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Admin
So she wants a young (and attractive) male so she can hook him, get married, get pregnant and have her first child so she can ask to work parttime?
Admin
The fact that a stupid manager works in IT doesn't make their quirks "curious perversions in Information Technology", but "normal perversions in Management Thinking".
How many times must various commenters repeat this before you bring in only the clever, fun pieces, rather the rants about stupid bosse?
Admin
8B -> 73 -> 69 -> 72 -> 66
(Linked list, 8B is 2's complement of the least significant BYTE )
Admin
Admin
We don't need a piece a day if it means having the rants from disgruntled ex-workers, rather than gems. Do you? I sure don't.
Admin
Women hate hiring other women, news at 11.
Admin
You keep flunking these submissions, and every time I give you a comment, you send back some stupid message about whether or not I should post up more of these management-type submissions. I’m not asking for your opinion, you arrogant little worm!
I don’t know, it's just courtesy, I guess. Now will you get out of my way and let me run my website, my way?
Admin
TRWTF is why Judith has not been dismissed from her position for breaking every single possible anti-discrimination law in the book. Or is TRWTF that Chris didn't act as the dessperately-needed whistleblower?
Admin
You win.
Admin
Nice, perfect way of resolving the problem. Let the idiot sink in their own shit. Make sure you also tell the rest of your team to start looking for a decent job where they won't get the cruel and stupid treatment.
Admin
Complete agreement. Hopefully (assuming the story is based on some reality) he did as part of his exist, at the very least.
Admin
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Only if the graviton beam is polarized. Sorry Remy I canna change the laws of physics.
Admin
Of course HR is just as likely to say who cares unless it can be proven which is nearly impossible. But yeah what a maroon Judith must be to blatantly discriminate.
Admin
Asked as it is (without some restriction), even a complete dummy should be able to produce some pseudo code.
With the restriction it's part of the "Swap two integers without using a third variable" group of interview quetions.
CAPTCHA uxor. u xor some bits to achieve this...
Admin
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OR the deflector dish is quantum entangled with a flux capacitor working in reverse mode to generate the neutron flow. Go back to Physics 101, kid.
Admin
so where are the java gurus? there must be an internal information about string handling.
basic structure must be:
typedef enum stringstatus { MIDDLE, START, END, FILE_NOT_FOUND }
struct string { char currentCharacter; string* nextChar; stringstatus status; }
with this internal structure one can just add a "backpointer"
sobilly is right
Admin
Except that in java a string is just a char[]. So there's no quick way to reverse it.
Admin
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new StringBuilder(string).reverse().toString();
Define "quick"
Admin
Such easy questions are needed because dummies can't answer them. In fact, they should be asked because around 90% of CompSci graduates are not able to answer them. There are enough blog posts in the web that state the same. Just search for "Fizzbuzz" or "Why can't programmers program".
This is something that I've seen for myself. We were 24 students that graduated in applied computer sciences (basically software development) and only about 7 people could program AT ALL... I still don't understand how they could successfully study for more than 3 years and not create a single running program.
Admin
if (str.length() == 1) return str; else throw new FileNotFoundException();
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Of course I've heard / read the stories but so far I haven't met wanna-be programmers that bad in the wild.
Although I must admit I haven't been on the employer's side of the interview table so far...
Admin
Oddly enough, StringBuilder also uses an array internally. Calling reverse on it does an in-place array reversal with some logic to handle multibyte utf-16.
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Lol.
Admin
The answer you were looking for is "That is an illegal reason to not hire someone, and you could be exposing the company to serious legal charges just for expressing that concern."
Of course, it's a big plus if you got her to put that into writing. If not, it'll be an uphill battle to prove anything when she fires you. On the plus side, it'll probably be easier to successfully argue that your firing was unjustified than to prove that the decision to not hire Lisa was made based on illegal reasons.
Admin
Also - Occam's Razor: which of these stories do you think more likely: a) candidate couldn't do a simple programming task, and tried to bluff it by regurgitating those bits of his course he could remember. b) A HR professional - not only completely ignorant of employment law on discriminatory practices, but happily admitting it - is also allowed to overrule the technical lead in an interview on a technical question, causing the technical lead to resign.
Clue: The first one happens all the time. The second one is somewhere between quite implausible and totally made-up.
So, Remy, or submitter, which bit is true?
Admin
I'm even more annoyed than usual with the editing of this story, because actual useful knowledge --- American vs. European maternity leave --- is hidden in the comments.
Admin
Because Paula cannot be everywhere, so 17 fresh people are to do the same great work.
Some CS exercise are the same from last year, so fraternities will gladly provide the answer. Or the older year's students for some money too.
And often they are done in team (of 2 or more): a team needs only one programmer, everything else is either noise, parasite or pretty documentation.
Admin
Judith being concerned about the woman getting married is hardly a WTF. A key developer going on leave for a year has the potential to destroy a project's viability.
Whether it sets off your PC sensitivities or not, the fact of the matter is that young, fertile women are much riskier hires than young, fertile men. Judith was just being brutally honest.
But the rest of the story is a complete WTF on Judith's part.
Admin
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TRWTF is that I was actually asked to reverse a string in a job interview once - because that comes up some often in real world programming.
Admin
I see both as similarly plausible. The first one isn't really much of a story as it is mostly that some candidate started spouting out bits of technobabble when he was fronted by something he didn't know. The second is hardly all that unlikely given a mildly backwards company with an underinvolved HR, where the manager (who is not an HR professional, and is likely undertrained with respect to legal hiring practices) decides that she has her own ideals for what she wants for her own [s]interests[/s] team.
I suspect that they were two different submissions that were glued together. Either that or they were both made up
Admin
As the head of a developer team, my boss expects me to fill any open positions. I've seen the need for easy screen questions like this more times than you can count.
Admin
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In fact, just because Lisa mentioned her pending marriage and later wasn't hired, even if Judith never asked her about it and the information was simply volunteered, Judith needs to carefully document some legal and justifiable reasons for not hiring Lisa, or she'll end up looking very guilty if Lisa does come back with a lawsuit.
Admin
Yeah, well that's just HR, CYA kind of stuff.
Admin
It's worth mentioning that there's always the potential to get a candidate who drops bits of information about a legally protected status during their interview specifically so that they can sue you if you don't hire them. Or just because they don't really want to work for an insufferable asshole boss who begrudges the lawfully-required reasonable accommodations they require, so they want to sound out your reaction when they mention it. Documenting good reasons for hiring or not hiring provides you a healthy measure of CYA.
Admin
One of my favourites was a candidate for a C# position who thought that composition in object oriented programming was using partial classes (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/wa80x488.aspx)
Thankfully that was a phone screening so I got it over with as quickly as possible.
Admin
Admin
The real WTF is that due to PC oversensitivity, you're not even allowed to ask the question. In my view it's perfectly legitimate for an employer to ask 'are you planning on having kids soon?' (both to men and women), just as you can ask 'do you have any holidays already booked?'
(Hopefully the employee will realise that them taking 6-12 months leave will be inconvenient to the employer. If they don't care, then that shows something about the employee's attitude).
But, because you can't ask, it just means that ALL young women are 'silently' discriminated against - even if they have no intention of having kids, or even can't.
The discrimination may not be as overt as Judith's, but it is there.
Admin
I always ask candidates to reverse a string. It's normally the first technical question I ask, and the questions get progressively more difficult, but about a quarter of the people I interview can't perform this trivial task, and it's a good way to terminate that interview early.
Question 2 is generally to ask them to print out all the unsigned integers from the highest possible down to 0. Some things that go wrong here:
I'm not anal about whiteboard code. I don't care if you use printf() without #including stdio.h I don't care if you miss a semicolon at the end of a line. I do care if you use an int when I asked for unsigned ints though because your code's logical structure doesn't do what I asked.
I've asked that loop question over 100 times. Maybe 5 people have got it right first time. 5. [sigh]
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There's an easy way to fix problems like this. Just pay women less in direct proportion to the statistical risk.