Category Archives: Human Behaviour

Blog entries related to how we behave in the real world

Lifting the Curse of Knowledge | DaedTech

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An interesting post regarding ‘the Curse of Knowledge’ — or the difficulty in remembering what it’s like not to know something!

The first paragraph alone sets the scene:

As most of you know, one of the biggest anti-patterns when you’re instantiating program slots is to forget to set CanRemoveOverride to true. But what you probably didn’t know was that the SlotConfig is — Just kidding. I lifted this from a post I wrote almost 3 years ago about legacy code I was working with then. I have little more idea than you do what any of that means. [Emphasis Mine, ksb]

Lifting the Curse of Knowledge | DaedTech.

TED Talks: What FACEBOOK And GOOGLE Are Hiding From The World – YouTube

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TED Talks: What FACEBOOK And GOOGLE Are Hiding From The World – YouTube.

This is worth being aware of.  People have a tendency to pay more attention to the things or ideas that confirm beliefs that they already hold (Confirmation Bias), so if you imagine your search results, or news feed, or similar being biased to show you stuff you already ‘know’, you may be happy with the results, but you may never be challenged to see other beliefs, or, in some circumstances… facts.

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Spammer Templates

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Although I generally consider email spammers – especially phishers – pretty evil, it is occasionally enjoyable to receive a spam email or comment which demonstrates how dumb they can be.  In this case, I received a comment on this blog which demonstrates nicely how some messages are created.

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Solving Problems Indirectly

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Indirect SolutionsMore and more of late, I have noticed that the solutions people arrive at for problems are often very indirect.  I have started to suspect that it may be a characteristic of human behaviour, but perhaps it is just a characteristic of my current management at work.  Also, there may be room to consider this ‘procrastination’, and maybe in some way, people have got it into their heads that problems always need creative solutions – when often the opposite is true – there is a simple and obvious next step that once taken will improve the situation.

The rest of this post will outline a number of cases in my own recent experience where actions and projects have been undertaken that seem to have been quite ‘indirect’. Continue reading →

Making Interview Questions Better

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I’ve written before about technical interview questions, especially of the tricky Brainteaser Interview Questions, and I wanted to take a moment to recount some recent experiences hiring a couple of DBAs.

We’ve had a technical phone interview for some time, written by a colleague, but I think mostly trawled from an internet search of database technical questions.  This undoubtedly has some value, with questions on technical details on the difference, say, between a Primary Key and a Unique Key, or perhaps what ACID stands for.  The problem I find is that day-to-day, a term like ‘ACID’ is almost never referred to, because it is simply (and in some fundamental way) is just expected to be possible and true of a database such as Sql Server – or we might even say prohibited by developers not using transactions.  We needed more structure for the face-to-face bit, and I was fearful about hiring someone who could not even do the DBA equivalent of the FizzBuzz programming exercise.

So for the last year or more, we’ve standardised our face-to-face interview questions to focus on three areas:

  • A practical Normalisation question;
  • Simple SQL queries;
  • Performance Investigation.

In each case, I have taken a practical example of real-world situation from our code-base as the inspiration… and it has been fascinating how helpful the approach has been to better understand the capabilities of the candidate.  I hope it also introduces the interviewee to practical examples of what the role entails. Continue reading →

Not using New Media doesn’t make you a Ghost

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(but please still be enthusiastic)

Megaphone

I have enjoyed and been very interested in several of Troy Hunt’s blog posts on security, and having had my attention drawn to one the other day, I found his post titled ‘The ghost who codes: how anonymity is killing your programming career‘. I think his assertion is unfair. In fact, my first criticism of his post is that it is somewhat tabloid in nature; compare that title with his ultimate conclusion:

Ultimately, complete lack of public profile doesn’t make someone a bad programmer. On the other hand, a rich track record of engaging with the community, asking questions, demonstrating enthusiasm and actively participating in the industry gives you a bloody good head start on the ghosts.

This seems a far more reasonable statement, and an alternate headline on a broadsheet newspaper might have been: “Engaging with New Media could make new Job Searches Easier”. Or something like that – which has less punch but might reflect the whole post more fairly.

But as much as anything else, I would like to engage in this post with the broad idea of the use of Blogs, Question/Answer sites, Twitter, and so on. Is it necessary for a programmer (or other IT professional) to engage in such activities?

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Our Mutual Friend Quotes

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A couple of years back I was given a set of Dicken’s novels, and have been reading them intermittently over that time. I’ve just started reading ‘Our Mutual Friend’ – which has been harder-going than several of the other books I’ve seen so far… but there have been a couple of nice little sections which I thought I would note here.

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Boiler Overheat Lockout, Bypass Valves and Experts

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Hot Water TankThere is an apocryphal tale that goes something like: A man has a problem with his boiler that continues for months and causes him no end of bother. Finally, an expert comes to see the boiler, and the expert taps the case a few times, tweaks a fitting… and then charges the man a large sum of money. The customer is surprised and exclaims: “But you only did 2 minutes of work!”, to which the expert replies: “You are not just paying me for my time today, but the ten yeas of experience that I have!”

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