Dweebonics, American Life, and Great Programmers ... nyuk, nyuk's

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TOP TEN SIGNS YOUR KID IS TAKING DWEEBONICS CLASSES

Who said that Ebonics is the only kind of nonstandard English schools need to
know about? School boards in Silicon Valley have already adopted a course for
the pocket protector set without telling anyone. There's only one way to find
out if your kids are learning this stuff, moms and dads. Watch for these
telltale signs your children are studying Dweebonics:

10. They tilt their head sideways to smile.

 9. When you ground them, they say, "Your UI could really use some work."

 8. They say, "My dad can beat your dad at Quake."

 7. Instead of laughing, they say, "LOL."

 6. They insult kids by saying, "And you've got limited bandwidth!"

 5. They change the answering machine message to "BRB, leave your URL,
    and we'll TTYL."

 4. This is how they ask someone out on a date: "Umm, uh, well...see ya!"

 3. Calling from camp, your homesick child says, "I'm roaming outside my
    service area!"

 2. When you ask if they've finished their book report, they say, "It's in
    beta, but it'll ship in time."

 1. You're telling them something they don't want to hear. 
    They're saying, "NAK, NAK, NAK" the whole time.



                    ~~~  Life as an Americian  ~~~


 We yell for the Government to balance the budget, then take the last
 dime we have to make the down payment on a car that will take 5 years
 to pay off.

 We demand speed laws that will stop fast driving, then won't buy a
 car if it can't go over 100 miles an hour.

 We know the line-up of every baseball team in the American and
 National Leagues but mumble through half the words in the "Star
 Spangled Banner".

 We'll spend half a day looking for vitamin pills to make us live
 longer, then drive 90 miles an hour on slick pavement to make up for
 lost time.

 We tie up our dog while letting our sixteen year old son run wild.

 We whip any enemy in battle, then give them the shirt off our backs.

 We will work hard on a farm so we can move into town where we can
 make more money so we can move back to the farm.

 We run from morning to night trying to keep our "earning power" up
 with our "yearning power."

 We get upset we're spending over a billion dollars for education, but
 spend three billion dollars a year for cigarettes.

 In the office we talk about baseball, shopping or fishing, but when we
 are out at the game, the mall or on the lake, we talk about business.

 We're supposed to be the most civilized Christian nation on earth, but
 we still can't deliver payrolls without an armored car.

 We have more experts on marriage than any other country in the world
 and still have more divorces.

 We're the country that has more food to eat than any other country in
 the world and more diets to keep us from eating it.

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How to Hire a Programmer
by Kevin D. Weeks

Forget about competency tests, previous work history, personality profiles
like the MBTI, reference-checking, and follow-up interviews.  After years
of rigorous and admittedly maverick research, I've identified five key
characteristics you can use to quickly assess the fitness of a programmer
candidate.  I humbly submit that if you follow my advice and check for
these attributes, you'll shorten your hiring cycle and simultaneously
increase your success rate.

The best programmers prefer cats as pets.  I've canvassed hundreds of
programmers on the subject of preferred pets, and despite the odd
ferret-lover (and believe me, ferret-lovers are odd), time after time cats
turn out to be the non-human companion of choice.  Think about it; it makes
perfect sense because programmers are human cats.  Cats are night animals,
as are programmers.  Cats are independent, like programmers.  Cats prefer
to be left alone except when they want attention, and so do programmers.
Cats are notoriously elegant animals and ... uhm, well ... programmers
love elegant code.  What's more, software guru Meilir Page-Jones has
likened managing programmers to herding cats.

Turning to the next characteristic, programmers have a highly developed
sense of the absurd.  And if you think about it, this makes no sense at
all.  I don't know why so many programmers can quote The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy or know the entire Naughty Hungarian Phrase Book skit, but
they do.  The next time you interview a programmer candidate throw a
"You're all individuals" at him and see what he says.

Perhaps a sense of the absurd matters because so much of what developers
put up with is absurd - absurd schedules, absurd requirements, absurd hours.
Treating the absurdities of the average development process with humor
makes developers' jobs much easier.

Developers are usually science-fiction fans.  Great programmers love
technology, especially technology that doesn't yet exist.  You're in a
business where the only constant is change, and you need developers who
don't mind a few arrows in their backs.  Make sure your candidate has read
Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.  And remember, every
programmer worth her salt knows what grok means.  Many developers also are
musicians, painters, or photographers.  Some will claim this is because
both programming and artistic endeavors require great creativity.  They're
wrong.  It's because programming is more like painting than engineering.
Like painters, when programmers make mistakes, they just code right over
them.

Then there's the matter of puns.  I've witnessed online pun-fests that
lasted as long as a week, with as many as 30 programmers trying to outdo
each other.  I've noticed that some participants are punctilious about
staying with the root word, while others approach them as pun-tests where
misspelling words is permitted.  Again, the predilection makes perfect
sense.  Programming is about using language to accomplish something, and
programmers have a highly evolved appreciation of how a language can be
manipulated to specific ends.  Puns are ways of both displaying a mastery
of language and honing it.

So there you have it.  Look for developers who love cats, quote Monty
Python, read Heinlein, play guitar, and are accomplished punsters.  If you
find all these characteristics in a single individual, hire that person
immediately - confident you're hiring a truly great developer.

VB Tech Journal
January 1998

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