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Admin
As soon as I saw the phrase "glowing recommendations from his previous employers" I knew* how this would go. It's often - but not always - shorthand for "they're an arsehole and we want rid of them"
ps, frist.
Admin
I will say again that this made me think of a different Sten, described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sten ... (The Sten I thought of might be useful for disposing of Sten of The Many Girlfriends.)
Admin
Most woman I know value communication skills, it is highly unlikely that the 'girlfriends' existed anywhere but Sten's imagination.
On a different note, asking for a code sample and walking through it during an interview is never a bad idea. Even if someone uses AI to generate the code, as long as it's legible and the candidate knows what each part of the code does, it shows that at the very least the candidate understands what they're doing.
Admin
Most but not all. Live long enough and you will see some crazy people, let me tell you.
Admin
This is what I thought of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sten_Adventures_Book_1:_Sten That Sten certainly didn't have "many girlfriends".
Admin
Hail Sten. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmZkac-XLBc
Admin
That wiki page reads like it was written by a school child. Like for example:
Who talks like that?
Admin
Sten?
Admin
In my years hiring devs I did pretty good at avoiding the wackos. I certainly hired my share of dud performers, but they weren't obviously nutso during the interviews.
Anyhow, the craziest guy we did hire, and who only lasted about a month before we got rid of him ... was named Sten. No kidding. What are the odds? And our Sten was plenty different from the one in the WTF story, so not the same person.
Admin
Admin
What I have come to find over the years is that education is not a substitute for intelligence and does not provide general knowledge. All it does is provide you with niche training in a specific field. Most people, even extreme experts in their field are actually very narrow in their knowledge. And you will find plenty of people with literal PHDs in one field who just can't wrap their minds around something comparatively simple in a related field simply because this is something that newer touched their minds.
In short, people are taught what to know, not how to think. And the population reflects that.
Admin
Which would be ironic considering how poorly girls tend to communicate. Unless you are looking for someone to host a guessing game, in which case girls are great at communicating.
Admin
I worked with a Sten-like person long, long ago. I was the maintainer of a large and rather complicated scientific application, written in Fortran 77. One of the contributors was a very strange man from Ukraine who when he visited us in my country lived on lingonberry jam and cheap boxes of chocolate. This person was the main developer of a large part of the code for really advanced calculations. The code I got from him was awfully implemented pieces of brilliant physics, but the main problem was the comments. The code was full of comments about the physical appearance of female celebrities, like "so-and-so has big ()()" but in plain text of course. He always sent full versions of his code and not just patches, and there was always new comments also in older parts of the code. I spent a lot of time cleaning both the code and the comments.
Admin
I would love to see Sten in a meeting with upper management. Sten knows how to not be invited meetings.
I would hate to have to work on any code written by Sten.