| Ivan's profileDe PertoPhotosBlogLists |  Tools  Help |
|
June 23 Puzzle Questions Are StupidI find very hard to measure how smart someone is during a job interview, and yet "intellectual horsepower" is one of the core competencies in my company. For some mysterious reason I'm frequently asked to measure that, and I find the whole thing very, very arrogant. It is arrogant because it assumes I will understand what the candidate tells me. If I ever meet the next Einstein or Currie, odds are I will not understand the first thing they tell me.
Computer Science folks frequently use puzzles to measure how smart a candidate is. More often than not the puzzle is a variance of a computer problem they learned in College and make little to no sense for a normal person (techie or not). There are dozens of websites that collect questions and answers, and all of them list problems like this one: an incomplete linear system with a couple of inequations to limit the number of possible answers.
Now, what do you think happens when you point out that a carefully manicured question, design to ease the interviewer insecurities, is a dud? As a candidate this happened to me a couple of times and all I got was a world of pain. My advice is to answer whatever they want to hear and move on.
I ask myself what would a normal person answer to someone that, when asked how they are doing after 20 years, says something like "I got married, I have three kids, the product of their ages is 72, and the sum of their ages is the same as the number on that building over there, and the oldest one just started to play the piano"?
The most polite answer crossing my mind right now is something like "and how are the hemorrhoids today?". But I'm cranky.
So if you really need to know if someone can solve a linear equation, or some obscure decidability question, have some courage and give the candidate a linear system or the decidability question to answer. That will let them know unequivocally that knowing such thing is a requirement for the job, and the candidate might quit the interview loop before causing you a lot of pain. Being explicit also has the merit to let other people on your company to know what are the things you value. June 21 Quick FixesI was watching the new show about NASA on Discovery Channel ("When We Left Earth") and it is amazing. If you have time to waste with TV this one is a great option. During the 50s and 60s the Russians were ahead of the Americans in space exploration. America was thinking God would fry the communists at any moment and Russia was forcing thousands into engineering. When Russia launched Sputnik the thinking part of the United States (which thankfully included the military) realized that was an amazing way to deliver nukes. The politicians realized the shift in power and what winnning the space race would do as propaganda.
Kennedy did something very insightful. He realized that playing catch up was useless and the only way to get ahead was to set a goal so ambitious that the lead the Russians had would be irrelevant. He set the goal to reach the moon within ten years, land humans there and bring them back alive and well. They did it without killing a lot of people and the advances included silly things like learning how to deal with computers and a relatively safe way to put heavy objects in orbit. Heavy as a satellite.
Setting high expectations is an amazing motivational tool. If you set expectations low you get mediocrity and even the lowest goals are not reached (check out this social experiment around racism). Being responsible for something important (or perceived as important) motivates humans like nothing else. No amount of money would make me as dedicated father as the love I feel or how important I think my daughter is. The sillier version of this statement is that nothing motivates a developer to produce great software than knowing what they do is relevant and there is no one else there to cover it for them.
And with this grandiose prelude, here is my two step suggestion for the software industry:
There you go. Instead of whining why, for crying out loud, I have to navigate through 12 clicks to change the tone of my speakers on Vista (versus 4 clicks on XP), or why my backup software still a piece of garbage after 10 years, I'm proposing an industry wide solution
June 18 Humans and Group SizesIf you believe in creationism I suggest stopping reading now and to go boil an egg or something.
The human brain is an amazing tool, but its design is very pragmatic and reflects evolutionary advantages. Working in groups gave us the ability to hunt bigger prey and defend more efficiently against much stronger, faster opponents. While operating in groups has some obvious advantages, it also brings complications. The brain evolved to give us empathy, the ability to mediate and share, as well as the ability to communicate. The bigger the group, the greater our ability to hunt. On the other hand, bigger groups require more food and sophisticated communication. So one would think there is a balance somewhere.
During the Paleolithic period humans would form groups of more or less 30 people and groups would mingle only for few activities (such as mating). In my experience school classes typically have between 20 and 30 students, otherwise they feel awkward or crowded. Is it possible that 30 is the magic number of people our brains can handle? If not, is there a magic number?
Modern society evolved faster than our biology, and we live together in very large groups. But we don't interact (or care that much) about a whole city. We tend to pick the people we care about. And we care more about some of them than others; we remember few phone numbers, not all. I tried to find situations where good team work is crucial and, besides professional sports, I could only think of war. There is nothing more extreme than war, as functioning as a team will define whether or not one lives. The smallest unit of a modern armed force is the platoon. Platoons are grouped in companies. Here are their sizes around the world:
What does that have to do with anything? I decided to count how many people I have to interact with at work to see if the number fits what my brain can hold. I counted how many people sent email directly to me and the number is 326. They live in three continents (Asia, Americas and Europe) and bombard me with email, instant messages, phone calls, social network posts (such as Orkut and Twitter) in a chaotic interruption pattern.
That may not justify, but probably explains, why I want to hide under a rock every time I take vacation. It may also explain why large groups need more process and produce crappier products - it is just not possible to have a team with hundreds of people. Our brains cannot take the abuse and, as defense, we stop caring about parts of the "team".
If you are overwhelmed by email and use Outlook, this is an interesting add-on to manage email: xobni (inbox backwards). Fun little tool.
June 09 Hungry HipposToday during lunch I managed to dip my forearm on a plate of burrito salsa. Great. The whole afternoon folks would tell me "all of sudden I got hungry - don't know why". I joked to a friend that saying "byte me" during meetings was a dangerous affair today as someone might act on it. His reply? "Only you would say 'byte me' during a meeting"...
It reminded me of a stand up commedian I saw on Comedy Central. He is a New Yorker and in his act he complains about a lot of stuff, including slow people climbing the subway stairs. He asks himself "how do they manage to get to the stairs before me? Do they run really fast and when they get to the station? Then they get tired of running and climb the stairs very slowly?". Apparently during one of his shows someone screamed back "they arrived on the previous train!".
One of the few movie passages I remember is from Robin Williams on Miss Doubtfire. He is on the employment agency being extemely funny to a lady that is not having any of it. When he is done she asks with not a speck of a smile "Mr. Hillard, do you consider yourself humorous?" and he replies "I used to". You can find the whole dialog online.
The other thing this situation reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert asks Dogbert "Am I an unclear communicator?". The reply? "Six o'clock".
Ah, great - the SQL job I was running completed. Now back to work. June 07 And It Never Stops Raining...If you ever needed proof that statistics are the best way to lie, check this out:
Seattle:
Lihui, Kauai, Hawaii:
So apparently it rains about the same in Seattle and Lihui. Of course, if you think Seattle, the first think that comes to mind is Hawaiian weather. And if you were to believe the weather almanac Seattle is more pleasant because of the dew point range on all seasons.
Manhattan is even worse:
Half of the year is gone and we had four or five great days and endless rain for six months. I need to build up goodwill to survive the next winter, the same way bears accumulate fat. With the weather like this I end up accumulating fat, but I'm not skilled enough to hybernate.
June 06 My First Blue Screen Of Death in 5 YearsToday Windows Update finally picked me to install Vista SP1 on my home PC and I got not one, but three blue screens of death. They were followed by reboots and a diagnose session that, I am sure, any customer out there would be able to do on their own. The blue screen of death now doesn't freeze the computer anymore, just reboots it.
I pressed F8 and picked safe mode, looked at the system and application logs and found absolutely nothing useful. But, just like anyone knows, Windows produces a crash dump file that can be loaded on the debugger. Since we all have the symbols handy on our work laptop it is obvious customers should load that crap on the debugger. This way they could spot the neat performance tool that runs after the only expected reboot to gather performance data. Let me send a hint: this was an aweful performance, regardless of how fast it was.
It is my fault after all. I keep forgetting to upgrade with the kernel debugger attached.
My scanner still doesn't work so if one of my local friends wants a pretty good scanner (Canon LIDE 80) please let me know. I'm done fighting it. My Creative Game Port still doesn't work but it shares the DSP with the sound card so I'm keeping it. The webcam also remains dead.
The good news? Since I was at it, I also removed all the crapware that accumulates on the startup options of the registry. Stuff like iTunes and two dozen 'Helper' applications from people too lazy to share a svchost or create a COM server. Now the computer starts up faster. Again, who out there doesn't know there is a key in the registry called 'Run' and another called 'RunOnce' in the registry?
I still think Vista is a good upgrade because of search being everywhere and the security enhancements alone. But we have to do better quality wise.
June 04 And More Geekiness And Search ApplicationsI just tried out two very cool search applications. One drives me back to my past as a Solaris developer, the other tries out a concept that I believe will shape the future of search.
The Google shell looks and feels like an unix shell and I caught myself trying to use man and other shortcuts. They like to stress this is not a Google product so they don't get in trouble (http://goosh.org).
I spent thirty minutes trying to find the link to the second one. I found it on the depths on my browser history - a feature I use less than than the advanced network setting under the advanced options. It so happens it was an internal application from Microsoft research and I cannot talk about it.
You might hate me for the lame post, but it is good news to me because I work there ;)
|
|
|
