I am in the cultural fit is BS camp. I work with men and women from across the world ranging from their early 20s to there 60s. I think the diversity of backgrounds does not hinder the work. If my workplace tried to optimize for cultural fit I think I we would find suddenly find the workforce is a bunch of dudes in there 20s with the same interests.

If someone gives huge red flags of course don't hire them. But beyond weeding out obvious red flags I don't think it is too useful.

Yeah I think we're on the same page here - I guess one meta point I was trying to make that I'm not sure was communicated well is that how words are interpreted matters. At a larger company, you cannot personally interview everyone so the only thing anyone can do is to create a framework, a set of guidelines that interviewers can follow and a hiring system that relies on a larger number of interviewers working under the same framework. And I think it's in this sense that "culture fit" is harmful. Because even if what works really well in general, like what we discussed, reduces to one possible interpretation of "culture fit" there are simply too many ways it can be interpreted that are extremely harmful. I think you're more focused on what you can practice personally and certainly it's possible to interview well with "culture fit" in mind but I think talking about "culture fit" without a focus on a specific set of values is highly problematic because it's just not a good guideline for interviewers.

yeah fair point

i never mentioned a lack of diversity. just bc culture fit can be used as a smokescreen for racism or agism or whatever doesn't mean the concept implies those things. and it's literal meaning does not. one can have, eg, a culture of diversity, and reject candidates perceived as too conservative

I have a question for anyone who knows about windows and networking.

My work PC has a company machine listed under 'network'.

I have a few questions.



I looked in the event viewer logs and found that the company machine is RDPing to my work PC regularly.

If I type netstat into cmd the machine shows up. If someone RDPs to my machine while I'm using I believe they
can't see my desktop as if I'm sharing it like with say skype or teamviewer but could see all the files, browser history etc?

How can I be monitored exactly? I'm using personal skype for work and personal chat; we all are. The people I work with are in my skype contacts and we either skype about work or about personal stuff depending.

I log into my personal email as well, but never saved the password but that doesn't matter I'd imagine. They could get my personal gmail password if they wanted by me being simply logged in?

If there is a pc listed under network it generally means that the PC is simply enabled for network sharing with other PCs. Usually just means files/printers.




Are you sure it's RDP? I thought that protocol was reserved for remote desktop. There may also be RPC which is totally different. Do you have any mapped network drives to that machine? That could explain why it's showing up in netstat.

There are instances where remote desktop sessions can share screens using Windows remote assistance or terminal services monitoring in a large remote desktop farm. You would have to approve the session for a remote assistance session. Otherwise you are correct that rdp doesn't not perform screen sharing.

Well if your company doesn't own the chat and email services you're using then I would guess the best they could do is traffic monitoring (assuming you're using their network). Either way I'm fairly certain they should make it clear to all employees what sort of monitoring they do.

Not sure how Google sessions work to keep you authenticated but I would doubt any reputable company would intentionally do this to get your personal email password.

I don't think my current workplace could be more dysfunctional. Our dev and production environments have been down since Friday with no end in site. Getting paid $$$ to sit on my deck and smoke cigars.

You would not fit in my company.

Idk how much you guys like pixel stuff but I thought this project was pretty cool:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mBdo75DtO0

Got an intro tech video call interview tomorrow. How much time do you guys spend going over the company history, background etc before the first call? Outside of being prepared to answer why you want to work at company X, is there anything else you guys really go over?

That is kinda cool.

Welp, I'm in S. FL and it looks like we are all gonna die so... it's been real, programming forum.

1/2 hour max. Never been asked "why do you want to work here", is that a thing?

It sounds like you're in a position of some authority at least. I report to a team manager who has what I refer to as 'selective hearing'. After explaining to him on at least 4 occasions that we can't do what he wants (I'm one of the UI guys. the most competent backend guy backed up my position) he created another task over the weekend asking if we could do that same thing. In case you are losing track let me sum up :

1) After lots of investigating I told him we could not do what he wants without subqueries (which are super super slow). I don't think he's ever written a query that had a subquery in it.

2) I told him on 4 different occasions after investigating possible solutions that we could not do what he wants without some big changes to our current db schema

3) He presented my possible solutions in a meeting with one of the most technical people in the company.

4) That person thought my first solution was the best (the one that my manager instantly rejected)

5) Fast forward 2 weeks or so I get assigned a new task asking if I can do the exact thing we discussed in the meeting (with the technical person) that WE CANT DO. I kinda wanted to explode when I saw it. It's literally like he somehow completed ignored what everyone around him was saying while being conscious. So ****ing ridiculous.

I was given a yearly raise that I expected, but the amount is bigger than I expected or would have asked for on my own if I had to (RSUs are included in that, but the new ones start vesting in November). Am I supposed to still try to ask for more?

I have no justification other than "if you're paying me this much, I'm worth more to you". I was perfectly happy with pretty much everything even before the raise.

Note that unless somebody presents a pretty compelling case here, I probably won't ask for more. Would need to have my case made by tomorrow morning.

Yea that's a thing. 1/2 hour is still good though, probably even less unless you actually do find yourself getting interested in reading more about the company. 5 minutes scanning and coming up with true or manufactured reasons why you're excited is likely fine.

Dunno about native/mobile but one of my "things" is I never tell anyone no re: UI/front end stuff on the web. Anything can be done - it might take some effort but as long as you have the data and the time you can make anything happen on the front end with very few exceptions. The latest one I can remember was someone wanting a "typeable" html select/option dropdown like this was just something magic built into html i.e. a select element that fuzzy filled in from what you typed.. no. But there's jquery plugins for that!

I think you are misreading my post for some UI thing he wanted. I was given a backend task which I was only able to solve with subqueries which are *very very slow*. Despite that, he still seemed to think some 'magic' solution existed. He still seems to think it because even after it was discussed with a backend guy *FAR MORE* competent than me in that area (that agreed with me), he creates tasks hoping to find some magic solution!

fwiw, while you guys may be right, two developers, even including a senior one, feeling certain that something is impossible is not strong evidence that it is. unless something is provably not possible and you know it (eg, we know that certain problems cannot be solved in less then O(n^2) time), you just set yourself up for a pie in the face when you say that it is.

you're better off saying that you (and so and so) don't know how to do it, and suspect it may be impossible, but are willing to investigate further or seek outside consultants if it's really important, even though you think there's a good chance it would be a waste of money or time or both.

The feeling I got when I told him I didn't think it was possible to do what he wanted efficiently with the current db schema is "Craggoo is not smart enough to figure it out". And then my position was reinforced by someone who *only* works in the backend code. After all that, he still thinks that I'm wrong.

I have told him that "given your limitations, I feel very strongly it is not possible to do what you want while maintaining the response times we have". You might as well be trying to explain physics to an ant. At least the ant might listen to everything you say. My manager seems to ignore anything he doesn't understand / doesn't conform to what he thinks.

A few days ago, he thought i was purposefully ignoring an error in the ui. I tried to explain to him that what I setup did not ignore errors. I even offered to show him it (a simple if-else loop). He would have nothing of it. He literally did not believe me until one of the backend guys confirmed that "yes, [that] case you are describing does not result in an error". He literally had to be shown actual logs before he would believe us [the group] that it was not actually an error. The lead engineer (eric) then explained why it was not an error. Like... everyone in the room except my manager understood (he didn't). I tried to explain it in another way (still didn't understand). I said "I'm outta here. Good luck Eric". Some time later when my manager returned to the UI office I asked him "Do you understand now?" I get the feeling that even though he answered yes the real answer was no otherwise he wouldn't still be creating tasks for it.

Man I am glad our managers leaving engineering tasks to the engineers.

Its a seriously dysfunctional world we live in where the blind lead the not blind

Craggoo;

On one hand, I totally get the frustration of having to deal with a non-tech manager. Can't be easy.

However, there is nothing written in stone that says a backend engineer is a master of black magic (SQL).

Subqueries are not inherently slow.

All subqueries have an equivalent join across two tables, which may or may not be faster than using a subquery.

This is intuitively true if you think of it like this. A subquery can be used as a pointer to a larger data set, removing the work needed to aggregate all results when you really only need one or two.

You can think of a join as a 1-to-1 pointer from table A to table B, which means that all the aggregations has to be done on the complete set A & B. If you use a subquery on A, you end up with a 1-to-1000 pointer system that only aggregates on one value from table A and a very small collection of values from table B.

In this case A' & B < A & B, thus is it generally true that A' & B will be faster.

examples:

query #1:
query #2
Despite them both using subqueries, #2 will generally be faster than #1.

My intuition thinks Subquery #2 is faster than this equivalent join, that uses no subqueries:

But really, it doesn't matter at all without measurements. Unless you tried the queries in questions and proved that it is inherently slow, using explain analyze, then you are merely stating opinions. This is only one step from "denormalize because joins are slow." Nothing about that statement or "subqueries are slow" is axiomatic.

I've got the rest of the day to determine whether I want to spend $50 to verify that I successfully completed MIT 6.001x (intro to comp. sci using python) on EDX. I'm currently a little over halfway through but I'm a lock to finish and fwiw am so far on pace to have a high grade, which I think gets listed on the certificate. As of right now, it's the only programming experience that I have. I don't know whether I'll ever seek jobs where it will be relevant but it's at least a decent possibility.

Anyways, the consensus on here a couple of years ago is that it wasn't worth it to buy the certificate and that one's resume is no better off with a certificate listed as opposed to without. I assume w/ these courses' rising popularity that may have changed since then, however.

Thoughts as to whether it's worth it?

I don't think it's possible to be successful and/or happy working under a non-tech manager as an engineer unless you're at executive level. Anyone have previous experience that contradicts that?

Craggo, I wonder if you could post some representative queries stripped down to illustrate the essentials of the problem. Kinda curious what kinds of problems you're dealing with. I've learned that with SQL, there was a lot of stuff I didn't know I didn't know until I learned them, after which I kicked myself for not having been continuously learning.

@karamazonk, I bet if you created a github profile and all it had was a project called MIT 6.001x that had your homework solutions, and then you added that github link to your resume, it would work even better.