Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

I am doing neither of those things. I said it was tempting, because it puts things I've read about G-WAN into perspective (the claims I saw some time back when I was shown a heads-up versus nginx were questionable, and it's an interesting data point). That's why it's an unrelated addendum, and it's completely unrelated to the blog post at all.

I have no desire to discredit someone I have never met and whose name I do not know, much like I have no desire to have my intentions explained to me by a Hacker News commenter. I wrote, quite clearly, that I wasn't doing something. To directly assert that I am in fact doing that thing and then ascribe further malice to it is to challenge my honesty and integrity, and I'd appreciate if you'd not do that in the future because you've never met me and know nothing about me.

There is an interpretation of my first bullet that would support your conclusion, but I only put down my first bullet to establish relevance in the comment, not to connect the two things.

I never said anything about your integrity but you inferred from my comment just like others will do from yours.

The difference is the individual you're disparaging is a real person with a reputation. You, like me, are a throw away account on a message board. You have no integrity because you have no identity.

I wouldn't call an account almost three years old a "throwaway" anymore.

Underwrite his mortgage and ask him to be the godfather of your firstborn.

Looks like he really did hit a sore nerve.

Do you really think there's no such thing as a simple observation without intent? I'm not allowed to find it odd that a Web site about a Web server operated by the same Web server went down under a Web load, and remark upon it yet stop short of drawing or stating a conclusion because I don't have all the facts? How many times do I have to say that I have no intent, here? Apply Occam and cui bono. I don't even bloody know who the person is. What is my incentive to disparage him or her? What do I gain from that? Why would I resort to questionable, politically-charged rhetoric to tear someone down who I literally didn't know existed four hours ago? Is it really more likely that I'm out to get him or her?

Maybe the datacenter burned to the ground. I don't know everything so I'm not going to conclude what's happened, just that I find it odd it's been hard down for several hours now. It's interesting, and it's oddly characteristic of this community to infer that I have malicious intent simply for observing something and finding it interesting.

There are many unkind interpretations of the blog post and I felt I did a pretty good job with restraint in the section even before the additional addendum. I didn't have a lot of sympathy. I didn't accuse the author of lying, or making shit up, or any sort of malicious behavior even before the evil addendum that everybody hates (and many, many non-gray comments nearby have done just that). Why would I suddenly change gears and attempt to destroy a reputation?

I am aware people are inundated with rhetoric like this in several forms of media due to the current political climate and other factors, but Jesus, people really need to put their knives away and start challenging their assumptions of the worst in people or we are all royally fucked. That's letting the rhetorical climate win. Occam: I'm a shady person not-so-subtly and rather hamfistedly deploying rhetorical tactics to destroy someone's reputation simply for blogging about the Google interview process, or I'm just a random dude typing things as I find them interesting. Your pick.

The repeated charge that I am somehow disparaging and discrediting an individual was my clue that I should probably disengage. I probably should have worded the first bullet differently, in hindsight, but still.

>The difference is the individual you're disparaging is a real person with a reputation.

So? If the criticism is invalid, then it's inoffensive. If it's valid, it's deserved.

False I think.

Invalid criticism posted on the Internet or spoken out loudly might very well negatively affect someones life even if they don't personally care.

Well, the problem here is apparently one of human relations. You are absolutely, 100% remiss to expect that, when you state "it is tempting to draw that conclusion," that you are actually stopping short of drawing that conclusion. It's as bad a communication mistake as expecting Quicksort to perform well in all cases is - which is to say it simply does not conform to reality.

Raising the possibility of the accusation and defining the basis for raising the accusation are, for almost all intents and purposes, exactly the same as simple raising the accusation, especially in an internet forum, where nuance, body language, and tone are absent.

Thus, you really didn't avoid actually disparaging or discrediting this person there - instead, you attempted it via an obtuse use of a 'sneaky' method, and you bear deserved downvotes for doing so. If that was not your intent, you may look on this experience as a bug - the language you used did not communicate your intent to your discussion partners. It's almost always valuable to gain a deeper understanding of the functions you're using, though, whether they're from English or C++! Have a great day, and talk to you some other time! :)

You tell that to anyone who has ever been falsely accused of anything, and ask them if the invalidity of the accusation led to the experience of being accused, questioned, tried, and then found innocent being describable with the word "inoffensive."

(Then multiply whatever result you get from that by the propensity of the internet to hear an accusation and judge it to be true WITHOUT actually researching it/'putting it on trial', so to speak, and post your answer here, I'm sure it will make for fascinating reading! ;) )

See, now, the thing is, Occam's razor would, when you use my experience on the internet to train it as a heuristic, absolutely, 100% tell me that you were being a mean, stupid, malicious sack of excrement in this case, because ALL of the reasons you state re: "What reason would I have to destroy this person's reputation?" are ones I've heard time and time again as excuses from someone who turned out to be a troll who was destroying somebody for fun.

And that is the baseline Occam on the internet: the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions is that the person on the other end is a troll who is destroying someone or something because destroying things is fun. Nobody needs any reason, on the internet, to want someone to go down in flames. Seriously, I have to make many more assumptions to assume good faith on your part than otherwise - the only reason I would bother applying another heuristic, that is, not to attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, would be because it isn't worth the skin I'll lose off my typing fingers to engage you. You seem interesting and worth engaging, which I why I'd tell you things like, "raising an accusation is functionally similar to making the accusation."

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12704822 and marked it off-topic.

Please don't take any more HN threads into tangents of drama. I know it's annoying to be accused of something you don't feel you did, but this subthread is the kind of noise we all need to avoid here.