When I was a kid, we used to quote completely made up statistics to each other – “people spend two years of their lives at stop signs!” And if it wasn’t TRUE, then it was at least true, in that much of life was outside our control, spent waiting in line at the grocery store, […]
Author Archives: Dan
Circus Manager: How long have you been juggling? Candidate: Oh, about six years. Manager: Can you handle three balls, four balls, and five balls? Candidate: Yes, yes, and yes. Manager: Do you work with flaming objects? Candidate: Sure. Manager: … knives, axes, open cigar boxes, floppy hats? Candidate: I can juggle anything. Manager: Do you […]
So, it’s time to retire my interview question. It feels like people are doing better on it than they used to (Glassdoor?), and frankly, I’ve asked it so many times that just walking into an interview room is enough to make me want to start chewing my own arm off. Still, if I’m going to […]
Early on during my tenure at TripAdvisor, I had the good fortune to sit in on a talk by the VP of Engineering, in which he went through a lot of the nuts and bolts of technical recruiting. He talked a bit about the interview process, how to find candidates, and the kind of candidate […]
There’s a big difference between a master mechanic and the guy at Jiffy-Lube who knows how to change your fluids; assembly language, C, C++, Java, and Lisp programmers; command line and GUI users; kernel programmers and Linux users. I’ve been using various flavors of *nix for the better part of 30 years, but as I […]
It seems like forever ago that I took on my first team at TripAdvisor – I was working with two junior engineers (both of whom had more experience with the codebase than I did), some tools and forum code, just muddling my way through. Almost five years later and I’m responsible for six teams, with […]
It’s spring career fair season. At most schools, the fall career fairs are dominated by graduating seniors and masters students looking for full-time work. During the spring the balance shifts, and the majority of candidates are freshmen and sophomores who just got started in their majors, don’t have prior work experience, and are looking to […]
Back in January, I started in on an exercise schedule with monetary penalties for missed workouts. In February, I added a restriction against late night snacks. I’m happy to report that things have continued to go well, with nary a missed workout or unapproved nosh. I haven’t been able to motivate myself to bank any […]
You wouldn’t think that it would be necessary to write a blog post about this, but I’ve found that when people are looking for ways to demotivate, demoralize, and otherwise just piss off their coworkers, they sometimes need that extra little oomf. You know, a way to kick things to another level, to push it […]
Some people just can’t catch a break. It’s never their fault, but things just seem to go wrong around them. Projects spin out of control, bug counts skyrocket, hardware breaks, people quit. Whenever you look at a specific problem, there’s always a good reason – the scope was increased, the agreed-upon technology turned out to […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 