SCJP

Does it determine someone's skill in Java programming? A few days ago a candidate came and I also joined the interview. To be honest, I was surprised when I first looked at his CV. Apparently he passed the SCJP 1.6 which I "was" always wanted to pursue some day, with a beautiful score: 90%. He also has a high International TOEFL score. I'm pretty sure that this person is very smart and works hard, actually that means a lot. But if we look from the other side, he has never worked as a programmer before and he went to college majored in Mathematics, not computer science or even Electrical engineering.

At first pardon me for my prejudicial before continue reading, but I do believe that somehow people who has taken basic IT courses, or self-educate themselves start from the basic will excel those people who have not. Without those basic knowledges, someone doesn't really understand what is what. Yeah, even most of the people who is already a programmer is just playing around and doesn't know what is what.

And experience? By doing mistakes, we learn from it. To be a programmer, someone has to make some mistakes. I did too, lots of it. But at that time I was only working on office's internal software, not any project which will be deployed to production.

At the end of the day, we decided to not hire him. Actually it's not because of his flying scores in TOEFL and SCJP. It's because he asked for a salary that should be given to an engineer with 3 years experience, while IMHO himself is still a fresh graduate.

I don't know why people care so much about scores. If you are experienced enough to identify smart persons, you don't have to look at their scores to know their ability. CV is just written words, anybody can lie about it.

A building should have a strong enough foundation to make it a good one.

Yahoo Messenger Import Contact Feature

Apparently a few years ago I've made a silly mistake to have something I don't like in my yahoo ID. So last Friday I managed to migrate that account to another account with a better name. As I've been using it for so many years, I had around 200 contacts. Sure I thought manually adding them to the new account will be a painful thing to do. Later I found a way to do that in an engineered way.

Here's what I did. First I exported my address book to a CSV file, and later import it to the new account. And then I login to the yahoo messenger and use the "Import Contact" feature. And voila .... Some contacts were imported and some were not. So, I just imported them once again and it surely became a mesh. I just got very upset and delete everything which made it worse than ever.

Currently I just couldn't add any contact at all with that new account. When I try to add contacts in Yahoo Messenger, after 40 seconds, a message appears as : "Your request to add a contact has taken longer than expected to complete. The Operation may have succeeded. Please check your Messenger List later."

Tried with Trillian, Pidgin, E-buddy, or whatever IM existed which I knew. Now I'm too tired to try and honestly I don't know what to try anymore. Tomorrow I'll just use the new account anyway and hope the contacts would pop up anyway.

Later I checked on the Google and some people said that it's suggested that we only add 5 contacts at a time, and later logout from Yahoo Messenger, and login again, and proceed to add another 5 contacts. Actually something crossed on my mind when I read this. Yeah sure they have made a limit, unless so people would be spamming around. BUT, why did they provide the import contact feature anyway ????? Or maybe I've just misused it ?? Anyone has experience migrating account ??

Hiring Smart

It’s because it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. A bad candidate will cost a lot of money and effort and waste other people’s time fixing all their bugs. Firing someone you hired by mistake can take months and be nightmarishly difficult, especially if they decide to be litigious about it. In some situations it may be completely impossible to fire anyone. Bad employees demoralize the good employees. And they might be bad programmers but really nice people or maybe they really need this job, so you can’t bear to fire them, or you can’t fire them without pissing everybody off, or whatever. It’s just a bad scene.

quoted from: The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing V 3.0 by Joel Spolsky

Whew I completely agree with Joel and personally encountered some experiences with it.

Suppose it only apply for a team that already has several senior programmers in it. When you have zero programmer at the team, it's better to temporarily hire someone right-away rather than to have no-one at all.

I always believe that some people are born with the nature ability to understand math and basic computer concept, and some of these people have the right personality and enthusiasm to do everything to write the best code that runs and is scalable. Those are the people we should be hiring.

Experience can be learnt in a period of time, but you can't replace someone's brain. Neither can you make someone take a course to modify his personality.