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| 5/25 |
| 2007/12/12-19 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:48790 Activity:moderate |
12/12 In an interview last week I got hit with
"What is your best quality?"
"What is your worst quality?"
I know these are standard interview questions, and I should have
expected them, but I am pretty sure I flubbed them.
What are some good responses?
\_ just do the David Lee Roth style to answering questions:
let me answer the question this way and then start
talking about whatever the hell you want
\_ Best: I never ask stupid fucking questions like this when
interviewing people.
Worst: I hate people who ask stupid shit like this and I
would never work for idiots who do.
\_ More seriously, if you can't come up with a best (or at
least damn good) quality you shouldn't be interviewing.
It is a question that gives you a chance to prove you
actually give a damn about your work and skills. The
worst quality question is still a bullshit question and
deserves all the feces you feel like flinging at it.
\_ "I respond very poorly to stupid questions."
\_ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/12
\_ http://csua.com/Computer/SW/Unix/?page=4
\_ http://csua.com/2003/09/17/#10220
(There are no good responses... but there are worse ones.
At least they only asked you for ONE bad quality.)
\_ Yeah, my last interview asked for 3.
\_ I told them the truth, I have fairly poor time management skills.
If I get wrapped up in one problem, I'll neglect the other things I
have to do. I got that job anyway.
\_ The problem with questions like these aren't that they're dumb.
They are not. The problem is that the people asking them usually
have no idea what a 'good' or 'bad' answer is. They just ask
because they were asked the same in the past. I assume at some
point in the distant past someone who knew what they were doing
came up with the best/worst question and it spread like a plague
from there. As someone above said, there is no good answer, just
don't say "my worst trait is <insert felony activity here>" and
you'll be fine.
\_ Worst trait: Sometimes I am too much of a perfectionist -or-
sometimes I work too hard or some other such bullshit. No one
expects a serious answer to such a question (or at least they
should not). It is also okay to list an actual negative trait
that you have that is not that big a deal "sometimes I get
excited about an idea in meetings and interrupt other people."
You better have some damn good answers to the "best trait"
question though.
\_ I once answered, honestly, that I don't react well to being
micromanaged, but 1) I didn't really want the job, and 2) I wasn't
offered the job. --erikred
\_ But that is the right answer is the manager was a micromanager.
\_ But that is the right answer if the manager was a micromanager.
You wouldn't have been happy anyway. Why would anyone try to
get a job they wouldn't like?
\_ In this case, because I was already in a job I didn't like.
Realization that the new gig was also what I didn't want hit
about midway through the interview.
until about midway through the interview.
\_ No matter how bad your current job is, don't flee it. Go
to a new job you want to have. Sounds like you made the
right call.
\_ Sounds like someone who never really had a job so
bad it was affecting your sleep, your health, and
other aspects of your life. Sometimes fleeing is
the best option.
\_ Oddly enough, you're both right. It was the latter
kind of job, but I needed the benefits and the
salary, and the other job would have been even
worse. Fortunately, something much, much better
came along two months later.
\_ sounds like to you, but incorrect. the guy who
replaced me didn't last 3 months. fleeing is not
a good option. you just end up at another crappy
place. and you'd miss out on the job you wanted
like the other person here posted. i see zero value
in going from one shitty life sucking job to another
shitty life sucking job.
\_ Sounds like the guy who replaced you was
smart enough to flee.
\_ He already had another job the whole time.
This job was easy for his first three months
because I unloaded all the easy but time
consuming crap on him. Once he had to do the
real work, it was easier for him to just pick
up more hours at his other job. He didn't
flee to another job. He had one all along.
\_ So he knew all along that your job
sucked, but it took you much longer to
figure it out.
\_ No he had no idea until he had to do it.
I kept it during that time because there
were no other jobs available without
taking a dramatic pay cut *and* working
for an equally shitty place. But I'm
sure you had your choice of great jobs
in the 2001-2004 years because you know
everything. |
| 5/25 |
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| csua.com/Computer/SW/Unix/?page=4 I've gotten that from two different guys at the same company before and it was kinda painful because they really, really pushed deep on that question. You're dealing with some doofus and every answer can be turned into the wrong answer. You can say something like, "well my girlfriend sometimes gets upset that I'm such a take-charge gung-ho kinda guy when we make plans but she always has fun!" All answers are stupid, just try to avoid giving an axe-murderer answer. If you had said that "take charge" answer they'd scoff and make you give a *real* weakness. One of them spent about half the interview on that question, and the rest questioning my "passion for engineering" and why I'm an engineer etc... The fact that they're asking these meta-questions might suggest that they're concerned with what your life goals and attitudes are, have you figured it out. It's just a job, but you spend half your life at work, so I can see why. So I told him I'm smart and have low tolerance for people who are intentionally stupid. Not stupid people, but people who play dumb for political or other reasons. I got an offer, but I don't think that had anything to do with it. I think he was just filling time and feeling self important. well, it actually taught me how to be better prepared for interviews. if yer just outta skewl, mention that you spent all yer time in the computer lab. What they are trying to get at is "What sort of stuff do you do poorly? Yeah saying something like "I goof off half the day and get everything done late" is stupid but a real answer like "when I'm working on a project with a bad debugging environment my productivity drops really bad" would, say let them know you might do better at being a server coding person that working with some proprierty scripting system that doesn't have real tools. They want people, not pretend workaholics who will leave in disgust six months later because they treated management as roadblocks to be worked around, and somehow, gee, that made work a nightmare. The consensus among those I've talked to is that the weakness question is the interviewer getting in an early stab at establishing pecking order. They, after all, will never have to answer such a ridiculous question of themselves from you. If you want the job, have your canned answer ready and don't be worried that it's not exactly honest. They're looking for you to subvert your ego for the "team". You may, however, want to consider whether this is the sort of situation where you'd like to work, if you have a choice in the matter. In the current times, nobody in my business really has much choice. Maybe we had the same one since I think there's only about 3 out there. But setting the user-agent value in addition to the referer one is a good idea. At any rate, I parsed the page manually and came up with a list of hrefs to d/l, and that worked fine. Ftp's normal mode is to have the server try to connect back to the client so the client becomes a server of sorts. This attempted connection smacks into your firewall and thus ftp in it's normal mode fails. Passive mode doesn't do that so you can ftp from behind firewalls. For ICQ, i gotten away with telnet to my shell account running micq. I don't know how to deal with MSN The funny part is that normal MSN client works for somereason, but my open-source client doesnt (miranda). It is tools like you that forces netadmins to close ports in the first place. has anyone ever told you not to get so worked up over trivial things? of course microsoft is going to have a more compatible client. anyway, miranda probably doesn't work cuz microsoft recently disallowed most older msn clients, stfw for more details. I am just wondering if any of you tried to configure your 3rd party IM to do the same when you guys are in the similiar situation. In any case, I am leaning toward installing Centericq on my shell account instead of dealing with this problem directly. For those who actually knows what I am talking let me know how you guys deal with this. I have a few JPEG files which I'm not able to view on my PC. However, I am able to view the thumbnail of the pic in Windows Explorer in XP. When I try to load it in 'xv' on unix I get the following errors. I tried on my work PC (W2K) and it seems to open the image fine without any problems in Netscape 71, IE 6, MS Paint, and MS Photo Editor. If it is from a digital camera, it is likely that they did a "smaller+regular" image trick. Basically they stored a smaller version of the image at the front to allow faster preview inside the camera. What is weird is that not all pictures have this problem, only 1 in 25-30. Some decoders don't understand the tags which follow the additional markers, and just look at the SOI bits themselves. just seems to me like there are many arbitrary ways one could generate music from a web page, gif, whatever, and the results of thsi weren't particularly compelling musically. c' | xargs perl -p -i -e 's/foo/bar/g' might have to play around with that, I haven't tried it -niloc \- you cannot do zsh-style ** recusive globbing in tcsh. rather than doing something really ugly use find | xargs. As a result, the date gets reset to 1970 if I power it up after more than an hour. This cause anacron to think that (minus) decades have passed and start runing all sorts of jobs run only an hour ago. I want to add to /etc/rc so that on restart if the date is ridiculous it will be set to, say, 1 hour beyond the last "normal" time the machine sees. The answer should some how involve sed/awk on the command with multiple layers of escaped chars. html They claim there's a "Secret password" encoded in there but it looks like every other "we don't have enough money" job posting to me. I'd never apply for a job like this but I'd like to know if there really is a "secret password" in there. you should be more careful about who you take advice from. txt thing, and your above thing is inconsistent with your cmdline. anyway, since OP is using csh, it would be even easier to use the r modifier. the sed version has that classic 'job security' look to it. d just like on a real unix box and I'm not getting anywhere. Has anyone here got any of this working and if so, please tell me how explaining very very slowly because I'm feeling really stupid right now. Set that to start automagically and you will be good to go. google for "cygwin sshd install" and i'm sure you will find it. fi/autikkan/kerberos -John \_ I've decided it doesn't matter anymore. If you run windows you just have to assume the whole thing is broken top to bottom and the rest is just details. It took a few minutes to figure out why new tcsh's would swap the machine to death and never start but that was it. Just trying to save someone else some hassle and time if it ever happens to you. I had about 12 rxvt/tcsh windows open and ssh'd to work. The only thing acceptable to you is questions about UNIX, HTML, tcch, cygwin, and freakin' Mountain View? publish the name who is deleting and modifying other people's post. The most amusing part is not who is censoring and modifying posts. I like seeing the hypocrites posting anonymously and then bitch about others who post anon. Post anonymously is one thing, modifying other's post and deleting other post is completely different \_ not really. doing it anonymously while bitching about others being anonymous posters just compounds the crime. Thanks for the answers, though they are not exactly what I wanted. What I want is some way to store a large number of (readonly) files, such as the mirror of some web sites, in one file. You want a tool like rsync that makes moving files easier. Write some scripts then GPL and share them so we can all enjoy the fruits of your labors. I'm no cs guy, but I've generally found uncompressed tar files to be larger than the directories they reproduced - particularly when a large number of small files were in the directory. I had to do a lot of this for my Master's thesis a few years ago. iso \_ Along the same lines, at least FreeBSD has a method for mounting ISO files as if they were a standard disk device. i was going to use NFS but someone sugges... |
| csua.com/2003/09/17/#10220 com - I'll be out of town this week and doing call backs next week based on the resumes I get. op \_ this guy never even has seen a job posting \_ I have. It annoys me when people say "C/C++" as if they're the same thing. They want someone with C/C++ as opposed to LISP or Fortran. You'd prefer you had 15+ years of C and no C++ and didn't get a call because they hired someone with no C and 2 years of C++? a more technical person probably wouldn't be caught dead saying 'c/c++', but i agree it's kind of silly to belabor this point. The candidate is supposed to be smart enough to be able to read a job posting without flipping out. Anyone bothered by a C/C++ listing so much is way too anal to work in most places. A job posting is just a vague wish list of 'stuff' they think might be nice for someone to know to some degree or another so candidates can self-disqualify. Stupid is when some marketing guy keeps applying to all of the perl and java jobs at my company. Zero programming experience and not much marketing but is applying for 3-5+ year experience required jobs. When we did open a marketing job he wasn't considered due to previous stupidity. If they don't care if it's C or C++, then just say, "C and/or C++". It's close enough for most places and a lot of people who know one also know the other. I only complained about job postings saying "10yrs of NT programming required" back in 1998. I've gotten that from two different guys at the same company before and it was kinda painful because they really, really pushed deep on that question. You're dealing with some doofus and every answer can be turned into the wrong answer. You can say something like, "well my girlfriend sometimes gets upset that I'm such a take-charge gung-ho kinda guy when we make plans but she always has fun!" All answers are stupid, just try to avoid giving an axe-murderer answer. If you had said that "take charge" answer they'd scoff and make you give a *real* weakness. One of them spent about half the interview on that question, and the rest questioning my "passion for engineering" and why I'm an engineer etc... The fact that they're asking these meta-questions might suggest that they're concerned with what your life goals and attitudes are, have you figured it out. It's just a job, but you spend half your life at work, so I can see why. So I told him I'm smart and have low tolerance for people who are intentionally stupid. Not stupid people, but people who play dumb for political or other reasons. I got an offer, but I don't think that had anything to do with it. I think he was just filling time and feeling self important. well, it actually taught me how to be better prepared for interviews. if yer just outta skewl, mention that you spent all yer time in the computer lab. What they are trying to get at is "What sort of stuff do you do poorly? Yeah saying something like "I goof off half the day and get everything done late" is stupid but a real answer like "when I'm working on a project with a bad debugging environment my productivity drops really bad" would, say let them know you might do better at being a server coding person that working with some proprierty scripting system that doesn't have real tools. They want people, not pretend workaholics who will leave in disgust six months later because they treated management as roadblocks to be worked around, and somehow, gee, that made work a nightmare. The consensus among those I've talked to is that the weakness question is the interviewer getting in an early stab at establishing pecking order. They, after all, will never have to answer such a ridiculous question of themselves from you. If you want the job, have your canned answer ready and don't be worried that it's not exactly honest. They're looking for you to subvert your ego for the "team". You may, however, want to consider whether this is the sort of situation where you'd like to work, if you have a choice in the matter. In the current times, nobody in my business really has much choice. Maybe we had the same one since I think there's only about 3 out there. jpg \_ throw in a joke about drunken indians and black people with big lips chowing down on the watermellon and fried chicken and you have comedy gold there. The new "legal driving for illegal aliens" license will look like everyone else's. I'm still trying to figure out why someone who is here illegally and already driving would feel the need to register with the state and get a driver's license. The reality is that they want them (if they want them) to use as ID, which is precisely why I oppose giving DL to them. I can't wait to see his "these low grade witless humorless morons sent me hate mail" page. emacs user was here \_ I had a beta version of 097b ssl installed so I got the 4/10/03 version and the compile and install went clean but the ssh client still says its using the old version.... There's no rpm for my system and the compile isn't the issue anyway. Do you know where your make install is putting things--is it the same place your startup scripts are running them from? I don't see where the openssl install is supposed to replace or install a newer version of this file. If you are using *BSD you should probably fetch the latest version of /usr/src/lib and rebuild that way. The errors seems to be random, but possibly occur slightly more in the AM wee-hours. Sounds like you bought a new computer in pieces and wasted a lot of time. As long as you get the right one with the right cycle (eg 2700/3200/etc) then it will work. I bought my GigaByte motherboard with a generic RAM and nothing worked. Changed CPU, changed grafx card, even changed MB and nothing worked. Went back to Frys, and had them try out the IDENTICAL RAM but this time using Kingston and other more expensive RAM, and voila, it worked. That's not as big a deal on the pc100 or what ever is in there. Add this to my list of a few days ago about why *not* to use them. I just hope you keep an original of all your pictures and copies of everything your friends have shared with you. What do I put at the end if I want to deliver locally to my soda account? lck | /usr/local/lib/mh/rcvstore +inbox \_ I want to put the spam in one file and have everything else written back to the mail spool. html \_ I'm going to just stop using email, stop logging in, stop using a browser, and go back to ftp, gopher, and telnet when it was safe to be on the net. What's the last gopher or telnet exploit you've heard of? Anyway, no one is going to be looking for the clear text wheat among the crypto chaff so I'm safe. BTW, its not like telnetd and inetd (or xinetd) are exploit free. I tried this on sparc/solaris and *ptr prints out the value AFTER the ++ increment. the order of evaluation of arguments is implementation-dependent, so a compiler is free to do whatever. The comma operator evaluates left to right (as in: (a=b, ++b) works just fine). However functions can evaluate their arguments in any order. I don't understand the need for people to do this anyway. can occur at any time between the previous sequence point and the next sequence point" In your case, this means that ptr++ could occur either before or after printf(); and both would be completely valid (even in the same program). I think they're going to increase, because my plan will increase productivity by cutting marginal rates. com bubble is what forced GWB and the Republican Congress to increase federal spending by 15%? com bubble would be to cut federal spending drastically, but this would piss off the 'Republicans are Nazi's who don't care about sick, infirm, aged and poor people who aren't white christians' crowd and they would go on national tv crying about how if we just passed up one sidewinder or a single aid pkg to Israel we could have all the welfare and medicare forever. Since Bush doesn't want that, we are stuck with a budget that doesn't (and cannot) properly reflect the economic circumstatnces we find ourselves in. GWB is doing is right, I'm saying that it is largely out of his (or anyones) control. The tax cuts and spending increases have done more to increase the deficit than the \_ Note:... |