As mentioned previously, the NYC Link kiosks have been posting NYC quotes and provided a pointer to E.B. White’s travel guide to NYC. At the time of the writing, White had left New York for Maine where he had set up a bucolic existence. He returned to the city during a heat wave and, in a vein similar to Steinbeck, had occasion to reflect on what had happened to the town where he’d cut his teeth.

What’s left is a reflection on the bliss and indignities of New York life. It is always, and ever was, the agony and the ecstasy, all the time. Every line is a gem. White’s gift for laconic, efficient text is on full display here. I highly recommend reading through the notes for some solid laugh-out-loud takes on the magic, majesty, mystery, and sweaty crowdedness of NYC.

And, should you be on a flight into Our Fair Town any time soon, load this bit of reading up for the flight. It will fill you with the excitement and expectation that only Gotham knows how to provide.

While I always include my notes as JSON, I’ve extracted these lines out for easier enjoyment after the jump.

When we were looking to figure out what breed of dog to buy, poodles were a possibility, and I saw several references to Charley, the traveling dog from the John Steinbeck book. While I’d been compelled to read Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men by the educational system of Texas many years before, I had never heard of this book. Years on from reading the title, and years on into poodle ownership, I thought I’d take a listen.

I have some real qualms about hiring in the technical professions.

What does it say about this industry that it interviews people by asking them to code contrived, arbitrary gimmick questions like the following on a whiteboard:

Given a 10 by 10 array of letter tiles with Scrabble &tm; values, what’s the highest-valued word we can generate from seven touching tiles”

while those who pass this winnowing blade, after hire, are the ones that are storing passwords in an unencrypted state.

There’s a cynical calculus in filtering for false positives in this fashion. I think that this process is prone to the “like me” bias and is rejecting many people who don’t match the dominant paradigm. It’s probably also part of what keeps the sector so non-diverse.

I think there’s a better way and it involves transparency and clarity.

While I’m not hiring for an engineering team, the idea of being more clear and transparent has a lot of resonance for my team which still has a strong technical component. I’m trying this out for my next hire at The Flatiron School.

I think if we transparently offer the following, we’ll set a groundwork of productive, fruitful discussions and ensure respect and humanity throughout the entire process.

1. Tell what you expect
2. Expect what you tell
3. Tell them what to expect

More on this after the jump.