Look at that title! If that doesn't trend on social media, I don't know what will.

Nothing spreads memes faster than an American election. The term post-truth was named the word of 2016 by Oxford Dictionaries, which is funny, considering the elections went on at the end if the year and that Oxford is in England, but it only emphasizes the impact that it had. However, like the cake, it is a lie. The truth of the matter is that Americans, like all masses of people, can't handle the truth, so they invent a more comfortable reality in which to dwell.

When Trump became president, people needed somebody to blame, someone other than themselves, of course. After all, only good things happen because of you and God, because you're awesome! And God, too, I'm sure. *The people* would never ever vote a narcissistic entertainer as their supreme leader, clearly. So they blamed social media. Now, I am not a fan of social media, but considering I've been blogging for more than a decade, I am not against it either. I've only recently and reluctantly joined Facebook, mainly for the messenger app, but when I saw the entire Internet rally against poor Zuckerberg (well, he is anything but poor, but you get the gist) I smirked, all superior and shit, because the idea was ludicrous. Not the idea that Facebook had a major impact on people's behavior, that one is totally true, but that this is a recent event, brought on by technology run amok and without checks.

Mass media is one of the pillars of American democracy, it has always swayed people one way or the other. The balance doesn't come because media is true to facts but because, like any other form of power, it is wielded by both sides equally. Facebook and the whole of Internet is just a distillation of that and when you distill shit you get... 3-methylindole - perhaps a bad metaphor. What I mean is that media has always been crap, it has always had an agenda and it was always under the control of people with power. Guttenberg himself was after all a goldsmith with political connections trying to satisfy investors. The Internet just gives you more granularity, more people to contribute in drowning facts into a sea of personal opinion.

We are not in the age of post truth, we are getting closer and closer to the actual truth which, as always, is not pretty, is not nice, is not politically correct. Instead it is painful, humbling and devastating. The truth, dear *the people*, is that this form of democracy is the worse political system that you can stomach while still functioning economically, mass media is not a pillar of anything, just another form of deadly power, and that when this political system that you wallow in turns its wheels you get people like Trump and Hillary Clinton representing you. And it's fine, because no one that is actually like you will ever reach a position of true power in any system. Normal people do not crave power, but comfort and security. Not even happiness.

So get over it, because after post-truth comes truth: you will forget about all the outrage in the customary six months and then everything will go #BackToNormal.

Nu, nu este vorba despre vacanta mea cu nevasta-mea in Bucovina, desi e funny si aia, ci despre apa Bucovina si disparitia bidoanelor de 5 litri din magazine.

In primul rind, hai sa dam sarci pe net. Dezamagire totala. Daca nu e ceva in engleza sau poate alta limba de larga circulatie internationala, Google esueaza lamentabil. Toate rezultatele sint ori magazinele mari care vind apa online ori despre altceva cu totul. Pasul doi: sosial midia. Putin mai mult succes, dar nu mult. Oamenii se lamenteaza de calitatea apei plate citind diverse articole panicarde cu cuvinte gen "colcaie" si "mizerie" in titlu. Cu toate astea Bucovina e pe primul loc la curatenie, chiar si in acele articole. Mai gasesti articole despre cum Apa Bucovina a fost cumparata de niste polonezi.

Desigur, putem merge direct la pagina Facebook a firmei, unde mai multe persoane s-au plins de lipsa bidoanelor. Din pacate, la orice intrebare se raspunde STAS cu:

Mai nou au bagat mai multe detalii:

Pe bune? Intii cineva din alta tara sau planeta a cerut multa apa Bucovina si nu a mai ramas ca sa ajunga si in Bucuresti, apoi problema s-a rezolvat, erau ei mai setosi si acum s-au potolit, asa ca putem sa luam iar apa de la jumatea lunii Decembrie. Dar sintem in 17 si tot nimic. E timpul sa scoatem armele babane: zvonurile!

La un magazin de linga mine cineva cu "surse" mi-a spus ca inchid linia de bidoane de 5L. Alt "informat" imi spune ca de fapt doar inlocuiesc aparatajul. Cineva care "se pricepe" spune ca asa "se face", intii scoti produsul de pe piata ca sa se vada cit de dorit este, apoi se introduce un inlocuitor, deobicei mai ieftin de produs, mai scump la cumparat si mai slab ca si calitate.

Acum ce sa cred? Daca era doar o chestie de imbunatatire hardware, de ce nu ar fi spus asta public? Daca inlocuiesc produsul cu altceva sau, mai rau, il scot de tot, de ce promit ca se va gasi din nou in magazine in aceeasi formula?

O ipoteza este ca aveau un surplus de sticle de 2L pe care nu le cumparau oamenii destul de repede. Alta ar fi ca s-ar fi intimplat ceva cu apa, o infestare cu ceva, o poluare cu ceva toxic sau dezgustator, si acum poti sa iei doar apa la sticle de 2L care a mai ramas, in timp ce ei incearca sa rezolve problema in tacere. Asa o fi, @apabucovina? Lasati zvonul asta sa se raspindeasca pina nu mai cumpara nimeni apa?

In mod clar, mai multi factori se intrunesc aici ca sa ne faca viata mizerabila (pardon da pan). Intii e lipsa de transparenta a producatorului. Era asa de greu sa fie sincer si direct? Apoi lipsa de profesionalism a jurnalistilor romani, atit de preocupati de ce fund sta pe ce scaun si ce gura vomeaza ce in politica, incit uita de lucruri de genul asta. In final, Americocentrismul internetului, care ne aduce doar informatii despre ce filme mai apar pe marile ecrane.

Pai atunci cum sa ne se umple tara de nationalijdi care beau apa de la chiuveta si nu ii intereseaza decit de ale lor?

The machines are here. They look like us, they walk like us, they speak like us, but they are not like us. Open your eyes and carefully look around, search for the suspect, for the out of place. Their actions give them away.

They walk to their destination if it is more efficient than driving. They always take the same route to get there, too, once they found out which one is the best. They are courteous for no reason, never get angry - unless it serves their nefarious purpose, they don't swear or do meaningless things. You will never see a machine throwing garbage on the ground. They are obsessively clean and never smell of anything. Watch out for people helping others with no apparent goal. Are they real people? In the office they will say hello to you even early mornings, then get to work almost immediately. Whenever you interrupt them from their tasks they will gladly stop whatever they are doing and listen to your problems. Be wary of people that never complain, a clear indicator of their origin.

Don't get fooled by their deception. You will see machines at restaurants, eating and drinking, even going to the toilet. They are only maintaining appearances. See how they will not shout at the waiter even if served poorly, watch them take blame for not looking at the price on the menu before ordering or for spilling a drink. By the way, that's also an act. Their superior agility would never allow them to do anything by accident. They are clever, but don't let them outsmart you. Some will appear to enjoy art, like paintings or sculptures or classical music, but most will have adapted and fake enjoying normal things like movies. They will be the ones that you will not notice in the cinema hall. They will not use their mobile devices, they will not talk over the movie, they will rarely eat anything from the entrance shop, but when they do they do it quietly. It's always the quiet ones.

Couples, even accompanied by children or pets, may be machines. Their children will be uncharacteristically mild mannered and well behaved. Their dogs will not bark or try to bite in anger, and their poop will be collected and thrown in the garbage rather than left behind. They all can be machines. The way they blend in our society is so complete and subtle that you will see people living together with machines and not know it. But you can still recognize them by the way they considerately care for the other person, even after long years of companionship. They don't seem to grasp the concept of getting fed up with another living being.

Their greatest trick, though, is behaving as they have our well being at heart. They do not. Slowly, subtly, underhandedly, they change the world and take away our humanity, turn us into soulless beings like them. Wake up! Do not be fooled! Rise up and destroy them all before it is too late!

I am often left dumbfounded by the motivations other people are assigning to my actions. Most of the time it is caused by their self-centeredness, their assumption that whatever I do is somehow related more to them than to me. And it made me think: am I a good/bad person, or is it all a matter of perception from others?

I rarely feel like I do something out of the ordinary for other people; instead I do it because that's who I am. I help a colleague because I like to help or I refuse to do so because I feel that what I am doing is more important. Same with friends or romantic relationships. Sometimes I need to make an effort to do something, but it's still my choice, my assessment of the situation and my decision to go a certain way. It's not a value judgment on the person, it's not an asshole move or some out of my way effort to improve their life. What I do IS me.

It's also a weird direction of reasoning, since I am aware of the physical impossibility for "free will" and I subscribe to the school of thought that it is all an illusion. I mean, logic dictates that either the world works top-bottom, with some central power of will trickling down reality or it is merely a manifestation of low level forces and laws of physics that lead inexorably towards the reality we perceive. In other words, if you believe in free will, you have to believe in some sort of god, and I don't. Yet living my life as if I have no free will makes no sense either. I need to play the game if I am to play the game. It's kind of circular.

Getting back to my original question: Isn't good or bad just a label I (and other people) assign to a pattern of behavior that belongs to me? And not before I do things, but always afterwards. Just like the illusion of free will there is the illusion of moral quality that guides my path. While one cannot quantify free will, they can measure the effect my behavior has on their life and goals and determine a value. But then is my "goodness" something like an average? Because then it would be more important the number of people I am affecting, rather than the absolute value of the effect per person. Who cares I help a colleague or pay attention to my wife? In the big sea of people, I am just a small fish that affects a few other small fish. We could all die tomorrow in the belly of a whale, all that goodness pointless.

So here I am, asking essentially a "who am I" question - painfully aware it has no final answer - in a world I think is determined by tiny laws of physics that create the illusion of self and with a quantity of consequence that is irrelevant even if it weren't so. I am torturing myself for no good reason, ain't I?

Yet the essence of the question still intrigues me. Is it necessary that I feel a good drive for my actions to be a good person, or is it a posterior calculation of their effect that determines that? If I work really well and fast for a month and then I do less the next, is it that I did good work in the first month or that I am a lazy bastard in the second? If I pay attention to someone or make a nice gesture, is it something to be lauded, or something to be criticized when I don't do it all the time? Is this a statistical problem or an issue of causality?

And I have to ask this question because if I feel no particular drive to do something and just "am myself", I don't think people should assign all kind of stupid motivations to my actions. And if I need to make this sustained effort to go outside my routine just to gain moral value... well, it just feels like a lot of bother. And I have to ask it because the same reasoning can be applied to other people. Is my father making terrible efforts to take care of just about everybody in his life, making him some sort of saint, or is it just what he does and can't help himself, in which case he's just a regular dude?

Personally I feel that I am just an amalgamation of experiences that led to the way I behave. I am neither good nor evil and my actions define me more than my intentions. While there is some sort of consistency that can be statistically assessed, it is highly dependent on the environment and any inference would go down the drain the moment that environment changes. But then, how can I be a good person? And does it even matter?

Today I received two DMCA notices. One of them might have been true, but the second was for a file which started with

/*
Copyright (c) 2010, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/license.html
version: 2.8.1
*/

Nice, huh?

The funny part is that these are files on my Google Drive, which are not used anywhere anymore and are accessible only by people with a direct link to them. Well, I removed the sharing on them, just in case. The DMCA is even more horrid than I thought. The links in it are general links towards a search engine for notices (not the link to the actual notice) and some legalese documents, the email it is coming from is noreply-6b094097@google.com and any hope that I might fight this is quashed with clear intention from the way the document is worded.

So remember: Google Drive is not yours, it's Google's. I wonder if I would have gotten the DMCA even if the file was not being shared. There is a high chance I would, since no one should be using the link directly.

Bleah, lawyers!

I have enabled Disqus comments on this blog and it is supposed to work like this: every old comment from Blogger has to be imported into Disqus and every new comment from Disqus needs to be also saved in the Blogger system. Importing works just fine, but "syncing" does not. Every time someone posts a comment I receive this email:

Hi siderite,
 
You are receiving this email because you've chosen to sync your
comments on Disqus with your Blogger blog. Unfortunately, we were not
able to access this blog.
 
This may happen if you've revoked access to Disqus. To re-enable,
please visit:
https://siderite.disqus.com/admin/discussions/import/platform/blogger/
 
Thanks,
The Disqus Team

Of course, I have not revoked any access, but I "reenable" just the same only to be presented with a link to resync that doesn't work. I mean, it is so crappy that it returns the javascript error "e._ajax is undefined" for a line where e._ajax is used instead of e.ajax and even if that would have worked, it uses a config object that is not defined.

It doesn't really matter, because the ajax call just accesses (well, it should access) https://siderite.disqus.com/admin/discussions/import/platform/blogger/resync/. And guess what happens when I go there: I receive an email that the Disqus access in Blogger has been revoked.

No reply for the Disqus team for months, for me or anybody else having this problem. They have a silly page that explains that, of course, they are not at fault, Blogger did some refactoring and broke their system. Yeah, I believe that. They probably renamed the ajax function in jQuery as well. Damn Google!

Having been so pleasantly surprised by First Light, the first book in The Red series, I quickly read the next two books: The Trials and Going Dark. However, possibly due to my high expectations, I have been disappointed by the continuation. Linda Nagata seemed to have reached that sweet spot between current tech trends and emergent future that makes stories feel both hard sci-fi and realistic. The integration between man and machine, the politics run by shadowy megarich "dragons" from the background, nuclear bombs detonated in major US cities, artificial intelligence and so on. The potential was immense!

Yet, the author chose to continue the story on the same flat note, like an ode to the Stockholm Syndrome, where the hero gets repeatedly coerced to run missions that at first seem bullshit, but in the end are rationalized as necessary and even dutiful by himself. The common intrusion of external forces into his emotional balance by way of direct brain stimulation also makes his feelings and motivations be completely isolated from the ones of the reader. A strange choice, considering the vast possibilities opened by the first book. Frankly, it felt like Nagata liked writing the first book and then was forced by publishers to make it "a trilogy", since that is the norm for fantasy and science fiction, but her heart wasn't really in it.

I don't want to spoil the ending, such as it is, but I will say it was disappointing as well, with no real closure for the reader of any of the important questions raised in First Light. Too bad, since I felt the story was beginning to touch on important subjects that needed to be discussed at a deeper level than just "boots on the ground".

I was listening to this Software Engineering Daily podcast about Facebook Relationship Algorithms and I had this weird idea. The more I was thinking about it, the more realistic it felt (as well as more than a bit creepy). Let me lay it out for you. The podcast is interesting in its own right, so go listen to it, it's instructive.

So they describe these metrics of your Facebook connections that they reached while trying to find an algorithm to detect your romantic relationship. They took a large sample of users that have declared their significant other and tried to find an automated way of predicting that from the other information Facebook had. The first idea was to use connectivity, one often used idea in sociology that the more common friends you have with someone, the closer you are, but it didn't quite work. One clear counterexample would be coworkers connected on social media. Instead, they realized that such functional connections often cluster, so you would have the cluster of coworkers, your family, your club friends, the people who share your hobby, etc. The romantic partner would be connected with many of these friends, but across clusters, in other words you would have many common friends that are not really connected with each other. By using this metric they called dispersion, they would guess with more than 50% accuracy from the first try who your partner is from the list of hundreds of your friends.

And here is my idea: why not reverse engineer it? Imagine you have someone you want to hook up with, but have no idea how to proceed. Maybe asking them on a date is not an option or maybe, like any engineer out there, you want to maximize the chances your experiment would work. Why not find the smallest subset of friends of that person that have the largest value of dispersion? So here is what this "hook me up" algorithm would do:

1. Collect the list of friends of your target
2. Find a sample that are well connected to the target, but less connected with each other
3. Approach each of them and befriend them

The result would be that you would become the "natural" choice for a relationship, by going backwards and reversing the direction of causality. Automatic stalking, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood software developer: Siderite! We live in an age in which information about us can be used or abused in innumerable ways and we become addicted and stuck to this way of relating. It's not a bad thing, but it has its drawbacks. It is good to know of them.

First Light is Linda Nagata's first book in The Red series, which follows a military man landing right into the middle of an emergence event. Stuck between his duty as a soldier, his love for his girlfriend and father, the maniacal ambitions of an all powerful defense contractor queen and a mysterious God-like entity which seems to like him, our hero does what he can to survive and do good by his own principles.

At first I thought it was going to be one of those cheap soldiering books. It was short, written by a woman, and frankly I expected a standard pulp fiction "read it on a train" kind of thing. Instead I was blown away by the subtlety with which the characters are being explored and the way the story was constructed. I loved the book and I plan to read all the series. I started reading The Dread Hammer, which is another Nagata book, this time fantasy, but it doesn't even come close to First Light. I may even dislike it.

Anyway, I can't say much about the plot without spoiling it, but I can certainly recommend this book. As I said, it is short enough to read and see if it evokes the same feelings. Instead of hurting it, the female perspective of the author enhances the experience and makes it unique. The technical aspects are spot on and the writing style is fluid and easy to read. Top marks!

Update May 2020: I used this on a web site and the body was white. It may be that the bug in Chrome was solved in the meantime.

Update October 2019: a CSS media feature (prefers-color-scheme) can be used in conjunction with this. A recent development, it's a media query that allows a browser to activate CSS code based on the theme set in the operating system. You set your preference in Windows or MacOS or wherever and then sites that use prefers-color-scheme will take advantage of that. Something like this:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  html,img, video, object, [style*=url] {
    -webkit-filter:invert(100%) !important;
    filter:invert(100%) !important;
  }

  /* this was solving a bug in Chrome that seems to have been fixed
  body {
    background:black;
  }
  */
}

  I am a very light sensitive person. Shine a light in my eyes and you limit my productivity immensely. Not to mention it makes me irritable. Therefore I often have the desire to turn cheerful black on white sites to a dark theme, where the colors are reversed. I am sure other people have the same problem so I thought of building a browser extension to enable a switching button between the two.

  The first problem is that I need to interrogate all the elements in a page, including the ones that will be created later. The second is that even so I would have problems determining the dominant color of images. But there is something I can use which makes all of this unnecessary: using the invert CSS filter! Since I already use a browser extension that injects my own styles in any site - it's called Stylish and I highly recommend it - all I have to do is apply a filter on the entire site, right?

  Wrong! The problem is that when you invert an entire site, all images on the site get inverted, too. That also includes videos and Flash objects. The worst offenders here are the elements that sport a background image that is declared via CSS, since you can't create a CSS selector for them. I am going to present my partial solution and maybe you can help me find a more elegant or more complete one. Here is a general dark theme stylesheet, without the elements that have a background image declared via CSS (it does include those with a background image declared inline, though):

 html,img, video, object, [style*=url] {
    -webkit-filter:invert(100%) !important;
    filter:invert(100%) !important;
  }

 /* this was solving a bug in Chrome that seems to have been fixed
 body {
   background:black;
 }
 */

  What it does is invert the entire page (html), then reinvert video, img, and object elements, as well as those with "url" in the style attribute. In Chrome, at least, there seems to be a bug in the sense that the backgrounds of the direct child elements are not inverted, which means body, as the first child, needs to have the background set to black specifically. (this seems to have been solved by May 2020) The hack to invert elements with "url" in style is pretty ugly, too.

  What I think of a solution is this:

• inject Javascript to enumerate all elements present and future using document.createTreeWalker and Mutation Observers, check if they have a background image and if so, add a class to them
• inject the CSS above with an additional rule for the class for the elements with background image

  However, this doesn't completely solve the problem. One of the major issues is the inverted colors sometimes look dumb. For example a red background turns cyan, white text on light gray background turns black text on dark gray background, which makes it hard to read. I've tried various other filters, like hue-rotate or contrast, but it doesn't really help. Detecting individual color patterns doesn't really work, as the filter attribute affects an element and all of its children. The CSS above only works because the images are inverted again when the entire page has been inverted.

  The good news is that most of the time you may use the CSS above as a template, then add various rules (manually) to fix small issues with colors of backgrounds. Even if I don't package this in an extension, you have the power to create your own themes for various sites. Never again will you be subjects to the tyranny of the happy bright shiny people!

Tad Williams probably fancies himself as another Tolkien: he writes long decriptions of lands and people and languages, shows us poetry and songs, tells us about the rich history of the land. And all of this while we follow yet another common, but good boy, with a mysterious ancestry, while he and his merry band of helpers fight THE DARK ONE. It's the same old story, with the hapless youth that is guided by wise but not forthcoming people who tend to die, leave or otherwise shut up before the hero gets the whole story and can do anything about it. Regardless, he is young and lucky, so it's OK.

If The Dragonbone Chair would have been fun or interesting or at least show us a character that we could care about, this book would have been readable. As such it's a trope filled, boring and sleep inducing thing. You have to wait until half of the book to see the things that you predicted would happen from the first few chapters. I couldn't even finish it. More than two thirds in the book and there is no significant part of the story that involves either dragons or chairs.

Bottom line: it sucks!

After a slightly misused sabbatical year, I went through a period of trying to get hired. That means interview after interview with people that were assessing my fit within their company. Man, that sucked! I mean, I am a white male professional in a business where everyone is looking for personnel and still it was frustrating, demeaning and painful. But I am not here to complain (maybe a little :) ), only to share my experience and my... constructive criticism.

The story

OK, so first off, the only other real experience in looking for work was more than ten years ago and then I was an absolute beginner on the market. However, back then I knew I was a nobody, while now I know that my experience and passion put me way up there as usefulness and value go. I may have started off this campaign with an unhealthy level of smugness, but it goes off quickly, I assure you.

I am lucky that I had this year of experimenting before I started looking, which allowed me to treat it as any other experiment: I accepted almost all interviews and I went diligently through the entire process, no matter my personal opinion about the company. That helped a lot as a learning experience; while I know how to code, it quickly became apparent that I have no idea how to convince others about it. I set up to try everything, learn from it, while continuing to be principled. In my mind that meant completely honest. I didn't expect company people to be honest with me, but that was on them. I would be a perfect WYSIWYG candidate. Better to fail fast, rather than have a miserable experience in the relationship. BTW, that is also my strategy with girls, which explains why I am virgin. I stuck to my guns, though.

The experience

I am not going to name names here. This is not about how awful some companies may have been. It is all about my perception of the hiring process. And it is that it sucks!

I don't know if in other fields it goes smoother, but imagine this: the only people that have any idea about how to hire people are the HR people and they have no idea what software programming is like. I could be married with an HR manager and she still would not know anything about software development. The technical people may know how to code, but they have no idea how to determine if the other person is any good and if you are a technical person you are definitely not an human resources person. I applaud people who can be both, mostly because I have not met one and I can't think of any scenario that would produce such an individual other than some radioactive alien arthropod biting a regular person.

Funny enough, compared with my past, is that HR mostly liked me while the technical people (the majority more than a decade younger) mostly dismissed me. At first I felt like a complete impostor (of course), my self esteem plummeted (which didn't help any), and I was about to beg for a job (which is what most people do, I hear). However, I tried to see the situation from the point of view of the people trying to hire me (I know: shocking!) and I could understand their situation and empathize. Think about it. How would you test someone for a programming job? Who would you call in that meeting? What would be the salary that you would budget for that person (in EUR, after taxes)?

Did you really think about it? Come on, make an effort. I guarantee it's worth it.

OK, so the HR people looked at my resumé and saw that I have had a lot of stable jobs before in all kinds of environments. I was a pleasant enough person (I mean, for a techie, which means without obvious homicidal tendencies) with a very good understanding of the English language. No obvious conflicts, although I may have been too honest in my (err.. constructive!) criticism of past employment. I mean, come on!, every dev can tell you that managers don't know what they're doing, right? If I think about it, the job of the HR department seems fairly simple to me: look for a candidate that fits the profile, lure them in, do the most simplistic psychological screening possible, then pass it along to the tech department. It's something that AIs will probably take over soon. I may fondly look backwards to these times, when there existed people that were actually biased towards me! The typical HR person is a girl. Now, if I am being insensitive here, I apologize, but if you want to seduce a tech to the point where he would do anything to come to you, you use a nice, sexy girl. It's only natural when devs are mostly male virgins. To be honest, these girls could have hated me or wanted me to have sex with them and I would have had no clue whatsoever. If they said it, I took it for granted. If they lied, again, it's on them. If they remained quiet, then I couldn't parse it into text and who's fault is that?

So then there was the tech interview. You have some guy who thinks he's God because he can code and maybe have some overview that is slightly larger than those of his juniors. He is young, probably coming from some technical university (yes, in Romania people actually do look for coding work after studying Computer Science). He has no idea how he needs to conduct an interview, but admitting to that, even to himself, is a bit too discordant with his view of his person. So he does what every tech would do in this situation: he Googles it. You might be amazed, but Google actually turns up some good advice, but you must be willing to admit that your expectations for how to do that may have been completely wrong. So he does the second thing anyone does when Googling: looks for links that validate their own beliefs (and also have some template for interviews that they can quickly print and use).

Am I being unfair here? Probably. But it is a good theory to explain the types of interviews that I had and how they all seemed carbon copied after each other. The template is basically this:

1. an algorithmic question, such as: how do you refresh a sorted list from another complete sorted list, or how do you intersect two sorted lists, or how do you search into a sorted list or... wait a minute, are they all about bloody sorted lists?
2. general algorithmic knowledge questions, such as: what is the difference between a list and a linked list, or an array and a list, what are the complexities of operations on lists. Pretty much there has to be a data container there.
3. general language knowledge questions, such as: behavior of some implementation in a specific language, the results of SQL queries, characteristics of SQL indexes, some HTML stuff, the life cycle of ASP.Net if you are really lucky...
4. tools and ways of working in tech from previous employers. Here they are actually interested, because while they appear to be judging everything you say, they actually want to hear of better ways of working themselves.
5. questions about a project you really liked or had a lot of influence over. Yeah! And while you feel like an idiot because no one ever let you work on a project that you think was special, the interviewer learns from your experience and adapts it to their crappy project.
6. asking you if you have questions for them and looking like they expect you to have some really sensible and relevant questions when all you want is to know if they want to have you or not

The existence of the first step is being fed by sites like HackerRank, Codility and CodingGame, which should never be considered as anything else than learning tools, if not just silly games. However, since these people went through grueling university lectures about algorithms and then inflated their own ego playing on the web sites above they assume you should know about them too. It doesn't matter that they rarely found use of any of it when working on their projects, they just push it under the vague concept of "wanting to see how you think". However, they are not logical problems (like they used to put 5 years ago, copying from Google and the like), they are very specific coding situations. You may know the exact solution - because you played around with algorithms when bored - or you might have no idea how to solve the problem.

And here you are now, facing a guy that looks critically at you, while trying to think of the problem, finding the best solution and doing it before the guy gets bored. It will take him about 60 seconds to get bored, too, as he already knows the answer to the question and he feels it's obvious and the only one possible. Hell, he knew how to solve this before he even left university! It doesn't matter that several scenarios fight for supremacy in your head, that for each there is another solution, that the very simple solution feels too simple and your brain is wracking itself to find another one - that would be probably either wrong, over engineered or both. And you want, you really want to implement a three step algorithm that you know always works (1. Google it 2. Think of something better 3. Use the best implementation found), but you believe it would be perceived as not knowing your stuff. I mean, what if you are at work and your Internet dies? Surely you need to solve the problem anyway, right?

In truth, the lucky scenario is if they send you to HackerRank or something similar to solve a technical test before you meet with anybody. That goes over fast and easy, while you hack comfortably in your underwear and you have no stress about who is thinking what. The unlucky scenario is that you get a guy who thinks you are not a true developer unless you are working on open source projects on GitHub in your spare time. Oh, and they need to be interesting to him.

Yet, after you go through the first two steps, the rest are a breeze: you know your stuff, you know your languages, you can even think of a project or two that had something remotely instructive in them. It feels like you went over a bump, but now you can go full speed. They ask you various things about your past experience, you gladly oblige, make a few jokes, get some laughter, start to feel good about yourself. Surely, you will pass the interview.

And then you get "the call", where you know you have failed from the tone of the HR girl who needs to tell you that they won't be going further with it. You still hope against hope while she goes on and on and on through her complex script of letting you go easy. She thinks she's being thoughtful, yet you are a tech and you want the answer first and the explanations after. And you despair. Obviously, you suck. You will never get a job. You are worthless, less than worthless, a complete buffoon. And here you were, thinking that years of successful work with people that appreciated your efforts meant anything. When was the last time you learned something new anyway? Last month? Three programming languages and five new frameworks launched since then, not to count the new versions of old frameworks that you never got around to master. Who were you kidding? There are ten year olds that can code better than you. And they are not married yet! You know getting a dog will ruin your career. You are a fossil, admit it! In five years you will be begging for food on the street with a sign that says "Will code for bread". And you know what? You are right: you are an idiot!

I cannot claim absolute truth here, because I don't have enough data to arrive at a clear conclusion. That is because when they flunk you, the sweet HR girl stops contacting you altogether. If you are lucky the company didn't use their own human resources and instead you arrived through a dedicated HR firm (headhunters) and they have the decency to not only tell you didn't pass, but also make the effort to tell you why. The people you maybe knew at that company and were really supportive of you joining their team drop from the face of the Earth. Clearly, you were too stupid to work there, so they cut you off. At the very best you are an emotional mess and they don't want to have anything to do with that. So the next section is mostly speculation, but I will try to make it sound good.

The Explanation

There are a zillion reasons people don't want you in their team on the specific project they are working on and that have nothing to do with your value as a human being.

You might have asked for a sum that is too large for what they were prepared to offer. Even if you are that valuable, they are too cheap for it. It's like the girl who dumps you without telling you why (maybe mumbling something about you being insensitive) because you said you liked anal and she was afraid to try it. It may also be because you think you deserve more than people are actually willing to pay in general. That's on you. However, the correlation between your skills and your pay is not linear. It mostly depends on the market. After all, you are trying to sell yourself. You are already a whore, now you are just negotiating on the price. Today you may be a hero, tomorrow you will be the guy that made some money in that [enter fleeting fad] boom and lost it all in the subsequent crash.

People might put a lot of value on algorithms. It may be a good decision, because in their project they often meet situations where good algorithmic knowledge saves the day. If you are not good at it, or you couldn't prove it in the makeshift interview you flunked, they have every right to not go through with it. They might also not know any other way to test your knowledge and be too lazy to actually look for value in people. There a lot of other similar reasons that you may file under this scenario. They wanted something specific from you, didn't tell you and you don't have it.

They think you are old. And you may just well be. Age discrimination aside, why should they hire someone like you when they perceive the same value from a guy 20 years younger - and way cheaper? If I had to chose, I would have no qualms whatsoever. This is also linked to expectations. Remember when you were counseled to try to move to a manager position before you got to [enter ridiculously low number here]? That translates to the expectation that after that age, being a simple techie means there is something wrong with you. This will never ever change. Look at the age average in all the big companies: it's about 30. Startups even less, around 22. That doesn't mean you need to become a manager, I am sure old managers feel just as threatened. Plus, you might really suck as a manager. I know I would. Unofficial sources say that even the places that usually hire people for experience (like government jobs) stop looking at resumes for people over 45. Age does matter, so plan for it.

And then there is the idea that if you are inexperienced you can learn quicker the things that "you really need", like that framework that became famous while you were reading this blog post. You may be experienced, but will they need to fight with you on whether to use ASP.Net MVC over ASP.Net forms? (or is ASP.Net MVC obsolete already? I don't know, I was blogging). I don't know if that's true. I did learn quicker when I was young, but that was mostly by failing miserably again and again. On the other hand a job position where you are hired for your ability to fail your tasks sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

There is also the personal thing. You might have rubbed someone the wrong way. That means not that you are an awful person, but that you just don't match with a person who you might have had to work with if they went forward and hired you. Again, want to be married with the girl that hates you, no matter how big her boobs are? You may be an asshole, but maybe the other person was, too. Some people might feel threatened by you, either because you threatened their life if they don't hire you or because they think you are way sexier than them and you would cock block their attempts to woo the HR girl. You won't become a better person by trying to be liked by everyone. They might have hated your shirt, for example, the one that you thought would look really professional, but they saw as threatening, because they usually work in shorts and t-shirts. Point is, they had some expectations and you didn't meet them. Were they justified? You don't know and you shouldn't care.

The position you would be working on is equally important. You might be a brilliant web developer, but if they actually wanted a server guy, or viceversa, they will drop you. They will not admit that they were not specific in their job description, of course, and instead just blame you for not being "a good fit". Imagine you are a cube that is crying it didn't fit in a circular hole. Ridiculous, right? I mean, would the tears be blocky? As a specific example: I went somewhere for several interviews. I was "a perfect match" for one and not the right person for another. The JD document they sent for both positions was identical.

Solutions

Since I code and have an overview on life, I can definitely tell you how interviews should be conducted, but you will have to buy the paid version of this blog for that. See, I am learning fast, in one phrase I was both a tech, a business person and an asshole.

The truth is that the only way I could think of that wasn't insulting to everyone's intelligence was to actually show them a computer, a real problem, and let them fix it with me watching and helping next to them. And it still wouldn't be sufficient. If it were "real" enough, then it would take time to understand all of the aspects of the problem. The guy might be overly nervous with me next to him. I know people that can only work when no one is watching, and they do great work. Plus, they may have experience on that exact problem and suck at anything else.

Unfortunately, in all my interviews the only tools that I had to work with were pen and paper. Putting aside the fact that I don't even understand my own writing, the last time I had to actually write anything on paper was... oh yeah, the last time I was looking for a job. Does it make sense to conduct software development interviews with no computer? I would say no.

Conclusions

There is a schism between what they expect and what you expect, what you think of yourself and what they do. That is the real reason behind every failed interview. It doesn't really matter if they had unrealistic expectations, but it matters a lot if you had. Like every experiment: acquire data, reason about the data, propose a theory that explains it, test it against new data. The best way to achieve anything is to change your behavior towards the goal. The important thing here is to define the goal. Is it to get hired at any and all costs? Or is it to find the place where you will enjoy working, keep growing and be appreciated for your efforts?

In the end it so happens that not only did I get hired at the company I was aiming for, but I did it on the position I feel I was best suited for, rather than some mediocre second best. Like with dating girls, it is worth waiting for the right one. And with software, you get to do side projects, too!

There was this quiz from the Planetary Society where Robert Picardo was interviewing people at a sci-fi convention and asking them what is the planet with the hottest surface in the solar system. The expected answer was Venus. Yet, if you think a little bit, Jupiter probably has a solid core, gases made liquid by high pressure and the temperature at the boundary between the gaseous and liquid layers is immense. Shouldn't Jupiter be the answer?

No. And that is because of the definition of a planetary surface. Quoting from Wikipedia: Most bodies more massive than Super-Earths, including stars and gas giants, as well as smaller gas dwarfs, transition contiguously between phases including gas, liquid and solids. As such they are generally regarded as lacking surfaces.

So there you have it: Jupiter loses due to a technicality... just like Pluto! Just kidding. I was cheating, as there is no clear boundary between the gaseous and liquid states inside Jupiter. It is hard to imagine that, since we have a clear image of what a liquid and a gas should look and behave like; it's like boiling water in a kettle and not being sure where the steam ends and the water begins. Jupiter, though, is a big kettle.

Today the free antivirus Avast reported my BitTorrent installation as infected with Win32:Evo-Gen (Susp). It also promptly removed the executable of the program. I tried to reinstall it, also to have the same happen to the installation program. I've reported a false positive (I hope it is) for BitTorrent Stable (7.9.8 build 42577) and then I added *bittorrent* as an exclusion pattern in Avast. I could then reinstall the program, retaining all of the settings and torrents in the download list.

I got this bundle of four books in the Alcatraz series, by Brandon Sanderson, and since I loved all of his books so far, I enthusiastically started to read them. First, you need to understand that there are five books in the series, with The Dark Talent just published. I think it pays to wait until you have it before you read the whole thing, since it pretty much reads as one long story (unless you read the beginning and then immediately skip to the end of each book, heh heh heh!). Second, you need to know that at the beginning the writing will appear waaaay too silly and under par compared to the author's other works. After a while it kind of grew on me, but be aware that it is written mostly for kids. Sanderson even says so in the story itself.

So at first I kind of thought this will be the series that breaks the rule, the one that I would not enjoy reading, and it took some time to shake off this feeling. It feels like the author could not make up his mind on what to write: the obligatory book about writers (after all, the rule says "write what you know", so in the end it's inevitable) or the recently obligatory Harry Potter spoof (which fantasy authors are peer pressured into writing). In the end he wrote something that has both: a story about a boy discovering he has magical powers and also a book filled with meta comments and breaks in the Fourth Wall (the character has the Breaking Talent, see) that shows some of the tools and processes in the writing business.

In fact, the more I read, the more I enjoyed the books. The characters are as always incredibly (annoyingly) positive and there is that Sanderson smartness behind even the silliest of exchanges. He references future scenes, with book and page number (which is amazing if you think about it), he hooks you to a scene then berates himself on using hooks in the book, he uses really silly and out of context details only to use them at full effectiveness a book later. In the end, you get something that children will undoubtedly read with giggling pleasure and that adults (especially those interested in writing) will see as a deconstruction of the writing process.

Now, I still feel the Alcatraz series is one of the lesser Brandon Sanderson books. The silliness sometimes feels forced and the way he writes each book changes slightly, as he experiments with the crazy shenanigans that he started with this series. It's still very entertaining, though. Give it a try, or give it to your children so they can get into writing themselves and make your life a living hell when they grow up :)