…the problem is that I’m retarded.
I start an interview and someone says, “What are your feelings on the comparative strengths and weaknesses of statically and dynamically typed languages” or whatever, and then my brain turns off, and I just sputter and mumble for about five minutes without saying anything.
Now that I’ve regained my articulateness, I’d like to say for the record that I don’t think strong and weak typing are anything worth starting a holy war over. I’ve never said, “Dear god, that terrible problem would never have occurred if I was using a language with strong typing!” Nor have I ever said, “Thank god I’m using a weakly typed language, or this would have taken all day!”
Strong typing is a little better for data integrity and weak typing is a little easier to develop, but in the end, it doesn’t make the difference between failure and success.
Also, SQL’s having and where clauses do much the same thing, but having is applied to grouped results. And unless I’m horribly mistaken, inner joins are the normal cartesian product type joins, while outer joins combine all rows from one table and only matched rows from another table (i.e. it will return a result for a row in the first table even if there’s no matching row in the second table).
Now, I’m going to go find out why my network connection is dead so I can post this. It’s acting suspiciously like someone unplugged the router, and I’m in no mood for that.
oh, I see
January 30, 2007 5:40pm (3 years, 5 months and 4 weeks ago)
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Comments
Feb 4, 2007 9:58am
Er… never put anything on your blog that you don’t want to be asked about in an interview! I was asked about static and dynamic typing about 8 times. Cracked me right up.
Feb 4, 2007 3:52pm
And yet they didn’t ask you about Life, The Universe and Everything.
I think they have their priorities skewed. In the grand scheme of things, the whole “static vs. dynamic” argument is pretty insignificant.
Besides, things like that are programmers' religious wars, and they shouldn’t base their hiring practices on religion.
At least they didn’t ask you where you like your curly braces and why. At least I can back up my preference with something more than “that is how I learned,” because it is certainly not how I learned.
I think they have their priorities skewed. In the grand scheme of things, the whole “static vs. dynamic” argument is pretty insignificant.
Besides, things like that are programmers' religious wars, and they shouldn’t base their hiring practices on religion.
At least they didn’t ask you where you like your curly braces and why. At least I can back up my preference with something more than “that is how I learned,” because it is certainly not how I learned.
Feb 5, 2007 2:34pm
I imagine it was more of a 'see if I know what I’m talking about' kind of question.
I think I came out looking weaker on databases than I really am because I’m stupid and can’t read ER diagrams. Then there are a lot of technologies I just haven’t played with because I’ve only worked at a really small company.
I don’t know if I did enough to stand out in general, and I possibly developed a stutter.
But it was a really fun interview and I liked everyone I met and I don’t think I made a complete idiot of myself.
I think I came out looking weaker on databases than I really am because I’m stupid and can’t read ER diagrams. Then there are a lot of technologies I just haven’t played with because I’ve only worked at a really small company.
I don’t know if I did enough to stand out in general, and I possibly developed a stutter.
But it was a really fun interview and I liked everyone I met and I don’t think I made a complete idiot of myself.
Feb 9, 2007 12:09am
I can relate to the small company thing. I’m getting lost in the enterprise-type stuff… Having 65 IT members (12 programmers, 4 DBAs and the rest helpdesk/network/operations type people), 1,200 faculty and staff members coupled with 12,000 students who managed to kill the servers while all getting their “self service” online-only schedules on the first day of class this semester is a new thing for me for sure.
Of course, the red tape is just as funny. As our director announces that we are an Oracle house to larger group in a meeting I attended in Denver, my coworker and I are having this issue where we need a custom in-house database. Easy, right? No. The DBAs do not want this entire database mixed into the financial system nor do they want to manage another instance. Oracle house indeed…
So, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are an Oracle house for anything that touches the core finance/student/financial aid/accounts payable/accounts receivable databases, but a SQL Server house for whatever the DBAs don’t want to mess with.
My new attitude: just tell me what you want me to do…
Of course, the red tape is just as funny. As our director announces that we are an Oracle house to larger group in a meeting I attended in Denver, my coworker and I are having this issue where we need a custom in-house database. Easy, right? No. The DBAs do not want this entire database mixed into the financial system nor do they want to manage another instance. Oracle house indeed…
So, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are an Oracle house for anything that touches the core finance/student/financial aid/accounts payable/accounts receivable databases, but a SQL Server house for whatever the DBAs don’t want to mess with.
My new attitude: just tell me what you want me to do…
Feb 11, 2007 10:10pm
Know what I hate? Politics. Of course, now I got a Senior Developer position, so I guess politics will fall into place. *sigh*
Feb 13, 2007 11:58pm
Where-vs-having is stupid. The SQL engine could figure out which to use without having to explicitly specify it. I would hope that any decent optimizer would assume you mean WHERE unless the expression involves aggregate results.
On of my favorite SQL tricks is a “where outer-joined primary key is null” filter. Basically, you do an outer join to a related table and return rows with null primary keys on the outer table, which generally won’t exist. You’re left only with the rows in the primary table for which there are no related records in the secondary table, and you didn’t have to resort to nasty “NOT EXISTS (SELECT …)” sub-clauses or “HAVING COUNT(…)” clauses.
On of my favorite SQL tricks is a “where outer-joined primary key is null” filter. Basically, you do an outer join to a related table and return rows with null primary keys on the outer table, which generally won’t exist. You’re left only with the rows in the primary table for which there are no related records in the secondary table, and you didn’t have to resort to nasty “NOT EXISTS (SELECT …)” sub-clauses or “HAVING COUNT(…)” clauses.
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I was talking to your sister about the other day and I figured the problem is that the interviewer is a “people person” who has the ability to speak clearly, calmly and concisely to others, where programmers don’t typically care for people so they have a hard time communicating. I don’t know how valid that is and there are always exceptions to the rules. But, still… it’s annoying.
I had a phone interview this evening and sounded like a goon. It was great. I’m sure I won’t get the job.