Zhanga: February 2008

Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.

Friday, February 29, 2008 (4 comments)

So... it's 5 AM, I dug up old Mandy Moore music to listen to (she's singing about how she's only 17 and she doesn't want to do "something stupid" blah blah), and I don't really want to memorize Chinese vocab.

Therefore, I was stalking this girl I knew in elementary school. I think I may have already mentioned this at some point, but I'll just tell it again, fitting for the old fart I'm turning into.

I had a little crush on this girl for pretty much all of second grade. She was pretty cute. Will always made fun of me for this, and I think he stopped about five years later, sometime in middle school. Oh yeah, sometime in that murky past, some years after second grade, she liked Will, which was an odd twist. But it was back when we were all little and none of that mattered.

A few months ago, I managed to find her on Facebook and friended her. Her picture had an unrecognizable fat girl dressed in typical Southern hick clothing that looked like they belonged on a redneck man with a beer belly and a motorcycle (tractor?). I shuddered in disbelief. Judging from the rest of her profile, she's one of those very conservative and very Bible-thumping types.

She also goes to the same school that Erica Lin did, which is a little (a lot) sad after hearing Erica's stories about that place...

What do you do when you find out about these things?? Should a little part of me die because I may have contributed to a fellow human's decline into redneckdom? =(

5:21AM

Thursday, February 28, 2008 (0 comments)

Looks like I'm relegated to being a computer nerd for the rest of my days =(

In related news, does anybody know how to convert wave files to MP3s in pure Java or pure PHP (i.e. no extra .dll or .so files allowed)? 10 points to the winner. These points can be redeemed on your next CS assignment.

8:10PM

Monday, February 25, 2008 (5 comments)

Interview in New York tomorrow... this is it, the fork in the road: will I become a finance nerd or a computer nerd? Well actually, a better question is which one of those I will be during the day. A job probably won't change who I am after hours.... if there is such a thing as "after hours" at an investment bank.

Chances aren't looking too good, especially considering when I have to wake up for my flight: 4 AM.

9:00PM

Friday, February 22, 2008 (0 comments)

  1. Why are you interested in this company?
  2. What is one class you have taken that you feel is most applicable, something you feel you would use in a job?
  3. What has been your favorite class, and why?
  4. What do you do outside of class?
  5. What's something you're passionate about?
  6. When you led a group, what was the biggest challenge you faced and how did you deal with it?
  7. Name three of your biggest strengths.
  8. Name some of your weaknesses.
  9. What is a situation in the past 2 years when you've made a proposal to a boss or professor and received a lot of opposition but pushed for it anyways?
  10. What is the biggest mistake you've made in the last two and a half years, and what did you learn from it?
  11. Describe a time when you set a goal and reached it.
  12. Describe a time when you set a goal for yourself and reached it.
  13. Describe a time when you've had to use analytical skills.
  14. How do you define success?
  15. When is a time that you feel you have been successful in the past?
  16. When have you had lots of things to do and managed to get through them all?
  17. How do you organize your day so that you don't miss anything?

All I got in today's phone interview were useless boilerplate questions. Well, except maybe the last question. She's the one who completely missed the interview yesterday, so maybe she wants some tips?

I'm now formulating a theory that correlates certain aspects of a job interview with that of the job itself. So I guess this company would offer me a horribly boring, repetitive, useless job not worth my time. But she sounded pretty cute, so maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

(Note to self: when I start looking for a girlfriend again, delete this whole website because it's really not helping my chances.)

5:33PM

Thursday, February 21, 2008 (1 comment)

Although I have not changed my mind about my future epitaph ("AFK, BRB"), I came across one fitting for my more, um... outgoing friends: "For a good time, dig."

In other news, I had a phone interview scheduled for 11 AM today but never got a call. This cost me about two hours of sleep. After the fact, I got an email from the interviewer telling me she was in a meeting. She didn't even apologize. Now she wants me to call her tomorrow, rather than the other way around... maybe because she's afraid of forgetting again?

11:07PM

Tuesday, February 19, 2008 (1 comment)

It didn't really hit me until last week, but recruiters can really make a big impact on my attitude towards the jobs they represent. In the past, employees and recruiters involved in the recruiting process were magical figures who, regardless of how they acted, were targets to be pleased unconditionally. My view has changed, and it's worth illustrating with an example.

The first one, Company A, is a financial services company. I received an interview invitation shortly after I submitted my resume and cover letter, and one of my friends did not. Yet when it came time to interview, the recruiter sent all interviewees, and my friend, an email about the interview. He inquired into the situation, and since all the interview time slots were already taken, he got a free pass to the second round of interviews.

The night before the interviews, they held an information session like most big companies do, though having it on the night before interviews is a little weird, since the only people who were going to show up were those who were accepted for an interview and presumably already knew about the company. Anyways, the info session was really stupid. Most companies will talk about all they contrived categories they're #1 in, like "#1 in corporate bond issuance in the healthcare industry in the Midwest in Fortune 1000 companies excluding Fortune 500, in 3Q 2006." Company A was #2, #6, etc in a lot of things, and they even said they're #12 or 13 in something in Texas. Seriously? It just makes them sound mediocre in everything. They weren't #1 in anything, apparently, except being bad at advertising themselves.

The info session was also sorely lacking in actual content. They didn't really talk about what they do, other than being leaders and developing and growing and gaining experience and making a difference and other mundane banalities. The presenter also falsely claimed to be "finishing up" about six different times, but I guess that's more of a personal complaint.

The interview was the coldest, most impersonal interview I've ever had. This was almost as bad as Google, but in a very different way. I walked in and he shook my hand. He told me we would not have time for anything but the case interview, so we immediately began with crunching numbers and analyzing a hypothetical profit. At the end, we still had ten minutes but he kicked me out saying there wasn't any time left. I forced a smile and thanked him for his time. He never told me his name.

Five days later, the recruiter (not the same person as the interviewer) invited me to a second round of interviews at their corporate headquarters. I accepted, and the next day, an automated email thanked me for my interest in the company and informed me that a better candidate had been found. The recruiter told me this was a mistake. Of the two people I know who applied (me and a friend), they screwed up both processes. How broken is their recruitment process?

In contrast, I saw a guy from Company B at the career fair a month ago, and I decided to apply to them just for fun because I wasn't really interested (hint: they sell used cars). At the interview, the interviewer talked about her job and it actually made me much more interested in the job. She responded in just one day to let me know I'd be moving on to the second round. A few days later, I took some online quiz about my background, and was then scheduled for an interview. Before the interview, besides the usual recruiting correspondence, some random nice director guy sent me an email to tell me a little bit about his job and to ask if I had any questions. I thought that was a nice touch.

All this stuff added up has given me a really good impression of B and a bad impression of a very disorganized A. Maybe that's why they're not #1 in anything? I was actually interested in A and not so much in B at the beginning of all of this, and now it's the other way around. It's ok, at least they're paying for my transportation and are feeding me.

7:40PM

Friday, February 15, 2008 (2 comments)

My grandmother raised me during my most formative years, and along with my grandfather, probably had more impact on who I am today than my parents did. They began feeding me science books when I was around 3, which must explain why I'm such a science nerd now.

Anyways, my grandmother died ~6 years ago. During the middle of the night, my dad came into my room with my grandfather on the phone and woke me up to tell me the bad news. After a little while he started shaking me because he thought from my lack of outward reaction that I was still asleep and hadn't heard him. But I had, and I was just as sad over it as he was. However, she had been dealing with worsening heart issues for as long as I could remember, and she was almost 70 at the time, so there was no shock factor. It wasn't surprising that she finally left us, and in fact I was surprised and grateful that the doctors there were able to resuscitate her as many times as they did.

(Trivia/digression: she lived on the 5th floor of an apartment with no elevator, and the roads (if you can call them roads) to it are pretty terrible to drive on, so it's pretty impressive that emergency staff were able to get up there in time multiple times).

Last night, Aalok, who lives across the hall from me, collapsed and died during a basketball game, for reasons yet unknown. He's a fit guy about 6 feet tall, quite active, and the last person you'd expect something like that to happen to.

We lost a great friend yesterday, and it really makes you think about life and human frailty in general. In just one hour, one can go from the basketball court to the morgue without apparent cause or significant history of health problems. In an hour's time, you can get dumped by your lover, you can watch your house burn down, and you can break a million-dollar violin, but you live again and no matter how stacked the odds are, you can come back from the loss. There is no replacement or substitute for a friend who was only 21 when he left us for good, and it is tragic that such a young person should lose the chance to fulfill his potential and pursue his aspirations.

I'm still recovering from the shock that this happened, and to Aalok of all people. May he rest in peace.

5:13PM

Thursday, February 14, 2008 (3 comments)

I have a short survey for you to fill out at deskle.com. In the spirit of SAD, Jerry is going to introduce me to a single girl for every 2 people who I refer to the survey... right Jerry?

Anyways, now that my anger has slightly subsided, I thought about my Google interview from a slightly more objective perspective.

In the past month, I've had seven business/finance interviews and one Google interview. Of the seven, six had some sort of technical component. In case you're curious, here are some things I was asked:

Anyways, the point is, I was able to answer all these questions to at least a somewhat satisfactory degree. In contrast, two out of Google's four questions went completely unanswered because I just had no idea.

By comparing results from my interviews, it would appear that I'm substantially better at business/finance/math than I am at computer science or algorithms, which is completely untrue no matter how you look at it. This school doesn't even offer business or finance (or accounting) classes to undergraduate students, unless you count a couple of the related econ classes, which means that I have little or no knowledge about the stuff I'm interviewing for. What little knowledge I do have comes entirely from outside reading. On the other hand, I've been taking CS classes since negative eternity, and I write programs and websites for fun. And I filled up 2/3 of the interview with "uhhhh"s and "ummmmm"s before giving up??

Admittedly, a really bright person could just figure it out, but do they really expect 20-year-old kids to do that? Anyone who got that question at the interview was far more likely to have gotten it due to having recently learned it in class than due to superior reasoning or algorithm skills.

Ok, I'm done ranting about Google and being bitter about my mental deficiencies, at least until next year when it hits me again.

5:26PM

Wednesday, February 13, 2008 (5 comments)

Before today, I've never had an interview that made me genuinely angry. I'm pretty peeved about Google right now, and here's why.

I prepared by thinking about the mundane questions like "Why do you want to work for Google?" or "What did you do at Microsoft?" and by brushing up on some C.

The interview started 10 minutes late, and she didn't have a copy of my resume. I don't know why she told me that, because I gave her a copy and she didn't say anything about it other some brief remark about economics.

She began by asking about a project I enjoyed in the past. Though she was pretty nice overall, that part felt like an interrogation. I won't go more into it because it's pretty standard and uninteresting.

After that, she asked me to write a function that reads a integer string and returns an int, à la Integer.parseInt(int). I kind of fumbled through this one like I do through most coding questions, but it wasn't too bad and took less than five minutes.

The next question she asked me went like, "Without using the / operator, how would you implement integer division?" Well, I learned the algorithm a full year ago in the hardware class. It has to do with bitshifting. Why would I remember the details? The whole point of having the / sign is so I don't have to know how it works! I'm not applying for Intel, and I'm not applying for an embedded systems job. All a software guy should know about division is:

  1. what it does
  2. how fast it runs

For the obligatory car analogy, this would be like asking a mechanic the chemical composition of tire rubber and the processes that produce it. Anyways, I didn't get anywhere on this question and eventually gave up after about half an hour.

The next question was just as useless. She asked me how to detect whether a linked list has a cycle (i.e. if you follow the list in one direction you'll return to where you began). It might sound like an interesting problem, but if you haven't seen this problem before, it's not something you'll come up with during an interview. I saw this problem last year in a room of ~8 TAs, and nobody solved it in a memory-efficient manner.

The solution is to have two pointers. One of them travels along the list one node at a time, and the other goes to every second node. She asked me why this works, and by this time I was really irritated. I'm pretty sure she saw this when I shot back with, "Well, if you're asking for a proof, I can't come up with one off the top of my head."

I think she had more questions, but our time ran out and I got booted. At the very end she began asking questions that were actually relevant, like the performance of a hash set.

The division and linked list problems took 90% of the interview and have almost zero to do with the job I'm applying for. I'm going to be using hash sets as a programmer, but I will absolutely not be implementing integer division or finding cycles in linked lists. Is that really the impression Google wants to give off?

I know I just sound bitter, and I am, but all this measures is how many contrived questions you've Googled and read up on before the interview, and it just means if I ever interview with them again I'm going to have to play their game and memorize every stupid brainteaser on the web, which I'm not too happy about.

11:17AM

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 (0 comments)

Here's the difference between computer science and, for lack of a better term, the lesser fields. Today's exam in economic history included such questions as (recalled to the best of my ability):

(A hypothetical country has GDP growth = 4.75% and TFP growth = 0.68%.) True/false: These figures were within 0.25 percentage points of actual US figures for 1840-1860.

Wtf? What do I look like, an Asian teenager who loves to memorize numbers for no reason? (Hah! Got you. Not a teenager any more.)

In CS, I think I've had only two professors who didn't like open-note exams. One guy even let us use laptops. The attitude I get from CS professors is that even if you're retarded and forgot the tenths digit of pi (which, by the way, is not 2), they'd figure "oh, well, you could just look it up anyway" and, if they really wanted to punish you for being mentally deficient, maybe knock a point off your test.

Luckily I guessed right (T) on the above T/F question, but there are 15-ish other questions (admittedly this one was the worst), plus only two non-T/F questions on the whole test. I also did long multiplication for the first time in years... on a history exam.

In other news, I am interviewing with Google tomorrow. Googlebot/2.1, please tell your masters that I am very excited and love Google very very much.

7:46PM

Monday, February 11, 2008 (0 comments)

In the past year or so, Hans Reiser, a pretty well-known name in open source (see ReiserFS), has been under investigation/trial/whatever for the murder of his wife Nina Reiser. Linux causes murder!

Anyways, I saw a funny snippet from this Wired article (defendant = Mr. Reiser):

The officer also testified the defendant flatulated in his face when the authorities were snapping nude photos of him Sept. 28, 2006. The officer said Reiser told him: "'You're about to experience chaos' and, for lack of a better term, he farted in my face."

Jurors snickered and the defendant grinned.

Besides the part where he murdered his wife, this guy is my hero.

2:56PM

Friday, February 8, 2008 (4 comments)

Maylene: i thought duke basketball sucked
Maylene: how did it beat UNC?

3:37AM

Wednesday, February 6, 2008 (2 comments)

If I'm remembering correctly (and I am), Microsoft paid Facebook a whole lot of money for the right to advertise on Facebook. Check out what that $240 million has bought Microsoft:

Leaving Microsoft to start a company?

That's right. An advertisement targeted at a Facebook user who is in the Microsoft employee network, encouraging him to leave Microsoft to start a competing business. Brilliant.

9:17PM

Monday, February 4, 2008 (2 comments)

Pluto (disambiguation)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pluto is the second-largest dwarf planet in the Solar system.

...

Aaagghhhhh!!

When is this travesty going to be fixed? If the solar system were open-source, it would be patched already!

11:50PM

Older posts can be viewed through the links to the left, under the main menu.
874 hits since March 3, 2008.