I have asked a simple question about reversing characters in a string in place (no copying to a new string). This is in C. If the candidate has trouble here it implies they will have many problems.
I'm wondering if I should just present some Obfuscated C Contest examples and see if the candidate can decipher them. Because this probably accurately describes the job of dealing with maintaining an old code based that started life in a startup.
I spend some amount of my time fixing bugs in third party libraries. I've even had to work around compiler bugs. When the customer is complaining you still have to fix it even if it's not your bug.
In my experience, such things are highly relevant to the job. The job involves coding, and we already have enough people who claim to be able to program but who are terrible at it, so we want someone who can do the coding without needing hand holding. This is surprisingly hard at times because most candidates are exagerating on their resumes. (and yes, I am speaking in terms of embedded systems)
Sample code is fine but you have zero confidence that the candidate actually wrote it. In my experience, I ask simple questions which surprisingly often cannot be answered by the candiate despite having a glowing resume.
So if I ask for a basic simple linked list example that anyone who's done any programming can do. If they say "I usually use a library for this" it means either they don't spend much time thinking about how things work and instead just plug together lego blocks, or that they'll be totally inadequate at debugging low level code which is a part of the job. A part of the job even involves debugging the third party libraries, you can't rely on them as perfectly built black boxes.
One big snag for C or C++ programmers is that so few entry level or junior programmers know it well. So you're forced to look to older workers, and they may not really be interested in spending part of their time doing basic programming.
Well, if you're highly skilled you can get a job in many many places where they won't recognize how great you are anyway and you'll be doing grunt jobs. And some people, especially when approaching retirement age, want a job like that. But if the job is going to be great then you should expect that they're going to try and make sure that the candidate is great also, and you can't do that merely by looking at a resume.
There's a shortage because the appropriately skilled people are above average in the first place, they're not the majority of applicants. And they're often just staying put with their current job.
Way back in the dark ages, pre Reagan, I took the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery tests. I had no intention of being in the military at all, but it was another of those periodic standardized tests that all of the students are expected to take in high school. Except it was a bit easier than most tests. Apparently I had a perfect or near perfect score on it. After that I got so many phone calls and mails from military recruiters who were all baffled that I didn't want to join, and the wandered why I bothered taking the test.
Often the very useful people get turned into management. Sometimes they can still program but it's such a time sync that they spend less and less time doing this. I was promoted to management and I honestly feel like I am so much less useful now, I'd much rather be programming as a team lead or mentor and let someone else do the bureaucratic stuff and attend the useless meetings.
The code monkey is generally the entry level job. You work your way up beyond that. But even at some senior levels you are still doing coding, especially if the team or company is not large. It's rare to just drop big boxes in an architecture diagram and then let junior people do the programming from there.
(possibly GUI is weird in this regard from listening to others in that many companies have a UX designer who never touches a computer and yet has strongly held views on how things must be done)
But if you don't like programming at all, then go into product or project management instead. Not wanting to code in a computing system job is like saying you don't like to do math when your job is a physicist.
I dunno, I didn't learn most of that stuff in college. I learned computer science and engineering instead:-) Most of that stuff is on-the-job training and experience.
Plus, you almost never get the good job your first time out. Entry level jobs are grunt jobs, it's the nature of the beast. In some overfunded startup they may make you senior director of designing cool stuff in your very first job, but in general you work your way up over time.
This is a part of the job. It makes sense to see if the candidate can handle the job. There are no jobs available where you can get by just programming Fizz-Buzz every day. If the candidate can't do the hard stuff then the candidate is not worth hiring.
In other words, find out if the candidate can pull their own weight. Sure, relax the standards for entry level hires, increase them for junior level, and be very picky for senior hires.
You misunderstand part of the interview process here. The candidates are almost always trying to deceive you. The goal is to find out if they are lying and what parts of their resume are accurate, and most importantly if they can do the job. It is far too common to have a candidate that seems to pass with flying colors and then utterly fail at the job. I've seen cases where in only one or two weeks it is clear that a mistake was made in hiring the person.
Now it's not always that way. In some companies I've been at everyone seemed competent, and in other places there were a lot of barely competent people, and some places were a mix. If you've never had to deal trying to decide if a candidate is actually good or merely doing a good job of acting, then you're lucky.
I've given one question that totally stumped the two people I gave it two before I stopped asking it. One was in a total panic and visibly sweating over it. All I wanted to see was how they approached the problem, but I think candidates really think that they must have the right answer (and I have often had interviewees ask me if they got the right answer or what the right answer was).
The thing was, at my previous job I was asking all sorts of hard questions and having them answered. Not super hard to be sure, but enough that you knew some thinking was going on. After that though my standards have declined because so many candidates were just awful. I suspect a problem with recruiting and HR screening and not being in as glamorous a field.
What surprises me that I will apologize for a question in advance saying "I know this is simple but I ask it of everyone" and then the candidates stumble and flail around. And the candidates are NOT newly graduated students, but people who claim to have a decade or more of embedded systems experience looking for a senior position and yet they can't answer the simplest questions. Ie, how to clear a bit in a word with C, it's something you do all the damn time in small embedded systems and even if you haven't done it you can figure it out quickly with basic binary logic. My standards at this point are that I won't have to be a remedial tutor for the candidate.
The thing is, you MUST ask the programming questions because most of the resumes are exaggerations or outright lies. People cannot program merely by going to google every time there's a new bug or task. I see candidates who claim big things on the resumes, citing what great project they worked on but in actuality they just fixed bugs in the logging mechanism.
The first Jessica Jones season seemed pretty original to me, and wasn't like Jessica Jones in the comics either. Of course, probably those superfans who've read every Marvel comic ever will claim it's just a rehash of a story already done (Simpson's did it!).
One of the more famous experiments was done to disprove a bet against a flat earther in England. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... The scientist was Alfred Russel Wallace, essentially the co-discoverer of evolution who was a bit naive in thinking that the flat earther would ever actually pay up when losing the bet.
No, these flat earthers with Youtube channels even do experiments. They're really bad experiements, but they do them. It's not just a sequence of ever louder denials.
And so there are indeed some Christians who feel this way. However I have a feeling that this may only be a minority of those calling themselves Christian.
The thing about Creationism is that it is just for a particular interpretation of the Christian Bible. None of these intelligent design researchers have claimed that the evidence points to the ancient Norse mythology to be the correct on, instead they claim the findings show that a literal reading of the Bible is accurate.
I visited a Creationism museum once. Maybe the last 1/3 of the displays were about ancient history, not creationism. The idea was to prove that ancient Egyptians really existed (a shocker, I know) and that they enslaved many Hebrews, just as the Bible said. It really was sort of disconcerting to see it turn into a basic history lesson. But the whole thing was all about how the Bible was right first and foremost. The "research" didn't really exist and instead was mostly counter explanations for various things, such as how the geological evidence didn't necessarily point to an ancient earth.
When I was a kid, my grandmother got me a few glossy books/pamphlets arguing against evolution from the Armstrong church (a big radio personality who started his own college). I liked those books, they talked about all sorts of strange animals like the platypus and the lungfish. However they did a terrible job of teaching against evolution because their arguments were so flat that even an eight year old could see through them ("this can't be true because the Bible says otherwise"). Instead they did get me very interested in biology:-)
Remember also for polio, quite a long time later than smallpox, research was funded by a large amount of funding from grants and foundations. This started the March of Dimes organization as well (originally a different name). Jonas Salk also did not patent the vaccine, he wasn't in it for the money.
The patents have expired on most of these medicines, no one should have a patent that lasts for eternity. Pharmaceutical companies have gone further and provided tweaks to medicines so that they can continue the patents and discouraging doctors from using (or knowing about) the drugs with expired patents.
Ie, they will add an ingredient to a drug with an expired patent that reduces a minor side effect that only a few patients experience. At which point the doctors will prescribe the new patented drug rather than seeking out the generic equivalent. The doctors rarely see the cost that the patients see, and they don't see the cost that insurance has to cover. So the doctors don't see the cost of the drugs, only that drug A has that extra ingredient that drug B doesn't have.
I would not shed a tear about pharmaceutical companies not making enough money. They make a ton of money from their patented drugs that they don't need to resort to shenanigans to try and extend the patent duration.
But is medicine even supposed to be a business model in the first place? Profit and loss should have no bearing in medicine. We're in a society now that puts way too much emphasis on money.
You know a lot of people freaked out and lost their marbles with Fallout 76, but I think this was completely overblown. It was essentially a multiplayer online game - not massively though so not fully MMO. Some of the stuff people complained about the most were standard things for MMOs, and other complaints boiled down to not meeting the player's self-created expectations. And yet despite all the pre-release griping about how awful it would be, people still bought it. Not even waiting to see what the reception would be, they would even pre-order the game. If I had that game for free, I would play it, but otherwise I just don't have time for a second MMO as that's a big time sink in itself. I watched some of the Youtube videos of people ranting about Fallout 76 and some are hilarious how freaked out the presenters are.
On the other hand, go to any MMO and you will find a set of players there or in the forums loudly proclaiming how their MMO is the worst game of all time. I think that showing up to gripe is a hobby of many players. As for Bethesda, Oblivion was called a horrible game because it wasn't like Morrowind, and Skyrim was a horrible game because it wasn't like Oblivion, and Fallout 3 was the worst game of all time because it wasn't made by Interplay, and Fallout 4 was horrible because it wasn't as good at Fallout 3, and so on. Really, this is just more people who are griping as their primary form of entertainment.
What I am saying is that *IF* the government is going to tax some entities, please tax corporations as your first priority and the residents as a second priority. If you want to argue to remove all taxes everywhere then that's a different argument unrelated to this thread.
Corporations don't exist to create jobs. If corporations could have zero workers they would happily get along with zero workers, that's the nature of the beast. Bending over backwards to give corporations everything they ask for because they promise a handful of jobs (that they won't deliver on) is a path to ruin. The problem is that we've gone away from politicians listening to the workers because they're the ones who vote and instead towards the corporations because they're the ones who bribe the politicians.
Irrelevant. The workers pay tax on their own earnings, they are not paying tax on behalf on Amazon. Corporations are not people, so why are you defending the absurd ideas that only citizens and residents should pay taxes but never a corporation?
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I have asked a simple question about reversing characters in a string in place (no copying to a new string). This is in C. If the candidate has trouble here it implies they will have many problems.
I'm wondering if I should just present some Obfuscated C Contest examples and see if the candidate can decipher them. Because this probably accurately describes the job of dealing with maintaining an old code based that started life in a startup.
I spend some amount of my time fixing bugs in third party libraries. I've even had to work around compiler bugs. When the customer is complaining you still have to fix it even if it's not your bug.
In my experience, such things are highly relevant to the job. The job involves coding, and we already have enough people who claim to be able to program but who are terrible at it, so we want someone who can do the coding without needing hand holding. This is surprisingly hard at times because most candidates are exagerating on their resumes. (and yes, I am speaking in terms of embedded systems)
Sample code is fine but you have zero confidence that the candidate actually wrote it. In my experience, I ask simple questions which surprisingly often cannot be answered by the candiate despite having a glowing resume.
So if I ask for a basic simple linked list example that anyone who's done any programming can do. If they say "I usually use a library for this" it means either they don't spend much time thinking about how things work and instead just plug together lego blocks, or that they'll be totally inadequate at debugging low level code which is a part of the job. A part of the job even involves debugging the third party libraries, you can't rely on them as perfectly built black boxes.
One big snag for C or C++ programmers is that so few entry level or junior programmers know it well. So you're forced to look to older workers, and they may not really be interested in spending part of their time doing basic programming.
Well, if you're highly skilled you can get a job in many many places where they won't recognize how great you are anyway and you'll be doing grunt jobs. And some people, especially when approaching retirement age, want a job like that. But if the job is going to be great then you should expect that they're going to try and make sure that the candidate is great also, and you can't do that merely by looking at a resume.
There's a shortage because the appropriately skilled people are above average in the first place, they're not the majority of applicants. And they're often just staying put with their current job.
Way back in the dark ages, pre Reagan, I took the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery tests. I had no intention of being in the military at all, but it was another of those periodic standardized tests that all of the students are expected to take in high school. Except it was a bit easier than most tests. Apparently I had a perfect or near perfect score on it. After that I got so many phone calls and mails from military recruiters who were all baffled that I didn't want to join, and the wandered why I bothered taking the test.
No, it'll be outsourced overseas, H1Bs are too expensive.
Often the very useful people get turned into management. Sometimes they can still program but it's such a time sync that they spend less and less time doing this. I was promoted to management and I honestly feel like I am so much less useful now, I'd much rather be programming as a team lead or mentor and let someone else do the bureaucratic stuff and attend the useless meetings.
The code monkey is generally the entry level job. You work your way up beyond that. But even at some senior levels you are still doing coding, especially if the team or company is not large. It's rare to just drop big boxes in an architecture diagram and then let junior people do the programming from there.
(possibly GUI is weird in this regard from listening to others in that many companies have a UX designer who never touches a computer and yet has strongly held views on how things must be done)
But if you don't like programming at all, then go into product or project management instead. Not wanting to code in a computing system job is like saying you don't like to do math when your job is a physicist.
I dunno, I didn't learn most of that stuff in college. I learned computer science and engineering instead :-) Most of that stuff is on-the-job training and experience.
Plus, you almost never get the good job your first time out. Entry level jobs are grunt jobs, it's the nature of the beast. In some overfunded startup they may make you senior director of designing cool stuff in your very first job, but in general you work your way up over time.
This is a part of the job. It makes sense to see if the candidate can handle the job. There are no jobs available where you can get by just programming Fizz-Buzz every day. If the candidate can't do the hard stuff then the candidate is not worth hiring.
In other words, find out if the candidate can pull their own weight. Sure, relax the standards for entry level hires, increase them for junior level, and be very picky for senior hires.
You misunderstand part of the interview process here. The candidates are almost always trying to deceive you. The goal is to find out if they are lying and what parts of their resume are accurate, and most importantly if they can do the job. It is far too common to have a candidate that seems to pass with flying colors and then utterly fail at the job. I've seen cases where in only one or two weeks it is clear that a mistake was made in hiring the person.
Now it's not always that way. In some companies I've been at everyone seemed competent, and in other places there were a lot of barely competent people, and some places were a mix. If you've never had to deal trying to decide if a candidate is actually good or merely doing a good job of acting, then you're lucky.
I've given one question that totally stumped the two people I gave it two before I stopped asking it. One was in a total panic and visibly sweating over it. All I wanted to see was how they approached the problem, but I think candidates really think that they must have the right answer (and I have often had interviewees ask me if they got the right answer or what the right answer was).
The thing was, at my previous job I was asking all sorts of hard questions and having them answered. Not super hard to be sure, but enough that you knew some thinking was going on. After that though my standards have declined because so many candidates were just awful. I suspect a problem with recruiting and HR screening and not being in as glamorous a field.
What surprises me that I will apologize for a question in advance saying "I know this is simple but I ask it of everyone" and then the candidates stumble and flail around. And the candidates are NOT newly graduated students, but people who claim to have a decade or more of embedded systems experience looking for a senior position and yet they can't answer the simplest questions. Ie, how to clear a bit in a word with C, it's something you do all the damn time in small embedded systems and even if you haven't done it you can figure it out quickly with basic binary logic. My standards at this point are that I won't have to be a remedial tutor for the candidate.
The thing is, you MUST ask the programming questions because most of the resumes are exaggerations or outright lies. People cannot program merely by going to google every time there's a new bug or task. I see candidates who claim big things on the resumes, citing what great project they worked on but in actuality they just fixed bugs in the logging mechanism.
The first Jessica Jones season seemed pretty original to me, and wasn't like Jessica Jones in the comics either. Of course, probably those superfans who've read every Marvel comic ever will claim it's just a rehash of a story already done (Simpson's did it!).
One of the more famous experiments was done to disprove a bet against a flat earther in England. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... The scientist was Alfred Russel Wallace, essentially the co-discoverer of evolution who was a bit naive in thinking that the flat earther would ever actually pay up when losing the bet.
No, these flat earthers with Youtube channels even do experiments. They're really bad experiements, but they do them. It's not just a sequence of ever louder denials.
I've pretended to be an idiot for so long that even I believe it!
And so there are indeed some Christians who feel this way. However I have a feeling that this may only be a minority of those calling themselves Christian.
The thing about Creationism is that it is just for a particular interpretation of the Christian Bible. None of these intelligent design researchers have claimed that the evidence points to the ancient Norse mythology to be the correct on, instead they claim the findings show that a literal reading of the Bible is accurate.
I visited a Creationism museum once. Maybe the last 1/3 of the displays were about ancient history, not creationism. The idea was to prove that ancient Egyptians really existed (a shocker, I know) and that they enslaved many Hebrews, just as the Bible said. It really was sort of disconcerting to see it turn into a basic history lesson. But the whole thing was all about how the Bible was right first and foremost. The "research" didn't really exist and instead was mostly counter explanations for various things, such as how the geological evidence didn't necessarily point to an ancient earth.
When I was a kid, my grandmother got me a few glossy books/pamphlets arguing against evolution from the Armstrong church (a big radio personality who started his own college). I liked those books, they talked about all sorts of strange animals like the platypus and the lungfish. However they did a terrible job of teaching against evolution because their arguments were so flat that even an eight year old could see through them ("this can't be true because the Bible says otherwise"). Instead they did get me very interested in biology :-)
Remember also for polio, quite a long time later than smallpox, research was funded by a large amount of funding from grants and foundations. This started the March of Dimes organization as well (originally a different name). Jonas Salk also did not patent the vaccine, he wasn't in it for the money.
The patents have expired on most of these medicines, no one should have a patent that lasts for eternity. Pharmaceutical companies have gone further and provided tweaks to medicines so that they can continue the patents and discouraging doctors from using (or knowing about) the drugs with expired patents.
Ie, they will add an ingredient to a drug with an expired patent that reduces a minor side effect that only a few patients experience. At which point the doctors will prescribe the new patented drug rather than seeking out the generic equivalent. The doctors rarely see the cost that the patients see, and they don't see the cost that insurance has to cover. So the doctors don't see the cost of the drugs, only that drug A has that extra ingredient that drug B doesn't have.
I would not shed a tear about pharmaceutical companies not making enough money. They make a ton of money from their patented drugs that they don't need to resort to shenanigans to try and extend the patent duration.
But is medicine even supposed to be a business model in the first place? Profit and loss should have no bearing in medicine. We're in a society now that puts way too much emphasis on money.
You know a lot of people freaked out and lost their marbles with Fallout 76, but I think this was completely overblown. It was essentially a multiplayer online game - not massively though so not fully MMO. Some of the stuff people complained about the most were standard things for MMOs, and other complaints boiled down to not meeting the player's self-created expectations. And yet despite all the pre-release griping about how awful it would be, people still bought it. Not even waiting to see what the reception would be, they would even pre-order the game. If I had that game for free, I would play it, but otherwise I just don't have time for a second MMO as that's a big time sink in itself. I watched some of the Youtube videos of people ranting about Fallout 76 and some are hilarious how freaked out the presenters are.
On the other hand, go to any MMO and you will find a set of players there or in the forums loudly proclaiming how their MMO is the worst game of all time. I think that showing up to gripe is a hobby of many players. As for Bethesda, Oblivion was called a horrible game because it wasn't like Morrowind, and Skyrim was a horrible game because it wasn't like Oblivion, and Fallout 3 was the worst game of all time because it wasn't made by Interplay, and Fallout 4 was horrible because it wasn't as good at Fallout 3, and so on. Really, this is just more people who are griping as their primary form of entertainment.
Has EA ever had a good game?
What I am saying is that *IF* the government is going to tax some entities, please tax corporations as your first priority and the residents as a second priority. If you want to argue to remove all taxes everywhere then that's a different argument unrelated to this thread.
Corporations don't exist to create jobs. If corporations could have zero workers they would happily get along with zero workers, that's the nature of the beast. Bending over backwards to give corporations everything they ask for because they promise a handful of jobs (that they won't deliver on) is a path to ruin. The problem is that we've gone away from politicians listening to the workers because they're the ones who vote and instead towards the corporations because they're the ones who bribe the politicians.
Irrelevant. The workers pay tax on their own earnings, they are not paying tax on behalf on Amazon. Corporations are not people, so why are you defending the absurd ideas that only citizens and residents should pay taxes but never a corporation?