Sweden is almost entirely cashless; cash is about to go extinct. :/
Just the last few months, however, the the powers to be (the elected government) have chosen to tell the population that this could be problematic if there was an extended power outage because of some vague reason. (We all know it would be Russians, though.)
Incidentally, the Swedish Riksbank repo rate is -0.25%.
Wow. That's newbie behavior. By now 99% of "legitimate spammers" have realized that it's in their interest to make unsubscription at most a two click operation. The best make it a one click operation. Otherwise you get threads like these...
This was always my theory. It would also explain some of the crazy religiousness in the US, and the atheism in Sweden.
Essentially:
In the mid 1800s there were two reasons for Swedes to emigrate to America. And out of popultion of four million people, one million did emigrate.
The two reasons:
a) starvation - this triggered the smart individualists to migrate to the US (in my mind, these are the ones that has helped fueled the US to a super power over the years)
b) religious persecution - loads of super religious people from various christian sects migrated to the US because of the higher degree of religious freedom over there (in my mind, these people are a big reason for why your politics are so broken)
I just can't shake the feeling that people like this guy just enjoy solving intellectually and estetically challenging puzzles more than solving actual problems in an efficent and (in terms of recruiment) scalable and maintainable way.
I really can relate to why this happens, but at the same time.. there are clear downsides towards employing a person like that if you're actually trying to build a company/product and solve a problem.
These calls were answered by Swedish-speaking people in Thailand.
Their business idea was to handle calls that were placed in inconvenient hours, relative to Swedish business hours.
My best guess is that the Thai ISP this office used filtered all outgoing connections except port 80 and 443.
And then someone decided that the way to implement this securely while still allowing this office to access the data was to put a plain HTTP server on port 443. "Who is ever going to crack that?"
A while ago we had a job applicant who had travelled very far and long to reach us. (literally from the other side of the world.)
So, as a courtesy we figured, why not spend a few hours extra with this applicant in the programming test. We set up a laptop with a clean Ubuntu install, devised a programming test that was quite involved. Not algorithmic hard, just more complex than what can normally be done within a 20-minute whiteboard interview. We expected it to take at least 2-3 hours. Google/Stack overflow/etc access was allowed and encouraged. "Just act as like you would normally do when solving a problem."
We spent like 2x4 hours devising this problem, based on our codebase (cutting out something somewhat easily digestible and making it able to run standalone).
It took like one hour to get productive. Explaining the problem, setting up editors, compilers, etc.
We took turns, but most of the time someone in the interview team (of two) sat next to the guy. We did give him some alone time.
This is probably nothing new in terms of interviewing techniques, but to us it was such a revelation. We learned so much more about the applicant. Perhaps it worked well with this guy because he happened to be a bit more outgoing than our typical successful applicant. We'd never felt so confident about giving someone an offer before.
I'm really looking forward towards testing out this approach with local candidates to see if we can replicate this "data gathering success".
This seems misguided. I always thought the primary concept of baristas was to make it socially acceptable to pay someone a few dollars in order to have a brief social experience with them.
I think it's an IQ-based problem. That's hard to solve.
I get the feeling that the IQ of the average developer is dropping by the month. The software industry is growing at very high rates, requiring more and more developers. There are only so many smart people.