Posts in category Software

Jul 15, 2018 in Software

Against Programming Hobbies

In my capacity as a senior employee at Alert Labs (it’s easy to be senior when the company is only three years old), I do a lot of hiring. Since I started, I’ve been involved in interviews for four full time hires and five interns. Throughout all of this, I’ve learned a lot about what to look for in a resume.

I’ve also gotten in the occasional disagreement about what we should look...

Read more

Feb 3, 2017 in Advice, Software

A Dialogue on Lateral Thinking

Cast: The Hare (interviewer #1), The Coyote (interviewer #2), and The Tortoise (interviewee).

Hare: Okay, that wraps up the technical portion of the interview. Now we want to ask you some lateral thinking questions.

Tortoise: Lateral thinking questions?

Coyote: You know, questions that challenge your ability to come up with non-obvious solutions? Or when you find a solution by throwing out all your assumptions? Here at Acme Corp., we pride ourselves in coming up creative solutions to problems.

Tortoise: Okay…

Hare: We’ll start off easy1. Acting on an anonymous phone call, the police raid a house to arrest a suspected murderer. They don’t know what he looks like but they know his name is John and that he is inside the house. The police bust in on a carpenter, a lorry driver, a mechanic and a fireman all playing poker. Without hesitation or communication of...

Read more

Nov 21, 2016 in Advice, Software

Resume Tips For Students

I graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Honours Nanotechnology Engineering in 2015. Like all engineering programs at UW, this is a coop program. Over the course of four coop terms, I submitted over a hundred resumes and did about 20 interviews.

After I dropped out of graduate school, moved back to Waterloo, and got a job at Alert Labs I suddenly found myself on the other side of equations. I’ve now had a chance to interview students and look at resumes. Hundreds of resumes. Do you know what looking at 200 resumes in a day does to a person? It’s not pretty.

Looking through all these resumes, I was struck by a bunch of self-defeating things that students did. Some of them I remembered doing myself. The double vision was… enlightening. I considered posting an angry anonymous rant on the UW subreddit, but with some...

Read more