Gamblers doth Idyl

When hiring or being hired, if they fuck you during the application they will fuck you on the job.

There are several things wrong with this picture…

Another strange picture from Epping, Vic…

Not classic video games, but songs about video games from the classic era. Ones you could buy on record!

These are the only ones I can think of from the late 70s and early 80s.

Computer Games by Mi Sex.

Video Fever from the War Games soundtrack.

Pacman Fever by  Buckner and Garcia.

Player One by Space Invaders.

Any more?

(and I know that Buckner and Garcia had a whole album of it - so not counting them)

I live 17km from work. A zone 1&2 ticket to get there for a week costs $47.40.

To drive in a car that I will own regardless (so I’m not really factoring in rego and comprehensive insurance) using fuel at $1.25 a litre, is $30 per week.

This car uses 10.4 litres per 100 km on average driving city/highway cycle.

Per month that works out at $130. The monthly ticket is  $161.

This is the same for people who live in the northern suburbs of melbourne from the north side of Reservoir to Epping. Those a bit closer, but still in zone 2,  the mathematics of driving is going to be better still.

Oh and driving is the same or quicker for the overall trip in peak times. And did I mention that trains in Melbourne are now constantly overloaded and unreliable? From Epping, its standing room only after about 5 stops. By Northcote its sardines. In the evening, the trains are consistently late and DANGEROUSLY overcrowded. How there hasn’t been a death or serious injury lately is just pure luck - I have been on carriages where people have fainted or become caught in doors. The latter is a once a week observation.

If I factor in my registration and insurance its more like $255 a month. However were I to buy a crappy corolla or datsun or some other $1000 shitheap to get to work in (which I’m seriously considering), bomb insurance only plus rego brings it down to pretty much the same cost and providing the engine isn’t shot will get more like 8 litres per 100km. Now if I get a motorcycle…

Science is the search for fact.

Art is the search for meaning.

Engineering is the application of both.

Discuss.

Is the name of a butcher in Epping, VIC.

Reminds me of a computer company in NSW, from ages ago, called penultimate computers.

Can someone direct me to the best computer shop, rather than the second best one? Oh and anyone know of a butcher in Epping that has always been, and will always be, of good quality?

I have 12 pipes in my rotation. On average I might smoke 1 a week. I originally took up the occasional cigar, but tough times (being a professional student) forced me to look for a cheaper alternative.

I have:

• 3 falcons - 2 straight and 1 with a slight bend
• 2 MM cobs - 1 corn and the other cedar
• A small yellow bole
• An amadeus greek briar (takes a 9mm filter)
• A black, straight “the pipe” graphite
• A peterson standard system
• A regal Dr Grabow
• A kaywoodie standard
• 2 no name briar bents - 1 rusticated and the other plain

Favourite blends include most englishes, half and half and, for a aromatic, amphora red.

Fortunately my search for a job seems to have come to an end. For those want some kind of measure of how long it takes for a masters/PhD qualified developer/analyst/team leader with 10 years experience to get a job: the answer is a bit short of a month in the current market. In some cases my education actually hindered with one proven example of a company binning the resume when they saw the ongoing PhD work mentioned - only in Australia.

The main problem I have is that I don’t have any J2EE (which I’ll fix once my PhD is finished by taking a certification) as there is lots of java work around. It shits annoys me because there is nothing in J2EE that I don’t know about but if you can’t show commercial experience you’re screwed. Especially with clueless recruiters in the way shortlisting people.

c++ is very scarce at the moment. My estimation would be about a dozen jobs available at most at any one time and the companies interviewing for them are being ridiculously picky and very slow to hire.

Getting to the point of this post, I’ll list some of the questions I got on a few job interviews. I’m doing this in the spirit of giving people a good idea of what gets asked these days for c++ jobs in Australia. I’m not identifying the companies that asked them so I’m hardly poisoning the recruitment process. This blog is also quasi-anonymous so a recruiter that has inside information on me shouldn’t be able to put 2 and 2 together either and give their next candidate an unfair advantage. I’m doing it because I was really unsure of what the process was going to be like given how long I’ve been out of the permanent job market. This interview came to me as quite a shock given the questions asked in the last round of interviews I took when I last went for a permanent job (7+ years ago). Yes, this post does relate to an earlier one.

Here are some questions that I got for a fairly senior c++ position at a medium sized company. I considered them an excellent set of questions that certainly made me think. They are mostly in order to the best of my memory. They range from modern c++ then to a bit of SQL along to some team leading and finishing with a little behavioural.

1. Why would you declare a destructor virtual?

2. When would you inherit or use templates?

3. Whats wrong with using the default copy constructor all the time?

4. Tell me about what design patterns you have used.

5. What unit testing or test driven development have you done?

6. What do you need to do to manage a multi-threaded application?

7. How do you debug a multi-threaded application?

8. How do you prevent a race condition in a multi-threaded application?

9. What was the last profiler you used?

10. What version of gcc did you last use?

11. Whats your favourite dev environment?

12. What do you know about the STL?

13. What did you find most useful in Boost?

14. Demonstrate iterating through a map in STL. Write code on paper.

15. Demonstrate a breadth first search in pseudocode (this was actually shown as how do i iterate this tree in this order - where a binary tree was shown numbered such that a BFS was required - so you actually needed to know what a BFS was as well)

16. What have you done with .NET?

17. Consider the following code:

new

third_party_function();

delete

where would you add exception handling to deal with errors the third party function?

18. Consider the database table with the following values:

+———-+
| red |
| green |
| blue |
| red |
| green |
+———-+

How do you stop multiples from being entered in future?
How do you return only the duplicate values?
How do you return just the unique values?

19. What are the 4 types of cast in c++?

20. What do you have on your desk?

21. What would you do if you were managing a person who was given a week to do a job and then at the end of the week asked for a few more days and then a few days after that still hadn’t finished?

22. What would you do if there were two jobs that needed doing and only a week to do them in and only one person with which to do it?

23. What do you do outside of work?

24. Tell me a joke.