Microsoft still in favour with some paid developers and their superiors.
FTFY. And, of course, I know this. It's just amusing (and encouraging) to see Microsoft whinging that they're having a hard time indoctrinating students into dependence on their tools.
I've worked at a few places where the company had negotiated a separate budget for fixing bugs in the current version (this was for expensive custom software packages, though). If you missed a bug before release, no worries--you (as a programmer or tester) would just get paid to fix it later anyway, and probably get paid more for doing it late, since it would be an emergency and therefore done on overtime. So, in a way, leaving non-serious bugs was like almost like guaranteeing a bonus.
Consequently, testing was fairly haphazard. It was certainly of far lower quality, quantity and depth than the 3 or 4 "hobbyist" open source projects I've worked on. Maybe I've just been lucky though.
I dunno, but I'm sure somebody will be glad to add a feature into their browser that will strip all scripts, tags, and other unspecified annoyance delivery methods out of untrusted pages before it renders them.
but if you learn programming at an older age, programming will always be a dreary slog
Oh noes, I didn't even *start* programming in C until I was 28, and didn't start learning Python until I was over 30. I just started learning Java and Go last week, and I'm over 40 now.
Fuck...this probably applies to physics and math too, doesn't it? I just remembered that I didn't start learning fluid mechanics, asymptotic methods, and solution methods for partial differential equations until I was 38.
GOD DAMMIT, WHY DIDNT SOMEBODY TELL ME THIS WHEN I WAS YOUNG?!?!?!?
...oh, wait, I actually find enjoyment in doing all those things. I guess it doesn't work like you said.
It's hard to tell, since some things are hard to convey in text, but this kind of attitude:
Now all this some it was feeling somewhat insulted as these things are elementary...to be asked to write a binary search algorithm was not so inspiring...
would make me not want to hire somebody (regardless of whether or not they have gray hair or a receding hairline) if I caught too many whiffs of it.
The reason I say that is this: I've worked with people that would balk at having to explain something so elementary, and yet they couldn't actually do it, even given an unlimited amount of time. They can easily memorize things or look them up, but never learned how to figure out stuff on their own. The interviewer has no way of knowing whether or not you're one of those people, except to ask you to explain how to do it.
The way I personally approached this (or any) interview, is to remember that the guy/gal on the other side of the table has nothing but my word that I actually did anything listed on my resume. People lie all the time, and sometimes invest a lot of effort into figuring out how to scam interviewers. If he asks some probing questions, it's because he's worried he's going to hire somebody that doesn't have a clue about the job, and he'll get flak for the hire. If she asks something that exposes a lack of knowledge on my part, it's best to thank her, go brush up on the topic, and try another interview elsewhere.
Some friends of mine reported that they knew some very smart people that reported the same experience, which helped my ego somewhat I'm glad.
I find it's much better to try to separate my ego from my job. That makes me less susceptible to people that know how to take advantage of geek egos. Your mileage may vary.
...but only recent graduates, or people who specially refresh their oral exam skills in advance, will do well in these types of interviews.
That's interesting, because I just interviewed with Google last week, and I completely disagree. Here's some information about my background, just to explain why I don't agree:
While I'm a "recent" (1 year ago) masters graduate, my degrees are all in applied math. None of my coursework in the last 5 years required writing anything more complicated than some loops, taking products and sums, and throwing matrices and vectors off to libraries to do the "hard" work like solving and plotting. Most of my time in the last 5 years has been spent trying to learn enough math and fluid physics to get by in my coursework and research topic.
I did finish a minor in CS during my undergrad, 3 years ago, which required only one junior-level algorithms class (covering mostly basic things about lists and trees). I'd never even heard of a hash table until maybe 6 years ago when I was working as a programmer but curious enough to find out on my own how Python dictionaries worked.
I'm not a people-person. I get sweaty and nervous if somebody wants me to give a presentation, and I avoid it if at all humanly possible. I neither like writing on the board nor taking oral exams. The last time I had to solve complicated problems on the fly in an oral exam was 15-20 years ago when I had to demonstrate I had enough of a clue to be trusted to operate parts of a nuclear power plant.
All I did to prep for the interview was pick up "Mastering Algorithms With C" and Knuth's first two books, and skimmed through them over the course of 2-3 weeks, and work out on paper or in a short C program why and how some of the algorithms worked. I didn't have time to look at nearly everything in those books, of course, so I tried to stick to basic things. I didn't try to work on my oral exam skills, didn't try to improve my (horrible) board handwriting, and didn't have a buddy barrage me with random questions from a list of Google interview questions I found.
But somehow, I managed to answer the questions they asked, except for one that was easily solved with a lock-free data structure I'd never heard of. I felt pretty comfortable because it was obvious the guys doing the interviews "got their hands dirty" in some code on a regular basis. I have no idea if they'll make me an offer, and I don't know if I'll accept it if they do. I just need a job to pay the bills, and I don't need to work at Google for that.
I would say that my time as a paid developer and as an "oh that's cool, how does that work" open source hobbyist were far more valuable to me than recent CS coursework or oral exam prep would have been, because that's where you learn to figure stuff out on your own, while classroom coursework doesn't always require you to do that.
I'll take Google's interview process with real coders any day over the "HR person with a checklist of skills, and no clue about what coders do" process.
This will drive up outsourcing prices, which drives up the market value of us programmers here in the U.S., at least a little bit.
Not to worry--I'm sure there are already some inventive U.S. politicians and business leaders hard at work innovating a synergistic solution to this disturbing development.
Between teaching, research grants, and cleaning test tubes, grad school in the sciences will cost you $0 out of pocket for tuition, fees, rent, and food.
That must be nice, but it's not reality where I am. I'm at a university that ranks as about #40 in most science/math/engineering rankings, and the only thing I get waived is tuition. I have to pay ~$750 in fees per year. I get about $1500/mo after tax from my stipend, and I have to pay for 100% of my rent, food, and textbooks out of that.
You can't get a part-time job and still get a stipend, and I don't know anybody that's managed to get a "research grant" that provides them with extra money beyond the stipend for being a teaching or research assistant.
Unless you're the president, the pope, or a nobel prize winning physicist, chances are the stuff you're working on that you think is "important" is probably not worth a hill of beans to the rest of humanity at large.
I think just about everything those people do is probably not worth a hill of beans, either. With the exception of the physicist, there are probably many billions of people that would prefer these people not do the "important" things they're so hot to do.
I bought a color laser printer over two years ago, and haven't had to buy toner yet. I haven't been careful about what I printed...the printer volume page says it has printed 3463 pages, all the color toner cartriges indicate 100% full, and the black toner is 60% full.
imagine if some borderline nutbar in a $X lab got treated badly by $Y_j in $Y and decided to take revenge on $Y by making a $Z that would leave $EVERYBODY - $Y intact. Sure, you could make an $ANTI_Z with enough people and effort, but how many people world die in the meantime? We see the battle between dedicated coders already with DRM and DRM-cracking... if that were to happen in the $X space, it would be an utter disaster.
It's easy for me to fill in these variables with things I don't know much about. The more I know about a subject, the harder it is to believe that it's possible for one person to have the foresight, depth of knowledge, and resources to single-handedly work around the enormous number of variations, complications, and unknowns that would get in the way of killing a large fraction of the human population.
I'm not saying it doesn't make for good fiction, just that doing anything wide-reaching in the real world is almost always orders of magnitude more difficult than anybody imagined it would have been.
Providing lists of variables previously used to make best-selling thrillers and propaganda films is left as an exercise for the reader.
You should go take a class (any class), and sit in the back. I've seen people browsing ESPN for the whole lecture, playing Flash games, reading the news, voting on $HOT_OR_NOT_CLONE, looking at page after page on $PICTURE_CAPTIONING_SITE, you name it.
For bonus entertainment, try to get in on study groups with these same people to hear them gripe about how hard it is to learn the course material.
I know Hollywood has done its best to make people think "critical == exploding," but reactors producing energy at a constant rate are critical. Prompt criticality is a different story (the linked article explains the difference).
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft still in favour with some paid developers and their superiors.
FTFY. And, of course, I know this. It's just amusing (and encouraging) to see Microsoft whinging that they're having a hard time indoctrinating students into dependence on their tools.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
You're living in a fantasy world.
That fantasy world isn't nearly as nice as my real one, where my wife enjoys pointing out noteworthy asses and breasteses for my enjoyment.
Thanks for mentioning that; I'd never run across it before. Yay for learning something cool before I finished my first cup of coffee. :)
You mean like regular light switches? Is that tunnelling taking place through oxide layers on the contacts or something?
I've worked at a few places where the company had negotiated a separate budget for fixing bugs in the current version (this was for expensive custom software packages, though). If you missed a bug before release, no worries--you (as a programmer or tester) would just get paid to fix it later anyway, and probably get paid more for doing it late, since it would be an emergency and therefore done on overtime. So, in a way, leaving non-serious bugs was like almost like guaranteeing a bonus.
Consequently, testing was fairly haphazard. It was certainly of far lower quality, quantity and depth than the 3 or 4 "hobbyist" open source projects I've worked on. Maybe I've just been lucky though.
I dunno, but I'm sure somebody will be glad to add a feature into their browser that will strip all scripts, tags, and other unspecified annoyance delivery methods out of untrusted pages before it renders them.
And I'll be quite glad to use that browser.
but if you learn programming at an older age, programming will always be a dreary slog
Oh noes, I didn't even *start* programming in C until I was 28, and didn't start learning Python until I was over 30. I just started learning Java and Go last week, and I'm over 40 now.
Fuck...this probably applies to physics and math too, doesn't it? I just remembered that I didn't start learning fluid mechanics, asymptotic methods, and solution methods for partial differential equations until I was 38.
GOD DAMMIT, WHY DIDNT SOMEBODY TELL ME THIS WHEN I WAS YOUNG?!?!?!?
...oh, wait, I actually find enjoyment in doing all those things. I guess it doesn't work like you said.
It's hard to tell, since some things are hard to convey in text, but this kind of attitude:
Now all this some it was feeling somewhat insulted as these things are elementary...to be asked to write a binary search algorithm was not so inspiring...
would make me not want to hire somebody (regardless of whether or not they have gray hair or a receding hairline) if I caught too many whiffs of it.
The reason I say that is this: I've worked with people that would balk at having to explain something so elementary, and yet they couldn't actually do it, even given an unlimited amount of time. They can easily memorize things or look them up, but never learned how to figure out stuff on their own. The interviewer has no way of knowing whether or not you're one of those people, except to ask you to explain how to do it.
The way I personally approached this (or any) interview, is to remember that the guy/gal on the other side of the table has nothing but my word that I actually did anything listed on my resume. People lie all the time, and sometimes invest a lot of effort into figuring out how to scam interviewers. If he asks some probing questions, it's because he's worried he's going to hire somebody that doesn't have a clue about the job, and he'll get flak for the hire. If she asks something that exposes a lack of knowledge on my part, it's best to thank her, go brush up on the topic, and try another interview elsewhere.
Some friends of mine reported that they knew some very smart people that reported the same experience, which helped my ego somewhat I'm glad.
I find it's much better to try to separate my ego from my job. That makes me less susceptible to people that know how to take advantage of geek egos. Your mileage may vary.
That's interesting, because I just interviewed with Google last week, and I completely disagree. Here's some information about my background, just to explain why I don't agree:
While I'm a "recent" (1 year ago) masters graduate, my degrees are all in applied math. None of my coursework in the last 5 years required writing anything more complicated than some loops, taking products and sums, and throwing matrices and vectors off to libraries to do the "hard" work like solving and plotting. Most of my time in the last 5 years has been spent trying to learn enough math and fluid physics to get by in my coursework and research topic.
I did finish a minor in CS during my undergrad, 3 years ago, which required only one junior-level algorithms class (covering mostly basic things about lists and trees). I'd never even heard of a hash table until maybe 6 years ago when I was working as a programmer but curious enough to find out on my own how Python dictionaries worked.
I'm not a people-person. I get sweaty and nervous if somebody wants me to give a presentation, and I avoid it if at all humanly possible. I neither like writing on the board nor taking oral exams. The last time I had to solve complicated problems on the fly in an oral exam was 15-20 years ago when I had to demonstrate I had enough of a clue to be trusted to operate parts of a nuclear power plant.
All I did to prep for the interview was pick up "Mastering Algorithms With C" and Knuth's first two books, and skimmed through them over the course of 2-3 weeks, and work out on paper or in a short C program why and how some of the algorithms worked. I didn't have time to look at nearly everything in those books, of course, so I tried to stick to basic things. I didn't try to work on my oral exam skills, didn't try to improve my (horrible) board handwriting, and didn't have a buddy barrage me with random questions from a list of Google interview questions I found.
But somehow, I managed to answer the questions they asked, except for one that was easily solved with a lock-free data structure I'd never heard of. I felt pretty comfortable because it was obvious the guys doing the interviews "got their hands dirty" in some code on a regular basis. I have no idea if they'll make me an offer, and I don't know if I'll accept it if they do. I just need a job to pay the bills, and I don't need to work at Google for that.
I would say that my time as a paid developer and as an "oh that's cool, how does that work" open source hobbyist were far more valuable to me than recent CS coursework or oral exam prep would have been, because that's where you learn to figure stuff out on your own, while classroom coursework doesn't always require you to do that.
I'll take Google's interview process with real coders any day over the "HR person with a checklist of skills, and no clue about what coders do" process.
I think Keith Richards qualifies for that; is he being decoded as well?
This will drive up outsourcing prices, which drives up the market value of us programmers here in the U.S., at least a little bit.
Not to worry--I'm sure there are already some inventive U.S. politicians and business leaders hard at work innovating a synergistic solution to this disturbing development.
Between teaching, research grants, and cleaning test tubes, grad school in the sciences will cost you $0 out of pocket for tuition, fees, rent, and food.
That must be nice, but it's not reality where I am. I'm at a university that ranks as about #40 in most science/math/engineering rankings, and the only thing I get waived is tuition. I have to pay ~$750 in fees per year. I get about $1500/mo after tax from my stipend, and I have to pay for 100% of my rent, food, and textbooks out of that.
You can't get a part-time job and still get a stipend, and I don't know anybody that's managed to get a "research grant" that provides them with extra money beyond the stipend for being a teaching or research assistant.
Newsflash: governments already spy on their own citizens.
Yeah, but now it's trendy and hip!
Unless you're the president, the pope, or a nobel prize winning physicist, chances are the stuff you're working on that you think is "important" is probably not worth a hill of beans to the rest of humanity at large.
I think just about everything those people do is probably not worth a hill of beans, either. With the exception of the physicist, there are probably many billions of people that would prefer these people not do the "important" things they're so hot to do.
If there is one place I've seen worse code than OSS, it would be in academia.
You've only seen code from those two, then? Because there's no shortage of hard-core WTF code in private business and government.
The few that I have printed don't look much different from what I recall getting with an inkjet.
It's a Dell 3110cn.
Thanks for the tip on third party toner; I'll have to try that if it suddenly tells me a cartridge is empty.
You know a company is full of shit when they start to use microchips to prevent 3rd party ink cartridges.
I wonder if somebody out there is making a living selling little DIY electronic doodads that bypass that "feature."
I bought a color laser printer over two years ago, and haven't had to buy toner yet. I haven't been careful about what I printed...the printer volume page says it has printed 3463 pages, all the color toner cartriges indicate 100% full, and the black toner is 60% full.
I'm never buying an inkjet again.
imagine if some borderline nutbar in a $X lab got treated badly by $Y_j in $Y and decided to take revenge on $Y by making a $Z that would leave $EVERYBODY - $Y intact. Sure, you could make an $ANTI_Z with enough people and effort, but how many people world die in the meantime? We see the battle between dedicated coders already with DRM and DRM-cracking... if that were to happen in the $X space, it would be an utter disaster.
It's easy for me to fill in these variables with things I don't know much about. The more I know about a subject, the harder it is to believe that it's possible for one person to have the foresight, depth of knowledge, and resources to single-handedly work around the enormous number of variations, complications, and unknowns that would get in the way of killing a large fraction of the human population.
I'm not saying it doesn't make for good fiction, just that doing anything wide-reaching in the real world is almost always orders of magnitude more difficult than anybody imagined it would have been.
Providing lists of variables previously used to make best-selling thrillers and propaganda films is left as an exercise for the reader.
You should go take a class (any class), and sit in the back. I've seen people browsing ESPN for the whole lecture, playing Flash games, reading the news, voting on $HOT_OR_NOT_CLONE, looking at page after page on $PICTURE_CAPTIONING_SITE, you name it.
For bonus entertainment, try to get in on study groups with these same people to hear them gripe about how hard it is to learn the course material.
Sorry, pet peeve:
Yeah Chernobyl went critical because...
I know Hollywood has done its best to make people think "critical == exploding," but reactors producing energy at a constant rate are critical. Prompt criticality is a different story (the linked article explains the difference).
Yikes...I had no idea addition was so complicated you needed to get a diety involved.