I surprised more folks haven't picked on that aspect of the OP.
The quick work-around you didn't document because it was meant to be a short-term fix, but you never resolved that issue so short-term turned in to SOP, yes, document that bit for your successor.
But scripts you feel you need to stop or remove? Sounds like you'll get away with whatever you were up to this time. Stop looking back and concern yourself with your new position. Take this as a lesson learned. Work in a manner such that you could leave at a moments notice and worse that could be said was you left some project unfinished.
The factor I don't see mentioned in any of the calculations is, how many accidents and deaths will this cause?
I've had a car with a rearview camera for a couple years. My observation is when backing up with my head up and using my mirrors, there is a significant blind spot directly behind my car. However, when backing up with my head down and watching the screen, the blind spot is now much bigger. I can't see what's on either side of the car or what may be coming toward me (until it is directly behind the car).
Perhaps the intended use is for the driver to just glance at the screen while keep head up and maintaining awareness of what's going on around the car, but realistically, are you able to look away from a screen?
From video games, to Joss Whedon, to pr0n, we've been conditioned like Pavlov's dogs to expect pleasure from video screens. Just ask any woman who's been out with a guy some place where there was a TV showing a sporting event behind her head. Was the guy able to maintain eye contact?
To the folks who have these cameras I ask, honestly, are you more aware of your surroundings than you were without the camera? I know I'm not.
Make a new plan, Stan. You don't need to be coy, Roy, Just listen to me. Hop on the bus, Gus. You don't need to discuss much Just drop off the key, Lee. And get yourself free.
(But seriously, anything you would do, should have been done already. Anything you'd document, should be already documented. Any scripts you're stopping or removing, sounds like stuff that shouldn't have been running in the first place.
Any clean-up/CYA you feel you need to do now, just keep in mind for your next job. And don't do those things again! That way you won't feel the need to cover your tracks when you move on.)
The relationship between learning how to use Powerpoint and writing computer programs is approximately the same as that between knowing how to read and write and writing a poem or short story.
Students need to learn how to read and write before they can write a poem or short story (assuming they progress past the oral tradition). Are you saying students need to learn Power Point before they can learn programming?
Since I'm not interested in the correctness of any answers given by the interviewee, I print out the page with questions and answer selections. The interviewee can mark up the page or just talk about it.
As it is, that test does have a unique solution, and I have completed it. It did take me longer than the amount of time an interview should dwell on brain teasers.
If you're using brain teasers as pass-fail criteria, then you're stupid. And if you're using them in an interview process that lasts less than an hour or two, you're even more stupid. They can be good for understanding a person's thought process during problem solving, but that's it. It's not the answer, but how they come up with it.
But that's it???? I guess if someone offered you a million dollars, you'd say, I could buy a lot of stuff with that money, but that's it.
If I didn't have problems to solve, I wouldn't have an open position to interview for. Unless you're talking about a code monkey who is expected to only work with a single language, there are few things more important than a person's thought process during problem solving.
As for your time scale, I've used a brain teaser during interviews (http://drunkmenworkhere.org/170) and I get everything I need to know (from the brain teaser) in less than 5 minutes. Certainly something I can fit in a 1 hour interview. Like you say, it's about the thought process, not the answer.
If you're running interviews that run 2 hours, you're stupid. What is it you couldn't figure out in the first hour?
Everything you've ever learned is on your resume broadly speaking, since including your transcripts from your university is a normal part of the hiring process.
Your position, while authoritatively voiced, is nevertheless unreasonable.
Maybe it's an EU/USA difference, but here in the wild west, I haven't provided transcripts outside of applying to grad school. It's never been part of the job application process, even for a first job out of school.
But if I did provide a transcript to a potential employer, I would prepare myself to speak to each item in transcript. That doesn't mean I'm ready to sit for the final exam, but I can at least address what topics were covered and any interesting assignments.
However a course included in a full transcript is not the same as a course included in a resume or CV. I claim no authority, other than as a person who has interviewed and been interviewed. I can speak in depth on every item on my resume, and I expect the same from folks I interview.
I'm a PC, but I'm guessing this also means Macs aren't the kind of folks who might have one power adapter at home and another one for traveling.
I have 3 different adapters I might use with my ThinkPad between home, work, and traveling. Would you need a matched set of adapters with the same memory chip in each? Would using an adapter with a different chip change the encoding on the passwords?
Really, you expect everyone to be fully conversant in every class they ever took and passed and also retain a high level of problem solving skills in each of those domains?
If it's on a resume or CV, yes. Everything on your resume is open for questioning, and you should be prepared to provide detailed answers.
Including your educational history is different than listing individual courses. Most folks just include school and degree. If you're applying for a programming position and recently out of school, you may want to list specific programming courses you've taken that are relevant to the position.
To have something on your resume and not be ready to speak to that item for a few minutes and answer a follow-up question is a good way to not get a job. At the least, do you really want to sweat through the interview hoping you aren't asked about that one thing? You'll give a better impression if you have the confidence of knowing you can speak to everything you've given the interviewer.
Yea, because no applicant would find good code, mask it up a bit and pass it off as their own.
Last interview I did they gave me a real-world problem to solve, put me in a room with a virtual machine and a proctor, and let me go to town. Deliverables included not just a working tool to solve the specified problem, but also documentation for same and the ability to explain what/why... and while the VM had unfettered Internet access, I had/have to assume that even when the proctor wasn't there in person they had a VNC client sharing what I was doing from the outer host or such.
From our discussion afterward, I gather that that exercise filtered quite a few folks who otherwise might have slipped through but couldn't actually transform requirements to code in a timely manner.
Always check if they can think on the spot- I hate being in the room with a senior executive and the subject matter expert next to me can't come up with any alternative ideas to solve crisis X.
Yup, that's important too.
I would have walked out on such an interview. Or submit an invoice. I don't work for free.
In any case, I'm guessing you didn't get the job, but got called back for a series of follow-up "interviews". Why buy the cow when they can get the milk for free?
Brain teasers are just like any other interviewing tool - what matters is how you use the tool. As an interviewer, if you use brain teasers to determine *how* the candidate is attempting to solve the problem, you are probably doing it right. If you are using the brain teaser to tick a box in your checklist based on the answer, you're probably doing it wrong.
I've used this in interviews for developers. I probably wouldn't do this for a straight-up code monkey. I do this for more complex roles that interact with more systems than I can directly hire for.
For example, I have an application which uses crystal reports that get updated every year or so. So while experience with CR is a plus, I can hire someone who will be able to learn enough about CR to get the job done when the time comes. Same thing with PL-SQL, DOS batch files, Cron jobs, FTP servers, LDAP, XML, and about a dozen other technologies. These are all areas that are not day-to-day issues, but could break or need to be updated at any time.
I can hold out for someone who knows everything, but I'm more interested in finding folks who can learn new things and have good troubleshooting skills. Even for the core technologies in my application, I know things will break in some way we've never seen before. It's what Dick Cheney called the known unknowns.
So for my brain teaser, I have absolutely no interest in the answers given during the interview. It is all about how they handle the question. Do you take a few moments to study the problem or just start talking right away? What assumptions do you make about the 'rules' of the puzzle? Are you able to articulate a plan for finding a solution?
At the heart of it, I'm more interested in what someone can learn than what they know.
"The crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia might imply that its content should be more 'correct' than other sources. As the saying goes, the more eyes the better."
As the saying goes, none of us is as dumb as all of us.
Who's responsible for checking those wikipedia entries for correct spelling? All of us? You mean, none of us.
The Bible does not say that God hates homosexuals. The Bible states that homosexual behavior is sin, along with sex before marriage, failure to respect your parents, and witchcraft, among other things. God hates sin because it separates him from his creation, which he loves.
Where in the bible does it say homosexual behavior is sin? There is the passage quoted above:
"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." (Lev 8:22)
I can see how that might be interpreted as against homosexual behavior, if and only if the bible also says god is only talking to the men folk. Is that also a common interpretation of the bible, that god's rules only apply to men? Certainly you could not say god is against women lieing with mankind, unless his intention is for mankind to go extinct due to a lack of babies.
No amount of understanding the user will allow me to figure out what the hell they're talking about, other than their giving me the context in which to find the line of text.
Give us a break. Search the text your app displays for "the". One of those hits, the user thinks should be "an".
I'm not suggesting you do that, but to say that report is unintelligible or beyond understanding is overly dramatic. Useless yes, but unintelligible no.
Little johnny breaks the $100 whatever (window, computer keyboard, mouse, textbook, lab equipment, whatever). Well its gonna be hard to look him in his black eye tomorrow, so the written report will be the teacher somehow broke it
Are you saying the teacher will take responsibility for property damage to cover up child abuse or a physical assault? I don't follow what you are saying.
This is the only way to do it... if your time is entirely worthless.
If we measure time in minimum wage, the OP spent more time composing this question and submitting it than if the OP had just spent 7 cents worth of disk space and archived it away.
This is a troll "ask slashdot"
-- BMO
P.S. Where i get my 7 cents from: Go to Newegg. List internal 1TB drives by price. Pick lowest. 140 bux divided by 1000 = 14 cents per Salesman GB. He's using half. 7 cents.
But what if addition to storing old email, he ever actually needs to go back and search or read old email?
You're the one saying his time is worthless by only looking at the cost of hard drive space.
Sharing files with friends is one thing. I assume for your friends you are a trusted source. So when you say, download these files, they don't have much to worry about.
When I'm looking for software, I will usually go to friends and family who I trust to have good judgement on which sources of software to trust. When I don't get a recommendation by that route, I'd go to download.com before rapidshare.
Do this quickly while you are still an unknown quantity, full of magical skills. Once you become the guy who fixes the printers they won't be able to hear your message so clearly.
I agree. Do it. But under the following conditions.
1) Only if you can not take the job too seriously. If you're the type who gets stressed out about work, who doesn't know when it's time to walk away from an issue and start over tomorrow, this type of job can be heck.
But if you can remember it's only a job, and if things don't work out, you can get another job, that it's only bits you're moving around, it's not brain surgery, this sounds like a potentially rewarding opportunity. That leads to...
2) Make sure you are getting rewarded. If you are an old hat and getting paid well, take the money and run. It's job security (at least until you get things straightened out) and interesting work. You'll be facing a new problem every day, which sounds rough until you consider the boredom of facing the same problem every day.
Or, if you're a young gun, even not well paid, think of this as your education. What you learn on this job will aid you for the rest of your career. You'll get to work with many more systems and different technologies than you would at most IT jobs. And you'll get a chance to build up your troubleshooting muscles. Nothing obliterates my respect for someone who looks like a greybeard faster than a lack of troubleshooting sense.
Troubleshooting--good troubleshooting--is an art. Listen to Car Talk. That kind of crazy you only get from experience. There's a feel for how modules and systems interact and how something over here throws an error when something over there isn't right.
Think of this job as grad school. 2 or 3 years of dirty work, but do it for the education. Then get out.
Slashdot Mirror
I surprised more folks haven't picked on that aspect of the OP.
The quick work-around you didn't document because it was meant to be a short-term fix, but you never resolved that issue so short-term turned in to SOP, yes, document that bit for your successor.
But scripts you feel you need to stop or remove? Sounds like you'll get away with whatever you were up to this time. Stop looking back and concern yourself with your new position. Take this as a lesson learned. Work in a manner such that you could leave at a moments notice and worse that could be said was you left some project unfinished.
The factor I don't see mentioned in any of the calculations is, how many accidents and deaths will this cause?
I've had a car with a rearview camera for a couple years. My observation is when backing up with my head up and using my mirrors, there is a significant blind spot directly behind my car. However, when backing up with my head down and watching the screen, the blind spot is now much bigger. I can't see what's on either side of the car or what may be coming toward me (until it is directly behind the car).
Perhaps the intended use is for the driver to just glance at the screen while keep head up and maintaining awareness of what's going on around the car, but realistically, are you able to look away from a screen?
From video games, to Joss Whedon, to pr0n, we've been conditioned like Pavlov's dogs to expect pleasure from video screens. Just ask any woman who's been out with a guy some place where there was a TV showing a sporting event behind her head. Was the guy able to maintain eye contact?
To the folks who have these cameras I ask, honestly, are you more aware of your surroundings than you were without the camera? I know I'm not.
Make a new plan, Stan.
You don't need to be coy, Roy,
Just listen to me.
Hop on the bus, Gus.
You don't need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee.
And get yourself free.
(But seriously, anything you would do, should have been done already. Anything you'd document, should be already documented. Any scripts you're stopping or removing, sounds like stuff that shouldn't have been running in the first place.
Any clean-up/CYA you feel you need to do now, just keep in mind for your next job. And don't do those things again! That way you won't feel the need to cover your tracks when you move on.)
I have mod points, but can't find the 'pollyanna' option.
The relationship between learning how to use Powerpoint and writing computer programs is approximately the same as that between knowing how to read and write and writing a poem or short story.
Students need to learn how to read and write before they can write a poem or short story (assuming they progress past the oral tradition). Are you saying students need to learn Power Point before they can learn programming?
Since I'm not interested in the correctness of any answers given by the interviewee, I print out the page with questions and answer selections. The interviewee can mark up the page or just talk about it.
As it is, that test does have a unique solution, and I have completed it. It did take me longer than the amount of time an interview should dwell on brain teasers.
Why? Publicity stunt.
Does your employer charge you rent for the desk where you do your job?
Labels charge musicians for studio time.
That is how it is different.
If the OP keeps this app to himself, how does that improve the efficiency of his coworkers?
If you're using brain teasers as pass-fail criteria, then you're stupid. And if you're using them in an interview process that lasts less than an hour or two, you're even more stupid. They can be good for understanding a person's thought process during problem solving, but that's it. It's not the answer, but how they come up with it.
But that's it???? I guess if someone offered you a million dollars, you'd say, I could buy a lot of stuff with that money, but that's it.
If I didn't have problems to solve, I wouldn't have an open position to interview for. Unless you're talking about a code monkey who is expected to only work with a single language, there are few things more important than a person's thought process during problem solving.
As for your time scale, I've used a brain teaser during interviews (http://drunkmenworkhere.org/170) and I get everything I need to know (from the brain teaser) in less than 5 minutes. Certainly something I can fit in a 1 hour interview. Like you say, it's about the thought process, not the answer.
If you're running interviews that run 2 hours, you're stupid. What is it you couldn't figure out in the first hour?
Everything you've ever learned is on your resume broadly speaking, since including your transcripts from your university is a normal part of the hiring process.
Your position, while authoritatively voiced, is nevertheless unreasonable.
Maybe it's an EU/USA difference, but here in the wild west, I haven't provided transcripts outside of applying to grad school. It's never been part of the job application process, even for a first job out of school.
But if I did provide a transcript to a potential employer, I would prepare myself to speak to each item in transcript. That doesn't mean I'm ready to sit for the final exam, but I can at least address what topics were covered and any interesting assignments.
However a course included in a full transcript is not the same as a course included in a resume or CV. I claim no authority, other than as a person who has interviewed and been interviewed. I can speak in depth on every item on my resume, and I expect the same from folks I interview.
I'm a PC, but I'm guessing this also means Macs aren't the kind of folks who might have one power adapter at home and another one for traveling.
I have 3 different adapters I might use with my ThinkPad between home, work, and traveling. Would you need a matched set of adapters with the same memory chip in each? Would using an adapter with a different chip change the encoding on the passwords?
Really, you expect everyone to be fully conversant in every class they ever took and passed and also retain a high level of problem solving skills in each of those domains?
If it's on a resume or CV, yes. Everything on your resume is open for questioning, and you should be prepared to provide detailed answers.
Including your educational history is different than listing individual courses. Most folks just include school and degree. If you're applying for a programming position and recently out of school, you may want to list specific programming courses you've taken that are relevant to the position.
To have something on your resume and not be ready to speak to that item for a few minutes and answer a follow-up question is a good way to not get a job. At the least, do you really want to sweat through the interview hoping you aren't asked about that one thing? You'll give a better impression if you have the confidence of knowing you can speak to everything you've given the interviewer.
Last interview I did they gave me a real-world problem to solve, put me in a room with a virtual machine and a proctor, and let me go to town. Deliverables included not just a working tool to solve the specified problem, but also documentation for same and the ability to explain what/why... and while the VM had unfettered Internet access, I had/have to assume that even when the proctor wasn't there in person they had a VNC client sharing what I was doing from the outer host or such.
From our discussion afterward, I gather that that exercise filtered quite a few folks who otherwise might have slipped through but couldn't actually transform requirements to code in a timely manner.
Yup, that's important too.
I would have walked out on such an interview. Or submit an invoice. I don't work for free.
In any case, I'm guessing you didn't get the job, but got called back for a series of follow-up "interviews". Why buy the cow when they can get the milk for free?
Brain teasers are just like any other interviewing tool - what matters is how you use the tool. As an interviewer, if you use brain teasers to determine *how* the candidate is attempting to solve the problem, you are probably doing it right.
If you are using the brain teaser to tick a box in your checklist based on the answer, you're probably doing it wrong.
I've used this in interviews for developers. I probably wouldn't do this for a straight-up code monkey. I do this for more complex roles that interact with more systems than I can directly hire for.
For example, I have an application which uses crystal reports that get updated every year or so. So while experience with CR is a plus, I can hire someone who will be able to learn enough about CR to get the job done when the time comes. Same thing with PL-SQL, DOS batch files, Cron jobs, FTP servers, LDAP, XML, and about a dozen other technologies. These are all areas that are not day-to-day issues, but could break or need to be updated at any time.
I can hold out for someone who knows everything, but I'm more interested in finding folks who can learn new things and have good troubleshooting skills. Even for the core technologies in my application, I know things will break in some way we've never seen before. It's what Dick Cheney called the known unknowns.
So for my brain teaser, I have absolutely no interest in the answers given during the interview. It is all about how they handle the question. Do you take a few moments to study the problem or just start talking right away? What assumptions do you make about the 'rules' of the puzzle? Are you able to articulate a plan for finding a solution?
At the heart of it, I'm more interested in what someone can learn than what they know.
"The crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia might imply that its content should be more 'correct' than other sources. As the saying goes, the more eyes the better."
As the saying goes, none of us is as dumb as all of us.
Who's responsible for checking those wikipedia entries for correct spelling? All of us? You mean, none of us.
The Bible does not say that God hates homosexuals. The Bible states that homosexual behavior is sin, along with sex before marriage, failure to respect your parents, and witchcraft, among other things. God hates sin because it separates him from his creation, which he loves.
Where in the bible does it say homosexual behavior is sin? There is the passage quoted above:
"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." (Lev 8:22)
I can see how that might be interpreted as against homosexual behavior, if and only if the bible also says god is only talking to the men folk. Is that also a common interpretation of the bible, that god's rules only apply to men? Certainly you could not say god is against women lieing with mankind, unless his intention is for mankind to go extinct due to a lack of babies.
No amount of understanding the user will allow me to figure out what the hell they're talking about, other than their giving me the context in which to find the line of text.
Give us a break. Search the text your app displays for "the". One of those hits, the user thinks should be "an".
I'm not suggesting you do that, but to say that report is unintelligible or beyond understanding is overly dramatic. Useless yes, but unintelligible no.
Sounds like a nice, although complicated, system.
How do you handle bugs in the bug reporting system?
Little johnny breaks the $100 whatever (window, computer keyboard, mouse, textbook, lab equipment, whatever). Well its gonna be hard to look him in his black eye tomorrow, so the written report will be the teacher somehow broke it
Are you saying the teacher will take responsibility for property damage to cover up child abuse or a physical assault? I don't follow what you are saying.
You forgot, I have router hardware, what software should I put on it? And, I want to run this router software, what hardware should I buy?
What I first saw the headline, I thought the change would be a new section just for DD-WRT questions.
This is the only way to do it... if your time is entirely worthless.
If we measure time in minimum wage, the OP spent more time composing this question and submitting it than if the OP had just spent 7 cents worth of disk space and archived it away.
This is a troll "ask slashdot"
--
BMO
P.S. Where i get my 7 cents from: Go to Newegg. List internal 1TB drives by price. Pick lowest. 140 bux divided by 1000 = 14 cents per Salesman GB. He's using half. 7 cents.
But what if addition to storing old email, he ever actually needs to go back and search or read old email?
You're the one saying his time is worthless by only looking at the cost of hard drive space.
Apple, I have this orange I'd like you to meet.
Sharing files with friends is one thing. I assume for your friends you are a trusted source. So when you say, download these files, they don't have much to worry about.
When I'm looking for software, I will usually go to friends and family who I trust to have good judgement on which sources of software to trust. When I don't get a recommendation by that route, I'd go to download.com before rapidshare.
Do this quickly while you are still an unknown quantity, full of magical skills. Once you become the guy who fixes the printers they won't be able to hear your message so clearly.
Best. Advice. In the comments.
I agree. Do it. But under the following conditions.
1) Only if you can not take the job too seriously. If you're the type who gets stressed out about work, who doesn't know when it's time to walk away from an issue and start over tomorrow, this type of job can be heck.
But if you can remember it's only a job, and if things don't work out, you can get another job, that it's only bits you're moving around, it's not brain surgery, this sounds like a potentially rewarding opportunity. That leads to...
2) Make sure you are getting rewarded. If you are an old hat and getting paid well, take the money and run. It's job security (at least until you get things straightened out) and interesting work. You'll be facing a new problem every day, which sounds rough until you consider the boredom of facing the same problem every day.
Or, if you're a young gun, even not well paid, think of this as your education. What you learn on this job will aid you for the rest of your career. You'll get to work with many more systems and different technologies than you would at most IT jobs. And you'll get a chance to build up your troubleshooting muscles. Nothing obliterates my respect for someone who looks like a greybeard faster than a lack of troubleshooting sense.
Troubleshooting--good troubleshooting--is an art. Listen to Car Talk. That kind of crazy you only get from experience. There's a feel for how modules and systems interact and how something over here throws an error when something over there isn't right.
Think of this job as grad school. 2 or 3 years of dirty work, but do it for the education. Then get out.