short takes

[cellio]

Yesterday's mail brought a lovely magnet from browngirl based on the Kipling poem "Helen All Alone", which I had not previously read. Good call and beautiful art!

We're playing D&D this Saturday, which means we can have a longer session than when we play on a weeknight. I'm looking forward to it.

And now a few links:

A really interesting article on how to interview candidates for software jobs (link provided by goljerp).

Buy T-shirts and more from the Total Information Awareness store! This is the Orwellian logo they don't use any more. (Link provided by a co-worker.)

Everyday etiquette hell (source forgotten). Put the Coke down first. Really. Either that, or plan to clean your monitor.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Excellent article on interviewing. I was rather struck by how much it reminds me of the interview for my current job. This place was the only one that didn't ask a bunch of Stupid Programming Trick questions, and wasn't hugely focused on narrow specific skills. Instead, they told me that they were explicitly looking for generalists (albeit ideally ones whose experience was at least somewhat relevant), and the main body of the interview was a design session. They sat me down with the rest of the team, threw out a design problem that they were starting to think about, and had me run a meeting to figure out how to design that system. End result was that they hired me to write the engine that I'd led the discussion on. (And the work is far more interesting because it isn't same-old same-old -- after about five years of being highly client-centric in my code, I'm now writing a high-power server engine. It makes a nice change of pace...)

Moral of the story: that article holds as true for the interviewee as for the interviewer. How a company does its interviews says a great deal about the company. If you are a top-end programmer, you don't have to settle for the stupid companies -- it's better to look for the rare gem that really understands what they're looking for, because they're probably a better working environment...