This is incredibly true. I once turned 60kLoC of classic ASP in VBScript into about 20kLoC of python/django including templates. And added a bunch of features that would have been impossible on the old code-base.
It turned the job from hellish (features were impossible to add) to very nearly boring (there wasn't much to do anymore). So with this newfound freedom I built some machines to automate the data entry and once that got rolling the job got even more boring. Because it was a small company with a very long learning curve the owner didn't let people go, but instead kept them on so that he didn't have to hire and train new people as growth accelerated.
But with all the automation some slack found its way into the system and problems that had normally required me to stop working on my normal job and help put out fires now got handled by people who weren't stretched a little too thin.
Sadly there's (seemingly) no way to interview people for this ability so we're stuck with the standard "write some algorithm on a whiteboard" type problems that are in no way indicative of real world capabilities.
I got fired from a job because I had done this and they couldn't figure out how to keep me billable after that. Well, I got fired because I would "show up late" and "leave early" because there was nothing else for me to do (even though I was actually pulling a full 40 hours, they were expecting 60 out of people).
They could have given me more work, put me on new projects, etc., like I kept asking to be done, but instead they just wanted me to figure out some way to bill the client for 60 hours a week, and not call it "bug fixes" or "new features", because the client wasn't paying for it. That left data entry, which I had automated from a whole day to 10 minutes. They wanted me to go back to entering data by hand.
I would have quit then, but I didn't want to give them the pleasure. A flood had recently destroyed all of my stuff and I used the insurance check to get out of debt rather than replace the lost stuff, so I suddenly didn't need money for a LONG time. It's funny how easily debt can make you a compliant little slave towards people who want you to perform bullshit tasks.
I've been freelancing ever since, making twice what they paid me for only half a week's worth of work. And the flexibility of the freelancing enabled me to pursue a long-distance relationship that eventually lead to marriage. So I say getting fired was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
I think P.T. Barnum wrote the prototypical "Self-help: finance/entrepreneurship" book in "The Art of Money Getting: Or, Golden Rules for Making Money" [0]. A lot of it sounds like the stuff you hear getting hammered to death on motivational TED talks. It's a pretty short book and he doesn't go into too much exposition on a lot of the issues he addresses, with the exception of debt. He probably spends half of the already short book on talking about the evils of debt, especially debt put into things that aren't assets. It's not the debt that is the problem, it's the mindset you have to be in to take the debt, the mindset that the debt puts you in, and the mindset of the type of person that continues to use debt, especially destructively. There are some closely related issues with spending money, which tie in nicely.
It's an interesting read. This book was written in 1880, and if not for the dated writing style, would fit right in to the modern day self-help genre. It really helps underscore the idea that there's "nothing new under the sun."
I've come across this a few times. The managers' thoughts were probably along the lines of "great, I got all my code cleaned up/the hard part of my product built for the expensive rate, now I can fire him and pass on maintenance to the cheap guys over there".
And of course your thoughts were "I'm going to work extra hard initially, which will make a good impression and get the product built on time and all the tasks automated, and then I can coast and it will still be worth their money."
The manager doesn't care because when your code starts rotting due to bad maintenance and badly added features (or just the fact that nobody has bothered taking it over), he'll already have been promoted or changed companies.
Except this was a 5-person company that could have used all the help they could get. They styled themselves a "startup", but I don't know how valid it is to call yourself a startup after 8 years. They had me very cheaply, but I think they knew I was never going fit their "company culture" of lying to clients.
Billing by the hour is basically just telling people how much effort you expect the task to require smoothed by how valuable it is to you. If you can do it quicker, I say bill the full amount of time and if they have extra inquiries, fit it into the buffer zone.
For one of my current clients, I still bill only the time I actually work. It's a long-term project with no explicit end-date. I'm trying to get out of, I want to do shorter-term projects now, but while I'm here, they've hired me for the fact that I can crush out code and make things better than their own employees. They didn't buy a specific thing, they buy my expertise.
It means I'm not making as much as I could be, but it's not their fault I agreed to the arrangement 3 years ago.
I had an interview recently where we did something similar and it was awesome. They had picked an especially good example: the code was small enough that it didn't take long, but it has a variety of sorts of badness, from coding errors to bad names to bad method grouping to logical errors.
I wrote one of these for my work as well. Definitely our go-to for getting a sense of how well people can understand others' code and how they think about data modeling/complexity. A very small initial page of code can go a long way.
This is great. Reading (and maintaining, refactoring, improving, etc.) obtuse code is often much more difficult than a fresh slate. Its also a major real world requirement. Where is that statistic on number of engineers doing maintenance vs greenfield development?
Agreed, being able to read and reconstruct models from OPC (other peoples code) is such a big piece of coding but hardly ever a part of the interview process.
(OPC also refers to one's own code that when you can't remember wtf you did and the comments aren't useful)
I think it was a class of 30-50 lines of Java code.
The problems were those you see daily in production code. Misleading names. Duplicated constants. Overly complex constructs. Off by one errors. Maybe a resource leak when exceptions are thrown. Etc.
> Sadly there's (seemingly) no way to interview people for this ability
I think there is. Show the candidate some bad code. Not WTF code, but something you wouldn't be proud of but is realistic. Bonus points if you're comfortable enough to pull this out of your own production system. Ask the candidate about adding some functionality, but be clear that cleanup and refactoring changes are fine (even encouraged). The conversation should be enlightening.
This happened to me once. I went for an an interview at a huge real estate company. They had a chat with me for exactly five minutes, then gave me a computer (an old one, with keyboard not working properly) and some legacy code. I wasn't asked to fix it, but I was asked to make a small change and given half hour for it. That code had no documentation and no comments. Then 5 more mins to explain what I understood about the codebase - no questions, just me talking about the codebase as much as I understood in that half hour. The whole thing took like 45 mins or so in total. No whiteboard questions etc. And they made an offer.
> gave me a computer (an old one, with keyboard not working properly)
What I like most about this is how close to reality their interview model is. Less than stellar equipment, legacy code, and a maintenance task... just a normal Monday.
Another story - I walk in on my first day (this is a subsidiary of a HUGE company). Nobody remembered that a new guy was supposed to join that day - so no desk or computer for me. First couple of hours I spent reading magazines, then I was given the oldest (probably older than me, ha) computer I've seen in my life. I am not kidding - I spent half hour just cleaning the thing (not talking about software, but hardware. it had half inch of dust on it).
You know, interviews ideally go both ways. If a company was not willing to provide me with working equipment, I would likely decline any offer they might make. Not because I need the best of the best hardware or anything, but because it would be a huge red flag that they don't value the position or the people that fill it.
Our main product was developed on a keyboard that was missing a "w". It's not a big deal, though - you can use a for(;;) loop instead of a while loop without hurting performance. And it's easy to just avoid "w" words in the view templates by being clever with word choice.
Of course, that's not true at all. But giving someone a defective-but-not-entirely-broken tool can be a clever way of seeing how they work around problems or how they deal with frustration. Joking aside, we once let a guy go during his 1 week probationary period because he got a little too angry at a slow server. It's a valuable test.
It's too contrived though; not having a single working keyboard anywhere isn't a real business situation. A slow bottlenecked server, sure.
If the "w" key weren't working I'd copy-paste "w" characters from elsewhere in the document, or bring up the on-screen keyboard. Writing bastardized code -- for (;;), really?! -- would be a huge negative against a candidate. And, of course, if a company really didn't have a working keyboard to provide me with, I'd never work there in the first place, because if they can't even provide working peripherals there's no limit to what else they might skimp on.
I actually have three keyboards at my desk right now -- one with Cherry MX blues, one with Cherry MX browns, and a Model M. No way in hell would I ever write code without "w"s.
Whenever you need a character your keyboard won't produce - either because it's broken or because it's in a different language and you can't figure out how to get it, just google the character and copy/paste it. i.e. Google "double u"
Or just use the mouse to open your whatever "Character Map" program comes with your OS... which works when you're missing the same letters you'd need to "sound them out", or even with no keyboard at all. (Assuming you managed to log in.)
I actually like "for (;;) {}" as an idiom for an infinite loop (or at least, the terminating conditions are in the body rather than the loop construct itself.) It maybe stands out more than "while(true)", so readers can easily see what's going on. But maybe that's just a justification, and the real reason is that it looks clever because not everybody knows you can do that with a C-style for loop.
Not at a company, but in Bulgaria every year there is a National Programming Olympiad - basically high-schoolers (but some time even mid-schoolers) would compete by solving 2 or 3 exercises in small amount of time. Their code would be ran, against tests, and it should finish in time, and with correct answers. Possibly code review might be done as well. Most used languages were Pascal, C, C++, Basic.
But then computers were not provided, each school had to travel with a computer for each student. So around 1993/94 a friend of mine, who also had some terrible medial situation at the time, and was quite weak decided to compete, and to make things worse for him - his spacebar wasn't working. I think he did a lot of presses of Alt+32 (or was it Alt+20 - I haven't used this combination of entering ASCII codes in a long time). He finish pretty good for the situation and keyboard problem he had, and next year when he was healthy and with good keyboard he did just awesome!
I'm sorry but I can't help to find this situation ridiculous.
Unless you're from a very poor country there is no excuse for not having a working keyboard.
I don't know if that was part of the test, but if it was, it's worse than the big blue chip corps asking about the number of piano tuners. Which actually can be valuable at understanding how one reasons about unknown problems/areas.
About the server being slow, well I don't know the magnitude of the slowness or the anger, but unless you're a ramen fueled startup there is no excuse for having slow machines. It's management failure. It's a waste of developer time. Instead of coding the dev is having to deal with stress inducing constant 5 second hiccups or similar things.
Put yourself in the interviewee's shoes. Do you really want to work in a company that can't conduct a proper interview and has broken/slow hardware?
> Do you really want to work in a company that can't conduct a proper interview and has broken/slow hardware?
Slow is relative. The employee in question was trying to figure out why a remote server was experiencing extreme slowdown. He ssh-ed in, but he was able to type far faster than the beleaguered remote could echo his keystrokes. So he needed to just carefully type his commands, wait for them to appear, and then press enter. Instead, he typed angrily and too quickly, swore at the connection, and eventually started slamming his keyboard in a fit of pique.
It was a totally reasonable real-world slow machine problem, and a totally useful insight into the mindset of a potential new employee.
Not egregious at all. We're developers, sometimes we have to walk into an annoying situation and deal with it like adults.
I have been forced to work with really old computers connected to as old research hardware. At some point it is probably more economical to let someone figure out the interface and solder something together with an Arduino or similar so we can start using a new computer. But that point is never now. Until then we have this old chain of hardware just to get the data from the old machine via 5 1/4 floppy disks.
Maybe it's why I'm not a developer anymore, but my approach to a broken "w" key wouldn't be figuring out a workaround to using "while", but rather copying and pasting a "w" from somewhere else.
If someone's approach to a broken keyboard is some workaround instead of just asking for another keyboard it is a sign they handle problems very, very poorly.
^^^this is the correct answer. as a manager I want to know if my team is experiencing an obstacle that should be simple for me to fix for them. A managers job is to remove these kind of obstacles. I don't want them wasting time with poor workarounds.
My would be to (in order): jury-rig the keyboard to make it type "w" anyway, rebind it to some unused key, or just bring my own keyboard from home (if this would not be an interview but probational period setting).
It does, but having to click to type that one letter would be annoying as hell, and a last-ditch resort (after copy-pasting the letter itself from some text that contains it).
If the 'w' key is the only worn out key on a keyboard, I would suspect that it had seen heavy use attached to a gaming PC, as the "forward" key in the default WASD movement layout.
I have a keyboard with a broken 'w' key myself, and I know exactly why that key cap died young. It sure wasn't from typing out "while".
Somewhat off-topic, but I'm suddenly reminded of a joke proposal for Fortran to drop the letter 'O' entirely from its character set (in response to frustration regarding its confusion with '0'), the justification being that 'GOTO' statements would suddenly be impossible and therefore incapable of doing harm.
No, I had another offer that I took. I'm an average programmer and was able to do the task easily, but that codebase really scared me. Plus the other job was to build something from ground up and I really liked the CTO, so I took it. They were primarily hiring someone just to keep it running than adding new features.
It was a great interview experience though. One of the engineers commented that they gave the same task to other interviewees too.
I think this is a smart and lazy way to hire people :P No need to spend an hour in the room asking random questions, having awkward pauses etc. Just let the candidate fight with the codebase - lazy and simple!
We did something similar at previous job. We handed the candidate some code that was intentionally bad, explained that it was so (so they wouldn't think we wrote like that every day), and then asked what they'd do to improve it. This let us find out a few things - whether they could read & understand someone else's code, whether they could make improvements to existing code, what levels of abstraction they were comfortable working at, and whether they had a strong enough personality to mix with everyone else.
The key was in how we presented it - we didn't want to come across as elitist jerks (but we probably did to some people), so we tried to soft-sell it to them and work it in gradually during the interview.
That sounds like a good way to set expectations for communication and introduce the interviewee to the way your team respects each other.
Some teams are like "Man, what idiot wrote this code! This is garbage!" (sometimes in other words). I can imagine they couldn't do the type of interview you're doing.
In your interview, you show them some bad code, ask them to change it, and if they start disparaging whoever wrote it, you can red card them before they start dragging down team morale.
Or, if they start wondering about 'how did this code get like this? are there other issues leading to the bad code?' they've got some strengths in areas outside of development.
And then -- and this is important -- actually follow through on allowing and encouraging refactoring, as indicated in the interviews, instead of insisting on "features first, features fast" in practice.
I agree. There are tons of ways to test for this. Write a simple library that doesn't use any good design principles and have your candidate spend some time refactoring it. You can even use the same library multiple times. Heck, have your senior engineers also do this, so that you can get a good baseline for what an ideal candidate should come up with.
It would be actually interesting to look at the commits of a candidate's any online project repository from the very start and observe how the candidate made the progress with respect to the structure of code and improvement in coding practice. To check whether the candidate optimizes and refactors the code during the development of the project leading to a stable release.
This assumes that developers' off-work behavior is similar enough to their work behavior that it's a reliable indicator of their workplace performance. Or that developers should comport themselves on their off time to a workplace-level standard.
The problem with this is that it doesn't let my personal projects be Play. If I'm writing something for myself, it's not going to be as clean and documented to the level it would be in the workplace. And why should it? It's supposed to be for me.
And if I'm learning a new technology, I'm going to be sloppy. I'm going to make mistakes. That's the very nature of learning-by-doing.
But in the real world of managers and companies looking for reasons to say "no hire", I have to assume that every public checkin I do is another potential "no hire" justification. Which means if make all my checkins public, I have to treat my personal projects as Work, not as play. Which is an excellent way to burn out.
Or I just give you a curated look at the final product. Which ought to be enough.
>This assumes that developers' off-work behavior is similar enough to their work behavior that it's a reliable indicator of their workplace performance. Or that developers should comport themselves on their off time to a workplace-level standard.
Actually I hold myself to a higher standard when writing open source - A) because I know everything is open to the world, and B) because I'm not under tight time constraints.
Nonetheless, there's no perfect project, and any employer that looked at a github project and was needlessly, ridiculously picky or made a presumption that there shouldn't ever be mistakes would end up just not hiring anybody at all.
>And if I'm learning a new technology, I'm going to be sloppy. I'm going to make mistakes. That's the very nature of learning-by-doing.
Only idiots expect a perfectionist. Thus if you try to make every commit an exercise in perfection you're only selecting out the idiots.
I'd actually far rather see incremental improvement (in code quality, documentation clarity & commit messages) than sheer perfectionism.
Also bear in mind that no matter how interested the employer is in you, the chances of them taking anything but the most cursory glance at anything beyond HEAD is very small.
Yeah, personal projects could be sloppy, as it's mostly for learning new technology. And it may also be unfair to say that a good programmer always produce clean code, no matter the reason for development.
But still, there must be one project that the candidate considers his best work, one he/she is proud of, one where he/she has motivation to do best. If the employer can just ask the candidate for that project, and the candidate can show that project in a public or private repository, this would give really important insights to the employer about the candidate which would be beneficial for that both.
Also, this doesn't mean that the candidates who doesn't have public repository to show have any disadvantage, they are at the same point. Its just that the candidate who is able to provide a project of his choice through public repository would be a few points ahead other candidates.
>But still, there must be one project that the candidate considers his best work, one he/she is proud of, one where he has motivation to do best.
For an experienced developer, that would be a workplace project, which you probably could not see. Indeed, it _should_ be a workplace project; would you hire a professional developer whose best work is their personal project?
But if what you're saying is that the mark of an ideal developer is one who has produced a personal-time product of professional quality, where every checkin is to workplace standards, and has developed the project from conception all the way to release, again all on personal time, then what you're asking for is not a developer who also codes as a hobby, but a developer who (at least part of the time) works two actual jobs. One of which they do for free for portfolio development. I don't find that to be a reasonable expectation, even if it would give employers "important insights".
When I was writing this, I actually had only new grads in my mind. You got me there. But, I think this would especially helpful incase of recent graduates. What I am trying to say is that if a candidate can show the life-cycle of some academic/personal project in a public/private manner, it would help the employer make a better decision, which will inturn benefit the candidate.
> But still, there must be one project that the candidate considers his best work, one he/she is proud of, one where he/she has motivation to do best.
Were I to have such a project that I could show to people, it would be for a company that I had founded and as such despite my having the ability to show it, I would have absolutely no incentive to do so.
Basically if I had EXACTLY everything you purport to want in an employee I would be entirely unmanageable. Someone who has not only the skill and ability to turn out such a project but the motivation to do so on their own time is probably the definition of a founder. And founders are often terrible employees.
So while you're right that it would theoretically be better for candidates to share their codebases with potential employers, in practice I suspect that it rarely happens.
And that online repo is fully complex and developed. And has a stable release, isn't a work in progress. That code you hacked together in a couple hours to solve a quick problem isn't going to be an indication of how you handle a mature project with multiple developers.
>I think this is quite a discriminating practice - what if i don't do public projects?
Then either start one or resign yourself to not getting the best possible tech jobs out there?
As a discriminatory practice it's probably one of the most benign. There's a low bar to putting open source code out there. You can write a simple project and put it out there in a couple of weekends. That alone puts you ahead of about 80% of candidates.
It's a way better discriminatory practice than the current default assumption that the best developers out there are white, male twenty-somethings.
> default assumption that the best developers out there are white, male twenty-somethings.
don't you think that there's a higher proportion of white, twenty-something people who would have public projects (because they tend to have the most spare time)?
Don't you think that the over-worked CRUD programmer at an obscure insurance company wanting to get out because they are in a difficult situation (may be financially, may be race/background etc), would find it hard to have time for a public showing of their coding prowess?
No one is saying don't use public projects, but i would only consider them after other aspects, and certainly wouldn't cull people because of it.
>Don't you think that the over-worked CRUD programmer at an obscure insurance company wanting to get out because they are in a difficult situation (may be financially, may be race/background etc), would find it hard to have time for a public showing of their coding prowess?
Like I said: the amount of time you realistically need to get something out there is about a couple of weekends.
The bar is not necessarily as low as you think. At companies like Amazon you have to get approval for even the simplest personal projects, which could take months if you're unlucky.
Generally speaking, I preferentially hire developers with public projects--though I do not just pick one at random and ask for one they're particularly proud of. I think open source development is virtuous and is something that I want to promote and encourage; in the process, I get what I think is a better view into how somebody works.
If you don't do public projects, then you start a few steps behind the other candidates. This isn't insurmountable, but the error bars are wider, making you a somewhat greater risk.
Only in the weirdly defensive world of Hacker News does preferring people who contribute to open source software imply throwing out resumes without it, does it imply "missing out" on those people. Of course I consider resumes without open source work. It would be stupid to not do so. But I will look first at those with a publicly auditable track record. Is that a surprise? I look, earlier in the list, at people who've worked at a number of large firms with strong technical teams, too. They shrink the error bars on hiring.
Though, even if it didn't mean I was getting a view into how they actually work, I'm okay with preferring public-minded people who give things back and make the world a better place through it. I try very hard to live by the motto "pay it forward" and I find it to be rewarding and pleasant to work with those who do likewise.
> Then pay them for it.
My last two employers did exactly that. Should I need to hire directly for my consulting adventures, I'll do it there, too. I mean, this reply makes no sense to me: why would I not?
So I have a small side project I have hosted on Heroku. Getting stuff working on Heroku was a pain, and involved a commit for every thing I changed to try and make it work. How would you view a ton of commit messages in that context?
> Sadly there's (seemingly) no way to interview people for this ability
In a recent interview, I spent 45 minutes pairing with a current employee. Our goal was to take a (contrived) piece of legacy code, clean it up, and add a new feature to it. I imagine it was a very telling experience for them, and I feel it was more useful than the whiteboarding we'd done before.
Hopefully we as an industry will keep iterating on this sort of interview.
Yeah, that is cool and lets you get a hand on the job and a feel for what you'd be working on, but it makes me a little wary. Doing work for some employer without getting paid is a red flag. It's not a total klaxon blaring, but it does raise eyebrows.
Spending 45 minutes working on "a contrived piece of legacy code" with an employee competent enough to evaluate your effort doesn't sound to me like "doing work" for the employer. I get what you're saying, though... I think if the evaluator were incompetent and you were solving an important problem for them (things that would be pretty obvious), it would be an awful interview. But hey, that's 45 minutes well spent if it shows you for sure that you wouldn't want to work there.
Pairing makes this seem less egregious to me, even if the company is getting some value from the process. In a traditional interview, both you and the interviewer would be spending the same amount of time, and arguably learning less about each other.
Asking for some work to be done off site before an initial on site interview, where the potential employer is getting something of value, would be a much bigger red flag to me, personally.
My policy for this is that we have a pairing exercise that either: (a) is on sample code that the candidate brought, (b) an open source project with the end-goal being a pull request, or (c) a Make Work exercise. I do not want to have a candidate working on our real code precisely because I do not want to have the charge of unpaid work levelled against us.
Well, to get to the point of being interviewed, you had to have some education (either formal or self taught, or both). This involved writing a lot of code (homework assignments, etc) that you didn't get paid for. And you had to write / polish up your resume, again without getting paid for it. And you had to drive to the site without compensation (unless the place is big enough to fly candidates across country for the interview). So why would actually demonstrating your competence raise a red flag? Either they like what you did and you get hired (in which case you are getting paid for the work), or they don't like it, won't use it, and it is no worse than putting a bit of work into a homework assignment that you ended up getting a C on.
A for profit company isn't benefiting from those activities, though. I can easily see a situation where a less than scrupulous company brings in a bunch of candidates to do this in order to get free labor.
There's a lot of hate for whiteboard coding. Having been on both sides of whiteboard, code reading, and code pairing interviews, I like them all for different reasons:
Code reading: In <10 minutes, I can have a basic grasp on someone's ability to read, understand, and explain new code. Usually simple examples of <50 LOC in the language of there choice. I've used it a lot in phone screens (just providing URL to the code) and gained the reputation of being able to predict fairly well the quality of a code submission to a "take-home coding challenge".
Whiteboard: in ~15-20 min I can get a grasp on how someone takes a vague problem and works toward a solution and how they are to work with. I'm actually less concerned about code, and more about how they handle ambiguity, flesh out requirements, communicate issues, and think holistically without the distraction of a compiler/syntax-highlighter/etc. I think whiteboarding is slightly more about communication than coding and can provide a lot of context in a short amount of time. Of course, not all whiteboarding interviews are equal - I spent plenty of days complaining about certain whiteboarding interviews, and now I'm clearly biased to believe that mine take the good and leave behind [most of] the bad.
Code pairing. Takes ~1hr to understand and modify some piece of code in a meaninful way. (Maybe there are simpler versions - but in an effort to feel more "realistic", I've always focused on changing a requirement to the candidate's code submission). It's more realistic than whiteboarding, but it carries the [real-world] overhead of getting syntax right, finding docs for a specific function, and other surpries that come up (network issues, desktop crashes, editor problems, etc.). I've seen it work well when there are several interviews that focus on very different skills, but inevitbaly after such interview, I've often felt like I had a very narrow view of a candidate.
I've done a few similar things at my previous employer. Basically, taken it upon myself to write internal reporting applications, to much success. I've also done some other small things (AHK, etc..) which worked out well.
Point is, I've been modestly bringing these up during interviews when asked what I've been doing the past few years. It is always glossed over.
I don't think companies want or recognize that they want someone who will be able to handle these tasks. If they knew these tasks needed to be done, they'd hire for it, right?
Seems some of the most important things that can be done for a company may be hidden to the executive team.
I was fortunate to be a valued player on a small team. But what you're talking about is basically trying to hire yourself in as a tech exec when you're just applying for a job as a programmer. I think that's because management (generally) doesn't really want to hear that they've got a blind spot even if they do.
Ultimately all you can really do is try and work your way into a situation where you have some kind of meaningful equity. Founder, co-founder, early hire, buy a piece of a company, whatever. That's the only way to really get rewarded for your skills; knowing enough about the state of the art to see what can be done better and also having the skills to see those projects through to completion and realizing the benefits thereof.
I wish there was a job title for "good all-arounder with knowledge of the state of the art in a role with substantial self-direction", but I think that's probably "founder" or something. Or "owner of a very small business" maybe?
> I wish there was a job title for "good all-arounder with knowledge of the state of the art in a role with substantial self-direction", but I think that's probably "founder" or something. Or "owner of a very small business" maybe?
That's the way I am drifting. I just can't seem to get in gear on my own. :(
Part of it is social and general anxiety. I'm afraid of putting myself out there, having my ideas and implementations judged, and finding both coworkers and customers.
Part of it is having trouble focusing on a single idea. Finding the right partner would help here: see #1.
Part of it is fluctuating levels of depression sapping my motivation outside, and sometimes inside, work. I have been fighting this for almost a decade. At one point several years ago the mere thought of doing things outside of work so reinforced how miserable I was in my day job that I couldn't get anything done.
I'm slowly working through my barriers. My most recent dip into the job market has demonstrated that the only way I am going to get the job I want where I want it is to make it myself, so I have renewed motivation to get moving.
Where are you located, and what are your qualifications? I'm NYC, Python/full stack. Email me!
I'd be interested in working on a project together (I have a recent "good idea" but it will need to be built ground-up). I don't have a lot of money, but I'd be fine with putting some capital down for hosting, domains, etc..
It would be very casual. No pay either way of course. Ownership is something to discuss.
For your first part, I feel everyone has that to some degree. You just have to do it. Email startups.
In my case, it's the "lot of work" issue that is the problem. It's really easy for me to ignore the work I don't understand very well (marketing) or don't enjoy very much (which is largely a function of not understanding very well) for raw programming.
I have a couple of friends doing a startup in the same space in which I'm writing some software, and their software is nowhere near as far along as mine, yet I don't have anywhere near the "business development" that they do. I'm not there because it's too much work for one person and I've focused on the tech. Their tech isn't that great because it's too much work for one person and they've focused on the biz.
Aaaaah, I just don't know. They're pretty inexperienced, mostly just straight out of college. I'd like to find one person who is as passionate and experienced about business development as I am about software development. Instead, I mostly get contacts from guys who've worked in government offices all their lives, looking for a free programmer to boss around on their "1 in a million idea".
Why don't you join forces with your friends? If your tech is as far advanced as their business development, it sounds like you could join as an equal founder.
Well, they're pretty sold into their idea (which doesn't interest me) and they have one or two other people involved (so I'd be coming in as an outsider anyway). I've met their developer once and he seemed like a nice guy, though very inexperienced (not to speak ill, he's just young). So basically, they have a team together and I don't want to break them up, before their time, if that time should ever come.
Some of it is selfishness on my part, too. I want as much ownership and control as I can keep, and I want it to be on my ideas. I've tried working on other people's ideas before and it just doesn't move me. I have a pretty clear vision of where I want to go, both tech and business. I guess I'd rather keep going slow right now than get side-tracked working on someone else's ideas.
If their current project ever tanks, they might be interested in coming on board with me. I think we're both just trying to see where everything we're currently working on is going.
Other than "virtual reality" with some aspect of "multiplayer", they don't. I'm going after productivity applications. They're going after social networking.
Back when I worked corporate I loved when I got time to make the apps I was responsible for better. Getting free time to refactor an outdated procedure written by four different developers who'd all left that just barely worked, albeit slowly, was something I enjoyed. As was getting a couple days for minor bug fixes and small feature adds. I happily had the freedom to sit with the users directly and ask them about how they used the software in their jobs as part of those few bug-fix and feature days for the "late lifecycle" apps (read: they worked OK, so almost zero time was spent updating them other than major crashes and no major versions were scheduled). So, I got to implement unique features based on how they needed to do their jobs that previous developers hadn't thought to add because they'd only done the official 'users get together and ask for features, department head filters it, hands it to our department, department head filters it, assigns it to one of us to do in spare time not working on more important software' thing.
That sounds really nice. At my current position, we never get time just to refactor, though supposedly that time is "just around the corner." We are always cranking against tight deadlines. Consequently, we end up with some pretty jacked up code, since as the saying goes "you never get it right the first time."
It was. It wasn't as often as I'd have liked. But it was nice to have once in a while. And the users loved it. It's amazing how much someone likes a developer sitting down next to them applying their full ability to try and make their job better.
There's no way to interview for what you're looking for, but compilers seem to require both great organizational skills and some algorithmic chops. there's enough complexity you can't hide lack of one side or the other.
Anyway, asking about building and enhancing a compiler seems like one of the ways to get insight about how people grow code. Every program is a seed. Is this the kind of guy that will end up with a mighty oak tree, or kudzu in 10 years?
Compilers aren't real-time, distributed, multi-user, ... basically anything that is hard from a software engineering perspective which includes deployment and testing. Compilers have reproducible test cases (if they don't, that is a bug in itself). You can catch regressions in a compiler with an automated test suite, and bisect their version history to see where it was introduced. Bug reports from the field tend to be easy to confirm. A compiler isn't going to work well when it has 10,000 users, but mysteriously spiral to a crash when there are 10,100.
Compilers have been developed by lone developers in isolation. Some compilers are only a few thousand lines of code.
Someone who can demonstrate knowledge of making a compiler could well be completely behind in their knowledge about language design. He or she shows how calculations are turned into a tree and then into code on a register machine (i.e. "for-mula tran-slation"). But no idea how to compile exception handling, closures, and doing advanced things with type (beyond just checks) and such.
That is to say, the bar for what can be legitimately called a compiler is quite low.
On the topic of languages, I'd rather interview someone who knows about a lot of modern language features and how they can contribute to the improvement of program organization, yet is foggy about the details of how some of them are might be compiled to machine code.
There is still "compiler worship". On a previous job, I fixed a code generation bug in gcc affecting MIPS targets. Everyone was talking about that: "like wow, he fixed gcc".
If the point is looking for organizational skills, i think compilers are legitimate. They're big complicated beasts. Sure, some people in isolation can make amazing things with a few thousand lines of code - I think most people would be happy employing Fabrice Bellard.
Writing a C compiler seems like one of those standard undergrad activities. If a programmer can make that work, they probably have sufficient organizational skills. It seems like real-time, distributed, multi user app development is a separate filter.
I guess it's the distinction between looking for someone who is capable of solving those problems vs looking for someone who has solved those problems.
"Tell me about writing a compiler" seems mostly to be a question intended to restrict your hires to fresh grads who took a compiler course or if you're trying to poach compiler writers from another company. You're not likely to get a very useful response from someone who hasn't written one recently or at all. You could just as well ask "Tell me about writing a POSIX shell", or "Tell me about writing a browser", or basically any "Tell me about writing a <FOO>". It's not a useful question unless you're specifically hiring them to write a <FOO>.
It's both. If it doesn't work with threads, there is no concurrency.
If the threads have to stop, it's still concurrency in the sense that threads are stopped in arbitrary places (just like an interrupt can stop a task at any point in its execution and dispatch another task or whatever).
But the garbage collector isn't running concurrently with the threads.
I.e. I think the term "concurrent garbage collector" is understood to be in contrast with "stop-the-world garbage collector" not with "synchronous garbage collector as a library function in a single-threaded virtual machine".
So when you say "real GC, not reference counting", you have to understand that tracing GC and reference counting are duals, and every concurrent collector is going to be some hybrid of the two [1].
But there are a number of algorithms that most people would probably consider "real GC" that don't stop the world. Modern Java GCs use the train algorithm [2], which bounds pause times to some arbitrarily-sized constant. Erlang per-process heaps [3] also give good soft-real-time characteristics.
It is theoretically possible to run the whole GC in a background thread (eg. while a GUI is idle). Both the JVM and the CLR have options for this [4][5], but they're only useful for workloads with large pause times (eg. GUI apps, lightly-loaded servers) and so aren't enabled by default.
In typical software today, much of the complexity arises from interactivity. There are user actions, network events and all sorts of contingencies that make the program flow non-deterministic.
A compiler doesn't have that. It's blissfully old-fashioned, really: read files in, write files out -- no interruptions or real-time requirements. You could do compilers on punch cards.
In a way, the compiler is the most complex piece of software that you could imagine in 1960... But software has moved on and faces a different kind of complexity.
Hence I'm not sure if asking about compiler architecture is really representative of the organizational skills needed by today's software engineering.
I used to work on the Delphi compiler, for 6 years or so. That compiler was not a simple function of file input to file output. It lived in an IDE. It had to do incremental compilation, throwing away the compiled version of an in-memory file and recompiling it, but avoid recompiling the whole world of downstream dependencies if not necessary. It had to provide code completion, which meant parsing and type analysis of a file, but skipping codegen, with reasonably sophisticated error recovery. It had to provide the debug expression evaluator, which lived intermixed with the constant evaluator, and needed to know how to set up calls to symbols in the program being debugged. And it had to do all of these things in a long-lived process, with no memory leaks and high reliability.
The degree of asynchronicity is low, I agree. The most significant was just interrupting compilation on user request. But the complexity was not trivial.
These days I work at a startup on a full stack SaaS; C++, Java, Rails, and Coffeescript with as few blocking browser actions as possible. It is far less complex than compiler work, but it pays better. I've never had to debug OS code to diagnose runtime library issues in this job; nor write manual structured exception handling. I haven't had to try and build stack frames dynamically to implement reflection calls, nor unpick stack frames dynamically to implement virtual method interception. The relative complexity of potential races with SQL read-committed, or writing UI such that it can't become inconsistent, really doesn't compare.
Compilers are a nice example because they require a lot of code, and all the code has to be right. If you can't impose enough organization there, you don't have a chance at getting a distributed event driven system to work.
Compilers are simple. They are organized as a pipeline. Frontend, middleend, backend. In more detail: lexer, parser, semantic analysis, optimzation 1 to n, instruction selection, scheduling, register allocation, assembly.
Ok, you can do more complex. I work on a compiler, which does it lazily. Transformations are per file and depend on each other. If something goes wrong, you print out the graph to figure out the problem. No idea what the benefits could be. Might actually be a good example, where it could have been simpler.
Yes, but there are a bunch of tradeoffs. do you try to lex the floating point format, or push that back to the parser? Do in introduce an extra pass for constant folding or do you try to shoehorn it into AST generation in the parser?
The nice thing about compilers, it requires a ton of code.
It's the kind of thing that any programmer can do (well good ones), and there are organizational tradeoffs to be made. There is no "right" answer, it's an opportunity to talk about organization. There are blind alleys that seem like a good idea, but turn out not to be. There are opportunities to merge and split passes. Some layers might want information from other layers, some layers might look very similar to other layers.
Something I just realized that I wanted to write, but didn't, was that I generally don't do well in whiteboard interviews. I've done a few and it's always algorithms that I didn't learn in school because I was EE/CE (not CS) and while I took Data Structures and Algorithms, I didn't take Advanced Data Structures and Algorithms or anything like that. I took two compilers classes (which were great!) and a pile of classes dealing with hardware and the practical realities of computers rather than the theoretical aspects.
I'm pretty happy that I did what I did in school, but I wish that people didn't rely on the whiteboard situation as much. If I can talk about what I did to find the edges and corners of a piece of mail in a picture, and how I used that I can rotate the image to be square and then crop the image so that all you see is the letter and not the background, perhaps my ability to do some kind of whiteboard coding exercise isn't terribly relevant. The odds that I can answer questions about how I developed such an algorithm while still not being able to actually write code are pretty small.
You're hiring me to solve business problems and last I checked FizzBuzz or reversing a singly-linked-list aren't business problems. End Rant.
The interview simply doesn't have the time required and both sides will have to be okay with spending more time evaluating each other if we want to move forward.
Also we simply need to teach people the things that we want them to know after we hire them instead of looking for perfect fits.
You could give them some mild spaghetti, and ask how they'd try to improve the code.
I think one reason why what you did doesn't happen more often, though, is because they wouldn't have the freedom to reimplement in a language they felt was more suitable.
It turned the job from hellish (features were impossible to add) to very nearly boring (there wasn't much to do anymore). So with this newfound freedom I built some machines to automate the data entry and once that got rolling the job got even more boring. Because it was a small company with a very long learning curve the owner didn't let people go, but instead kept them on so that he didn't have to hire and train new people as growth accelerated.
But with all the automation some slack found its way into the system and problems that had normally required me to stop working on my normal job and help put out fires now got handled by people who weren't stretched a little too thin.
Sadly there's (seemingly) no way to interview people for this ability so we're stuck with the standard "write some algorithm on a whiteboard" type problems that are in no way indicative of real world capabilities.