Hung Truong: The Blog!

Ted Dziuba == WIN!

Mostly because of this post, where he tells you what the programming interviewer is really thinking when he’s asking you how to find a cycle in a singly-linked list.

What The Interviewer Thinks: This job has nothing to do with linked lists. In fact, I don’t think anyone has used a singly liked list since the seventies. I wonder if you’re good at PHP and MySQL, because that’s what all the work is here, but I’m not going to ask you anything about actual job requirements, because that doesn’t afford me the opportunity to be pathologically pedantic.

Seriously, did he read my earlier post where I hated on the exact Amazon.com interviewer that he’s describing in his post?

Ted Dzubia should seriously be named the patron saint of computer science nerds instead of this guy. He says what we think and some people actually listen to him!

PS, I just noticed I used the double equals (==) twice in a row on this blog. Hmm. Maybe I should come up with better headlines.

Yahoo’s Job Site == Fail

So I’m looking at jobs and stuff, and I’m also applying for something at Yahoo.

Most employers’ job sites are pretty bad. I’m not sure why, but it seems that companies think that if the company is good enough, people will try to apply for jobs no matter how bad the actual process is. I’ve seen good implementations in the past as well as horrible ones. Google’s is actually not too bad (upload your resume and transcript, pdf is okay) while Yahoo’s is probably the worst.

First off, when I talked to a recruiter from Yahoo at Michigan, I was told that as a “green” measure, Yahoo wasn’t taking paper resumes. Okay, that’s pretty cool, I guess. Power to the Purple. But then I attempted to actually apply online.

The Yahoo careers site doesn’t take pdfs. It doesn’t take .pages either (which makes sense because those are actually directories!). So I convert the .pages to .doc and upload it. For some reason, the random filler stuff from the template (latin words, etc) makes it into the parser and pre-fills my resume with junk. Also, I found it very funny that the Yahoo resume parser thinks “Ann Arbor” is my name, and not my city!

Another thing I noticed is that there’s a list of universities, but for some reason, it’s only the big ones. University of New Mexico is not on there. Luckily for me, I’m going to a big-name school now! There’s also a field for “Other University.” Way to make community college kids feel good, Yahoo.

Finally, in order to get my resume in there, I have to copy and paste. That’s right, COPY AND PASTE. All the formatting I did to make my resume easy to read and cool-looking has gone down the drain. Getting resumes that are easy to read is apparently not important to Yahoo.

You might think that I would hold my tongue since I’m applying at Yahoo. But seriously, the Yahoo Careers Site is horrible. It needs work. I’m sure Yahoo is a fine place for a career; I’m also sure that Yahoo would be happy that its (prospective) employees would call a spade a spade, and recognize when there’s a problem with the site.

Who knows, I might even end up fixing the Careers site as my first gig at Yahoo. That is, if they’re willing to hire someone who can see problems and is not afraid to point them out.

DOM Vs. SAX: Only One Will Survive

So while working on iPhone stuff, we used a SAX parser to handle xml. I thought this was a wacky way of parsing stuff, and I prefer DOM since it is much easier to understand as it’s conveniently in tree form.

Today, I tried parsing a 39mb xml file with Python’s minidom. Bad idea. It’s currently making my MacBook choke and it also made my desktop PC cry for memory. Apparently SAX is 1337 when it comes to memory efficiency while DOM is incredibly inefficient. Seriously, Python was taking more than 1gb of memory to parse a 39mb file! Perhaps my actual use of the minidom stuff was incorrect, but either way, I’ll probably try doing stuff in SAX if the file happens to be even remotely big.

Lesson learned!

Update: SAX totally pwned those large files. All 8 of them! And in less than a minute!

Google’s 10^100 “Contest”

Google’s 10^100 “contest” sounds like a pretty cool concept. Basically it’s crowdsourcing ideas for the best ways to help the most people, then $10 million dollars from Google goes to fulfilling those ideas.

I put “contest” in quotation marks because the media seems to be portraying the thing as “submit a great idea and win $10 million!” But that’s not really the case at all. The “winners” of the process will win nothing (except “good karma” as Google explains) and the job of making the ideas into reality will go to some organization chosen through an RFP process. So really, the people who will benefit from the ideas (and whichever organizations get the $$$) are the real “winners.”

I guess this process makes the most sense, but I have questions about how an organization would be chosen (it’d need to be done very fairly, non-biased to US-centric ideas, non-imperialistic in origin or intent). Also, where is the incentive, besides karma, for people to submit ideas? There’s something to be said about social entrepreneurism. If it’s really a great idea, others should be able to take that and do something really positive while also making money. If that’s the case, maybe Google can choose to fund startup companies that can execute the idea. I think that’d be a really cool angle to hold an actual “contest” of sorts.

I’ve been thinking about what kind of submission I would send to Google. I think it’d be for:

A non-evil search engine whose mission would be to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. One that doesn’t censor any of its results and doesn’t do business with governments that engage in censorship.

University of Michigan Job Fair ’08 + Facebook!

Today and Yesterday were fun days since the engineering career fair was going on at north campus. Having started my own company (I’m the President!), I might not need to be looking at jobs this very moment. But I’m also looking at PhD programs and other stuff to do after I graduate, so I figured I should scope out the job scene as well.

You’re already familiar with my past job hunting experiences, I wager. Or if you aren’t check out some posts here in the archives. I stuck to the engineering fair this time (there’s also a normal career fair going on at central campus). The experience seems to be more of the same for me this year.