It reminds me of early 20th century footage of barnstorming aircraft inventors. Now it's just Boeing and Airbus and precious little in the way of real innovation.
I think it was the fall in oil prices in the late 70s/early 80s - combined with a ruinous invasion of Afghanistan - that finally did in the Soviet Union economically. Putin should take note.
Otherwise - despite the appalling human cost of projects such as the White Sea Canal and farm collectivisation - the USSR did indeed become a global power if only for a short period. Red Plenty [1] is an excellent book on the subject.
Typically deployment is a "solve-once" problem, even if you don't use docker. You set up chef, puppet, ansible or fabric to handle deployment, installs, database migrations and so on, and tweak as needed.
Of course that may not be the case if you have some kind of commodity service you have to install in lots of different environments, such as Wordpress.
Hiring right now is a shitshow of old wives' tales, cargo-culted practices from big name tech companies, shady recruiters, mismatched incentives, interviewers who have no experience or training in interviewing, gimmicky apps trying to somehow gamify technical interviewing and endless whining back and forth on HN and Medium.
I'm sure a lot of developers who are currently employed are put off applying elsewhere because the whole process has become so demanding and unpleasant and disrespectful.
One company I applied to for example asked to do a take-home test, maybe 2 hours. I did the test, only to be told it was the first stage of a long and gruelling process involving a further 8 hour take-home project (unpaid, of course) followed my several rounds of technical and non-technical interviews. I immediately withdrew my application. When would I have the time to do 8 hours - it was timed for some bizarre reason, so it had to be done in a single block of time - on a project? Maybe for my own projects, sure, but that's my spare time.
Interviewers and recruiters are, after all, being paid to sit there, while interviewees are - unless they're unemployed - taking precious time off to travel, maybe stay overnight in a hotel, sit through hours of gruelling interviews and tests, all for a job that may or may not offer anything much better than what they've already got. And yet the penny hasn't yet dropped that maybe your shitty process is the reason you haven't found anyone yet?
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm convinced that it wasn't this bad 5 or 10 years ago - maybe if you were interviewing at Google or Microsoft, but not if you were applying for a bog standard dev role at a startup or SME.
Nailed it. :)
Recruiting is now based on some unproven theories that companies utilize as if they were the 10 commandments. Written by some nontechnical MBAs.
We should unite together and form an organization that blacklists companies with incompetent hiring practices. :)
In tests like this you make it clear what's allowed - "use the standard library, no external dependencies" etc. Because in a normal working situation, his solution is perfectly valid.
If I were interviewing him it certainly wouldn't be a dealbreaker. I'd probably want to discuss more about pros and cons of in-house vs using libraries, because you tend to find out more about the skills and qualities of a developer from human conversation than scribbling on a whiteboard.
How do I know that? What is the interviewer looking for?
Maybe in company A they are looking for developers who come up with a solution on their own and don't rely on external libraries or Google. Maybe company B don't like developers reinventing wheels and prefer they at least research prior art first.
I don't know what kind of culture your company has, but at the very least out of courtesy you can signal what the requirements are in your test.
Interviews like this are a two-way thing. In this case, I'd pick up the vibe that this was a company cursed with NIH and withdraw my application (unless I was desperate for a job or some other overriding factor, of course).
Technical interviews (much as I hate the whiteboarding bullshit) do give some insight to the interviewee about the kind of work and codebase they'll be dealing with - like the time an interviewer told me "We're really enthusiastic about MongoDB!" - OK, thanks for the coffee, I'll see myself out....
Are people using React starter kits? The major issue I'd see with React at hackathons is the large amount of configuration you typically need to do before you get started. I dislike starter kits due to the additional complexity overhead, but I can imagine for a throwaway project they'd be fine.
I actually wonder what the correlation is between PHP use and MongoDB use. They both have an attitude that mistakes ease with simplicity, a philosophy that puts correctness way down the priority list, and an easy introduction with a heavy ongoing maintenance tax.
