Anyone else suffering trying to work with the new VAT rules? It's insanely complicated! Made a bit of a mistake in writing my own software to do all our accounts (I maintain it's not a big mistake still though!) and implementing these new rules into it is really quite bloody hard

My company is looking for people who can use Excel. I end up with two kinds of applicants: office workers who only used it as a glorified notepad with visualizations and people who have some background / interest in CS. Most of the latter are either students or people who claim to have 10+ years. Neither group would be able to do equations. The majority of my coworkers either has a education in CS, CE, math, engineering, etc. We don't really care too much about anything. We look for problem solvers. We can teach anyone with a decent brain.

Most of the CS applicants are uh... can I say comical? The best are the mind-dumps of 1800 programming languages that often stand in stark contradiction to either other. I don't really care either way, but listing all this stuff sort of indicates bull****ters, so I can move on.

I called an applicant who seemed to have a decent background, currently going to school for CISM. It isn't a bad degree for the job, so I pick up the phone. As I'm walking through the experience, I look back up at the skills section and see this:

C+ (sharp)

"Yeah, we learned that language in school."

-- Right on. I never heard of that one. What is it used for?

"Well, you know, websites and stuff."

-- Uh huh.

"I mean, actually, it is called C++. Have you heard of that?"

-- So, it's actually called C++ sharp?

"No, it's C++ and C#. I just put them together as one language because they are the same thing.

-- They aren't the same thing.

"My teacher taught us they are the exact same language, so if you know one, you know them both."

-- You're kidding me. Your teacher told you they are the same language?

"Yes."

-- That's... astonishing.

"Well, my professor has [long impressive background]"

-- I don't know what to say...

"Well, that's what he taught us."

-- I hope not!

"You mean they are different?"

-- They are totally different.

"Well, maybe I misunderstood him."

re: listing tons of languages. How mush should one know about the language before listing it at all?

Listing tons of languages is a big red flag imo.

If you want to put lots on, separate them into categories, maybe something like:

Highly Experienced in...
Working knowledge with...

I would imagine it would be like listing foreign languages on any resume: put the ones you can, at minimum, have a casual conversation with, and note the ones you know really well.

saw this article on HN about why it's important to get answers wrong. Had me thinking about test-driven development.

At least for Ruby on Odin Project, they have you do some tdd in rspec (i think). It's definitely nice to be able to get all green tests, ensuring that your code does whatever it's supposed to correctly, but do many/most/some test environments also encourage you to test what happens when something goes wrong, to make sure your code can handle invalid input or whatnot?

It's obviously important to verify that your code does what it's supposed to when it's getting the correct input, but it seems almost as important to check that it's doing what it should when it doesn't get correct input.

dave you won't like the answer but I think for Excel jobs the best strategy is to get someone fresh out of college and just train them. You're basically looking for someone who is willing and able to learn quickly and not scarred of math.

I know a major German cooperation that does it even more extreme. They intern college students with that profile, get them up to speed in a week or two and after that they basically do a ton of complicated stuff already. Plan is usually to hire them upon graduation, mostly controlling and market analysis kind of stuff with Excel.

Having to interview people for an "excel" role sounds like another circle of hell.

If you can't have a 5 minute conversation about what you've done in it/what you know how to do in it then you shouldn't list it imo. If you interview with enough companies you will eventually be asked about everything you have listed. I know someone who listed nodeJS on their resume when they haven't even gone so far as making a "hello world" nodeJS app.

I think this works in the general sense for the kinds of jobs these people are applying to. A long list of languages look impressive to a non-technical person. Surely, I'd have fallen for this trick 5 years ago. Only a handful of people were actually able to talk intelligently about that stuff when I brought it up with them. While it is totally irrelevant to the job, I enjoy making some conversation and it is something I like talking about. Talking about this, hobbies, and other things kind of helps all of us get into a relaxed state.

This is pretty much what we do. The Excel stuff isn't that much to know, but the rest of the job is extremely difficult to train for. It is one less thing to worry about. There have been plenty of people who applied who had no experience with the stuff and I've trained them. All of us that work there didn't know that much excel when we first started. I'd bet not a one of us knew what a vlookup was before we started.

The job itself involves way more than Excel. I can teach someone to copy / paste. The problem is that the job has a steep learning curve. The fastest I ever trained anyone was about 6 weeks, but this was when things were not very complex. My current assistant was under my training for 3 months, and he learned everything pretty fast.

Reality is we look for a few traits, mainly honesty, the ability to think on your feet, and a certain fearlessness. We probably have the most difficult application process you'd ever have for this level of work, but we have a very low attrition rate as well.

Interviewing is a terrible process no matter what.

Yes bolded is correct.m

It's called "fuzzing". It's the more important of the two sides of testing in ITSec for obvious reasons.

Incredibly impatient and very bored. Can't get my Java teacher to fess up to what books I'll need next semester, so looking for something to do in the meantime.

Taking JavaScript this coming semester, so I was looking for something oriented around that. Did the full JS track on codecademy, but didn't feel like I had any clue what to do with the language at that point. Does something like this sound more, uh, all-encompassing?

http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-l...ript-properly/

Your guide is probably fine. Did you check out the in-depth javascript/jquery portion on Odin Project? http://www.theodinproject.com/javascript-and-jquery

I imagine you'll want to look through this at some point, but it might not be until after your course. http://addyosmani.com/resources/esse...patterns/book/

this is a terrific book for learning javascript if you want to learn the new es6:

https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix

it will teach fundamental functional programming concepts, and has an emphasis on truly understanding how the language works. it's comfortably paced, clearly written, and free to read online.

most of the concepts apply to pre-es6 js as well, but the examples use es6 syntax like arrow functions, etc.

also this is a great video by douglas crockford, especially his warning that classes are the single worst mistake in es6:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGEjv3Tqo0&t=5m

One thing I will mention is the book that article lists for "advanced javascript" is more of a reference text. I haven't actually gone over the whole thing, but based on what I have read I would say that a vast majority of the stuff in the book are things you will never encounter/need to know.

I kinda got hung up doing an alternative version/path through odin and got lost in the middle of ruby, somehow. I did all of codecademy's JS and about half of jquery, but I just didn't get how it all integrated together with webpages or the back end.

think 'integrated' was the word i was looking for earlier.

Anyway, thank you guys for the links and ideas, I'll have to pursue those.

I've been trying out Fedora. I have to say I'm quite pleased with what I have seen of it so far. It strikes a good balance between Archlinux and CentOS, IMO. Where Archlinux has no baseline configs (not even sudo by default), and CentOS is just bat**** by default, Fedora comes prepackaged right in the middle.

It is also much faster, cleaner, and smaller than *buntu, where 99% of the programs pre-installed are things I haven't felt the strong urge to uninstall.

Even though RHEL added systemd to Fedora, they haven't totally removed SysV either, so you can kind of get the best of both worlds.

From what I've seen, the configs you'd install have great defaults that are much easier to deal with. The dependency packaging is much more robust and complete, and includes all you'd need to get things to just work. While I get the argument of YAGNI, it is nice to not have to stop every 5 minutes to find that one thing...

I don't have an opinion of dnf over yum yet. I think they both have their pluses and minuses. Semantically, yum just feels better to use and is a bit easier to use, but perhaps I'm not quite familiar with dnf yet. Searching something like postgresql* in yum results in things that begin with postgresql and not FTS like dnf. I think CentOS yum loses a lot of ground by not coming with the latest and greatest without the Fedora packages, plus I recall it requires a bit of upfront configuration that I didn't enjoy finding out.

Unfortunately, Fedora is not at the amazing level of documentation found on Archlinux. I still use the Arch docs to figure out how to config many things. Nothing else comes close to the coverage and accuracy.

Installing tarballs is much easier and straightforward than either Cent or Arch. I hate RPM installs and I haven't had to use it on Fedora yet, so not sure how that will end up working out.

I'd definitely consider Fedora beginner-friendly. It looks nice, has a slick interface, and is easy to use. Unlike other linuxes I've used, it doesn't come with a ton of bloatware, won't wreck your VM, and I can't think of a single time I had to search for some obscure item to get stuff to work. It just takes care of things for you.

Best JS advice: read up on JS6 now and only use that. Default module system alone is worth it.

Also "Functional JavaScript" (O'Reilly) is one of the better books I've picked up in the last couple of years (uses _ though). It's a bit dense and kind of hard but well worth it.

I'd basically recommend "Eloquent JavaScript" -> Crockford talks (specifically part 3, see below) -> Some "JS6 is awesome" summary blog post -> "Functional JavaScript"

Whaaaat? ES6 while cool is not at all practical for anything outside of personal projects i.e. stuff that doesn't pay. Learn jquery.

Is that a joke? I can't tell lol

What's the deal with recruiters posting jobs dealing with iOS and then asking specifically to email your resume in Word.

What's the hate with PDF?

Javascript purest is hip.
Gotta watch out for virus embedded in those pesky pdfs

Pages saves to Word format, what editor are you using to create your resume? Vim + Latex?

They want to take your resume, remove your name, add details that you don't have, and then send it to hiring managers as "sample candidates" to get reqs.

Or they want to take your resume, and put it in their style, because that adds tons of value and clearly justifies a 25% fee.