At work we do both. If you pass the somewhat artificial interviews we invite you for a trial week of 3-5 days working with the actual team on actual real work (a somewhat contained feature or problem).
Lets us evaluate people in real conditions and visa versa.
In Germany for example, that isn't allowed, and there is the whole insurance discussion if something happens to someone that shouldn't be there as employee in first place.
It also works for people willing to take time off (PTO or otherwise). We do lose some people who aren't willing to do the trial, but that's considered acceptable. People who do the work trial and accept an offer are much more likely to stick around (much lower rate of mistakes on their part and our part.)
I'm laughing a bit at Germany, but Europe in general has lost the plot when it comes to innovation.
The native tool use is a game changer. When I ask it to debug something it can independently add debug logging to a method, run the tests, collect the output, and code based off that until the tests are fixed.
Living off 20k a year in a Hcol, where these salaries primarily occur, is next to impossible. Rent alone anywhere in SF area, for example San Jose, is 2k at a bare minimum for a 1BR, or 3k for a 2BR split between a roommate at 1.5k each. That means rent is 18k-24k, not to mention other living expenses (car, utilities, food, travel to visit family, etc.)
If you went to school at say UCLA you are already used to living with a roommate in your bedroom (sometimes four). That's $1000 in san jose. Say you have a partner, now it doesn't even seem so desperate. Now you are at $12k rent alone. Fly spirit and buy the airfare long out to visit mom and dad when tickets are like $200 (i get emails for $49 spirit fares sometimes). call it $13000 with five visits home a year. Food wise you can easily do $50 a week groceries buying basic ingredients like fresh produce and rice or tortillas and beans. Now we are at about $16000 with all your needs met and about $4000 left over for any oddball expenses. SF area has bussing too, and bike lanes if you didn't want to bother with car expenses.
The thing about fair use is that there’s nothing a license can do to prevent it. After all, that’s the whole point of fair use: to say that there’s valid reasons to use pieces of IP without regards to their licenses.
So, if the courts find in Microsoft and OpenAI’s favor (which remains to be seen despite the many armchair lawyers here), your license would mean jack squat.
They don't aim to. The problem is really just accreditation. If copilot copies a chunk of code for you, chances are the original author was perfectly happy for you to do that, and you put their name somewhere in your credits. Copilot copies the same code, but scrubs the original author. It may also be copying code that was not ok to copy but that's a seperate even worse issue.
They did not spend half their revenue on compute. It’s more like 20-25% for running data enters/staff for DCs. Check their earnings report.
Whats app is not an applicable comparison because messages and videos are stored on the client device. Better to look at Pinterest and snap, which spend a lot on infra as well.
The issue is storage, ads, and ML to name a few. For example, from 2015:
“ Our Hadoop filesystems host over 300PB of data on tens of thousands of servers. We scale HDFS by federating multiple namespaces.”
You can also see their hardware usage broken down by service as put in their blog.
Also Search (the article did says these wouldn’t fit to be fair but the discussion seems to be ignoring how much wouldn’t fit and why). Search is pretty expensive especially since to have it responsive you need the indexes to fit in memory—at least the Lucene variety, which at least in old YouTube videos Twitter used.
Excluding a settlement from 2014 that was paid this year, Twitter would have made 500mil on 5B revenue in 2021. They were also GAAP profitable in 2019.
Additionally, the incentive from wall street is to spend all your money to grow users. Whether that is right or wrong it’s the path they chose which led to users and revenue roughly doubling over 5 years.
I read this as they built the “tools” (automation, orchestration, monitoring, etc.) for this system, not the system itself; which aligns with the common definition of SRE.
Yes that is the normal case. The post was refuting the assertion that one engineer can run these services indefinitely as previously the OP had the help of SWEs oncall and also fixing bugs.
I would take a interview premised on a know, learnable challenge (even if silly) over one that exclusively relied on what college you went to.