Category: Random

I've written a couple of times about why I don't believe in the "No False Positives" view of hiring. Among other reasons, o I work in an area (doc classification) where we make precision/recall (false-positive vs false negative) tradeoffs all the time, and I know that there is _always_ a tradeoff o I believe that… Continue reading Hiring: False negatives in the bigcorp →

In systems design, a Single Point of Failure (SPoF) is a component that brings everything down if it fails - for example, a single master server machine that is your only way to communicate with a cluster of child servers. Having a SPoF in your design is supposed to be a Bad Thing. In organizational… Continue reading SPoFs and SPoCs →

Thinking more about what annoyed me about Norvig's post on hiring at Google, I realize that it's not that involved a computer simulation of hiring - it's that it pretended to take a simple simulation seriously, like it was, well, science or something. I don't have anything against quick-and-dirty simulations - I actually think that… Continue reading Simulations as thought experiments →

I was disappointed to see this post by Peter Norvig on the Google Research blog - disappointed because it's so silly, and because I have had feelings of near-reverence for Norvig in the past (based mainly on his AI Programming book from back in the day). What's wrong with the post? Well, it's one of… Continue reading Silly Google post on hiring →

Following up on both my last post and Jeremy's, I've been amused and interested to see how wifi (and other connecting technologies) has changed my working environment - especially in ways that no one was anticipating when they constructed the building... I work in one of those buildings that have floors full of cubicles, with… Continue reading How wifi changes the workplace →

In an earlier post (In Praise of Meetings) I ranted about the unfortunate fact that, although meetings undeniably suck, they're also irreplaceable for certain kinds of decision-making. As a subrant, I griped about the fact that having people "dial in" to meetings is a lose, since the communication bandwith is just too low (this observation… Continue reading Meetings, 2 →

So last week I travelled to Ann Arbor, Michigan to recruit for my company. I've pounded the table for a while about needing to broaden our college presence beyond the first two coasts, and so I got to put my time where my mouth was. I took this particular one because I grew up in… Continue reading Michigan recruiting trip →

One of the first things people learn about optimizing software performance is that you have to figure out the limiting factor --- if you're maxing out the CPU, then increasing I/O performance won't help, and vice versa. If CPU is the current limiting factor, then you are "CPU-bound". Using the same language, I'd like to… Continue reading On not being idea-bound →

So, someone who was hoping for a particular feature to be shipped by my group was disappointed; the representation of their info in the websearch index wasn't in a form that was usable by them. This was a pure miscommunication: the guy who dealt with the requesting group didn't know that they wanted this particular… Continue reading Communication bugs →

I think the best statement of my worries about Scrum's applicability to anything and everything is this: how would Scrum organize a marathon runner's time during a race? The answer, of course, is 1) do a sprint, 2) do another sprint, 3) do another sprint, ...