So you're saying the government that ignores the people has a soft spot for hippies protesting nuclear power? I don't buy it...
The government doesn't ignore the people. This is still vaguely a democracy so public support is required. Working against the interests of the people is done through hiding the existence of the effort or deceiving the public into believing that it is a good and/or necessary thing. A large enough and vocal enough movement is, for a politician, an opportunity to gain or lose power. No politician will ignore that. The first action may be to step up the misdirection efforts but the movement's desires will be addressed. Whether the movement's aims make any sense has little bearing. The anti-nuclear movement is and remains too large to ignore and too entrenched to misdirect so they often get their way to the determent of saner voices.
A surfer paddling on the surface is back lit by the sun. A shadow against the sun is going to appear black no matter what color the suit.
This isn't a problem for scuba diving. However, shark attacks on scuba divers are quite rare even without special wet suits. Sharks' MO is to watch for seals near the surface and lunge upward to catch them. Scuba divers don't linger on the surface and under water they don't look anything like seals.
A cursory look at the Wikipedia article indicates that Egypt has spent time under the rule of a few empires here and there over history, but it and Greece have both been their own societies for several thousand years in spite of this. I figure that both countries are closer to the age of China than they're listed...but that's just me.
But China is wrong too. The Ming Dynasty was conquered by the Manchu Empire in 1644 which gradually morphed into the Qing Dynasty. So no more than 369 years.
China before 1950 did not include Tibet.
It could even be argued that modern China's sovereignty was not recognized until 1971 when the UN recognized the PRC as the legitimate ruler of China.
Why doesn't your asshole friend give his employees health coverage in the first place? If he had, he wouldn't have a problem now.
Because he couldn't afford to be in business at all if he were to offer coverage. He's a cash flow business, as are all functional small businesses that aren't someone's spouses hobby funded by the other spouse. He's literally two payrolls from going out of business due to the current regulatory environment for small businesses being dictated by large businesses to lobbyists and thence to the congressmen that the big businesses own. Big business does not like competition.
So, in other words your friend runs a barely viable business that can not survive another economic head wind no matter where it comes from. He is probably going out of business soon anyway but he wants to score political points by blaming it on Obamacare.
Intel *is* a foundry. They make chips for third parties. They have a whole "Intel Custom Foundry" division dedicated to this. They make chips for Cisco, Netronome, Altera, etc. Some of those chips even have ARM processors.
Intel is inching into the foundry business. They are *not* making chips for Altera. They have a deal with Altera to make chips at 14nm but Intel doesn't even have a production 14nm process yet. The Cisco deal was only signed in January. No word on when they expect to ship. Their shipping customers (Achronix, Tabula, Netronome) are all startups with limited volumes. Apple needs huge volume. I don't think Intel is ready for that yet.
For example, wouldn't it be preferable for Saudi Arabia and Syria and Egypt to be out of natural resources in 50 years, but the socially-compassionate countries still have theirs?
Yes, because those areas aren't volatile enough yet, we need to have them energy-starved (and likely literally starving) as well, while we Westerners continue to enjoy our remaining energy reserves in front of them. If you think they generate too many terrorists now, just wait for real desperation to set in. You're going to need all those oil reserves for defense...
Quite the contrary. Terrorism is expensive business. Extremists need weapons, ammunition, and training. They also need food, clothing and shelter in difficult to supply areas because they are obviously not working for a living. Right now those bills are paid by us via the the petrol-dollars we send to the Middle East. When that spigot dries up, the Middle East will still be volatile but it won't really effect us much since they won't have the resources to wage war on a large scale and we will lack the motivation to mess around in their world. Sort of like Africa: sad, disheartening even but not really threatening.
Based on my experience (YMMV), corporations love consistency. Their recruiters are uncomfortable with varied background, because they don't think outside the box and don't understand that a person can do more than just the same thing for the entirety of their lives.
My advice: aim for startups. They're looking for skills rather than a consistent, tidy work background.
Unfortunately, hardware startups (the kind that would hire an electrical engineer) are scarce these days. There's also the problem that large companies look for experience with other large successful companies so choosing the startup route prematurely can bring difficulty later.,
So then what's the story? The US government has been making noise about banning Chinese gear for a while. Reciprocation is entirely fair.
Reciprocation is entirely fair by definition. However, that doesn't make it reasonable or productive. If China doesn't want to buy Cisco gear it should be because of actual concerns about Cisco gear, not as retalation for the US not buying Huawai gear. That path leads only to deadlock or agreement to mutually ignore the problem.
I always thought it was a rule from Espionage 101 that you don't let the other side know when your side has been compromised. You use it as an opportunity to start sending out false information, and to learn their tactics and precisely who is involved.>/p>
I don't understand why we are telling everyone in the world that the Chinese have stolen our information. It just makes us look inept in all sorts of ways.
Probably because all the useful counter-espionage plays have been done. Now the biggest payoff is from using the information for political leverage.
You don't? Well, OK, they aren't made by Tesla but electric buses have been running in San Francsico for decades. Neat thing about buses: they run a set route so you can power them from overhead wires and not even have to carry batteries. Hybrid buses are common in the South Bay, where densities do not support the infrastructure for electric buses.
Buses are generally way ahead of private cars in terms of propulsive technology. A lot of buses around here run on compressed natural gas. A decade ago there were buses (in Toronto, I think) that used fly wheels as a form of regenerative braking.
If you steal billions and proceed to give that away, you should go to jail.
If you earn billions through a successful business and then proceed to give that away, then yes, you should be held in awe.
Out of interest, what percentage of your total lifetime earnings have you committed to giving to charity?
The relevant question would be what be what percentage beyond that required for a comfortable existence have you committed to give to charity. The saints give over 100%. They live in poverty so that others may live better. Bill Gates is able to give a large percentage of his total income to charity because his has far far more than he needs. What remains after his charitable donations is still much more than most of us here can hope to earn.
Where they can use their authority to force everyone else to use obsolete and "considered harmful" methods as policy because it needs to be done that way so they can still understand it.
No that I've ever had to deal with this situation.....
Please notice very few small locally owned booksellers have gone out of business recently. Books are apparently a business where small companies do quite well.
When is recently? Keep in mind that when a locally owned bookstore closes, it doesn't usually make the national news. Palo Alto has lost two. Stanford Books Store doesn't operate Downtown any more either so maybe that is three. Adjacent Menlo Park has only managed to save Kepler's through extraordinary measures. Now, I don't think any of these events occurred within the last two years but there weren't that many book stores to start with.
True, and Usenet could be handy. But basically it became a spam forest, and you'd have to wade thru 200 spam emails for one on the topic. Maybe if they would have developed filters for it, it could have gone on further.
No, it didn't. Spam was a big issue for a while but server side spam filters like cleanfeed and distributed systems like nocem became very sophisticated and effective. Unlike email filters, Usenet filters have the advantage in being able to see *all* the destinations. If an article that appeared in more than a handful of groups was quickly squashed. Spam never entirely went away but it well under control long before the decline of Usenet.
There were also efforts like Usenet2 that created a network of trusted servers who would keep spam out. It worked fairly well but interest waned initially because the spam problem was effectively controlled in regular Usenet but even more so as total volume declined and the Usenet2 corner became too thinly populated to be of much use.
Now there is still the problem of idiots posting things in inappropriate places but that's a problem of moderation, something Usenet never did well. (Usenet *did* have moderated groups but it drastically slowed conversation and did not scale well)
I still run a small news server. Spam is only a "problem" is groups where the posting volume has dropped near zero and spam is all that is left. A bigger problem is that I keep losing peers as people give up and shutdown thier servers.
I think he's right. Have you noticed that phones are getting bigger and tablets are getting smaller? I think phones are about to eat tablets in the same way they ate other stand along devices. People don't want two devices. They want one.
Ah come on, what sort of a relationship do you have with your family if you can't play a little prank on them from time to time.
Probably the kind where the parents can not entirely dismiss the notion that their child may be doing something quite serious that they don't know about. In other words: virtually every parent of a teenager who is honest with themselves.
I've had a couple of cases where I needed a feature, that there had been lots of requests for, in existing software whose development had slowed or stopped. I offered to hire the developer, bounty style, but they weren't interested.
I hired professional programmers to add the feature or make necessary changes to the existing code. I then submitted the code as patches to the original developer, hoping that he would accept the patches and make it so I didn't have to patch and compile everytime there was an update or distro change. My patches were always GPL and there were no restrictions on them, so if the developer didn't like the style or specific implementation, they could use my patch as a starting point or model and change whatever they chose.
In all cases, the developers have not incorporated the patch. In most cases, they have done nothing at all. I'd likely have been better off just buying Windows COTS.
Have their been any updates at all since you submitted your patch? If not and the time period is long enough to believe there never will be, then your best course of action is to fork. As one with enough vested in the project to pay for further development, you are probably in a better position to steward the project than the original developers, who likely have no more use for the program.
If there have been updates, then you have a more sticky position. Most likely, the maintainers considered your patches to be too narrowly applicable at least relative the difficulty required to integrate and maintain them. At that point, you are pretty much stuck re-integrating your patches with each release.
Windows COTS wouldn't necessarily solve your problem either. It just takes away the option to patch your own. If the company is not interested in making the changes you request, there isn't much you can do about it. The exception would be of the commercial software is more popular and better maintained but that's true in the open source world too. If you have a choice between two projects, both of which an do the job with adjustments, you are most likely better off contributing the one that is actively maintained than the one that isn't, even if the required changes are more extensive.
His point was to go into a deep level of detail. Instead of handwavy "code the GUI" the only way to really get anything remotely close to a real time is to estimate everything down to at least half day, if not lower granularity. It's not the "oh you feel the time better" as much as to think of EVERYthing you need. If you go to a lower level, you may remember that dialog box that you didn't think of at the 25,000 foot level.
Unfortunately, making an estimate to half-day granularity takes a great deal of time. So much, in fact, that you will likely need to give an estimate for the time to complete the estimate because it will be significant part of the total project time.
And you will still likely be wrong because what you are really doing is a sketch implementation without the feedback that prevents small errors from exploding into total nonsense. A course estimate may actually be better since it forces you to factor in unknowns rather than assuming unknowns don't exist because "look at all the detail!"
Having had a company for 4 years might not be enough to qualify for giving advice people should listen to.
I've worked for several startups. Four years is long enough to expect some turnover if the headcount is non-trivial. The pointed questions to ask are:
1) How many employees? 2) What kind of roles to they serve? 3) Is the company obscuring turnover by keeping traditionally high-turnover roles like sales as contractor?
That seems the most plausible path. All it takes is a hole in the sewer pipe and a hole in the water pipe and there's your path. Once in the water pipes it doesn't sound impossible for pathogens to move backwards into the aquifer. I admit the pressure gradient should work against this but it sounds more plausible than quickly transiting a "a thick layer of clay or shale" separating the sewer pipes from the aquifer.
Not necessarily. If you improve benefits in such a way that the job becomes more appealing to women, more qualified women will apply. Child care, for instance. It would be a benefit for any employee that has children but, statistically, women are more likely to be single parents and take greater responsibility for children in a two parent family.
If you write the code, the GPL doesn't prevent you from including it in commercial products. You're the copyright holder, so you can relicense it to suit yourself.
Absolutely... as long as you are the copyright holder for all of the code. Otherwise you need to track down everyone else who contributed and get them to agree to the new terms. Or rewrite the bits that you don't own.
I try to keep a quiver full of excruciatingly difficult questions which most people could not possibly know the correct answers to. I bust a couple of them out on each interview. I suppose this would disqualify me on your first criteria, heh heh heh. But I'm not looking for a correct answer when I do, I'm trying to make sure the candidate won't try to bullshit me when he doesn't know something. It also shows me if they're willing to think about a problem for a bit before giving up. I don't want bullshitters on my team, and I do want people who will at least try to solve a problem before giving up.
I'm not even really looking for an answer with the function I'm asking them about. I'm looking for how they handle it. If you get a question like this and try to just crap code onto a whiteboard, you're going to fail. If you actually design it the way they ostensibly taught you to in school, you'll do all right. Except most people never really learned that in school. They just procrastinated until the last minute, crapped a bunch of half-assed code into an editor and limped through on the basis that all their classmates did about the same thing. Truly master this one part of the interview and you'll be able to land any programming position you interview for. Even if you are an asshole.
Unfortunately, like many interviewing methods, this doesn't test what you think it tests. It actually tests a candidate's ability to quickly produce low to moderate effort results under stress and to think out loud. It is a good skill to learn but mostly because it comes up a lot in interviews. Actual development is seldom done this way. Quiet contemplation and low stress collaborative banter is how problems usually get solved. Unfortunately, though effective, neither method prepares a candidate for being given a problem they have never seen before and then having every movement watched as time ticks down.
Okay, lets say there is an actual bubble, and places are hiring, how do I get a position? I've tried online job boards, and I'll find 300 technical recruiters who say they're thoroughly impressed with what I have on my resume, but I've only ever had three interviews in the past 10 years from these people. There has to be a better way. On paper, I should be in demand, I've programmed my entire life and can make Android and ios aps.
Come out to the Newtech Meetup and similar regular events. Specifically watch for the "Shout Outs" but also just talk to people. Backend database is actually in more demand than front end app development but both come up.
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So you're saying the government that ignores the people has a soft spot for hippies protesting nuclear power? I don't buy it...
The government doesn't ignore the people. This is still vaguely a democracy so public support is required. Working against the interests of the people is done through hiding the existence of the effort or deceiving the public into believing that it is a good and/or necessary thing. A large enough and vocal enough movement is, for a politician, an opportunity to gain or lose power. No politician will ignore that. The first action may be to step up the misdirection efforts but the movement's desires will be addressed. Whether the movement's aims make any sense has little bearing. The anti-nuclear movement is and remains too large to ignore and too entrenched to misdirect so they often get their way to the determent of saner voices.
A surfer paddling on the surface is back lit by the sun. A shadow against the sun is going to appear black no matter what color the suit.
This isn't a problem for scuba diving. However, shark attacks on scuba divers are quite rare even without special wet suits. Sharks' MO is to watch for seals near the surface and lunge upward to catch them. Scuba divers don't linger on the surface and under water they don't look anything like seals.
I like broccoli but, like many people, I don't feel so well after I eat very much of it.
A cursory look at the Wikipedia article indicates that Egypt has spent time under the rule of a few empires here and there over history, but it and Greece have both been their own societies for several thousand years in spite of this. I figure that both countries are closer to the age of China than they're listed...but that's just me.
But China is wrong too. The Ming Dynasty was conquered by the Manchu Empire in 1644 which gradually morphed into the Qing Dynasty. So no more than 369 years.
China before 1950 did not include Tibet.
It could even be argued that modern China's sovereignty was not recognized until 1971 when the UN recognized the PRC as the legitimate ruler of China.
Why doesn't your asshole friend give his employees health coverage in the first place? If he had, he wouldn't have a problem now.
Because he couldn't afford to be in business at all if he were to offer coverage. He's a cash flow business, as are all functional small businesses that aren't someone's spouses hobby funded by the other spouse. He's literally two payrolls from going out of business due to the current regulatory environment for small businesses being dictated by large businesses to lobbyists and thence to the congressmen that the big businesses own. Big business does not like competition.
So, in other words your friend runs a barely viable business that can not survive another economic head wind no matter where it comes from. He is probably going out of business soon anyway but he wants to score political points by blaming it on Obamacare.
Intel *is* a foundry. They make chips for third parties. They have a whole "Intel Custom Foundry" division dedicated to this. They make chips for Cisco, Netronome, Altera, etc. Some of those chips even have ARM processors.
Intel is inching into the foundry business.
They are *not* making chips for Altera. They have a deal with Altera to make chips at 14nm but Intel doesn't even have a production 14nm process yet. The Cisco deal was only signed in January. No word on when they expect to ship. Their shipping customers (Achronix, Tabula, Netronome) are all startups with limited volumes. Apple needs huge volume. I don't think Intel is ready for that yet.
For example, wouldn't it be preferable for Saudi Arabia and Syria and Egypt to be out of natural resources in 50 years, but the socially-compassionate countries still have theirs?
Yes, because those areas aren't volatile enough yet, we need to have them energy-starved (and likely literally starving) as well, while we Westerners continue to enjoy our remaining energy reserves in front of them. If you think they generate too many terrorists now, just wait for real desperation to set in. You're going to need all those oil reserves for defense...
Quite the contrary. Terrorism is expensive business. Extremists need weapons, ammunition, and training. They also need food, clothing and shelter in difficult to supply areas because they are obviously not working for a living. Right now those bills are paid by us via the the petrol-dollars we send to the Middle East. When that spigot dries up, the Middle East will still be volatile but it won't really effect us much since they won't have the resources to wage war on a large scale and we will lack the motivation to mess around in their world. Sort of like Africa: sad, disheartening even but not really threatening.
Based on my experience (YMMV), corporations love consistency. Their recruiters are uncomfortable with varied background, because they don't think outside the box and don't understand that a person can do more than just the same thing for the entirety of their lives.
My advice: aim for startups. They're looking for skills rather than a consistent, tidy work background.
Unfortunately, hardware startups (the kind that would hire an electrical engineer) are scarce these days. There's also the problem that large companies look for experience with other large successful companies so choosing the startup route prematurely can bring difficulty later.,
So then what's the story? The US government has been making noise about banning Chinese gear for a while. Reciprocation is entirely fair.
Reciprocation is entirely fair by definition. However, that doesn't make it reasonable or productive. If China doesn't want to buy Cisco gear it should be because of actual concerns about Cisco gear, not as retalation for the US not buying Huawai gear. That path leads only to deadlock or agreement to mutually ignore the problem.
I always thought it was a rule from Espionage 101 that you don't let the other side know when your side has been compromised. You use it as an opportunity to start sending out false information, and to learn their tactics and precisely who is involved.>/p>
I think this has already happened. They traced the attacks to a specific building in Shanghai operated by the Chinese military and learned a great deal about the operations taking place there.
I don't understand why we are telling everyone in the world that the Chinese have stolen our information. It just makes us look inept in all sorts of ways.
Probably because all the useful counter-espionage plays have been done. Now the biggest payoff is from using the information for political leverage.
I don't see Tesla Buses coming any time soon
You don't? Well, OK, they aren't made by Tesla but electric buses have been running in San Francsico for decades. Neat thing about buses: they run a set route so you can power them from overhead wires and not even have to carry batteries. Hybrid buses are common in the South Bay, where densities do not support the infrastructure for electric buses.
Buses are generally way ahead of private cars in terms of propulsive technology. A lot of buses around here run on compressed natural gas. A decade ago there were buses (in Toronto, I think) that used fly wheels as a form of regenerative braking.
If you steal billions and proceed to give that away, you should go to jail.
If you earn billions through a successful business and then proceed to give that away, then yes, you should be held in awe.
Out of interest, what percentage of your total lifetime earnings have you committed to giving to charity?
The relevant question would be what be what percentage beyond that required for a comfortable existence have you committed to give to charity. The saints give over 100%. They live in poverty so that others may live better. Bill Gates is able to give a large percentage of his total income to charity because his has far far more than he needs. What remains after his charitable donations is still much more than most of us here can hope to earn.
It's simple. You promote them to management.
Where they can use their authority to force everyone else to use obsolete and "considered harmful" methods as policy because it needs to be done that way so they can still understand it.
No that I've ever had to deal with this situation.....
Please notice very few small locally owned booksellers have gone out of business recently. Books are apparently a business where small companies do quite well.
When is recently? Keep in mind that when a locally owned bookstore closes, it doesn't usually make the national news. Palo Alto has lost two. Stanford Books Store doesn't operate Downtown any more either so maybe that is three. Adjacent Menlo Park has only managed to save Kepler's through extraordinary measures. Now, I don't think any of these events occurred within the last two years but there weren't that many book stores to start with.
In many areas the chains were all they had.
True, and Usenet could be handy. But basically it became a spam forest, and you'd have to wade thru 200 spam emails for one on the topic. Maybe if they would have developed filters for it, it could have gone on further.
No, it didn't. Spam was a big issue for a while but server side spam filters like cleanfeed and distributed systems like nocem became very sophisticated and effective. Unlike email filters, Usenet filters have the advantage in being able to see *all* the destinations. If an article that appeared in more than a handful of groups was quickly squashed. Spam never entirely went away but it well under control long before the decline of Usenet.
There were also efforts like Usenet2 that created a network of trusted servers who would keep spam out. It worked fairly well but interest waned initially because the spam problem was effectively controlled in regular Usenet but even more so as total volume declined and the Usenet2 corner became too thinly populated to be of much use.
Now there is still the problem of idiots posting things in inappropriate places but that's a problem of moderation, something Usenet never did well. (Usenet *did* have moderated groups but it drastically slowed conversation and did not scale well)
I still run a small news server. Spam is only a "problem" is groups where the posting volume has dropped near zero and spam is all that is left. A bigger problem is that I keep losing peers as people give up and shutdown thier servers.
I think he's right. Have you noticed that phones are getting bigger and tablets are getting smaller? I think phones are about to eat tablets in the same way they ate other stand along devices. People don't want two devices. They want one.
Personally, I hate the idea.
Ah come on, what sort of a relationship do you have with your family if you can't play a little prank on them from time to time.
Probably the kind where the parents can not entirely dismiss the notion that their child may be doing something quite serious that they don't know about. In other words: virtually every parent of a teenager who is honest with themselves.
I've had a couple of cases where I needed a feature, that there had been lots of requests for, in existing software whose development had slowed or stopped. I offered to hire the developer, bounty style, but they weren't interested.
I hired professional programmers to add the feature or make necessary changes to the existing code. I then submitted the code as patches to the original developer, hoping that he would accept the patches and make it so I didn't have to patch and compile everytime there was an update or distro change. My patches were always GPL and there were no restrictions on them, so if the developer didn't like the style or specific implementation, they could use my patch as a starting point or model and change whatever they chose.
In all cases, the developers have not incorporated the patch. In most cases, they have done nothing at all. I'd likely have been better off just buying Windows COTS.
Have their been any updates at all since you submitted your patch? If not and the time period is long enough to believe there never will be, then your best course of action is to fork. As one with enough vested in the project to pay for further development, you are probably in a better position to steward the project than the original developers, who likely have no more use for the program.
If there have been updates, then you have a more sticky position. Most likely, the maintainers considered your patches to be too narrowly applicable at least relative the difficulty required to integrate and maintain them. At that point, you are pretty much stuck re-integrating your patches with each release.
Windows COTS wouldn't necessarily solve your problem either. It just takes away the option to patch your own. If the company is not interested in making the changes you request, there isn't much you can do about it. The exception would be of the commercial software is more popular and better maintained but that's true in the open source world too. If you have a choice between two projects, both of which an do the job with adjustments, you are most likely better off contributing the one that is actively maintained than the one that isn't, even if the required changes are more extensive.
His point was to go into a deep level of detail. Instead of handwavy "code the GUI" the only way to really get anything remotely close to a real time is to estimate everything down to at least half day, if not lower granularity. It's not the "oh you feel the time better" as much as to think of EVERYthing you need. If you go to a lower level, you may remember that dialog box that you didn't think of at the 25,000 foot level.
Unfortunately, making an estimate to half-day granularity takes a great deal of time. So much, in fact, that you will likely need to give an estimate for the time to complete the estimate because it will be significant part of the total project time.
And you will still likely be wrong because what you are really doing is a sketch implementation without the feedback that prevents small errors from exploding into total nonsense. A course estimate may actually be better since it forces you to factor in unknowns rather than assuming unknowns don't exist because "look at all the detail!"
Having had a company for 4 years might not be enough to qualify for giving advice people should listen to.
I've worked for several startups. Four years is long enough to expect some turnover if the headcount is non-trivial. The pointed questions to ask are:
1) How many employees?
2) What kind of roles to they serve?
3) Is the company obscuring turnover by keeping traditionally high-turnover roles like sales as contractor?
That seems the most plausible path. All it takes is a hole in the sewer pipe and a hole in the water pipe and there's your path. Once in the water pipes it doesn't sound impossible for pathogens to move backwards into the aquifer. I admit the pressure gradient should work against this but it sounds more plausible than quickly transiting a "a thick layer of clay or shale" separating the sewer pipes from the aquifer.
You just redefine what 'best' means.
Not necessarily. If you improve benefits in such a way that the job becomes more appealing to women, more qualified women will apply. Child care, for instance. It would be a benefit for any employee that has children but, statistically, women are more likely to be single parents and take greater responsibility for children in a two parent family.
If you write the code, the GPL doesn't prevent you from including it in commercial products. You're the copyright holder, so you can relicense it to suit yourself.
Absolutely... as long as you are the copyright holder for all of the code. Otherwise you need to track down everyone else who contributed and get them to agree to the new terms. Or rewrite the bits that you don't own.
I try to keep a quiver full of excruciatingly difficult questions which most people could not possibly know the correct answers to. I bust a couple of them out on each interview. I suppose this would disqualify me on your first criteria, heh heh heh. But I'm not looking for a correct answer when I do, I'm trying to make sure the candidate won't try to bullshit me when he doesn't know something. It also shows me if they're willing to think about a problem for a bit before giving up. I don't want bullshitters on my team, and I do want people who will at least try to solve a problem before giving up.
I'm not even really looking for an answer with the function I'm asking them about. I'm looking for how they handle it. If you get a question like this and try to just crap code onto a whiteboard, you're going to fail. If you actually design it the way they ostensibly taught you to in school, you'll do all right. Except most people never really learned that in school. They just procrastinated until the last minute, crapped a bunch of half-assed code into an editor and limped through on the basis that all their classmates did about the same thing. Truly master this one part of the interview and you'll be able to land any programming position you interview for. Even if you are an asshole.
Unfortunately, like many interviewing methods, this doesn't test what you think it tests. It actually tests a candidate's ability to quickly produce low to moderate effort results under stress and to think out loud. It is a good skill to learn but mostly because it comes up a lot in interviews. Actual development is seldom done this way. Quiet contemplation and low stress collaborative banter is how problems usually get solved. Unfortunately, though effective, neither method prepares a candidate for being given a problem they have never seen before and then having every movement watched as time ticks down.
Okay, lets say there is an actual bubble, and places are hiring, how do I get a position? I've tried online job boards, and I'll find 300 technical recruiters who say they're thoroughly impressed with what I have on my resume, but I've only ever had three interviews in the past 10 years from these people. There has to be a better way. On paper, I should be in demand, I've programmed my entire life and can make Android and ios aps.
Come out to the Newtech Meetup and similar regular events. Specifically watch for the "Shout Outs" but also just talk to people. Backend database is actually in more demand than front end app development but both come up.