February 9, 2009 @ 23:27
Being a software engineer I feel the need to optimise the crap out of everything. I’m that guy that does the washing up at the same time as he’s cooking, who reads while vacuuming and generally just tries to multi-task as much as possible to make maximum use of my brain at all times. As a result I take the same sort of approach to my relationship with my girlfriend of 6 1/2 years, trying to always become a better boyfriend, improve my communication and help her whenever I can.
As a result of this I’ve taken to sporadically reading relationship-help books and books about the differences between men and women psychologically. The most recent of these was recommended to me by a good female friend; the classic Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
.
The book basically uses the model of two species from different planets interactions to represent the stereotyped (the author admits this) but often valid problems in the interactions between men and women, focusing this book on those in romantic relationships.
I think a lot of the points that John Gray makes are fairly apt, about how men and women respond to their negative emotions (men tend to want to be by themselves, women tend to want a sympathetic ear but not to get solutions to their problems). We didn’t find this particularly revelatory; after a relationship as long as ours you tend to work these things out for yourself.
What I found interesting was that instead of challenging the fact that neither of these slightly extreme reactions should actually be challenged and improved upon (encouraging men to become more open and women to be more pragmatic when upset) John Gray instead seems to imply that you should just learn to accept that a few days a month (his rough estimate) your partner will act irrationally and selfishly and you just need to let them do that to get it out of their system.
I’m pretty glad I didn’t read this at the beginning of our relationship or I think my girlfriend and I would have developed some fairly destructive attitudes towards dealing with our differences. I think understanding these are a key element in improving a damaged relationship or knowing how to better communicate with your partner but I think blind adherence to John Gray’s advice could actually be fairly damaging for a relationship that doesn’t already have problems.
I’d probably recommend reading this book if you are having problems communicating with your partner but if you are happy and both of you are sharing your feelings and honestly and openly dealing with issues in your relationship I’d say it’s perhaps one to miss. Regardless of your camp I’d personally recommend from following his advice to the letter and perhaps strive for a great relationship all the time and moving beyond your biological impulses to try and become a better partner.
Posted in My Life, Random
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September 22, 2008 @ 23:44
So apparently the UK government doesn’t care about a private company wiretapping its citizens and giving them to another company (for money) as long as when they roll it out to everyone they are sure to ask for permission first (i.e. most probably at the end of a huge EULA).
I can’t say I’m surprised but I am pretty disappointed. When it first emerged on The Register that Phorm had been monitoring the internet communications of BT customers I was a BT employee. When it came out that BT outright lied on to those tech-savvy customers who raised the issue my opinions of my employer had sadly dropped to an all-time low.
I’m not someone who believes in publicly criticising the company I am currently working for (partly because the company I work for currently is awesome) and didn’t want to straight after I left at the risk of seeming bitter or unprofessional but I feel it needs to be publicly stated that I did not at any time agree with the actions that were being taken by my current employer and everything negative I found out second-hand and eventually was part of the reason I left.
I’m not sure what the management of BT that thought that Phorm was a good idea were up to at the time but I feel they may need a little reminding that massively alienating a huge portion of your technical user-base is probably not the best way to run an ISP, considering how much influence we have on our non-geeky friends’ technology choices.
As for their “anonymous” technology, if I’m “anonymous” enough for you to be able to track me across multiple IPs then I’m not “anonymous”!
Posted in My Life, Politics, Software Development
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August 10, 2008 @ 13:44
So the first day of Akademy is over and my morning drowsiness has subsided sufficiently that I felt I should inform the one person that reads my blog about the goings on.
Yesterday was pretty fun, saw a lot of great talks and met a lot of awesome people. My particular favourites were Celeste’s usability talk, Peter Siking’s printer dialog usability talk and the Plasma Frenzy (is it just me or does that sound like a scifi themed wrestling match?).
The talks were interesting and I was positive on almost everything that was said. The only thing that slightly twinged my pragmatism was the suggestion that GNOME and KDE collaborate more on underlying libraries. I suggested to the speaker that the reason we hack using GTK/Qt is because they are far, far less painful than writing straight C/C++ and that until KDE is willing to depend on glib or GNOME on Qt I doubt we are going to see a lot of the developers developing cross-DE solutions.
The social event in the evening was a good laugh. Held in a brewery, I managed to make the stupendous faux pas of asking for Stella when they have some stupid selection of local beers there. Whoops. I particularly enjoyed recanting with Riddell the complete list of everything awesome about Scotland and particularly didn’t enjoy being repeatedly whipped in the nipple by Adriaan’s jockey whip (why the hell he has that with him I’ll never know…).
Looking forward to the rest of today’s talks and starting the furious coding on Monday!
Posted in My Life, Software Development
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July 24, 2008 @ 00:26
At my awesome new job I’ve had the luck of giving technical interviews to our software engineering applicants.
I’ve really enjoyed the process and been doing quite a lot of reading from wise people like Joel Spolsky on the type of things that you should and shouldn’t be asking in an interview.
Two of the most important things Joel emphasises are that it is essential to have an applicant writing code in the interview and that you are better to not hire a good software engineer than hire a bad one. Thankfully our judgement has seemed good on the latter as everyone working at Mendeley seem to be not only great people but all of our software engineers (including me!) are really passionate about writing software that is more than just “good enough“.
I’ve found Joel’s first point an interesting conundrum. How should you get people coding in an interview? Obviously I’m not going to detail our exact interviewing process on my blog but I personally believe that getting the applicant to write out a solution to a simple algorithmic problem on paper (while you watch them) is a great way of seeing how they approach a problem, how quickly their mind works and how careful they are with validating their requirements. It’s interesting the sheer variation in the above exercise from people with very similar academic backgrounds and length of experience, even when asked a very simple algorithmic problem.
It’s an interesting experience as an interviewer looking at personally appeals to me about a candidate. This is by no means an exhaustive list or even that all of these indicate a good software engineer but just my own thoughts:
- A very solid technical understanding is obviously crucial. On these lines, however, I think it is important to not oversell yourself. Nothing is worse than someone claiming to be an “expert” in a technology and they don’t have more than a basic understanding of it. If your understanding is basic and you’re being interviewed, that’s ok. Just sell your other attributes. If it was a requirement, you wouldn’t have got this far!
- If there’s one thing I think is the number one attribute in a software engineer it’s the drive to learn new technologies and techniques. If software is clearly more than just a job to you and you are reading software blogs, listening to software podcasts or contributing in OSS outside of work, chances are you are going to take more pride in your work than someone to writing software is just a 9-5.
- No matter how good someone is technically, if they aren’t going to fit in the team then they shouldn’t be hired. The last thing you want is a new member disrupting the social dynamic of a group of people that currently get along. I think everyone wants to work with people that they’d be happy to talk to outside of work so if you’re a likeable person than that reflect well on you.
Also, as an interviewee I’ll share some of what has annoyed me in interviews:
- If you don’t ask me any technical questions, you probably have some software engineers in your team that suck at programming. I don’t really want to work with people like that.
- Please don’t keep me waiting for weeks only to tell me I didn’t get the job based on something that I said in my original CV/cover letter I sent to you.
- If I don’t get a job I want constructive criticism so I can improve myself.
I try to keep the latter points in mind when interviewing people so as not to annoy others as I was annoyed.
I’d be grateful for anyone else’s input as either an interviewer or interviewee.
Let the argument commence!
Posted in My Life, Software Development
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