Chan's Personal Blog

About this time last year, I had applied to Carmanah Technologies for a job. The company specializes in manufacturing solar powered lights in Victoria. I originally applied to them because they were listed as one of the top 100 tech companies to work for in BC. I also remembered seeing some positive news coverage about the company's innovative products.

I submitted my resume for a web developer position, and I promptly landed an interview. When I got to the office for the interview, I observed the people working there, and it was a bit of a turn off. Everyone was dressed up in business clothes, and it seemed very office-like, and not so much a tech company (in the computer high-tech sense).

I met with two of the guys who were maintaining all of their web applications in-house, and I wasn't too impressed. One guy was a self-taught programmer, and the other guy did some computer stuff in community college. The technologies they were using for their web applications were a huge turnoff as it was a Microsoft technology stack. The problems they were trying to solve were quite unappealing as well, because they focused most of their time working on a content management system. This is a fairly boring problem space because I consider this to be a "solved" problem, and there are plenty of free open source content management systems out there. There's no sense in trying to write one from scratch and reinventing the wheel.

I asked the other interviewers what other interesting web applications could I expect to write. One of the guys said, oh, if you're advanced enough, you can help write an online calculator. Unfortunately for me, a calculator definitely falls under the "solved" problem category as well. It's a fairly trivial problem, and it didn't even come close to the type of complex work I was working on before.

The biggest turn off in the interview was that they never got me to write a single line of code on a white board, or solve any technical problems. As a rule of thumb, I never accept jobs from companies that don't do a proper technical interview (including writing code). This is because from experience, my former teams have hired some terrible programmers before, because in the interview a candidate could talk a big game, but we discovered later on that they couldn't program properly. Talking to a programmer about their technical skills in an interview isn't a great way to figure out their coding abilities. As a result, we forced every candidate to write some simple code to prove they can code competently. So, if a company interviews me, and doesn't get me to write code I won't join them. I'm too scared because there's a good chance that they have some awful programmers. A single bad programmer in a team can be a huge drag on the team.

Anyway, in hindsight, I'm quite glad I didn't accept Carmanah's job. Myron just sent me a link that says Carmanah was closing their Victoria branch due to cost-cutting. In addition, their stock has been doing absolutely horrible in the last year.

Thank God I didn't take that job.

As I've mentioned before that high gas prices are definitely having an effect on our habits and the environment. The USA Today has an article entitled, "Drivers cut back by 30B miles."


I realize the title says drivers have cut back 30 billion miles, but the news article quote reads 22 billion miles. I think it's because the newspaper is measuring miles from November - April, which was 22 billion miles. If you go Novemeber - June, it's probably 30 billion miles.

Anyway, this is quite an amazing change. One ironic thing though is that I still think gas is cheap. Down here in California, it's about $4.55/gallon of gas, or $1.1375/L. In Victoria, gas is about $6.00/gallon, or $1.50/L. Next time I head back to Victoria, perhaps I will bring some gas as a Christmas gift.

As we move forward in time, it seems like talk about climate change and the environment is intensifying. Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of solutions out there that are merely bandage solutions that are designed with good intentions, but the net effect is pretty minimal. One example is Earth Day at my work. The company that runs our cafeteria decided to make us all aware of how much carbon it takes for various food to arrive onto our plates. To drive home the point, they decided to ban cheese for the day because it has a big carbon footprint. Has this one day ban on cheese reduced my consumption of cheese? Not at all. I can point to other futile acts like Earth Hour, which I've ranted about before.

In either case, the capitalist in me believes that true solutions to climate change is more of an economics problem. You may have heard of the invisible hand of the market which was introduced by Adam Smith's book, The Wealth of Nations.


So how does this relate to the environment? I present the argument that high gas prices is actually doing a lot of good for the environment. Lets look at General Motors' business, which has primarily focused on building large trucks. GM recently announced they were shutting down 4 truck plants, and considering dumping Hummers. GM is shifting their production lines to creating more smaller cars, and plug-in hybrids. The market reality is that people are trading in their large fuel inefficient vehicles for smaller more efficient cars.

I saw this piece on 60 Minutes entitled, "The Millennials Are Coming." It talks about individuals born between 1980-1995 who are now entering the workforce, and companies must deal with this new generation.