Star Wars Interviews

There’s all kinds of theories about how to get good programmers. You could separate Sheep from Goats with Jeff Atwood or experience the madness which is Interview 2.0 with extra riddles. Alternatively you could trust yourself to the force with Tech Splurge.

The methodology is simple but breathtakingly effective. When you contact a candidate with perhaps some direction to the interview or a pre-screening test simply append this simple line to the end of the mail

Use it wisely and only for good.

Any true geeky tech spod will immediately recognise the Star Wars-ness of the statement and will not be able resist replying in the same vain. So if the response is a boring old “Thank you for your response and I look forward to seeing you in due course” then I’m sorry you haven’t passed the test and we won’t be pursuing your application. However if the response is permeated with references to light sabres, X-wings and Princess Leila then you’ve found your ideal candidate. Employ immediately.

I’ve already done the ground work and test ran the phrase with developer colleagues and we are talking an impressive 100% hit rate. Every one of them replies with a Darth Vader image, a Yoda impression or some other Star Wars ephemera. It’s eerily effective.

Geek Pin-ups

In the course of general office chit-chat it was asked “who was your favourite childhood pin-up?”. Being a bit of a geek I struggled for any kind of answers and muttered something vague and non-committal. As a mini-child geek I didn’t do pin ups of pop-stars and other such normal, healthy juvenile obsessions. I was too busy sticking paperclips in the back of my Commodore 64 just to see what it would do.

So I got to thinking - what would be the pin-ups of geeks. What should adorn the grey walls of our work pods?

ZX Spectrum

It’s every geek’s first love. Squishy keys, the size of a postage stamp and graphics that give migraines. Hours wasted with our Jet Set Willys. If you’ve every wondered why the average geek doesn’t have a girlfriend until they’re 25 then this probably goes a long way to explaining why.

Space Invaders
Big as a refrigerator, monochrome graphics and 10p a go to you, young fella my lad. If you have just floated your new Web 2.0 company for millions on the NASDAQ then you’ll have a whole room full of these kind of machines. For everyone else, it’s a poster on your cubicle wall and some warm, fuzzy memories of summers spent in darkened rooms playing this. Sunlight, pah, that’s not for geeks.

Mandelbrot Set
It’s like maths but it’s beautiful. It’s numbers with colours. It’s algebra with swirls. Pin it up and then spend hours explaining to colleagues the bizarre recursive mathematics that generates it. Everyone loves a maths whiz (possibly).

C-3P0
The golden translator droid of Star Wars surely deserves a place on every geek wall. The more rebellious geek may opt for the more edgy R2-D2 but I think everyone will agree that hours spend staring at C-3P0 in wonder are hours well spent.

Blog Hero
What geek wall would be complete without a picture of an IT blog hero doing his thing. Mmmmmm – a step to far maybe.

Gordon Brown Loves Developers. It’s Official

It appears that Mr Gordon Brown our beloved prime minister is proposing that we reinflate the UK economy by a massive digital infrastructure programme. Mr Brown has clearly been reading recent Tech Splurge posts and is quite rightly basing his economic policies on my idle technology musings. With this blog as his guiding light we can expect the recession to be a mere blip.

While Mr Brown is in the technology investment zone here’s a five point tech investment plan that can only assist the UK ailing economy.

1. Two monitors for all programmers and designers.


2. Comfy chairs and foot stools for anyone who knows what a complier is.


3. Free StarBucks/Café Nero coffee for anyone even obliquely involved in software development.


4. Dry cleaning service for anyone that can write a bit of HTML


5. Free taxis service for anyone who can tell the difference between a computer and a microwave.

With this forward thinking policy I believe that the UK will be at the forefront of technological innovation and the five point plan is in now way motivated by greed, self-interest and a desperate attempt to get something for nothing.

IT Rudeness

There is a commonly held IT myth that the profession is populated by quiet young gentlemen who like nothing better than to play board games and sip hot chocolate and engage each other in light banter. Nothing could be further away from the truth. IT is in fact a hot bed of sordidness and depravity. Consider the following examples of IT unpleasantness.

1. Fiddling with your URLs
2. Giving your database a serious purging
3. Inserting a probing element into your colleagues web.config file
4. Frigging your application with your project managers full knowledge
5. Wielding your mighty python in your workplace
6. Examining your sockets
7. Giving the application a good hard penetration testing
8. Engaging in a naked ASP.Net midnight romp (that last one might be just me)
   

Far from the cleanroom, clean living, clean coding haven most people believe IT to be. It is in fact a sordid, sweaty, unhealthy and dirty experience. Very dirty indeed.

Note: I tried to find an explantory link for frigging an application by typing frigging into a Google. Predictably this resulted in some genuine rudeness of a non IT nature so I left it alone. Frigging in an IT sense is pretty much synonomous with hacking an application except frigging has more of a sense of 'we really shouldn't be doing this but if you look the other way then I promise not to tell'.

Technology after the Crunch

I was listening to ‘Analysis’, a BBC Radio 4 podcast about the credit crunch. It turns out that giving people six figure bonuses to destabilise the banking system isn’t the best way to run a modern economy. So given that driving the economy via financial services has ended in collapse and misery, the question being asked was what should replace it?

The answer was that we should get back to what we are good at – technology. The argument was that finance has gone too far, other countries do basic manufacturing better and cheaper (admittedly by working children 14 hours a day with no toilet breaks) and we’re not suddenly going to start exporting huge quantities of basic commodities. So technology will be the new driver.

So good news fellow tech nerds. When the dust settles on the credit crunch we will be the new investment bankers. So say farewell to tiny monitors, rickety office chairs and crappy vending machine coffee and say hello to corner offices, chair massages and ludicrous annual bonuses. It’s Aston Martins’ all round. So when I’ve finished delivering a minor website upgrade I see you all in the champagne bar for a 4 day celebration. It’s only what we deserve.

Boring Names

The other evening I was reflecting on past projects I've worked on – as a gentleman often does. When I started work as an IT tadpole I first worked on PEO, graduating to RMS then TMS. I then worked on the CRS Portal, EMISWeb and interfaces to LV and PCS. Lately I have been doing work with BVA, NAO and ePIMS.

Other than suffering under my hand – what have all these applications got in common? Are they all high-transaction wonder apps? No. Are they all shrink-wrapped money spinners? Not that either. Are they all groundbreaking super fast system software? Nope, nope, nope. The real connection is that they all have boring names.

I don’t know if there is something about business type applications that encourages people to give them vague three letter acronym names. Perhaps users of these applications need to be in a sedate state of mind before use so hand them software in a grey box with a vague name. Otherwise hyper stimulation and all kinds of unpleasantness may ensue.

However 7 years of working on apps with generic TLA names is enough. So, starting from tomorrow I’m going to rechristen all my apps. I won’t be working on IPD tomorrow – it will henceforth be called Timux Turbo Polka Fortress Green Hat v5.1. My project manager will be delighted.