OT: Working Visas are on the chopping block

[ucodegen]

[quote=flu]He didn’t know the difference between stack versus help wrto memory allocation[/quote]
I think you meant ‘heap’, not ‘help’. Took me a sec – was trying to figure out how stack and help were related… ;-P

I didn’t use the ‘reply’ function, so your post is still ‘editable’ – unless someone else directly replied to it.

I also think that part of the problem is the lack of concentration in the basics in computer systems from Universities in general. I saw that more recently the work done at UCSD classes were more oriented to building from libraries (ignoring that someone has to build some of the libraries and to use the libraries effectively, you need to understand how they are created).

BTW, if a person is largely working in kernel space, what the heck were they doing w/o knowledge of the difference between stack and heap? That is kind of like having a blind bull in a china shop.

[an]

[quote=ucodegen][quote=flu]He didn’t know the difference between stack versus help wrto memory allocation[/quote]
I think you meant ‘heap’, not ‘help’. Took me a sec – was trying to figure out how stack and help were related… ;-P

I didn’t use the ‘reply’ function, so your post is still ‘editable’ – unless someone else directly replied to it.

I also think that part of the problem is the lack of concentration in the basics in computer systems from Universities in general. I saw that more recently the work done at UCSD classes were more oriented to building from libraries (ignoring that someone has to build some of the libraries and to use the libraries effectively, you need to understand how they are created).

BTW, if a person is largely working in kernel space, what the heck were they doing w/o knowledge of the difference between stack and heap? That is kind of like having a blind bull in a china shop.[/quote]Simple answer as to why the Universities are doing that. It’s because majority of startups out there today is about using libraries to build services. So, the Universities are just trying to prepare the students for careers that they most likely will be getting. I personally HATE those stack vs heap interview questions. I’ve never used it in my entire career and don’t expect to use it in the future. I tend to like to ask about TDD, clean code, refactoring, etc. If you know the difference about stack vs heap but then write the most unreadable code, it’ll be a big mess trying to maintain that code. Not to mention to difficulty to test, which mean even harder to maintain or add new functionality w/out breaking something.

[Coronita]

Speaking of hiring and contract workers… I just experienced this just today….

We were phone screen a candidate for a Senior Software Engineer. The candidate had over 13 years of experience, and currently is working at a electronics company. I’m not sure how me managed to get through our pre screening for a mobile software apps position, because the guys experience was completely at the low level/kernel level work.

Anyway, the person’s resume looked doctored,and it had all the right buzzwords. But I noticed the guy has never held a job very long at a reputable US company. All his experience has been at a contracting shop, based out overseas, doing like 5-6 months assignments here and there….And guess what the bulk of his work was for as a contract developer? Yup. Qualcomm, TI, Samsung, LG, Intel.

And the guy’s fundamental knowledge and experience was just terrible for someone who’s been in industry for 12-13 years. The guy, claiming to have OO knowledge, have no idea about object oriented design. He didn’t know the difference between stack versus heap wrto memory allocation. Claiming to be an Android develop, he couldn’t pass basic java general know-how questions. And when I delved into his experience, it came to light at these chop shop contracting companies, they run them like assembly lines, in which each engineer has a tiny little code function/procedure they work on, and that’s all they know. They don’t need to know/learn anything else, threading, framework, stack, system. Just the little tiny piece(s) they are assigned.

Absolutely awful. So like I said, these contracting shops are really shady, but it’s completely different from the sort of H1-Bs at reputable companies. And these aren’t the type of people that end up getting hired for the full time positions requiring a lot of technical experience. At all the job functions I’ve interviewed candidates for at all the past companies, this guy would not have gotten hired for any of the opportunities.

[Coronita]

fixed :)…

I normally don’t ask those questions, but for this specific role, the candidate in question was an embedded SW guy…And they were open ended questions, not some brain teaser textbook type of question. What led me to ask this question was he couldn’t even answer the previous easier questions we asked. That called into question his credibility and what he put on his resume.

He brought up that he was very experienced in Android O/S framework (not many people are, I’m one of them), and I asked a few questions as to the APIs he’s designed on the Android framework. He couldn’t answer. They weren’t even tough detailed questions: there were open ended questions like what part of the Android O/S where you working on, and can you explain to me what were some of the components you added/modified to support this….Dead silence. Strike 1….

That led to the easier basic question: “in all the Android framework projects you worked on, you mentioned you created public APIs and libraries for clients/users… Can you give me examples of when you designed interfaces and abstract classes, what led you to chose one versus the other?” I asked this question, because we need people to design APIs for our development kit given to customers, and wanted to see how he went about designing customer facing APIs..Again, it was an open ended question, not those stupid brain teaser question.. The guy didn’t know the difference between the two…Hello? Someone working with java for 13 years, and claiming to have worked with Android since the first 1.0 beta release, and you can’t say 1 thing that’s different between an interface or abstract class, or show me examples of when you used both in all the libraries you claimed to have created? Strike 2

He finally said “well I don’t really work that much at the Android java framework layer, I’m more at the hardware HAL layer on Android O/S, and Bluetooth stack layer and kernel drivers”, despite what his 1.5 pages of resume says…..That lead to him bringing up how he worked with memory management, and hence my very basic question what is heap and what is stack and what are they used for…(because I had a suspicion he didn’t know that either)….And he didn’t.

We ended up terminating the interview 15 minutes into it, because none of us had any confidence anything on his resume reflected what he actually knew.

If all we needed was a programmer to implement a well defined/well designed/already spec’d out module, where all the integration and touch points to our hardware was already done, and the only remaining work was to implement a function or method or two to implement some basic logic that was already well speced out, we could use guys in Bangalore or China to do that at a cheap cost., so we could focus on the really difficult parts to do. That’s not what we needed.

I was annoyed.

And you would be surprised how many people can’t even code a simple program. The guy who wrote this. is pretty accurate…We’ve personally have seen this time and time again.

http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest

The “Fizz-Buzz test” is an interview question designed to help filter out the 99.5% of programming job candidates who can’t seem to program their way out of a wet paper bag. The text of the programming assignment is as follows:
“Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.”
Source: “Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers who Grok Coding”

Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers who Grok Coding

http://tickletux.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/

[ucodegen]

It sounds like interviewers are going to have to come up with another test… One of the links you provided for the ‘FizzBuzz’ test had a bunch of solutions, and I could just believe someone not good with writing programs would try to memorize one of them in planning for a tech interview.

One of the things that does surprise me is how far some of these people get when there is no technical interview questions. In a previous job, I had to deal with someone who was supposedly senior to me working on the same project I was. The project was broken down into applications (C++ network comm/data processing and ‘rendering’ code for various parts of the system). The project this person was working on was not getting anywhere. The Proj Mgr put an additional senior person on the that particular application – and still no forward movement. I got thrown into the mix by the Proj Mgr to try to figure what the heck was going on and found out that the person who was supposedly senior to me was loosing track of code changes made by himself, was not coordinating with the other person he was to be working with, was not integrating the other persons changes (they were getting dropped on the floor) and that was literally having problems programming basic algebraic equations.

[Coronita]

[quote=ucodegen]It sounds like interviewers are going to have to come up with another test… One of the links you provided for the ‘FizzBuzz’ test had a bunch of solutions, and I could just believe someone not good with writing programs would try to memorize one of them in planning for a tech interview.

One of the things that does surprise me is how far some of these people get when there is no technical interview questions. In a previous job, I had to deal with someone who was supposedly senior to me working on the same project I was. The project was broken down into applications (C++ network comm/data processing and ‘rendering’ code for various parts of the system). The project this person was working on was not getting anywhere. The Proj Mgr put an additional senior person on the that particular application – and still no forward movement. I got thrown into the mix by the Proj Mgr to try to figure what the heck was going on and found out that the person who was supposedly senior to me was loosing track of code changes made by himself, was not coordinating with the other person he was to be working with, was not integrating the other persons changes (they were getting dropped on the floor) and that was literally having problems programming basic algebraic equations.[/quote]

There’s a solution to this. You tweak the problem slightly so that if the candidate gives you one of the canned answers on the internet, you know that in addition to the person not being able to write any code, the person is also dishonest with trying to cover it up.

[no_such_reality]

[quote=flu][quote=ucodegen]It sounds like interviewers are going to have to come up with another test… One of the links you provided for the ‘FizzBuzz’ test had a bunch of solutions, and I could just believe someone not good with writing programs would try to memorize one of them in planning for a tech interview.

One of the things that does surprise me is how far some of these people get when there is no technical interview questions. In a previous job, I had to deal with someone who was supposedly senior to me working on the same project I was. The project was broken down into applications (C++ network comm/data processing and ‘rendering’ code for various parts of the system). The project this person was working on was not getting anywhere. The Proj Mgr put an additional senior person on the that particular application – and still no forward movement. I got thrown into the mix by the Proj Mgr to try to figure what the heck was going on and found out that the person who was supposedly senior to me was loosing track of code changes made by himself, was not coordinating with the other person he was to be working with, was not integrating the other persons changes (they were getting dropped on the floor) and that was literally having problems programming basic algebraic equations.[/quote]

There’s a solution to this. You tweak the problem slightly so that if the candidate gives you one of the canned answers on the internet, you know that in addition to the person not being able to write any code, the person is also dishonest with trying to cover it up.[/quote]

You work in a tech company, if your HR can’t source a basic skill, they should be replaced.

[Coronita]

[quote=no_such_reality][quote=flu][quote=ucodegen]It sounds like interviewers are going to have to come up with another test… One of the links you provided for the ‘FizzBuzz’ test had a bunch of solutions, and I could just believe someone not good with writing programs would try to memorize one of them in planning for a tech interview.

One of the things that does surprise me is how far some of these people get when there is no technical interview questions. In a previous job, I had to deal with someone who was supposedly senior to me working on the same project I was. The project was broken down into applications (C++ network comm/data processing and ‘rendering’ code for various parts of the system). The project this person was working on was not getting anywhere. The Proj Mgr put an additional senior person on the that particular application – and still no forward movement. I got thrown into the mix by the Proj Mgr to try to figure what the heck was going on and found out that the person who was supposedly senior to me was loosing track of code changes made by himself, was not coordinating with the other person he was to be working with, was not integrating the other persons changes (they were getting dropped on the floor) and that was literally having problems programming basic algebraic equations.[/quote]

There’s a solution to this. You tweak the problem slightly so that if the candidate gives you one of the canned answers on the internet, you know that in addition to the person not being able to write any code, the person is also dishonest with trying to cover it up.[/quote]

You work in a tech company, if your HR can’t source a basic skill, they should be replaced.[/quote]

HR usually don’t do recruiting except for interns. Recruiting is usually farmed out to recruiters. Either way, I have never met anyone in Hr or recruiters that have technical knowledge to ask these questions . If they did, they wouldn’t be in HR or a recruiter…

What one company did that I interviewed for was interesting. They made candidates take an online test. Interesting idea.

[FlyerInHi]

Here are the numbers. Fully 1/2 of STEM doctorates
are foreign students. Send them back home?

Incidentally, education is a great export for the USA. Running education more like businesses would bring more foreign students, not less.

[XBoxBoy]

[quote=flu]What one company did that I interviewed for was interesting. They made candidates take an online test. Interesting idea.[/quote]

I’ll spare you the rant, but I’d argue that the online tests are horrible at figuring out whether a candidate is qualified or not. (And they often rule out good experienced programmers since the questions are geared to recent college grads vs those with work experience) Most if not all of the questions on these tests are totally irrelevant to real programming tasks. The open ended questions you asked in the interview, “Can you give me examples of when you designed interfaces and abstract classes, what led you to chose one versus the other?” will give you much more insight into the person’s ability.

More importantly, if you can make the person feel relaxed and get them to talk about their past work experiences you will be able to get clues about whether they are productive, whether they are passionate about what they do, or whether “it’s a job man, I’m just here for the paycheck.”

So, skip the online tests and go straight to the questions that tell you who this person is, and what they know.

[gzz]

Regarding fizz buzz test, I could do that in half an hour at age 15 in BASIC or VB4, which I taught myself when I was in 9th grade for fun.

Hard to believe that any career programmers could not do the same.

I mostly used my VB skills to make Pacman and space invaders style games for Windows 95. It was pretty fun changing the enemy AI code a bit and seeing the results each time.

[poorgradstudent]

Our visa system is broken at least in the sense there is little oversight. I’ve worked at more than one company where the renewal process is a joke; the company makes a posting, but they can tailor the posting so narrow that only the person currently in the role could possibly fit it. And “we can’t find an American worker to fill the job” often means “We can’t find an American who will do the job for as little as we want to pay”.

These days its less of an issue, but during the Great Recession there were a lot of companies employing cheaper imported labor while American talent sat unemployed.

I don’t think the program is all bad, but I do think there is a lot of room to reform the abuses that occur.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=FlyerInHi]There is a labor shortage of doctors. Rural communities increasingly rely on foreign doctors. Maybe that’s why the rural folks are unhappy with healh care. Better some health care than none.[/quote]

But really only in certain fields, the lowest paying fields of medicine (Internal, Family), and yes, especially in rural areas. Some of that gap is being covered by a trend towards PA and NPs for most general needs; when little Susie has a cough she doesn’t REALLY need to see an MD to determine if antibiotics or antiviral medication is needed.

We actually have a pretty good system in place to control the pipeline of new MDs in this country. If there was a true shortage UCSD and friends could all start pumping out a few more doctors a year.

[no_such_reality]

[quote=flu]
HR usually don’t do recruiting except for interns. Recruiting is usually farmed out to recruiters. Either way, I have never met anyone in Hr or recruiters that have technical knowledge to ask these questions . If they did, they wouldn’t be in HR or a recruiter…

What one company did that I interviewed for was interesting. They made candidates take an online test. Interesting idea.[/quote]

You need new recruiters unless this was a total one off f-up on their part. Any technical recruiter working the sub-field should be able to ascertain if the candidate is writing fiction on their resume. What the recruiter did was just throw darts at the board to see what sticks.

[Anonymous]

Maybe there is a shortage of qualified recruiters.

[Author]

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