November 7, 2009 at 11:09 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item A Bad Litmus Test
November 7, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow.
Compiler is very low level work with very few changes; business software development is much higher level work.
Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang
I know about Erlang comes with limited implementation so not very relevant to Microsoft platform developer.
Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google
This is the only person whose work I would like to see because I would like to see if it is clean or comes with base mathematical flaws like other Object libraries.
Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger
I am interested in performance tuning and profiling not too deep in testing.
Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!
Now I know why Yahoo new is slow as molasses I have sent them more than ten emails I will cancel my account so they have added navigation that takes me out of their slow JavaScripts loaded pages.
L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1
I know Martin Fowler he creates usable objects and patterns and he tells you where he got the original patterns he implemented.
Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation
I don't like Mozilla because IE saves my yahoo map pages Mozilla saved files are blank.
Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal
ADO.NET with Http cache not very complicated engineering, important in Java because Sun did not pay for it but Microsoft did and we take it for granted.
Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer
I can relate to Martin Folwer from Small Talk the rest is distance history.
Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler
Software history not relevant to current software implementation.
Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX
Another history great contributions with limited current implementation .
Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI.
Microsoft runs one of those anybody who is interested can see most of what they do but most is not implementation ready engineering.
Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress
Software history not relevant to current implementation.
Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX
He is relevant because most of the none Windows operating systems uses it, I have used Oracle in Solaris, IBM ISeries and HP all uses a variation of UNIX so he is relevant.
Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker
The University of Illinois sells Marc Andreessen’s code so most serious developers can create a browser.
:hehe:
:Whistling:
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie
November 7, 2009 at 7:47 pm
I agree... it's a very bad Litmus test. It's more like a ring-knockers club and it shows a very narrow mind.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
November 8, 2009 at 6:37 pm
I also agree. While checking credentials is good sometimes, some of the brightest people I have known did not have degrees but they did things no one else could.
I think that a bad litmus test is one that uses absolutes and does not consider other accomplishments of the individual. Sometimes these are the type of people that will take you down a path that you would not have considered otherwise.
November 9, 2009 at 1:13 am
I think my response to that question in an interview would be: "Sorry I think we're wasting each others' time <Exit stage right>" 😉
November 9, 2009 at 2:34 am
Being a programmer foremost and group leader at one time, I can the say the interview question is junk. The best programmer I ever developed was an engineer graduate who didn't know how to program well at the time of hiring. I just saw his personal potential.
On the SQL world, there are some good authors but if I am forced to read only one in a day, I would read the articles of the very brilliant person: Itzik Ben-Gan of SQL Magazine.
November 9, 2009 at 4:26 am
I wonder why who the famous people contributed to science, history and geography are taught at school when one can Google it and get the answer.
November 9, 2009 at 4:48 am
Raju Lalvani (11/9/2009)
I wonder why who the famous people contributed to science, history and geography are taught at school when one can Google it and get the answer.
Aside from Google, there's also Wikipedia. But the Internet has another nickname, 'Worldwide Web of Lies'. 🙂
Anyone who has a vested interest will contradict, misinform, dis-inform or outright lie (in ignorance of not knowing everything in the Internet is logged and can be tracked).
November 9, 2009 at 4:49 am
Gift, I'm not sure which side you were arguing, but your post showed what is likely to happen if you _do_ bone up on such things before an interview: you are likely to make flippant remarks that get you in trouble like:
"Donald Knuth: ... not relevant"
If the interviewer knows who Knuth is, they will pounce on that remark, and ask you to justify it. If they really are a fan of Knuth, there is no chance of you winning that argument.
I appreciate that you probably meant something a little different, but now you have to explain why you failed to get your point across the first time, which is another black mark.
Much better to say that you read what you have time for, and evaluate all advice empirically, and hopefully end the question right there. As others have said, if they push any further you should consider your position then, and politely ask them to get back on topic...
November 9, 2009 at 4:53 am
I'm guessing whoever wrote that quote doesn't actually do a lot of hiring. There are numerous things that can rule a candidate out during an interview (chewing gum through the interview springs to mind, there were other reasons but that sticks in my mind) but if someone thinks it can be decided by a single question then I guess that benefits both parties.
Itzik Ben-Gan was the first name I thought of as well...
November 9, 2009 at 5:16 am
I've got a feeling that I disagree with most of these comments if they are meant to apply to programmers rather than DBAs.
Programmers do well to study the code written by the masters, and study that code in depth. I learned far more from studying in depth the code written by Jonathan Sachs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sachs code (the guy who originally wrote Lotus 123 and STOIC) than from a whole shelf of books. I pored over everything that was written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. If you do not study Ken Henderson's books, you're doing yourself a disservice.
Most of the list given in Steve's example are B-list in terms of the art of programming, but it contains one or two programmers who should be on everyone's list. If I interview a programmer who has never heard of Knuth, then I know he/she has never studied algorithms and I'm sure that this will handicap their ability to write really great code.
If we studied the work of the great programmers such as Charles Moore in more detail, then the current dreadful standard of coding that we come across must surely improve. We have no reason to feel complacent that we can somehow do better than they did without being familiar with what they did. That is pure arrogance.
I've interviewed, and appointed, several programmers who subsequently enjoyed great success. They had no qualifications at all, and were from a wide range of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. The one thing they had in common was that they had studied the art of programming and knew the work of the greatest proponents of the art. It takes a great deal of effort to become a skilled programmer, and I'd never want to work with a programmer who can't be bothered to study the work of the greats.
Best wishes,
Phil Factor
November 9, 2009 at 5:39 am
My experience is that most standard interview questions, no matter what they are 'designed' to do, just arbitarily eliminate x% of applicants using a reason that could stand up to a challenge. Very rarely do they identify the best shortlist of candidates for the job.
The questions that do help identify the best are tend to be the 'What would you do if x happened...' which do not often have a single 'right' answer. But many organisations like the 'Tell me the syntax of the y statement' because it is easy to score and compare this type of result.
An example of a poor litmus test is the requirement to have a university degree. The result I see is that you get the same cross section of no-hoper through to genius if you insist on candidates having a degree compared to those who do not. In the main, the ability to actually do the job is not much affected by the posession of a degree*. But insisting on a degree means employers can quickly eliminate most of the potential applicants, leaving a more manageable number to look at in more detail.
As for using a question about who appeared in a particular book, this beggars belief. It may be the bedtime read of the interviewer, but that does not mean that the group of people most capable of doing the job feel it is worth looking at.
* I say that in the main a degree is no guarantee of suitability, but I do admit the absolute top class people I have seen are never without one.
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November 9, 2009 at 5:45 am
Three points I'd like to make:
(1) In a profession as diverse as software development, where no two positions are exactly the same between companies, where so many different classes and training materials apply to what we do, why on Earth would you expect a candidate to know names out of a particular book?
(2) You aren't the sum of 'what' and 'who' you know, professionally or otherwise. Knowing names and facts proves nothing at all about your critical thinking ability, learning potential, etc....
(3) Since we're talking Litmus Tests, if I as a candidate was ever asked to rattle off names out of a book during an interview, it would be an immediate red flag. I would no longer be interested in working with that person.
November 9, 2009 at 5:45 am
I realize I'm not terribly well educated... but I didn't recognize a single name on that list. I must not know what I'm doing. I'd better go tell my boss to fire me.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
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November 9, 2009 at 6:00 am
Many "programmers" I know, including me, care very little about celebrity, fame or names.
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