1. No interview room has been booked in advance

Companies are in business and they survive (usually) by making money. Well, if they’re not ‘disruptive’ startups, quangos, or a department of the civil service, but hey I digress.

Making money is generally associated with having at least a modicum of organisation and an offshoot of this is being able to furnish the interview process with a room in which to hold meetings.

I’ve been there. Admitted to a building, met the interviewer in a busy corridor, been led on an impromptu tour of said building looking for a vacant meeting room. Booking failure mode engaged.

Whilst this failure could…

The perennial software problem that has divided engineers for decades.

A Line in the Code

There are two types of people in the world of software engineering¹ when it comes to a legacy product- those that are prepared to rewrite and those that are not.

Sometimes people, usually managers in this case, just want to hang on until the dear end come what may and keep on patching away until they are left with the software equivalent of the Ship of Theseus.

Let’s talk, briefly I hope, about the common pros and cons of a rewrite and understand why a ‘progressive rewrite’ is never a…

Another exposed metal object on the software job searching minefield.

LinkedIn, It’s a Banger

I’d like to say I have an on-off love affair with LinkedIn, but it’s more like owning an old banger of a car you can’t realistically get rid of. Let’s go with the analogy that it gets you to the shops for food, mostly, but you have to put up with the continuous clanking, oil patch on your driveway, and endless expensive repair bills.

And, as a result, you get a headache just by looking at it.

These days it’s likely, especially if you’re in the software game like me…

Togs aren’t just a feel warm factor, they’re a well defined unit of how well you’re not losing valuable sleepy time heat.

Never Judge A Duvet By Its Cover

When you’re buying accoutrements for your boudoir, especially those that you’re planning on keeping you warm on a cool night (or cold, if you’re frugal with the central heating like myself), it’s best not to judge on appearances only. They’re not books, after all.

Buying the wrong duvet can be extremely disappointing as if you’re losing heat too fast to the bedroom you’ll be chilly and if you’re not losing it fast enough¹ then you’ll be all hot…

We live in an age where software companies are desperate to attract, and hopefully retain, genuine talent to their development teams. An age where software development has become a key factor in pretty much every high tech startup business and where new, tangible¹, ideas can generate astronomical valuations for those lucky, lucky few² with tiny collars and long technical sounding words.

Prepare your cynical brain for a yet another assault on the software industry and its nefarious hiring practices. This time, let’s think about those things that don’t involve technology, software development methodologies, or testing. Testing? Who am I kidding?

Crustless Sandwiches and Coloured Balls

…

If we live in a simulated reality, chances are it’s a prison.

A Trope for our Times

It’s been talked about, considered, pondered, and philosophically mused for some time. It’s even been posited as the most likely state for the universe you’re experiencing right now. And, we’re going to consider it and its ramifications for all of us once again, but from a slightly different perspective.

Are we living in a simulation right now?

I wrote an article back in 2020 theorising that the most likely future for the human race would be an existence within an all encompassing simulation and I still very much…

This is a strategy that fails not only the company but also, more importantly for you, the employee.

Why People Resign

People leave their jobs all of the time, it’s nothing new. And neither is it as frowned upon as it would be in generations past when often jobs were considered as jobs “for life” and people would say that “you’re lucky to have one and you should be grateful.”

Fortunately, the onus has changed somewhat with the happiness and fulfilment of the employee now taking more focus in the workplace. …

Software engineering interviews nowadays often involve some kind of coding test or programming exercise and I think that’s a very Bad Thing. Here’s why.

Lazy Tropes

Asking software engineers to perform a particular task such as writing an algorithm to generate factorials (a very common one) or to sort a [singly|doubly] linked list can be easily memorised beforehand and offers no insight into a candidate’s skill other than their strength of rote memorisation. You may as well ask the ASCII code of the character ‘A’.

The detailed solutions to many such exercises are widely available online in various reference materials and, in…