Correction: my slashdot description is indeed condescending, but my statement to the interviewer along the lines of "Sure, but I find it better to have 2 PC's, one for experiments, and one for every-day work because..." is not condescending in any way I know. The interviewer had not said anything about their policy or preference on multiple PC's. He simply asked if I liked doing experiments on a PC.
Perhaps you can clarify this aspect for me. What logical or human-interaction reason should I have had for not stating such? I thought it conveyed practical experience, which is normally considered a good thing for interviews.
It doesn't seem condescending to me, but maybe the fact that my view of what "condescending" is differs from most interviewers is the reason I didn't get the job. Whether Rome is "good" or not doesn't change the fact that if in Rome, if you don't do what the Romans are doing, you won't get along with Romans. "Typical" humans often baffle me, I must admit. If I had such "typical" people skills, I could probably earn about 5k more per year. (The place in question didn't exactly pay a premium, I would note.)
I must think it is admirable that they explained in so much detail why they did not hire you.
It was more of body language, voice tone, and the type of follow-up questions they asked that clued me that I gave a "bad" reply.
Anyhow, they seamed to prefer a present-time-centric tinkerer and my non-start-up experience had given me longer-term-view habits. That's fine; it is what it is.
I'm surprised that the paper required 15 co-authors
They should consider "juicing it up" to make it sound more worthy:
"Using Dr. Foo's bi-directional triangulation method, the source of the mysterious Peryton radiation was eventually pin-pointed after 17 years of difficult and dangerous research among native fauna.
The source turned out to be a cuboid cooking mechanism used by the species, Homo Sapiens. Further research was conducted to understand the pattern of behavior related to the cuboid cooking device.
It was observed that the Homo Sapiens were warned by their pack alpha male not to use the cooking device during certain periods of the planet's rotational cycle. However, a subset of the pack ignored the pack leader and participated in the device ritual.
Oddly, the alpha male didn't bite the others for ignoring his wishes. To better understand why, our team camouflaged ourselves as native fecal matter containment devices, made of an unknown smooth white substance, and sedated a sub-set of the cooking device ritual participants.
We then applied simulated bite marks to the sedated specimens using sharp instruments to see if this changed the relationship between the alpha male and the device ritual participants. The observations of this bite experiment are still ongoing.
However, an interloper male, external to the tribe, which answers to the call "loy-ur", has tried to block access to our observational area. The interloper often waves a white flat rectangular sheet of compressed wood pulp. One researcher was able to temporarily fend off the interloper's attacks by lodging his head into the cuboid cooking device while activated. A follow-up research report will detail our observations of this new interloper.
A professor once told the class he was tasked with finding the source of intermittent "garbage" characters emanating from a data entry work-station. After checking and swapping all the hardware, IT staff couldn't find the cause. So he sat to observe the work-station in action. Turns out the data entry lady had large bosoms that occasionally bumped the keyboard.
I predict that non-contact hand motion detection will be made practical soon. 3D cameras will "read" hand gestures so that you are essentially typing in the air. Everyone will look like magicians, waving gestures at their watch or gizmo.
Past paid experience with obscure and legacy languages saved my arse after the dot-com crash dumped tons of coders back into circulation on the west coast. I got no offers until I down-played my web experience and highlighted pre-web experience and languages. You never know what experience will come in handy. It's similar to investing advice: diversify your portfolio.
I've been around a while, and I agree there are what can be called "elite programmers", but with a caveat. Such people are "masters of code", but generally they are not very good communicators, and work on projects and niches that require a high degree accuracy, fastidiousness, and debugging skills. They often work on systems software, such as OS's, database engines, network control software, weapons control systems, etc., and are usually paid quite well.
But they don't do so well when the requirements are fuzzy or change often. They don't handle ambiguity well.
Of course, this is probably an oversimplification, and possibly a feedback loop where one that is highly "code oriented" will tend to be given yet more code-centric projects away from fuzzy office politics and fickle customers such that they don't develop their "fuzzy" analytical skills. Thus, they are not necessarily inherently "bad" at dealing with Dilbertian chaos, it's just that they lack experience with it because they went into a field or niche that is more technology focused, which helps keep them away from office politics and goofy users.
It's hard to master both human nature AND machines in one lifetime. Those who focus on a mix of both are probably in-between skill-wise between people and machines, and this is where the majority of developers and developer/analysts are.
And of course there are exceptions to the rule: some master both, but those are rare in my experience. (Those who believe they have mastered both are common, but egos tend not to be accurate to their owners.)
When they say that, I sometimes reply, "Yes, one CAN often win Russia Roulette, actually. But that doesn't mean it's a good game to play." Communicating risk is a tricky balancing act, though. Generally if somebody wants to be a jerk, they can and do spin it either way.
I may end up replying, "since you often seem to disagree with our risk assessment, how about we schedule a meeting to discuss it?" They often then pipe down because usually such mouthy people don't have the solid reasoning to plead their case: they just play sound-bite politics, but are fish out of water in detail-land.
When a company wants to do something risky, I try to make sure I practice C.Y.A. with a well-CC'd email with wording similar to, "I believe it's notably risky to do X. I highly recommend against it. A lower-risk alternative is to do Y."
Management can go ahead and choose X if they want, but at least you've documented that it's against your recommendations.
Some people simply enjoy blaming and pointing fingers, and will jump at the chance to do so. (Sometimes there's also sticky politics behind it that a techie isn't made aware of.)
And don't expect outright apologies. Many people really hate to admit they are wrong. Humans are just that way. The best you can hope for is that they respect your opinion more in the future because your prediction turned out correct and theirs flubbed.
Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is a great book on office relationships and human nature, even if it's a bit disturbing in places. I highly recommend all geeks read it. It should be required reading in college.
Probably. It's difficult to project such in an interview and I'm not very good at faking not being nervous. Most geeks are probably more like Jamie Hyneman than Adam Savage. "Oh goody, a beta DLL, watch this mamma smoke! Heee he he...!"
I knew the risk of startups at the time and was willing to accept it then. I was trying to transition off of desktop application dev, expecting it to be a shrinking field, and knew I'd probably have to eat some salary for a year or two in exchange for web-oriented experience.
There is a middle ground between groundbreaking and dud. We could learn something new about the interaction of fairly well-known forces, for example, even though it won't provide anything of significance in space due to some yet-to-be-found limit. Or be some inadvertent testing snafu that will make future testers smarter, having this hard-won lesson.
If I had to guesstimate the probabilities right now, I'd go with:
10%: Revolutionary breakthrough
50%: Somewhat interesting lesson having only incremental practicality per new technology or testing methods
Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is worried that scientists employed by the U.S. government have been running roughshod over the rights of Americans in pursuit of their personal political goals...
And politicians, corporations, and the wealthy have NOT?
Let's not have a double standard here. If we are going to hunt down bias, hunt down ALL bias.
Their bullshit may be more modern. Perhaps us ol' fogies should attend "Bullshit like a young buck" courses.
When you are interviewing with a PHB, talking the talk matters. Let's face it, the work world is largely a bullshitting game, for good or bad. It would be nice if it were about logic and planning, but humans got into the mix and mucked up that ideal.
I remember during one interview the PHB asked me if I liked to download stuff to my PC to experiment with new gizmos. I replied that I did, but that I prefer to have one "production" PC to get regular work done and a separate "experimental" PC that can be rebaselined if the experiments mess it up and/or to not cross-mix experiments. (Active-X was the "big thing" at the time, which should be enough to explain my caution.)
Anybody with experience will agree this is the rational way to do it. However, this was a start-up and they had no money for double PC's. (Maybe I should have offered to buy my own spare.) My "kind" wasn't welcome. The details of reality bothered them: they wanted to be sold cheap pie in the sky. That is, naive pioneers who don't know about the arrows yet.
That's not me. I value my experience and all the caveats I've learned over the years. I don't intend to sound grumpy or a like parade-rainer, but rather I'm just giving potential risks and estimated probabilities in a direct factual way. If you want to plow thru the asteroid field without being told the odds, then hang out with Jedi's fresh off the dust-farm and contraband runners. And off my swamp, get!
Slashdot Mirror
Correction: my slashdot description is indeed condescending, but my statement to the interviewer along the lines of "Sure, but I find it better to have 2 PC's, one for experiments, and one for every-day work because..." is not condescending in any way I know. The interviewer had not said anything about their policy or preference on multiple PC's. He simply asked if I liked doing experiments on a PC.
Perhaps you can clarify this aspect for me. What logical or human-interaction reason should I have had for not stating such? I thought it conveyed practical experience, which is normally considered a good thing for interviews.
It doesn't seem condescending to me, but maybe the fact that my view of what "condescending" is differs from most interviewers is the reason I didn't get the job. Whether Rome is "good" or not doesn't change the fact that if in Rome, if you don't do what the Romans are doing, you won't get along with Romans. "Typical" humans often baffle me, I must admit. If I had such "typical" people skills, I could probably earn about 5k more per year. (The place in question didn't exactly pay a premium, I would note.)
It was more of body language, voice tone, and the type of follow-up questions they asked that clued me that I gave a "bad" reply.
Anyhow, they seamed to prefer a present-time-centric tinkerer and my non-start-up experience had given me longer-term-view habits. That's fine; it is what it is.
us geeks typically have insufficient exposure to the subject matter to perfect those sorts of details
Volunteer the entire Tea Party to go colonize Mars.
They should consider "juicing it up" to make it sound more worthy:
"Using Dr. Foo's bi-directional triangulation method, the source of the mysterious Peryton radiation was eventually pin-pointed after 17 years of difficult and dangerous research among native fauna.
The source turned out to be a cuboid cooking mechanism used by the species, Homo Sapiens. Further research was conducted to understand the pattern of behavior related to the cuboid cooking device.
It was observed that the Homo Sapiens were warned by their pack alpha male not to use the cooking device during certain periods of the planet's rotational cycle. However, a subset of the pack ignored the pack leader and participated in the device ritual.
Oddly, the alpha male didn't bite the others for ignoring his wishes. To better understand why, our team camouflaged ourselves as native fecal matter containment devices, made of an unknown smooth white substance, and sedated a sub-set of the cooking device ritual participants.
We then applied simulated bite marks to the sedated specimens using sharp instruments to see if this changed the relationship between the alpha male and the device ritual participants. The observations of this bite experiment are still ongoing.
However, an interloper male, external to the tribe, which answers to the call "loy-ur", has tried to block access to our observational area. The interloper often waves a white flat rectangular sheet of compressed wood pulp. One researcher was able to temporarily fend off the interloper's attacks by lodging his head into the cuboid cooking device while activated. A follow-up research report will detail our observations of this new interloper.
A professor once told the class he was tasked with finding the source of intermittent "garbage" characters emanating from a data entry work-station. After checking and swapping all the hardware, IT staff couldn't find the cause. So he sat to observe the work-station in action. Turns out the data entry lady had large bosoms that occasionally bumped the keyboard.
If the kitchen theme holds, they'll find the missing "giant leap" video tapes inside an old freezer.
Now, to be renamed "Dufons".
I told you the Burrito Nebula wasn't real
People with bluetooth earbuds are already walking around like schizophrenia patients talking to themselves.
I predict that non-contact hand motion detection will be made practical soon. 3D cameras will "read" hand gestures so that you are essentially typing in the air. Everyone will look like magicians, waving gestures at their watch or gizmo.
Past paid experience with obscure and legacy languages saved my arse after the dot-com crash dumped tons of coders back into circulation on the west coast. I got no offers until I down-played my web experience and highlighted pre-web experience and languages. You never know what experience will come in handy. It's similar to investing advice: diversify your portfolio.
I've been around a while, and I agree there are what can be called "elite programmers", but with a caveat. Such people are "masters of code", but generally they are not very good communicators, and work on projects and niches that require a high degree accuracy, fastidiousness, and debugging skills. They often work on systems software, such as OS's, database engines, network control software, weapons control systems, etc., and are usually paid quite well.
But they don't do so well when the requirements are fuzzy or change often. They don't handle ambiguity well.
Of course, this is probably an oversimplification, and possibly a feedback loop where one that is highly "code oriented" will tend to be given yet more code-centric projects away from fuzzy office politics and fickle customers such that they don't develop their "fuzzy" analytical skills. Thus, they are not necessarily inherently "bad" at dealing with Dilbertian chaos, it's just that they lack experience with it because they went into a field or niche that is more technology focused, which helps keep them away from office politics and goofy users.
It's hard to master both human nature AND machines in one lifetime. Those who focus on a mix of both are probably in-between skill-wise between people and machines, and this is where the majority of developers and developer/analysts are.
And of course there are exceptions to the rule: some master both, but those are rare in my experience. (Those who believe they have mastered both are common, but egos tend not to be accurate to their owners.)
When they say that, I sometimes reply, "Yes, one CAN often win Russia Roulette, actually. But that doesn't mean it's a good game to play." Communicating risk is a tricky balancing act, though. Generally if somebody wants to be a jerk, they can and do spin it either way.
I may end up replying, "since you often seem to disagree with our risk assessment, how about we schedule a meeting to discuss it?" They often then pipe down because usually such mouthy people don't have the solid reasoning to plead their case: they just play sound-bite politics, but are fish out of water in detail-land.
That study is full of ships!
When a company wants to do something risky, I try to make sure I practice C.Y.A. with a well-CC'd email with wording similar to, "I believe it's notably risky to do X. I highly recommend against it. A lower-risk alternative is to do Y."
Management can go ahead and choose X if they want, but at least you've documented that it's against your recommendations.
Some people simply enjoy blaming and pointing fingers, and will jump at the chance to do so. (Sometimes there's also sticky politics behind it that a techie isn't made aware of.)
And don't expect outright apologies. Many people really hate to admit they are wrong. Humans are just that way. The best you can hope for is that they respect your opinion more in the future because your prediction turned out correct and theirs flubbed.
Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" is a great book on office relationships and human nature, even if it's a bit disturbing in places. I highly recommend all geeks read it. It should be required reading in college.
Well, we have an ex-Prime-Minister who paints puppies, goats, and feet sticking out of bath-tubs!
Probably. It's difficult to project such in an interview and I'm not very good at faking not being nervous. Most geeks are probably more like Jamie Hyneman than Adam Savage. "Oh goody, a beta DLL, watch this mamma smoke! Heee he he...!"
I knew the risk of startups at the time and was willing to accept it then. I was trying to transition off of desktop application dev, expecting it to be a shrinking field, and knew I'd probably have to eat some salary for a year or two in exchange for web-oriented experience.
There is a middle ground between groundbreaking and dud. We could learn something new about the interaction of fairly well-known forces, for example, even though it won't provide anything of significance in space due to some yet-to-be-found limit. Or be some inadvertent testing snafu that will make future testers smarter, having this hard-won lesson.
If I had to guesstimate the probabilities right now, I'd go with:
10%: Revolutionary breakthrough
50%: Somewhat interesting lesson having only incremental practicality per new technology or testing methods
40%: Dud or scam
And politicians, corporations, and the wealthy have NOT?
Let's not have a double standard here. If we are going to hunt down bias, hunt down ALL bias.
By political standards? "Hillargrams"
Apptly named. Even better than "fappler".
Ada Lovelace, first digital programmer, top that!
(Clear the network, send out the kids, nerd cat fight!)
Their bullshit may be more modern. Perhaps us ol' fogies should attend "Bullshit like a young buck" courses.
When you are interviewing with a PHB, talking the talk matters. Let's face it, the work world is largely a bullshitting game, for good or bad. It would be nice if it were about logic and planning, but humans got into the mix and mucked up that ideal.
I remember during one interview the PHB asked me if I liked to download stuff to my PC to experiment with new gizmos. I replied that I did, but that I prefer to have one "production" PC to get regular work done and a separate "experimental" PC that can be rebaselined if the experiments mess it up and/or to not cross-mix experiments. (Active-X was the "big thing" at the time, which should be enough to explain my caution.)
Anybody with experience will agree this is the rational way to do it. However, this was a start-up and they had no money for double PC's. (Maybe I should have offered to buy my own spare.) My "kind" wasn't welcome. The details of reality bothered them: they wanted to be sold cheap pie in the sky. That is, naive pioneers who don't know about the arrows yet.
That's not me. I value my experience and all the caveats I've learned over the years. I don't intend to sound grumpy or a like parade-rainer, but rather I'm just giving potential risks and estimated probabilities in a direct factual way. If you want to plow thru the asteroid field without being told the odds, then hang out with Jedi's fresh off the dust-farm and contraband runners. And off my swamp, get!