4 ms·

No...based on your reaction I think I phrased it pretty much spot on. I added a new question to my interview process a number of years ago. Anyone who put "co

by kjs3 12y ago

No...based on your reaction I think I phrased it pretty much spot on. I added a new question to my interview process a number of years ago. Anyone who put "computer science" on their resume get's asked "What do you think of Andrew Tanenbaum?" It's free-form question intended to see what about computer science interested them enough to remember; I have similar questions about Turing & Knuth. Our team requires a lot of broad knowledge and original thought. If they don't know who AST is, the interview is probably over. We continue if they can discuss pretty much any of the 6-7 seminal, award winning CS textbooks he wrote, the other major projects he lead like the Amsterdam Compiler Kit or the Amoeba distributed operating system, or the other contributions he made to networking, distributed systems, languages, computer architecture, operating systems or information security (he did publish nearly 200 journal papers over 43 years as a professor). If they know about Electoral-vote.com, bonus points. If all they can come up with is "Minix" and "that pissing contest with Linus", then I might see if the Linux devops guys have an opening. If they're that incurious, they'll do fine there; those guys think the world begins and ends with Linux, too. Continuing in the "let me Google that for you" vein, both QNX and various L4 family microkernels are in use in a variety of embedded systems; QNX is also in the new Blackberry products. There's a number of very mature security oriented research microkernels (like L4se and K42) that could very well show up in commercial products eventually. But that's back to needing to know more about computer science than Windows and MacOS.

sanderjd 12y ago
I'm totally with you that questioning Tannenbaum's legacy is pretty poor form, but your interview questions sound designed to filter out anyone who doesn't share your exact interests, which is a real shame. A better follow-up than ending the interview upon a candidate not knowing who he is would be to describe his achievements (as you did here) and then ask the candidate to tell you what they know about someone else interesting who you may or may not already know all about.
- kjs3 12y ago
  Another good interview technique is "did you actually read what I said". Things like when I said it's an open ended question, asked about 3 of the seminal minds in CS at least one of which a CS graduate would have bumped up against, and that the candidate can focus on whatever they want to. Just a tip for your next interview.
  - sanderjd 12y ago
    > If they don't know who AST is, the interview is probably over. We continue if they can discuss pretty much any of the 6-7 seminal, award winning CS textbooks he wrote, the other major projects he lead like the Amsterdam Compiler Kit or the Amoeba distributed operating system, or the other contributions he made to networking, distributed systems, languages, computer architecture, operating systems or information security (he did publish nearly 200 journal papers over 43 years as a professor).
- gtirloni 12y ago
  This has nothing to do with cultural bias. It's just basic CS stuff that anyone with "CS" in their resumes should know about. Heck, even undergraduate students will probably have "AST" tattooed inside their brains in the first semester alone. I'm sorry to be picking on you but this is one of the things that is absolutely wrong in our field: we don't learn anything from history. We don't know what was being researched in the 70's and proceed to reinvent the wheel over and over thinking we somehow have magical brains that are unearthing some concepts for the first time in human history. The traditional CS curriculum should adopt a mentality of "ok, you now understand at which point in history we are in CS? Know most of the past inventions? Fine, now proceed to build on top of them and stop wasting everybody's time with your rediscoveries".
  - sanderjd 12y ago
    I don't think you're picking on me, and I wasn't trying to suggest that such a question is cultural bias. What I meant is just that people in general tend to think the things they know about are the most interesting things, and that people who don't know about those things are deficient. But by definition they can't know about things they don't know about, which may be just as interesting. So my proposed replacement question just acknowledges and tries to work around that phenomenon. I doubt it is actually critical for people to be super familiar with Tannenbaum's work specifically, it is just an indirect way of assessing intellectual curiosity and CS chops, which I think my question would also achieve. I pretty much agree with everything else you said, and I wish I knew more about the history of computing myself, since I've lost a lot of my memory of my college course on it to the sands of time. I wonder if there's a good survey book. Maybe AST wrote one...
elliotz 12y ago
> If all they can come up with is "Minix" and "that pissing contest with Linus", then I might see if the Linux devops guys have an opening. If they're that incurious, they'll do fine there; those guys think the world begins and ends with Linux, too. Do you actually believe that someone is incurious simply because they don't share your own interest in Tanenbaum? Perhaps they've focused their curiosity on one of the many other luminaries in CS, or perhaps they're more interested in the topics themselves than the personalities behind them. Your contempt for your own devops team is also disquieting. Based on your comment your company sounds like a toxic place to work.
- kjs3 12y ago
  That's why we ask the question about 3 people in broadly different areas. Frankly, if you don't recognize at least one of those names and understand the foundational contributions they made, then yeah I'd call that a kind of incurious. As to devops, you may think whatever you want. I give them shit about the "all the worlds Linux" attitude, they give me shit about "fucking research projects" (e.g. anything that isn't Linux). We understand our respective views, and it works.
  - elliotz 12y ago
    > That's why we ask the question about 3 people in broadly different areas. Frankly, if you don't recognize at least one of those names and understand the foundational contributions they made, then yeah I'd call that a kind of incurious. Well that's a lot more reasonable! Your original comment left no ambiguity that candidates insufficiently knowledgeable about Tanenbaum would be shunted over to devops. > As to devops, you may think whatever you want. I give them shit about the "all the worlds Linux" attitude, they give me shit about "fucking research projects" (e.g. anything that isn't Linux). We understand our respective views, and it works. That could be the basis of some good-natured ribbing, which would be OK. What's not OK for a healthy company culture is the suggestion that devops people are inherently incurious, and the strong whiff of intellectual elitism which came across in your original comment.
ggchappell 12y ago
> Continuing in the "let me Google that for you" vein, both QNX and various L4 family microkernels are in use in a variety of embedded systems; QNX is also in the new Blackberry products. There's a number of very mature security oriented research microkernels (like L4se and K42) that could very well show up in commercial products eventually. But that's back to needing to know more about computer science than Windows and MacOS. Let's be fair here. Your claim was that microkernels are "in general use". Ongoing research, however mature, does not support this claim. And Blackberry is hardly the heavy hitter they used to be. Meanwhile, the major OSs for computers as computers -- and as phones -- have backed away from the microkernel design. Maybe they shouldn't have; regardless, they did. That leaves embedded systems. And there you have a point. So: microkernels are in common use in embedded systems. But let's not overstate their successes.
- kjs3 12y ago
  Let's be fair here. If you get to redefine "computer" to exclude embedded systems, even though they vastly outnumber "computers as computers" (whatever that really means), then you get to be right. But really all that does is show your limited view of the the field. For example, QNX runs 10s of millions of cars alone and who knows how many Cisco routers running IOS-XR. If that is "overstating" success, I'm not really sure what success looks like.
  - ggchappell 12y ago
    > Let's be fair here. If you get to redefine "computer" to exclude embedded systems, even though they vastly outnumber "computers as computers" (whatever that really means), then you get to be right. Actually, I don't think I disagreed with you, except to note that a research kernel that might be used someday, does not count as "general use". You might count the insinuation of overstatement as a disagreement. The point of that is that context matters. When I talk about choice of OS, the Mac in my living room has rather more weight in my mind than the embedded controller in my garage; I know I'm not alone in this. So if we say only that microkernels are heavily used, then we are correct, but we will be misunderstood. It is better, I think, to make a statement that is both correct and understandable, than to make one that is merely correct, while looking down on those who misunderstand. EDIT: A quote[1] from me, giving an example from a rather different topic: > If I open up a restaurant that serves General Tso's chicken and chop suey and sweet and sour pork and fortune cookies, and I advertise that I serve "American food", then my description is accurate, but my customers will be confused. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/25dji0/til_general_tsos_chicken_is_an_american_dish_it/chgfpdx http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/25dji0/til_ge...
walterbell 12y ago
What do you think of Heinz von Foerster?
- cgio 12y ago
  Or Niclas Luhmann, Maturana and Varela?
  - kjs3 12y ago
    Yes...I think we can all agree that I've committed an unpardonable sin by only including 3 luminaries. There's only so much time in an interview.
    - lnkmails 12y ago
      Please tell me where you work so I don't apply. It's just that every time I think about Tannenbaum I'll remember your posts. For me, that's not good.
      - kjs3 12y ago
        I don't think either of us need worry about that.
59nadir 12y ago
You sound like a terrible interviewer.

by kjs3 12y ago

sanderjd 12y ago

I'm totally with you that questioning Tannenbaum's legacy is pretty poor form, but your interview questions sound designed to filter out anyone who doesn't share your exact interests, which is a real shame. A better follow-up than ending the interview upon a candidate not knowing who he is would be to describe his achievements (as you did here) and then ask the candidate to tell you what they know about someone else interesting who you may or may not already know all about.

kjs3 12y ago
Another good interview technique is "did you actually read what I said". Things like when I said it's an open ended question, asked about 3 of the seminal minds in CS at least one of which a CS graduate would have bumped up against, and that the candidate can focus on whatever they want to. Just a tip for your next interview.
- sanderjd 12y ago
  > If they don't know who AST is, the interview is probably over. We continue if they can discuss pretty much any of the 6-7 seminal, award winning CS textbooks he wrote, the other major projects he lead like the Amsterdam Compiler Kit or the Amoeba distributed operating system, or the other contributions he made to networking, distributed systems, languages, computer architecture, operating systems or information security (he did publish nearly 200 journal papers over 43 years as a professor).
gtirloni 12y ago
This has nothing to do with cultural bias. It's just basic CS stuff that anyone with "CS" in their resumes should know about. Heck, even undergraduate students will probably have "AST" tattooed inside their brains in the first semester alone. I'm sorry to be picking on you but this is one of the things that is absolutely wrong in our field: we don't learn anything from history. We don't know what was being researched in the 70's and proceed to reinvent the wheel over and over thinking we somehow have magical brains that are unearthing some concepts for the first time in human history. The traditional CS curriculum should adopt a mentality of "ok, you now understand at which point in history we are in CS? Know most of the past inventions? Fine, now proceed to build on top of them and stop wasting everybody's time with your rediscoveries".
- sanderjd 12y ago
  I don't think you're picking on me, and I wasn't trying to suggest that such a question is cultural bias. What I meant is just that people in general tend to think the things they know about are the most interesting things, and that people who don't know about those things are deficient. But by definition they can't know about things they don't know about, which may be just as interesting. So my proposed replacement question just acknowledges and tries to work around that phenomenon. I doubt it is actually critical for people to be super familiar with Tannenbaum's work specifically, it is just an indirect way of assessing intellectual curiosity and CS chops, which I think my question would also achieve. I pretty much agree with everything else you said, and I wish I knew more about the history of computing myself, since I've lost a lot of my memory of my college course on it to the sands of time. I wonder if there's a good survey book. Maybe AST wrote one...

elliotz 12y ago

> If all they can come up with is "Minix" and "that pissing contest with Linus", then I might see if the Linux devops guys have an opening. If they're that incurious, they'll do fine there; those guys think the world begins and ends with Linux, too. Do you actually believe that someone is incurious simply because they don't share your own interest in Tanenbaum? Perhaps they've focused their curiosity on one of the many other luminaries in CS, or perhaps they're more interested in the topics themselves than the personalities behind them. Your contempt for your own devops team is also disquieting. Based on your comment your company sounds like a toxic place to work.

kjs3 12y ago
That's why we ask the question about 3 people in broadly different areas. Frankly, if you don't recognize at least one of those names and understand the foundational contributions they made, then yeah I'd call that a kind of incurious. As to devops, you may think whatever you want. I give them shit about the "all the worlds Linux" attitude, they give me shit about "fucking research projects" (e.g. anything that isn't Linux). We understand our respective views, and it works.
- elliotz 12y ago
  > That's why we ask the question about 3 people in broadly different areas. Frankly, if you don't recognize at least one of those names and understand the foundational contributions they made, then yeah I'd call that a kind of incurious. Well that's a lot more reasonable! Your original comment left no ambiguity that candidates insufficiently knowledgeable about Tanenbaum would be shunted over to devops. > As to devops, you may think whatever you want. I give them shit about the "all the worlds Linux" attitude, they give me shit about "fucking research projects" (e.g. anything that isn't Linux). We understand our respective views, and it works. That could be the basis of some good-natured ribbing, which would be OK. What's not OK for a healthy company culture is the suggestion that devops people are inherently incurious, and the strong whiff of intellectual elitism which came across in your original comment.

ggchappell 12y ago

> Continuing in the "let me Google that for you" vein, both QNX and various L4 family microkernels are in use in a variety of embedded systems; QNX is also in the new Blackberry products. There's a number of very mature security oriented research microkernels (like L4se and K42) that could very well show up in commercial products eventually. But that's back to needing to know more about computer science than Windows and MacOS. Let's be fair here. Your claim was that microkernels are "in general use". Ongoing research, however mature, does not support this claim. And Blackberry is hardly the heavy hitter they used to be. Meanwhile, the major OSs for computers as computers -- and as phones -- have backed away from the microkernel design. Maybe they shouldn't have; regardless, they did. That leaves embedded systems. And there you have a point. So: microkernels are in common use in embedded systems. But let's not overstate their successes.

kjs3 12y ago
Let's be fair here. If you get to redefine "computer" to exclude embedded systems, even though they vastly outnumber "computers as computers" (whatever that really means), then you get to be right. But really all that does is show your limited view of the the field. For example, QNX runs 10s of millions of cars alone and who knows how many Cisco routers running IOS-XR. If that is "overstating" success, I'm not really sure what success looks like.
- ggchappell 12y ago
  > Let's be fair here. If you get to redefine "computer" to exclude embedded systems, even though they vastly outnumber "computers as computers" (whatever that really means), then you get to be right. Actually, I don't think I disagreed with you, except to note that a research kernel that might be used someday, does not count as "general use". You might count the insinuation of overstatement as a disagreement. The point of that is that context matters. When I talk about choice of OS, the Mac in my living room has rather more weight in my mind than the embedded controller in my garage; I know I'm not alone in this. So if we say only that microkernels are heavily used, then we are correct, but we will be misunderstood. It is better, I think, to make a statement that is both correct and understandable, than to make one that is merely correct, while looking down on those who misunderstand. EDIT: A quote[1] from me, giving an example from a rather different topic: > If I open up a restaurant that serves General Tso's chicken and chop suey and sweet and sour pork and fortune cookies, and I advertise that I serve "American food", then my description is accurate, but my customers will be confused. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/25dji0/til_general_tsos_chicken_is_an_american_dish_it/chgfpdx http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/25dji0/til_ge...

walterbell 12y ago

What do you think of Heinz von Foerster?

cgio 12y ago
Or Niclas Luhmann, Maturana and Varela?
- kjs3 12y ago
  Yes...I think we can all agree that I've committed an unpardonable sin by only including 3 luminaries. There's only so much time in an interview.
  - lnkmails 12y ago
    Please tell me where you work so I don't apply. It's just that every time I think about Tannenbaum I'll remember your posts. For me, that's not good.
    - kjs3 12y ago
      I don't think either of us need worry about that.

59nadir 12y ago

You sound like a terrible interviewer.