The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2017-12-19 Reply Admin

Trying to measure the mass of the earth is a fun thing to do.

Radius of the earth is about 40.000 km. That would mean the radius is about 40.000 /23.1415 or 6366 km. I'll admit it, I had to look up the volume of a sphere, it should be 43.1415/3 * (6.366.000)^3. And if we take about 1 liter = 1 kg that's 1080626724089712000000000 kg.

Estimate: 1080626724089712000000000 kg Wiki: 5972000000000000000000000 kg

Good enough but I seriously under estimated the density of the earth.

2017-12-19 Reply Admin

Sounds exactly like by 14 interviews at Google back in 2005, over two days. I am (was) a network engineer, after each coding question or how to estimate the Earths mass etc. I'd say so. It was an utter waste of everybody's time and then 3 1/2 months later they offered me a job in a different city (relocation hadn't been discussed) doing something I didn't want to do, and I'd already started a new job at 30K pa greater salary (OK so the stock would have made up for it...) I've been on the other side of the table plenty too, and mostly made good hires, but a handful of bad ones. Nothing beats 90 days trial, as long as you're actually up for saying goodbye in that time if you need to.

2017-12-19 Reply Admin

I'm just picturing it playing out like this: https://youtu.be/f7sYaxkSfJI

2017-12-25 Reply Admin

Gravity does not exist and the Earth is flat. But of course she does not know that.

2018-02-13 Reply Admin

Assuming 'C', then arrays are zero indexed. So are C++, C#, C, D, Java, The syntax indicates this is a pointer-based language, if we accept the common syntax of late model languages. So, are there any that are 1-nased?

Yes, there are those that follow the more 'human' convention such as Matlab, FORTRAN and Julia, ALGOL68, AWK, COBOL, Lua, Mathematica, PL/I,, RPG, Sass, Smalltalk, Wolfram Language, and XPath/XQuery.

Visual Basic is 1-based by default.

However the syntax would show up differences.

The real problem with 'C' is that it has no intrinsic way of dealing with OutOfBounds exceptions. int a[10]; b = 20; a[b] = 1; That's valid code, unless the compiler has smarts enough to issue a warning.

'C' made sense in the early days of UNIX, a memory and CPU cycle starved machine with a simplistic compiler needed a HLL that was just above machine code and easy to 'translated'. People still make the argument that this is needed for the kernel, but that was disproven even before the days of UNIX. Per Brinch Hansen demonstrated this with the PASCAL based OS on the RC4000 machine back in 1967.

Today, we have machines that are so much faster than they had in the 1960s and 1970s that it boggles the mind, and we have interpretive languages such as Python, PHP and Perl and Ruby that can run web services servicing hundreds of clients faster than the single machines of the 1960s could serve a single user with hand optimized assembly code.

Some people, some managers, seem hung up on machine code efficiency and the number of lines of code programmers can produce a day, when the real issues are the quality of the service delivered to the client. That takes a focus on the UI and on the reliability of the product to deliver the service.

2018-02-19 Reply Admin

Unfortunately that's a very common experience for a UI interview. Tech interviewers generally have no training at interviewing, they just have their own experiences being interviewed, which were mostly by other people with no interview training.

Interviewers ask questions that they know the answer to. If they only know technology A, they ask questions about it even if the position will only use technology B. In the event that the interviewer googled something to ask using technology B, if the candidate's answer differers at all from the googled answer (such as explaining fine points or edge cases) the interviewer might think the candidate is wrong.

The rationale for having interviewers who don't know technology B is that they are checking for "cultural fit". There is a belief that in half an hour, each interviewer will be able to vett the candidate's pertinent "ist". For example, if a woman interviews the candidate without obvious issue, the candidate is not a sexist. On the flip side, I have walked into an interviews and felt instant dislike, and will never know if it's because of my gender, age, or other character characteristic such as resembling someone they know.

2018-04-04 Reply Admin

All you need to find the mass of the Earth is a barometer.

Find someone who knows the answer, then tell him, "I'll give you this barometer if you tell me the mass of the Earth."

Done!

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