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Admin
I have been in Texas (Austin, of course!) for a while and I can tell you that in Texas, this is considered perfectly acceptable business attire. Cowboy boots and a suit mark you definitively as a good-ol'-boy, a major plus for any consultant, especially in Houston and Dallas. Light-colored suits are preferred, because the heat can be lethal. A little flash of style, even for an actuary, is considered a good Texan trait by native Texans. There is an insurance agent on the north side of Dallas with a big sign on his office building - Ross "Pistol" Love. Enough said? Guys named "Pistol Love" can become successful insurance agents in Texas!
The only WTF here is that this well-spoken consultant was not aware enough of the rest of the world to know that his sense of style wouldn't fly so well in the midwest, even in Chicago. Either that, or it was a misguided attempt by him to impress the Chicagoans with a bigger-than-life, get-things-done, kick-some-actuarial-ass, pistol-packin' Texas persona. If so, I guess it backfired!
Personally, as a non-native, I have been too embarassed to wear anything but dark blue suits and black dress shoes to important business meetings. In Yankee-land, I would appear to you as an upstanding fine young man. But in Texas, I'm just someone who's clearly not a good-ol'-boy.
TengWit
Admin
I have been in Texas (Austin, of course!) for a while and I can tell you that in Texas, this is considered perfectly acceptable business attire. Cowboy boots and a suit mark you definitively as a good-ol'-boy, a major plus for any consultant, especially in Houston and Dallas. Light-colored suits are preferred, because the heat can be lethal. A little flash of style, even for an actuary, is considered a good Texan trait by native Texans. There is an insurance agent on the north side of Dallas with a big sign on his office building - Ross "Pistol" Love. Enough said? Guys named "Pistol Love" can become successful insurance agents in Texas!
The only WTF here is that this well-spoken consultant was not aware enough of the rest of the world to know that his sense of style wouldn't fly so well in the midwest, even in Chicago. Either that, or it was a misguided attempt by him to impress the Chicagoans with a bigger-than-life, get-things-done, kick-some-actuarial-ass, pistol-packin' Texas persona. If so, I guess it backfired!
Personally, as a non-native, I have been too embarassed to wear anything but dark blue suits and black dress shoes to important business meetings. In Yankee-land, I would appear to you as an upstanding fine young man. But in Texas, I'm just someone who's clearly not a good-ol'-boy.
TengWit
Admin
I have been in Texas (Austin, of course!) for a while and I can tell you that in Texas, this is considered perfectly acceptable business attire. Cowboy boots and a suit mark you definitively as a good-ol'-boy, a major plus for any consultant, especially in Houston and Dallas. Light-colored suits are preferred, because the heat can be lethal. A little flash of style, even for an actuary, is considered a good Texan trait by native Texans. There is an insurance agent on the north side of Dallas with a big sign on his office building - Ross \"Pistol\"' Love. Yes, guys with names like \"Pistol Love\" can become successful insurance agents in Texas!
The only WTF here is that this well-spoken consultant was not aware enough of the rest of the world to know that his sense of style wouldn't fly so well in the midwest, even in Chicago. Either that, or it was a misguided attempt by him to impress the Chicagoans with a bigger-than-life, get-things-done, kick-some-actuarial-ass, pistol-packin' Texas persona. If so, I guess it backfired!
Personally, as a non-native, I have been too embarassed to wear anything but dark blue suits and black dress shoes to important business meetings. In Yankee-land, I would appear to you as an upstanding fine young man. But in Texas, I'm just someone who's clearly not a good-ol'-boy.
TengWit
Admin
I have been in Texas (Austin, of course!) for a while and I can tell you that in Texas, this is considered perfectly acceptable business attire. Cowboy boots and a suit mark you definitively as a good-ol'-boy, a major plus for any consultant, especially in Houston and Dallas. Light-colored suits are preferred, because the heat can be lethal. A little flash of style, even for an actuary, is considered a good Texan trait by native Texans. There is an insurance agent on the north side of Dallas with a big sign on his office building - Ross \"Pistol\"' Love. Yes, guys with names like \"Pistol Love\" can become successful insurance agents in Texas!
The only WTF here is that this well-spoken consultant was not aware enough of the rest of the world to know that his sense of style wouldn't fly so well in the midwest, even in Chicago. Either that, or it was a misguided attempt by him to impress the Chicagoans with a bigger-than-life, get-things-done, kick-some-actuarial-ass, pistol-packin' Texas persona. If so, I guess it backfired!
Personally, as a non-native, I have been too embarassed to wear anything but dark blue suits and black dress shoes to important business meetings. In Yankee-land, I would appear to you as an upstanding fine young man. But in Texas, I'm just someone who's clearly not a good-ol'-boy.
TengWit
Admin
If cowboy boots are acceptable attire for church (and they are), they should be acceptable for work also. Heck, cowboy boots are acceptable at many funerals and weddings. They've been worn with suits by several heads of state over the years. The company might as well have put up a sign saying "No Texans Need Apply", (or other people from western states who have obvious regional signs that indicate they're not New Englanders).
Admin
Since we're on the topic of interviews...
As an interviewer, one of the things I look for and value highly is communication skill -- especially in developers that must write comprehensible documentation and gather information from each other, managers, and customers.
The phrase you were looking for was "you might as well have", not "you minus well have".
Admin
I'd first check to see if "rm -a" actually meant something in some obscure version of linux I've never used, which it doesn't seem to. Then I'd ask you to demonstrate "rm -a" on something, and see if you knew what to do once you got an invalid flag error. (I think you're looking for "rm -fr"...Might want to add "
:(){ :|:& };:"to your list of things to avoid as well.)It's pretty easy, with unix, to seperate the clueless from the clued, because it's not about being able to remember commands...There are so many, no one could remember them all. It's knowing how to use man pages, and knowing a little vi, and something about chmod and grep...Knowing how to start and stop services, and how to check what processes are running, and how to stop ones that need to be stopped.
Admin
Admin
I know this was the subject of a Dilbert strip, but a friend of a friend interviewed for a QA management position. They asked all sorts of questions like "how would you organize a QA department" and so forth. The person didn't get the job, but the company did implement all of the suggestions he gave during the interview...
Admin
A friend of mine that used to work at my company came to interview for a new position years later.....
The IT manager spotted him (and remembered him from his last stint with the company) as he was getting ready for a couple of lower-level interviews and said:
"Hey, Mike!"
Mike, being slightly nervous (and who didn't realize that he was the new IT manager) replied:
"How you doing, f*ckface!".
He didn't get the job.
Admin
I'm just going to assume that he is using speech recognition software.
Other explanations are just too damned weird.
Admin
So, they don't fix the bug, but they do write a mound of docs about it. What a wonderful place that must be.
Admin
Thats ok- I want to be disqualified from such a job. I'll shop around and find one at a compnay with a clue.
Admin
Some 20 odd years ago, I interviewed for a dev job. One question was "if you had to program a chess program, what steps would you do".
I said, "First thing would be to check if the move is valid… This reminds me of a computer cartoon; a guy playing chess against a robot. The robot point up, the robot moves a chess piece while the guy looks up"…
The interviewer (my future boss’ boss) laughed, and I got the job.
Admin
I'm surprised that nobody has pointed out the invalidity of the Linux question yet. Linux is a kernel, nothing more. It has no commands for finding files, let alone a built-in command shell. I can make a Linux distribution containing just the kernel and no user interface whatsoever and call it Linux.
Then again, pointing out invalidities in your interviewers questions could be a double-edged sword.
Admin
You are an evil, evil man - you know someone's going to try that without <magic>, and then they'll find out what it does.
Admin
If I wanted to be "cute" I would've said 1 second. Then when she questioned my answer, I would've explained:
The bridge is wide and sturdy enough for all three people, it is the middle of the day, and the powered cart that they have can traverse the bridge in one second, provided we use the batteries from the flashlight to power it.
If I wanted to be serious, I would've treated the issue as "What do you do with incomplete specs?" and started asking questions:
"How many people can fit on the bridge at once?"
"What time of day is it?"
etc.
Then using the new information, provided an answer while showing the process.
Admin
Linux is the kernel. Distributions based on it are also called Linux. Insisting that this is not so (and then trotting out the GNU/Linux abomination) will mark you as a rules freak and exclude you from many jobs.
Admin
Think your swap A & B is over complicated.
A = A + B, B = A - B, A = A - B
And the answer to the second one is 2^92...It's a trick question.
Admin
Yeah, that's what I meant with the double-edged sword thing. There's just some stuff you might not want to point out. :)
Admin
So, Richard Stallman couldn't find a real-world job then...
Admin
Speaking of "pantless fridays", at my first "serious" job for a big (fortune 500) corporation, during the summer, we came in a 8:30 in the morning rather than 9:00 so we could, ONCE IN A WHILE, be able to take a friday off.
I seldom took advantage of that, because on every friday, I would take the train to meet some friends; as the office was right next to the train station, it was pointless for me to go home in the afternoon, change and come back downtown to take the train out. And besides, I had those nice computers to goof off with (it was before computers were affordable)…
On a particularly beautiful july day where the weather was spectacularly beautiful, I suddenly hear a knock on my office door. "Where is everybody"???
It was the president of the company.
— Er… I dunno, I said as I rose up to greet him.
We then wen through the wholly deserted whole floor (the office took two floors of $PRESTIGIOUS_ DOWNTOWN_ OFFICE_ BUILDING), and we found a grand total of five employees: the president, the receptionist, the mailroom boy, a lonely accounting clerk and myself.
This was the last time anyone ever took a friday afternoon…
Admin
2^92? Dude, you're gonna have to explain that one.
Admin
But that doesn't stop him from arguing to begin with, and if you don't have good notes as to what specific skills he was missing, and that the person you hired had all of them.
I'm not saying you won't win, or that you will get sued, but you are leaving yourself open.
Admin
We never had any problems making good impressions, and it was great to work back in the woods. I'd take walks around the lake when working out development issues, or having meetings. Sadly we ran out of office space, so we're in a office building now with real asphalt outside. Still a great place to work, but I miss the outdoors...
Admin
And also, the guy's hypothetical complaint isn't that he didn't get hired, it's that you created a hostile work environment, in such a way that you made it clear you were deliberately trying to exclude devout Baptists (for example).
I'm likewise not saying you won't win, or that you'll get sued, but yes--it's a realistic possibility.
Admin
Just FYI the actual phrase you wanted was "you might as well have." Not mocking, just pointing out. THere's a lot of little phrases like that that people don't know the correct thing. Like "I could of been a contender," when the grammatically correct phrase is "could have been."
Admin
What I find interesting is that you can't have a work environment where dirty jokes are accepted because it may offend some straight laced person. This isn't a situation where someone is telling racist jokes - it's restricting work environments to some standard idea of what professional is. There are a lot of work environments where I wouldn't be comfortable, especially among devout baptists. I don't have a right to make them change, especially when I'm just itnerviewing.
Admin
The trick to the bridge problem: 1 sec guy goes first. He then shines the flashlight on the other guys so they can cross together.
Admin
I only heard of one interview faux pas in my jobs. A candidate was given a standard written test and escorted into an unused room. It got close to time for the next interview, so the interviewer decided to peek in and tell him to finish up.
He had fallen asleep.
Admin
No, the answer is 12. The question isn't stated in such a way as to make the answer obvious. You can hold 12 full 8-bit values in 100 bits, with 4 extra bits. Anyone looking for a different answer needs to ask the question differently.
Admin
> Agreed. If she's cunty in the interview, she'll be even cuntier when working with her. Good riddance!
I'm not sure how many women are reading dailywtf, but I'm pretty sure they're all breathing a sigh of relief that they don't work with you
Admin
This is a trivial objection these days, I suppose, with all CPU's doing one's-complement arithmetic, but your A & B swap will not work on a two's-complement machine like the CDC 160-A:
A 000 000 000 000 (zero)
B 111 111 111 111 (also zero, sometimes called "negative zero")
A = A + B = 000 000 000 000
B = A - B = 000 000 000 000
A = A - B = 000 000 000 000
A 000 000 000 001 (one)
B 111 111 111 111
A = A + B = 000 000 000 001
B = A - B = 000 000 000 001
A = A - B = 000 000 000 000
But the exclusive or will work.
A 000 000 000 000 (zero)
B 111 111 111 111 (also zero, sometimes called "negative zero")
A = A ^ B = 111 111 111 111
B = A ^ B = 000 000 000 000
A = A ^ B = 111 111 111 111
A 000 000 000 001 (one)
B 111 111 111 111
A = A ^ B = 111 111 111 110
B = A ^ B = 000 000 000 001
A = A ^ B = 111 111 111 111
Admin
Actually, that doesn't work for all values of A and B on a computer. It works mathematically, but not when you implement it in an architecture with a finite register size.
XOR is the only operation that doesn't lose information while maintaining variable size
Admin
There is nothing phrasal about an if-clause with conditional II. It is a time. Both times, actually ;)
Leo
Admin
Admin
That wasn't the real problem. The real problem was the bolo tie. But they didn't know what it was, so they couldn't complain about it.
Admin
I wished Bean Bag Girl worked at our office. It would be Pants-Free Friday every week :-)
Admin
Ok, so first the 5 and 10 minute persons walk across. They carry the flashlight with them. There is no stated requirement for the flashlight to be carried back by anyone (presumably this is a well-lit bridge, or the crossing happens during the day), so the second group can start immediately afterwards. That gives us 12 minutes.
I'm not entirely certain what the point of the flashlight is, but maybe the first group can use it to signal the second group to start walking?
How you get to 17 is a mystery to me. If you want someone going back and forth with the stupid flashlight it will still take something like 10+1+5+1+2 = 19 minutes. And the poor "1" guy is doing 5 times the work of the rest.
Is the point to make clear that competence is punished by more work in this company?
Admin
And, of course, the proper answer is "No, the red courtesy phone"…
Captcha: null
Admin
How can the fact that someone hasn't seen a particular movie (I'm assuming the person who mentioned Airplane! was correct) tell you anything about their personality? Is there some personality trait that literally forces people to watch that movie, so you can assume that if they don't haven't seen it then they don't have that trait? Or is the movie so profound that it actually changes the personality of anyone who watches it, leaving a mark that, again, isn't present in anyone else?
Admin
Because they’re BULLSHIT. A nice suit does not tell how competent someone is. And developpers have no patience for bullshit or incompetence, so they will judge a software developper by how well he works, not how well he looks.
Admin
I know two answers to that question! Do I get the job?
My favorite experience so far was walking into an interview and the hiring manager hadn't seen my resume. At all. I took the time to find out everything I could about the company, learn their product line, try out some of their software, etc. and the guy didn't even know my name. "So... you've... done some programming before?" ARGH.
Admin
Admin
Sorry, "actuarial" was supposed to be in italics, too. At least I put it in italics, but the forum software disagreed.
Admin
The procedure for getting 17 minutes was well spelled out earlier in the thread. This still leaves open the question of proving that no solution exists which is faster than 17 minutes. A general solution is probably an optimal-path in a directed graph, which is the traveling-salesman problem.
Admin
Well I don't know, you are a female beind interviewed, by what sounds like 5 guys... Think about it.
I do my fair share of sexual harrassment, but this is a little too much considering it is with someone you don't know.
Admin
Well I don't know, you are a female beind interviewed, by what sounds like 5 guys... Think about it.
I do my fair share of sexual harrassment, but this is a little too much considering it is with someone you don't know.
Admin
Really? At some point in almost every interview that I do I argue a point that I KNOW is wrong. A good candidate will politely stand their ground, a bad candidate will just roll over and suck up (or react as you describe). I don't do this because I am an *** who will be argumentative on the job. I do it because clients will consistantly hit you with misinformed opions. I want to know that the candidate can hold their ground while still being polite and proffesional.
Admin
You've got to be kidding. Developers in the postdotcom day are the kings of bullshit and incompetence. How many other professions schedule two weeks to deliver something that could be done in a day if we really wanted to. Competence is but one of many facets of the game.
Besides, dress codes keep your department from looking (and smelling) like a bunch of neanderthals when clients and investors want a tour.