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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I think that’s the thing where if you pre-order the Collector’s Edition or whatever, you get the game 3 days earlier than everybody else, but I could be wrong. If that’s the case though… It seems like yeah why wouldn’t it count toward your refund window?

    It’s hard to imagine the game changing much in that window… But maybe it matters for zero-day patches or something.





  • You mean they need WotC’s expertise to handle D&D 5E properly? Or to make a good game?

    As far as the former… I think that the partnership was a major factor in BG3’s success, but I expect it has more to do with the D&D brand and BG nostalgia, than any virtues of the 5E system. Maybe WotC’s contributions to worldbuilding and lore helped… Larian are of course good at that in their own right, but there’s a whole Forgotten Realms canon to navigate. (I don’t actually know what WotC contributed in that regard, mind you)

    In the case of the latter… The Divinity system is pretty heckin good, and in many ways a better CRPG system than any edition of D&D. Larian ARE experts at making really solid CRPGs, after all. The Divinity series is perhaps the most successful ever, maybe now behind BG3… So returning to their own IP would not be shooting themselves in the foot by any stretch, IMO. More like trading one kind of overwhelming success for a different kind of overwhelming success.






  • Design in your head a cabinet that can be designed and built within 30 minutes with no research or preparation, and build it. We will be watching over your shoulder, so please coherently describe your process as you figure out what it is.

    You wouldn’t have learned to do this at any previous workshop, so hopefully you’ve specifically practiced making this kind of shitty half-hour cabinet in preparation.


  • That sounds like a good plan in many situations… But how do you handle candidates who say something like “look, there’s heaps of code that I’m proud of and would love to walk you through, but it’s all work I’ve done for past companies and don’t have access (or the legal right) to show you?”

    You might just say “well the ideal candidate has meaningful projects outside of work,” and just eliminate the others… But it seems like you’d lose out on many otherwise great candidates that way.


  • Pretty questionable take IMO:

    The truth is, there are typically a bunch of good candidates that apply for a job. There are also not-so-great candidates. As long as a company hires one of the good ones, they don’t really care if they lose all the rest of the good ones. They just need to make sure they don’t hire one of the no-so-great ones.

    That’s actually a pretty bad thing. Like you could say the same thing about rejecting applicants who didn’t go to a certain set of schools, or submit a non-PDF resume, or who claims to have experince with a library/language that you don’t like (I had a colleague who said that he’d reject anyone with significant PHP experience because they probably learned “bad habits”) or any number of arbitrary filters.

    If “good at leetcode” was a decent proxy for “knows how to build and scale accessible web UIs” or whatever, then okay great… But it’s not, as the author admits in the conclusion:

    Coding interviews are far from perfect. They’re a terrible simulation of actual working conditions. They favor individuals who have time to do the prep work (e.g., grind leetcode). They’re subject to myriad biases of the interviewer. But there’s a reason companies still use them: they’re effective in minimizing hiring risk for the company. And to them, that’s the ball game.

    So it’s unclear to me what they mean by “effective.” Are they good at evaluating how good a candidate will be at the job? No. Are they good at identifying talent that hiring teams might otherwise overlook? No. They are good at “minimizing hiring risk” by setting up another arbitrary hoop to jump through.

    Let’s just call a spade a spade and admit that our hiring processes are so bad at evaluating talent that we settle for making candidates “audition” to prove that they can code at all, and then decide based on whatever entrenched biases we’ve decided constitute “culture fit.” Then the title could be “Coding interviews are the most effective tool we have, and that’s kind of a disaster.”

    Thank you for reading my rant. I am available for podcasts and motivational speaking appearances.