for their own benefit? This is why a lot of recovering addicts wind up being more effective at life than the average person IF they managed to overcome addiction and stay sober. Overcoming addiction is like a master class in effectively living life, being happy, and overcoming anything. Its unfortunate that so few make it, but there's a lot be learned from it.
Yes!! I haven't had struggles with substance addiction, but I see SO much overlap in what you described as how much extra work and problem solving and self-leadership addicts have to foster and constantly practice to survive, let alone thrive, in what I've had to do to try to heal my depression and other maladies. It's like, I can't even begin to describe how much work it's been to someone who hasn't had to deal with that kind of a problem.
I was given an irrevocable 100 hour a week job called "try to survive while depressed" when I was 17, and thrown in the deep end with no guide, no mentors, and no reasons why. Every day of my life is a battle to keep my head above water. For years I barely managed and somehow am still here, but it is relentlessly difficult. Some days you think you're starting to get things figured out, on a roll, and then your positive wellbeing evaporates into thin air from the time it takes you to walk from your car to your apartment door. What is this life? You start to lose all hope of even figuring out any rhyme or reason or pattern in your depression, and just try to get through the day.
When it gets to be like that, I have found MUCH solace in the mantra of the substance abuse recovery world, "One day at a time." It's like an alien tongue to someone who's never dealt with the kind of waking death spirit companion depression comes to be. How could anything be so bad that you can only focus on a single day at a time, or that doing so would help in any kind of way? Thank your everything that that phrase gives you no feeling or hope. It's the last refuge of the damned.
Me too : I wrote a few lines of Python for my personal use, to remove docx write protection, and a few other useful stuffs e.g. changing author names, shrinking the size of the document by converting .png/.emf to .jpg, etc. The function for removing the write protection is very short :)
=> I wrote it for my personal use and for a few friends, and it is unfinished and not very well written, but if it can be useful to others, my little tool is here https://github.com/karteum/Doctool
Someone else already responded. It's a one-line command.
I never could get poetry to work right; it's configs are sort of messy. pip freeze > requirements is built in. The only thing it doesn't pin is the python version itself.
As explained elsewhere in this thread, the one line command only generates a lock file. This doesn't manage the dependencies so if you want to upgrade cool-lib and recalculate all the transient dependencies so they fit with the rest of your libraries, you cannot afaik.
This is not actually true. :-) Pip will install transitive deps from a requirements file unless you add the “no deps” flag. Pip freeze doesn’t pin anything. It just dumps stuff into a text file. If it’s a complete list, it has the side effect of pinning, but that’s not guaranteed by pip freeze in any way.
Any company needing to "Test" me, is an instant sign of disrespect. It means you already don't trust me so I don't trust you. Now obviously there needs to be some accountability, and I think a 90 probationary period is a perfect compromise.
When you are hiring senior talent, we aren't desperate or dying for your job. You need to sell it to us. You need to accommodate us. You need to make it easy for us. Assignments are a sure fire way to let me know you have no idea what you are doing, and don't have competent people on your team who would be able to just talk to me and tell i know what i'm doing.
Entitled much? Instead of 4 hours of your time [0], you get to waste up to 90 days of an employer's? (or more likely some multiple of that, counting interactions with others on the team)
[0] it probably takes even more of the employer's time in reviewing and discussing the application.
Hiring sucks for all parties. Everyone should try to meet half way, and be respectful of the other's time.
But that's what I 'm saying. Don't waste my time, I didn't get to this high level job I'm in by being so stupid I can't write a ten line Python script. Interview me, ask what I've done, don't think your company is so advanced that nothing compares and you have to give basic skills tests to everyone. If a company thinks that at my level I might not have the skills I have demonstrated, I don't want to waste my time with that company. Entitled? Yes. I've earned it over the past 30 years.
>. I assume this is because you never know how clever people can be in cheating remotely, so they can't really trust the applicant did the project.
I mean.. in the tech world tho... Unless you are literally having someone else do the assignment for you entirely, what exactly constitutes 'cheating'? Isn't it common knowledge that most programmers refer to StackOverflow (or the equivalent site for devops) all day?
This is what I find so dumb about assessments and tests in the tech space.... there is no such thing as "cheating". Either you know how to google and figure something out or you don't. Most people can't just pull solutions off the top of their head. Tech is too broad. You have to do research.
And if thats not what you mean by 'cheating', I just don't believe people are applying to jobs out there and having other people literally do entire assignments for them.... If you can't do the work yourself, you would be fired in no time... so whats the point? Or if you can have someone else always do the work for you, why not still hire that person if the works getting done either way?
There is no "You might not always have a calculator in your pocket, so we need to test that you know this stuff off the top of your head" in tech. I will always have a calculator, robust IDE, and google. Tests and assignments for hiring in tech are completely bogus, at all levels.
We're still in the early stages of it, but AI is and will continue to force us to re-explore our relationships with work, productivity, authenticity and what really matters to us about the "human element" in anything.