I'm going through interview cycles for a Software Engineering type job right now. I've been reading a few forums and blogs about general interview advice/rants from others. One of the things a lot of people keep complaining about is something along the lines of, "I've had 7-10 years of experience, and they wanted to test me on so-and-so algorithm which I could've googled in two minutes. Why test memorization? Why not ask questions about / in-depth discussions on how to solve difficult real world problems?" My question for those of you who have been part of plenty of interviews, what sort of questions qualify as "real-world non-trivial problems"? I guess the question is also directed at the Sr. Software Engineers who have complained in the past that the interview didn't test their "experience"; what type of questions would have highlighted your "non-trivial real-world experience" instead of asking about specific data structures or algorithms or implementation details?

I think job posts with "show us your code" or "articles you've written for others" are quite all right in my book. It's a good habit to develop for any developer, and something I struggle with.

That sounds like a great gig. I'd sign up for that.

It's kind of sad though. Genuinely good companies with excellent jobs are ruined by plastering such nonsense phrases. Makes me facepalm at 100mph.

Whoa whoa whoa! Watch your language mister! No need to bring such filth in this conversation. And also no need to talk about Blaenau Gwent.

You've been around the block, right? I'm a relatively young'un. Help me! What's this crazy fascination with "javascript rockstar" and "data rockstar" and "scala rockstar" and "whatever rockstar"? :confused: Has this been the case all these years and I just never noticed?

No kidding! I want to punch a pillow, because even a hundred head-shakes are not going to be enough. :doh:

Is it just me or have others also started noticing unnerving amounts of "programming rockstar required" job posts? First of all, WHAT? Second of that, let's assume that there is such a thing as a "programming rockstar". And if there were that many programming rockstars around to fill these jobs, then they'd not be rockstars! They'd be just another set of developers. Oh and then the job posts say the candidate can be fresh college graduate or with "2-3 years of experience". Again, WHAT? What kind of rockstar is this? It's getting to a point where I am going to have to write a browser add-on that puts a big fat red STOP sign on a job post that mentions requirement of "rockstar". -oo

From my time in India, I think some companies wanted to know your "Native Place". You may be from Australia (i.e. Australian citizen?!), working in India. Or perhaps from one state in India (e.g. Gujarat) working in different "current location" (say, Punjab).

I wholehearted support Octave, but seeing your needs I suggest the following. If you need a free option, you can screencap, but preferably say you can spare $6/month (or between $45-$65/year) for WolframAlpha. Either way, you can get WAlpha output. Here's a sample. I asked WAlpha: (x^2)+(min(x,y))-abs(y)+(xy+y^2)[^] Hope that helps.

I'm grad student, doing some biological data analysis. Although I use R/Python/MATLAB exclusively, I have seen my colleagues use some of the following things. R/Python are standard norms here. Beyond that, if you're looking for tools with "nice" GUI and built-in analysis, you're really looking at a large variety. No tool does everything (or just-about-everything), but many tools do a lot of things. On commercial end, cheapest to get into would be JMP. Then you're looking at Stata. SAS and SPSS are mostly cost-prohibitive unless a large company or university is paying. On open-source end, you have Deducer, which is similar to JMP (but has quite limited set of features). There's also Minitab for quality control related analysis. There are some programs to help you with specific type of analysis. For example, machine learning and data mining related work can be done using Weka. Data mining and visualization using GGobi and Cranvas (requires R, but it's worth a look I think). Network analysis related statistics are available through Gephi and Cytoscape. Bayesian simulation via nice "friendly" programs based on BUGS Project. There are tons more for specific types of tasks, but I think most of the tasks you wish to do, above mentioned tools can get you your answers.

Continued from PHP forum :) Ok, so you said

sk8te320 wrote:

Can someone point me in the right direction? Dazed and Confused. All help will be greatly appreciated.

So, I thought I'd suggest which modules etc. to look up. If you have already done that, and have all the modules installed, would you please let me know where you are stuck? Are you able to verify that you have all the modules installed? Let me know if I could be of any help. I'm no Perl pro, but I've done similar stuff earlier, so I may be able to help you out on this one.

sk8te320 wrote:

but thanks for the help, oh that's right, you didn't really answer my question, my bad...

D'Oh! I just realized you are talking about my response to your question in Perl forum (You posted in PHP forum, and I'm like.. what? When did I say go look in Google?!) Anywho, my further response is in Perl forum :)

sk8te320 wrote:

Nice try, but that's the first thing I did.

I truly believe you did that. In fact, I'm not even a PHP expert. I was just visiting this PHP forum to see what people were discussing. And I saw that someone kept on providing Google links, so I thought I'd suggest "Let me google that for you" web-site. And I'm sure there's plenty to learn about Google Search... otherwise there won't be books sold about "Google Search Hacks" and "How to do effective Google Search". Anyways.. hope you have a good one. Peace.

Have you heard about LetMeGoogleThatForYou[^]? You should start linking that from now on. Seems to me searching on Google is a skill we should put on our Resume!

You should start in Perl doc and Perl reference online. This is a common task and usually achieved through DBI module. Here's a guide from CodeProject KnowledgeBase[^] That takes care of accessing data from database using an SQL query. Once you have data in a perl variable, you can do all sorts of manipulation (I'm thinking along the lines of regexp and what not). Now onto your Excel problem. Perl has a couple of modules (OLE, Spreadheet::Excel, etc.) to deal with MS products. I have never used them, but I have heard good things about Spreadsheet::Excel. I just did a quick search and found a nice tutorial/article on IBM developerWorks series. Here's a link[^]. I hope this points you to the right direction. And in case you are not familiar with installation of Perl modules, I'd suggest searching for Perl CPAN. Its homepage will point you to installation instructions and whatever else you might need to get the modules up and running.

dadashri wrote:

hi i heav videomail

I don't believe you. Prove it!