In a blog post, Joel Spolsky talks about the mathematical inaccuracies associated with claims of “only hiring the top 1%”. It seemed pretty obvious to me that whether or not you’re hiring the top 1% of all programmers is pretty much unknowable, and when managers say they hire “the top 1%”, I assume they’re talking about the top 1% of their applicants. Note too that I always thought it was idiotic to point this out, because, well, isn’t that what you’re SUPPOSED to do? You’re not very well going to aim for the middle & hope for the best are you?

Apparently I’ve been giving too much credit to management. There I go giving people with ties on the benefit of the doubt again.

Then, in another blog post, Jeff Atwood talks about how it’s very difficult to even get interviews with programmers who can actually program. The problem is real.

The original blog post that pointed me at the two others is one by Roberto Alsina where he talks about his own methods for weeding out the non-programmers. He’s clearly seen the issue as well.

But if you open all three of these posts in separate tabs and read them, you’re likely to come away with the same basic problem I did:

• Who the hell are these managers who can’t figure out a dead simple statistics problem?
• How can a person fairly inept at simple math be qualified to make a hiring decision for anything but a summer intern?

That sorta blew my mind a little. But it blew my mind a lot when Atwood started describing the problems that interviewees *couldn’t* perform in an interview! One task described by Imran was called a ‘FizzBuzz’ question. Here’s one such question:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.

Here’s the part that blew my mind: He says, and I quote:

Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes.

Want to know something scary ? – the majority of comp sci graduates can’t. I’ve also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.

That’s amazing to me. I decided to quickly pop open a Python prompt and see if I could do it:

>>> for i in range(1,101):
...     if (i % 3 == 0) and (i % 5 == 0):
...             print i,'FizzBuzz'
...     elif i % 3 == 0:
...             print i, 'Fizz'
...     elif i % 5 == 0:
...             print i, 'Buzz'
...     else:
...             print i
...

Note that I’ve taken the liberty of printing out the numbers in addition to the required words. I’m playing the role of interviewer and interviewee here, and wanted to be able to easily verify that things were correct, since there was no time for unit testing

Turns out it worked on the first try! That was pasted directly from my terminal screen. I didn’t time myself, but it took far less than 5 minutes. This leads to my other question, of course, which is “if you’re going to complain about CS degree holders not writing good code, maybe it’s time to open the doors to non-CS degree holders?”

I know this is my geek blog, but geeks have kids too, so first I want to announce the birth of our second daughter, Sadie, who was born on September 15th. She’s now over a month old. This is the first time I’ve stayed up late enough to blog about her. Everyone is healthy, if slightly sleep-deprived

New Job!

The day before Sadie’s birth, I got a call with an offer for a job. A *full-time* job, as a Senior Operations Developer for MyYearbook.com. After learning about the cool and very geeky things going on at MyYearbook during the interview process, I couldn’t turn it down. I started on October 5, and it’s been a blast digging into all of the cool stuff going on there. While I’m certainly doing my fair share of PHP code review, maintenance, and general coding, I’m also getting plenty of hours in working out the Python side of my brain. I’m finding that while it’s easier switching gears than I had anticipated, I do make some really funny minor syntax errors, like using dot notation to access object attributes in PHP ;-P

What I find super exciting is something that might turn some peoples’ stomachs: at the end of my first week, I sat back and looked at my monitors to find roughly 15 tabs in Firefox open to pages explaining various tools I’d never gotten to use, protocols I’ve never heard of, etc. I had my laptop and desktop both configured with 2 virtual machines for testing and playing with new stuff. I had something north of 25 terminal windows open, and 8 files open in Komodo Edit.

Now THAT, THAT is FUN!

The projects I’m working on run the gamut from code cleanups that nobody else has had time to do (a good tool for getting my brain wrapped around various parts of the code base), to working on scalability solutions and new offerings involving my background in coding *and* system administration. It’s like someone cherry-picked a Bay Area startup and dropped it randomly 30 minutes from my house.

My own business is officially “not taking new clients”. I have some regular clients that I still do work for, so my “regulars” are still being served, but they’ve all been put on notice that I’m unavailable until the new year.

New Car!

I’m less excited about the new car, really. I used to drive a Jeep Liberty, and I loved it. However, in early September, before Sadie’s arrival, it became clear to me that putting two car seats in that beast wasn’t going to happen. The Jeep is great for drivers, and it has some cargo space. It’s not a great vehicle for passengers, though.

At the same time, I was running a business (this was before the job offer came along), and I was finding myself slightly uncomfortable delivering rather serious business proposals in a well-used 2003 Jeep. So, I needed something that could fit my young family (my oldest is 2 yrs), and that was presentable to clients. So, I got a Lexus ES350.

I like most things about the car, except for the audio system. It seems schizophrenic to me to have like 6 sound ‘zones’ to isolate the audio to certain sets of speakers, but then controls like bass and treble only go from 0 to 5. Huh? And the sound always sounds like it’s lying on the floor for some reason. It’s not at all immersive. The sound system on my Jeep completely kicked ass. I miss it. A lot.

Other News

I’ve submitted an article to Python Magazine about my (relatively) recent work with Django and my (temporarily stalled) overhaul of LinuxLaboratory.org, and my experiences with various learning resources related to Django. If you’re looking to get into Django, it’s probably a good read.

I’ve been getting into some areas of Python that were previously dark, dusty corners, so hopefully I’ll be writing more about Python here, because writing about something helps me to solidify things in my own brain. Short of that, it serves as a future reference point in case it didn’t get solidified enough

My sister launched The Dance Jones, a blog where she talks about fitness, balance, dance, and stuff I should probably pay much more attention to (I’m close to declaring war on my gut). Also, if you ever wanted to know how to shoulder shimmy (and who hasn’t wanted to do that?), you should check it out

1. Command-line-fu: this is a repository of handy one-liners submitted by pretty much anyone. You can log in with OpenID or register on the site itself. I expect this, or something like it, will become a great resource. You can browse the sweet one-liner goodness, or “grep the archive”. Nice.
2. Down for Everyone or Just me? is a site that’s handy to know about if you’re, say, holed up in a hotel room, forgot to set up port forwarding on your FIOS router, and so don’t have a remote shell to test from, and you can’t reach a site. Pop the url into this site, and it’ll test access for you. Of course, it’s limited — it’ll change url’s with “:22″ to “%3A22″, so you’re not going to get it to be a generic service tester, but still… handy!

Enjoy!

I have to use IE – it’s my internet!

IE is not your internet. IE is what’s known as a web browser. There are lots of different web browsers. IE just happens to be the one that comes with Windows. It doesn’t make it a good browser or anything. It’s just there in the event that you have no other browser. If the only browser on your system is IE, the first thing you should do is use it to download Firefox by clicking here.

If IE is so horrible, how come everyone uses it?

They don’t, actually. There was a time not too long ago where over 90% of internet users used IE. However, with the constant flood of security issues (IE usage really should be considered dangerous at this point), IE’s horrible support of web standards (which makes it hard for web developers to create cool sites for you to use), and its inability to keep up with really cool features in modern browsers, its share of the internet usage market has been declining steadily over the last couple of years. In fact, this source puts IE usage at around 45% currently, so not even a majority of people use IE anymore, if statistics are to be believed. Accurate statistics for browser use are difficult to nail down, and are probably more useful to discern a trend, not hard numbers. Still, the usage trend for IE is moving downward, steadily, and not particularly slowly. If you’re still using IE, you’re almost a dinosaur. Just about the entire tech-savvy world has migrated over to Firefox, with small contingents choosing Safari (Mac only) and Chrome (Windows only). Very small camps also use Opera and Konqueror.

This is also not to be trusted, but it’s my opinion based on observation of the IT field over the past 10 years: of the 40% of people still using IE, probably half of them are forced to use it in their offices because they don’t have the proper permissions on their office computers to install anything else. The other half probably just don’t realize they have any choice in the matter. You do. There are other browsers. I’ve named a few in this post. Go get one, or three, of them.

Will all of the sites I use still work?

It has always been exceedingly rare that a web site actually *requires* IE in order to work properly. Your online banking, email, video, pictures, shopping, etc., will all still work. The only time you might need IE around is to use the Microsoft Update website. In all likelihood, you’ll be much happier with your internet experience using something like Firefox than you ever were with IE. Think about it this way: I’m a complete geek. I use the internet for things ordinary users didn’t even know you could do. I bank, shop, communicate, manage projects, calendars and email, registered and run my business completely online. It’s difficult to think of a task that can be done on the internet that I don’t use the internet for, and I haven’t used IE in probably 8 years, and have not had any issues. If you find a web site that absolutely, positively CANNOT be used UNLESS you’re viewing it with IE, please post it in the comments, and I’ll create a “hall of shame” page to list them all, along with alternative sites you can access WITHOUT IE, which probably provide a better service anyway

I’m not technical enough to install another browser.

Who told you that?! That’s silly. You installed Elf Bowling didn’t you? C’mon, I know you did. Or what about that crazy toolbar that’s now fuddling up your IE window? Or those icons blinking down near the clock that you forgot the purpose of. At some point, you have installed something on your computer, and it was, in all likelihood, harder to do than installing Firefox would be. It’s simple. You go here, click on the huge Firefox logo, and it presents you with super-duper easy instructions (with pictures!) and a download. It takes less than 3 minutes to install, and you DO NOT have to know what you’re doing in any way or be geeky in any way to install it. If you can tell whether you’re computer is turned on or not, you’re overqualified to be a professional Firefox installer.

I Like IE. I have no problems with IE.

Whether you realize it or not, you have problems with IE, believe me. I had a cousin who said he had no problems with IE too. Then he came to my house one day, knocked on my door, and when I opened it, he handed me a hard drive from his computer. He said that all of his pictures of his first-born child were on there, and his computer had contracted a virus, and he couldn’t even boot from the hard drive. So it was up to me to recover the only pics he had of his only son being born. True story. Turns out, I tracked down the virus on the hard drive, and it was contracted by IE. Also, it wasn’t the only virus he had. If you think you’re safe because you have antivirus software, you’re sadly mistaken. He had it installed too, but it hadn’t been updated in 6 months, so any viruses released since the last update weren’t recognized by the antivirus software, and were allowed to roam freely onto his hard drive.

There has never, in the history of browsers, been a worse track record with regards to security than IE. Never. I promise – but you’re free to Google around for yourself. Half of the reason antivirus software even exists is purely to protect IE users (though email viruses are a problem independent of what browser you use, admittedly).

The other reason you might say you like IE is because you’ve never used anything else. As an alternative, I strongly suggest giving Firefox a shot.

Why do you care what browser I use?

I’m a technology guy. I’m one of those people that would work with technology even if he wasn’t being paid. Some people care about cooking, or quilting, or stained glass, or candlemaking, or knitting, or sewing, or horticulture, or wine. Heck, my mom cares about every single one of those things! Me, I care about technology, and I care about the internet. I want the internet to be a better place. Browsers play a non-trivial role in making the internet a better place. Also, one reason I care about technology is that it helps people do things they might otherwise be unable to do. Browsers enable users to do great things, and it allows us developers to make great things available to you. But when countless hours are spent trying to make things work with IE, it just slows everything down, and you don’t get cool stuff on the internet nearly as fast as you could.

So, it’s less about me caring what browser you use. In fact, I don’t really care if you use Firefox or not, it just happens to be the best browser out there currently. If you want to try something completely different, I encourage that too. It’s more about me caring about technology, the internet, and your browsing experience.

Working in academia for 6 years also exposed me to people who are firing up businesses, or projects that accidentally become businesses, and some of those go nowhere, while others seem to be on the verge of NYSE listing now, while a year ago they were housed in the smallest office I’ve ever seen, using lawn furniture for their workstations.

Of course, I’ve also consulted for, and been interviewed by, a host of other startups – recently, even.

First, the bad news

The bad news is that most or all of these startups are headed by developers, and they have applied *only* dev-centric thinking to their startup. They’ve thought about how to solve all of the app-level issues, mapped out use cases, drawn up interfaces, hacked together prototypes, and done all kinds of app-level work. Then, they’ve hired more developers. Then more after that.

Some seem to have given almost zero consideration to the fact that their application might become successful, and its availability might become quite critical. They haven’t given much thought to things like backups or disaster recovery. They have no plan for how to deploy their application such that when it comes time to scale, it has some hope of doing so without large amounts of downtime, or huge retooling efforts.

They’ve also given very little thought to how to enable their workforce to communicate, access their applications and data remotely without huge security compromises, and generally provide the back end system services necessary to run a business effectively (though, admittedly, most startups don’t require much in the way of things like NFS, or even internally-hosted email in the very beginning).

In short, they’ve either assumed that systems folks’ jobs are so easy that it can be handled by the developers, or they think that scalability lives entirely in their code, or they’re just not thinking about system-level aspects of their application at all. And don’t even get me started about the databases I’ve seen.

I know of more than one startup, right now, months late in going live. None of them, at the time I spoke to them, had a systems person on staff, or a deployment plan that addressed things that a systems person would address. What they had was a lot of developers and a deadline. Epic fail.Yes, even if you use agile development methodologies.

The Good

The good news is that, while some companies hire no systems folks at all and flounder around system-related issues forever, others hire at least one or two good systems folks, and make them a part of a collaborative effort to solve systems problems in interesting ways, utilizing the knowledge and experience of both systems and development personnel to create truly unique solutions. When sysadmins and developers collaborate to solve these issues, I have learned that they can create things that will blow your mind (in a good way).

In fact, Tom Limoncelli wrote recently that systems administration needs more PhDs. Well, I suppose that would help, but I think we’d get really far, really fast, if we could just break down some of the walls between sysadmins and developers, give them a common goal, and let them hash it out. Sysadmins have an understanding of the system and network-related issues that developers aren’t likely to have. Developers, in most cases, can probably write better code, much more quickly, than a sysadmin. Developers and sysadmins working together, sharing their knowledge and communicating with each other, can solve systems problems in new, unique, creative, and very effective ways.

The End

In the end, issues facing startups now blur the line between development and system administration a bit more than in the past. There are problems that need solving for which there is no RPM or Deb package. These problems require some knowledge of how related or analogous problems have been solved in the past. A knowledge of the systems and development approaches that have worked, and why. Enough experience to have seen where and when things go bad, and why. It also requires creative and critical thinking. I think that good, senior systems and development people have these skills, and much more.

For whatever reason, it seems that the only time these two camps ever meet is on opposite sides of a deployment or application support problem. Perhaps this happens with enough frequency for people to think that the two camps can’t, or won’t, work together. They can, and they will. People with a love for technology will come together if the common goal involves furthering technology and its use, regardless of their background. Sure, it takes proper management like any other project, but it can be done.

If you’ve had experiences, good or bad, with dev/sysadmin collaboration, I’d love to hear your stories!