Category: Archive

This Call Center video is the funniest thing I’ve seen this year (requires Flash player)…LOL

Information Week has published an article, where FBI warns job hunters of online scams.

Be careful online…

Some time ago I was whining/blogging about a lack of women in information technology. A professional journalist Jeremy Geelan have picked this blog and made a story out of it called “Can i-Technology Be Feminized “. Since then, I’ve attended a couple of more IT events, did not find many females there and almost forgot about this topic, but…

A group of IT women decided to fight for encouraging young women to consider computer career. No, they did not blog or complain. They’ve chosen a tried-and-true method: they took their clothes off. Literally. These smart ladies have published a calendar of IT professionals undressed. I like Sharon, general manager, left. I wonder if she was swiming with her blackberry? But if Sonja from IT amp;T, right, will place this rose petals photo in her office, her status meetings may become less productive.

As per The Sydney Morning Herald, Ms Bernhardt, the founder of Women in Technology Queensland (WIT) and co-founder of Australian Women in IT (AWISE) explained:

“The method in the madness is to get to a broader audience so that people can see that it’s not nerds in the IT industry. ” And more, “They are full bodied, fully intelligent, fully socialized women who absolutely love what they do. ” Well said and done!

If Australian women could pull it off, we can do it to. IMHO, each IT department must publish their own version of such calendar where the women they see each day in “business casual ” will be pictured in bikinis. Here’s what you need:

1. One digital camera

2. One color printer

3. Kodak (or similar) photo paper

The rest is easy: just stop by the cubicles of your female coworkers, explain them your intentions, ask them to sign a form stating that they won’t press the sexual harassment charges against you. After the sexual harassment waiver is signed (not before! The order is very important here) ask them to undress a little bit.

You’ll be surprised, but at least a half of them will agree to pose for this very noble goal: bringing more women in IT.

When your calendar is ready, publish it online and pin the printed version on the wall of your pantry room. HR department will count this action as a “Team Builder ” event!

Preview and purchase this calendar: this is the very least you can do if you’d like to support this movement.

Italy vs France…It’s twenty five minutes and two Leff beers into the final game…It’s 1:1 and the game is great!

I love France (was skiing there in January), and I love Italy (attended a wedding in Stresa in May)!

I’m wondering, why good football players are making good money while good programmers are not?

It should be a simple math: if Zidane helps to make a team, say $100M, it’s reasonable for him to make $10M.

But if a really good software developer helps a Wall Street company make a $100M because he wrote this very efficient program, why s/he does not get $10M? It’s not fair…

Update: it’s 71 minute and three Leffe beers into the game…1:1… My wife is an Italian fan. Why? Their players are more handsome then French…Just saw Bill Clinton there sipping wine. I’m wondering if he’s drinking Italian or French wine?

Update: 110 min are over. Zidane hits an Italian guy with his head. Italian player immediately falls down, as per the final training session. Zidane gets a red card and is out. Screw Zidane. This is really bad…If Someone is watching us from the above. France must lose this game.

Sorry guys, for not using the word “soccer ” in this blog, because it’s football, really: there is a foot kicking a ball. Get it? foot-ball…

P.S. French cuisine is out of this world, sorry Italy. Ironically, we are going to a Thai restaurant after the game.

A couple of years ago I’ve published an online article with a list of 30 Java questions that can be used during job interviews.

This article has been re-posted a couple of times, and it became my most readable article ever: the read counter will reach 300000 in a month or two. Also, you should not miss the feedbacks to this article, which is a good read on its own.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the vast majority of the people who are seriously getting ready for Java are located in India. The typical feedback is this “Give me the job interview questions for J2EE for a person with 1 year of experience “.

But today I’ve received a different post, and this blog is my answer to it. This is the feedback:

“Don’t you think people should already know the answers to those questions before applying for a job?
You’ve given kids with no experience but a faked resume a prime source to cram questions and answers to trick themselves into jobs by writing this, thank you very much for making programmers as a group look bad (by making it possible for even more unqualified people to get programming jobs). ”

It’s refreshing to receive such a feedback after a couple of years of demands for more questions on servlets and EJBs. It also raises a broader question: is publishing of the technical job interview questions a bad thing to do in general? My short answer is: no it’s not a bad thing and here’s my reasoning :

For most questions I “ve provided only short answers to encourage further research. Any decent interviewer can ask some further drill-down questions to find out if the candidate understands what s/he is talking about.

There is a bunch of web sites and even books that list hundreds of questions, which in my opinion are not too practical and are more useful for certification exams then for the real-world work. So the goal of these questions was to give people guidance in learning Java when preparing for the job interviews. When a person is getting ready for an enterprise job interview, s/he should not spend days trying to figure out how the byte shifting in Java works and what the difference between gt; gt; and gt; gt; gt;. The chances are very slim that you’ll need to use this knowledge while working on an order processing application. Besides, these kinds of questions are easily googlable when needed.

If a job candidate can trick the interviewer by simply repeating the answers that I offerred, it’s clear that the only person who does not qualify for the job is the interviewer. I’m sure there are some vocational schools that bake Java programmers in 2-3 months by forcing them to memorize technical questions for the job interviews. And it’s the employer’s responsibility to weed out the applicants that know just this. If a hiring manager does not have people who can interview Java applicants, they should outsource (not offshore though) the interviewing process. For example, some time ago I’ve been moonlighting by conducting technical interviews over the phone for several consulting firms.

Figuring out if a resume is fake is completely another story and has nothing to do with the questions/answers I’ve provided.

India is not just a country where most computer jobs go.

The Times magazine has published an interesting set of narrated photo slides on this country. It requires Flash Player, and turn on the sound.

If you are an active software developer, you keep asking yourself the same question: what language to learn next.

The next language to learn is Chinese. At least the Chinese government wants to teach you.

China is a king of the “99 Cents ” stores here in America. When my younger son saw a toy with a sign “Made in the USA ” he was sincerely surprised: “Daddy, I thought all toys are made in China “. Need a Rolex? Find the closest China town and you’ll get it for 10-20 dollars.

At the same time India is dreaming of becoming a number one high-tech country in the world. China wants a piece of this pie, but do they go in the right direction? While India is learning English, China wants me to learn Chinese…In general, I do not mind:this may bring some new business development, but if I can give one advice to Chinese government, it would be this: outsource to India development and support of the Web site that is teaching Chinese . The current version is dead slow.

Eric Sink wrote a nice essay “The one key thing to know about negotiation “. I just wanted to add a couple of my comments/observations.

1. It’s much easier to negotiate as you get richer. If this extra thousand dollars for the car does not really matter to you, the car dealer can feel it right away. They know that you CAN buy this car and are more willing to negotiate and drop the price. When a poor guy shows up, they are not sure if he’s going to buy it, so why bother wasting time on negotiating…

2. Eric’s example of negotiating while buying a Chevy would not apply to hot cars like Mini Cooper or Toyota Prius.

3. I’m not looking for job now, but hey… The job market is hot and I’m getting all these emails from recruiters. I do not tell them “I do not want this job now “. I always ask about the offered compensation . If they say it’s $X, I respond that I’ll do this job for $X+$Delta, which is higher than the current market rate. As Eric put it, I can easily walk away without getting this job. But who knows, one of these recruiters may say “OK, I’ll lower my markup and will pay your rate “.

4. It really helps if you are a pretty looking girl. Yesterday, a nice girl was entering the bus and she’s asked the bus driver if he’d be willing to stop by the Dunkin Donuts. There is no bus stop there, and usually bus drivers are getting angry if someone would ask them to stop at the wrong place. But she was really pretty, and he said yes.

You can come up with all rules and advices on how to do something, and than this nice girl walks in, just smiles to the salesman and gets the best deal in town 🙂

When I saw this tiny USB Paper Shredder, I though it’s a joke. It’s not, because it has a price: $32 USD and will be available in a couple of weeks. It’ll help you with “shredding bank receipt, credit card receipt, post-it notes, name card and documents “. I guess this device is intended for people with the late stages of arthritis whose fingers have literally stopped working. But if you can’t even tear a bank receipt or a business card with your hands, would you be able to use this device?

I guess, it’s a human nature: as soon as you see a hole, you have a crave for poking something into it. Since there is a USB port, let’s plug in something there. It’s a good entertaining to browse these USB gadgets. Some of them are really something…

For example, say you had too much whiskey last night, but have to go to work anyway. Or you are a heavy smoker…This bad breath…nothing helps….wait a minute…have you tried this mini USB aromatic diffuser? You boss comes to your cubicle and both of you immerse in this nice aroma of Jennifer Lopez…or Michael Jordan…Make sure you know what smell your boss enjoys the most. To increase the coverage, use this Aroma Digi fan.

Or go and get some coffee in your office pantry room. It tastes like sh*t freshly made. Try to imagine its taste after spending a couple of hours in this beautiful USB Cafe Pad.

Typing while wearing these USB heated gloves should be a pleasant experience too, especially when you’re sitting with your laptop on the back seat of a 4X4 somewhere in Siberia and the car heater broke down.

And now the pinnacle of USB devices…drum roll…Ladies and Gents: USB Massage ball. Just be a little creative with places where you put it while working in the office. I wonder if it makes noise when vibrates as its popular competitor? I’m not sure if your productivity will increase though, but boring office hours will turn into fun… Actually, this device can even save lives. If Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct 2) would have had this massage ball in her car , that poor guy would still be alive…

The JSR-80 is in the works, and hopefully we’ll be able to program these USB devices directly from Java in a couple of years.

Las week, on the J2ME meeting of our Princetun JUG, Jonathan Knudsen said that because of memory constraints of the mobile devices J2ME uses a small version of JDK/JRE were not all Java classes are present, for example, it includes only a minimum number of collections (just the Vector and a couple of more) and a simpified version of GUI, sort of an old AWT or something.

This made me thinking, is this a must for Java to weigh about 20Mb (especially for the Web applications)? Lots of people will never have broadband internet connections, and those who do have it, still experience slowness at various times of the day. Popular virtual machine Flash from Adobe is less than 1.2MB in size (actually Flash 9 has two VMs under the hood for compatibility reasons and Flash 8 was half the size).

There are tons of non-mobile applications that do not need fancy graphics or LinkedLists? For example, lots of Wall Street applications have plain looking screens. Maybe it’s time to create a Java CE edition (C stands for Crippled) so many business users can enjoy fast downloads too?

JavaLobby runs a discussion on removing packages from JDK and making them downloadable. +1 from me on this one.