OK, no asumptions. So you'd agree that if the process doesn't work or individual processes work just as well, then a "standard" process doesn't offer any advantage, right?
Since we have no way in general to determine which conditions apply, we can't conclude in general that expecting candidates to solve problems in a standard way is a good thing. So it just goes back to the subjective judgement of those who are doing the interviews.
"The fact of the matter is that the US economy was unable to provide support center services at a competitive price."
Dell is learning the economics of support at a "competitive price" right now as customers have discovered that the quality of Dell's support has slipped.
"And for various reasons, they can produce products at a lower cost than they can be produced in America."
Various reasons? I think you'll find all of those reasons to be related to being a poor country easily exploited by the western world.
"If your entire team thinks the same way, provided that thought process will successfully create software, you are going to have an easier time getting work out the door."
It's easy to say "provided that thought process will successfully create software". But if we are allowed to assume that unproven statement, it would also be true if everybody used their own process, provided that those each of those processes "will successfully create software".
It's funny how some people shun a mono culture of OS's but embrace a mono culture of software development practices.
Sorry about that. Still by saying that I was "missing the point" you embraced his argument so my point is still valid.
"And unless you're built on Free Software, your customers will definately lose."
So who appointed you to speak for customers? I'm a customer and I own plenty of non-free software that I consider a win for me. Or is this one of those cases where you think you know more about what other people need than they do?
"music players are composed of many hi-tech components (TFTs, small hard drives) which tend to improve in quality rather than decrease in price."
A sustained price point is a common characteristic of a market that is still in the early-adopter stage. iPods can already hold more music than the average consumer is interested in owning. Most of them will jump in the market when the price goes down. That doesn't mean that iPods won't be valued - they'll just be at the high end of the market.
"In order for a software company to enter the photo-manipulation business, they need to produce something better than the Gimp- not better than Photoshop."
You said "raise the bar" but you apparently don't understand what it means. Perhaps you mean rasing the barrier to entry instead. Regardless, there are probably $30 photo editing programs that are no better than Gimp and still turn a profit. The success of a product isn't entirely due to technical merit, marketing plays a role as well. For many people if Gimp isn't in a box sitting on the shelf next to the other photo-editing software at Best Buy it doesn't exist.
"Microsoft's Visual line of development support more languages than GCC."
GCC can compile C,C++,Objective-C, Objective-C++,Java, and Fortran. The current VS can compile C,C++,VB.NET,C#, and J#. This is a significantly less diverse set of languages.
"And that's what makes Free Software so much better than proprietary software. Someone needed 48-bit floating-point per-component editing at extremely high resolutions, and so someone could extend the Gimp to do so (and has!). Without the Gimp, that feature would have to be important to Adobe."
I agree that it's useful for those with niche needs that don't represent a market large enough for a commercial company to invest in.
"In that regard, I think the greatest contribution of Free Software is that it raises the bar of people's expectations. Commercial photo editors have to be better than GIMP. Commercial 3-D mesh editors have to be better than Blender. Commercial GUI systems have to be better than KDE. Commercial compilers need to be better than GCC."
But for the most part these non-free applications were already better years ago than the latest "free" software versions are today. The "free" alternatives might eliminate the low-end customers, but they can't "raise the bar" if they can't even reach it.
GCC is a special case because no commerical company would build a single compiler that supported so many different languages. All other compilers are oranges to GCC's apple. The practical comparison would be language-specific. If you program in Java, for example, is GCC the best Java compiler?
Apple certainly has a very large market share, but it's still a bit of an early-adopter product. Let's see how the iPod does when mp3 players are as common as DVD players and you can get 8GB flash player for $25.
"You know that judicial activism that those "right wing wingnuts" bitch about? This is an example of it."
The "right wing wingnuts" know a lot about judical activism since they so strongly believe in it. Examples:
Campaign contributions are protected by the first amendment (no officer, I wasn't soliciting a prostitute, I was making a political statement about legal prostitution by making a contribution).
They believe that the President has the power to wiretap US citizens without court approval, to hold people indefinitely without being charged etc, based on the following passage in the constitution:
"The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States"
I agree. If you end up being hired, you're not going to be writing a lot of production code on a whiteboard. If interviewers feel the need for a code test they should at least make the conditions as close to the real world as possible.
In any case, I've been to thedailywtf.com and I don't think there's any insight to be gained there. Just a bunch of people who try to pump themselves up by knocking other people down.
I admit I've never had the guts to do it, but I thought it would be great to prepare a test for the interviewer that you can whip-out when presented with a test for you to perform.
I suggest a reverse-trick "what is the code doing" question: i.e. one that appears at first glance to solve a well-known problem but actually doesn't. Make them examine all the trees rather than the forest.
It probably want get you the job but it might scare the interviewers from testing other candidates in the future.
"Not that I necessarily ask folks to write code on a white board, but if they can't handle that it shows that they're inflexible and would probably be totally lost in a design discussion or a code walkthrough."
Inflexible? Programmers? Who has ever heard of such a thing? It's not as if one would be so inflexible that they wouldn't hire someone who couldn't code on a whiteboard.
First you say: "No coworker has been harder to work with than those who have had "20 years of experince" because in several (of course not all) cases they just will not do it any other way than what they think is correct."
But then you say: "One thing to consider would be the fact that standards exist for a reason."
So what you really mean is not the programmers should have an open mind, but rather they should do it your way.
And yet these guys have probably been writing successful software systems for years, what's going on?
Perhaps there's really not much of a connection between writing code on a whiteboard under interview pressure and writing applications in the real world.
If the recent Season 10 premier of SG-1 had been done by the Farscape writers, the action would have started a few weeks after the cliff-hanging plot with the characters having a casual conversation. If you listened carefully you might figure out how they escaped the danger.
Farscape always had anti-climatic plot resolutions. Doing it once might be clever, doing multiple times suggested that they didn't have the writing skills or budget to do it right.
If MS simply wanted to make IE incompatible with Google's applications, they could just offer a service pack or include it with a security patch, there's no need to delay IE7 or Longhorn.
I think you're confusing the current wishful thinking of the anti-MS crowd that Google is going to kill MS with what MS believes. Besides, Google isn't going to increase their revenue by delaying Vista so I think your reading Google's intentions wrong. I suspect that Google is already planning on how they can take advantage of a new Windows OS. Vista will probably drive a new round of PC purchases. Those new PCs will be more powerful and may improve the user experience for Google's applications. So an earlier introduction of Vista may actually be more to Google's advantage than a delay would be.
AOL either bought Netscape out of stupidity or to get the ability to extort money out of MS. Although they ended up getting a lot of money from MS, they still didn't get enough to make a profit on the deal.
"The issue is that with the BSD license, people who receive your code, can now restrict others from using it in any way they please including yourself if they so wish."
No, you're absolutely wrong. If I write BSD'd code nobody can restrict it in any way shape or form. Yes, if they incorporate my code in their own application they could restrict that code, but my code reamains unrestricted.
But all that reverse engineering would have come to naught if IBM hadn't chosen an outside company to provide the OS and that company hadn't pushed for the right to sell the OS to others. MS also played a key role in making the multiple-vendor PC market possible.
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OK, no asumptions. So you'd agree that if the process doesn't work or individual processes work just as well, then a "standard" process doesn't offer any advantage, right?
Since we have no way in general to determine which conditions apply, we can't conclude in general that expecting candidates to solve problems in a standard way is a good thing. So it just goes back to the subjective judgement of those who are doing the interviews.
"The fact of the matter is that the US economy was unable to provide support center services at a competitive price."
Dell is learning the economics of support at a "competitive price" right now as customers have discovered that the quality of Dell's support has slipped.
"And for various reasons, they can produce products at a lower cost than they can be produced in America."
Various reasons? I think you'll find all of those reasons to be related to being a poor country easily exploited by the western world.
"If your entire team thinks the same way, provided that thought process will successfully create software, you are going to have an easier time getting work out the door."
It's easy to say "provided that thought process will successfully create software". But if we are allowed to assume that unproven statement, it would also be true if everybody used their own process, provided that those each of those processes "will successfully create software".
It's funny how some people shun a mono culture of OS's but embrace a mono culture of software development practices.
"Check again. That was GPP, not me"
Sorry about that. Still by saying that I was "missing the point" you embraced his argument so my point is still valid.
"And unless you're built on Free Software, your customers will definately lose."
So who appointed you to speak for customers? I'm a customer and I own plenty of non-free software that I consider a win for me. Or is this one of those cases where you think you know more about what other people need than they do?
"music players are composed of many hi-tech components (TFTs, small hard drives) which tend to improve in quality rather than decrease in price."
A sustained price point is a common characteristic of a market that is still in the early-adopter stage. iPods can already hold more music than the average consumer is interested in owning. Most of them will jump in the market when the price goes down. That doesn't mean that iPods won't be valued - they'll just be at the high end of the market.
"In order for a software company to enter the photo-manipulation business, they need to produce something better than the Gimp- not better than Photoshop."
You said "raise the bar" but you apparently don't understand what it means. Perhaps you mean rasing the barrier to entry instead. Regardless, there are probably $30 photo editing programs that are no better than Gimp and still turn a profit. The success of a product isn't entirely due to technical merit, marketing plays a role as well. For many people if Gimp isn't in a box sitting on the shelf next to the other photo-editing software at Best Buy it doesn't exist.
"Microsoft's Visual line of development support more languages than GCC."
GCC can compile C,C++,Objective-C, Objective-C++,Java, and Fortran. The current VS can compile C,C++,VB.NET,C#, and J#. This is a significantly less diverse set of languages.
"And that's what makes Free Software so much better than proprietary software. Someone needed 48-bit floating-point per-component editing at extremely high resolutions, and so someone could extend the Gimp to do so (and has!). Without the Gimp, that feature would have to be important to Adobe."
I agree that it's useful for those with niche needs that don't represent a market large enough for a commercial company to invest in.
"In that regard, I think the greatest contribution of Free Software is that it raises the bar of people's expectations. Commercial photo editors have to be better than GIMP. Commercial 3-D mesh editors have to be better than Blender. Commercial GUI systems have to be better than KDE. Commercial compilers need to be better than GCC."
But for the most part these non-free applications were already better years ago than the latest "free" software versions are today. The "free" alternatives might eliminate the low-end customers, but they can't "raise the bar" if they can't even reach it.
GCC is a special case because no commerical company would build a single compiler that supported so many different languages. All other compilers are oranges to GCC's apple. The practical comparison would be language-specific. If you program in Java, for example, is GCC the best Java compiler?
Apple certainly has a very large market share, but it's still a bit of an early-adopter product. Let's see how the iPod does when mp3 players are as common as DVD players and you can get 8GB flash player for $25.
"You know that judicial activism that those "right wing wingnuts" bitch about? This is an example of it."
The "right wing wingnuts" know a lot about judical activism since they so strongly believe in it. Examples:
Campaign contributions are protected by the first amendment (no officer, I wasn't soliciting a prostitute, I was making a political statement about legal prostitution by making a contribution).
They believe that the President has the power to wiretap US citizens without court approval, to hold people indefinitely without being charged etc, based on the following passage in the constitution:
"The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States"
"which would explain how the y2k bug got started."
No. They were junior programmers way back then.
I agree. If you end up being hired, you're not going to be writing a lot of production code on a whiteboard. If interviewers feel the need for a code test they should at least make the conditions as close to the real world as possible.
Perhaps you missed the word "successful".
In any case, I've been to thedailywtf.com and I don't think there's any insight to be gained there. Just a bunch of people who try to pump themselves up by knocking other people down.
That's "won't" not "want".
I admit I've never had the guts to do it, but I thought it would be great to prepare a test for the interviewer that you can whip-out when presented with a test for you to perform.
I suggest a reverse-trick "what is the code doing" question: i.e. one that appears at first glance to solve a well-known problem but actually doesn't. Make them examine all the trees rather than the forest.
It probably want get you the job but it might scare the interviewers from testing other candidates in the future.
"Not that I necessarily ask folks to write code on a white board, but if they can't handle that it shows that they're inflexible and would probably be totally lost in a design discussion or a code walkthrough."
Inflexible? Programmers? Who has ever heard of such a thing? It's not as if one would be so inflexible that they wouldn't hire someone who couldn't code on a whiteboard.
"If you can't talk through a problem on the whiteboard, in [pick your favorite language], then I humbly submit that you cannot code."
Perhaps your humility prevents you from offering any evidence to support your conclusion.
First you say: "No coworker has been harder to work with than those who have had "20 years of experince" because in several (of course not all) cases they just will not do it any other way than what they think is correct."
But then you say: "One thing to consider would be the fact that standards exist for a reason."
So what you really mean is not the programmers should have an open mind, but rather they should do it your way.
And yet these guys have probably been writing successful software systems for years, what's going on?
Perhaps there's really not much of a connection between writing code on a whiteboard under interview pressure and writing applications in the real world.
I agree with you. What a waste of RDA. I'd rather see him come in and kick some ORI butt.
If the recent Season 10 premier of SG-1 had been done by the Farscape writers, the action would have started a few weeks after the cliff-hanging plot with the characters having a casual conversation. If you listened carefully you might figure out how they escaped the danger.
Farscape always had anti-climatic plot resolutions. Doing it once might be clever, doing multiple times suggested that they didn't have the writing skills or budget to do it right.
If MS simply wanted to make IE incompatible with Google's applications, they could just offer a service pack or include it with a security patch, there's no need to delay IE7 or Longhorn.
I think you're confusing the current wishful thinking of the anti-MS crowd that Google is going to kill MS with what MS believes. Besides, Google isn't going to increase their revenue by delaying Vista so I think your reading Google's intentions wrong. I suspect that Google is already planning on how they can take advantage of a new Windows OS. Vista will probably drive a new round of PC purchases. Those new PCs will be more powerful and may improve the user experience for Google's applications. So an earlier introduction of Vista may actually be more to Google's advantage than a delay would be.
Another way of looking at it is that a product like this may have the potential to bust the "brainbank" myth if it sucks.
AOL either bought Netscape out of stupidity or to get the ability to extort money out of MS. Although they ended up getting a lot of money from MS, they still didn't get enough to make a profit on the deal.
"The issue is that with the BSD license, people who receive your code, can now restrict others from using it in any way they please including yourself if they so wish."
No, you're absolutely wrong. If I write BSD'd code nobody can restrict it in any way shape or form. Yes, if they incorporate my code in their own application they could restrict that code, but my code reamains unrestricted.
But all that reverse engineering would have come to naught if IBM hadn't chosen an outside company to provide the OS and that company hadn't pushed for the right to sell the OS to others. MS also played a key role in making the multiple-vendor PC market possible.