On 12/2/2012 6:30 AM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> (Some statistics: At my last place, I brought a cake, and with 23 people
> in the building, the cake lasted 3 days. A brought a similar cake to my
> current place of work, and it vanished in UNDER THREE HOURS. Less than
> 10 people work here.)

A plague of locusts descends upon everything left in our coffee bar. 
Except for the bacon-flavored jelly beans.  Those lasted a while.

> Of course, The Real WTF is hiring. With unemployment at historic record
> levels, we literally cannot find *anybody* with the skill-set we need.
> Personally I find this baffling. The market must be /flooded/ with
> experienced programmers, and yet we keep interviewing people who can't
> program their way out of a paper bag.

What I noticed that that when the dot-com bubble crashed, a whole lot of 
firms became very selective in their hiring.  They wanted people who had 
experience with a specific environment or database.

> We have yet to interview anybody who can actually accomplish this
> Herculean task. My personal favourite is the guy who, 25 minutes into
> the task (??!), decided to add a comment explaining what the function
> does. Because, hey, if you can't work out how to write the code, at
> least look like you know how to type, amIright?

My company asked about the languages I knew, but I don't recall them 
testing knowledge of specific languages during the testing for the job.

> Of course, I've seen first-hand that there are *a lot* of people who
> can't program, and never will. But I would have thought that with an
> ocean of people looking for work, it shouldn't be too hard to find the
> minority who can. I WAS WRONG! >_<

The hard part is finding people who like coding enough that they won't 
get tired of a 40-hour week spent coding, and who are actually good 
enough at it that their code is worth hiring them for.

Regards,
John

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On 03/12/2012 02:17 AM, John VanSickle wrote:
> What I noticed that that when the dot-com bubble crashed, a whole lot of
> firms became very selective in their hiring. They wanted people who had
> experience with a specific environment or database.

Ah, so /that/ is where that came from? "Yes, I've been programming for 
20 years, writing code morning, noon and night, in half a dozen 
radically dissimilar languages. But no, I haven't actually used the one 
specific one you're asking about. Can I still be hired?" Most places 
immediately say no.

> My company asked about the languages I knew, but I don't recall them
> testing knowledge of specific languages during the testing for the job.

Several of the people we tested claim to have many, many years of C# 
experience. And yet none of them could write trivial programs like 
sorting integers or counting words or printing prime numbers.

> The hard part is finding people who like coding enough that they won't
> get tired of a 40-hour week spent coding, and who are actually good
> enough at it that their code is worth hiring them for.

IMHO, there are two kinds of coders:

The ones who go to college, take a Java course because they think 
there's money in it, learn the bare minimum to pass, get a job, and then 
completely stop learning. They write code from 9 to 5, go home and stop 
thinking about coding. /Everybody/ I went to uni with seemingly fell 
into that category. They all /hated/ coding, but it was on the syllabus, 
and they believed there was big money to be made with it.

On the other hand, there are people like me. I presume that doesn't 
require much further description. There are people who actually /like/ 
coding, are passionate about it, and voluntarily do it all day just for 
the /fun/ of it.

The latter are the people you want to hire.

One of the interview questions we use is "what hardware is in your PC?" 
If you're a computer enthusiast, you quite probably built your own PC, 
and even if you didn't, you'll almost certainly know if it's an Intel 
Core 2 or an AMD Athlon or whatever, how much RAM is has, and so forth. 
It's really very, very easy to tell the difference between somebody 
who's memorised a list and somebody who knows what they're talking about.

Knowing what hardware you have is of course in no way directly relevant 
to the job - but it's a nice way to gauge how much computer knowledge 
somebody has.

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> Of course, The Real WTF is hiring. With unemployment at historic record
> levels, we literally cannot find *anybody* with the skill-set we need.
> Personally I find this baffling. The market must be /flooded/ with
> experienced programmers, and yet we keep interviewing people who can't
> program their way out of a paper bag.

Hehe welcome to the real world. We have exactly the same problems with 
hiring Engineers. Can you describe what this circuit does? No, ok what 
about this one? No, ok what does this *component* do ... ermmm not 
exactly, have you every used an oscilloscope? No, ok we'll be in touch, 
thanks bye.

> Here's a challenge - write me a C# function (or even just some
> psuedocode) which will take a string containing space-delimited positive
> integers, and return them in ascending order.

I would have written almost exactly the same as you posted, but would 
have probably written this line instead (no reason other than I didn't 
know Int.Parse existed, and I don't normally use {} for single line 
loops...).

foreach (String word in words)
     list.add(Convert.ToInt32(word));

> We're using an online site where we can watch people type while we're on
> the phone to them, so save wasting our time with face-to-face
> interviews. Apparently the last guy we interviewed, the guys could hear
> typing but not see anything on the screen, and then suddenly big chunks
> of text would appear... It's /almost/ as if the guy was desperately
> Googling the code while he was on the phone.

Or typing it into the IDE then copying & pasting over, that's what I 
would probably do, as I pretty much rely on the auto-complete stuff to 
get code right first time (or even remember the method names correctly).

> Of course, I've seen first-hand that there are *a lot* of people who
> can't program, and never will. But I would have thought that with an
> ocean of people looking for work, it shouldn't be too hard to find the
> minority who can. I WAS WRONG! >_<

 From what was discussed here before (sorry don't remember who with) it 
seems recruitment agencies for software are very poor compared to ones 
for engineering for some reason. Seems like there is a market for a 
decent software recruitment agency that actually employs people who know 
a tiny bit how to program so can weed out people like you describe.

Also as a software company you should be able to knock up a quick 
website that has programming exercises (like the one above) that the 
candidate has to fill in within a set time, design them so you can't 
just google the answer. Send the link to people with a unique login 
before you even invite them to interview...

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> I've learned a couple of things so far. First, in almost two months,
> I've yet to

...install Thunderbird.

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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> It's also conspicuous that, unlike any of the people we interviewed, 
> you're currently employed. :-P

I have had the great fortune of never having to work with someone who
isn't a competent programmer. My first job was at the university, in the
deparment of computer science, so you might imagine the competence of
the average programmer working there. (In my current job I basically work
alone on the code. We have another developer but he develops unrelated
projects. Nevertheless, he's quite competent himself too.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On Sun, 02 Dec 2012 21:40:55 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>>> It may be too early to say, but the WTF quotient of my new employer
>>> appears to be significantly lower than my previous one. I mean,
>>> there's still some minor brokenness there. But it's not like the last
>>> bunch of losers I worked for, where the company was run by deranged
>>> howler monkeys.
>>
>> It's good that you are seeing that what many of us told you for so long
>> is in fact true - not all employers are as odd as the one you just
>> left. :)
> 
> Or rather, I had assumed that I was working for *the only* broken
> company. But now it appears that each company is broken, it's just a
> question of how seriously or trivially.

All companies face challenges, certainly.  People are involved.

>> Spotify is great, subscribed recently myself - very large catalog of
>> music, not all of it is as annoying as Gangnam Style or "other terrible
>> music."
> 
> I think my boss just likes trolling people, BTH. ;-)
> 
>> And yes, it is legal - you pay a monthly fee and get access to what's
>> in their catalog.
> 
> But not Pink Floyd or The Beatles, apparently... And yet, at the same
> time, unknown bands like The Senti-Mentals are there. Very odd.

It's called "licensing fees", and some of the very popular bands (and 
their labels) want extortionate fees to be included in the catalog.

But I did find some Floyd on Slacker, another similar service that I also 
subscribe too.

> 
>> Think Netflix or Lovefilm for music.
> 
> Ah yes - two other services that I don't yet understand...

What's to understand?  I want to watch a movie, it's in their catalog, I 
stream it to my PS3 and watch it.  I pay a monthly fee and can stream as 
much as I want.

Jim

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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > Think Netflix or Lovefilm for music.

> Ah yes - two other services that I don't yet understand...

You don't understand why people would pay a moderate sum of money in
order to be able to watch movies or listen to music? (And *legally* at
that...)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 03/12/2012 12:20 PM, scott wrote:
>> I've learned a couple of things so far. First, in almost two months,
>> I've yet to
>
> ...install Thunderbird.

At works? Are you nuts?? They have aggressive network surveillance 
systems. It would probably be grounds for immediate termination. :-P

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On 3/12/2012 2:54 AM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On 02/12/2012 03:06 PM, Warp wrote:
>> Orchid Win7 v1<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>>> Here's a challenge - write me a C# function (or even just some
>>> psuedocode) which will take a string containing space-delimited positive
>>> integers, and return them in ascending order.
>>
>> If it were C++, I could write a few lines of code that does that
>
> Haskell:
>
>    foobar :: String -> [Int]
>    foobar = sort . map read . words
>
>
> C#:
>
>    public List<Int> foobar(String s)
>    {
>      string[] words = s.Split(' ');
>      List<Int> list = new List<Int>();
>      foreach (String word in words) {list.add(int.Parse(word));}
>      list.Sort();
>      return list;
>    }
>
>
> Not exactly taxing, eh?

Of course there are many ways to approach this in C# and most other 
languages.  Using LINQ and and working in decimal datatype without error 
handling:

private List<decimal> ParseAndSortValuesFromString1(string text)
{
	return text.Split(' ').Select(s => Decimal.Parse(s)).OrderBy(s => 
s).ToList();
}

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>> Not exactly taxing, eh?
>
> Of course there are many ways to approach this in C# and most other
> languages. Using LINQ and and working in decimal datatype without error
> handling:
>
> private List<decimal> ParseAndSortValuesFromString1(string text)
> {
> return text.Split(' ').Select(s => Decimal.Parse(s)).OrderBy(s =>
> s).ToList();
> }

According to one of the guys I work with, "LINQ is great and everything, 
but it makes the code extremely slow". Does anybody have any actual 
/facts/ with which to confirm or refute this? I would have expected 
there to be a fairly minimal speed difference...

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