Chan's Personal Blog

Last year, I interviewed a ton of programmers at work. Our interview process is a multi-layered approach; each layer acts as a defence intended to filter out candidates along the way as they run the gauntlet. The first line of defence is with our recruiters who makes first contact with the candidate, chats with them, and ask some simple technical questions. The second line of defence is the phone screen interview with one of our programmers. The final line of defence is the on-site interview where the candidate meets with several managers and programmers. The reason for all these hoops is because it's actually very expensive in terms of time and money when you get a bad candidate come through.

One day I get an e-mail from our recruiter informing me that an on-site interview was being scheduled. I took a look at the candidate's resume and found something quite peculiar, the candidate had a bachelor's degree in writing, and a master degree in journalism. Don't get me wrong, the degrees are perfectly fine, but this isn't the usual educational background that I see for programmers. Interestingly enough, the candidate had also published several books about a programming language that use. I assumed that if you could write a book about a subject and have it published, then you would be a domain expert in that area. So this was going to be an interesting interview.

The interview day finally comes, and it's my turn to interview the candidate. I do my usual introduction, and then immediately ask him what his story was. How does a writing major transition to the world of computer science? The candidate asserts that writing good software and writing are actually very similar disciplines, it all comes down to syntax and grammar, and being able to express yourself creatively. A part of me was somewhat skeptical about this analogy because I remember all those painful math and algorithm courses that I took in university. Is every writer out there really a closet programmer just waiting to be discovered?

I jump into the technical portion of my interview and ask the candidate to write some code on the white board. I present a fairly simple programming task and the candidate seems to be stumbling through it. I go through a couple questions related to what he had written on the white board, and asked how he could optimize the code to run faster, and he was completely stuck. I look at one of the functions he had used on the board and asked him if he could implement a simple naive version of it by hand, and he could not. Long story short, the technical portion of the interview didn't go well at all.

I left the room fairly unimpressed. I met up with a colleague who had interviewed the candidate earlier just to trade notes. I asked my colleague if he had read the candidate's book before. My colleague said he read snippets of it on Amazon.com, and it was absolutely garbage. I thought to myself, how could a bad programming book possibly be published? In academia, when you publish a paper, they're typically peer-reviewed which ensures a certain level of quality. My colleague laughed at my naivety; he explained that book publishers/editors aren't necessarily domain experts in good programming practices, and that's why there are a lot of really bad programming books out there. Just because you could publish a book about programming doesn't mean you're a good programmer.

This was an eye opening experience, and I definitely learned something that day.

I've gone through my photo archives in Flickr, and have curated a collection of photos that best highlight the year that was 2010 for me. There were a lot of new experiences and challenges, some epic victories, and some extraordinary failures. Please hit 'play' on the Grooveshark Music player below before starting the slideshow as the music complements the slideshows. The slideshow has a 'full-screen' button for optimal viewing.

Those viewing this blog article from Facebook will need to click here to view the slideshow and hear the music.


I'll have a more thorough review of 2010 article later.
Enjoy!

So I'm back in Victoria for Christmas vacation, and I'm watching the CBC again, and I come across the show "Dragon's Den." I absolutely fall in love with the show. The concept is, you have entrepreneurs going on Dragon's Den, pitching their ideas to five venture capitalists for funding. I'm encouraged by this show because when I took entrepreneurship in business school, the main source of funding they recommended was through government grants and agencies. I hope a show like this helps foster a culture of angel investors and venture capitalists in Canada.

It's pretty valuable to watch people pitch their ideas to a room full of very skeptical investors. On the flip side, if you've got money to invest, it's pretty valuable to develop a healthy sense of skepticism and ask the right questions when presented with an investment opportunity. These investors are even more brutal than Donald Trump, and it's strangely refreshing.

I really like how you get to see both sides of a business deal from the perspective of the business owner and the investor.

For the business owner:

• How much control of my company am I willing to give over to investors?
• Is the valuation of my company fair?
• What expertise do I lack?
• What expertise do I want from potential investors and partners?
• What's the exit plan for investors?

For the investor:

• What's the risk/reward of this investment?
• How much money does the business owner have on the line?
• Does the owner have good knowledge of the market and competitors?
• How long until I get a return on my investment?
• How much of my time do they need and what are my roles and responsibilities?
• Is the business model realistic or too good to be true?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of this business?

Here's an example of a pitch where the entrepreneurs have a business plan, but clearly didn't do their homework on their idea, and don't understand the market that they're getting into. In this video, the owners are pitching a digital wall calendar.



This other clip is a great business pitch, but the entrepreneurs are too innocent and naive. It's a family business pitching Cosy Soles.The venture capitalists tell them if they weren't on the show, they would destroy them by taking advantage of them. Take away is, beware of investors bearing gifts and understand your financing options.


I'm finding this show very useful because I'm starting to be approached with investment opportunities, and this helps sharpen my business sense. I'm also in a position to pitch investment ideas as well (both personal and work), so learning how to present well is key to success.

Awesome show. There's plenty of clips of this show floating around on YouTube. I heard in the U.S., there's an equivalent show called Shark Tank, where two of the venture capitalists from the Canadian show appears on.

Dear Canadians,

This December, I will be executing Operation Snowbird which will be a daring winter migration from California to Victoria. I will be home from December 18th - January 17th this year. Call me up when I get back in town, my calendar is wide open at the moment, and dinner/lunch slots will go on a first-come-first-serve basis. I intend to feast while I'm in Victoria, and I'm going to be making my rounds to all my favourite restaurants.

On the bucket list is also to try curling while in Victoria. Any takers? Also I want to get in as much ice skating as I can while back home. Skating is REALLY expensive in San Jose, California, who would have thought?

Anyways, looking forward to seeing friends and family for Christmas. It has been too long.

-CHaN

It's nearing the year end and I'm in the middle of taking inventory of all my successes and failures of 2010, and beginning battle planning for my goals and aspirations for 2011. I'm anticipating yet another year of turbulent change, so it makes anticipating strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that much funner to plan for.

In such a time, I draw solace in Ecclesiastes 3:1-11:


It begs the question, what time is it?

Fox Business News was filming in Silicon Valley yesterday, and they made a pit stop at Yahoo! HQ. I happened to be walking by during the interview with Juniper's CEO, and you can see me walking in the background in a blue shirt at the 3 minute mark of the video.


Enjoy! I hope this helps me get discovered as a TV personality.

I was recently looking at my site's visitor data. I was interested to see if the addition of my delicious bookmarks on the left rail under "What I'm Reading", was helping with traffic. Looks like you folks like the feature, and traffic is up due to it.

In either case, I found some interesting data about search engine traffic. These are the top query terms that people search who end up on my site:

1. Roast Pork Tenderloin - This is my signature dish that I cook
2. Coast Capital - This is due to the epic rant I have against this credit union.
3. J2EE Sucks - I really don't enjoy coding in J2EE.
4. Chan Can Cook - Has to do with my cooking?
5. Church Mortgage Burning Ceremony - I've got an article about this.
6. Sen Zushi - My favourite restaurant.
7. Chan Productions - This site.
8. Jeremy Postale - This guy was doing a vanity search on himself, and found his name on my site.
9. Nanoose Bay Camp - A beautiful camp that my church is involved in.
10. Mighty Fish Taco - I like fish tacos?

Anyways, interesting query mix. Four of the top queries are related to food, so I guess that makes this a Foodie blog for 40% of the time.