So why is EOF in C defined as -1 (when it is)?
Not sure why this was downvoted. I'm curious too.
Job interviews go both ways (2011)
61–70 of 82 posts
Re: Job interviews go both ways (2011)
#62One question I always ask my interviewers is "What is the best thing about working here?". You can tell a lot by their immediate response and whether their face lights up with excitement. One answer I will never forget is a developer responding with "We have a Dyson hand dryer".
An equally interesting, and perhaps more useful, question I always follow that with is "What's the worst thing about workign here"... The cop out answer is usually 'it's a big company so you get some politics and inefficiencies'.. I suppose a good follow up would be; "how does the company intend to change this going forward?" or even "how does it compare to other places you've worked"
Re: Job interviews go both ways (2011)
#63So why is EOF in C defined as -1 (when it is)?
If I had to guess:
prematurely ending a stream is a problem for the current stream, and for the next stream as well, and thus is more desiderable to avoid corruption in bytes signaling an EOF than other bytes.
corrupting an EOF in something else is probably not as bad, and/or maybe a corruption 1->0 is more likely than a bit flip 0->1 (maybe when stored/transmitted as 1==higher voltage) and thus
01111111 10111111 11011111 11101111 11110111 11111011 11111101 11111110
are less likely to be corrupted into a EOF, if 11111111 is the least likely state for a byte to be in.
Also, not one of these bytes is a printable ASCII character, which might thus possibly be/have been much less frequent in data streams, and thus further reducing the likelihood the probability of such a corruption happening.
Re: Job interviews go both ways (2011)
#64I interviewed for a dev job a good many years ago. I hadn't heard of the company at the time (they were pretty small so there was no reason that I should have) so I did a lot of research. I remember that their financials were looking decidedly bumpy, but almost always in the black.
I asked about this at the interview. The lady interviewing me looked offended that I would ask about their financial situation as it was "not really something [I] should be worrying about".
I didn't get the job, and their feedback was that they wanted a dev, not an accountant.
Re: Job interviews go both ways (2011)
#65So why is EOF in C defined as -1 (when it is)?
EOF is returned by functions that can return a valid character. So this rules out all the values in 0x00-0xFF (0 would have been a nice choice for EOF but how do you read nul bytes?). -1 is the logical solution (note that getchar returns an int so -1 != 0xFF).
Re: Job interviews go both ways (2011)
#66The author advocates questioning the interviewer directly, but he doesn't mention questioning anyone in his Netscape interview, only making mental notes of various red flags. In practice, I think that's the way 'both way' interviews generally have to go - you don't interview your interviewer, but you do evaluate and judge your potential employer critically. Personally, my attempts at interviewing an interviewer have…
Asking if someone is on medication is not only unethical, I'm pretty sure it isn't legal either. Do you want to also know their sexual orientation, religion and who they voted for?
It's completely unethical, but I don't think the candidate has any legal requirements to not discriminate against the employer based on protected classes at all.
Re: Job interviews go both ways (2011)
#67This is a really relevant piece, if I'm interviewing you I'm going to wonder if you're not asking any questions about the company. I get that its hard to ask challenging questions in a situation where you want to get hired, but you will need to ask challenging questions when you don't want to get fired too, and if you can do that you are more valuable than someone who can't. That bit about everyone focused on the sto…
I'm going to wonder if you're not asking any questions about the company
Maybe I've already gone through 5 other people today, and I'm exhausted, and I've already used up all my questions about the company.
This strikes me as yet-another-psychology-test-designed-by-non-psychologists.
Re: Job interviews go both ways (2011)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a better way to ask your first question would be: "What would you say separates the strongest and the weakest members of your team?" It allows you to get a sense of what they value in the team without needing to make them get defensive over staff they probably worked hard to acquire.
> "What would you say separates the strongest and the weakest members of your team?" It's easy to reply to this phrasing with a canned answer and very little though. "Experience, skill, and a positive attitude." If someone gave this answer to you and you're the candidate asking the question it is basically 0 information. I think the better way to ask this question is to ask "Has anyone been recently let go and why? H…
> It's easy to reply to this phrasing with a canned answer and very little though. "Experience, skill, and a positive attitude." If someone gave this answer to you and you're the candidate asking the question it is basically 0 information.
Although it doesn't say much about the team, I'd say it provides some information on management and the level of transparency vs image management you can expect on the job.
Re: Job interviews go both ways (2011)
#69So why is EOF in C defined as -1 (when it is)?
If I had to guess: prematurely ending a stream is a problem for the current stream, and for the next stream as well, and thus is more desiderable to avoid corruption in bytes signaling an EOF than other bytes. corrupting an EOF in something else is probably not as bad, and/or maybe a corruption 1->0 is more likely than a bit flip 0->1 (maybe when stored/transmitted as 1==higher voltage) and thus 01111111 10111111 110…
While a nifty idea, corruption of this sort is so rare and so unbounded (that is, there's no reason to believe it'll strike in your incoming data, it could well strike at the CPU instructions itself or whoknows) that there's not much you can do about it from inside the code. It's all but impossible to deal with corruption rates on the order of 1 in 10^18 (or better! properly functioning hardware is obscenely reliable at doing what it was designed to do [1]) instructions on properly functioning hardware, and all but impossible to deal with failing instructions at a much higher rate on nonfunctioning hardware, except to replace it with functioning hardware.
[1]: If anyone wants to pop up with complaints about that statement, remember that properly functioning hardware is also doing a lot of things very quickly, so it has a lot of chances to fail. ECC RAM is important, for instance, because something that only happens every few billion accesses may still happen several times a day. But this is still an absolutely obscene degree of reliability. Most disciplines would laugh at worrying about something at that rate of occurrence... they wouldn't even be able to detect it.
Re: Job interviews go both ways (2011)
#70The author advocates questioning the interviewer directly, but he doesn't mention questioning anyone in his Netscape interview, only making mental notes of various red flags. In practice, I think that's the way 'both way' interviews generally have to go - you don't interview your interviewer, but you do evaluate and judge your potential employer critically. Personally, my attempts at interviewing an interviewer have…
Here are some that I've asked: 1. "During your most recent budget period, what influence did politics rather than the merits of budget requests have in distributing resources, and in what ways?" 2. "How heavily influenced by politics (or upper management) is the performance review process?" 3. "Has anybody recently been let go as the result of being ranked lowest on a performance review?" 4. "Are managers subject to…
On 1. 2.
Politics is what happens in subjective situations where people are wrestling for resources. How many budget requests are absolutely objective and easy decisions to make? Truth be told, in a high functioning company, there shouldn't be many. But politics absolutely comes into play when you have the fuzzy.
Is Google+ a better product objectively than Buzz? I have no idea. How do you even make that decision when the project is in its infancy?
Consider John and Katy. Assume that Katy does her job, pushes her code and gets her shit done. John comes in, is a superstar gunslinger. He keeps an eye out for upper management beliefs, quickly prototypes them. Shows a bunch of flashy shit to them. YET, that is all they are. Flashy shit with rotten code. It is the job of the Katy to come and work and write good fucking code. However, both Katy and John are essential for a good organization. They should be ranked by completely different metrics depending on the needs of the organization at that time. In reality, you have managers who have a complex trade-off to make between the short term and long term. This is a situation ripe for jockeying. Politics definitely comes into the picture.
I haven't seen an organization where a power structure doesn't exist. It always does.