Asking them to sit down and whip up a simple app in an hour is not unreasonable. Otherwise go for a 90 day trail period or contract to hire.
But, you are doing it wrong.
>>ask them to solve it, and tell them that they can ask you whatever they want Chances are, if you are the hiring manager, keyword being manager, you won't have a good answer to any important questions I have, and in fact will just give me bad information and make things worse.
This is software right? You do have a plan right? Just like the guys who built the building you are sitting in? Are you content to think that the guy who physically placed the rafters over your head was able to solve a tricky issues with those on the fly?
>> How they figure it out Ya, now you are creeping me out, they figure it out with experience, intelligence, reason, knowledge, critical thinking, skill and intuition. Critical thinking is nurtured more in some cultures than others and intuition, a combination of all of the above attributes, is highly valued for some work.
>> How they figure it out I don't' think you can evaluate that with a physical test, that's what the interview is for, to get an idea of peoples thought processes.
The government takes 30% of my pay, the state gets 6% off the top on most things I buy like cars and appliances. You think I mind paying 10% (~$4/month) of a $1000 computer every two years for a vendor supported OS? Somebody whittle down the 30% and then we will have something to talk about talk.
I guess it has to do with the goals of the project. It looks to me like the current approach is low effort for low value. I assume that after scanning they will have to attach some meta-data to the files and perhaps have them reviewed for legibility and make corrections, which brings it to medium effort for medium value.
I figure if you are going to do medium effort anyway you might as well shoot for high value. I see it as medium effort for someone to transcribe their own notes of a subject they understand completely and it returns high value.
Perhaps it can't realistically be done with existing work but if the people paying the professors want to get more out of their investment then they might introduce it as part of the process and include it as part of the deliverables as it were. I understand that universities are as political if not more so than corporations and that what I have suggested may not always work either place.
In another industry, programmers, no matter how smart they are, should not create 100's of pages of code that is not distributable, readable, searchable or re-usable. If they do then they are not doing what they are being paid to do.
Give your professors a copy of Open Office and have them redo the work in a format that can be read, indexed, searched and distributed.
The problem is that it is an unimaginative implementation and they are riding first to market to the bitter end and keeping the product dumbed down.
Tivo needs to be able to play mpegs off of a samba share.
Tivo needs to have a built in web interface for filling a recording grid so that it is better utilized.
Tivo needs to be able to do pay per view/rental downloads. Laced with nasty DRM is fine by me. They do it with ads already, why not what I want to see.
The thumbs up and thumbs down feature is useless and the associated priority based scheduling misses more than it catches. I can figure out what I like that is related if I can see a grid and fit it in with what else I have scheduled.
It runs Linux and has a broadband connection and can be auto updated so what is the hold up?
It is overpriced and under featured and the interface is slow, simply limited and annoying.
I want an appliance not a TV portal.
Yet I still use my Tivo every day.
In the death march projects I've worked on success is never clearly defined so conversly you can never really fail. It is a way for (incompetent) project managers to have an out. Commit to everything at once and nothing fully.
>>the cost of collecting $1 of revenue--45 cents in 2002
And they are still in business?
Seriously, this sounds like another case of a consulting firm taking advantage of the disfunction of the client to profit. For the kind of money invloved CSC should have been able to spec out and create an new system from scratch. The reason the job for the army worked is because they used sap which others have used before and had gotten to work, mostly.
The old dead wood probably knows what all of the fields on all of the files do and they may be able to scratch together some assembler or cobol to display what could pass for xml in a log file somewhere.
I guess it is hard to code a game engine but I get the impression that most of the maps and some of the total conversion mods are done by small teams and some end up being much better overall than the original.
It may be that in this case they decided that FWD was an information service because all they provide is a directory service. Once the look up is made, they are out of the picture and the parties connect and communicate on their own.
It is more like a crutch. Their DLL uses the Browser Helper Objects COM hook to synch events from IE. They examine the url and take you to their website instead when you try to navigate to a spoofed url.
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Asking them to sit down and whip up a simple app in an hour is not unreasonable.
Otherwise go for a 90 day trail period or contract to hire.
But, you are doing it wrong.
>>ask them to solve it, and tell them that they can ask you whatever they want
Chances are, if you are the hiring manager, keyword being manager, you won't have a good answer to any important questions I have, and in fact will just give me bad information and make things worse.
This is software right? You do have a plan right? Just like the guys who built the building you are sitting in? Are you content to think that the guy who physically placed the rafters over your head was able to solve a tricky issues with those on the fly?
>> How they figure it out
Ya, now you are creeping me out, they figure it out with experience, intelligence, reason, knowledge, critical thinking, skill and intuition. Critical thinking is nurtured more in some cultures than others and intuition, a combination of all of the above attributes, is highly valued for some work.
>> How they figure it out
I don't' think you can evaluate that with a physical test, that's what the interview is for, to get an idea of peoples thought processes.
The government takes 30% of my pay, the state gets 6% off the top on most things I buy like cars and appliances. You think I mind paying 10% (~$4/month) of a $1000 computer every two years for a vendor supported OS? Somebody whittle down the 30% and then we will have something to talk about talk.
Na, 5. VB5, NT5
I thought TV already accomplished all of this.
I guess it has to do with the goals of the project. It looks to me like the current approach is low effort for low value. I assume that after scanning they will have to attach some meta-data to the files and perhaps have them reviewed for legibility and make corrections, which brings it to medium effort for medium value.
I figure if you are going to do medium effort anyway you might as well shoot for high value. I see it as medium effort for someone to transcribe their own notes of a subject they understand completely and it returns high value.
Perhaps it can't realistically be done with existing work but if the people paying the professors want to get more out of their investment then they might introduce it as part of the process and include it as part of the deliverables as it were. I understand that universities are as political if not more so than corporations and that what I have suggested may not always work either place.
In another industry, programmers, no matter how smart they are, should not create 100's of pages of code that is not distributable, readable, searchable or re-usable. If they do then they are not doing what they are being paid to do.
Give your professors a copy of Open Office and have them redo the work in a format that can be read, indexed, searched and distributed.
And how about some native mpeg4 compression already which would vastly expand my recording capacity. Obsolete out of the box.
The problem is that it is an unimaginative implementation and they are riding first to market to the bitter end and keeping the product dumbed down. Tivo needs to be able to play mpegs off of a samba share. Tivo needs to have a built in web interface for filling a recording grid so that it is better utilized. Tivo needs to be able to do pay per view/rental downloads. Laced with nasty DRM is fine by me. They do it with ads already, why not what I want to see. The thumbs up and thumbs down feature is useless and the associated priority based scheduling misses more than it catches. I can figure out what I like that is related if I can see a grid and fit it in with what else I have scheduled. It runs Linux and has a broadband connection and can be auto updated so what is the hold up? It is overpriced and under featured and the interface is slow, simply limited and annoying. I want an appliance not a TV portal. Yet I still use my Tivo every day.
The bad news about dinner. The cat dumped in our pot and it all taste like shit. The good news about dinner. There's plenty of it.
In the death march projects I've worked on success is never clearly defined so conversly you can never really fail. It is a way for (incompetent) project managers to have an out. Commit to everything at once and nothing fully.
>>the cost of collecting $1 of revenue--45 cents in 2002
And they are still in business?
Seriously, this sounds like another case of a consulting firm taking advantage of the disfunction of the client to profit. For the kind of money invloved CSC should have been able to spec out and create an new system from scratch. The reason the job for the army worked is because they used sap which others have used before and had gotten to work, mostly.
The old dead wood probably knows what all of the fields on all of the files do and they may be able to scratch together some assembler or cobol to display what could pass for xml in a log file somewhere.
More like Opteron or P4
I guess it is hard to code a game engine but I get the impression that most of the maps and some of the total conversion mods are done by small teams and some end up being much better overall than the original.
It may be that in this case they decided that FWD was an information service because all they provide is a directory service. Once the look up is made, they are out of the picture and the parties connect and communicate on their own.
Of course we would use l shift+o... And then sys c000.
You have job security through obscurity.
Orwell was describing an IT project after all. And, no suprise, it has come in a little late.
It is more like a crutch. Their DLL uses the Browser Helper Objects COM hook to synch events from IE. They examine the url and take you to their website instead when you try to navigate to a spoofed url.