hiring

If you say to me How are you? these days and don't expect a useless, no-substance Western answer like Not so bad, I'll reply back with Good, hiring.

And it is the HOW I am doing it that matters this time. I am putting extra effort to eliminate phonies in interviews, those that sound brilliant and don't do the job, so you'll get a hands-on test at the end of the 2h interview which is structured like this:

- discussion on recent projects and professional experience
- questions from various subjects like algorithms, data structures, technologies, software development
- hands-on test

I am only looking for 2 engineers, so hiring one not good for the job will mean 50% failure. Fingers-crossed.

XML and aliens

[...] If SETI@home works, for example, we'll need libraries for communicating with aliens. Unless of course they are sufficiently advanced that they already communicate in XML. [...] - Paul Graham

Man, this line is so good, I had to reproduce it here and post yet again a link to Paul Graham's essays so that other know-it-all programmers can read them and realize they know next-to-nothing.

Humble me.