Testing a junior's mettle part 2

[Eldelshell]

@tarunik said:

Of course, it helps if you know how to program before you start college...

I remember my first programming assignment (it was on our second year of college) and got very popular to be the guy with Java's API in a CD which everyone wanted. It was like magic for everyone.

[blakeyrat]

@cartman82 said:

He sent in his full grades,

1. he shouldn't send those, and 2) you shouldn't look at them.

@cartman82 said:

No sign of programmer's personality

I'm not sure what that means.

@cartman82 said:

Kid's quiet as a mouse. Likes JAVA. I had eclipse. He asked for NetBeans.

Ugh, this is what Minecraft hath wrought.

@accalia said:

i mean he almost used Java after he said he liked programming in Java!

Are you (Cartman82) only hiring grads?

You gotta find this guy's classmate who did all his homework for him, but didn't do CS himself because the math requirements suck.

[Maciejasjmj]

@accalia said:

with the requirement to use a language none of had used for school

You started C on third semester? Guess that's TRWTF... It really helps to start out early (unless you don't plan to teach low-level programming at all), since there are a lot of concepts that are actually pretty easy to someone with no background, but way more complicated to someone with purely OO experience.

Then again, our intro to programming was done in Delphi 7. In 2011. I was running an XP VM on a fucking Atom netbook.

@accalia said:

and he would run all our programs through google and if we had used code from somewhere without proper citations that code was considered invalid and incorrect. (at least we could cite to include)

Point for you - it's really fucking hard to create an unique linked list implementation...

@tarunik said:

This, sadly, is the state of 99.9% of code-monkey-mills out there. You pretty much have to work your tail off outside of class to get a decent CS education unless you are at a place like MIT which still has a rigorous CS program.

You don't really expect college to teach you everything, so that you can just go to the lectures for 5 or so years, do the exercises, and become a skilled professional?

@tarunik said:

Of course, it helps if you know how to program before you start college...

Don't know about the US, but here it's pretty much mandatory to know something. Sure, you might be a TDWTF material, but if you're one of the majority of population who just doesn't get it, a college won't shovel the knowledge into your head.

@cartman82 said:

I'm sort of hoping to dig up a gem; someone who's actually programming on their own time and just goes to school to get the door-opener piece of paper. Not sustainable in the long term, but one can always hope.

Sadly, I'm taken.

[blakeyrat]

@Maciejasjmj said:

It's something you'd expect from a guy who read "Teach yourself Programming in 24 hours" in 12 hours, not from a CompSci student.

This is exactly what I'd expect from a Comp Sci student.

That is because I've done this interviewing before. It's also why I say possessing a degree in this field is utterly useless in trying to determine whether someone is worthwhile or not.

BTW when you do find someone, GRIP ON TO THEM TIGHT WITH BOTH HANDS AND NEVER LET GO. (That might apply more here in Seattle, where IT is super-competitive.) You'll know them in the first 10 minutes, offer them 25% more than they ask. I'm not kidding.

[blakeyrat]

@mott555 said:

I didn't learn much useful stuff in college other than database design.

Ditto, and the only reason for that is that database normalization is the only part of CS that hasn't changed in long enough that it's still relevant.

Remember, your 54-year-old professor:

1. likely never worked in industry that produced practical code to solve practical problems, and
2. learned programming from his 54-year-old professor, who was barely wrapping his head around not having to replace vacuum tubes every Monday.

[Maciejasjmj]

@blakeyrat said:

This is exactly what I'd expect from a Comp Sci student.

Holy shit, your education is bad.

I mean, sure, most people here barely get through the paper exams, and a lot of code would probably end up on TDWTF if in production, but at least they can code a decently-sized project in pairs or threes. A basic programming puzzle like the one with the string? 15 minutes for the worst students.

[blakeyrat]

@cartman82 said:

I'm sort of hoping to dig up a gem; someone who's actually programming on their own time and just goes to school to get the door-opener piece of paper.

You're only going to find that guy if you remove the piece of paper requirement, because I guarantee you otherwise 47 start-ups in your area have already hired him.

[accalia]

@Maciejasjmj said:

Point for you - it's really fucking hard to create an unique linked list implementation...

tell me about it! i had to argue for points on more than one occasion because he found simmilarities between my code and others.

so i started using rediculously_long_variable_names_because_it_is_important_to_document_your_code and relied on autocomplete to fill them in for me.

i also started documenting the crap out of the code so that it was rare for two lines of code to be on the same screen.

If we didn't have to hand in printouts i would have written a program to fold it into something like war and peace so that each symbol was separated from the rest by a multiline paragraph of "random" text making it all but impossible to read.

for the last program i actually wrote a code walker that replaced all my variable names with UUIDS (replacing the hyphens with underscores and slapping a v at the front to avoid octal issues) and handed in the output.

you may have gathered that i did not like that teacher.

[blakeyrat]

@Maciejasjmj said:

Holy shit, your education is bad.

Fuck you.

What I'm saying here comes from experience: the people with degrees in Computer Science who interviewed for us were all useless. I think it's safe to say every single one. The one guy who worked at what I'd consider minimum competency had a degree in, I think Accounting? I don't remember for sure. He was the best interviewee by an order of magnitude, and we were only able to hold on to him for about 2-3 years until he went somewhere better.

@Maciejasjmj said:

I mean, sure, most people here barely get through the paper exams, and a lot of code would probably end up on TDWTF if in production, but at least they can code a decently-sized project in pairs or threes. A basic programming puzzle like the one with the string? 15 minutes for the worst students.

Where is "here"? What are you talking about?

I wager you're 100% wrong. Have you spent time interviewing CS grads in "here"?

[cartman82]

@blakeyrat said:

1) he shouldn't send those, and 2) you shouldn't look at them.

Agree. We have a long list of the stuff we'd like to see, with grades being a "desperation move" of sorts at the bottom.
I believe there are some grade patterns that might mean something, but either way, I'd much rather see something more meaningful.

@blakeyrat said:

No sign of programmer's personality
I'm not sure what that means.

Does he have a preferred code style or just uses whatever the editor says by default? Are variable names in English and well formatted? Did he bother to rename auto-generated code to match the general style? Comments? Does he use functional or procedural paradigms?

Anything to show he gave some actual thought to the code outside of what was strictly required in classes.

@Maciejasjmj said:

Sadly, I'm taken.

Twas not meant to be.

[Matches]

Maybe it's more of a west coast problem, because I'm in oregon, and I know washington / oregon both severely suffer from this.

[Matches]

Didn't he say it was serbia? Do they even have 47 startups in that area?

[Matches]

He's using 'your education is bad' not at you directly (I think) - but rather the area of the schools.

[blakeyrat]

Yeah. Well part of the problem is that in Washington, and probably Oregon since that's driving distance, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo of America, Google, etc basically hover over every university's job fair like vultures. So if they're even in the interview circuit, they've probably already been rejected by one of the "big'uns", which losers the quality^* of CS grads for everybody else.

Our 500 person company with only about 75-80 engineers couldn't afford to compete in the "university job fair" recruiting arena.

^* I was going to edit and fix this to the intended "lowers the quality", but I think in retrospect I like "losers the quality" better.

[accalia]

/me gets the tea and popcorn to watch this debate.

@arantor, join me? this promises to be interesting to watch!

[cartman82]

@blakeyrat said:

BTW when you do find someone, GRIP ON TO THEM TIGHT WITH BOTH HANDS AND NEVER LET GO. (That might apply more here in Seattle, where IT is super-competitive.) You'll know them in the first 10 minutes, offer them 25% more than they ask. I'm not kidding.

Hmmm. I'm pretty sure my boss did that with me :-)

[cartman82]

@blakeyrat said:

You're only going to find that guy if you remove the piece of paper requirement, because I guarantee you otherwise 47 start-ups in your area have already hired him.

We don't have the piece of paper requirement.

The school is basically the boss's Alma mater and he likes to pick people from there. I've been trying to convince him we should try fishing in a bigger pool, but he's had negative experiences and is very reluctant to open up the floodgates.

We have another cousin-of-a-friend kind of candidate, who's actually supposedly senior and good, but only knows C# desktop development. If he refuses or doesn't work out, we're finally going to do this seriously. I hope.

[Arantor]

for everyone!

[cartman82]

@blakeyrat said:

What I'm saying here comes from experience: the people with degrees in Computer Science who interviewed for us were all useless. I think it's safe to say every single one. The one guy who worked at what I'd consider minimum competency had a degree in, I think Accounting? I don't remember for sure. He was the best interviewee by an order of magnitude, and we were only able to hold on to him for about 2-3 years until he went somewhere better.

Ha! That guy went out and taught himself programming. That's why he was good. That's the sort of thing I'm looking for.

All these schoolboys might be OK in 5-6 years, but they'll never be truly GOOD. They just don't have the fire in their bellies. To them, this is just a meal-ticket. That's why I feel free to post these here. They are NEVER gonna waste their time on a forum like this, unless it's a part of the coursework.

[cartman82]

@Matches said:

Didn't he say it was serbia? Do they even have 47 startups in that area?

Maybe not that many, but the government has so far kept their paws away, so the IT sector is chugging along decently.

[tarunik]

@Maciejasjmj said:

You don't really expect college to teach you everything, so that you can just go to the lectures for 5 or so years, do the exercises, and become a skilled professional?

It's not even that. For a program that's worth its salt, you still have to have a clue, but at least you'll learn what you need to know to get from 'has a foggy clue' to 'actually gets it, more or less'. In a code-monkey-mill, though...good luck, have fun, don't get hit by the proverbial bus. Because you won't learn a thing about how stuff actually works unless you go out and get it on your own.

@Maciejasjmj said:

Don't know about the US, but here it's pretty much mandatory to know something. Sure, you might be a TDWTF material, but if you're one of the majority of population who just doesn't get it, a college won't shovel the knowledge into your head.

Indeed not; I just wish people would stop going 'ooh, CS degree, '

@blakeyrat said:

This is exactly what I'd expect from a Comp Sci student.

That is because I've done this interviewing before. It's also why I say possessing a degree in this field is utterly useless in trying to determine whether someone is worthwhile or not.

BTW when you do find someone, GRIP ON TO THEM TIGHT WITH BOTH HANDS AND NEVER LET GO. (That might apply more here in Seattle, where IT is super-competitive.) You'll know them in the first 10 minutes, offer them 25% more than they ask. I'm not kidding.

QFT. There are very few things that a CS degree will teach you that you won't learn better yourself, and even then, you need a good program. (Most of it has to do with basic algorithm analysis/big-O, which isn't that hard, really, and then the odd-off tidbits such as relational theory.)

@blakeyrat said:

Ditto, and the only reason for that is that database normalization is the only part of CS that hasn't changed in long enough that it's still relevant.

I'd say that between a Codd/Date and Ch. 2, 3, 5, and 6 of Knuth...you're pretty much set (Ch. 4 is intermittently useful, as well, but the original text predates IEEE 754 FP, which is a big hinderance). If you want to go for broke, get a numerical analysis text. Other than that, you'll be researching more than you ever re-read textbooks.

@blakeyrat said:

Remember, your 54-year-old professor:

1. likely never [s]worked in industry that[/s] produced practical code to solve practical problems, and
2. learned programming from his 54-year-old professor, who was barely wrapping his head around not having to replace vacuum tubes every Monday.

Prize the times when that isn't the case. I've actually run into a few that weren't/aren't that way, and they were real treats to learn from.

@blakeyrat said:

What I'm saying here comes from experience: the people with degrees in Computer Science who interviewed for us were all useless. I think it's safe to say every single one. The one guy who worked at what I'd consider minimum competency had a degree in, I think Accounting? I don't remember for sure. He was the best interviewee by an order of magnitude, and we were only able to hold on to him for about 2-3 years until he went somewhere better.

At that rate, it makes me wish that I'll never have to interview someone for a programming position in my life.

@blakeyrat said:

Yeah. Well part of the problem is that in Washington, and probably Oregon since that's driving distance, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo of America, Google, etc basically hover over every university's job fair like vultures. So if they're even in the interview circuit, they've probably already been rejected by one of the "big'uns", which losers the quality* of CS grads for everybody else.

It's a lot easier out where I am I suspect, because we don't have a lot of names that scream "TECH JOBS HERE!!!" to everybody walking by.

@cartman82 said:

Ha! That guy went out and taught himself programming. That's why he was good. That's the sort of thing I'm looking for.

All these schoolboys might be OK in 5-6 years, but they'll never be truly GOOD. They just don't have the fire in their bellies. To them, this is just a meal-ticket. That's why I feel free to post these here. They are NEVER gonna waste their time on a forum like this, unless it's a part of the coursework.

Exactly. I'd be more inclined to hire a purely self-taught programmer then put them in a short "CS for the working man" course that deals with basic complexity, formal grammars (hand-rolled parsers are a WTF that peeves me greatly), relational theory, and probably a bit of understanding of trees and graphs as well, then deal with 99% of CS grads out there. Makes me wonder where all the 'brogrammers' come from...

[blakeyrat]

@tarunik said:

Prize the times when that isn't the case. I've actually run into a few that weren't/aren't that way, and they were real treats to learn from.

My best prof was a Russian defector (and yes, he didn't "move here", he "defected") who previously had worked on a Soviet PDP-8 ripoff programming guidance systems for nuclear ICBMs. Loved my 1-on-1 meetings with him, you never got the actual thing you wanted, but you always got a great story... and hell, what's more important?

[cartman82]

@blakeyrat said:

My best prof was a Russian defector (and yes, he didn't "move here", he "defected") who previously had worked on a Soviet PDP-8 ripoff programming guidance systems for nuclear ICBMs. Loved my 1-on-1 meetings with him, you never got the actual thing you wanted, but you always got a great story... and hell, what's more important?

Err... the actual thing you wanted?

:-)

[blakeyrat]

Look. I'm older and wiser now.

If you asked me in 1998 to choose between, "what data structure should this assignment use to store Cars?" and "tell me an entertaining but kind of rambling story about your homeland in Russia and leaving everything behind to travel halfway around the world for a better life", I'd have probably picked the first one.

But that's because I was fucking stupid back then.

[Maciejasjmj]

@blakeyrat said:

Where is "here"? What are you talking about?

My university. Duh.

@blakeyrat said:

Have you spent time interviewing CS grads in "here"?

I've spent past 3 years being a CS student, and am planning to study for another two, thank you very much.

The point is, I'm doing a very average job there - there are lots of people better than me at my year, not just at "uni stuff", but at coding in general - and yet I still would pass @cartman82's interview with a finger up my nose playing a tape recorder with Justin Bieber at full volume.

@blakeyrat said:

Yeah. Well part of the problem is that in Washington, and probably Oregon since that's driving distance, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo of America, Google, etc basically hover over every university's job fair like vultures. So if they're even in the interview circuit, they've probably already been rejected by one of the "big'uns", which losers the quality* of CS grads for everybody else.

Yep, that might be a problem. Though here CS grads seem to end at startups because of Python, Ruby and other flashy technologies (and general lack of knowledge of the business process). Plus there aren't a lot of big tech companies around the area - I think Volkswagen scoops up a lot of engineers in various fields, and that's about it.

@cartman82 said:

If he refuses or doesn't work out, we're finally going to do this seriously. I hope.

Nooooooo... I was expecting more fun from you.

@tarunik said:

For a program that's worth its salt, you still have to have a clue, but at least you'll learn what you need to know to get from 'has a foggy clue' to 'actually gets it, more or less'.

In my experience, it's the very opposite - at uni, you learn how to "get a foggy clue" about gajillions of things, and outside of it, you choose which of those things you're comfortable with and develop yourself further.

[Arantor]

FWIW I didn't go to university and have almost no formal study of actual CS beyond the 'A Level' in Computing I did aged 17-18, and even that I already knew the theory behind a lot of it before I got there anyway.

I have no idea where this leaves me in the argument.

[blakeyrat]

@Maciejasjmj said:

I've spent past 3 years being a CS student, and am planning to study for another two, thank you very much.

You're on the inside looking out.

When you're on the outside looking in, come back to this thread and post.

@Maciejasjmj said:

and yet I still would pass @cartman82's interview with a finger up my nose playing a tape recorder with Justin Bieber at full volume.

YouTube superstardom!

@Maciejasjmj said:

In my experience, it's the very opposite - at uni, you learn how to "get a foggy clue" about gajillions of things, and outside of it, you choose which of those things you're comfortable with and develop yourself further.

My school's program was utterly useless. I'm only successful as a programmer because I ignored everything I learned there, and learned it all on my own. (Except relational database design.)

The double-linked-list problem? Long before I even went to school, I was writing code for a MUD which was in old-fashioned C, and had double-linked lists all fucking over the place. That kind of pointless shit I knew. I just didn't at the time know it was pointless shit.

[cartman82]

@Maciejasjmj said:

The point is, I'm doing a very average job there - there are lots of people better than me at my year, not just at "uni stuff", but at coding in general - and yet I still would pass @cartman82's interview with a finger up my nose playing a tape recorder with Justin Bieber at full volume.

If you tried that, I'd kick you out, just on principle.

That must be a top school, if you all have that level of competence. The school we are drawing from is more in line with the code monkey factory discussed earlier.

[cartman82]

@Maciejasjmj said:

If he refuses or doesn't work out, we're finally going to do this seriously. I hope.

If he refuses = more fun intern threads.
If he accepts = game over, I actually have to get back to real work.

[mott555]

I did have a couple really good CS professors, but they were held back by the sheer mediocrity and incompetency of the majority of the class and had to spend way too much time explaining basic things like the purpose of a main method and the difference between public and private variables. When we did get into advanced topics it was clear they knew what they were talking about, and they knew how to teach it to students who cared. I would have learned a lot from them had I not already been working as a programmer where I was learning things way before we got to them in class.

I also had some worthless CS professors. I had a joke of a VB.NET class where we had two or three assignments all semester that were basically drag a few controls onto a form, hook it up to an autogenerated ADO.NET thingy, and then play Spider Solitaire for the next few weeks. And my networking professor hardly ever showed up to class and let a TA teach instead.

And to re-ignite another old debate , the good CS professors used to be math professors before CS was even a thing at my university.

[cvi]

@blakeyrat said:

If you asked me in 1998 to choose between, "what data structure should this assignment use to store Cars?" and "tell me an entertaining but kind of rambling story about your homeland in Russia and leaving everything behind to travel halfway around the world for a better life", I'd have probably picked the first one.

But that's because I was fucking stupid back then.

Yup, this. Had a math teacher at Uni who would go on tangents about his work as a mathematician at various nuclear facilities in Russia. IIRC, there was even a story about him almost being at the reactor in Chernobyl during the accident if not for some random fluke.

I don't know if any of those stories were true (somemost probably were), but who cares? So very much less boring that the math I could also learn from a book (sort of). (I also remember much more from the actual topics of his lectures than from any some of the other utterly uninspiring lecturers, so...)

[cvi]

@mott555 said:

And to re-ignite another old debate , the good CS professors used to be math professors before CS was even a thing at my university.

s/math/physics/, but otherwise that is my experience as well.

[Maciejasjmj]

@blakeyrat said:

You're on the inside looking out.

When you're on the outside looking in, come back to this thread and post.

I don't see the difference. It's not like they get utterly dumb right when entering an interview, and regain their skills at the door.

@blakeyrat said:

My school's program was utterly useless. I'm only successful as a programmer because I ignored everything I learned there, and learned it all on my own. (Except relational database design.)

Oh, sure, don't get me wrong - the program tends to be shit. It's the requirements that's important - no matter how utterly useless shit it's about, you still need to write working code to pass. It's like math - your program might be good or shit, but you sure as hell need to know what addition is if you want to graduate.

@cartman82 said:

That must be a top school, if you all have that level of competence. The school we are drawing from is more in line with the code monkey factory discussed earlier.

Not really - not an utter code monkey factory, but not top of the country either.

[accalia]

FWIW: i actually have a bachelors degree in Comp Sci (not sure what that translates to across the pond)

however: my best experience for programming didn't come from anything i did for school. It came from about 20 some odd years of going: that shiny metal box with the electricity and the lights and the beeps.... What can i make it do?

<rant>

I've blown a few power supplies, melted a processor, and done all sorts of crazy stuff. I'm curious and fascinated by computers. I love the challenge of getting them to do what i want, of figuring out what i want them to do. I love that feeling that i get when i step back and can say I made a thing and it is good

none of that i learned in school, none of that was ever on a test, and none of that has ever helped me get a first interview with a company (it has however on at least two occasions clinched me the job).

The reason I stuck it out and got that degree? Because that was the only way i was going to get past round 1 with HR. It doesn't help me interview with my prospective boss, it helps me get to interview with my prospective boss.

Given that, and given the people i've been in a position to interview for jobs, i've got to say.... there's something very wrong with the job market in this country if i can't get HR to approve applicants that don't have a completed postsecondary education, and the ones i get where there major is in the field they are applying for more often than not completely fail to metaphorically find their ass with a star chart when asked to do soething on the level of "write me a program in the language of your choice that prints the message hello world"

i'm not kidding. A DOCTORATE graduate of computer science with a focus in programming completely failed to write hello world.

we have something wrong in our education system. we have something wrong in our job markets.

and i have no idea how to fix it.

</rant>

[tarunik]

@accalia said:

none of that i learned in school, none of that was ever on a test, and none of that has ever helped me get a first interview with a company (it has however on at least two occasions clinched me the job).

The reason I stuck it out and got that degree? Because that was the only way i was going to get past round 1 with HR. It doesn't help me interview with my prospective boss, it helps me get to interview with my prospective boss.

Given that, and given the people i've been in a position to interview for jobs, i've got to say.... there's something very wrong with the job market in this country if i can't get HR to approve applicants that don't have a completed postsecondary education, and the ones i get where there major is in the field they are applying for more often than not completely fail to metaphorically find their ass with a star chart when asked to do soething on the level of "write me a program in the language of your choice that prints the message hello world"

i'm not kidding. A DOCTORATE graduate of computer science with a focus in programming completely failed to write hello world.

we have something wrong in our education system. we have something wrong in our job markets.

and i have no idea how to fix it.

QFT and +1, because a like just isn't enough.

We have an education system that produces reams of worthless, meaningless credentials, and C-list HR [s]people[/s]droids who are like "lalalalala CAN'T HEAR YOU" if you don't have the credentials, basically no matter what other experience you present. I'll tell you that me going for my CS degree certainly didn't help me land the internship I held for a good 18months over all the other CS students who wanted it; it was that I could present prior experience in making the box with blinky lights do stuff, whereas all the people who were just interested in being the next code monkey to come out of Code Monkeys 'R Us were like "Uh...."

My suspect is that the textbook police neutered primary (and secondary, even) education to the point where students have lost all ability to handle a rigorous treatment of any field at all, and businesses -- run by mostly-clueless business/accounting/... majors, because institutional shareholders don't want to invest in a business run by clueful people out of fear they couldn't get away with their increasingly ridiculous demands -- insist that postsecondary education provide enough people to fill a perceived 'tech shortage' that is mainly self-inflicted by the interference of HR in the hiring process for technical positions. Not only do they persist in requiring useless credentials, they impose increasingly arcane laundry-lists of technological qualifications on positions to the point where practically nobody can fulfill them 'out of the box'. Yet, these very same HR folks complain about a shortage while they too cheapskated and near-sighted to offer any sort of technical training.

Is this a conspiracy to allow the modern business world to mine for cheap labor overseas while generating unemployment on their own shores? Or is this just a sign of woeful short-sightedness on the part of the clueless, tie-strangled sheeple that inhabit the vast majority of the business world?

[Arantor]

Indeed. This is why I don't have any kind of degree - I'm one step down the ladder since an 'A Level' is normally the diploma one would do as a prelude to university degrees in general.

Though we had two teachers over the course, one taught the programming theory (badly) and could barely cobble together crude VB programs, the other taught database theory (very well) and had actually built the college's course management system and thus understood how this stuff was actually supposed to work in practice.

[dkf]

@tarunik said:

Or is this just a sign of woeful short-sightedness on the part of the clueless, tie-strangled sheeple that inhabit the vast majority of the business world?

I suspect ignorance, stupidity and cowardice. Always. It saves time. "Ignorance" because so many people through management have no fucking clue what they're doing, “stupidity” because they don't try to fix their ignorance, and “cowardice” because they won't admit there's a problem for fear of showing themselves up.

[redwizard]

@cartman82 said:

Oh boy, he descended into "randomly change things and hope something happens" mode.

Why oh why do so many people DO this? When you don't know what to do, but at least know the goal, the thing to do is find out how it's supposed to work. Hell, some candidates I didn't hire at least said they'd "ask Dr. Google" - that's better than random hacking!!!

Embarrassing if you have to do it during an interview, sure, but still...

[redwizard]

@tarunik said:

Of course, it helps if you know how to program before you start college...

Sixth trimester in College, questioned the example given to write a program in C to evaluate the voltage of a capacitor under given circumstances. I could be mis-remembering the problem, but I recall it was set up in such a way that it couldn't work in real life (led to a divide by zero condition or something impossible like that). When I tried to point this out to the professor*, he told me to "SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP."

After class, I verified the circuit couldn't work with my old Circuit Analysis professor, just to be sure I didn't misunderstand something.

*This "professor" basically read the book to us during class. Our lab assignments were to write the program examples exactly as laid out in the textbook and run them on the lab computers. The only real programming we did was a final exam that basically required us to write "hello world" after counting up to 100 or some such inanity. Any "learning" done was on your own time.

[ben_lubar]

extern "C++" {
#include <list>
}

OK DONE

[redwizard]

@tarunik said:

Indeed not; I just wish people would stop going 'ooh, CS degree, '

+1

[redwizard]

@blakeyrat said:

Look. I'm older and wiser now.

And crankier, probably - and probably because of all the code you've run into and had to decipher. ;-)

[redwizard]

@accalia said:

It came from about 20 some odd years of going: that shiny metal box with the electricity and the lights and the beeps.... What can i make it do?

You earned my like here. I had those same moments starting at Radio Shack right after high school (worked there too), taking computers and electronics apart and seeing what I could make them do.

+1 for all of it.

Oh, you might remember my posts from a few months ago when we were interviewing for a tech job at my place of work? The guy we ended up hiring had a degree in...Psychology.

To think I almost didn't give him a second look when I initially read that...but his work experience was so compelling! TRWTF? He's refreshingly competent!

[boomzilla]

@tarunik said:

Or is this just a sign of woeful short-sightedness on the part of the clueless, tie-strangled sheeple that inhabit the vast majority of the business world?

FTFY

[accalia]

@ben_lubar said:

```
extern "C++" {
#include <list>
}

OK DONE</blockquote>

sure in the real world that works, but not in academia. In academia you have to keep reinventing the wheel, over  and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over **5 hours later**  and over and over and over.


edit: what the fracking hadesfire? discourse you really screwed up quotes with codeblocks in them that bad?

[antiquarian]

@tarunik said:

Is this a conspiracy to allow the modern business world to mine for cheap labor overseas while generating unemployment on their own shores? Or is this just a sign of woeful short-sightedness on the part of the clueless, tie-strangled sheeple that inhabit the vast majority of the business world?

Why not both?

[Arantor]

@antiquarian said:

Why not both?

Why not Zoidberg?

[PJH]

@blakeyrat said:

So if they're even in the interview circuit, they've probably already been rejected by one of the "big'uns", which losers the quality* of CS grads for everybody else.

Vaguely relevant, for those who haven't seen it yet: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html (Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1%.)

[Medinoc]

@cartman82 said:

Additional:
return ALL the most common characters as an array.

What does that even mean? "ALL" put with "the most" makes little sense.
Or perhaps you meant "Return all distinct characters in the string as an array, sorted by decreasing frequency"?

[cartman82]

Yeah, it doesn't make sense. It would make sense to return the number of characters in the most often occurring group.