The Water Cooler - 2020-01-23

« first day (2843 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1534 days later) »

Pointy Haired Boss

1:26 AM

0

Q: Answers defaced with "(Answer not available under cc by-sa 4.0)"?

Why were so many answers defaced by replacing the text with: (Answer not available under cc by-sa 4.0) for example: https://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/140306/7777

6 hours later…

7:24 AM

Is this question possible spam?
https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/151722/large-number-of-companies-in-ycombinator-and-quality

cv-pls startup Needs Details Or Clarity Large number of companies in ycombinator and quality‭ - msgboardpana‭ 2020-01-23 06:36:09Z

2 hours later…

9:39 AM

@ChrisE As long as somebody is archiving all the old questions/answers, I figure we'll be fine even if the entire community falls apart.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica See, I wouldn't go with evil. My preferred identifier is "dangerously effective".

@Kaz there's a regular data dump

which anyone can import and display at will

(subject to CC licensing requirements, but still)

4 hours later…

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

1:32 PM

Wow, the latest crop of questions aren't even provoking any snark from me. They are largely completely uninteresting to me.

2 hours later…

3:31 PM

Someone who went above and beyond in writing an answer and deserves some upvotes for it:

43

A: Can I claim only part of the full amount of a check?

In a comment you said, I'm not suggesting scratching anything. I don't know how banks talk to each other, but presumably my bank would just tell the other bank to please send over $800. And if they want it in pennies they'll say pennies. If you know how banks talk to each other and you know t...

3:50 PM

I also like this answer:

22

A: Chapter 7 and Abe's crazy bad situation

The IRA is protected. Protect it. First and foremost, the IRA is untouchable in MD. Creditors cannot touch it. Bankruptcy cannot touch it. Abe must not touch it. The IRA is a sort of "trust account", and Abe, as a "trustee", must protect that from misspending (by Abe). The penalty for fail...

@Kaz Yeah, that settlement advice is really good. If I was a lender, I'd accept that.

If I were him, I'd potentially also (try to) get the police to nab her for a bit (maybe something about stealing his part of the car) while I get the car turned over to the bank.

MyWrathAcademia

4:11 PM

If in a job interview you are asked about your desires for the future, what sort of things should you say to the interviewer?

Just talk free :)

Talk about where you want your career to go. Talk about your personal goals a bit--want to bring your 12min mile to a 10min mile? That helps put a person behind the face.

MyWrathAcademia

@Hosch250 thanks. Say the interview is for a full stack job. Is it simply a case of saying that I want to become a full stack developer, what else? As for personal goals, are you talking about personal goals do you mean for example running a 10 min mile instead of the usual 12 min mile?

Yeah, something like that.

I mean, why do you want to become a full-stack dev?

When I interviewed at my current job, I talked about how I wanted to learn architectural skills, and my current job wasn't giving me a path to grow to being a dev. I discussed how eventually I wanted to be the older dev with experience that could successfully build a system for a company.

Instead of just staying as a code monkey that would always need someone more experienced to guide the project to success.

MyWrathAcademia

I want to become a full-stack dev because I really enjoy programming with Java and JavaScript, solving problems and I want to build applications. Although the job uses C# instead of Java so I'm not sure mentioning Java is good.

C# is like Java, but better :)

Once you get used to it, there's no going back (at least, for me).

MyWrathAcademia

4:23 PM

haha, its on windows. How can it be better :)

They are pretty similar. You could mention your Java experience.

Windows is pretty nice, IMO. It crashes less than Ubuntu (I just switched to learn Docker).

But seriously, it's not just on Windows either.

I'm developing an ASP.NET Core website on my Ubuntu machine.

I started it on my Windows machine, but .NET Core runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux.

MyWrathAcademia

ASP.NET core is what the job I'm interviewing for use

The thing is I'm actually just starting out so it would be my first programming job. It's actually an internship opportunity

If it's an internship, I'd talk about my Java experience. Show you know programming in general, and are excited for the opportunity to learn more languages, etc. They don't really expect you to know much in an internship, usually.

But most important, be sincere.

I started out in Java and switched to C# about 18 years ago.. never looked back

If you don't want to touch Windows, then seriously consider looking elsewhere. The dev machine they provide will almost certainly run Windows, and they might be integrating with other tools that require Windows.

MyWrathAcademia

4:27 PM

I hope the same doesn't happen to me. I like Java a lot

They are structurally very similar.

MyWrathAcademia

Yes they are because C# is a clone

No, it isn't. J++ was, or whatever that was called.

They got sued and had to start from scratch with C#.

They deliberately kept it close, but made some better decisions (runtime generics, for one).

MyWrathAcademia

Interesting stuff. Good to know

I've been told the questions in the interview will be about my programming experience and my desires for the future

Should be pretty easy. Just be honest and sincere.

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

4:31 PM

VB.Net is a superior language to C#, but C# is dominant because the entry point is higher.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica Noooooo.

LOL, I hate the feel of VB. It's just so wordy...

Sometimes even C# feels too verbose to me.

I'd be interested in seeing a C# variant where whitespace was significant, instead of using braces.

MyWrathAcademia

@Hosch250 Like Python basically?

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 That's what I like about VB, but then, I started with BASIC and COBOL. It's also, like you said, sans those damn braces

@MyWrathAcademia nope.. J# was the .NET clone of Java - C# started life as C Object Orientated Language (aka COOL)

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

Python must die

4:33 PM

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica But you have "End Function" everywhere.

@MyWrathAcademia No. Python doesn't have types :(

And it doesn't have a strict compiler. Best it has is type "hints".

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 end function, exit function, yep. Nice and neat

and explicit.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica Way too verbose, though.

MyWrathAcademia

But in Python indentation actually means something to the interpreter

I prefer a } over that.

MyWrathAcademia

Same

4:34 PM

@MyWrathAcademia Yes, I like that part of it.

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 which makes it far easeir to maintain.

Maybe :)

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 VB gets a bad rap becaise ot

it's easu tp learn

VERY hard to master, but easy to learn

The problem with VB being so easy to learn is that every last idiot out there thinks he IS a master of it.

Yes, I believe that's where it gets a bad rap from. But, I have worked with VB before, and I don't like how verbose it is.

VB gets a bad rep because it's far too easy to learn how to write extremely poor code in it - and if you are good enough to write good code in VB you can use C# and get the additional power

4:36 PM

Not saying it's bad. I just like C# better.

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 I get that. I also know that I started out as a maintenance coder. It's much easier, for me at least, to clean up VB

Fair enough.

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

Of course, if C# programmers actually COMMENTED from time to time....

:D

The only good comment is a dead comment :)

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 You would really hate my code if you hate verbosity. LOL

4:38 PM

Not completely serious, but MOST comments I see are either expressed directly by the code as well, or make false statements about what the code does.

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

I still go by the old habit of a three letter prefix signifying the data type.... str_Name for a string value :D

:'(

A good comment should explain why you went this route instead of the obvious route, but if the code says the same thing as the comment, leave the comment out--I can read the code more easily.

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 One letter variable names are enough for me to track down the original programmer at their home address

Yeah, I hate that. Be descriptive.

But don't encode the type into the variable name--the type is on the variable already.

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 Yeah my comments are more like "Process number of free-time, add discount, return total"

4:40 PM

Who and what and how. And why and when and where. Good code tells that.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica That's not too bad, but if you are writing well-structured code, the function says t hat directly anyway. Return FreeTime(number) + Discount()

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 yep, all of my boolean functions start with "is" like "IsAlpha" for one that I used to filter out special characters or numerics.

Mine are more like "Right here we are doing ABC. Normally, I would do X, but that doesn't work here because Y, so I had to fall back on Z".

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 yeah, pretty much like that with the comments. To note what I am doing, and why... or breaks. Or, if the calculations are a bit involved

MyWrathAcademia

@Hosch250 So for my programming experience I want to talk about how long I've been programming in Java for (I do have previous Freelancing experience with Python before I started learning Java but that may not be relevant). I also know JavaScript and command line.

@Hosch250 And I would actually be interested in learning C#. Is it also a good idea to talk about how I wanted to learn full stack frameworks and technologies and use them on real world projects because as a self taught programmer I wasn't getting the opportunity to apply what I'm learning. And like you I also want to add that I want to eventually be the older dev with experience that could successfully build a system for the company, but what sort of system are you referring to here?

Yeah. If I get into, for example, calculating the width of a circle of radius X at a distance of Y from the top of the circle, I'll include a comment with the formula I'm using :)

@MyWrathAcademia Sounds good, except I wouldn't say "I want to get a job because my personal projects weren't teaching me enough." That sounds like you are independently wealthy. Never admit you need a job, but never admit you don't need one either (they might just think you'll dump them after a year or two of experience), is my policy.

I'd say something to the effect of "I have ABC skills, and I've been using them in M & N projects. (Discuss the projects here, including difficult problems you've solved, who benefits from the project, etc.) I'd like to get more experience developing business-grade applications (maybe drop some topics/business jargon like uptime, security, etc.). I'm interested in your product because (show you know what they are developing here)."

But most important--don't try to script the interview. Be human.

And don't go in thinking you know a lot. I was programming on/off for 4 years through HS/college before I got a job, 3 of them in C#. And I found I had a TON to learn.

Granted, most of my experience was with desktop apps, and my job was in web dev, so I had to learn JS, ASP.NET, databases (I knew the theory of normalization, but that was it), etc.

I already knew HTML/CSS from college and the C# language from my personal work, but I knew nothing about developing at the scale a business needs or interacting with other programs, etc.

For example, if you write a website, will it scale to supporting thousands of users hitting it at once? If the website does, will the DB? Can your network handle the load?

What about your nightly jobs? If someone uploads a bunch of files that need to be processed overnight, can you do that?

You really don't know until you either run a stress test or it actually happens. And sometimes stress tests don't test the right thing.

You'll never get that experience with a personal project. Even if you make a wildly popular game like flappy bird or 20148, those all run on the client and just need to be served from a CDN.

I didn't realize any of this until I got a job and started dealing with it in real time--because we never stress-tested anything, LOL.

I got a job and we got a couple new super big clients (bigger than our others; even bigger than some others combined) right around the same time.

Obviously, our systems started to crumble.

5:03 PM

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica Prefixes should be descriptive. But the data type is often the least useful thing you could be describing about the variable.

I always liked Joel's take on the subject: joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-look-wrong

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

5:15 PM

@Kaz I tend to do that by making my code very lean, so anything does stand out. I still use the type prefixes because I am a dinosaur, but it does help make code more clear to me. My type prefixes are like the old story about Van Halen having written into their contract that they would have a bowl of M&M's in their room, with all the green ones removed.

MyWrathAcademia

@Hosch250 brilliant, I think I know what to do now. Speaking of interacting with other programs. Their product is an open source API and they showed me the code during the previous informal interview. Can I say that I am interested in the company's web API because it's language agnostic? I'm not very familiar with API's so not sure what I can say about them

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

If that wasn't followed, they knew they had bigger problems. I've found the same thing with my standards. Anyone not following them isnt going to follow ohters

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica I'm really strict about standards, and I'd use the same argument about your standards :D

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 Well, when I call the shots, it's my standards, when I'm not, I follow the standards set

@MyWrathAcademia All web APIs are language agnostic, really, so I wouldn't mention that. Mention something that's specific to them. Like, what unique thing does their web API do that no other, or very few other, web APIs do?

If it's Netflix, you could talk about how important it is for developers to easily access videos/TV shows, etc. If it's Amazon Marketplace, you could talk about how it's really important for small businesses to have a good platform to sell their goods on, etc.

Talk about how you will benefit from working for them, and how they will benefit from employing you.

They won't hire you if they don't benefit, but if you benefit too, you'll stick around longer and work harder to improve their systems.

Pointy Haired Boss

5:24 PM

0

Q: Management Questions

I have a question(s) that I want to post about Management. However, it is about 2 employees, with similar problems, roles, and backgrounds (thus sources of issues) but drastically different personalities. Should I post it as two questions or one?

discussion asking-questions

MyWrathAcademia

@Hosch250 Did you mean to say users instead of developers:

7 mins ago, by Hosch250

If it's Netflix, you could talk about how important it is for developers to easily access videos/TV shows, etc. If it's Amazon Marketplace, you could talk about how it's really important for small businesses to have a good platform to sell their goods on, etc.

No, developers. Users could use the official Netflix app.

It's important for devs to be able to tie into Netflix and use their content, which is where their API is important and why you'd like to work on it and improve it.

MyWrathAcademia

It's actual a RESTFul API, is that the same as a web API because the RESTFul API they showed me looked like it was designed for programmatic access not for user access

Right. A RESTful API is targeting devs, so the users/devs are one and the same.

So, talk about how the API is important to devs and how you'd like to be involved in making it the go-to system.

MyWrathAcademia

@Hosch250 Thanks I perfectly understand what makes an API good - the easier an API is for developers to work with the more developers will use it to create their own products

5:36 PM

Yep.

And then, you could talk about how more devs using the API will help the company. Look into how they want the API to be used. Do they want devs to just do whatever, or do they have a very specific idea of how they want it to be used?

MyWrathAcademia

It's an open source API, doesn't that mean that they want devs to do whatever with it?

Not necessarily.

It means that someone else can take the code, modify it, and release it themselves.

But how does the company want their version of the API to be used?

There's a lot of stuff you can look up and turn into talking points.

It's actually kind of fun to interview. Especially when you don't care if you get the job or not.

There's no pressure in that case, and you can show up in whatever clothes and talk about whatever you want.

Learn about new companies and things other devs in the area are working on.

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

So, where's the best place to learn about API's All of my stuff has been self-contained, but that's going to change soon

Online is pretty good. Just read about APIs in general.

I just read Irresistable APIs from Manning. It was really good (all their books are).

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 I've been doing that.... I'm wondering if there's anywhere I can do some hands-on stuff. I learn best by reverse engineering things

5:46 PM

Mmmm, not sure. Maybe find an OSS system to look through and maybe contribute some?

Maybe build a personal project for fun?

Are you interested in using APIs or writing them?

If it's using them, maybe write a Spotify clone or something.

If it's writing them, that's a bit harder to recommend something.

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

@Hosch250 that helps, thanks.

MyWrathAcademia

@Hosch250 I just read more about the company's product. It's a software to hold medical records of countries citizens. And three aspects of their software sets it apart: 1. Common and extensible data model
2. Open and extensible APIs
3. Insert-only data persistence

@MyWrathAcademia Cool. That should give you lots of talking points.

Maybe find someone to do a practice interview with if you are nervous (I never did that).

The most important thing, though, is to relax and be a human, not a robot.

Demonstrating your skills is easy once you get that part down.

Time for lunch, TTYL!

MyWrathAcademia

@Hosch250 One more thing before you go. It's a video interview. Do you think it would be a bad idea to schedule it for tomorrow or should I wait for next week?

Richard Says Reinstate Monica

6:10 PM

@Hosch250 thanks for the lead. I'm starting to get a good grasp on it already

@MyWrathAcademia Whatever is most convenient for you. If you think you are ready, do it sooner rather than later.

Personally, I find 1hr of research on the company is enough to give me talking points specific to them, and no matter how hard you study, it won't be enough to make a difference, really.

MyWrathAcademia

6:46 PM

@Hosch250 And because the API is extensible it means that they want devs to have freedom in how they use their API

« first day (2843 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1534 days later) »

Transcript for

Jan '2023

The Water Cooler

General chit-chat for workplace.stackexchange.com. Feel free t...

ask-your-manager use-headphones

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile