clint_hill

This is a great story. I admire Kenneth's "abilities".


It is something that makes me feel small and makes me humble.

I like Wards description of those that are most productive are the ones that "throw" themselves at an API. Now, I certainly do that. I didn't used to. I used to beleive that it wasn't very important to know all of the tools around me. I thought, once I finished a task I was done and move on to the next. Ward also hit on another topic that I beleive seperates the men/women from the boys/girls and that is the amount of environment a programmer allows into his/her work. This couldn't be more true with my work. 7 years ago when I started, I worked best in my room all by myself. I thought this was the "only way to do it". Now it couldn't be further from the truth. I often have sat myself in front of end users and watched them shuffle folders in front of themselves just to see what they do with the "objects". Great interview conversation. 

Thanks for clearing that up. I guess I didn't put closure together with anonymous methods. When you have an idea or problem in your head, everything starts to sound like that idea or problem.

"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
 Mark Twain

In this interiew (at the end) they are discussing closure and the misnomer in C#. Are they talking about Dispose and garbage collection? I am curious because I have implemented IDispose in a couple of objects but now I am curious if it is redundancy for managed code.

What I appreciate the most is that they even consider looking at blogs or comments from clients/developers. This in of itself is a major step in the right direction. I know they spin stories about how they always listen to us, but how much of that do I really believe.

It just seems from my experience that when I have a project and I have a "committee" that leads the direction of this project, the end-users aren't considered. The end-user opinion gets lost because the "committee" feels it knows what is best for the end-user and worse they think they know what the end-user wants.

This interview and others makes me feel better about MSFT willingness to jump into the "community waters" a little bit. This is a good thing.

I'm sure you were wanting a response from Euan, but I enjoy talking about "what technology or product to use". And I think it comes down to this: What makes your job easier. I am sure you could come up with a list of 10 things for both MSSQL and MySQL that would want you to move to other side. But this really isn't the point. The point is you have work to do and if one tool helps you do that job better, than by all means that is the one you use.

I should qualify my statement here by saying I use MSSQL and wouldn't care to use MySQL. But to give you an example of what I mean I have often used Access Data access pages to give people an interface to the data. I am an ASP/ASP.NET developer and I am opening up Access to build interfaces?? Yah, because sometimes it's just easier. Be pragmatic in your work. Work smarter and things will get easier. It means that the client/end user will get their job done easier as well.

I would like to hear however a response from MS on some of the technology advantages of MySQL - honestly I don't know.

I had a similar interview happen to me when switching jobs recently. I had 3 jobs that I wanted. All of which gave me good enough reason to leave my current position. What was interesting to me was how the interview persuaded my decision. Typically my interviews have been full of the "tell us about yourself" questions mixed in with a few of the "tell us about your most difficult project" types of conversation. This always bored me, and never gave me a good sense of the interviewer. I am the type of person that needs to be in an environment where I am going to learn from others. I can lead. I can even follow. As long as who I am following is smart in my opinion. Well, the decision was easy. I interviewed with a company that I actually felt wasn't going to be a cool place to work and got blown away by the interview. Nearly 3 hours worth of questions (good difficult with no real answer types of questions). Then at the end, when I thought I had failed all of that they asked if I had time to go through the coding interview. I said "absolutely" and jumped right in. The task was easy yet would have certainly shown my weaknesses if I didn't know what I was doing. 60 minutes later they came in and made me "defend" my code. Fortunately for me I did well in both parts of the interview. And as I said before, the decision was easy. I went to work for the place that really challenged me in the interview. This made me realize they were serious about finding good people and serious about their work. I start next Monday and I can't wait.