TL;DR: we still suck! As a species…
Day “I can’t even remember” of “what seems like forever”. The pandemic rages on, uncontested. It feels there’s no end in sight. Each piece of good news is followed almost instantly by a bad one. Like we’re caught in a weird, extremely repetitive dance: one step forward, one step back. Step forward, step back. Forward, back…all of humanity moving together to the tune of the most boring dubstep song ever.
I am trying to adapt. To find ways to cope. To find some ounce of joy hidden somewhere. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I don’t. This time, I was lucky…
Other than how to ride a motorcycle, that is!
Last year I passed my A2 exam and got myself a bike. It was a bumpy ride, especially given that it was a pandemic year, with lockdown and delays, but I managed to push through.
Getting the license and buying a bike was an impulse decision: one day I decided I want a motorcycle and I actually followed through. For about 10 months. This is quite new for me since I don’t generally deliver on impulse decisions that take that long to be implemented.
When we entered 2020, I had no idea how to start a motorcycle. How to shift…
2021. The year of redemption! The year in which I will do all the things that I wanted to but I couldn’t in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, those are the very same things that I have wanted to do for the past 3 pandemic-free decades. You know, back when the world was open and we had to actually work for excuses…
Is 2021 really going to be any better? The pandemic runs wild with the same inept politicians at the helm taking the most idiotic decisions. Spain is experiencing one of the worst snowfalls in decades…
I did my fair share of interviewing in my time. So I should be good at it. Practice makes perfect, right? The more we do something, the better we get at it. Or at least, that’s the theory. In practice, I’m still finding it quite difficult to interview someone.
The goal of any interview is to vet if the candidate can make a valuable contribution to the company or not and assess their level. That’s it!
No need for brain teasers, impossible situations, weird algorithms, or synthetic academic style problems. We need a teammate, not a techno-Rambo.
Leveling a candidate…
I enjoy reading quotes from famous thinkers from time to time. It’s like accessing concentrated wisdom, packed in a couple of phrases. Without any boring details. One either gets it or doesn’t. They’re like puzzles of the mind, just showing the focal point and allowing me to fill in the blanks and add my own interpretation.
This post is a collection of quotes I find interesting with my own interpretations added to them. However, I will not use the cliché approach of writing them in uppercase on an inspirational background of a sunrise, or someone doing yoga, or a waterfall…
Talk to the engineers in your organization
I feel I did enough recruiter bashing in my two previous “letters to (tech) recruiters”: A letter to (tech) recruiters and A letter to (tech) recruiters 2.0 to try something else. Pointing out other people’s mistakes is easy. And fun. I must admit. I had my laughs writing it. Coming up with something constructive is, however, difficult.
But I decided to give it a go. Do a good deed. I scratched my car this weekend, so I could use some positive vibes. We can say I’m trying out the karma thing. I even bought a 10 euros lottery ticket. …
The COVID-19 pandemic took us by storm and fundamentally changed the way we interact: social distancing, face masks, sanitizing gels, and of course, remote working.
In the last 3 months, more companies went fully remote than in the last 10 years. Years of digitalization work have been done in weeks. Companies like Zoom saw their stock skyrocketing.
Remote working advocates have been quick to proclaim the death of the office and a perpetual WFH future. Personally, I don’t think that will be the case. I think we will flock back to our offices as soon as the situation allows it.
…
Spain is still in quarantine, but some of the restrictions have been lifted. More will follow next week. As the confinement is eased, the responsibility moves from the government to the citizen. That’s the official message. We need to be responsible for our actions in containing the pandemic. The streets full of thrown away surgical masks and plastic gloves tell a different story.
I’m looking outside. For the first time in months, I can go out, but I don’t want to. It’s raining. Barcelona is not a city built for rain. Even on a good day, if it rains, everything…
My initial letter to (tech) recruiters got a lot of positive feedback, more than I expected. It seems recruiters do have a sense of humor. Most of them, anyway. So I have decided to continue the saga.
Below are some other types of recruiter approaches I encountered over time.
The “Pinocchio”
What can make a Sunday evening more enjoyable than receiving a phone call from a recruiter eager to explain to me how amazing the work-life balance is in their company!?! And I’m like: sure, but before we start, where are you calling from exactly? Timezone-wise? Asking for a friend…
The “feudal warlord”
Hi Tudor…
Psychology teaches us that when dealing with grief we go through 5 stages: “denial”, “anger”, “bargaining”, “depression” and “acceptance”. And nothing causes more grief to software engineers than dealing with bugs. Especially other people’s bugs.
In general terms, a bug is an anomaly in a computer system that causes it to behave in unexpected ways. The first bug was a moth that got stuck in the relays of a 1940s computer (full story here).
Present-day bugs are more software rather than hardware or well…biological in nature. And the fix requires a software engineer to dive in and patch the faulty…
Tudor Barbu
Trust me, I used to be an engineer!
