[NA rant] Lies on resumes

I've had headhunters change my resume before. In the interview, they ask about something I know nothing about.. "but its here on your resume..."
Ask to see copy, apologize and explain that what they had wasn't what I gave the headhunter. Jerk even took all my contact info off the resume and put his on it, so all contact had to go through him. Quite embarrassing.
 
murphey said:
Once upon a time, I interviewed with a major aerospace company for C/C++ and FORTRAN programming. In the discussion with the manager, the issue of quality of code came up. His attitude was that hardware gets faster all the time, we don't need no stinkin' quality code, just get something out the door that works.

Which is why to this day, the company spends most of the programmer hours fixing legacy code, fixing current code, just fixing code.

No, I didn't go to work for them.
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Yeah, pet peeve. Why do you need multi-GB for freaking Windows? The current crop of SW "engineers" should try this with 128KB. Frankly, I'm amazed anything works these days. And these same people are going to code your self-driving car?
 
PayPal once invited me to apply and I had to take a timed online exam. They flew me out for an interview and said that everyone who passed their exam would probably be hired. As I was leaving I received a phone call offering me a job in my hometown so I took it.
 
What I've learned from reading this thread is that programmers / developers lie through their teeth, and most wouldn't know good code if it showed up in their email . . . Thankfully I'm not one and don't work with any!


*dad blasted apple spell changer!
 
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Hank S said:
What I've learned from reading this thread is that programmers / developers lie through their teeth, and most sound pint know good code if it showed up in their email . . . Thankfully I'm not one and don't work with any!
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I never sound pint good code.
 
paflyer said:
Yeah, pet peeve. Why do you need multi-GB for freaking Windows? The current crop of SW "engineers" should try this with 128KB. Frankly, I'm amazed anything works these days. And these same people are going to code your self-driving car?
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ain't that the truth. look how big excel is, the first calc ran on 4k machines..........
 
unsafervguy said:
ain't that the truth. look how big excel is, the first calc ran on 4k machines..........
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And it had 16 colors, screen resolution was about 1/10, couldn't switch windows to check an input from another application, couldn't play music while working, couldn't be sent through email, don't remember if it could draw charts, but if so, insanely crude ones relative to today, worked on one computer with expensive and very limited options, required memorizing dozens of hot-key controls, UI completely different than any other application.

There's a reason for the bloat. If the OS didn't have shared code (including old versions so you're old programs still work) to do all those things, applications would cost a lot more, take longer to create, and be harder to use.

I don't miss the days when you sat and twiddled your thumbs while waiting for your dot-matrix to print out your spreadsheet because the computer could only do one thing at a time, even if the OS could fit on a 5 1/4" floppy.
 
Salty said:
I never sound pint good code.
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Spell check is another feature that lends to OS bloat. But I'm not convinced spell check is a net gain as the quoted post reflects.
 
Salty said:
Spell check is another feature that lends to OS bloat. But I'm not convinced spell check is a net gain as the quoted post reflects.
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I'm pretty sure it's a net detriment, as I see a lot more misspellings since spelling checkers were invented. I think the reason is that when people use them, they are less likely to proofread, so a lot of the many errors that spelling checkers can't catch make it into the finished document.
 
Palmpilot said:
I'm pretty sure it's a net detriment, as I see a lot more misspellings since spelling checkers were invented. I think the reason is that when people use them, they are less likely to proofread, so a lot of the many errors that spelling checkers can't catch make it into the finished document.
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That's not how apple's spell check works. I can type a word correctly, but if I'm looking at the touch keys and not the text, I won't notice the little box with a different word that pops up, then when I hit the spacebar, the what I typed goes away and what Apple thinks I meant goes in. This is handy when I misspell, or am up unsure, or miss the correct key spot and get the letter beside it, but as often as not, apple spells words that I do not want.

My Samsung phone gives me multiple choices of every word that I type, a great timesaver. But unlike apple's "opt out" spelling changer, I must select the word I want or my actual typing goes in. "Opt in" is much more user friendly! Having more than one option is also nice, but apple thinks that unnecessary; in fact, I often type entire sentences without the ipad offering a single thing . . . Then when it does, it will decide one letter from the end what word I might want.

So the problem is not lazy typists, and it is not societal change--the problem is stupid iOS vs. Android.
 
SkyDog58 said:
The lack of faith that some of you programmers have in the skills of other programmers makes my lack of faith in fly-by-wire and heavily computerized aircraft seem very reasonable.
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Hank S said:
That's not how apple's spell check works. I can type a word correctly, but if I'm looking at the touch keys and not the text, I won't notice the little box with a different word that pops up, then when I hit the spacebar, the what I typed goes away and what Apple thinks I meant goes in. This is handy when I misspell, or am up unsure, or miss the correct key spot and get the letter beside it, but as often as not, apple spells words that I do not want.

My Samsung phone gives me multiple choices of every word that I type, a great timesaver. But unlike apple's "opt out" spelling changer, I must select the word I want or my actual typing goes in. "Opt in" is much more user friendly! Having more than one option is also nice, but apple thinks that unnecessary; in fact, I often type entire sentences without the ipad offering a single thing . . . Then when it does, it will decide one letter from the end what word I might want.

So the problem is not lazy typists, and it is not societal change--the problem is stupid iOS vs. Android.
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I don't see how any of that refutes my point. Before you post a reply or send a message, you still have the option of proofreading to make sure that what's on the page is what you intended, do you not?

And I wouldn't use the word "lazy." I think that it's more a case of not being clear on what the limits of the technology are.
 
Another one of these today...

How does someone who is a Computer Science major with a 3.8 GPA not have any clue in the world what recursion is?

Sigh.
 
deonb said:
Another one of these today...

How does someone who is a Computer Science major with a 3.8 GPA not have any clue in the world what recursion is?

Sigh.
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I can think of two possibilities
  • He is a freshman and the 3.8 is from his first semester
  • He went to a school with significant grade inflation
 
deonb said:
Another one of these today...

How does someone who is a Computer Science major with a 3.8 GPA not have any clue in the world what recursion is?

Sigh.
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Funny interview story. I had been exclusively writing device drivers for 2+ years. (I had been writing code professionally for 10+ years.) I got in an interview and was asked to write some C code to process a tree. Clear case of recursion. Except I blanked. I started writing some pretty convoluted code and then turned to the interviewer and said "This is way to hard. I'm missing something." He said "Recursion." I immediately scrawled out the proper solution and then explained that in writing device drivers, I didn't use recursion for anything. (It's a pretty bad idea in that environment.)
 
jsstevens said:
Funny interview story. I had been exclusively writing device drivers for 2+ years. (I had been writing code professionally for 10+ years.) I got in an interview and was asked to write some C code to process a tree. Clear case of recursion. Except I blanked. I started writing some pretty convoluted code and then turned to the interviewer and said "This is way to hard. I'm missing something." He said "Recursion." I immediately scrawled out the proper solution and then explained that in writing device drivers, I didn't use recursion for anything. (It's a pretty bad idea in that environment.)
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It's a good way to run out of memory, quickly.
 
paflyer said:
It's a good way to run out of memory, quickly.
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Indeed it is. And if you're in an interrupt service routine, you may just run out of stack or time as well.

I did later use recursion in one device driver ISR. It was a prototype hardware board with 64K DMA caching memory on it. The main program filled it up in 8K chunks asynchronously. I would set up the 8K transfers in the ISR if there were any ready. I knew there would never be more than 7 (8K plus some overhead) and this was purely a prototype to measure the performance. It worked like a charm for gathering the data.

John
 
dmspilot said:
I can think of two possibilities
  • He is a freshman and the 3.8 is from his first semester
  • He went to a school with significant grade inflation
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No, just graduated with 4xx level C/S courses.

Third possibility:
* Modern C/S courses in schools suck.
 
deonb said:
No, just graduated with 4xx level C/S courses.

Third possibility:
* Modern C/S courses in schools suck.
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Yes it could be. Or the students suck. Or some of both. I interviewed a Senior CS major who couldn't answer basic questions from a course he'd taken last semester. (Unless he lied on his resume about the course. Thread's full circle...)
 
jsstevens said:
Funny interview story. I had been exclusively writing device drivers for 2+ years. (I had been writing code professionally for 10+ years.) I got in an interview and was asked to write some C code to process a tree. Clear case of recursion. Except I blanked. I started writing some pretty convoluted code and then turned to the interviewer and said "This is way to hard. I'm missing something." He said "Recursion." I immediately scrawled out the proper solution and then explained that in writing device drivers, I didn't use recursion for anything. (It's a pretty bad idea in that environment.)
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Yes, but you know what it was... right?

This wasn't playing "deduce the algorithm". It was: "Show any example of recursion".

Thereafter it was "Well, then use any other technique to traverse a tree", which the candidate could also not do. Would be odd for someone to be able to traverse a tree iteratively and not recursively, but I suppose it could happen if you have a highly specialized background like kernel dev and you've been out of school for 5 years.

Actually, I remember once for a C/S competition I could figure out a 'Towers of Hanoi' answer iteratively, but not recursively. But then, I was 12 at the time. I was also annoyed that the teacher didn't accept my very elegant iterative solution because he couldn't figure out whether it would work (it did), so I was probably also too stubborn to think of the recursive solution :)
 
Yeah. It's mind boggling some times. I got transferred into a SW group in the storage industry many years ago. There was an engineer with a MSCS degree who had been in the group for 2 or 3 years. We got assigned to the same project. I was architect and designer and he was supposed to build one of the components. I actually build the C++ class header defining the interface to a simple B-Trieve database accessor class. After 6 weeks of him not delivering, my boss asked me to take a look at his implementation over the weekend because it was now holding up other development. I looked at it and realized 1) he didn't understand strings in C/C++ and 2) he didn't even begin to understand what the class did. I stripped all of his code out except 2 lines of B-Trieve code and wrote the entire class over the weekend. And debugged it. And found the only bug I had was ONE OF HIS LINES I HADN'T DELETED. By Monday morning I had working code for the team.

When I told my boss (also newer to the team than the individual) we did some research and found that every project he'd worked on for his entire tenure had been canceled before release. He hadn't shipped a single line of code in 2+ years. In a department of 6. I was gobsmacked.

When we went through layoffs shortly after, he was on the list. He approached me about a reference and I politely declined.

John
 
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