321–330 of 611 posts
> My dad is 92 and we just put him in a home. Can you stay healthy enough to die of old age in a regular home? “Put him in a home” sounds so ominous and forceful.
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I was fascinated by this story as teenager. But looking back on it, I would say out of my current perspective this Mel guy was not a genius, but one of the worst programmers you could probably hire: He written unmaintainable and even unchangeable "write-once" code that was so complex that nobody else could handle it either. He refused to do what he was payed for and just went away as he lost interest. One of this kin…
nah, when you're constrained enough, you rarely to never sacrifice anything in the name of future changes. You figure out what needs to be done, then you write a program that does it. If it needs to change, you write a new program. Part of why that's not as bad as it sound is exactly because of those constraints, you're not dealing with megabytes of source code. There are lots of problems that are specific and simple…
We're not talking about embedded software with special constrains here!
This story is about mundane enterprise software.
Nothing in the story justified this insane level of over-engineering and premature optimization.
Just using the "optimizing compiler" was deemed "good enough" for all other needs of the company, likely…
Also nobody asked for that over-"optimized" throw-it-away-and-start-over-if-you-need-to-amend-anything-crap.
I have still this warmth nostalgia feeling when looking at this story, but when thinking about it with quite some experience in real world software engineering I'm very sure that this kind of programmer would be one of the worst hires you could probably run into.
Finding any valid excuses for "write-only" code is hard, very hard. This was also true back in the days this story plays.
Sorry for destroying your nostalgia feeling, but please try to look at it from a professional perspective.
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Perhaps not in the U.S due to labor laws and the EEOC, but in some countries you must also attach a head shot. Not only that, but HR can casually drop by your house unannounced to inspect your living conditions and make a note of anything "unusual". I know it sounds straight out of Severance, but that's how things would be stateside if unions and others hadn't drawn the line somewhere.
What are the countries where this is practiced?
That's cool. I may have worked in former IBM buildings in Endicott that he might have worked in. I worked there a few summers in the early/mid 2000's when it was Endicott Interconnect Technologies. I loved exploring those old buildings, lots of tunnels, abandoned sections, old equipment. I wish I took photos.
A LaTeX template for this style (from the last time this was posted): https://www.overleaf.com/read/cqscsqsqmskm
If the minimalist resume is appealing, can we also bring back walk-on hiring? In warehouse and construction work, if someone shows up at 7:30 AM on a Monday morning, odds are quite good that the foreman will have something for them to do. Maybe not that day, but maybe tomorrow, or maybe someone on the list above them won't show up that week and they'll get called. I made rent doing that in my early 20s and they even…
> Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud. This is missing the point of interviewing. The goal isn't to find any warm body to fill the chair, the goal is to find someone qualified to do the work who also has a history of doing good work at previous employers. You also don't have unlimited headcount and hiring budget, so it's worth making…
I never had a technical failure in my hires, but I did have a couple of "bad cultural fits." These usually weren't toxic people, but people that couldn't handle the responsibilities and pressures (we were a small, high-functioning team, and everyone's visibility was fairly high).
But this:
> who also has a history of doing good work at previous employers.
makes me wonder how LeetCode tests can tell you that, as they seem to be the single most important component of all software engineering hires, these days.
In my experience, they just drive out the qualified people that can see projects through, and leave you with ... the ones that are really well-practiced in short, academic exercises.
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My father was a physicist. He learned to program in FORTRAN in the university in the 70's. Decades later I, still a teenager, asked him something like this: "Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and physicist in the 70's, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn't you?"; he answered me: "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far."
It was very niche. My dad (also early FORTRAN programmer) graduated in the very first undergrad CS class at UCLA, around '69 or `70. I think very few universities had a CS course at that time.