I never got "Seinfeld" either. I saw a few episodes and it was okay I guess, but I never understood why it became so huge as it wasn't that funny. "No soup for you." Indeed.
I personally found that perhaps 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 episodes was brilliant. The rest just tried too hard. Look at how little good TV there was back then (and now) and you'll see why I'd sit through 4 or 5 episodes for 1 good one.
The top 500 company I worked for did just the opposite: Destroy all data in case a legal issue comes up. They called it 'desk cleanout day', and unless you were an official dedicated contact on a particular subject you were to wipe all correspondence of more than a year old. (There were also other grades of information, but erase after a year was the default).
Can I get a job working as a coder in this organization?
Boss: Have you finished your work on XYZ? Me: Yes boss. Boss: Can we deliver it next monday? Me: Sorry but I started that code more than a year ago. Cleaned it up this morning for desk cleanout day Boss: How long before we can have it then? Me: Well I'll have to put together a project plan but we should be able to deliver in 366 days. 367 tops.
Wait, it's "cigar-shaped" and they're naming it after a fertility _Goddess_? Something's not right here.
This is what bothers you most? By the IAU's definition a dwarf planet is not a planet, and a planet that doesn't orbit our own star is not a planet. I've got a masters in Astronomy (never used it professionally and never intended to, did the degree for my own learning). I have no time for the IAU's nonsense. It's a good example of how politics in science leads to nonsense in science.
In brief, the claim that the technology referred to in the article can achieve a 500x efficiency improvement over existing solar cells is flagrantly incompatible with the first law of thermodynamics.
News just at hand! 7th grader loses science scholarship, gains marketing and sales scholarships.
When I was in college, the kids who were the over-achievers in high school were always the first to crash and burn when they hit college. Without their parents to drive them, they went nuts (sometimes literally). Didn't happen to all of them, but it was a lot more common with them than with the rest of us. Probably about half of the Governor's Scholars and Presidential Scholars I knew failed out their freshmen year.
Check back 5 years later when they've matured just a little. Some of those kids will have recovered and gone back to college. They may not have persued the same degree but I bet you'll find a lot of them have adjusted after the massive culture shock that no longer being spoon fed constitutes. Others of course will not have had the tenacity for a comeback, but I think the numbers that did will surprise you.
That's just one reason it's important not to write someone off if they don't succeed immediately.
And before you jump up and down screaming "I want only the best of the best to be doctors!" I should remind you that many people don't have access to any doctors at all, and a B-student doctor is just as capable as an A-student doctor at determining whether your sore throat needs further medical care.
I can refute that. The B-student doesn't recognize subtle signs that it's throat cancer (or doesn't ask for a history to work out the patient is a smoker etc0. Tells the patient to go away and try cough medicine.
If you really believe that it doesn't matter how thorough or accurate a doctor is you've obviously never received bad medical advice. A good doctor will save your life. A good doctor will kill you. (I've seen first hand the results of a neurologist prescribing and managing a medication without properly checking the contraindications. This was a well studied and recommended neurologist mind you - plus 2 GPs who didn't want to check the damn fact sheet. It almost killed the patient).
I have no problems with doctors skipping research subjects, but I want the A student when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.
If they lose, he spends time defending himself that would otherwise be spent defending others. He's one man. They have money to throw around and can hire many.
If they win - perhaps he has a bad day or a judge makes a bad call, well that serves as a warning to other lawyers and takes him out of the picture.
What's moronic about that? Strategically it sounds quite workable. Stupidity may well be rampant but assuming someone is incompetent or stupid is quite a gamble. If these people were stupid there would be very little to fear.
VRML enabled sites have been around for years. It might be a more complex impimentation of a VRML plugin, but it hardly seems noteworthy.
What's noteworthy is that these fools try to claim they're the first, and call a plugin a web browser. That's enough hype and inaccuracy to make me not bother trying it. It feels like a sleazy scam even if it is a legit product.
Thanks for that. Interesting how there are different versions of the problem as well. The version I coded wrote out the word if the number was divisible by x or included the digit x. (Includes digit x is a bit more fun if you want to try to do it efficiently). The version that you pointed to only had the divisibility rule. Why anyone would call something with so varied a set of solutions uninteresting is what I don't understand.
You'd win that wager. I had enough time to comment on the idea of DNA testing dogshit. I did not really feel like exploring the idea further by reading the article etc. on a day that had already been shite at work and at home.
I have to point it out: dumb people do not DESERVE to be taken advantage of by smart people. Social Darwinism is an inherently fascist, evil, and anti-social philosophy that destroys societies and people's lives. Don't subscribe to it. Society works because of trust, and social Darwinism destroys that trust.
This is absurd! What the hell does this kind of DNA testing cost anyway? If it's in the article I'll never know because I'm NOT reading an article about DNA sampling of shit for the purpose of issuing fines. Moronic idea. This government must have a lot of money to blow (or be willing to force it's citizens to pay up big for stupidity)
It's actually scary what the average slashdotter thinks makes a competent coder. When I suggested that I spent some spare time exploring and extrapolating FizzBuzz for fun (and testing!!! my solutions), I got called incompetent because it was an "uninteresting" problem. Instant gratification, instant results seem to be the flavour of the day...leading to poor untested code resulting from poor and/or incomplete analysis. I wonder how many "uninteresting" business problems some of these jokers would code poorly and/or incompletely without testing for the sake of saying they're quick and switched on.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I don't know you personally, so my comments can only be based on the objective information you gave us here on Slashdot, and I have no reason to lie or to attack you maliciously
You might want to work on your people skills then. "I'm sorry but you are incompetent" is not friendly and is no way to present opinion unemotionally and objectively.
However, your reaction to criticism and the defensive nature of your posts do reinforce the initial impression that apparently at least two people formed on reading your previous post.
Oh yes, 2 people who troll on slashdot or are misinformed or hold a contrary opition - that greatly supports your case. It's on slashdot! It must be true! Nothing on slashdot is ever irrational or reactionary. Not to mention that what I said was controvertial because A) I put myself out there and B) presented a different point of view to what most others have put forward on this thread.
As I said to the other AC, you go ahead and reinforce your opinions while I continue to hold a good job where I am respected and my work is valued.
There is an old poker adage that if you can't immediately identify the weakest player at the table, that's because it's you
Did you get that from some kind of poker fortune cookie? You want to know what they say about people who quote canned adages?
You might like to consider that even if you are as technically brilliant as you think you are, it's possible that other experienced people might have valid perspectives from which you could learn something useful.
Quit with that straw man. I've never said I'm some technically brilliant programmer. I have said that I'm competent, capable and trusted to do advanced and varied work. I've said that I'm confident and comfortable with where I'm at. When you can find a quote where I said I'm technically brilliant or better than everyone who holds a contrary opinion, then try that line on. Until then your misdirection is pitiful.
What am I suppose to learn from you exactly? What lesson have you chosen to try to teach me oh wise one? That I'm incompetent? That my point of view is worthless. Sorry but I don't think that's a lesson that's useful to me in life. What's more it's inconsistent with my reality where I'm a happy and productive member of a team. I sought to present an alternative view to yours and what did you do? If you want an old saying that I think fits you, try: Pot. Kettle. Black.
Some problems require a complex, researched solution. Some don't. This didn't. In reality it's more like 5 minutes just due to speed of writing, but spending any more than that is a sign of incompetence.
Well to be quite blunt you can keep accusing me of incompetence and I can keep working at a job where I'm well paid, often act as team leader and mentor and put out high quality code that has often been commended.
If thoroughly understanding that problem took more than 1 minute of thought, please never program again. Its a question a 3rd grader should understand.
Understanding the basics of doing mod and char includes operations took less than a minute of course. However don't let me interrupt your trolling, or going on a TV show for 3rd graders or whatever you want to rabbit on about.
Never program again? How dare you fucking tell me what I should and shouldn't do? I bet you're a gem to work with or work for. If this is you approach on a team thank fuck my chances of being struck by lightning are higher than working with your retarded inbred monkey arse.
Yes, it was. It's a problem you'd ask a grade school child and expect the right answer. On top of that it was a pointless one, with no real world application. Its entire point is to be a garbage question to show basic programming competence
Of course it's uninteresting and unworthy of your royal attention. What's the bet you've never bothered to code it. As for real world application, it was never meant to have real world application. Sudoku doesn't have real world application. Nor does chess (unless you turn pro). People have spent huge amounts of time on these. By your limited short sighted arse backwards estimation these are unintersting problems that have no real world application.
Yes, I do. On the "How do you think" questions I want them out of their comfort zone. If I ask them a question they can answer too easily, I don't learn anything about them.
THIS above all of your other stupidity shows how bad a boss you'd be. You don't need to put people out of their comfort zone to see what they're capable of. I bet you're the sort of arsewipe who as a boss insists on having staff work long hours regardless of how productive the extended hours are. Work should not be trial by fucking ordeal.
As for the better solution- if you can, fine. I'll give you a minute or two to get it. But I have 45 minutes to break the ice, sell the company, evaluate you, and answer your questions in return
If you'd only give me 45 minutes you can go fuck yourself. For my current job I had 3 interviews, and only after I'd finished a long on paper technical test. However answers like "I don't know I'd have to look that up" or "I can't remember if arrays work like this or like that in this language but I'd look it up" still got me the job. And you know what, my bosses love what I do. I fit in well with everyone at work. I can work along side them. I can lead a small project. I can mentor. I can do support and on site external work. So good luck hiring some goddamn code monkey that has memorized a bunch of reserved words but couldn't analyze a real complex problem to save their life.
You know what you want? The fucking MacDonalds instant food of the coding world. Few business problems work that way. Few are trivial and quick to solve just by knowing a few keywords and some basic code constructs.
I am most definitely not looking for a code monkey. But I am looking for an engineer, not an academic.
No. You're looking for a code monkey. Otherwise you'd never disparage a person for spending some time exploring some other facets of a problem in their spare time for fun. The best engineers do that. They're curious people. They want to try different things etc. You're confusing speed coding for engineering skill. It's laughable.
The really funny thing is problems don't often come along like FizzBuzz at all. Ones where fast solutions work (or can work - your attitude still leads
What you're essentially saying is that one cannot believe in the Bible as literal truth and science at the same time, and that perhaps if that foundation is unseated then one cannot even believe in Christianity and science at the same time. This I support completely, but it doesn't mean it's impossible or illogical to believe in the existence of a god
It's not impossible but it is illogical to select a religion by birth, location or comfort factor and state that you believe a particular interpretation of it above all other religions.
perhaps one described by some other religion, perhaps one we know absolutely nothing about except the rules that govern our universe that we determine through science.
Choosing a religion is like playing a shell game with lots of shells and no peas under the shell. There is nothing compelling about one religion over another. They're all based on mystical untestable nonsense. As for some hypothetical God we know nothing about I'm going to take a pragmatic approach and say that even if one does exist, unless we can get useful contact with this entity we might as well use Occam's razor.
Plenty of other people think that science is compatible with religion and spirituality because they address different concerns.
People who say that usually do so due to pressure to be politically correct and/or to justify irrational beliefs that they themselves hold.
No spiritual or moral code can be valid if it is inconsist with the truth. The truth is best understood via the scientific method. Sure if it's not provable or ther is some leeway for interpreting the truth, there is room for a moral code and you could call that religion or spirtuality. However you can't simultaneously hold the belief that the world was created in 6 days by a god and that it was created over billions of years and that life evolved over a long period. Therefore any religion that insists in the former is incompatible with the truth as we best understand it. The trouble then is if a religion is considered wrong about something so fundamental, how do you take the rest of that religion seriously? How much more of that religion is wrong.
Another fundamental problem with religion is that there are so many competing and mutually exclusive religions and belief sets. Most dismiss the others as flawed or evil (false gods etc.) Which one you are born into is a matter of blind luck. So to believe in a religion based on traditional values makes no sense as opposed to believing in a process that can be improved, includes provability and testability and isn't mutually exclusive with a whole raft of competing belief sets.
Don't think so. Plumbing consists of a well understood set of problems with solutions that remain static for years.
Not so with computing. The problems are constantly changing. The software is constantly changing. Today's best practice is tomorrow's obsolete technique. Today's working system is the system hosed by tomorrows security fix.
I'm very sorry, but if you're being truthful here, then yes, right now you are incompetent for the kind of job I was talking about.
I'm very sorry but to make a statement like that as AC is trolling. Consider a career in politics.
You have made a quick, simple task slow and complicated through over-generalisation, over-engineering, premature optimisation and perfectionism, which is a very bad character trait in a lead developer.
That's how you see it. As I see it I chose to explore and extend the problem. My solutions weren't over-engineered for the goals I set. I decided to set my self goals of optimization, and learning (certainly not perfectionism). If the problem were larger to begin with or of a practical nature I wouldn't have gone that way.
You also, by your own admissions, took several minutes to debug what sounds like a simple typo
If you've never done this yourself, you've never coded. I had to find the bug to fix it. I've seen some of the best programmers I've worked with struggle with bugs that in thend were easily fixed.
and couldn't write the program on paper, which suggests to me that you never grasped the kernel of the problem
Of course it couldn't have to do with having shocking handwriting and prefering to jump around when writing the code.
And finally, you seem to be over-confident of your own abilities, which is another dangerous character trait in a programmer.
You've chosen to interpret my disdain for the test as overconfidence in my own abilities. I consider myself a good solid programmer, not a genius. Nothing i've said above indicates this.
You're definitely trolling, but the bottom line is I'd never be happy working with you.
And THAT is why you'll always have crap code. You want the guy that can spit out code quickly never having understood the problem.
You over-engineered and spent time on things that were not in the requirements, nor likely to ever be used.
What requirements? I wasn't doing this for anyone else. I was doing it for myself. I set the requirements. My requirements were to thoroughly understand the problem, and doing that meant playing with it. It wasn't over-engineered at all. Once I'd solved the initial problem I set myself new goals like remove the repetition and extend the algorithm.
I'll take someone who spent 5 minutes writing and testing in their head over someone who spent 2 hours making repeated versions of an uninteresting problem any day of the week.
It actually wasn't an uninteresting problem problem at all. You'd end up hiring a guy that only wanted to work on 'interesting' problems. The truth is there are few problems that aren't interesting....if you're interested in the first place. The halting problem and the travelling salesman are easily stated.
What I really want in an interview is the quick, simple way. It doesn't have to be bug free, but I expect to see you test it or I'll ask you to, and I expect you to catch your own bugs for simple cases (corner cases I may give some help prodding on).
You would encourage writing code without testing it? And you accuse me of wasting time?
I don't want perfection- I want to see the way you think.
Perfection? You're not even looking for a working solution. Just someone who can parrot out what the mod operator, string conversion and string includes look like.
For example, we sometimes ask someone to implement division without the division operator. This is possible by bit operations, but we try to push them away from this path- if you can get it major props, but it takes too long for most to figure out. We want you to do the simple subtract in a loop method- the point of this problem is to see if you know basic syntax and logic, not if you know binary math. If you can't come up with the extremely simple way very fast, fail.
You want to see if you can confuse someone? Or force them to do it in a very narrow way that you've pushed them into. (Bonus points for mind reading I suppose). You don't want someone who'll actually think of a better solution? Or spend time on a problem because you deem it 'uninteresting'. You're looking for a code monkey and that's what you'll get. If you tested me like that I wouldn't want to work for you anyway. You could fail me till you turned blue because if you did offer me the job I'd be the one to decline. Interviews cut both ways. I wouldn't even consider it a loss. Thank heavens I don't work for your kind.
computers are still relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of IT gurus to keep a network up and running, when a basic desktop computer can get rid of every moving part, there is less to replace and maintain, thus less IT workers needed...
Cars are relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of.... No wait that doesn't work. We have mechanics.
Plumbing is relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of.... No wait that doesn't work, we have janitors and if they can't fix it we have plumbers. Oh and plumbing is old
Electricity is relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of.... No wait that doesn't work, we have electricians.
Science is relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of.... No wait that doesn't work, we have janitors and if they can't fix it we have scientists.
Do I need to repeat with other professions? Anything that requires specialised expertise will require professionals. It has nothing to do with how new a field is. It has to do with the knowledge to operate in the field not being common knowledge. It has to do with how badly things go if they go wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I never got "Seinfeld" either. I saw a few episodes and it was okay I guess, but I never understood why it became so huge as it wasn't that funny. "No soup for you." Indeed.
I personally found that perhaps 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 episodes was brilliant. The rest just tried too hard. Look at how little good TV there was back then (and now) and you'll see why I'd sit through 4 or 5 episodes for 1 good one.
The top 500 company I worked for did just the opposite: Destroy all data in case a legal issue comes up.
They called it 'desk cleanout day', and unless you were an official dedicated contact on a particular subject you were to wipe all correspondence of more than a year old.
(There were also other grades of information, but erase after a year was the default).
Can I get a job working as a coder in this organization?
Boss: Have you finished your work on XYZ?
Me: Yes boss.
Boss: Can we deliver it next monday?
Me: Sorry but I started that code more than a year ago. Cleaned it up this morning for desk cleanout day
Boss: How long before we can have it then?
Me: Well I'll have to put together a project plan but we should be able to deliver in 366 days. 367 tops.
Wait, it's "cigar-shaped" and they're naming it after a fertility _Goddess_? Something's not right here.
This is what bothers you most? By the IAU's definition a dwarf planet is not a planet, and a planet that doesn't orbit our own star is not a planet. I've got a masters in Astronomy (never used it professionally and never intended to, did the degree for my own learning). I have no time for the IAU's nonsense. It's a good example of how politics in science leads to nonsense in science.
In brief, the claim that the technology referred to in the article can achieve a 500x efficiency improvement over existing solar cells is flagrantly incompatible with the first law of thermodynamics.
News just at hand! 7th grader loses science scholarship, gains marketing and sales scholarships.
Don't feel bad; you make me feel stupid for spending my childhood throwing cats at rocks. Your way works a lot better.
Do you really expect us to believe you invented the catapult? I say there was lots of prior art even if you do hold the patent!
When I was in college, the kids who were the over-achievers in high school were always the first to crash and burn when they hit college. Without their parents to drive them, they went nuts (sometimes literally). Didn't happen to all of them, but it was a lot more common with them than with the rest of us. Probably about half of the Governor's Scholars and Presidential Scholars I knew failed out their freshmen year.
Check back 5 years later when they've matured just a little. Some of those kids will have recovered and gone back to college. They may not have persued the same degree but I bet you'll find a lot of them have adjusted after the massive culture shock that no longer being spoon fed constitutes. Others of course will not have had the tenacity for a comeback, but I think the numbers that did will surprise you.
That's just one reason it's important not to write someone off if they don't succeed immediately.
And before you jump up and down screaming "I want only the best of the best to be doctors!" I should remind you that many people don't have access to any doctors at all, and a B-student doctor is just as capable as an A-student doctor at determining whether your sore throat needs further medical care.
I can refute that. The B-student doesn't recognize subtle signs that it's throat cancer (or doesn't ask for a history to work out the patient is a smoker etc0. Tells the patient to go away and try cough medicine.
If you really believe that it doesn't matter how thorough or accurate a doctor is you've obviously never received bad medical advice. A good doctor will save your life. A good doctor will kill you. (I've seen first hand the results of a neurologist prescribing and managing a medication without properly checking the contraindications. This was a well studied and recommended neurologist mind you - plus 2 GPs who didn't want to check the damn fact sheet. It almost killed the patient).
I have no problems with doctors skipping research subjects, but I want the A student when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.
Actually it's not such a bad gamble.
If they lose, he spends time defending himself that would otherwise be spent defending others. He's one man. They have money to throw around and can hire many.
If they win - perhaps he has a bad day or a judge makes a bad call, well that serves as a warning to other lawyers and takes him out of the picture.
What's moronic about that? Strategically it sounds quite workable. Stupidity may well be rampant but assuming someone is incompetent or stupid is quite a gamble. If these people were stupid there would be very little to fear.
VRML enabled sites have been around for years. It might be a more complex impimentation of a VRML plugin, but it hardly seems noteworthy.
What's noteworthy is that these fools try to claim they're the first, and call a plugin a web browser. That's enough hype and inaccuracy to make me not bother trying it. It feels like a sleazy scam even if it is a legit product.
Thanks for that. Interesting how there are different versions of the problem as well. The version I coded wrote out the word if the number was divisible by x or included the digit x. (Includes digit x is a bit more fun if you want to try to do it efficiently). The version that you pointed to only had the divisibility rule. Why anyone would call something with so varied a set of solutions uninteresting is what I don't understand.
You'd win that wager. I had enough time to comment on the idea of DNA testing dogshit. I did not really feel like exploring the idea further by reading the article etc. on a day that had already been shite at work and at home.
I have to point it out: dumb people do not DESERVE to be taken advantage of by smart people. Social Darwinism is an inherently fascist, evil, and anti-social philosophy that destroys societies and people's lives. Don't subscribe to it. Society works because of trust, and social Darwinism destroys that trust.
One more time, for the dummies.
This is absurd! What the hell does this kind of DNA testing cost anyway? If it's in the article I'll never know because I'm NOT reading an article about DNA sampling of shit for the purpose of issuing fines. Moronic idea. This government must have a lot of money to blow (or be willing to force it's citizens to pay up big for stupidity)
It's actually scary what the average slashdotter thinks makes a competent coder. When I suggested that I spent some spare time exploring and extrapolating FizzBuzz for fun (and testing!!! my solutions), I got called incompetent because it was an "uninteresting" problem. Instant gratification, instant results seem to be the flavour of the day...leading to poor untested code resulting from poor and/or incomplete analysis. I wonder how many "uninteresting" business problems some of these jokers would code poorly and/or incompletely without testing for the sake of saying they're quick and switched on.
This guy writes a lot of utilities including password recovery software.
Check out the false positives listed here:
http://www.nirsoft.net/false_positive_report.html
I'm sorry you feel that way. I don't know you personally, so my comments can only be based on the objective information you gave us here on Slashdot, and I have no reason to lie or to attack you maliciously
You might want to work on your people skills then. "I'm sorry but you are incompetent" is not friendly and is no way to present opinion unemotionally and objectively.
However, your reaction to criticism and the defensive nature of your posts do reinforce the initial impression that apparently at least two people formed on reading your previous post.
Oh yes, 2 people who troll on slashdot or are misinformed or hold a contrary opition - that greatly supports your case. It's on slashdot! It must be true! Nothing on slashdot is ever irrational or reactionary. Not to mention that what I said was controvertial because A) I put myself out there and B) presented a different point of view to what most others have put forward on this thread.
As I said to the other AC, you go ahead and reinforce your opinions while I continue to hold a good job where I am respected and my work is valued.
There is an old poker adage that if you can't immediately identify the weakest player at the table, that's because it's you
Did you get that from some kind of poker fortune cookie? You want to know what they say about people who quote canned adages?
You might like to consider that even if you are as technically brilliant as you think you are, it's possible that other experienced people might have valid perspectives from which you could learn something useful.
Quit with that straw man. I've never said I'm some technically brilliant programmer. I have said that I'm competent, capable and trusted to do advanced and varied work. I've said that I'm confident and comfortable with where I'm at. When you can find a quote where I said I'm technically brilliant or better than everyone who holds a contrary opinion, then try that line on. Until then your misdirection is pitiful.
What am I suppose to learn from you exactly? What lesson have you chosen to try to teach me oh wise one? That I'm incompetent? That my point of view is worthless. Sorry but I don't think that's a lesson that's useful to me in life. What's more it's inconsistent with my reality where I'm a happy and productive member of a team. I sought to present an alternative view to yours and what did you do? If you want an old saying that I think fits you, try: Pot. Kettle. Black.
Some problems require a complex, researched solution. Some don't. This didn't. In reality it's more like 5 minutes just due to speed of writing, but spending any more than that is a sign of incompetence.
Well to be quite blunt you can keep accusing me of incompetence and I can keep working at a job where I'm well paid, often act as team leader and mentor and put out high quality code that has often been commended.
If thoroughly understanding that problem took more than 1 minute of thought, please never program again. Its a question a 3rd grader should understand.
Understanding the basics of doing mod and char includes operations took less than a minute of course. However don't let me interrupt your trolling, or going on a TV show for 3rd graders or whatever you want to rabbit on about.
Never program again? How dare you fucking tell me what I should and shouldn't do? I bet you're a gem to work with or work for. If this is you approach on a team thank fuck my chances of being struck by lightning are higher than working with your retarded inbred monkey arse.
Yes, it was. It's a problem you'd ask a grade school child and expect the right answer. On top of that it was a pointless one, with no real world application. Its entire point is to be a garbage question to show basic programming competence
Of course it's uninteresting and unworthy of your royal attention. What's the bet you've never bothered to code it. As for real world application, it was never meant to have real world application. Sudoku doesn't have real world application. Nor does chess (unless you turn pro). People have spent huge amounts of time on these. By your limited short sighted arse backwards estimation these are unintersting problems that have no real world application.
Yes, I do. On the "How do you think" questions I want them out of their comfort zone. If I ask them a question they can answer too easily, I don't learn anything about them.
THIS above all of your other stupidity shows how bad a boss you'd be. You don't need to put people out of their comfort zone to see what they're capable of. I bet you're the sort of arsewipe who as a boss insists on having staff work long hours regardless of how productive the extended hours are. Work should not be trial by fucking ordeal.
As for the better solution- if you can, fine. I'll give you a minute or two to get it. But I have 45 minutes to break the ice, sell the company, evaluate you, and answer your questions in return
If you'd only give me 45 minutes you can go fuck yourself. For my current job I had 3 interviews, and only after I'd finished a long on paper technical test. However answers like "I don't know I'd have to look that up" or "I can't remember if arrays work like this or like that in this language but I'd look it up" still got me the job. And you know what, my bosses love what I do. I fit in well with everyone at work. I can work along side them. I can lead a small project. I can mentor. I can do support and on site external work. So good luck hiring some goddamn code monkey that has memorized a bunch of reserved words but couldn't analyze a real complex problem to save their life.
You know what you want? The fucking MacDonalds instant food of the coding world. Few business problems work that way. Few are trivial and quick to solve just by knowing a few keywords and some basic code constructs.
I am most definitely not looking for a code monkey. But I am looking for an engineer, not an academic.
No. You're looking for a code monkey. Otherwise you'd never disparage a person for spending some time exploring some other facets of a problem in their spare time for fun. The best engineers do that. They're curious people. They want to try different things etc. You're confusing speed coding for engineering skill. It's laughable.
The really funny thing is problems don't often come along like FizzBuzz at all. Ones where fast solutions work (or can work - your attitude still leads
What you're essentially saying is that one cannot believe in the Bible as literal truth and science at the same time, and that perhaps if that foundation is unseated then one cannot even believe in Christianity and science at the same time. This I support completely, but it doesn't mean it's impossible or illogical to believe in the existence of a god
It's not impossible but it is illogical to select a religion by birth, location or comfort factor and state that you believe a particular interpretation of it above all other religions.
perhaps one described by some other religion, perhaps one we know absolutely nothing about except the rules that govern our universe that we determine through science.
Choosing a religion is like playing a shell game with lots of shells and no peas under the shell. There is nothing compelling about one religion over another. They're all based on mystical untestable nonsense. As for some hypothetical God we know nothing about I'm going to take a pragmatic approach and say that even if one does exist, unless we can get useful contact with this entity we might as well use Occam's razor.
If you are a baby or preggers then use glass containers
Giving glass to your baby????? Please tell me you're not a parent!
Plenty of other people think that science is compatible with religion and spirituality because they address different concerns.
People who say that usually do so due to pressure to be politically correct and/or to justify irrational beliefs that they themselves hold.
No spiritual or moral code can be valid if it is inconsist with the truth. The truth is best understood via the scientific method. Sure if it's not provable or ther is some leeway for interpreting the truth, there is room for a moral code and you could call that religion or spirtuality. However you can't simultaneously hold the belief that the world was created in 6 days by a god and that it was created over billions of years and that life evolved over a long period. Therefore any religion that insists in the former is incompatible with the truth as we best understand it. The trouble then is if a religion is considered wrong about something so fundamental, how do you take the rest of that religion seriously? How much more of that religion is wrong.
Another fundamental problem with religion is that there are so many competing and mutually exclusive religions and belief sets. Most dismiss the others as flawed or evil (false gods etc.) Which one you are born into is a matter of blind luck. So to believe in a religion based on traditional values makes no sense as opposed to believing in a process that can be improved, includes provability and testability and isn't mutually exclusive with a whole raft of competing belief sets.
Don't think so. Plumbing consists of a well understood set of problems with solutions that remain static for years.
Not so with computing. The problems are constantly changing. The software is constantly changing. Today's best practice is tomorrow's obsolete technique. Today's working system is the system hosed by tomorrows security fix.
I'm very sorry, but if you're being truthful here, then yes, right now you are incompetent for the kind of job I was talking about.
I'm very sorry but to make a statement like that as AC is trolling. Consider a career in politics.
You have made a quick, simple task slow and complicated through over-generalisation, over-engineering, premature optimisation and perfectionism, which is a very bad character trait in a lead developer.
That's how you see it. As I see it I chose to explore and extend the problem. My solutions weren't over-engineered for the goals I set. I decided to set my self goals of optimization, and learning (certainly not perfectionism). If the problem were larger to begin with or of a practical nature I wouldn't have gone that way.
You also, by your own admissions, took several minutes to debug what sounds like a simple typo
If you've never done this yourself, you've never coded. I had to find the bug to fix it. I've seen some of the best programmers I've worked with struggle with bugs that in thend were easily fixed.
and couldn't write the program on paper, which suggests to me that you never grasped the kernel of the problem
Of course it couldn't have to do with having shocking handwriting and prefering to jump around when writing the code.
And finally, you seem to be over-confident of your own abilities, which is another dangerous character trait in a programmer.
You've chosen to interpret my disdain for the test as overconfidence in my own abilities. I consider myself a good solid programmer, not a genius. Nothing i've said above indicates this.
You're definitely trolling, but the bottom line is I'd never be happy working with you.
Yes, I'd rather have the 2 minute guy.
And THAT is why you'll always have crap code. You want the guy that can spit out code quickly never having understood the problem.
You over-engineered and spent time on things that were not in the requirements, nor likely to ever be used.
What requirements? I wasn't doing this for anyone else. I was doing it for myself. I set the requirements. My requirements were to thoroughly understand the problem, and doing that meant playing with it. It wasn't over-engineered at all. Once I'd solved the initial problem I set myself new goals like remove the repetition and extend the algorithm.
I'll take someone who spent 5 minutes writing and testing in their head over someone who spent 2 hours making repeated versions of an uninteresting problem any day of the week.
It actually wasn't an uninteresting problem problem at all. You'd end up hiring a guy that only wanted to work on 'interesting' problems. The truth is there are few problems that aren't interesting....if you're interested in the first place. The halting problem and the travelling salesman are easily stated.
What I really want in an interview is the quick, simple way. It doesn't have to be bug free, but I expect to see you test it or I'll ask you to, and I expect you to catch your own bugs for simple cases (corner cases I may give some help prodding on).
You would encourage writing code without testing it? And you accuse me of wasting time?
I don't want perfection- I want to see the way you think.
Perfection? You're not even looking for a working solution. Just someone who can parrot out what the mod operator, string conversion and string includes look like.
For example, we sometimes ask someone to implement division without the division operator. This is possible by bit operations, but we try to push them away from this path- if you can get it major props, but it takes too long for most to figure out. We want you to do the simple subtract in a loop method- the point of this problem is to see if you know basic syntax and logic, not if you know binary math. If you can't come up with the extremely simple way very fast, fail.
You want to see if you can confuse someone? Or force them to do it in a very narrow way that you've pushed them into. (Bonus points for mind reading I suppose). You don't want someone who'll actually think of a better solution? Or spend time on a problem because you deem it 'uninteresting'. You're looking for a code monkey and that's what you'll get. If you tested me like that I wouldn't want to work for you anyway. You could fail me till you turned blue because if you did offer me the job I'd be the one to decline. Interviews cut both ways. I wouldn't even consider it a loss. Thank heavens I don't work for your kind.
GOO-GLE-MI-NA-TE!
Don't you mean GOO-GLE-MI-NA-TE! beta?
computers are still relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of IT gurus to keep a network up and running, when a basic desktop computer can get rid of every moving part, there is less to replace and maintain, thus less IT workers needed...
Cars are relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of .... No wait that doesn't work. We have mechanics.
Plumbing is relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of .... No wait that doesn't work, we have janitors and if they can't fix it we have plumbers. Oh and plumbing is old
Electricity is relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of .... No wait that doesn't work, we have electricians.
Science is relatively new, and eventually you won't need a whole staff of .... No wait that doesn't work, we have janitors and if they can't fix it we have scientists.
Do I need to repeat with other professions? Anything that requires specialised expertise will require professionals. It has nothing to do with how new a field is. It has to do with the knowledge to operate in the field not being common knowledge. It has to do with how badly things go if they go wrong.