I just passed the 35 year mark in tech last fall. Maybe it's because I'm winding down career-wise, maybe it's just something that happens in your late 50s - whatever it is, I've been prone to reminisce. As I was thinking back at all of the post-college jobs I've had in engineering it occurred to me that there's not really anything I can definitely point to that's still in production. I don't…
I started seeing the job match emails in July. The ones that say "We think you're a good match for a job at Company X". Most of the time I either wasn't interested in Company X or their algorithm wasn't all that great at finding a good fit. But this one was intriguing. There was a wide range of technologies involved that ranged from very close to the metal to very high level development. It was…
Up until last Tuesday I had worked 2.5 years for a large semiconductor company that shall remain nameless. They're a household name. Their CPUs are in your laptops & desktops... but the problem that's causing them much consternation is that their CPUs are very likely not in your phone or tablet. OK, you know who I'm talking about now, but I'll refer to them as MegaCorpCo in this post. So why the…
First off, I'm really surprised how many views yesterday's post got: over 17,000 views in about 24 hours. It also got a surprising number of upvotes on Reddit as well as Hacker News. I was expecting views to be in the hundreds at best, so it seems my post struck a nerve out there. As for the responses they seem to fall mainly into the following categories: "Why don't you medicate?" I'm really…
Hi. My name is Phil and I have s i tuational anxiety related to technical interviews - specifically, the coding part of the interview. Now, of course, everyone has this to some extent, but maybe I should clarify: I panic when the interviewer says "Co uld you code this algorithm on the whiteboard" . And when I say panic, I mean PANIC : racing thoughts of doom, impending death, doubt about my…
I ran across Chris Okasaki's excellent Red-Black Trees in a Functional Setting article a few weeks back. Excellent functional take on Red-Black trees - so much easier to understand than the imperative explanations I've seen elsewhere. Highly recommended. The example code in the article is in Haskell. I've been learning OCaml for several months now and reading an article like this helps me learn a…
Not programming related, but This American Life did a great show on the Mortgage Meltdown . If you've wondered what led to this debacle which will lead to $Trillions of lost wealth in the US (technically speaking, it's not being lost, it was never really there - it was pretend) give this show a listen.
Let's see, I guess this is that part of the interview where the interviewer asks me to tell him/her about myself. Always an awkward question... I've been a software developer since the early 90's. Prior to that I was firmly ensconced in the hardware side of the world: wire wrap, PLDs, FPGAs, ASICs, schematics and all that. At some point I got the idea that it would be more fun to develop the…