benaston

My favorite job advert was one for a large-ish company (200 people) that invited you to criticise their public-facing web application. The implication was that not following the instructions on the advert to a T would result in your application being ignored.

Clearly this was a lose-lose proposition.

Hilariously, I naively took them at their word and described amongst other observations how their application used far too many HTTP requests (i.e. they weren't using concatenation) and that the page size was phenomenally large.

Needless to say I got no response.

Another time an in-house recruiter for a company that creates a light-blue VOIP client that everyone uses, mentioned that there were free soft drinks and that the executive management were really down to earth. At which point I moved the phone away from my mouth, took a breath and regained my composure.

I suppose what I meant was that you point out that the coercive behavior of some operators is counter intuitive; ergo type coercion in JS is a mess. I dont think that follows because some operators behave in a coercive fashion more convenient than many other languages.

That is not specifically type coercion, but the behavior of the equality (==) operator in JavaScript. Type coercion in JavaScript can be very useful, for example !!('foo') is coercive and easily understood (and has an unsurprising result). Thankfully the == operator is completely optional and has a more easily understood === (identity) correspondent, making your point less about a language and more about a specific operator within a language.

"JavaScript type coercion is such a mess" - in what way? Seriously.

I suppose the difficult thing to gauge is whether using these cool-sounding names has any effect.

You think you can go from almost zero to being good enough at JS for a 100k job in 12 weeks?

This article is so wrong I don't know where to start. Sorry.

I love Adam Curtis' work, but I can't help but feel that this "peering behind the curtain" is all a bit passé. I think many (most?) people people are aware at some level of the media manipulation of populations using crude psychological ploys, the hegemony of the big banks and multinationals and the hidden agendas of so-called benevolent nation states and governments. More interesting is what we (can?, should?) do about it?

Agreed. Was left less enthused and more suspicious of the product because they couldn't/wouldn't tell me what it was in the prmo video.

You may also be interested in an open source library I wrote called EventAPI https://github.com/benaston/event-api

Thank you for the helpful comment. I can't help but feel you miss the point of my post though. I can solve the problem. Verbally, (but admittedly less eloquently and less complete) I approximately gave your answer in the interview. Give me a quiet Monday morning, a pair of headphones and a compiler/interpreter and I can solve it well.

It's the fact that it is being used as a filter when the person filtering doesn't know what is being filtered in and out.

All in all, it's a spectacular waste of time and money.

Oh how I agree with this post. And I've been the asshole on the hiring end before - but I (hope) have learned my lesson.

I recently interviewed with a consultancy (role was UK-based) that is desperate (quite literally) to hire experienced developers in the technical area I have experience in. I came highly recommended by a recent senior hire of theirs (he had been my manager).

The technical filter question in the face-to-face interview was (paraphrased and simplified): "write an algorithm on the whiteboard to check for mismatched braces".

I described an approximate solution aloud, but did not complete the solution in the interview.

As it happens I solved it in my sleep the following night - but of course they will never, ever know that.

Now everyone will have their pet theories as to why this is a good or bad question, but these are frankly moot because I am confident the hiring developer had no idea what he was testing for with it. He may have a vague "I know the answer, so he should too" mindset, but not much more.

What does this question, presented verbally in an interview really test? A recursive solution sprung to mind, but I can recall implementing recursive solutions in production code only a few tens of times over a ten year career. The question does not test for experience with the technology they are hiring for. It certainly filters out developers who cannot come up with an algorithm while standing at a whiteboard infront of a hostile audience. I could go on, but the biases implicit in this question are as numerous as they are irrelevant.

After a few years in the industry you typically get to work direct with these so-called "top end" consultancies anyway, so you get to know what these kind of questions don't filter for. I can say with confidence and from experience they don't filter for ability to create high quality software.

The thing is, this 'clever' 'does he know recursion?!' question is almost insultingly trivial when compared to the type of problems most development teams face.

Like the fact that although "Joe" has an IQ of 150, he speaks in sentences so impossibly convoluted he may as well be mute. Or "Alice" the sole domain expert, who begrudges her position in some way and will only communicate after you have negotiated the massive chip on her shoulder.

Hell, most organisations can't even provision accurate testing environments and force their developers to run underpowered Windows laptops.

Let's walk before we can run yeah?

A weak piece that, more than anything else, serves to highlight the sorry state of journalism in the paid-for media.

I see no fresh insight in her comments. And this is her full-time job?

The problem is that now this is public, any positive review of a Microsoft product will be viewed with suspicion, having the very opposite of the intended effect.

It was a tongue in cheek reference to the antitrust trial of the 1990s where Microsoft spent millions arguing that IE was inseparable from the core OS.

I highly recommend FireFox, Opera or Chrome instead of IE. IE is perennially around 2 years behind (or more) every other browser (overall - in places they are on a par - and very occasionally ahead).

Of course, they would highlight the complexities of the process wouldn't they? (cough - antitrust - cough)

Does this mean that Internet Explorer can, in fact, be run completely independently of the core operating system?

Because they've got a shit codebase?

Great, so having previously suffered a rash of sites that permanently took up valuable vertical screen space with fixed headers, they now will all have headers that disappear whenever you scroll down and appear when you scroll up, with slightly buggy behavior on iOS. Has anyone considered what non-technical users will think of this UX idiom?

The effect is exacerbated on mobile devices whose browser chrome follows this very same idiom (for arguably better reasons - at least it's not buggy). So you now have two "competing" user interface effects.

Can anyone tell me the company(ies) that designed and implemented this website? They seem to have negotiated a much freer hand with the client wrt design than is typical.

That is not a solved question. There is a lot of evidence that democracy is deeply flawed, but there is no evidence for a better way of organising nations. Indeed there is plenty of evidence that when you take democracy away from people, you get popular uprisings, civil disobedience and ultimately, violence. Given that, democracy should be our first port of call.

Research into more effective forms of governance should continue to be persued.

I omitted to mention the European Parliament for the very reason that it is democratic and is not relevant to my point. The European Commission, a key part of the EU is not elected by the people of Europe, hence it's members cannot be removed directly by the people of Europe and hence the EU as it currently stands is inherently undemocratic.

Given the lessons to be learned from the history of Europe, I find this surprising and concerning.

That is orthogonal to my point. With the current system you get Cathy Ashton and Barroso and the farce that is the Ukraine. If people in positions of significant power are not elected directly by the people then said people have no way to remove them from power. That is not democratic.

The very fact that the EU is designed in this way speaks to the mindset of those in Brussels and while it might not concern you, it concerns me.

If you think there is any truth in this article, then real democracy becomes ever more important as a check on the power afforded the elite.

I note that the European Project (i.e. the slow but relentless move towards a United States of Europe) is a step away from democracy in that the European Commission is not elected by universal suffrage, but appointed, and that rules are made centrally and applied to diverse populations with different priorities.

I think Michael O'Church would have a field day with this one. Particularly the "frustratingly smart" line.

I installed 14.04 yesterday and was unable to get retina support. How do you enable it?

Context is the binary implementation of the Number type. Crockford believes it should be more akin to a fast decimal implementation.

That's a mischaracterisation of my argument. I am blaming the political elites, not the eastern bloc countries (who are blameless). If I had no qualifications and I suddenly no longer needed a masters degree to come to a country with a minimum wage 7 times that in my homeland - I'd be on the first flight there.

Your discussion regarding the situation in France and Germany is pertinent but widens the discussion beyond my narrow point.

Supply and demand is econ 101. If the supply of low wage labour goes through the roof, then wages are compressed for a section of the population (the young and low paid) that can ill deal with the effects.

Now you you might say, "well, we have the minimum wage in the UK" - but there are all kinds of tricks employers will use to circumvent this, and with high supply, they can more easily get away with this type of behavior. Finally, the minimum wage, is not actually a liveable wage for an independent adult in the UK in 2014 (despite protestations, I'm sure), and so offers little in the way of protection anyway.