Wouldn't you be able to evaluate all these things to an even greater degree by sticking the candidate in a room for 2 hours and having him complete a slightly more involved coding task instead of ask him to write out snippets on a white board by hand?
I agree. Even more telling might be spending a little time looking at their open source contributions, which reflect actual development, unencumbered by nerves, the clock, and an unfamiliar environment.
In corporate Amerika, harassment is not illegal unless the harassment falls under a protected category like race or gender.
A minor quibble. Even outside of a protected class, it's still illegal, but the burden of proof falls upon the plaintiff instead of the company. This makes such cases harder to win, but not impossible.
I guess that's the point. It weeds out the arrogant assholes like you.
No. It weeds out those who take no pride in their tools or their work. I cannot imagine a chef who doesn't have a preferred set of knives. Why should we expect otherwise in other artistic endeavors?
Unless that's your point: that programmers are interchangeable.
When i do it i make sure to use an environment that has the same capabilities but they are not familiar with.
If that really were a good idea, then do more of it. For example, give them only Dvorak keyboards if they are fluent in qwerty. See how silly that sounds? Introducing unnecessary cognitive overhead isn't testing much of anything except whether the applicant is willing to accept ridiculous constraints just because they are directed to do so.
And actually I suspect that obedience is the real property your company needs to test for anyway.
Moving where it's burned is worthwhile as long as we're being efficient, which batteries are, relatively. Power stations are cleaner than cars.
Batteries perhaps, but we were speaking of synthesizing hydrogen. I was suggesting that while there is still oil in the world, hydrogen can't rival it.
It DOES solve the problem if we generate electricity from non-carbon sources. Wind and nuclear are good choices, but solar has some problems if we need to charge batteries at night.
I agree. I find it very sad that though there are no economical non-carbon sources.
There's no problem obtaining and transporting hydrogen. You make it at the fueling station from water and electricity - the exact inverse reaction that occurs in a fuel cell.
Unfortunately, that's only almost true. Electrolysis is not very efficient, so it's not the exact inverse reaction.
In any case, a hydrogen economy does not solve our fossil fuel problem; it merely moves where they are burned.
I'm surprised by your comment. I actually find some of the stories from the Star Wars tv series to be better written, and far more poignant, than the movies
I wouldn't even call Star Wars science fantasy, it's fantasy. Scotty on the other hand didn't become chief engineer because he was the son of the king of engineers.
As someone who just turned down a job offer at a "big company" because I felt the background check was becoming too invasive, I now worry about how much control big employers have in defining candidates' eligibility to be employable.
It was much more about security theater than security. And, I'm troubled that the definition of employability is now the willingness to send one's tax records to outsourced fact checkers on the other side of the world.
While I am loathe to seem to defend the position of an anonymous coward who uses the term "retard" as a pejorative...
Yes, terrible code is a fact of life. And a language feature like operator overloading can either ameliorate or exacerbate that. But I suggest that it's more than merely a matter of taste to support infix operators. Their ubiquitous use in mathematics indicates that they help reasoning about expressions. I miss them in Java.
That's silly, if you're going to go to that trouble, you may as well go back to 1967 and stop the films from being destroyed. Or better yet, take them out of the bin and bring them back to the 21st century.
Sorry, can't. Since they were actually destroyed, messing up the timeline is a no-no.
Oh, but wait! We could copy them and put the originals back. Argh, can't do that either. Curses, RIAA.
Many people like Pyramids of Mars, and the Talons of Weng Chiang, though the latter isn't particularly culturally sensitive.
I agree, but there's a wonderful moment when Tom Baker exclaims something like, "Wait a minute, you're Chinese," as if that visually obvious fact had eluded him up to that point. Made quite an impression on my young mind, that an alien -- even a super intelligent one -- would be less capable of seeing our trivial differences. To be truly unprejudiced, we must see through better eyes.
And Euler's formula is more beautiful than most poems.
And as Richard Feynman argued, Tartaglia's general solution of the cubic equation was the most important accomplishment of the Renaissance, because it was the first time in a thousand years that a living man could do something that a classical man could not.
Now back to other issue of bad teachers. I would love to be a teacher of either math or physics, but guess what? They won't pay me as well to be a teacher as I can make being an engineer./quote>
There is no such thing.
Teachers are teachers of students, not of math or physics. The job you think you would love does not exist.
Slashdot Mirror
While I won't claim there is enough evidence yet to concluded that there is life on Mars, there is more then "no evidence".
I agree. Their response was careless.
The best software development managers were formerly software developers themselves.
Citation needed.
But seriously, these are completely different skills.
Wouldn't you be able to evaluate all these things to an even greater degree by sticking the candidate in a room for 2 hours and having him complete a slightly more involved coding task instead of ask him to write out snippets on a white board by hand?
I agree. Even more telling might be spending a little time looking at their open source contributions, which reflect actual development, unencumbered by nerves, the clock, and an unfamiliar environment.
In corporate Amerika, harassment is not illegal unless the harassment falls under a protected category like race or gender.
A minor quibble. Even outside of a protected class, it's still illegal, but the burden of proof falls upon the plaintiff instead of the company. This makes such cases harder to win, but not impossible.
I guess that's the point. It weeds out the arrogant assholes like you.
No. It weeds out those who take no pride in their tools or their work. I cannot imagine a chef who doesn't have a preferred set of knives. Why should we expect otherwise in other artistic endeavors?
Unless that's your point: that programmers are interchangeable.
When i do it i make sure to use an environment that has the same capabilities but they are not familiar with.
If that really were a good idea, then do more of it. For example, give them only Dvorak keyboards if they are fluent in qwerty. See how silly that sounds? Introducing unnecessary cognitive overhead isn't testing much of anything except whether the applicant is willing to accept ridiculous constraints just because they are directed to do so.
And actually I suspect that obedience is the real property your company needs to test for anyway.
Moving where it's burned is worthwhile as long as we're being efficient, which batteries are, relatively. Power stations are cleaner than cars.
Batteries perhaps, but we were speaking of synthesizing hydrogen. I was suggesting that while there is still oil in the world, hydrogen can't rival it.
It DOES solve the problem if we generate electricity from non-carbon sources. Wind and nuclear are good choices, but solar has some problems if we need to charge batteries at night.
I agree. I find it very sad that though there are no economical non-carbon sources.
There is no such thing as a verbal contract.
There's no problem obtaining and transporting hydrogen. You make it at the fueling station from water and electricity - the exact inverse reaction that occurs in a fuel cell.
Unfortunately, that's only almost true. Electrolysis is not very efficient, so it's not the exact inverse reaction.
In any case, a hydrogen economy does not solve our fossil fuel problem; it merely moves where they are burned.
Every schoolboy knows (or used to) that WWI was started by an assasniation
Well... the hostilities were triggered by the assassination, but the causes of the war were much deeper.
...it was the wrong circle constant.
http://tauday.com/
Hilarious! I can't believe the moderators haven't gotten the reference yet.
Uhm, yes, that was the joke.
wait, is that football football or soccer football?
I'm surprised by your comment. I actually find some of the stories from the Star Wars tv series to be better written, and far more poignant, than the movies
I wouldn't even call Star Wars science fantasy, it's fantasy. Scotty on the other hand didn't become chief engineer because he was the son of the king of engineers.
Clearly this was faked by our martian overlords. Whom I welcome, by the way.
Our overlords are displeased with subjects who fail to use "whom" correctly...
How was that incorrect? "Whom" is the direct object.
As someone who just turned down a job offer at a "big company" because I felt the background check was becoming too invasive, I now worry about how much control big employers have in defining candidates' eligibility to be employable.
It was much more about security theater than security. And, I'm troubled that the definition of employability is now the willingness to send one's tax records to outsourced fact checkers on the other side of the world.
While I am loathe to seem to defend the position of an anonymous coward who uses the term "retard" as a pejorative...
Yes, terrible code is a fact of life. And a language feature like operator overloading can either ameliorate or exacerbate that. But I suggest that it's more than merely a matter of taste to support infix operators. Their ubiquitous use in mathematics indicates that they help reasoning about expressions. I miss them in Java.
That's silly, if you're going to go to that trouble, you may as well go back to 1967 and stop the films from being destroyed. Or better yet, take them out of the bin and bring them back to the 21st century.
Sorry, can't. Since they were actually destroyed, messing up the timeline is a no-no.
Oh, but wait! We could copy them and put the originals back. Argh, can't do that either. Curses, RIAA.
Many people like Pyramids of Mars, and the Talons of Weng Chiang, though the latter isn't particularly culturally sensitive.
I agree, but there's a wonderful moment when Tom Baker exclaims something like, "Wait a minute, you're Chinese," as if that visually obvious fact had eluded him up to that point. Made quite an impression on my young mind, that an alien -- even a super intelligent one -- would be less capable of seeing our trivial differences. To be truly unprejudiced, we must see through better eyes.
I can't tell whether you are being facetious or whether I should feel sorry for you.
And Euler's formula is more beautiful than most poems.
And as Richard Feynman argued, Tartaglia's general solution of the cubic equation was the most important accomplishment of the Renaissance, because it was the first time in a thousand years that a living man could do something that a classical man could not.
Now back to other issue of bad teachers. I would love to be a teacher of either math or physics, but guess what? They won't pay me as well to be a teacher as I can make being an engineer./quote>
There is no such thing.
Teachers are teachers of students, not of math or physics. The job you think you would love does not exist.
Okay, I'll bite too.
x = 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 ... ... ...
= (1 - 1) + (1 - 1) +
= 0 + 0 +
= 0
But by associativity of addition,
x = 1 - (1 - 1) - (1 -1) - ... ...
= 1 - 0 - 0
= 1
Therefore, 1 = 0