Re: Computer programmers' habits in electronics

On Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:28:17 -0800, the renowned Tim Wescott
<tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Ignoramus32515 wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 21 Dec 2005 19:31:08 GMT, Rich Grise, but drunk <yahright@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:49:09 +0000, Ignoramus10397 wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:29:21 GMT, Rich Grise, but drunk <yahright@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Got any overflow work?
>>>>
>>>>I am sorry, what is overflow work.
>>>>
>>>
>>>When you have so many customers that you can't fill the need, so you take
>>>on outside help temporarily to take care of the overflow. You know, like
>>>"My cup runneth over", but of work?
>>>
>>>I'm kinda looking for some stuff where I could telecommute; I know just
>>>enough C and perl to get myself in trouble, and can do hobbyist-level
>>>electronics - I used to be able to slap together uC circuits, but I
>>>don't really have a proper lab these days.
>>>
>>>I'm wondering if I should look around for proofreader work, or does
>>>anybody bother to have anything proofread these days?
>>
>>
>> Sorry, nothing that I can think of, of the sort.
>>
>> Somewhat tangentially...
>>
>> We are interviewing people for computer programmer positions. We are
>> looking for those who can actually "do stuff" without too much
>> babysitting.
>>
>> Lots of people come in with impressive resumes. When I talk to them, I
>> know that some peope are very good at bullshitting, so I give them a
>> couple of actual tasks to do. Very small simple things. One is to
>> write a nice function that reverses a string in place. For example,
>> "Rich" would become "hciR".
>>
>> Almost no one can actually do this without making mistakes, many
>> people give up completely.
>>
>> Very frustrating. I consider it the most basic capability of a
>> programmer.
>>
>> i
>>
>Someone who likes to ask that question told me of an interviewee who got
>as far as saying "I think it involves recursion...".
>
>So I wrote a version that did it using recursive function calls and sent
>it to her. I don't know if I would have gotten the job -- they had
>already made the mistake of hiring me.
>
>Good thing the PC has a lot of stack space.
>
>For interviewing embedded SW engineers we finally settled on a fairly
>basic scaling problem. We started with a little story problem that
>required the interviewee to find the ratio of a couple of numbers and
>multiply it to a third, then we said "oh, by the way, our floating point
>library is too slow -- do it with integers". The question usually took
>about 40 minutes to explore fully, with some folks never getting it and
>some just glancing at the board and writing down the correct answer.
>
>It's amazing how you can separate the desktop programmers from the
>embedded engineers with that one.

The string reversal problem also may test whether the programmer
thinks about limit-checking and error handling, unless they choose to
reverse it in place (which could be influenced by specifics of the
question).

Reminds me of the time I gave a little programming job to a fellow.
Other than the GUI (which he did an okay job on), the 'guts' of the
task involved coming up with a handful of vectors and doing a few
dozen flops. Speed was of no concern. He precalculated every possible
value and created a multi-megabyte Access-compatible database.
Absolutely grotesque.


Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@xxxxxxxxxxxx Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
.

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