Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective « Just Say “No” To Google The following has been making the rounds on just about every internal email list I belong to in Microsoft. Here it is to share a little insight with the rest of the world. Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not. Any peek is a good peek. Many of you were asking for the feedback I received from my interview with the former Google employee I hired into ABC Development as a Sr.SDE. Enjoy 1. The culture at Google is very much like the old culture at Microsoft – back when the company felt like most employees were in their mid 20’s. This culture changes a bit with more experienced folks. 2. 20% of your time on personal project. “20% is your benefit and your responsibility.” In other words, it’s your job to carve out 20% of your work week for a project. Most people don’t actually have a 20% project. 3. Google believes that developers are, with few exceptions, interchangeable parts. Google doesn’t seem to think that private offices are valuable for technical staff. 4. 5. 6.
Coding Horror: Why Can't Programmers.. Program? I was incredulous when I read this observation from Reginald Braithwaite: Like me, the author is having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can't write code at all. I repeat: they can't write any code whatsoever. The author he's referring to is Imran, who is evidently turning away lots of programmers who can't write a simple program: After a fair bit of trial and error I've discovered that people who struggle to code don't just struggle on big problems, or even smallish problems (i.e. write a implementation of a linked list). They struggle with tiny problems.So I set out to develop questions that can identify this kind of developer and came up with a class of questions I call "FizzBuzz Questions" named after a game children often play (or are made to play) in schools in the UK. Dan Kegel had a similar experience hiring entry-level programmers: Between Reginald, Dan, and Imran, I'm starting to get a little worried.
Why Religion Must End May 15, 2006 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Sam Harris is not your grandfather's atheist. The award-winning writer practices Zen meditation and believes in the value of mystical experiences. But he's adamant in his belief that religion does more harm than good in the world, and has sparked controversy by suggesting that when it comes to faith-based violence, religious moderates are part of the problem, not the solution. Laura Sheahen spoke with him about his provocative book "The End of Faith" and his comments at the World Congress of Secular Humanism, where this interview was conducted. Laura Sheahen: You've said that nonbelievers must try to convince religious people "of the illegitimacy of their core beliefs." Sam Harris: On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. SH: Right. SH: Yeah. SH:There are so many.
How to Interview a Programmer Writing Better CodeHow to Interview a Programmerby Bill VennersFebruary 24, 2003 Page 1 of 3 >> Summary Recognizing good programmers among job applicants is not easy. This article contains interview techniques, garnered from a recent summit on writing better code, that can help you can find the most qualified programmers for your project. In January 2003, I attended a Writing Better Code summit in Portland, Oregon, organized by Scott Meyers and Bruce Eckel. Finding good programmers is hard because good programming is dependent on much more than just knowledge of programming language syntax. The final morning of the Writing Better Code summit, Bruce Eckel announced he was "hijacking" the meeting. Although various interview methods were tossed about that morning, a few fundamental techniques emerged from the discussion. Dave Thomas: Hire for talent. Chris Sells: To identify how good the candidates are technically, I let them choose an area in which they feel they have expertise.
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing by Joel Spolsky Thursday, March 23, 2000 This is a very old version of an article that has since been extensively rewritten. This version is here for historical reasons only. Hiring the right people is extremely crucial to Fog Creek Software. First of all, the #1 cardinal criteria for getting hired at Fog Creek: Smart, andGets Things Done. That's it. Smart is hard to define, but as we look at some possible interview questions we'll see how you can ferret it out. Now, people who Get Things Done but are not Smart will do stupid things, seemingly without thinking about them, and somebody else will have to come clean up their mess later. The most important rule about interviewing: Make A Decision At the conclusion of the interview, you have to be ready to make a sharp decision about the candidate. There is no other possible answer. Never say "Maybe, I can't tell." But how do you make this difficult decision? Actually, there are some even worse questions. Is their function fast?
Benoit Mandelbrot thinks we're all screwed Professional Software Development » 100 Interview Questions to Ask Employers The interview process should ideally be an equal, two-way conversation between the interviewers for an employer and a potential employee. However, speaking as someone who has sat on both sides of the table, it has always seemed to me to be imbalanced towards the interviewers. They control the process and ask far more questions than the interviewee. But it is just as important that the interviewee make sure the employer will be a good fit as it is that the interviewers ensure that the interviewee will be a good fit. It does neither side any good to have an unmotivated, unhappy employee looking for the first opportunity to leave, no matter how skilled they may be. This point was brought to my attention again a few weeks ago when I read the article 100 Interview Questions for Software Developers by Jurgen. Your first priority in an interview process is to convince the interviewers to hire you by selling yourself. Without further ado here are the questions organized into categories. Teams
Into the cloud: a conversation with Russ Daniels, Part I - Ars Technica If you asked ten random techies to define "cloud computing," you might get twelve or thirteen different answers, but if instead you asked those same ten folks to identify the most overused buzzword of the last year, they'd probably all agree that "cloud computing" was it. Truly, "the cloud" is aptly named, because everyone who stares at the concept sees something a little different. So imagine my surprise when, on attending a session at this past summer's AlwaysOn conference, I heard someone on the stage talk intelligently, coherently, and technically about a topic that I had written off as so much noise. That person was HP's Russ Daniels, CTO and VP of Cloud Services Strategy, and by the time his panel was done, I knew that I had to talk to him in more detail about cloud computing. This interview actually altered the way I thought about the cloud and about software delivery in a networked world. "Cloud" vs. This trend around utility computing is important for existing workloads.
Into the cloud: a conversation with Russ Daniels, Part II - Ars Technica If you asked ten random techies to define "cloud computing," you might get twelve or thirteen different answers, but if instead you asked those same ten folks to identify the most overused buzzword of the last year, they'd probably all agree that "cloud computing" was it. Truly, "the cloud" is aptly named, because everyone who stares at the concept sees something a little different. So imagine my surprise when, on attending a session at this past summer's AlwaysOn conference, I heard someone on the stage talk intelligently, coherently, and technically about a topic that I had written off as so much noise. That person was HP's Russ Daniels, CTO and VP of Cloud Services Strategy, and by the time his panel was done, I knew that I had to talk to him in more detail about cloud computing. I managed to land an interview with him a few weeks ago, and it was so good that I've reproduced it (in slightly edited form) in this article. Mobile devices as "sensors" for the cloud