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Admin
Nomination for this award: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b9/MagrittePipe.jpg
Admin
for x=Amount of water (in gallons). 1[<]x[<]infinity. Correct and just as relevant to the job as the question.
Admin
+1 For mentioning a famous Belch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Magritte
Admin
Been waiting to see when Initech will offer Carlos a job now that he has amassed a great deal of knowledge about the Amazon
Admin
An interesting argument for not working for HP. Mind you, this is the company whose white papers leave you quite unsure of what the product does, even if you happen to be familiar with the application area.
It is of course remotely possible that a company which cannot explain in one sentence what it does is simply doing something so clever that it has a huge first mover advantage. But wait...it's a marketing company. Scrub that.
Admin
http://famousbelgians.net/picts/poirot.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e2/Tintin_and_Snowy.png
Admin
That would make a +3 then when we include the dog ...
Admin
But in that instance you only care about order of magnitude.
If you're estimating the flow rate because you need to fill a container within x time, you need to know a little more than 100 or 1000.
Sorry, still not convinced in Fermi estimates. Most of the people giving estimates here already know the answer, or know enough about the amazon.
I would have never ventured the amazon was 100km, or it was so many miles long. I have no idea about these scales.
Admin
Would you accept “longer than 1m and shorter than a light year” as a valid bracketing of the length of the river? OK, it's a ridiculously wide band. Let's make it tighter.
We know that the Amazon is one of the greatest rivers on Earth, so we can probably get away with a lower bound of 1000km, and we know that the circumference of the Earth is about 40,000km and we're smaller than that. Oh, we're starting to get better bounds. What about taking the geometric mean of that? (The geometric mean is really neat for some things, especially where the things you're averaging are still of fairly different orders of magnitude, such as you'd expect from Fermi estimation.) A little calculation says that's 6324.555320336759km (ridiculous precision, yeah); call it 6300km.
A search online indicates that the Amazon is 6992km long. Fermi estimation and a geometric mean got us in exactly the right order of magnitude and to within 1 significant figure. Damn, that's actually good! Better than I expected…
Admin
Man,
I didn't know that Earth was 40,000km circum.
So, where do I start if I don't know that.
This is my point. Not that Fermi doesn't give you better estimates, but that Fermi doesn't do any good if you don't have any knowledge of related facts. And whereas you can google these facts, you can't do that in a closed office.
Fermi dropped a piece of paper and had intimate knowledge of forces and their effects.
The average programmer won't have those facts from an unrelated field at their disposal in a locked room with only a piece of paper.
Maybe if you asked them to estimate the O(x) of an operation based on glancing at code.
Admin
FTFY
Filed under: sig figs
Admin
That's actually a piece of measurement history (and some trivial geometry). The original definition of the metre was one ten-millionth of the length of the distance from the north pole to the equator along the meridian of Paris. They got the measurement wrong, but it's pretty close, especially at the scale of Fermi estimation. 10Mm = 10000 km. Multiply by 4 for the circumference — that's the geometry — and ignore the fact that the Earth is an oblate spheroid. ;)
Knowing that the Amazon is longer than 1000km isn't too hard. I remember that charity runners in my country often do things like running from one end to the other, and that's somewhere on the order of 1000 miles (random fact from the news). I also know that Brazil is bigger and contains the majority of the Amazon, and that miles are longer than km. So I've got a lower bound. Again, it's about knowing a bunch of basic stuff and silly things from news stories — general education — and putting them together to get an estimate (perhaps a little creatively, I admit).
Remember, we're looking to get a bracket on the sort of figures we're talking about. So we make some wild-ass guesses and then see if we can do better. It really doesn't take long. The geometric mean trick is a neat way to pick a representative value from the range when you've still got at least an order of magnitude between the values, where a normal mean would overly skew things to the upper end (the geometric mean is really a normal mean in the log domain ;)).
Admin
Still going to disagree.
I found no use for trivia in school and promptly forgot anything I found uninteresting outside of my profession.
Some people have the capacity and interest to store trivia. I don't think having the lack of that capacity is somehow a ethical problem like everyone makes it out to be.
General education. I can easily debate its usefulness. Any attempt to dissuade me, I just view as nostalgia.
Admin
How boring of you.
Admin
Yes, cous when I'm entertaining, I totally roll up to a group jammin on cocktails and blarg out, "Doest thou knowest the amazon, if stretched outeth, is X% of the circumference of the Earth".
And they be like, "Cheerio, good host. Thou art the awesome!".
Admin
and then you tip your fedora to the good m'ladies?
Admin
No, I be rocking a hoodie and a vest, with gold teeth and a monocle. A diamond tipped cane, and Jordans.
They call me the baller bowler.
So, I pull up my hood, bow, and wink with outstretch left arm holding out a westside sign.
Admin
:swoon.txt:
Admin
Exception: Failed to find "ladies" class.
Admin
heeeey! :angry:
;-)
Admin
And when you don't know what "right" looks like, vaguely, to your end users, because their jobs are different than yours, you'll screw something up without noticing. "I'm a programmer, I don't know that negative numbers in accounting are red and parenthetical! I wouldn't know the difference!"
Admin
That's why requirements gathering is important.
Or do you suggest that the programmer doesn't talk with the customer and design software using divination.
Admin
Yeah, but let's be realistic: the users are never going to know all of what they want. If you have some idea what they're looking for and what it would look like, you'll be able to prompt them for things they've forgotten.
Admin
That's why you involve project managers. They take gibberish and convert it into technical specs, which you then convert into working code.
Post-script disclaimer:
Admin
You kids and your newfangled toys
Admin
Project managers are useless at this sort of thing, or should be.
Admin
That's why you have requirements and contracts on those requirements. You come to an agreement.
Trust me, the software doesn't have to work. I've worked on throw away projects before.
How can you expect me to know in detail what you don't even know? And then, what's the liability if I am wrong about what I tell the customer.
The ideal world is one in which we work together and come up with software that works, and we implement it incrementally until it works as the customer desires.
But legal liability screws all that up.
Plus real life costs screw that up too.
Admin
No, a tech writer / system analyst comes up with the requirements from the gibberish.
A project manager manages the costs of the project and keeps the team from over or under reaching the contract. This assures the contract is fulfilled and the team doesn't waste cost on tasks the customer hasn't paid for.
Admin
I've had a few that were amazing. They knew exactly what to ask the customer, and exactly what to give me. It was a small enough company that they were called "project managers" instead of the more apt titles that @xaade mentioned.
I miss them. :grimacing:
Admin
Around here, the main job of the project managers is to lie about the project schedule.
Admin
Or as the one project manager I ever worked with liked to do, "here's a bar chart showing project % complete and % not complete and the total of those two things".
Admin
But..... that adds up to 80%
Admin
No, the charts actually worked--IIRC the complete/not complete bits were off a Gantt chart or whatever MS project or whatever it is uses. So you'd see "37% complete, 63% complete, 37+63=100% complete bars", the latter being a stacked one, in every status update.
Admin
Technically, you just need someone on the project who can do that. It's usually me, when I'm on the project.
Ah. I'm at the opposite of that, where a program manager needs to deal with contracts and regulations and zzzzzzz....sad;fkljsadf;lkjsd...Sorry, drifted off. I stay as far away from program management as possible.
Admin
That's one of the things I specialise in for us. (That and debugging the undebuggable. :smiley:)
Admin
Well, sure. Fermi estimations can be accurate enough, if for some reason you happen to know values for every part of the equation.
Admin
Reminds me of the Drake equation, now that I think of it...
Admin
[image] source
filed under: THEY MADE ME DO IT!
Admin
If I had managers working for me, I would fire one who ever used the phrase "cultural fit" in a positive manner. What it really means is that he's incompetent and puts his own likes and dislikes over the needs of the company.
Admin
The people who apologize are generally not the ones who deserve most of the blame.
Admin
Awesome. Expresses everything I've ever observed about the interview process.
Admin
You are a fucking idiot. I can tell because you are speaking about something completely out of your realm of experience. When a person says: "If I had managers working for me", it leads me to believe that they have never supervised anything at all.
Admin
FTFY
Admin
Using "cultural fit" in a positive is different than saying "they wouldn't fit" as a negative. I took his statement as it being a neutral or assumed thing.
Admin
I took it as he needs to keep quiet when the grownups are speaking. ;)
Admin
You should be aware that “cultural fit” is hellishly important. Some people are just jerks, and you don't want them about (but then who would?). Other people are nice enough, but they disrupt how the team works even though they don't mean to. You don't want them around either, even though you don't wish them any harm, and they may well fit well somewhere else.
For example, if they're someone who thinks that nerf battles are the greatest thing ever and that people who object are just spoilsports who need to loosen up, putting them in a team who think that's all childish BS will not work well. It's not that people don't want to work, it's that the newcomer will not fit and will not be happy with the not fitting either.
Admin
Not to mention that, no matter how talented a person might be, if they are a corrosive influence they are not worth having around. If a massively talented person drags the rest of the team down with their attitude, you need to shitcan the massively talented person. People need to be able to work together and mesh well.
Admin
You need to keep quiet when intelligent people are speaking.
Admin
Intelligent people wouldn't go in a discussion here, so we're immune to such nonsense.
Admin
I'd like to think that assuming both the nerf-battler and the serious-businessers are good, tolerant people - it shouldn't be a problem to pair them up. They might not agree too much with each others' hobbies or behaviour, but they'd understand them and will be able to effectively work together despite this and maybe even because of this.
I mean I know I'm wrong, but that's just something I'd like to think.