It is that time again, we are looking for more developers. And this time I ended up so pissed after an interview I had to call a sick colleague just to vent.

One candidate I ruled out early during the interview process. It was a somewhat sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach as I spoke with the candidate, and I couldn’t get a single actually technical description about what the candidate is actually doing now. A lot of broad descriptions, and a lot of sweeping statements, but no real technical details. But the candidate did know jQuery mobile back & forth, it appears.

The decision was made final when I asked the candidate what web framework they were using. I asked whatever they were using ASP.NET WebForms, ASP.NET MVC or ASP.Net Web API. Note that from my perspective, it is a list in a ascending worth order, and you you are using something not on it, that is a plus (it means you aren’t just using whatever is available, which is nice). So I was quite excited when the candidate said (confusedly) “none of them”. Then it took me putting on my investigative hat and asking a lot of questions about how they are actually doing things before it finally came out that they were doing ASPX.

Not knowing the name of the environment in which you are working with for the past several years… I am not sure what to call it.

At least the candidate was able to let me know how they were using that in great detail. We do stuff in Page_Init, then we have  a method that load the data from the database and put it in the ViewState or the Session, then we bind it to a grid, and most of the code is in the grid event handlers. I am sure that the candidate is a great web developer, but I would rather that this particular candidate be great at another location.

The second candidate actually passed our phone screen and was invited to an interview. We have a fairly basic interview process. Some background information for both sides, then a few questions that you need to solve in Visual Studio (and yes, you have full MSDN & Google access) and then a technical portion of the interview that include a system design and a more detailed set of technical knowledge questions.

Now, I am sure that you have heard about interesting interview questions like sort a 100 GB file in a machine 32 bits with 512MB of memory. I admit that something like that would be challenging and interesting. I would probably quite enjoy seeing how people deal with that.

That is not the type of questions that we ask. I asked for a “sort these strings” and a “calculate this tax” programs. I gave the candidate about an hour and a half, alone in a room with VS and internet connection. I am not even asking to implement your own sort, just customize the comparison function and run the standard .NET sort. And do some basic math. The candidate was unable to finish either problem on the time allotted. Now, to be fair for the candidate, the way he solved the first problem was correct and much better than many other attempts that I have seen. Note that the issue was an IComparable<string> instead of IComparable<Item> that caused the issue. It is subtle and something that I would expect an newbie to catch. But this candidate came with full 6 years of experience.

Okay, I said to myself, it is natural to be nervous when doing interviews, let us see what the candidate knows beyond that. The CV mentioned that work with mutli threading. So I began with some questions about that. But it appears that “I only know Thread and BackgroundWorker”. But the absolute clincher was when I asked the candidate about what would cause a high CPU problem and how to diagnose that: “Well, I think that there are special tools that will tell you which process is using the CPU…”

Special tools? Well, I guess Task Manager can be called special, but I am not really sure that I would call it that .And if your experience in troubleshooting stuff never go to the point where you actually look at Task Manager to see what is going on… it probably means that you don’t have meaningful experience in actually troubleshooting stuff.

On the 30 June, I had just about 30K subscribers to this blog. With the death of Google Reader, I dropped down to less than 10% of that.

This sucks, but it also means that this is a much smaller audience. Which means that it is easier to interact with. In particular, I would like to know what sort of blog posts do you, as a reader, like.

• Features, like “see how I can do this cool thing in RavenDB”?
• Reviews for applications, like “cringe at how horrible the code is”?
• Challenges, like “can you figure out what is wrong with this code”?
• Mystery codebase, like “let us read a codebase in a language I don’t know and try to figure it out”?
• Architecture, like “let us see how we should resolve this problem”?

Or, you know, something else. I would appreciate your feedback.

I just got myself a UFO Mini Helicopter, it looks like this:

This is the first helicopter that I got, and for a 30$ toy, it is an awesome amount of fun. The only complaint that I have is that this has only about 5 minutes of battery life.

I am really bad at flying it, too.

As mentioned, this is the very first helicopter that I bought, and I think that I would like to have a better one for the next time. Any recommendations from you guys?

• I would like a better battery life. 30 minutes – 1 hour would be what I want.
• Should be pretty resistant to crashes. I know that I am going to crash it a lot.

Any recommendations?

It is not just developers that are making life interesting. Here is an exchange from today:

I am very happy to sell you whatever you want, but I would really like to know what it is that you want.

So today we had elections, and by tonight you will have a lot of people doing a lot of electoral math.

I don’t like elections, because of an assumption problem. It isn’t linear. This is how we usually portray the choices in elections. You pick a candidate / party that fit where you are on this line.

In reality, this isn’t nearly as simple. Mostly because this one line assumes that there is a central idea that is important being anything else. But let us take a few examples:

• Tax policy
• Security policy
• Gay marriage
• Religion
• Social justice
• Climate change

Now, they don’t fit on a single line. Your position on gay marriage doesn’t impact what you want with regards to tax policy, for example. The real scenario is:

Now, usually there is some concentration of ideas, so it is typical that if you give me your idea about gay marriage, I can guess what your ideas about climate change are.

By the way, I am taking gay marriage and climate change as examples that are common in more than a single country.

But that is guessing. And in many cases, people are a lot more complex than that. We are limited to choosing a candidate, but what happens when we have someone who we support on issue X and oppose on issue Y? We have to make tradeoffs.

So you are limited to one vote, and have to choose something on this line. Yes, as a result of that you get commonalities, a lot of people that like position X also like position Y, but not always, and sometimes I find it abhorrent that someone with whom I share the position on X also have an opposed idea on Y.

When working with stuff that throws exceptions (like Lucene), this is a god send.

I don’t believe that I ever did this, but I was just completely blown away by Skills Matter.

Please note, I never actually dealt with them as a student, although I got great feedback from the people I taught about them in that capacity. I am talking here solely about dealing with them as a service provider.

I have been working with them since 2008, and we have a great working relationship. I am routinely dealing with many businesses, and almost always you have this… friction. I usually have great rapport with the technical people with whom I work, but then it comes to dealing with other departments, it can be… annoying.

With Skills Matter, not only was it never the case. They go out of their way to make it easy and fun to work for them.  I can’t talk about the “straw that broke the camel’s back” and was the trigger for this post, but I can talk about some other things.

From spreading the word about RavenDB and NHibernate by organising talks with me for the Skills Matter community to helping me with a payment dispute that I had with a hotel (that I reserved, but they took care of all the details of getting my money back and saved me tons of international calls an angst) to being willing and able to accommodate screw ups (oops, I missed the plane) in the most pleasant way possible and all the stuff they do for the developer community.

In my time working with them, I found them to be honest, hardworking, professional, ethical and in general Very Good People.

I mean, huh?! How could an ebook be unavailable?