Poonam Lall Blogs

Interviews

 

Yesterday was interview day! We're looking for a junior developer, 1 or 2 years out of school, with a bit of experience / exposure to Microsoft Technologies. We use .NET, C# and SQL and I expect to have to train them some, (I'm not expecting a Chris Sells or Rory Byth to come walking through my door looking for a Jr. Developers job). A brief synopsis of my 3 candidates yesterday - all of them are CS graduates, and all have the required 1-2 years experience, and each one has spent the last year working in .NET (either VB or C#) and claims to be reasonably proficient in SQL.

 

Excerpts from the SQL Interview

 

Question : What's a clustered index?

Candidate 1 : A class what? Can you say that again?

Candidate 2 : Um….

Candidate 3 : Is that in SQL or in .NET?

 

Question : What's an index?

Candidate 1 : You put an index on a column like 'Customer Name' when you want to do a search on Customers. It makes the query run faster.

Me : Can you have more then 1 index on a table

C1  : I don’t think so but I'm not sure.

Candidate 2 : Um….

Candidate 3 : I don’t know, is that like a primary key?, that’s something you have to have on every table, but I haven't heard of indexes really.

Me : Didn’t you say you did a semester on Relational Databases in college?

C2  : Yes, but I'm pretty sure they didn’t cover indexes.

 

Question : Well you've been working with SQL Server for the past year, what did you do when queries performed badly?

Candidate 1 : Well we had one query which was slow, so we ran a batch job at night which aggregated the data and then ran the query on the aggregated data.

Candidate 2 : Our queries were fine, we never had a problem.

Candidate 3 : We had one query which was very inefficient, it was a directory list of all the employees. So we made Employee Name the Primary Key for our Employee Master instead of Employee Number.

 

A question on GROUP BY somehow got converted into an ORDER BY - I guess they both have 'BY' so that’s close enough. All three of them used embedded SQL in their code, and not stored procedures, on asking why, one said stored procedures were much harder to write, the other said he had a unrealistic deadline for the project and didn’t have the time to learn stored procedures and the third said his boss / mentor didn’t like them. There really was no point going any further with SQL, none of them knew what an index was.

 

Ok, I thought, so SQL wasn’t going well so, lets try programming languages. All of them had studied C++ and Java in college. Two worked on C# apps for the past year and one on a VB.Net app.

 

Question : What is the difference between a public, protected and private member in C#

Candidate 1 : A public member is accessible to everyone, a private within the class it belongs - I never used a protected one so I don’t know.

Candidate 2 : Um….

Candidate 3 : He knew it (thank god - I was ready to start crying)

 

Question : What's option explicit?

The VB candidate : You know I've seen it used in the application on which I was working and always wondered what it did. Can you tell me?

 

Question : So you've worked with both C# and C++, can you tell me some of the differences and if you like one over the other?

C# candidate 1 : I like C# more, its easier

 

Me : Why?

C1 : C++ does a lot of strange things, which C# doesn’t allow

Me : Could you elaborate?

C1 : Um - I read that some where

C# Candidate 2 : In C# I can drag and drop controls, in C++ I cant.

 

OK - no luck here either, So lets see what they know about ASP.NET or just ASP or just anything at all.

 

Question : So you've worked with ASP and ASP.NET, what are the differences, what you like or dislike about ASP.NET

Candidate 1 : Well its nice to separate the UI from the business logic so I like ASP.NET.

Me :(thinking - this is a reasonable answer - I don’t want to ask a follow-up question because he might blow it and I'd be very depressed)

Candidate 2 : Um…..

Candidate 3 : ASP.NET is nice, you can drag and drop everything, but its too big, it has too many libraries and no one can know all of them. I wish they had made it smaller.

 

 

Well it went on and on - by the end of the day I had a splitting headache and was truly depressed. Today, having had a day to reflect, I am angry as well.

What are universities teaching these days. I would have thought public, private, protected would be something covered in the first semester, probably first lecture of a c++ course. Even a databases 101 class should make at minimum a reference to indexes and what they are. Who are these people teaching and why are we allowing them to teach?

 

More disturbing, is these kids learnt nothing at their jobs either. They hadn't heard of Source Control, didn’t understand what I meant when asked about their CM processes, and the only testing they had heard of was unit testing - the application moved directly from their desktop into a production environment. Who are these people in charge of Software development and why are they in charge?

 

 

 

 

Why software developers have a bad reputation

 

Its tax time again, which means that I am once again struggling with  my various bank accounts, IRA's, 410k's. I expect to struggle with this, I'm no financial wizard and the tax laws were evidently written by people who were doped out of their collective minds. What I don’t expect to struggle with, is the downloading my accounts into MS-MONEY.

Believe me this has not been easy. Lets take American Express for example, I have an AMEX card, an IRA and I use their online bank. The card and brokerage account I can set up from within Money, the online bank requires me to log into my bank account and download a file which is subsequently imported in. In fact their online bank does not even exist in the list of Financial Institutions. Fidelity for some reason allows you to download their brokerage accounts into MS-Money or Quicken, but for some reason thinks you have no need to be able to download your 401K. My favorite however is Legg Mason. I couldn’t find any documentation on how to download my 401K into MS-Money but I did find this gem about Quicken on their FAQ

 

How do I set up and download my  account into Quicken?

Click on Section Guide called TRANSACTION HISTORY. Once there you will have an option to "Download Transaction History File" and by selecting that option you can download your selected range of 401(k) account transactions to wherever you want.

You need to download and save it as a text file. Then you can open it in Excel, set the column parameters and then upload it into Quicken.

Quicken has accepted Excel files in the past as some of us have used Quicken before and as far as we know it should still do so. However, their specs might have changed. We will try to locate a copy of Quicken and check on that further.

 

What strikes me as being truly sad, is how easy it to write this code. Not doing it, or providing this half-baked solution which may or may not work 'cos we're just too damn lazy to find out' shows not only total disregard for the user, but a lack of pride in your work, and a lack of professionalism.

 

And we wonder why software developers have a bad reputation.

The News

So today I decided I’d take a break from my normal routine of reading blogs, looking at code and such like. Thought I’d read the news instead, find out what was happening around me, get my finger on the pulse of the nation as it were. Based on todays experience I have decided to make reading the news a weekly feature - it is definately more entertaining and enlightening the what the mainstream media has been handing out namely Kobe Bryant Janet Jackson and Martha Stewart.

 

Lunch-time breast lifts?
Women can get lunch-time injections of Botox and various facial fillers, and now researchers in Sweden may have found a way to boost a woman's breast size during the lunch hour as well. In the near future, Rohrich says, injections of hyaluronic acid, a compound used to fill fine lines and wrinkles, could be used to do temporary breast enhancement. Peering into his crystal ball, Rohrich forecasted what else may be on the distant horizon, including grow-your-own breast implants. “We may one day make our own implants from our own fat where surgeons harvest fat via liposuction and stimulate it to grow," Rohrich says, "so it will be natural but to grow that amount of fat and grow it consistently may be years and years away."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3972625

 

Yellow Snow Leads To Arrest

Elko police arrested Roger Gray, 25, on the basis of yellow snow he left after relieving himself on the rooftop of a restaurant that had been burglarized. Investigators said the evidence produced enough DNA to link Gray to the scene.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040209/D80K1GIO0.html

 

American Airlines Pilot Suggests Passengers Discuss Christianity on Flight

An American Airlines pilot asked Christians on his flight to identify themselves and suggested the non-Christians discuss the faith with them, the airline said. The case was handed over to the airline's personnel department for an investigation, spokesman Tim Wagner said Sunday. "It falls along the lines of a personal level of sharing that may not be appropriate for one of our employees to do while on the job," he said earlier.

May not be appropriate????? I'm not sure whether the pilots remarks or the spokesmens were more inappropriate

 

Winning at any cost

 Three livestock exhibitors at last year's Ohio State Fair have been disqualified for allegedly outfitting their Holstein cows with hairpieces. State Fair inspectors said the three glued or painted hair from another part of the animal or from another animal to create straighter backs on the cows and enhance their appearance in the show ring.

 

The Bride Wore Black Because the Groom Was Dead

NICE, France (Reuters) - A 35-year-old French woman has married her boyfriend 18 months after he was killed in a car accident.  Christel Demichel, who wore black, was married Tuesday under a little-used law in the presence of friends and relatives at city hall in the southern city of Nice, local officials said. It would have been her husband Eric's 30th birthday.  "Eric and I promised when he was alive that we would get married," she told French television. "Even though he is dead, I respect the values I shared with him, especially as his death was not his fault."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=573&e=7&u=/nm/20040211/od_nm/marriage_dc

Christel - I don't think its normally a dead persons fault that he is dead.

 

It’s a dog’s world

ED FALLS, Ohio - Dogs in this Cleveland suburb have something to bark about. OLMST City Council unanimously approved a law Tuesday requiring doghouses to be waterproof and lined with bedding that resists dampness. The houses also must be equipped with self-closing doors or flaps.

Removed from the final law was a provision that required dog owners to bring their pets inside if the temperature dips below 20 degrees.

 

Men march demanding freedom to wear skirts

."We're not transvestites, homosexuals or cross-dressers," David Johnson told the New York Times for Sunday editions. "We don't want you to call us Jean or Sally. We're men - men who want the right to wear a skirt."

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/Northeast/02/08/offbeat.men.skirts.ap

 

Football seats mark man's grave

Paul Wellener's family found the perfect marker for his grave: two blue plastic seats from the Three Rivers Stadium auction. Wellener, a lifelong football fan and a Pittsburgh Steelers season ticket holder for 42 years, died unexpectedly on March 16. Wellener's son, Paul, and widow, Mary Ann, bought three pairs of stadium seats for $2,100 at an auction — and knew they had found the perfect gravestone.

 

Man receives death notice from Pentagon

General Peter Schoomaker has a message for the bureaucrats at the Pentagon -- he's not dead.

His untimely passing was news to the Army chief of staff -- until his notice arrived at his home in Tampa, Florida. His demise was certainly a surprise to his wife. But there is a reasonable explanation. Schoomaker came out of retirement to take the top Army job. So when his name was dropped from the retired officers payroll, Pentagon accountants figured it was for the usual reason -- death.

This confirms what I have long suspected, no one in the army knows what anyone else in the army is doing

 

Intoxicated drivers take note: Don't ask your 10-year-old daughter to drive you home.
Angela Michelle Brown, 37, was charged Monday with child endangerment and driving under the influence of alcohol after authorities said she got drunk and used her 10-year-old daughter as a designated driver.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-210designateddriver,0,2704745.story

My vote for the stupidest person

 

posted by poonam with 2 Comments