I wonder if they've done the research to see how that 100 hours scales with each additional employee? I don't know if comparing a lager group of people to each scales linearly, my first guess is it wouldn't.

I don't think its 100 hours. It's just "generic people units". So assuming every employee is equal - at 100 employees you have 100 people units of potential productivity but will get 0 actual productivity because of overhead and cost of communicating.

I doubt there's any research, its pretty hand wavy. But I think the general principle is sound.

SELECT * FROM a1 UNION SELECT * FROM a2 ORDER BY k;

Very much this. Even if you don't know it, it's suppose to start a discussion between you and interviewer as to what they want you to accomplish.

I think a lot of complaints is that people think they are expected to memorize algorithms or CS trivia. But I guess we as programmers are so socially unaware that we are unable to read the situation correctly.

I had a phone interview once where I had to design an LRU cache. I heard of it and it is something I studied in the past in my Operating system class but not something I remembered. The interviewer and I talked through as to what it is and how it is meant to be used. Though I felt that he was a little condescending when we were talking. I was able to start coding it out but never finished. Anyways I was asked to do a second phone interview so that must have been a success.

I've got a 20-year-career in computer programming (no CS-degree). I don't know what a bubble sort is. If you explain it to me however I can probably throw enough on a whiteboard to show you my thought process and that I know how to code.

Me and John Gruden can talk about a bubble screen all day however.

In that scene from No Country For Old Men, Woody Harrelson says "You're not cut out for this."

Anyone got any advice on PC upgrade for work?

Current system:

i7-2600k @ 3.4ghz
16GB ram
Radeon R9 200
Normal SSDs
3 Monitors

Running Visual Studio with Resharper, SQL server on Win 10. That's about all I do on it. System starting to fail (need to power on 5x sometimes in morning before it actually turns on, and some horribly distracting graphical glitches on screen which I assume is gpu failing).

Building projects is starting to get slower as project gets larger, opening files in VS is a bit laggy now as well as the project gets bigger (guessing that's resharper doing some processing)

Thinking of:

i7-7700K 4.2ghz kaby lake
Samsung 950 Pro 256GB M.2 SSD
GTX 1050

Any thoughts? Not too hot on PC parts anymore.

Going to need "UNION ALL" to handle duplicates, suzzer :-)

Sometimes this happens when you end up with someone who is coming upto speed with a subject and needs a ton of handholding initially. The problem is that if they need the time for someone who is 10x more productive for an hour a way, you've got a net decrease. (The 10x'er may be because of whatever abilities, not necessarily an ability to ship 10x the code functionality in a similar period.)

Regardless, the point is sound and a lot of quality organizations look to stop this sort of stuff from happening by being comically cutthroat (Netflix comes to mind, Amazon as well), not that their policies are without drawbacks.

I'm getting the 6850K, 960 Pro, and a GTX 1070. I'd consider dropping the processor a bit and getting more memory (insanely cheap now), but seems like a decent enough upgrade. (Didn't realize the 950 Pro was that fast!)

How are you handling three monitors on one card? Going dual card may solve problems if doing something kinda weird.

Damn the 960 pro is fast! Not looking to save money so don't want to drop the CPU.

Most modern graphics cards have 3 slots I think, monitors I have are good and have connections for anything.

So how should a self taught code monkey go about better understanding all the fancy whiteboard stuff, right now I am working through exercism.io

Gullanian, look at AMD Ryzen. Perhaps a bit early to jump in however. Maybe of interest to you also Thremp.

Ryzen looks great, but am a bit nervous with AMD right now as don't have the best experiences with them. Would rather let them bake in for a year or so before I take the plunge with expensive stuff I think.

Good article imo about managing system complexity over time.

A couple things regarding this:
- as you later mentioned, he might be assuming that he's just told to write bubble sort without a reference on what bubble sort is, i.e. he's expected the memorize the algorithm that someone could conceivably look up on the internet in 2 seconds if allowed to (without looking it up - is bubble sort the laziest, most obvious n^2 sort? if not I don't remember what it is lol)
- I'm not sure if he's calling "whiteboarding bubble sort" a "riddle" or if he's stating that he doesn't do riddles as a separate fact from the aforementioned things. As an example, I've been given a "a farmer has objects X, Y, and Z on one side of the riverbank and needs to take them across the river with these restrictions" riddle in an interview, so maybe he's (correctly) saying "**** things like that".

I'm currently on an older setup. Guess its the GPU wearing out :/

Thanks.

Agree with this. I've already got my mobo (didn't see any Ryzen with 8 DIMM support either), so I'm barreled in.

Isn't bubble sort just walking a list comparing x to x+1 and if x > x+1 you swap their position and keep going, repeat until no swaps are made?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_sort

"Bubble sort, sometimes referred to as sinking sort, is a simple sorting algorithm that repeatedly steps through the list to be sorted, compares each pair of adjacent items and swaps them if they are in the wrong order. The pass through the list is repeated until no swaps are needed, which indicates that the list is sorted."

Apparently you remember more algorithms than you think!

I've never understood the fascination for archaic sorting/etc in this sort of stuff. Aren't there just a handful of esoteric times you don't use quicksort?

Just use the sorting algorithm already implemented in the standard library of the language. (I'm not sure I'd call it "esoteric" to need a stable sort, for example.)

IMO - the best whiteboard questions are very simple to explain, and something the candidate is likely to have never implemented before. You want to see their thought process in working through a new problem.

Ya, def over aggressive on that front.

Seems reasonable.

Holy mother of God what terrible UX. I just opened a small SEP-IRA with Fidelity to offset some side income and avoid paying taxes on it now. They have received my initial payment, which has cleared. I've been wandering the site for 5 minutes now trying to figure out how to move it from cash to an investment.

Lots of pop-up windows which offer the same view of the page I'm on. Lots of informational pages about how great investing is and all their fancy research tools. I can customize my nickname for the account - woo hoo!

So far can't find one action item to invest my balance in something else. Still searching...



One would think this Invest button might help, but now. Nope just leads to this page, still searching for an action item:

Argh finally found it. One one of the side menus it has a Trade menu item. Cannot navigate there through Portfolio or Account Positions of course. That wouldn't make too much sense. Gotta find the wizard with the magic key.

To be fair they only taught us like 3 at DeVry...