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World-writable memory on Samsung Android phonesWorld-writable memory on Samsung Android phonesPosted Dec 18, 2012 16:06 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones by ekj Parent article: World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones
That depends on the job-market. Over here, there's a lack of suitable candidates, thus rejecting candidates who would've been a good, or even a reasonable fit, can be a pretty big deal.Even if the job market is tough it's still much better to reject good candidate and leave your team understaffed rather then to give to them someone who'll drag them back. Sure, hiring a entirely hopeless case is probably going to be worse, but most of the time we hire people on a 6-month probation-period, so the downside is somewhat limited. Bad candidate left unsupervised can create a lot of problems for your company in the future in one day (how much time is needed to create the abomination we discuss here?) and if you constantly supervise him (or her) in these 6 months then you are effectively interviewing him (or her) for the duration of these 6 months. Do you really think it's sensible approach to spend valuable time of senior engineers for this constant interviewing when they could do 5-10 simple interviews in that time instead? Or do you live in the area where you can not find even 10 candidates in 6 months? In this case perhaps it's better to move your operations in other place or at least try to understand why candidates avoid your particular company specifically.
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World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 18, 2012 18:19 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Even if the job market is tough it's still much better to reject good candidate and leave your team understaffed rather then to give to them someone who'll drag them back.That depends entirely on how understaffed your team is, in both relative and absolute terms. A team making no progress because it has too few members and they are all off sick is a team with an effective zero members.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 18, 2012 20:24 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] That depends entirely on how understaffed your team is, in both relative and absolute terms. No. It really does not. I've seen this reasoning applied few times when we hired candidate we had doubts about and in almost all cases this was a mistake. A team making no progress because it has too few members and they are all off sick is a team with an effective zero members. Yes. But such team is still just making zero progress. With a bad enough employees team will make negative progress instead which is worse then zero.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 18, 2012 18:22 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Or do you live in the area where you can not find even 10 candidates in 6 months?This depends on the difficulty of the task. In my current role, we've been searching for candidates globally more or less continuously since I joined, with a multinational company's job search process behind it. The job requirements are arcane enough that applicants are few and far between, and successful applicants rarer yet. Now maybe we'd have lots of applicants if we could search Asimov's Galactic Empire, but unfortunately we don't have 25 million inhabited planets to add to our search process. We're stuck with this one. And this is not a terribly rare case. A lot of companies are hurting for qualified staff.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 18, 2012 20:18 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] The job requirements are arcane enough that applicants are few and far between, and successful applicants rarer yet. We had such problems in the past, too. If job requirements are so arcane then you can not find enough candidates then you need to change something. Sometimes you just need to pay more, sometimes you need to accept the fact that you'll be unable to find someone who satisfies your job requirements exactly and will need to broaden them (and then spend some effort to raise newbie to the original level of job requirements). What you should not do is to lower requirements arbitrarily in the middle of the interview process just to hire "somebody, anybody to fill this %#^%^&*@#@ vacancy". Once you understand that "10 years of experience working with Renderscript" is not something you actually need you suddenly find lots of suitable candidates. Enough if them to pick ones who can code and can talk with you meaningfully (I assume the position indeed has something to with programming: it's quite pointless to ask candidate to write code if you are hiring an art-director).
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 19, 2012 21:19 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> And this is not a terribly rare case. A lot of companies are hurting for qualified staff.
I wonder if this is due to the messes that underqualified staff hires from the past created.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 20, 2012 0:03 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Certainly not where I work :) in my experience, the places that hire underqualified staff are probably happy to continue to do so (they have a competence floor, but it's lower than the expert shops).
Or are you suggesting some way in which underqualified hires can somehow... breed other underqualified staff? In the absence of bogon supercolliders (or, well, actual human breeding) I don't see how that's possible. Am I missing your point?
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 20, 2012 0:43 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> underqualified hires can somehow... breed other underqualified staff?
My experience is that underqualified hires kind of breeds more underqualified staff by the following process: more-qualified staff (QS) can't fix the messes done by the underqualified staff (US); QS gets overwhelmed with work requests (everyone wants QS on the job), its work becomes of lesser quality (effectively turninq QS into an overworked US); time passes and US gets more and more UNDERwhelmed with work requests and this affects QS's motivation to work (I work well, people put me to work a lot, and I can't take my vacations with my children because they put the payroll system under my responsability, etc... while Joe surfs the web the whole day, never leave one minute and a half past five and takes the whole July vacationing.) driving QS's work quality still further down, etc. etc...
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 20, 2012 3:23 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> Or are you suggesting some way in which underqualified hires can somehow... breed other underqualified staff? In the absence of bogon supercolliders (or, well, actual human breeding) I don't see how that's possible. Am I missing your point?
I read "companies are really needing qualified staff" and wondered if the need was caused by the process of cleaning up the unqualified staff's messes. The unwritten part was "if companies hadn't hired unqualified staff in the first place, maybe they wouldn't need 10 competent people, just one or two".
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 20, 2012 14:50 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Ah. That's true enough, though it's amazing how much mess even one qualified person can clean up (though 'qualified' is really the wrong word: 'competent and motivated' is more important).
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 19, 2012 17:11 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Bad candidate left unsupervised can create a lot of problems for your company in the future in one day (how much time is needed to create the abomination we discuss here?)
That abomination made umpteen millions (billions?) of dollars. That can buy rather a lot of time spent fixing it.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 21, 2012 16:22 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I'm not talking about Exynos here but about these libraries which use peek/poke interface to access camera. Do you mean someone actually bought phone because it contained proper implementation of peek/poke interface from 30 years ago? News to me. Perhaps you imply that this was purposefully inserted as some kind of backdoor and the person in charge receive huge bribe? That's pretty heavy accusation. No, I doubt it's anything that sinister. More likely then not someone just made it because it solved their immediate problem and they refused to even think for a second about consequences.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 21, 2012 17:12 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> I doubt it's anything that sinister.
I suppose Hanlon's razor apply here.
> More likely then not someone just made it because it solved their immediate problem and they refused to even think for a second about consequences.
Even if the engineer warned someone of the consequences, middle management deemed those inconsequential... =D
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 21, 2012 17:30 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Even if the engineer warned someone of the consequences, middle management deemed those inconsequential... =D And they were right! This was engineers mistake, not a management one. Someone probably forgot about Iceberg principle and showed demo which looked good enough to be released. Don't do that! Management is not competent enough to discuss such things. Don't ever forget about the rule: build your UI in such a way that unfinished parts look unfinished. It's surprising how often seemingly competent software engineers forget about this simple rule and how much grief this produces in the end.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 22, 2012 11:40 UTC (Sat) by lab (subscriber, #51153) [Link]
> Someone probably forgot about Iceberg principle and showed demo which looked good enough to be released. Don't do that! Management is not competent enough to discuss such things. Don't ever forget about the rule: build your UI in such a way that unfinished parts look unfinished.
> It's surprising how often seemingly competent software engineers forget about this simple rule and how much grief this produces in the end.
Oh my God. I'm highly embarrased to admit, that only now did I read that piece for the first time. I'm banging my fist against my forehead, for making this mistake so many times, and getting frustrated by it. Thing is, as a programmer I have been in denial about my surroundings really being that 'stupid', and refusing to accept it. But it's blindingly obvious, and I've known it all along. I think you (well, Joel) just saved a good chunk of my sanity going forward.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 26, 2012 22:29 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
The implications for the design phase are fairly important too.
Our UX person prototypes things with pieces of paper printed in a haphazard way. Instead of a flashy series of screens, the users are looking at pieces of paper they can cut up with scissors or scribble on with a pencil, and as Joel points out, they can't help but notice that none of this _exists_ yet, it's just pieces of paper and so they don't get the erroneous impression that it's set in stone and asking to change it will mean a delay or increased costs.
The haphazard printing also means when your question is "Is this phrasing clear?" or "How should these things be grouped?" you don't get feedback about typography, iconography, image formats, or how slow the demo machine is.
World-writable memory on Samsung Android phones Posted Dec 27, 2012 9:31 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
I had a boss that had an incredible difficulty with that. Whenever I built an electronic prototype, he wanted to ship it, and I had to explain that the thing did not work, just gave the illusion of working... And then he wanted to know why I was "wasting my time" with the prototype...
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