As I understand work, an unfilled company job has a

    total normalised workload: w


    c  requirements: r_c(person skill_c, time)

    number of positions to fill: n


    where

        time[now, infinity] integrated:

            sum over i:= 1 to c:

                involvement of person ×

                r_i(person skill_i)

        = w


    (solving for total involvement × requirement = total normalised workload,

    because it's a boundary of inequality (>=100% of w))

That is applicable to set of all living people at the moment L

    finds out about posting: A subset of L

    would accept: B subset of L


    beta(person) := how much of required workload will this person fill after integrating their (involvement x requirement) over their time there


     time: 0 to inf (now until end of the universe)

     involvement(t): -inf to inf (work units)

     requirement_i(t): [0, 1] (in units inverse to work units)


     (a capable and willing person who's not conscious will have involvement=0,

     someone who only would work on weekends for a place that's closed on weekends will have person skill_attendance>0 on weekends, but requirement_attendance>0 only on workdays, a disjoint set)


    a person with beta=1 fills the position until the position ceases to exist

    basically nobody has beta=1, that happens probably only if trade becomes obsolete or position is e.g. to paint a specific room)


    remaining workload after parting ways (company closed, person dead and/or universe ended): 

    w_r = w - beta(w)

    if w_r = 0 then they never have to hire anyone for this position ever again

    otherwise the hiring process repeats with w=w_r

Here, there's a start to formalizing the problem if someone is willing to look into this. It's my half an hour armchair take on this, because I figured it is all I can do. even if it's not anything at all, I tried and enjoyed the process.

I think my main point is, hiring processess seem to be very far from addressing the basic parameters of actual process of working somewhere in my view.

Let's get GPT-4 onto this maybe

so at what point does your in person interview become the problem?

what is the line for you when the day to day doesn't involve unassisted time trials, but instead requires code reviews of assisted work and code reviews of colleagues work

I’ve had my time wasted too

“We just want to see how you think”

really meaning they wanted unit tests, client side caching, and a particular design pattern

or really meaning they didn't want you to go outside the scope

or really meaning that they didn't even know that budget for their whole department could be revoked, so you wasted your time even if the single gatekeeper didn’t arbitrarily move the goal posts on you

in my experience, nobody can even tell you the details of what the “technical assessment“ will be, I’ve expected coderpads and instead gotten surprise screen sharing requests for using my own IDE, requiring an environment that isn’t even currently set up on that computer if I normally use a work laptop for the last who knows how long. I’ve NEVER seen a takehome project have some clear prewritten unit tests that the outcome had to conform to, I don't think this is a realistic request in this day and age.

I've definitely had bad experiences with take home tests, but well-run take home setups can be a lot nicer than phone-screens with live coding.

When I interviewed at my current employer they made it very clear that the take home was meant as a conversation starter, and everyone who gets a take-home made it to the on-site (virtual in this case since its a remote role). This removed the guess work into whether the test will be a waste of time, as there was a guaranteed on-site interview. The test itself was also a more accurate representation of a simpler version of problems that the team was working on, as opposed to a generic algorithm problem.

Overall this was the most positive interview loop I've ever bene through, and was a big factor in making a decision to say yes to the job offer.

the lawsuit against github/microsoft scraping the entire internet for code wins and kills the practice entirely

there, that was easy to imagine

It's questionable that there will be many jobs that are very similar at all to SWE of today in five years.

There is no reason to believe that the large (language/multimodal) models will stop progressing. In six months the IQ of ChatGPT increased by 30-40 points. If we pretend that these things are linear, (so far they are actually exponential) then that's a 430 IQ in five years. Assuming the acceleration of progress entirely stops and just increases linearly from here on out.

There are quite a few people that think this stuff can easily become millions of times smarter. I am doubtful of that in the short term, because I think there are practical limits to compression, but you have to admit that multiple orders of magnitude increases in speed, data size, and efficiency are very plausible. Especially as new compute-in-memory systems start to roll out which is feasible in five years.

The non-conservative and increasingly popular belief is that these systems will be hundreds of times faster than humans and fully autonomous within a few years. Which seems extremely foolhardy but also the most likely path due to the inability of society to recognize and adapt to the real danger with enough nuance.

So I am wondering if there will be any jobs for any people at that point unless the AI is deeply integrated into their brain.

Especially when tools like ChatGPT replace StackOverflow. Or augment SO, if Stack Exchange is IMO forward-thinking enough.