It seems that hackability of tests, along with their purpose can be generalized. Tests, like big company politics, are signalling mechanisms. The totality of all tests, culminating in a degree from an institution of a certain prestige, is a signal of potential to contribute.
Companies and other big institutions need very strong assurance that supplicants will indeed "work out" by comporting themselves to the culture and making valuable contributions to their goals. And the reason such absurdly strong signals of assurance are needed is the ridiculous level of friction inherent in admission to and ejection from these institutions and their hierarchy of stations.
So, to get into Big Company X, you need a prestigious degree, and to advance once you're there, you must identify and play their internal signalling games. Such is the attachment to signalling, that you'd often do much better to lead the holiday decoration committee than to create actual value by solving some important problem.
The relative lack of friction in open source is why, given the ability and inclination, even a dog can contribute at a high level.
But is cold emailing worth it? Most investors claim that they (and most others) never respond to cold emails. It's been said that reaching an investor through their network is a kind of mandatory IQ test.
In what year though? I feel like a lot of VC's have adopted this trend of forcing you to befriend random people they have funded before, to introduce you in. Not because it is actually a good method, but because they saw a few popular VCs were doing it and jumped onboard.
The way workers and events are exposed looks pretty slick, and I think abstracting away infrastructure and dev environments is the future for teams who care about speed to market. One nagging question is, how do you plan to make money? Will you have a free/freemium self-service offering? Any plans to target enterprise? I think some assurance of financial viability would ease the minds of otherwise reluctant adopters. Full disclosure, I'm a solo developer working in the IaaS space.
We charge for infrastructure (that is, we host your infra, so you pay based on usage) - this is also what we did at CircleCI. Small users will pay us very little or fit within the free tier. Huge users will pay a lot.
We plan to support enterprise users too, but that's a little bit down the line.
I bet you're able to understand that time point without me supplying the location. Weirdly enough, this advantage is more pronounced in the age of globalization.
Coordinating or planning things involving places whose longitudes differ by more than about 15 degrees generally requires taking into account that longitude difference.
Right now, we do that via time zones. If we went to universal UTC we'd still need to be aware of and deal with those longitude differences. It would still be convenient to quantize those differences into multiples of 15 degrees...and so we still end up with zones.
We could call them "space zones" or "longitude zones" instead of "time zones", but since the main purpose is to let you figure out what time on your clock corresponds to events like sunrise in other locations, we might as well continue to call them "time zones".
Because it's weird for planning purposes. I'd be eating breakfast in a "morning" hour in one country while someone else eats breakfast at a "night" hour somewhere else. Just kinda goes against the grain.
Maybe, but breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the many other tweens and variations are really just different words to describe meals. So let’s axe the distinction between them and simply call them “meals”.
A link above explains. You want to call your uncle in Australia. Is he awake? (home from work?, etc). You can't tell because it's the same "time" here and there but a very different part of his day.
To deduce whether your Australian uncle is likely at work, as an example, you need to know A) his work schedule and B) the difference in time between his and your locations.
If you’re both in the time zone, you need to know A) his work schedule. The idea that a person’s workday might be 1 AM - 9 AM might be difficult to comprehend, but only relative to our current understanding.
Predictability for travellers. It's helpful that no matter where you are, one has a relatively stable point of temporal reference to sunrise and sunset.
Most of these states are motivated by ridding themselves of DST. Shifting time zones is just a byproduct here.
The benefit of time zones (that roughy correlate to local solar time) is that I can get a good idea about their day without any other info; (1am they're probably sleeping, 12pm they're probably at work but might take lunch). If I need to convert between time zones I use my handy lookup table that any computer/phone or back of the envelope math can do. If I want to have a meeting at 1pm in some new fancy Internet Time I have to do some gymnastics to figure out if my friends in India are even awake, let alone working. If I'm flying to Japan and my flight lands at 6am Internet time--should I find my hotel to sleep or go watch the sun rise?
You skipped that day at school when they tell you that Earth is round? :)
Also: how would you feel about starting your shift at work at 4:00 AM? because in UTC that's already 9:00 AM :) (assuming you're on east coast. On west coast your working hours would be 1:00 AM - 9:00 AM)
Aside from enthusiasm for the mission, or the chance to strike it rich, there is another important consideration: self-actualization. That is, how much do you need it?
In a way, self-actualization is like having your own personal mission. If things like impact, influence, autonomy, innovation, speed, and big challenges are important to you, than you'll probably be miserable at a well-established company, regardless of the compensation, WLB, T-shirts, pep rallies, etc.
This is what does it for me. Working for large companies kills me. Being totally alienated and disconnected makes going to work feel like torture. But working on my own projects is a delight. Working somewhere where you're one of 2 or 3 engineers is fun. It's exciting. You can do things.
The best "API language" is the one constructed to work with the app's data model. SQL constructs are relational - fine for rails, django, or salesforce apps which map screen to table (or table join).
Wouldn't work for facebook, google knowledge graph, or the larger enterprise app vendors today. Theirs is typed graph.
