"The question to ask is, 'How do I determine, in 30 to 60 minutes, if this person can do the work we need..'" - ACM Queue

The true goal of any interview is for both parties—the interviewer and interviewee—to work out whether the person can do the work and is a good fit with the rest of the group. There are many brilliant programmers out there whom I would never hire because the detrimental impact of their character defects on the rest of the team would outweigh their abilities as coders. The question to ask is, "How do I determine, in 30 to 60 minutes, if this person can do the work we need, and in a way that I can put up with him or her for 10 hours a day, five days a week, and possibly for years on end?" That's a lot to ask of such a short meeting.
via queue.acm.org

"It's harder to read code than to write it." - Joel Spolsky

There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:

It’s harder to read code than to write it.

This is why code reuse is so hard. This is why everybody on your team has a different function they like to use for splitting strings into arrays of strings. They write their own function because it's easier and more fun than figuring out how the old function works.

via joelonsoftware.com

Highly recommend you read the entire article at joelonsoftware.com

UBS: "a suburban location has become a liability in recruiting the best and brightest..." ☛ NYT

Fifteen years ago, New York City’s reputation as an international financial center was called into question when the giant Swiss bank UBS moved its North American headquarters to the Connecticut suburbs, where it built the largest trading floor in the world.

...

Now, though, UBS is having buyer’s remorse. It turns out that a suburban location has become a liability in recruiting the best and brightest...

via nytimes.com

Another example of quick iterations to get to a solution: "You Are Solving The Wrong Problem"

You Are Solving The Wrong Problem « Aza on Design

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/

The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did...

(via Instapaper)


Sent from my iPad 2

"The key to building a great game is rapid iteration... There is no magic formula..." ☛ Andrew Brownsword

The key to building a good game is rapid iteration... There is no magic formula that makes a great game.  What you want to be able to do is try things rapidly. By trying things rapidly, you get to experiment with what works better.  There is a rule of thumb that says... "The more times you can iterate, the better" and that means speeding up interation time.

- Andrew Brownsword

via Software Engineering Radio

Recommended: Marissa Mayer quote from "In the Plex" by Steven Levy

"If you look at the arc and growth of content over time ... In 1995 there were 3 million web pages on the web and they could be hand categorized into categories. Which was Yahoo.  At some point the content just begins to explode which means the directory model has to fall by the wayside because you can't categorize everything, all the way, all the time and that is what really gave rise to search. ... When content gets large you need to search.   But now the web  is so vast you need different organizing tools in addition to search in order to see different aspects of it.  I think that social is something really important there.   What content have my  friends written? Or people I know and respect, what have they written? What have they liked? What have they read themselves?  Those pieces help to make sense of this vast sea of information that is the web."

Sent from my iPad 2

"The Difference Between the Janitor and the Vice President" ☛ Steve Jobs

Interesting view from Jobs in todays "Inside Apple" from Fortune...

Jobs imageines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets and excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn't have a key.  This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living.  The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong.  Senior people do not.  "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incomping VPs, "reasons matter."  He continues:  "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop  mattering."  That "Rubicon," he as said, "is crossed when you become a VP."

via Inside Apple -- Fortune