On the road again

                Just can’t wait to get… wait a second.  That’s not right at all.  As the casual reader may not know (but the die-hard fan most certainly will) this particular penguin is not of the migratory nature.  That is to say that while I like destinations, I hate travel.

                There are a near-infinite number of reasons why this is the case, many of which I have already blogged about in previous sessions.  Feel free to check the archives if you are curious, I’ll wait.  If you’re using IE7 you can hit ctrl-t to bring up a new tab and that way you won’t even lose your progress here.  Spiffy, eh?

Back already? Great, then we can get on with it.

                I am currently sitting in the Chicago airport.  The plane that I am supposed to board is not.  This, as one might imagine, poses some logistical problems that I am fairly confident are beyond my abilities to resolve at this time with my current resources.  Were I, perhaps, rich and/or famous I could enact some kind of positive change but, alas, I am pretty much an anonymous middle-class white boy.

                It’s not all bad though.  I could be back aboard the flight from Seattle to Chicago wherein I was serenaded for 3.5 hours with the delightful sounds of a squalling infant. 

Evolutionary Quandary

                Ok, so… Screaming children…  Now here is something that I just don’t understand.  How did we ever survive to this point as a species with hatchlings who, so far as I am able to detect, spend the majority of their firs few months screaming their damn lungs out? 

                This cannot be a good idea when one lives in the wild.  The child’s clamorous crying would certainly cause carnivorous creatures to come calling.  It’s nature’s equivalent of ringing the dinner bell.  Every meat-eater in a five-mile radius would be lining up to eat your little precious.

                “Oh, excuse me ravenous lion, were you here first?  Well, it’s just that the wife and I had dinner reservations.  It’s our anniversary you see.  And we do SO love the crunchy bits of fresh ape-baby.”

                Aside from the meal-klaxon aspect, the constant high-pitched whine is annoying to the point of murderous thought-processes.  I find it amazing that in days of yore when we were (presumably) less civilized babies were not abandoned or snuffed in bulk by frustrated cro-mags.

                And thus my question.  How is it that this behavior is still with us?  How is it that the gene that programs babies to scream their throats raw still exists?  Frankly, it baffles me.

Service with a sneer      

                But back to the present for a second.  My flight has been delayed further, possibly due to the fact that there is still no airplane available to transport the passengers.  It’s an easy thing to overlook.  In the hustle and bustle of providing air travel to your valued hostages passengers there are many little things that need to go right.  For instance, the airline must make sure to find enough people to give up their seats because they overbooked your flight.  They must also provide customer service representatives who have mastered the subtle nuance of barely controlled contempt.  With all that going on, who can remember details like airplanes?

Fast Forward

                Note to reader:  At this point the Penguin’s battery died.  The following text was written three days later.

Why I am here

                This isn’t a deep or metaphysical entry, so if you are thinking that you are going to get a paragraph talking about the esoteric nature of Man and our place in the universe, well you’ve certainly come to the wrong blog for that.  I’m more along the lines of schadenfreude, which I think means “driving pleasure”. 

                Anyway, I am at the airport because I have been conducting a lot of college interviews lately.  The basic gist is that recruiters are not techy people and so don’t make terribly good interviewers.  Therefore my company searches within itself to find employees with a simmering distrust of humanity and underdeveloped social skills and sends them to colleges around the country.

                It’s not a bad gig, except for the travel and the fact that I get way behind in my email.  For one thing, I eat very well when I’m on these trips, much better than when I’m back in Seattle anyway.  Last night I had some very good fettuccini alfredo, the night before I had a steak.  Usually I eat peanut butter and jelly (when I remember to eat).

                Another bonus is the fact that I get to wander around a new and unusual city, which I actually enjoy.  There’s something about being  stranger in a strange land that’s quite appealing. 

                Then, of course, there are the interviews themselves.  I did 25 of them over the past two days.  Thee interviews are always a grab bag of random human behavior.  The screening process is… well, non-optimal to say the least.  It seems like anyone who has managed to boot up a computer in their lifetime can get to the initial stages.  Let’s run through some of the better ones, shall we?

Actually Man

                Actually Man was great.  In truth, Actually Man was someone that I interviewed on my previous trip about two weeks ago, but he is quite memorable, so I will relate the story here as though it happened over the past few days.

                Actually Man had on his resume that he had worked on a networking application doing socket programming.  Through the course of the interview I would ask Actually Man a question, which he would reply with “Actually, <statement>.” Every time, like clockwork.  Here then is what I learned when I dug into the details.

                Actually…

·         I worked on it with a friend .

·         There was no checking for packet loss, the professor stated that packets were guaranteed to be received

·         There was no code to handle multiple simultaneous connections

·         There were only two machines, one client and one server

·         The program was only five lines of code.

It was all I could do to keep from busting out laughing at this point.  This socket programming project that was highlighted on the resume turned out to be five lines of code that he had help writing! 

Combative Research Guy

                I always scan the resumes of the people that I am going to interview on the plane flight to the college.  In the latest batch I ran across Research Guy and instantly I knew there was going to be a problem.  You see, Research Guy was pursuing a PhD in a hardware-related field.  The hardware guys always seem to just not understand that my company is first and foremost a software company.  It’s kind of what we do.

                So I go into the interview knowing that this is going to be a problem.  The guy has on his resume “Solid coding skills in C”.  Ok, little digression time and some advice.  If you put something on your resume you damn well better be prepared to show knowledge in that area, particularly if you qualify your skills with an adjective such as “solid”.

                Note too that “solid” is basically code-word for “crappy”.  Nobody ever says they have “shaky” coding skills or “adequate” coding skills.  No, they fire up the thesaurus and settle on “solid”.  Any time you see that someone claims they have solid skills at something, you may as well ask them a fundamental question and see just how bad the skills really are.

                Research Guy hands me his application and it says he wants to be an SDET.  He immediately tells me that he doesn’t want to be an SDET, he just marked that because he didn’t know what else to check because he really just wants to do research.  Great.  It’s only been 15 seconds.  This is a new record.

                I explain a little bit about how the interview is going to work, wherein I am going to pretend like this is not a waste of my time, and he is going to completely fuck up a coding question.  Well, ok, I said it a bit nicer than that, but whatever.

                I pop the coding question on him and tell him to write it in C.  Of course, he balks.  He hasn’t used C in a long time.  Suck it up and start coding is my basic response.

                So he writes pseudo-code, and bad pseudo-code at that.  Fine, great, whatever.  Let’s see an actual algorithm.  “This isn’t good enough?”  Oh by the gods.

                 I push him to write code and he writes some fucked-up C that wouldn’t even be acceptable if it was My First Compiler shit.  I ask him to walk me through his algorithm and he starts by telling me the four different assumptions he has made in his code.  None of these assumptions are valid.

Turning the Tables

                Gamely, I ask him to revise his algorithm so that it approaches something that someone in the universe might actually accept.  At this point things get very interesting.  Research Guy goes on the offensive. 

                Research Guy explains to me that he doesn’t see how this has any bearing on the real world, how his code is good enough and how he doesn’t think that I have the qualifications to conduct the interview. 

“Ok, we’re done here.  Thank you for your time.”

“I still have time left.”

“No, this interview is over,” is my reply as I open the door, which is thankfully right off the main lobby of the career center.

Research Guy doesn’t quite get the hint or doesn’t want to let this go, because he asks me what degree I hold and mentions again that he is a PhD candidate.  At this point I am making eye contact with the receptionist and sending her mental telepathy to escort this freak away.  Research Guy realizes that I’m not going to play his game and walks away in a bit of a huff with a parting remark of “Well I guess you must be a really good coder.”  (For the record:  No not really.  I have friends who are far better than I and light-years beyond this lunatic).

Shortly after he left I learned that Research Guy had apparently been unable to complete the application form accurately on his first, oh, FIVE tries and had therefore used EVERY APPLICATION that I had left on the table.  Thus the career center had to erase the text off one of his apps and run it through the fax machine, since their copier was busted.  Thank you, Research Guy, for once again reminding me why I hate humanity.

I Shall Rue the Day

I imagine that Research Guy will become a recurring villain, perhaps even a nemesis.  He will appear in front of my building one day with his army of flying robots (all of whom have doctorate degree, of course) and extract his revenge.