> If your arm gets broken, you don't "suck it up" and say "that's life", you go to a doctor and get treated. It's no different when your brain gets broken.
People say this sort of thing a lot, but it strikes me as unhelpful. The stigma against seeking help for mental health exists and is real, whether you think it's absurd or not. And that stigma often exists in the very people who need help, so just saying "oh you're being silly" is super not empathetic. It's actually not that different from the founder you mention.
Furthermore, 5 separate doctors will all concur that my arm is broken. But they will not concur that I have schizophrenia, or borderline personality disorder, or whatever. There are a number of reasons why that is, but my point is that none of this is as cut-and-dried as a fracture -- not the diagnosis, not the treatment, not the patient's acceptance that something is wrong.
> "The stigma against seeking help for mental health exists and is real"
Not only is it a societal stigma, but it is nearly a form of accepted discrimination set in concrete.
Within the past year some states have been pushing to start collecting all mental health records. There are people who really who really do need to seek help, but actions like that will only make them afraid to come forward.
I agree. I've battled with all types of "mental problems" throughout my life and honestly, the poeple around me that cared accepted that I needed help well before I did.
I'm not a founder, just a techie with mild depressive tendencies. I think the advice to talk to someone when you feel it coming on is the best - if you talk to someone about the specific things bothering you, it can help avoid the scenario where the things loom so large in your mind that you can't get past them. Talking about problems somehow brings them back down to human scale and can help you realize how much you've built them up in your head. It's remarkable the number of times in my life that I have dreaded something that ended up being totally not that big a deal.
The first time I went to Mexico, I was excited to get a fresh coconut, a hole cut in the top with a machete and a straw inserted. It was much less refreshing than I expected, so I don't understand this trend.
I lived in Vietnam for about a year. On many major street corners, you could usually find someone selling coconuts. The vendor would pick up a fresh one, chop the top off with a machete, and insert a straw + spoon. While the quality varied, more often than not they were good. That said, it's definitely not a taste everyone will enjoy.
I've been back in the states since June. The coconut juice/drinks sold in the stores taste nothing like actual coconut juice. I'm not sure people would go as crazy over the real thing...but who knows.
Did you by any chance try it while on port/coastal/tropical town? I know not everybody likes it, but having grown up eating and drinking coconuts I love the stuff. And yes, the packaged water found in grocery stores here (U.S.) is not quite the same, but I do buy one by 365 (Whole Foods brand?) which is cheaper and IMO better that the alternatives found here.
Sometimes the coconut is not at the right point, so the water will no only not taste as sweet, but will also have an unusual taste, even bitter sometimes. Even though he shouldn't, the guy will still sell it to you, though.
Right. The point here is actually reducing the pool of candidates to those enthusiastic enough, and with enough time, to do projects in a way that fits the template this interviewer is looking for. I don't doubt they had success hiring people this way, rather the problem is in the false negatives as you point out.
I worked at a place that had people whose responsibility was the workflow, precisely so that developers could focus more on writing code. Then people started doing their own projects (good) so they wouldn't have to use .NET anymore (good) but they never took the time to get the workflow right (bad) and each new project worked slightly differently or was built on a completely new and different platform (bad) so now everyone has a more complicated workflow than they used to, and they're all different.
No automated testing, no CI, no reasonable way of deploying code and certainly no rollback, who has time for such frippery? I left.
It's part of an effort to move towards something called "combined engineering" and was started as a pilot in Bing. The basic idea is less testers, more devs. Devs take on more responsibility for testing, while at the same time getting more details about usage from customers in the wild... My understanding is that it's like A/B testing features - something Bing does a lot with "micro-flighting".
I hope this person is OK but that strikes me as unrealistic. Ageism is a real problem for software developers, but also that 15 years at MS could just as easily be viewed as a negative than a positive.
That 15 years of experience at one of the world's top software companies is seen is a negative disgusts me.
It seems disrespectful to judge an employee based on the negative perception of an entire company. For all the broken things within a company like Microsoft, I think it would be foolish to mark the company's talent pool as tainted.
Perhaps this reflects a subtler form of the fanboy-ism that exists in technology culture today. The sentiment is that companies we dislike must have incompetent employees. Competent employees would surely build a better product, right? Obviously this is naive.
Absolutely right, ageism plays into this as well. If you're hiring, keep in mind that, while fashionable, it is illegal to discriminate based on age. I wish this law was slightly easier to enforce.
People say this sort of thing a lot, but it strikes me as unhelpful. The stigma against seeking help for mental health exists and is real, whether you think it's absurd or not. And that stigma often exists in the very people who need help, so just saying "oh you're being silly" is super not empathetic. It's actually not that different from the founder you mention.
Furthermore, 5 separate doctors will all concur that my arm is broken. But they will not concur that I have schizophrenia, or borderline personality disorder, or whatever. There are a number of reasons why that is, but my point is that none of this is as cut-and-dried as a fracture -- not the diagnosis, not the treatment, not the patient's acceptance that something is wrong.