AlanBarber.Org
Monday, June 27, 2005
Three questions to ask an engineer at an interview
Joe Kraus, founder of JotSpot and Excite, posted a little entry on his blog about three questions that should be asked at an interview for an engineer. These are not questions about technical skills as a programmer. These are questions to find out about intangibles. Those being communicating, tinkering and passion for coding
Without future ado here are the three questions:
1) Do you have a blog?
2) What’s your home page?
3) Do you contribute to an open source project?
The first question helps answer the need to know how well the person communicates. A person with a blog obviously does have the ability to communicate their ideas. They’ve taken the time to publicly write and express.
The second question shows if the person is a tinkerer or not. This might seem kind of odd but it does make logical sense. If the person makes their own custom home page, as opposed to just using yahoo or some other portal site, it shows they are not satisfied unless they get their hands dirty and do things better.
The final question is a way to test for passion. A person that takes time to work on a open source project shows they aren’t into coding just for the money. Not to say people that want to get paid to code are bad. On the contrary! It’s just a good way to find a real geek/coder vs. someone that became a programmer because they heard in high school/college that computers were a great industry to make money.
You know Joe might just be onto something here! I’ve done plenty of interviews and in so many of them they do nothing but ask the usual generic questions. Tell us about yourself, where do you want to be in five years, how well do you deal with stress, do you like working in groups or alone, etc, etc. There’s nothing wrong with these questions but they’re standard fair that they really don’t tell you much about a person really. As far as how well the person will actually do their job.
Well here are my answers just for the record.
1) Yes I have a blog. You’re reading it right now!
2) My homepage is custom made. You can see the sanitized version here (I removed any links that could cause security and/or privacy issues)
3) Well I don’t contribute any code to open source projects but I do follow several very closely including FreeBSD, Subversion, Haiku(openbeos) and SQLite. I monitor mailing lists daily to keep updated on them.
on 06/27/2005 at 09:34 PM
Computers & Technology • Work • (0) Comments • Permalink
Friday, June 24, 2005
A software engineer postion
I had an interview Monday for a Software Engineer position. I felt like the interview went very well. It’s this really awesome company and I’d love working there! They do mostly accounting systems that run on Linux. Well the backend server parts run on Linux but they use 4GL tools that let you run the front end on Windows, Linux/Unix, MacOS, etc.
It’s definitely my kind of place being very laid back and relaxed. They seem to run things very free flowing. You get to work directly with clients which I think I would like a lot. One of the problems many times is places put in so many levels of middle management and bureaucracy that the developers never communicate with clients. Some think this is a good thing because, well lets be honest, many developers don’t exactly have good people skills.
I’ve never done any major projects with clients so I don’t know how well it works but for the little freelance website design I do I like working directly with clients. Usually I get a lot of freedom to do as I see fit but its nice being able to just email or talk to a client and ask a question about how they want something. Then again doing website design you probably have to talk with a client more then if you are writing a new function for an accounting system. It’s probably more they ask for the system to do xyz and then you just go and crank out the new functionality.
Anyhoo, they said the plan is that they would finish up interviews this week and contact me sometime next week to tell me one way or the other.
If they call me to come back for a second interview it will be a coding test. They say to plan for it to take about four hours but it shouldn’t. Then based on that you could be called back for a third interview where you meet the HR, President, etc.
Funny thing, I actually like the idea of a coding test. Well, being honest, I’m a bit scared of the prospect but glad to see them do it. Not to bad mouth others but every other job interview I’ve had they’ve barely talked tech at all. Few questions to clarify what it says on my resume and that’s it. It sort of bothers me that a place doesn’t even take the time to see if a potential new hire actually has the ability to write code.
My mother used to rant about that all the time. When she would interview people at her place she would give them simple tests of their Excel knowledge because they used Excel all day long there. The test was nothing fancy, just basic stuff like doing simple equations, generating graphs, etc. The amount of people that would claim to know Excel but not be able to even do a sum total of a column was shocking!
Well, I hope they contact me early next week, I’m on my chairs edge with anticipation.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
UPS looses Citigroup customer information
Well that isn’t good!
It’s been in the news today that UPS managed to loose a package containing computer tapes of some 3.9Millon Citigroup customers being shipped to Experian, a credit reporting company.
Not good at all! As an employee of UPS it pisses me off that someone managed to loose the darn thing. UPS is very good about tracking packages. They should have been able to track down exactly where the box was last seen and where it didn’t show up and then find it.
For a box to just vanish off the face of the earth is strange.
I feel sorry for all those people having to worry if some evil person is digging through those tapes and using their info. Of course I feel sorry for every employee of UPS too. Lord knows that we’re probably all going to hear about this at work all week. Supervisors and staff will probably go on and on about how we have to work hard and be the best package handler service in the world. How we need to treat each package with equal care and importance. Something tells me this week is going to suck…
OY!
Monday, June 06, 2005
HA! Oh, now this is funny! Apple is going to switch to Intel CPUs
Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006
I’m not joking here folks. There were rumors last week that Apple would announce they were switching to Intel CPUs. It’s been said before in the past and Apple always said it was B.S. so I like many figured it was just another round of that.
However, Apple had a press confrence today and Steve Jobs said they would be switching to Intel hardware. This is good stuff people. When the new G5 PowerPC cpus came out for the Mac Apple made all these claims about their systems being “super computers” and so much better than Intel based systems. Now they’re claiming Intel will be better! That’s rich man!
The basic plan is to a slow conversion. First lower end systems in ‘06 and by ‘07 the high end boxes will be Intel too. Now the big news is they’ve been secretly maintaining dual versions of OS X. PPC and x86 side by side for some time now. It’s apparent that they probabbly finally realized that PPC while a powerful and advanced system is basically dead in the water thanks to IBM. Where as x86 cpus are growing faster and more powerful all the time. If they want to keep the Macs in the game as far as power is concerned Intel is the way to go.
You can read the official statement here:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html