Month: September 2018

Reading 05: Chelsea Manning

 

As a committed American, I was and still am startled by the blatant disregard for US National Security that Chelsea Manning displayed with her decision to leak top secret data to WikiLeaks.  While I am certainly not of the opinion that whistleblowing is always immoral, I believe that in this specific case, Manning was definitely in the wrong. Furthermore, I find her confession at her court-martial that she did not mean to put anyone at risk and had been “dealing with a lot of issues” when she decided to make the leaks to be a terrible excuse.  Regardless of her intentions or whatever issues she was going through related to her gender dysphoria, the effects of her actions were the same – she compromised the safety of Americans and foreign collaborators who were listed in the leaked documents.  Such an action is an egregious offense against the interests of the United States and should certainly be punished.

 

Those who defend Chelsea Manning typically fall into two camps, one of which has a much more rational position than the other.  The first camp justifies her actions based mostly on her status as a transgender woman forced to live in the macho environment of the US Military.  This position is absurd for the reasons I have already stated. Just because Manning faced significant personal doubts and hardship, it is not okay for her to lash out and endanger the lives of Americans and American collaborators.  I certainly do not want to diminish Manning’s struggle, but simply being a transgender does not give one the privilege to blatantly break the law.

 

The second pro-Manning camp has a stronger position.  They argue that the shocking content in some of Manning’s leaks made her decision the morally correct thing to do.  Regarding with some of the content she leaked, I think (but am still not 100% sure) that I agree with this position.  The leak of the videos of the 2007 Baghdad helicopter strike and the 2009 Afghanistan Garani air strike, both of which killed innocent civilians, could potentially be justified in an effort to keep the public informed of US Military actions and thus hold it accountable for such horrors.  However, these leaks went much further, and Manning seemed to place no filter whatsoever on what she released.  Manning released a trove of more than a quarter of a million documents. There is absolutely no way that she actually read through these documents, and her failure to do so shows a complete lack of responsibility.  If Manning had just found and released a few documents she felt the public deserved to see, then her actions could potentially have been justified, but the fact that she just unleashed a trove without reviewing it removes any possibility that she did the right thing, even if it turns out there was no threatening information in the leaks.  The fact that the Obama administration was scrambling to protect many people threatened by the info in the leaks going public only makes things worse.

Reading04: Codes of Conduct and James Damore

Personally, I feel like the question of whether codes of conduct are necessary for companies is akin to asking whether laws are necessary for jurisdictions.  Just as laws should lay out a set of rules that citizens are expected to follow and the punishments associated with breaking them, codes of conduct should provide a set of expectations employees are expected to uphold and the consequences for failing to do so.  Such policies protect both companies and their employees by providing a written explanation of what behaviors are forbidden and precisely what will happen when violations occur, thus reducing the scale of potentially problematic gray areas.  This should comfort employees because it helps prevent arbitrary complaints from placing them in serious trouble given that the behavior was in line with the code.

 

However, the similarities between codes of conduct and laws do not just stop with their benefits.  Unfortunately, just as unjust laws can be enacted, unfair codes of conduct can be put in place.  Ideally, codes of conduct should include reasonable protections against violence and harassment without infringing on reasonable expression (and most do).  There do exist, however, some blatantly ridiculous codes of conduct that give all such codes a bad reputation.  For instance, the Geek Feminism Code of Conduct states “Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.”  While this may seem reasonable on the surface, it forbids some reasonable (and even some morally demanded) behaviors.  For instance, if someone on a message board stated that they needed a few hours before they would get back to work because they needed to shoot up heroin, it would be against the code of conduct to advise against this life-threatening behavior.  This sentiment is echoed in this anonymous anti-code of conduct blog(though I definitely do not agree with all its statements).  Thus, a code of conduct is only as good as its least reasonable requirement, and I believe that all codes of conduct should go through screening by a diverse set of individuals before enactment.

 

Before concluding, I wish switch gears and briefly discuss the controversial case of James Damore, the Google employee fired in August 2017 for an internal memo he circulated railing against the supposed ideological echo chamber existing at the tech giant.  Before any further discussion, it is important to note that Damore’s writing skills are exceptional.  This outstanding rhetoric allows him to relate even his most controversial ideas quite convincingly, so this is important to keep in mind.  That being said, I find most of his assessment to be a reasonable and even needed counterpoint in the liberal realm of Silicon Valley.  I particularly agree with his assessment that the conservative viewpoint has been silenced by political correctness.  I think a diversity of ideas is crucial, and such diversity is impossible if one side of the political spectrum is completely silenced.  However, where I think Damore went too far was his insistence that a major part of the gender gap in technology can be explained by biology. While I will allow that it is possible that certain psychological factors could predispose different genders to be more interested in certain fields, making blanket statements that suggest women as a whole are less suited to technology is both counterproductive and offensive.  So much more of the gender gap has been proven to come from environmental factors stemming from a child’s upbringing, that suggesting women are simply genetically less able to perform in a tech job is a dangerous idea.  Damore may be right that we shouldn’t necessarily strive for equality of representation, I feel it is absolutely essential to strive for an equality of opportunity and give any woman who wishes to enter the tech industry every chance to sharpen her skillset to make this possible.

 

Reading03: Immigration

In today’s hostile political climate, a rational debate about immigration is almost impossible to undertake.  This is an extremely unfortunate reality, as I believe the US immigration system is hopelessly broken and that such a rational debate is the only real way to fix it.  Regardless of what side of the debate one lies on, I think most would agree with my bleak assessment.  An immigration system that effectively allows millions to break the law without punishment is clearly not working.  Either the law should be changed to accommodate people here illegally or they should be prosecuted for violating the law.  Personally, I am in favor for some major changes to the permanent immigration laws, but my full position on this is beyond the scope of this blog.  Going forward, I will discuss my position on a program of legal immigration – the H1B visa.

H1B visas are meant to provide authorization for temporary employment in the United States for specialty workers.  In practice today, most of these workers are employed by the tech industry, with tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft being among the top users of the program.  While there are certainly many issues with the program (which I will go through), I first want to note that the worst thing we could possibly do on this issue as a country is to get rid of the H1B program entirely.  In the US, we have some of the best universities in the world, and these universities educate some extremely bright foreign students.  Equipping such students with incredibly valuable skillsets just to kick them out seems idiotic.  How could it possibly be advantageous for our country to simply train talent for our competitors?  Therefore, we should either keep (and probably expand) the H1B program in some form or disallow foreign students from studying here in the first place.  The second option would be devastating for academic collaboration and the exchange of ideas (and not to mention expensive for universities who rely on tuition from foreign students), so we should probably stick to the first.

That being said, the H1B visa program is far from perfect.  For one, it has been exploited by companies as a means for depressing wages.  Many companies have used the program to replace American workers with foreign H1B workers at lower salaries – something that is clearly not in the interests of skilled Americans.  Additionally, the random nature of the H1B lottery means that many deserving candidates are skipped over for these lower-wage “replacement” workers.  Replacing the lottery with some sort of Canadian-style point rating system and increasing the minimum salary for H1B recipients are probably two good places to start. I also believe that the program should be expanded by increasing the number of visas granted and making it easier for those on the visas to receive authorization for permanent (or at least long-term) residence.  This would help the US regain its competitive edge by discouraging the flight of talent elsewhere and encourage a continuation of the incredible innovation that our country has seen in the past several decades.

Reading02: My Interview Experience

Going into the fall of my Junior year, I was completely overwhelmed.  Not only did I have zero technical (and almost no behavioral) interview experience, but I had essentially no idea what I wanted to do.  All I knew is I wanted a job where I would be coding.  This combination led me to essentially go rogue in my application process and apply to no less than 116 companies in industries from consulting to tech to finance and cities across the country from San Fransisco to Chicago to Washington DC.  After going through this somewhat ridiculous wide-net search, I feel quite acquainted with the ins and outs of the technical interview process and feel am in a decent position to speak on its merits and shortcomings.  Throughout the process last year, I experienced my fair share of behavioral and other non-technical interviews, but for the purposes of this blog, I will focus mostly on technical interviews.

At most firms I applied to, the process went somewhat like the following.  First, I would submit my resume into the black hole that was an online application.  If I was lucky, I did some sort of networking with that company through Notre Dame, but for the most part, this was completely random.  Due to the disconnected nature of this slingshot approach, I knew my response rate would be pretty low, but that was okay with me.  When I actually did receive a response that wasn’t just a standard rejection, most companies would ask me to complete a coding test (or some other type of technical assessment) on HackerRank or some similar online provider.  These tests would typically consist of about three coding questions of varying difficulty, usually structured so that time is not a horrible issue.  Though questions here or there were sometimes difficult, I usually felt that these tests were mostly manageable.  I completely understand the need for companies to screen their applicants with something like this before actually talking to them, so I was totally fine with them.

If I passed the coding test, the next step was usually a phone interview that could either be technical, behavioral, or a mixture, and often involved using a shared screen for coding.  In my experience, these interviews varied wildly in quality.  The worst phone screen I had felt more like a grilling on obscure data structures questions than a test for whether I would be a good fit at the firm.  I simply do not understand why being able to answer unrelated brain teasers like the data structures questions I received is even a somewhat good indicator of whether I’d be a good fit.  On the other hand, the best (and one of the most difficult) phone interview I had entailed me debugging an error I had made in the coding test I took in my application while talking to the interviewer.  I found this to be a much better assessment of my technical abilities than your standard algorithm/data structure coding interview question (which are a pain to prepare for and I don’t think are great predictors of actual job performance).

After these phone screens, the process diverged substantially (and I didn’t get to see it through completely due to thankfully finishing up relatively quickly), but most companies’ final round interviews involved an actual visit to the office for in-person interviews.  I won’t discuss those in this post, but before concluding, I would like to mention one other innovative interview tactic I found useful.  One company asked me to complete a small coding project to fulfill a prompt very relevant to its actual business and gave me a week to do so.  This allowed me to tackle a programming project in the way that I normally would with a timeline that wasn’t too much of a burden for me while going through other interviews and normal schoolwork.  And on the company’s end, it gave them a clear view into my coding style and problem solving ability.  Though candidates could certainly cut corners with this interview approach, I think it is a much better screening tactic than your typical coding interview.

In conclusion, I believe that while traditional coding interviews aren’t necessarily useless, they are best used when supplemented with some of the more innovative approaches I have discussed in this blog.