Family Matters

This piece about a programmer dad rings so true with me.  I was fortunate to have a job that supported flex-time when my son was born, and we kept his schedule later than typical until he started preschool, so I was able to spend evenings with him and my wife after work.  When my daughter was born, it was even more important to be home for them.

And now, years later, I still prefer to be home early enough to spend some time with them before homework and other teen activities fill up their evenings.

So if you plan on having kids and earn a living programming, start figuring out how you will make the time for them.

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More Grist for the Mill

I saw this today, pushing for more and better programming education for UK schoolkids.

I'm ambivalent about it - I like that it's for strengthening programming, but I feel that the globalization of software development makes it disingenuous to try and get more programmers in the developed nations when all the corporations are looking to ship the programming jobs out to less-developed nations where developers are cheaper.

The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that the CEOs who keep pushing this without bringing programming jobs back home are just looking to hedge their bets in case India and China become too expensive; having a lot of unemployed programmers at home will make it easy to offer lower pay.

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Parasitic Effects

I have seen a few things on the web recently that deal with the weird ways that some parasites hijack a host to reproduce.

There is some fungus that makes caterpillars climb high into trees where the die and liquify, dripping fungal spores down onto more leaves for more caterpillars to ingest.

There is some other parasite that makes ants climb to the top of grass stalks so that they are eaten by sheep, the other host in the parasites life-cycle.

And there is Toxoplasma gondii.  It makes rats attracted to the smell of  cat urine, so that they frequent places their predators are.

All this then jumped in my mind to the studies of how onloine games like Zynga's Farmville are highly addictive, providing an endorphin hit every time the player clicks the mouse.

For the first time on Earth, we have a large group of beings actively searching out the quirks of human biology and psychology, looking for things that they can hijack to sell their goods.  This concerns me - how long before someone finds the perfect combination of sights, sounds and smells that will allow them to induce the desired behavior in another person?

Until now, the search was limited by the blind chance randomness of mutations - if a hack evolved, it would survive, but the parasites were not actively seeking weaknesses in the behavioral armor of their hosts.

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You Catch More Flies With Honey....

Recently I was reminded of that old saying, and why it matters.

For quite a while now, the common social skills have been devalued in programming.  It's become almost our version of machismo, this blunt commentary about others' work.

Frankly, it's stupid.  Nobody is immune to the discomfort of having their work denigrated or dismissed.  I mean, why are we not promoting at least a modicum of civility?  How hard is it to rephrase from "This code sucks" to "This code needs some cleanup" ?

Some will no doubt claim that it's meaningless fluff; a waste of precious time to consider feelings.  But it's not - there is no truly egoless programming - if there were, we could not be as good as we wish to be, because only through the personal pride of doing a job well can we have good code, and even if we fail, we are not helped by someone else being rude in their discussion of the code.

This is not to say we should not mention failings in code we review - but we should be mindful of the impact of our words.  If you are rude to a coworker, you risk s/he will not hear your comment for the tone - they will get angry at your tone or wording, and resist the discussion because they will perceive you as hostile, instead of helpful.

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The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth

It's been a demotivating few months at The Job lately, what with the Google rejection, and sundry other depressing events of the new cow-orker variety.

But today I got a snootful of it.  One senior colleague explained today in a meeting that the feature that I was supposed to pull into my server 2 years ago, that would solve all my performance problems, in fact will not solve them as it is currently written, but requires more work to do what it was promised to do 2 years ago.

In the meantime, every time the performance issue was discussed in conversations where this colleague was around, this feature was touted, and my lack of action was wondered at.  Nevermind that changes to the core handling of a major process is not taken lightly; nor is it attempted when customers are getting bi-weekly update releases that cannot fail to work.  I was an idiot for not pulling this feature into my code immediately.

So the tip for developers is this - never lie to your colleagues about what you code can do for them.  If it is not complete, or plain wrong, shut up about it.

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Close Encounters of the Search Kind

A few weeks ago, I was driving home after dark, and while stopped at an intersection, a bright light shone down on my car and I levitated out of my car.

When I awoke, I was in Mountain View California, and I was being questioned by strange beings.

Not really - but I did get asked to interview with Google.

tl;dr version - I didn't get hired

The detailed version -
I was cold-called (emailed, actually), by one of Google's recruitment specialists, and got my resume to him - I don't know how my name was initially brought to his attention; I was told that someone at Google recommended me, but I don't know anyone at Google currently, so it may have been from an old resume submitted years ago.  I passed the resume screen, and shortly after was scheduled for a phone interview.

I spent the next week and a half cramming algorithms, data structures, and logic puzzles.  Everything I found online about interviewing at Google put me in fear for not knowing esoterica like red-black trees, how to implement a heap, and how to determine how many ping-pong alls would fit in a 747.

The phone interview turned out to be a single coding problem, and I managed to take 50 minutes to solve, and missed an obvious part of the solution.

After two weeks had passed, I pinged the interview scheduler for an update, and was pleasantly surprised to hear that I was getting a second phone interview!  So it was back to the cramming.

The second phone interview was somewhat better, in that I managed to not fall flat in solving the problem - again, a straightforward programming problem - and managed to do it quickly enough to field a few more questions.

Another two weeks passed, and my ping at that point resulted in a request to schedule an on-site interview!  I was elated, and spent a day grinning to myself.

Shortly after, I was winging my way out to the mothership for a whirlwind 36 hours in Mountain View.

The on-site interview was intense - 4 separate interviews with Googlers, covering a number of topics; fortunately, none of the questions were trick questions - nary a manhole cover or gas station in sight.  I was taken to lunch at one of the cafeterias, which had an interesting variety of food, and was quite busy.

Two weeks later, after no response, I pinged the interview coordinator and got the bad news - I was not moving forward.

I was dropped as low as I had been lifted.  It really sucked to hear that news.  Even though I knew that Google was willing to reject qualified people, it still hurt terribly.

So now I join the ranks of the many who have not passed muster in the Mothership, and I bide my time until next year, when I will try again, assuming they are still looking.

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No Comment

It seems that only a rant-worthy topic can stir me to blog these days, for which I apologize.

However, I just had an experience with a practice that I cannot fathom, and I had to rant about it.

I was looking over some code for another part of The Job's product, in preparation for implementing a similar thing in code I am responsible for.   The initial set of changes were relatively clear, and had been done by a local colleague.  Then it appears that there was a second set of changes made by another programmer that were less clear.  The second set was a bit more sweeping, and were done by a supposedly mid-senior developer.  There were no comments in the code that had been changed.  Wait, I was wrong - there were comments - every if/then and while block had the closing brace commented with "// end if" or "// end while" - EVEN THOSE IN FUNCTIONS ONLY 5 LINES LONG!!!!!

I remember when I was in college taking a FORTRAN class, we were told to comment heavily, and the ends of sections were required to have such comments, but we also had to have block comments before every major section of code.  How did this get mutated into commenting only the ends of blocks?  No comments about the intent of the block, the actions in the block, nothing.  Just the little end markers for the blocks, cluttering up the diff report.



The part that scares me is that this was also allegedly reviewed by the offshore manager, and passed without comment (or any comment was ignored).  What the hell is being taught as programming practices these days?!

I'd have preferred no comments at all to those useless bookends.

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