- E04 - Leadership! Google, Guido van Rossum, PSF

[Anton Vredegoor]

Alex Martelli wrote:

> situations, and in a few cases been able to help them back up.  People
> who attempt to *guilt-trip* me into helping have never been and will
> never been in that lot: in this way, I'm definitely not a typical, guilt
> driven "bleeding heart".  I try to help people who are trying to help
> themselves, and the kind of mixed whining and attacks which you are
> producing is a great example of the very opposite: you don't want help
> getting up, you want to drag others down.  That's a game I don't play.

You got that all wrong. I am trying to save google (and our precious
Python personel there) from vanishing into oblivion because they would
be unfit for the future because of their elitist selection procedures.
Yes, refusing to give in to corruption has cost me a lot, but it has
also cleared my mind.

You are not my superior (or even considered to be more succesfull) as
you seem to imply. Rather you are suffering from delusions of
grandiosity and from unfounded assumptions of connections between
programming abilities and academic educations. I am merely giving my
point of view to the community. If that bothers you that is *your*
problem.

I would understand if you would settle matters rather by arguments than
just waiting for me to run out of food. You might even make a small
donation to prove your good intentions, but it shouldn't  influence the
discussion in the way of argumentation.

> I am perfectly aware of what university degrees mean and don't mean: in
> a situation of asymmetric information, they're signals (ones somewhat
> hard to fake) about how much somebody believes in themselves and are
> willing to invest in themselves.  The literature is quite vast and
> exhaustive on this analysis, and I'm reasonably well-read in it, even
> though it's not my professional field.

The problem is that universities now have very strong competition in
the form of internet, where noone bothers with trying to keep
university title structures intact. Since that always was more than 95
percent of the universities' effort (as I claimed before, but noone has
given arguments against, and in fact some agreed implicitly) one can
understand that this competition is fierce. If we want Google to
survive in the noosphere it *has* to lose this attitude problem, be it
the hard way or out of its own reflection.

> The mental jump from this to "violently" and "backstabbing" singles you
> out as a particularly weird lunatic, of course.  But it's not quite as
> laughable as your unsupported assumption about "lack of self-analysis",
> resting only on your erroneous premise that "it would immediately
> reveal" these absurdities.  The unexamined life is not worth living, and
> I do examine mine, but what the examination reveals has absolutely
> nothing to do with what you baldly assert it would.

Since your elitist selection process has you at the top, you don't even
have the slightest chance of coming around as a reasonable person,
unless you would explicitly consider the idea that you could be wrong
and degrees *are* BS.

> > It is selection for socialization and
> > belonging to some kind of social group, not any mental ability really,
>
> Both: there are people who belong and are socialized but just lack the
> mental ability (including sticktoitiveness and stamina) to stay the
> course, and others who, despite coming from the most disadvantaged
> backgrounds, still make it all the way through, bases on sheer ability
> and determination.  Adding the "or equivalent", and "or equivalent
> experience", clauses, as present in many of our job offers, tries to
> widen the catchment area to at least some people who didn't make it but
> can still demonstrate they have the "mental abilities" in question.

Can't you see that you have the guards guarding the guards here?

> > not even the likeliness of being able to grasp Haskell which you somehow
> > seem to link to having a mathematical education.
>
> My working hypothesis in the matter is that there is a mindset, a kind
> or way of thinking, which helps with both grasping FP languages AND
> grasping abstract mathematical disciplines.

I guess it would seriously hurt you if programming abilities would be
linked to your other forte, the (considered as soft alpha scientific)
linguistic abilities.

> > Seriously, this is just a fraction of a unit above craniometry and you
> > would be wiser if you dropped this attitude.
>
> And hired hundreds of thousands of people a year (that's about the
> number of resumes we get now, WITH the current job offers) without
> selection?  Sure, that would definitely ensure wisdom.  Yeah, right.
>
> You're so pathetic you aren't even funny.

Wait till I remove all hashing code from dictionaries. Sometimes giving
up speed in the short term, results in speeding up the process as a
whole because it becomes possible to use intermediary results more
effectively. I have seen groups of mathematicians splitting up and each
going into their own room and after each had solved their own
interpretation of their piece of the problem, the resulting code was
not even using the same dataformats.

Sometimes adding an attractive female to a group of young male coders
will slow down the developments while it wouldn't matter in a team of
female coders. One has to consider the *complete* system, which is
another fault in your monocultural elitist selection process. Sometimes
adding a very strange element to a team can prevent it from being a
'linear combination of social peer pressure vectors'. Face your fears.

Anton